Creatures of the Earth

by John McGahern

  ‘For a good woman for you.’ McLoughlin didn’t notice the edge and smiled sweetly.

  ‘Dear Peter … I had no idea … This is too ridiculous.’ William Kirkwood was on his feet at once. ‘It is positively antediluvian.’ He had started to laugh dangerously. ‘Fortunately, no one will have me. Imagine the embarrassment of some poor woman who was fool enough to have me when she found I couldn’t abide her! I’d have to marry her. You couldn’t do otherwise to any unfortunate two-legged.’

  McLoughlin sat the outburst through in open-mouthed dismay. ‘We thought you’d like to be married.’

  ‘That’s true. I would.’

  He was even further taken aback by the positiveness of the ready response. ‘Is there any person you had in mind yourself?’ McLoughlin was glad to find any words on his lips.

  ‘Yes. There is,’ came even more readily still. ‘But what’s the use? She’d never have me.’

  ‘May I ask who she is?’

  ‘Of course you can. I was thinking of Miss Kennedy. Mary Kennedy.’

  ‘Well then. I don’t see why you had to get in such a state.’ It was McLoughlin’s turn to attack. ‘She was the first girl we were thinking of approaching.’

  McLoughlin was not so much surprised by the preference as by the fact that the solitary isolated ‘odd’ Kirkwood should have a preference at all.

  The Kennedys were a large local family, had good rock land and part of the woods, owned a sawmill and a small adjoining factory making crates and huge wooden drums on which electric cable was rolled. They had been rich enough to send Mary and her sisters to the Ursulines in Sligo. There she was nicknamed ‘big hips’, more for her laughing vitality than measurements. From the Ursulines she went to train as a nurse in the Mater Hospital in Dublin. She was black-haired and tall, too sharp featured to be beautiful, but there was about her an excitement and vitality that was more than beauty. Even the way she had of scratching her head as she laughed, her wide stance, intrigued men. At the Mater, she fell in love with a pale young doctor, conscientious and dull, who was flattered at first, but gradually he backed away from her high spirits. When he broke with her, she came home and hung listlessly about the house for six months, sometimes going for long solitary walks.

  It was on one of those walks that William Kirkwood met her in his own fields. She had been surprised by a play of the late October light all the way across the top of the hill, and there being no purpose to her walk she had crossed the stone wall to follow the streak of evening along the hill. To William’s polite inquiry, ‘May I help you in any way, Miss Kennedy?’ she had responded with a certain mischievousness – ‘No, thank you, Mr Kirkwood. I’m just out for a walk’ – because it was unheard of for a local person to be just out for a walk. Mary Kennedy was surprised to find the ‘young Mr Kirkwood’ that they used to laugh about when she was a child – the same Mr Kirkwood who spent all fine nights out in the fields studying the stars through a telescope and his days reading or in bed – a middle-aged man, tall and beautifully mannered certainly, but middle-aged. They chatted for a while before separating. She didn’t think much about the meeting but, apart from the good manners, what she remembered most was his openness and lack of furtiveness. Furtiveness was what she found in most Irish men when faced with a young woman.

  She returned to the Mater, but her confidence was broken and she had to school herself to meet the young doctor on the wards or along corridors, to smile and be polite when she felt like hiding or running. She saw with dull clarity that most women’s social position in Ireland was decided for the rest of their lives by one single unfair throw of the dice, and she had too much of the Kennedys’ sense of themselves to be interested in the young civil servants, policemen, and prison officers that were available to the other nurses. William Kirkwood felt that he should approach Mary Kennedy himself, but he knew too well that if left to his own devices he would think a great deal about it and do nothing.

  ‘How did you propose to approach Miss Kennedy?’ he asked McLoughlin.

  ‘We didn’t intend to put you into the back of a car and drive you round some fine Sunday anyhow.’ McLoughlin was now in the ascendant. ‘I know one of her brothers. If she has someone else or wasn’t interested, that would be the end of it. The Kennedys do not talk. If on the other hand …’ McLoughlin spread his hands in a gesture that meant that all things were possible.

  Mary Kennedy listened carefully to the proposal her brother brought. She had suffered and was close to the age of reconcilement. The tide was not lingering.

  She recalled the meeting in the fields. The few times they had met since then he had smiled and saluted in passing. There was the big stone house in its trees, the walled orchard, the avenue, the lawn, the spreading fields … no mean setting.

  A boast she had made carelessly once among girls came back to her. Love was not important, she had declared. She would love whichever man she married, whether she loved him or not before they married. This could be tested at last. She told her brother that she would meet William Kirkwood but could promise nothing.

  They met in the Wicklow Hotel and had dinner there. She wore a suit of black corduroy with a plain silver necklace and was more at ease than he with the formalities of dinner.

  ‘I was surprised you knew my name the time we met in the fields,’ she said.

  ‘That’s quite simple. I admired you and asked your name. But you knew my name?’

  ‘There was only one Mr Kirkwood. There are many Kennedys.’ She smiled back.

  When she saw him waiting for her later in the hotel foyer, the worn but well-cut blue pinstripe, the thick, lank grey hair, the jutting Anglo-Irish jaw, the military appearance of alertness, she knew that he was superior to most men she was likely to come on in the city, and she noticed how soft and long his hands were from years of gentle living. The hands of her own brothers were already large and coarse by comparison. They had two other meetings in the city before she agreed to come down and look over the big stone house and its grounds, but she had already made up her mind that she would marry William Kirkwood.

  The first sight Annie May had of her the Sunday she came to the house was standing beneath the copper beech on the front avenue. A handbag hung from her shoulder. William Kirkwood was smiling on her. The flurry of the past weeks, the visits to Dublin, the need for ironed shirts and polished shoes fell into place. The pain that filled her chest climbed into a tight band about her forehead. That there was no one to blame, that it was in the natural order of things only made it more painful. She couldn’t even be angry.

  They came to the big kitchen by way of the front door, looking in on the library and drawing-room, and Annie May heard her admiring the stairs.

  ‘What is this room with all the marble?’ she heard her ask as they drew closer.

  ‘It’s just a pantry now. In the old days it was the flower-cutting room … where the roses were cut.’

  When they came through the door, there was nothing but smiles and handshakes, but it was extremely tense. If William Kirkwood knew more of human nature, he would have seen that the two women were enemies.

  ‘Where’s Lucy?’ he asked.

  ‘I don’t know. She was here up to a minute ago,’ Annie May said and offered to make tea.

  ‘I’d love a cup of tea,’ Mary Kennedy said. ‘But first I’d like to see the upstairs rooms.’

  While they were taking tea, after having spent a long time walking through the upstairs rooms, darkness fell but still there was no sight of Lucy.

  ‘She must have gone outside,’ Annie May said worriedly, her own anxiety already transferred to the child.

  William Kirkwood walked Mary Kennedy over the fields to the road that led to her house. When they got to the house, it was full of the Kennedys and their families, most of whom William was meeting for the first time. It was a pleasant evening, and by its end it was clear to Mary that both William Kirkwood and the match were approved of. For his part, he liked the big old ramshackle f
armhouse, the crowd of people, the lashings of food and whiskey, the natural cheerfulness of people enjoying themselves, the absence of formality and selfconsciousness, reminding him more of political celebration than a family evening. When he left, Mary walked with him to the avenue. On the walk she kissed him for the first time. She was planning the wedding for June. The house would have to be painted, new curtains bought, some new furniture chosen. ‘The whole house will have to be opened up again. As it stands, the kitchen is the only room that looks lived in.’

  As he walked with her, he felt that the night was bathed in a dream of happiness, and would start in disbelief that this tall elegant high-spirited woman was about to become his wife. For her part, she felt that her girlish boast was coming true. She knew that she was going to love this strange man who spoke terms of endearment as if they were commands. ‘Venus, Mars, Saturn, Jupiter to the east over there.’ He was barking out the names in the clear sky, and she had to bite back laughter. She knew of men less knowledgeable about the stars who would be able to turn them to better advantage, but she would take care of that in her own time.

  ‘There’s one thing more,’ she said before they parted. ‘Annie May will have to be given notice.’

  ‘That I could never do,’ he said with such vehemence that it took her back. ‘She came as a very young girl to work for my mother. Lucy was born here, grew up here. I could never tell them to leave.’

  When she saw how disturbed he was, she put her hand on his arm. ‘Don’t worry, love. You’ll not have to do anything. I doubt very much if Annie May will want to stay once she hears I am moving into the house in June.’

  They were both standing still at the gate, and she turned and raised her lips to his, and he, feeling her body stir against his, took her into his arms.

  His own house was in darkness when he got home. He knew the back door was unlocked, but rather than go through the empty kitchen he let himself in by the front door with his key. There he sat for a long time in the cold of the library. He had many things to think about, and not least among them was this: whether there was any way his marriage could take place without bringing suffering on two people who had been a great part of his life, who had done nothing themselves to deserve being driven out into a world they were hardly prepared for.

  Bank Holiday

  It had been unusual weather, hot for weeks, and the white morning mist above the river, making ghostly the figures crossing the metal bridge, seemed a certain promise that the good weather was going to last beyond the holiday. All week in the Department he had heard the girls talking of going down the country, of the ocean, and the dances in the carnival marquees. Already, across the river, queues were forming for the buses that went to the sea – Howth, Dollymount, Malahide. He, Patrick McDonough, had no plans for the holiday, other than to walk about the city, or maybe to go out into the mountains later. He felt a certain elation of being loose in the morning, as if in space. The solid sound of his walking shoes on the pavement seemed to belong to someone else, to be going elsewhere.

  A year ago he had spent this holiday in the country, among the rooms and fields and stone walls he had grown up with, as he had spent it every year going back many years. His mother was still living, his father had died the previous February. The cruellest thing about that last holiday was to watch her come into the house speaking to his father of something she had noticed in the yard – a big bullfinch feeding on the wild strawberries of the bank, rust spreading in the iron of one of the sheds – and then to see her realize in the midst of speech that her old partner of the guaranteed responses was no longer there. They had been close. His father had continued to indulge her once great good looks long after they had disappeared.

  That last holiday he had asked his mother to come and live with him in the city, but she had refused without giving it serious thought. ‘I’d be only in the way up there. I could never fit in with their ways now.’ He had gone down to see her as often as he was able to after that, which was most weekends, and had paid a local woman to look in on her every day. Soon he saw that his visits no longer excited her. She had even lost interest in most of the things around her, and whenever that interest briefly gleamed she turned not to him but to his dead father. When pneumonia took her in a couple of days just before Christmas and her body was put down beside her husband’s in Aughawillian churchyard, he was almost glad. The natural wind now blew directly on him.

  He sold the house and lands. The land had been rich enough to send him away to college, not rich enough to bring him back other than on holiday, and now this holiday was the first such in years that he had nowhere in particular to go, no one special to see, nothing much to do. As well as the dangerous elation this sense of freedom gave, he looked on it with some of the cold apprehension of an experiment.

  Instead of continuing on down the quays, he crossed to the low granite wall above the river and stayed a long time staring down through the vaporous mist at the frenzy and filth of the low tide. He could have stood mindlessly there for most of the morning, but he pulled himself away and continued on down the quays until he turned into Webb’s Bookshop.

  The floor in Webb’s had been freshly sprinkled and swept, but it was dark within after the river light. He went from stack to stack among the secondhands until he came on a book that caught his interest, and he began to read. He stood there a long time until he was disturbed by the brown-overalled manager speaking by his side.

  ‘Would you be interested in buying the book, sir? We could do something perhaps about the price. The books in this stack have been here a long time.’ He held a duster in his hand, some feathers tied round the tip of a cane.

  ‘I was just looking.’

  The manager moved away, flicking the feathers along a row of spines in a gesture of annoyance. The spell was ended, but it was fair enough; the shop had to sell books, and he knew that if he bought the book it was unlikely that he would ever give it the same attention again. He moved to the next stack, not wanting to appear driven from the shop. He pretended to inspect other volumes. He lifted and put down The Wooing of Elisabeth McCrum, examining other books cursorily, all the time moving towards the door. It was no longer pleasant to remain. He tried to ignore the manager’s stare as he went out, to find himself in blinding sunshine on the pavement. The mist had completely lifted. The day was uncomfortably hot. His early excitement and sense of freedom had disappeared.

  Afterwards, he was to go over the little incident in the bookshop. If it had not happened would he have just ventured again out into the day, found the city too hot for walking, taken a train to Bray as he thought he might and walked all day in the mountains until he was dog-tired and hungry? Or was this sort of let-down the inescapable end of the kind of elation he had felt walking to the river in the early morning? He would never know. What he did know was that once outside the bookshop he no longer felt like going anywhere, and he started to retrace his steps back to where he lived, buying a newspaper on the way. When he opened the door a telegram was lying on the floor of the hallway.

  It was signed ‘Mary Kelleher’, a name he didn’t know. It seemed that a very old friend, James White, who worked for the Tourist Board in New York, had given her his name. There was a number to call.

  He put it aside to sit and read through the newspaper, but he knew by the continuing awareness of the telegram on the table that he would call. He was now too restless to want to remain alone.

  James White and he had met when they were both young civil servants, White slightly the older – though they both seemed the same age now – the better read, the more forthright, the more sociable. They met at eight-thirty on the Friday night of every week for several years, the evening interrupted only by holidays and illnesses, proof against girlfriends, and later wives, ended only by White’s transfer abroad. They met in bars, changing only when they became known to the barmen or regulars and in danger of losing their anonymity. They talked about ideas, books, ‘the human situation’, and
‘reality and consciousness’ often surfaced with the second or third pint. Now he could hardly remember a sentence from those hundreds of evenings. What he did remember was a barman’s face, white hair drawn over baldness, an avid follower of Christy Ring; a clock, a spiral iron staircase to the Gents, the cold of marble on the wristbone, footsteps passing outside in summer, the sound of heavy rain falling before closing time. The few times they had met in recent years they had both spoken of nothing but people and happenings, as if those early meetings were some deep embarrassment: they had leaned on them too heavily once and were now like lost strength.

  He rang. The number was that of a small hotel on the quays. Mary Kelleher answered. He invited her to lunch and they arranged to meet in the hotel foyer. He walked to the hotel, and as he walked he felt again the heady, unreal feeling of moving in an unblemished morning, though it was now past midday.

  When she rose to meet him in the foyer, he saw that she was as tall as he. A red kerchief with polka dots bound her blonde hair. She was too strong-boned to be beautiful but her face and skin glowed. They talked about James White. She had met him at a party in New York. ‘He said that I must meet you if I was going to Dublin. I was about to check out of the hotel when you rang.’ She had relations in Dundalk she intended to look up. Trinity College had manuscripts she wanted to see. They walked up Dame Street and round by the Trinity Railings to the restaurant he had picked in Lincoln Place. She was from Mount Vernon, New York, but had been living in Chicago, finishing her doctorate in medieval poetry at the University of Chicago. There were very pale hairs on the brown skin of her legs and her leather sandals slapped as she walked. When she turned her face to his, he could see a silver locket below the line of the cotton dress.