By the Lake

by John McGahern

  “And had she money?”

  “I think she had but John didn’t get his hands on any. She wasn’t that foolish. She may have parted with some things but she didn’t part with money.”

  “That fella,” Mary said with disapproval, but went on to say, “John always had horses. He had a white stallion then. When the odd mare used to come to the house he’d order the wife out to the yard to watch the performance. ‘Natural and healthy, what God intended,’ he’d say. The flat-bottomed boat he keeps below in the reeds is a living danger. Of course he had her out in the boat. He could be trying to get the money out of her. I’m sure she wasn’t far from the truth when she asked was he thinking of throwing her in. A lot he cared about the birds and the blue mountain and the swans sailing.”

  “Why would he regale us with the poetry?”

  “Because he thought it would suit, that it would go down well. It might help get Kate here on his side. John would watch mice at a crossroads,” Mary said with the same dismissiveness as she described Jamesie’s churchgoing.

  “Anyhow it wasn’t long till she left. The brother took her back. I don’t think John got a farthing, which was a God’s charity. They were decent, quiet people who minded their own business. They had no idea what John was like. Somebody was telling me not long ago that the poor thing isn’t all that well.”

  “If anything were to happen to her, John will be marching up the aisle again. Mark my words,” Jamesie said.

  “He’d be trying anyhow whether he’d succeed or not. He’s a pure disgust,” Mary said.

  “Look how he’s beating around. See how he’s round to Kate looking to get women from England.”

  “He’ll not get very far with Kate,” she said.

  “The poor fella is only doing his best. He’s contributing to the race. Like the rest of them he’s only trying to find his way to the boggy hollow,” Jamesie rubbed his hands together, slyly looking out of hooded eyes.

  “You, you, you—are a pure disgust as well!” Mary said, and added, “No wonder Lucy can’t stand this fella!”

  Lucy was his daughter-in-law, and Jamesie went quiet as if struck. She was one of the few people he had never been able to charm; it was a deep sore. “Some of these ones would want you tailor-made. Some of these ones are just too precise,” he said, and they were all too fond of him to say another word until he recovered and a path was found out of the silence.

  The Shah rolled round the lake with the sheepdog in the front seat of the car every Sunday and stayed until he was given his tea at six. Some days during the week he came in the evenings as well. On dry Sundays he loved to walk the fields, and to look at the cattle and sheep and the small wooded island out in the back lake where the herons nested, and to look across the lake to the acres of pale sedge of Gloria Bog, which ran like an inland sea until it met the blue of the lower slopes of the mountains where his life began, the stunted birch trees like small green flowers in the wilderness of bog.

  When it was raining or there was little to be done, he was content to sit in the house. Often he sat in silence. His silences were never oppressive and he never spoke unless to respond to something that had been said or to say something that he wanted to say. Throughout, he was intensely aware of every other presence, exercising his imagination on their behalf as well as on his own, seeing himself as he might be seen and as he saw others. Since he was a boy he had been in business of some kind but had never learned to read or write. He had to rely on pure instinct to know the people he could trust. This silence and listening were more useful than speech and his instinct was radar-sharp. His manners had once been gentle and hidden with everybody but to some extent the gentleness had been discarded as he grew in wealth and independence. With people he disliked he could be rough. People or places that made him ill at ease or uncomfortable he went to great lengths to avoid. When caught in such situations his manners would turn atrocious, like a clear-sighted person going momentarily blind. Where he blossomed was in the familiar and habitual, which he never left willingly. The one aberration of his imaginative shrewdness was a sneaking regard for delinquents, or even old villains like John Quinn, whose activities excited and amused him, as they tested and gave two fingers to the moral world.

  All his family, dominated by the mother, had been hardworking, intelligent, humorous, sociable. Across from the three-roomed cottage, the whitethorns had been trained to make an arch into the small rose garden, and a vine of roses covered the whitewashed wall when few houses on the mountain had more than the bare necessities. They also kept bees, had a small apple garden, ground coffee from dried and roasted dandelion roots; and when they got some money a room would be added to the house rather than building another outhouse to keep more fowl or animals.

  He alone in the family escaped school. A dedicated but ill-tempered schoolmaster, who had been instrumental in his older brother and sister becoming the first to win scholarships out of these mountains, had given him a bad beating during his first year at school. No amount of coaxing or threats could get him to return. At twelve, he made his first shillings by borrowing the family horse to draw stones to make a road to the new national school where his sister taught. His first job was in a local sand and gravel pit, where he learned to weld and fix machinery; soon, he was driving a sand lorry for the pit, and then purchased an old lorry of his own, drawing merchandise to and from the Belfast and Dublin docks. On the potholed roads it was more important to be a good mechanic than a driver, and by his early twenties he had four lorries of his own. At the outbreak of the war he switched into tillage contracting and made serious money.

  Seeing compulsory tillage about to disappear with the ending of the war, he sold out early, preserving and increasing the money he had made. For a few years he had a sawmill before buying the railway station, its land and buildings and some miles of track, when the small branch line was closed. In the middle of a long recession it went cheaply and he had to borrow very little. A bank manager he knew from the town card school gave him the loan, which he quickly repaid by dismantling and selling off the track, rails and sleepers and buildings that he didn’t want. At thirty, he owned a small empire and had no debts at a time when only the old established traders, the priests, the doctors, the big farmers had money and all the trains to the night boats were full. From such a position many men of his age would have expanded; he contracted. The only regular employment he gave was to a young boy, taciturn and intelligent, from a house close to his own on the same part of the mountain. Whenever he needed other workers he employed casual labour. When what was left of the railway line was broken up and sold off or stored, he began to buy old lorries, tractors, farm machinery to sell for spare parts and to put down fuel tanks. And when the four small railwaymen’s cottages that had come to him with the station became vacant, he installed bachelors he knew who had grown too old to work their mountain farms and wanted to move into the town. He charged them no rent and in return they helped about the sheds and in the big field of scrapped machinery on the edge of the town, while they were able. They were all silent, withdrawn people who spoke little, but seemed to understand one another perfectly and to get on well together without talking. When they died or had to go into the Home, he replaced them from the same stock, much as he replaced the black-and-white sheepdogs he was attached to. He did not drink or smoke and his fondness for cards was profitable. His luxuries were the new, expensive cars he liked to drive and the big meals he enjoyed every day in the hotel. With thick curly brown hair, an alert, pleasant appearance, his manner easy and assured, he was attractive to women in spite of an unconcealed, long-held determination to avoid marriage as he had avoided school. When he had the lorries on the road, he had several girls, all of them small and pretty; and then after a few years there was just the one girl, small too and pretty, Annie May McKiernan, and for nine years they went out together, meeting on the same two evenings every week.

  He called for her in his big car where she lived with her parents a
nd brother on their comfortable farm. They went to dances and films and the local plays. Gradually, he became almost another member of her family, helping her brother with the machinery on the farm, driving her parents to the seaside at Strandhill and Bundoran and later to Manorhamilton Hospital.

  When her father and then her mother died, he was as helpful and as present about the house as any member of the family, but soon afterwards her brother wanted to marry and bring a young woman into the house. Pressure was put on Annie May and on her suitor of many years. As they exchanged presents that Christmas while sitting in the big car, she said, in her placid way, “Aunt Mary wants me to go out to her in New York. You know, if something doesn’t happen soon I think I’ll go out to America around Easter.”

  It would not have been possible for her to be more direct, and he understood perfectly. There must have been an interminable silence, but the same negative resourcefulness that had frustrated every attempt to force him to go back to school won out over affection and scruples.

  “You know, Annie May, with the way this country is going I doubt but America will be the end of us all yet.”

  No door was ever closed more softly or with more finality. She did not go to New York at Easter but married old Paddy Fitzgerald, a cattle dealer, in an arranged match.

  The only change afterwards in the Shah’s life was that he went to the local cinema on his own and took to visiting the houses of his sisters and brother more often, especially on Sundays.

  Only his fellow card players in the poker school ever had the temerity to test the wall of stolidity he presented to the world.

  “Did you see that Annie May McKiernan got married to old Paddy Fitzgerald?” was slipped in with seeming casualness as cards were dealt.

  Feet sought other feet beneath the table. His reaction could not be predicted. There was none. All the cards were played and the winnings gathered in.

  “I’m afraid you missed out there,” was risked as new hands were dealt. “You didn’t move quick enough when you had the chance.”

  “If she had waited another few years she’d have been safe,” he said at last.

  The whole table erupted in laughter, but he did not even smile as his gaze travelled evenly from face to face and back to his hand.

  “Diamonds are trumps,” he said, and the intensity of the game resumed. “Let the best man win.”

  He and Ruttledge had always got on well together, and it did no harm that they shared the same first name. When Ruttledge abandoned his studies for the priesthood, his uncle had been supportive at a time when the prevailing climate had been one of accusation and reproach. “Let them go to hell,” the Shah had said, and offered money for further study—he who had never been to school long enough to learn to read or write—before Ruttledge decided to go to England, joining the masses on the trains and the boats.

  Not until some time after they had come to live by the lake, Kate having returned to London to find new tenants for her flat, did he learn how deep his uncle’s dislike of marriage ran, how ideal he considered his own single state to be.

  He couldn’t have been better company the previous Sunday, wishing Kate a safe journey to London with obvious affection. The very evening of the day Kate left, Ruttledge was surprised to see the Mercedes roll up to the house. The Shah remarked on the gardens and the improvements to the place, but not until he was seated comfortably was the purpose of the visit revealed.

  “It must be a great relief to you, now, that Kate is in London,” he offered in a tone of heartfelt congratulation.

  “I wouldn’t exactly call it relief.”

  “Tell us more,” the Shah said indulgently and began to shake in silent laughter.

  “She has business in London but I don’t feel any relief that she’s gone.”

  “I know,” the Shah agreed, wiping away tears with his fists. “I know full well. We all have to make those sort of noises from time to time.”

  “They are not exactly noises.”

  “That’ll do you now. That’ll do,” he raised his hands for silence and relief.

  “I thought you liked Kate. I thought the two of you got on.”

  “Kate is the very best. You couldn’t get better than poor Kate.”

  “I don’t know what you are on about, then.”

  “Listen,” he said. “If you talk to the wall tonight—answer me this while you’re at it—is the wall going to answer you back? Am I right or wrong?”

  “You’re right. Except I haven’t much interest in talking to the wall.”

  “Now you see,” he said contentedly, though it wasn’t clear what had been seen, and when Kate returned he welcomed her back as if he had missed her every single day she had been away.

  So regular were his habits—turning each day into the same day, making every Sunday into all the other Sundays—that when any small change occurred it was very noticeable. Only a few months before he had asked diffidently if he could have his meal early. He always ate silently, with such absorption that to be in the same room was in itself a silent, pleasurable participation in the single ceremony. Unusually, that evening he ate hurriedly, without enjoyment, and rose early from the table.

  “There must be something important on this evening,” Ruttledge remarked as he and Kate saw him to the car, Kate petting the sheepdog.

  “There’s a removal,” he said hurriedly.

  “Who’s dead?” Ruttledge asked without guile.

  “Missus Fitzgerald,” he said, immediately turning red.

  What had happened had taken place so long ago and was now so remote that Ruttledge would not have made any connection with the name but for his obvious discomfort. “Wasn’t she an old flame of yours?” he asked intuitively.

  “That’ll do you now,” he said, and let the sheepdog quickly into the car before getting behind the wheel. He was still red with embarrassment when he let the window down to say his usual, “God bless yous,” as the big car rolled out towards the alder tree and down towards the lake and shore.

  “It’s strange,” Kate said, “to show so much emotion going to her funeral when he could have married her when they were young. He was fond of her. His deep embarrassment was there to see.”

  “He wanted to be on his own. He didn’t want to be married,” Ruttledge said. “The priest, the single man, was the ideal of society, and with all the children we saw looking up at us from the floors of those bungalows, who can blame him?”

  “Don’t you think we are happy?” she asked so seriously that he paused, and drew her close.

  “We are different. I don’t think we should worry it too much. We wanted to be together. We weren’t afraid.”

  The four iron posts standing uselessly upright in their concrete bases had for long been an affront to the Shah.

  This Sunday as they walked the fields he remarked, “They are a holy sight. Do you think will that Ryan ever finish?”

  “He probably will—some day.”

  “If I was you I’d get in someone who’d finish the job properly. I’d run him to hell and not let him near the place again,” he urged.

  “I couldn’t do that. He did a good deal of work here when we had nothing.”

  They walked the fields until they found the sheep and lambs in the shade on the side of the hill. The cows were lying with their calves in a circle like wagons a few feet from the water in the small field where old potato ridges were still marked on the grass. A little way off the old Shorthorn stood on her own under broken whitethorns that came down to the shore.

  “She’s about to calve. It’s not a great time—out on all this grass.”

  “She’s a long time with you now. A great old lassie,” he said.

  The cow stood still as the Shah put out his hand to feel her bones. “She’s well shook,” he said. “She’ll have to be looked at again before night. She could calve at any time.”

  They turned away. The surface of the water out from the reeds was alive with shoals of small fish. There w
ere many swans on the lake. A grey rowboat was fishing along the far shore. A pair of herons moved sluggishly through the air between the trees of the island and Gloria Bog. A light breeze was passing over the sea of pale sedge like a hand. The blue of the mountain was deeper and darker than the blue of the lake or the sky. Along the high banks at the edge of the water there were many little private lawns speckled with fish bones and blue crayfish shells where the otters fed and trained their young.

  “I can never look at the blue of the mountain now without thinking of John Quinn,” Ruttledge said.

  “Oh John,” the Shah shook gently. “You wouldn’t want to be depending too much on John unless it was for women you were looking. John is a boy.”

  The meal was served when they returned to the house. He ate alone, with the sheepdog by his chair, and no one spoke. The only sounds were the knife and fork on a plate or a stirring spoon and the small birds on the green bank outside the window. Kate and Ruttledge left the room and returned without attracting his attention. When he rose from the table he said, “That was great. God bless and keep you, Kate.”

  They saw him to the car. The sheepdog leaped into the front seat and placed his front paws on the dashboard. He turned under the four iron posts and let the windows down to call out, “God bless yous,” as he passed the porch. They watched the light flash on the glass and metal as the car appeared and reappeared in the breaks in the big trees as it went slowly out around the shore.

  They continued looking for a long time at the evening sparkle on the lake until a dark figure appeared in a pale space, walking slowly, disappearing behind the trees. When the figure moved across the last clear space, it could either turn uphill or enter the fields along the shore. So even was the slow pace that Patrick Ryan emerged into the shade of the alder above the gate at the expected moment.

  “Talk of the devil,” Ruttledge breathed as soon as he recognized the figure in the dark suit.

  He came at the same slow, studied pace up the short avenue to the porch. The dark suit was neatly pressed, the white shirt ironed, the wine-coloured tie carefully knotted and the black shoes shone beneath the thin white dust of the road. He was five feet, six inches in height, with broad shoulders, a remarkably handsome head, sixty-five years of age, erect and strong.