Creatures of the Earth

by John McGahern

  It was cold and later than she thought. She was wearing a cardigan over a light dress. Not a single television set flickered behind the curtains of the little road. No music played anywhere. She thought of the children. She knew they would be safe and she could not go back to the house again. A car went slowly past on the main road. She would walk. She went out from the bungalows into the centre of town. A man was standing at one of the corners and shifted his feet and coughed as she passed. A full moon above the roofs shone down.

  She started to sob, then to laugh headily before she regained a sort of calm. Once she left the street lamps of the town, the moon gave her a long shadow for company. Now and then she broke into short runs. The cold never quite left her shoulders.

  So intent was she on getting to her mother’s house that it closed out all other thoughts. Close to the lake she smelt the rank waterweed and the sharp wild mint. The moon was amazing on the lake, flooding the water in yellow light, making it appear as deep as the sky. The path through the fields was sharp and clear above the lake. Around the house it was like day. She tapped on the bedroom window, but Maggie was already awake.

  As she told her mother what happened, Kate was suddenly so tired that listening to her own voice was like listening to the voice of another. Even with the children there, awake or sleeping, the bungalow that had been locked against her seemed as far away as Africa.

  *

  As Michael Doherty hadn’t a car at that time, Maggie cycled round the lake to ask if I’d drive them into town the next morning. There was trouble and Kate needed to see the solicitor. They were waiting at the lake gate an hour later. Kate looked pale but beautiful that morning. She was unusual in that she grew more beautiful with age. Maggie’s face was always interesting but never beautiful. Except for paleness and tiredness nobody could have guessed from either of them that anything was wrong.

  We stopped at the mart on the way into town. The great spaces were empty. A few beasts waiting within the sheds were lowing and listening before lowing again. Compared to the bellowing of market days, the lowing of the isolated animals sounded hollow and lonely and futile. When Kate came from the mart she told us that she had telephoned the school. Their father had taken the children to school that morning. From the mart Maggie and Kate went together to the solicitor’s.

  Old Mr Gannon received them. He was now partly retired but had been very fond of Kate ever since she’d worked for him as a young woman, but the advice he had to give them wasn’t good. By leaving the matrimonial home, Kate had forfeited all her rights. She couldn’t, though, be stopped from entering their house to see the children. Neither could her husband prevent her from leaving the house.

  Kate went to work in the mart, and I drove Maggie home. She told me everything on the way. ‘I know you won’t talk.’ Kate was going straight from work to see the children. I said I’d drive them anywhere they wanted to be driven to over the next few days. That is how I came to take Kate and her belongings from the house late that same night.

  Maggie asked me to stay in the car while she went into the bungalow. Kate opened the door and it was kept open. I saw the children near the door and once I thought I saw Harkin’s shadow fall across the light. The two women started carrying loose clothes and a suitcase out of the house. It was a relief to get out of the car, to open the boot and the back doors, besides sitting and watching in the mirrors. I only got back into the car when I saw the women kissing the children. The boy was clinging to them, but the two girls looked withdrawn.

  It wasn’t anything you’d want to watch too often. Kate cried in the back all the way out, but at the lake she was the first out to open that gate. She told us not to wait while she closed the gate. She wanted to walk the rest of the way in. Maggie and I had all her belongings taken from the car by the time she crossed the yard. She had stopped crying.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said to me as she came in.

  ‘There’s nothing to be sorry about.’

  ‘I should have more control,’ she said as she reached into the press for the whiskey bottle and poured me a large glass. Neither Kate nor Maggie ever drank. I dislike drinking on my own, but it was easier to drink than to refuse. I drank the whiskey down and left. I could see that the two women were tired out of their minds.

  I drove Kate in and out of town for most of a week. Maggie always came with me when I went to the house at night. I never saw Harkin once on any of these nights. They were worried about taking up too much of my time and tried to give me money. I would gladly have driven Kate in and out for a whole year, but when she found rooms above the hairdressing salon on Main Street I wasn’t needed any more. The one thing I wasn’t sorry to miss was seeing the way Kate looked as we drove away from the house each night.

  A slow, hard battle began, all of it silent and underground. Nothing ever came out into the open. After work she went to the house and stayed with the children till their bedtime. Harkin never spoke. As he would not allow her to cook or eat in the house, she delayed coming until after they’d eaten. Weekends were the worst. Often she would turn up at the house and find it locked. He would have taken the children with him on his rounds of the houses.

  Once when she suggested that she take the children out to Maggie’s for the weekend, he stared at her in silence before turning away. Gradually the children got used to their changed lives. There were times when they complained that she was not like other mothers. Knowing this, she was careful in everything she did outside the house. After more than a year had gone by, on certain evenings she found an attractive German woman in the house. On those evenings she left early.

  When Jerome Callaghan was in the mart on business, he would nearly always come into the office. His ease and charm only increased her wariness. The silence between herself and Harkin over the children was like inching across a glass roof. She could risk nothing. She could only live within the small worlds of her work at the mart, her mother’s house and company, the haven of her own rooms and the cramped confines she was allowed with her children. If Kate had continued living with her husband, any sexual attraction she held for Jerome Callaghan would have been suppressed, but once she left the house and moved into rooms, that changed. He was not put off that she gave no sign of reciprocating his interest. It was in his nature to be patient and he was used to getting his way.

  At school Jerome Callaghan had belonged with Kate to a small group distinctly better than the rest, and he belonged there easily, without effort. He could have gone to university, but instead went to work in his uncle’s insurance and auctioneering business in the town. Again, without much effort, he succeeded in expanding the business while getting on well with his uncle, his mother’s brother, who had never married, and when the uncle retired it was Callaghan who took over.

  Once the business was his own, he left it as it was. Hardly anything changed. The uncle came in to work as before, and often they had lunch together at the Royal Hotel. His nature was so well known that he was never suspected of courting the uncle in the hope of inheriting his money; and when his uncle died leaving him everything, the plain grief he showed did not look put on like a dark suit for the day.

  His uncle had been an original shareholder in the mart, and when Callaghan asked Kate to see McNulty, he was using the manager as a cover. The position was already Kate’s for the taking. While his modest way of life and manner and the underplaying of his increasing wealth were greatly approved of, his sexual inclination was nowhere liked. From a very young age he was drawn to older women: ‘Callaghan doesn’t want the trouble of schooling them; he likes his breaching done,’ was joked to cover suspicion and resentment of any deviation.

  An affair with the headmistress of the school Kate’s children attended continued over several years, an intelligent, dark gypsy of a woman who had many suitors once but had let the years run on without naming a wedding day. No matter how much care or discretion was used, word of this and other affairs always got out. On a Friday evening the headmistress
would leave her car at the railway station. Callaghan would meet her at a distant station, and they would drive away towards two whole nights and days together; but there was nearly always someone connected with the town who saw them in a hotel or restaurant or bar, and once, during the long school holiday, together on a London street. Harkin and Callaghan viewed one another with innate dislike. Callaghan was working for his uncle when Harkin first came to town. Football didn’t interest him, and he resented the popular athlete’s easy assumption of an animal superiority. Spoiled with adulation, Harkin saw the polite but firm distance Callaghan kept as criticism, all the more chafing since it was too hidden to be challenged.

  Once Harkin became involved with the tourists, an involvement that led naturally to property dealing, he was probably relieved to be able to turn their mutual antipathy into rivalry because of the enormous change in the strength of their relative positions over the years. All property dealings that came his way he directed towards Callaghan’s competitors, and now he was moving to set up as an auctioneer in his own right.

  ‘What does Callaghan ever do but fiddle with old ladies’ buttons while lying in wait for any easy game that comes along?’

  A change had come to Callaghan’s life that made him more vulnerable than he knew. His beloved mother died. His brother married. The newly married couple’s protestations when he suggested that he should move and leave them to their own young lives – ‘You’re no trouble to us at all, only help, and we hardly ever see you anyhow’ – strengthened his conviction that he should move out into his own life; but what life? Lazily he had believed that one day he’d marry a young woman, a doctor or a teacher, somebody with work and interests of her own. Years before, he’d bought part of an estate by a lake, with mature woods, oak and beech and larch. Above the lake he’d built a house he neither finished nor furnished, never making up his mind whether it was to be his life or an investment he would sell on a rising market. Several times he thought of finishing the house and going to live there while continuing to live with his brother and sister-in-law. During all this time he was careful not to pester Kate, and, if anything, visited her office in the mart less often than before, but the small courtesies he showed her could not be mistaken. When he did ask her openly out for an evening, she was able both to meet and turn aside the open sexual nature of the invitation.

  ‘We’re old school friends. We know one another too well,’ she said.

  ‘That’s not knowing,’ he smiled but did not press her further.

  He appeared no longer to be seeing any of the women he had been linked with. Most weekends he spent alone about the town, unheard of before, weekends when she, as often as not, found the bungalow empty and locked, and they could not avoid running into one another.

  ‘I’m not free,’ she said to him bluntly when they had coffee together in the hotel one Saturday. She had come back into the town after finding the house deserted, the car gone.

  ‘How not free? You live alone.’

  ‘I don’t even feel safe to be seen with you here over coffee in daylight.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Talk. Rumour. You know how little it needs to be fed.’

  ‘Such scruples do not seem to bother your husband.’

  ‘That’s his business,’ she told him sharply. ‘He has charge of the children.’

  ‘You are worried about losing the children?’

  ‘I think of nothing else.’

  She asked him as a favour to stay behind when she left. She wanted to be seen leaving alone. He agreed readily, ordered fresh coffee and was soon joined by two men from the bar who wanted to discuss a property deal.

  One of the few liberties she was allowed with the children was to take them to Mass. One Sunday came when she found the children gone and the house locked. Always the same excuse was used – when any excuse was offered – that the children were taken with him on his rounds of the tourist houses for their own safety. She became very upset and decided to walk all the way to the lake to talk to Maggie before going back to the solicitor to see if there was any way she could obtain more regular fixed access. Every week there was some new twist or difficulty. She was afraid that soon she would not get to see her children at all, Jim and Kate and young Maggie, all brought up in the same air and world, and all so different. As she walked outside the town with these images and anxieties moving through her mind, sometimes with the charm of their individual faces and endearing gestures before her, and then again turning away from her with the woodiness of placards or a picket line, a car drew in ahead of her. Before she recognized the car or driver she knew it was Jerome Callaghan.

  ‘I was just passing,’ he said when he saw her reluctance to enter the car.

  ‘I don’t want to avoid you but I can’t afford to be seen with you either.’

  ‘I’m offering a lift. That’s all,’ he said.

  ‘It’s too dangerous.’ He saw she was not herself, excited and troubled.

  ‘I’m just going that way,’ he said.

  ‘An hour ago I called to the house and it was shut; the children gone again. I’m not free. Sometimes I think I’m worse off now than before I got the job in the mart.’

  ‘You are free as far as I’m concerned.’

  ‘I’m aware of that.’ She smiled. ‘I’m still not free as far as I’m concerned.’

  ‘And I’m ready to help you in any way I can – and even wait.’

  At the lake gate he stopped the car, and as she was about to shut the door, she said, ‘If you’d like to come in to meet my mother, you are welcome.’

  ‘Maggie and I have known each other for years.’

  ‘We’ll have to drive, then. The car would be seen by too many at the gate.’

  When the car crossed the hill and was going down to the house under the tall trees, he eased it to a stop, letting the engine run.

  ‘What’s going to happen to us?’ he asked.

  ‘I don’t see how someone like you would want to get involved in my situation.’

  ‘I love you.’

  In spite of his rational or common-sense self, he’d been drawn into the town in the early morning because of nothing but her presence in the rooms above the hairdresser’s. He had this obsessional desire to see her, if only with her children at Mass. He’d watched her leave the rooms and walk to the bungalow on the outskirts of the town. From a safe distance he’d observed her attempts to enter the locked house. When he saw her walk out of the town in the direction of the lake, he guessed where she was going.

  ‘You are only making things bad for yourself. Even if I wanted to help, there is nothing I can do. You see how I am. It is as if I’ve already had my life.’

  ‘What’s going to happen?’

  ‘I don’t know but I know it can’t go on like this. On Achill it was this bad, but in a different way, and I knew then it couldn’t go on. I knew something had to happen. What happened was the last thing I wanted or wished, but it did happen. I have the same feeling that something is about to happen now that will change everything. It has to happen.’

  ‘Tell me one thing. It is all I ask. If you were free, would you be interested at all?’

  ‘Yes. But what use is that?’

  ‘It’s use to me. I know you well enough to know you would not say it for the sake of saying. Even I feel something has to happen. I hope to God it can set us free.’

  She thought of kissing him lightly but then drew back. She had not even that right. He drove to the house. In the house he had tea with the two women and chatted agreeably with Maggie before leaving them alone after a half-hour.

  If they had kissed when the car was stopped under the trees that went down to the house, if they had even lain bone to bone in the empty night above Main Street in the solace and healing that flesh can bring to hurt desire, they would not have gone halfway to satisfy all the rife rumour implied they did with one another: ‘Old Ireland is coming along at a great rate. There was a time you lay on the bed you made,
but now it’s all just the same as a change of oil or tyres. The Harkins have split. Harkin has a German woman and scores of others when he feels like rising. The heart, my dear, may be wobbly but it appears everything is healthy enough in other departments. The wife, I hear, hasn’t let any grass grow either. She works at the mart and is seen with Jerome Callaghan, who, they say, can tip a cat on the way out through a skylight. Yes, my dear, old Ireland is certainly coming along.’ None of those who discoursed so freely above supermarket trolleys or bar counters, or just standing or sitting about, could trace their words to any source, but it did not lessen the authority with which they spoke. I even heard things quoted that I was supposed to have said of which I had never spoken a word.

  At the height of these rumours, Harkin came all the way round the lake to see me. I was in the house when I heard the beat of a heavy diesel. I listened for it to go past the gate, but the sound stopped. After a while, a low tapping came on the front door. A small boy stood outside. I failed to recognize him.

  ‘Daddy wants to see you.’

  ‘Who’s Daddy?’

  ‘Guard Harkin.’

  ‘What does he want?’ It was too late now to try to make any amends to the boy. If he had been with Kate or Maggie, I’d have known him and given him coins or chocolate or cake or apples.

  ‘He said he wants to see you.’

  Harkin sat beside the wheel of the blue Mercedes outside the gate in the shade of the alders. His door was thrown open. The two girls sat in the back. He had put on a great deal of weight since his playing days. His features had coarsened. I assumed he did not get out of the car because of his heart condition.

  ‘What kind of fish are in the lake?’ he demanded though he already knew. He had helped to net the lake.

  ‘Pike, eel, perch …’