Creatures of the Earth

by John McGahern

  Bernardo’s door was open on to the street, and all but two of the tables were empty.

  ‘Everybody’s out of town for the holiday. We have the place to ourselves.’ They were given a table for four just inside the door. They ordered the same things, melon with Parma ham, veal Milanese, a carafe of chilled white wine. He urged her to have more, to try the raspberries in season, the cream cake, but she ate carefully and would not be persuaded.

  ‘Do you come here often?’ she asked.

  ‘Often enough. I work near here, round the corner, in Kildare Street. An old civil servant.’

  ‘You don’t look the part at all, but James White did say you worked in the civil service. He said you were quite high up.’ She smiled teasingly. ‘What do you do?’

  ‘Nothing as exciting as medieval poetry. I deal in law, industrial law in particular.’

  ‘I can imagine that to be quite exciting.’

  ‘Interesting maybe, but mostly it’s a job – like any other.’

  ‘Do you live in the city, or outside?’

  ‘Very near here. I can walk most places, even walk to work.’ And when he saw her hesitate, as if she wanted to ask something and did not think it right, he added, ‘I have a flat. I live by myself there, though I was married once.’

  ‘Are you divorced? Or am I allowed to ask that?’

  ‘Of course you are. Divorce isn’t allowed in this country. We are separated. For something like twenty years now we haven’t laid eyes on one another. And you? Do you have a husband or friend?’ he changed the subject.

  ‘Yes. Someone I met at college, but we have agreed to separate for a time.’

  There was no silence or unease. Their interest in one another already far outran their knowledge. She offered to split the bill but he refused.

  ‘Thanks for the lunch, the company,’ she said as they faced one another outside the restaurant.

  ‘It was a pleasure,’ and then he hesitated and asked, ‘What are you doing for the afternoon?’ not wanting to see this flow that was between them checked, though he knew to follow it was hardly wise.

  ‘I was going to check tomorrow’s trains to Dundalk.’

  ‘We could do that at Westland Row around the corner. I was wondering if you’d be interested in going out to the sea where the world and its mother is in this weather?’

  ‘I’d love to,’ she said simply.

  It was with a certain relief that he paid the taxi at the Bull Wall. Lately the luxury and convenience of a taxi had become for him the privilege of being no longer young, of being cut off from the people he had come from, and this was exasperated by the glowing young woman by his side, her eager responses to each view he pointed out, including the wired-down palms along the front.

  ‘They look so funny. Why is it done?’

  ‘It’s simple. So that they will not be blown away in storms. They are not natural to this climate.’

  He took off his tie and jacket as they crossed the planks of the wooden bridge, its legs long and stork-like in the retreated tide. The rocks that sloped down to the sea from the Wall were crowded with people, most of them in bathing costumes, reading, listening to transistors, playing cards, staring out to sea, where three tankers appeared to be nailed down in the milky distance. The caps of the stronger swimmers bobbed far out. Others floated on their backs close to the rocks, crawled in sharp bursts, breast-stroked heavily up and down a parallel line, blowing like walruses as they trod water.

  ‘I used to swim off these rocks once. I liked going in off the rocks because I’ve always hated getting sand between my toes. Those lower rocks get covered at full tide. You can see the tidal line by the colour.’

  ‘Don’t you swim any more?’

  ‘I haven’t in years.’

  ‘If I had a costume I wouldn’t mind going in.’

  ‘I think you’d find it cold.’

  She told him of how she used to go out to the ocean at the Hamptons with her father, her four brothers, their black sheep Uncle John who had made a fortune in scrap metal and was extremely lecherous. She laughed as she recounted one of Uncle John’s adventures with an English lady.

  When they reached the end of the Wall, they went down to the Strand, but it was so crowded that they had to pick their way through. They moved out to where there were fewer people along the tide’s edge. It was there that she decided to wade in the water, and he offered to hold her sandals. As he walked with her sandals, a phrase came without warning from the book he had been reading in Webb’s: ‘What is he doing with his life, we say: and our judgement makes up for the failure to realize sympathetically the natural process of living.’ He must indeed be atrophied if a casual phrase could have more presence for him than this beautiful young woman, and the sea, and the day. The dark blue mass of Howth faced the motionless ships on the horizon, seemed to be even pushing them back.

  ‘Oh, it’s cold.’ She shivered as she came out of the water, and reached for her sandals.

  ‘Even in heatwaves the sea is cold in Ireland. That’s Howth ahead – where Maud Gonne waited at the station as Pallas Athena.’ He reached for his role as tourist guide.

  ‘I know that line,’ she said and quoted the verse. ‘Has all that gone from Dublin?’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘Are there … poets … still?’

  ‘Are there poets?’ he laughed out loud. ‘They say the standing army of poets never falls below ten thousand in this unfortunate country.’

  ‘Why unfortunate?’ she said quickly.

  ‘They create no wealth. They are greedy and demanding. They hold themselves in very high opinion. Ten centuries ago

  there was a national convocation, an attempt to limit their powers and numbers.’

  ‘Wasn’t it called Drum something?’

  ‘Drum Ceat,’ he added, made uneasy by his own attack.

  ‘But don’t you feel that they have a function – beyond wealth?’ she pursued.

  ‘What function?’

  ‘That they sing the tired rowers to the hidden shore?’

  ‘Not in the numbers we possess here, one singing down the other. But maybe I’m unkind. There are a few.’

  ‘Are these poets to be seen?’

  ‘They can’t even be hidden. Tomorrow evening I could show you some of the pubs they frequent. Would you like that?’

  ‘I’d like that very much,’ she said, and took his hand. A whole day was secured. The crowds hadn’t started to head home yet, and they travelled back to the city on a nearly empty bus.

  ‘What will you do for the rest of the evening?’

  ‘There’s some work I may look at. And you? What will you do?’

  ‘I think I’ll rest. Unpack, read a bit.’ She smiled as she raised her hand.

  He walked slowly back, everything changed by the petty confrontation in Webb’s, the return to the flat, the telegram in the hallway. If he had not come back, she would be in Dundalk by now, and he would be thinking about finding a hotel for the night somewhere round Rathdrum. In the flat, he went through notes that he had made in preparation for a meeting he had with the Minister the coming week. They concerned an obscure section of the Industries Act. Though they were notes he had made himself he found them extremely tedious, and there came on him a restlessness like that which sometimes heralds illness. He felt like going out to a cinema or bar, but knew that what he really wanted to do was to ring Mary Kelleher. If he had learned anything over the years it was the habit of discipline. Tomorrow would bring itself. He would wait for it if necessary with his mind resolutely fixed on its own blankness, as a person prays after fervour has died.

  ‘Section 13, paragraph 4, states clearly that in the event of confrontation or disagreement …’ he began to write.

  The dress of forest green she was wearing when she came down to the lobby the next evening caught his breath; it was shirt-waisted, belling out. A blue ribbon hung casually from her fair hair behind.

  ‘You look marvellous.’
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  The Sunday streets were empty, and the stones gave out a dull heat. They walked slowly, loitering at some shop windows. The doors of all the bars were open, O’Neills and the International and the Olde Stand, but they were mostly empty within. There was a sense of a cool dark waiting in Mooney’s, a barman arranging ashtrays on the marble. They ordered an assortment of sandwiches. It was pleasant to sit in the comparative darkness, and eat and sip and watch the street, and to hear in the silence footsteps going up and down Grafton Street.

  It was into this quiet flow of the evening that the poet came, a large man, agitated, without jacket, the shirt open, his thumbs hooked in braces that held up a pair of sagging trousers, a brown hat pushed far back on his head. Coughing harshly and pushing the chair around, he sat at the next table.

  ‘Don’t look around,’ McDonough leaned forward to say.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘He’ll join us if we catch his eye.’

  ‘Who is he?’

  ‘A poet.’

  ‘He doesn’t look like one.’

  ‘That should be in his favour. All the younger clerks that work in my place nowadays look like poets. He is the best we have. He’s the star of the place across the road. He’s practically resident there. He must have been thrown out.’

  The potboy in his short white coat came over to the poet’s table and waited impassively for the order.

  ‘A Powers,’ the order came in a hoarse, rhythmical voice. ‘A large Powers and a pint of Bass.’

  There was more sharp coughing, a scraping of feet, a sigh, muttering, a word that could have been a prayer or a curse. His agitated presence had more the sound of a crowd than the single person sitting in a chair. After the potboy brought the drinks and was paid, the poet swung one leg vigorously over the other, and with folded arms faced away towards the empty doorway. Then, as suddenly, he was standing in front of them. He had his hand out. There were coins in the hand.

  ‘McDonough,’ he called hoarsely, thrusting his palm forward. ‘Will you get me a packet of Ci-tanes from across the road?’ He mispronounced the brand of French cigarettes so violently that his meaning was far from clear.

  ‘You mean the cigarettes?’

  ‘Ci-tanes,’ he called hoarsely again. ‘French fags. Twenty. I’m giving you the money.’

  ‘Why don’t you get them here?’

  ‘They don’t have them here.’

  ‘Why don’t you hop across yourself?’

  ‘I’m barred,’ he said dramatically. ‘They’re a crowd of ignorant, bloody apes over there.’

  ‘All right. I’ll get them for you.’ He took the coins but instead of rising and crossing the road he called the potboy.

  ‘Would you cross the road for twenty Gitanes for me, Jimmy? I’d cross myself but I’m with company,’ and he added a large tip of his own to the coins the poet had handed over.

  ‘It’s against the rules, sir.’

  ‘I know, but I’d consider it a favour,’ and they both looked towards the barman behind the counter who had been following every word and move of the confrontation. The barman nodded that it was all right, and immediately bent his head down to whatever he was doing beneath the level of the counter, as if to disown his acquiescence.

  Jimmy crossed, was back in a moment with the blue packet.

  ‘You’re a cute hoar, McDonough. You’re a mediocrity. It’s no wonder you get on so well in the world,’ the poet burst out in a wild fury as he was handed the packet, and he finished his drinks in a few violent gulps, and stalked out, muttering and coughing.

  ‘That’s just incredible,’ she said.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘You buy the man his cigarettes, and then get blown out of it. I don’t understand it.’

  ‘It wasn’t the cigarettes he wanted.’

  ‘Well, what did he want?’

  ‘Reassurance, maybe, that he still had power, was loved and wanted after having been turfed out across the way. I slithered round it by getting Jimmy here to go over. That’s why I was lambasted. He must have done something outrageous to have been barred. He’s a tin god there. Maybe I should have gone over after all.’

  ‘Why didn’t you?’

  ‘Vanity. I didn’t want to be his messenger boy. He could go and inflate his great mouse of an ego somewhere else. To hell with him. He’s always trouble.’ She listened in silence as he ended. ‘Wouldn’t it be pleasant to be able to throw people their bones and forget it?’

  ‘You might have to spend an awful lot of time throwing bones if the word got around.’ She smiled as she sipped her glass of cider.

  ‘Now that you’ve seen the star, do you still wish to cross the road and look in on the other pub?’

  ‘I’m not sure. What else could we do?’

  ‘We could go back to my place.’

  ‘I’d like that. I’d much prefer to see how you live.’

  ‘Why don’t we look in across the road, have one drink if it’s not too crowded,’ and he added some coins to the change still on the table. ‘It was very nice of them to cross for the Gitanes. They’re not supposed to leave their own premises.’

  The door of the bar across the way was not open, and when he pushed it a roar met them like heat. The bar was small and jammed. A red-and-blue tint from a stained glass window at the back mixed weirdly with the white lights of the bar, the light of evening from the high windows. A small fan circled helplessly overhead, its original white or yellow long turned to ochre by cigarette smoke. Hands proffered coins and notes across shoulders to the barmen behind the horseshoe counter. Pints and spirit glasses were somehow eased from hand to hand across the three-deep line of shoulders at the counter the way children that get weak are taken out of a crowd. The three barmen were so busy that they seemed to dance.

  ‘What do you think?’ he asked.

  ‘I think we’ll forget it.’

  ‘I always feel a bit apprehensive going in there,’ he admitted once they were out on the street again.

  ‘I know. Those places are the same everywhere. For a moment I thought I was in New York at the Cedar Bar.’

  ‘What makes them the same?’

  ‘I don’t know. Mania, egotism, vanity, aggression … people searching madly in a crowd for something that’s never to be found in crowds.’

  She was so lovely in the evening that he felt himself leaning towards her. He did not like the weakness. ‘I find myself falling increasingly into an unattractive puzzlement,’ he said, ‘mulling over that old, useless chestnut, What is life?’

  ‘It’s the fact of being alive, I suppose, a duration of time, as the scholars would say,’ and she smiled teasingly. ‘Puzzling out what it is must be part of it as well.’

  ‘You’re too young and beautiful to be so wise.’

  ‘That sounds a bit patronizing.’

  ‘That’s the last thing I meant it to be.’

  He showed her the rooms, the large living-room with the oak table and worn red carpet, the brass fender, the white marble of the fireplace, the kitchen, the two bedrooms. He watched her go over the place, lift the sea shell off the mantelpiece, replace it differently.

  ‘It’s a lovely flat,’ she said, ‘though Spartan to my taste.’

  ‘I bought the place three years ago. I disliked the idea of owning anything at first, but now I’m glad to have it. Now, would you like a drink, or perhaps some tea?’

  ‘I’d love some tea.’

  When he returned he found her thumbing through books in the weakening light.

  ‘Do you have any of the poet’s work?’

  ‘You can have a present of this, if you like.’ He reached and took a brown volume from the shelf.

  ‘I see it’s even signed,’ she said as she leafed through the volume. ‘For Patrick McDonough, With love,’ and she began to laugh.

  ‘I helped him with something once. I doubt if he’d sign it with much love this evening.’

  ‘Thanks,’ she said as she closed the volume and placed it in her
handbag. ‘I’ll return it. It wouldn’t be right to keep it.’ After several minutes of silence, she asked, ‘When do you have to go back to your office?’

  ‘Not till Tuesday. Tomorrow is a Bank Holiday.’

  ‘And on Tuesday what do you do?’

  ‘Routine. The Department really runs itself, though many of us think of ourselves as indispensable. In the afternoon I have to brief the Minister.’

  ‘On what, may I ask?’

  ‘A section of the Industries Act.’

  ‘What is the Minister like?’

  ‘He’s all right. An opportunist, I suppose. He has energy, certainly, and the terrible Irish gift of familiarity. He first came to the fore by putting parallel bars on the back of a lorry. He did handstands and somersaults before and after speeches, to the delight of the small towns and villages. Miss Democracy thought he was wonderful and voted him in top of the poll. He’s more statesmanlike now of course.’

  ‘You don’t sound as if you like him very much.’

  ‘We’re stuck with one another.’

  ‘Were you upset when your marriage failed?’ she changed.

  ‘Naturally. In the end, there was no choice. We couldn’t be in the same room together for more than a couple of minutes without fighting. I could never figure out how the fights started, but they always did.’

  ‘Did you meet anyone else?’

  ‘Nothing that lasted. I worked. I visited my parents until they died. Those sort of pieties are sometimes substitutes for life in this country – or life itself. We’re back to the old subject and I’m talking too much.’

  ‘No. I’m asking too many questions.’

  ‘What’ll you do now that you have your doctorate?’

  ‘Teach. Write. Wait on tables. I don’t know.’

  ‘And your husband or friend?’

  ‘Husband,’ she said. ‘We were married but it’s finished. We were too young.’