By the Lake

by John McGahern

  “Go ahead. There’s nothing new in the world. And we forget. We’ll hear it again,” Patrick Ryan demanded.

  There was a table in the room, a high-backed chair, a single bed, an armchair for reading and listening to the radio, a gas fire in the small grate. On the mantel above the grate he always kept a pile of coins for the meter on the landing. A gas cooker and a sink were in the corner of the room inside the door. He didn’t have a television. He saw all the TV he wanted in the canteen at work and at weekends in the betting shop or in the Prince of Wales.

  “Mister Singh owns the house. He’s an Indian and drives a Merc and owns several houses. All the rich Indians drive Mercs. On Thursday nights he collects the rents personally. If there’s anything wrong—a broken gas ring, an electric socket—you tell Mister Singh on Thursday night and it’s fixed pronto. The Indians are a very alphabetical people. Mister Singh doesn’t drink, very few Indians drink, it is forbidden in their religion. A Jock and a Taffie have rooms in the house but all the rest are Irish and all but two of the Irish are Murphy Fusiliers. Mister Singh rents only to single men: no marrieds, no women, no coloureds.”

  “Mister Singh must be coloured himself,” Kate said.

  “That makes no differ, Kate. It’s business. Mister Singh said to me once, ‘Even in Ireland you don’t mix robins with blackbirds.’ There was a pufter there for a while, English, but he ran into trouble with the Fusiliers. The Fusiliers only sleep in the house. A minibus collects them early. They work a lot around the airport and in tunnels. Most of them go straight from work to the pub without a change of clothes. They work at weekends as well. I don’t think any of them ever darkens a church. They make big money. A few of the married men are careful enough because they send money home but most let it go in smoke. Some of them get badly hurt from time to time. I heard a few were killed. They stand by one another then and take collections. A lot complains about the Fusiliers but I can find no fault. They used to give me their money to hand to Mister Singh on Thursday night and now I collect for the whole house. It suits all round. The Fusiliers are all big strong men.”

  “I can’t see them and the pufter making much hay together,” Patrick Ryan grinned.

  “I don’t know what happened,” Johnny said firmly. “There was a good-looking black-haired lad from the Galway Gaeltacht in the Fusiliers that the pufter tried to get friendly with. Anyhow he was taken away in an ambulance. The police were around. Mister Singh didn’t like that. Anyhow nothing came of it. The Galway lad left soon afterwards as well. The canteen in Ford’s is an easy number, clearing the tables, keeping the floors and the toilets clean, taking the bets down to the betting shop for the men on the line.”

  “How is the hearing?”

  “I often hear more than I want,” he said.

  “Still, anything must be better than the fucken assembly line.”

  “The noise was terrible but you get used. Time passes quickly on the line. You have no time to think. You’re too busy. Time is often slow enough around the canteen. But I know I’m lucky to be there at all.”

  “I suppose the evenings are hard enough to put round as well,” Patrick Ryan said.

  “They’re all right. As long as you have a plan,” Johnny said. “I sometimes take a light kip. Once I get up I wash and shave and change into new clothes. That’s the one thing I hold against the Fusiliers. They never change their clothes from morning till they fall into bed. If the darts team is playing away I go down to the Prince early. There’s always plenty of transport. If we’re playing at home I go down around eight-thirty and when there’s no game I dawnder down at nine. They all know me in the Prince. Saturdays and Sundays I lie in late. I always have a few bets on Saturday after going through the Post. Sundays I never miss evening Mass at St. Ann’s. Father Wrynn is the priest there. He’s from Drumshambo. I wait behind after Mass and if he’s not busy we have a long chat about home. We always have the joke how there’s no getting away from the Drumshambo wind no matter how far you travel.”

  “I knew Father Wrynn’s poor father and mother well,” Patrick Ryan said with feeling. “At that time you had to be rich to have a priest in the family. The Wrynns weren’t rich but they worked every hour God sent. They thought they were entering heaven the day Father Wrynn was ordained.”

  “The son isn’t a bit religious. I talk to him nearly every Sunday,” Johnny said. “Anyhow all the priests in England are sociable. They are not directly connected to God like the crowd here.”

  “Father Conroy isn’t like that,” Ruttledge intervened.

  “Father Conroy is plain. The priests had this country abulling with religion once. It’s a good job it’s easing off,” Patrick Ryan said.

  “At Christmas I go up on the train to Josie Connor in Birmingham. I always bring the turkey and a few bottles of Powers. We go over everything that ever happened round the lake. Anne and Josie are pure fourteen-carat. They always write to me well before Christmas. It’d be a lonesome oul Christmas Day looking down a deserted Edward Road with the Prince closed all day and a few people going by carrying presents.”

  “All the Connors were decent, as decent as ever wore shoe leather. Even when they lived on the edge of the bog they’d give you what they didn’t have for themselves,” Patrick Ryan said emotionally from the whiskey. “And Anne’s crowd, the Dohertys, were near enough the same cut of cloth. They’d give you as well what they didn’t have for themselves.”

  A fat bullfinch came into view and began to peck at the small wild strawberries on the bank. The black cat was sleeping in the window but tensed when its attention was drawn to the small bird’s darting movements as it hopped about like a mechanical toy among the ferns and grasses.

  “That’s a great cat,” Patrick Ryan said sarcastically. “She’d like if she was handed the bird and given a knife and fork.”

  “Half the pleasure of the wild strawberries is watching the finch,” Kate said. “I’m glad the cat is in the house.”

  “I’d side with Kate,” Johnny said. “I must have shot every game bird that ever moved. Now I’d sooner see them flying around.”

  “I wouldn’t,” Patrick Ryan said. “I’d shoot the lot.”

  “How is Bill Evans this weather?” Johnny asked.

  “As large as life. He still goes to the lake for the buckets of water.”

  “That’s one man who has earned his place in heaven,” Johnny said.

  “Jesus Christ had nothing on Bill Evans except Bill was never put up on a cross. He has had a better time since his Master Packie died. You wouldn’t call it heaven now but it’s a big improvement on what went before,” Patrick Ryan said.

  Johnny and Patrick exchanged cigarettes, sharing the single match Johnny had struck. Patrick Ryan’s face lit in a strange childlike peace as he reached into the flame, as if they were in possession again of that old warm world that was once theirs together. It could not last. As soon as he took the last quick draw on the cigarette, he thrust the butt towards Ruttledge without preamble or warning.

  “Throw that out on the street for me, lad.”

  Ruttledge did not speak or move. The air filled with the tension of uncertainty. The low murmur of summer outside the house that had gone unheeded entered the room, the blundering of a big black fly against the window on the bank from which the finch had disappeared was suddenly loud.

  Ruttledge rose slowly and bowed. “At your service, sir,” and took the smouldering butt and opened the door of the unlit brown Raeburn and threw it in. He was too familiar with these demands to be hurried. He had seen him make supplicants who needed his skills carry his coat and tools as abjectly as slaves.

  “You wouldn’t have made a bad actor, lad,” he laughed uncomfortably as Ruttledge closed the door of the stove; but the room stayed silent.

  “I should have put out an ashtray,” Kate said.

  Johnny had already slipped his quenched cigarette into his pocket. “Thanks for everything,” he rose and placed his glass on the table. “
It’s great to see yous all so well after another year.”

  “Thanks for coming over,” they answered. “It was great to see you again.”

  “I’m going. I’ll not be back for a while,” Patrick Ryan said, his anger still raw from the unsatisfactory confrontation. “You’ll have plenty of time to finish the creosoting. That way you’ll not have to worry about the rain on the timber.”

  “That’ll be all right.”

  “What’ll be all right?”

  “Everything. The creosoting—everything,” Ruttledge answered.

  “It won’t be all right but it’ll have to do,” Patrick Ryan said.

  “Would you ever think of coming back for good when you retire from Ford’s?” Kate asked as they saw them to the gate.

  “I don’t know, Kate. You get used to England. When you cut your stick and make your bed you have to lie on it,” he said.

  “It wouldn’t work out,” Patrick Ryan said. “He’d know nobody here now.”

  “Be sure and remember us to Mary and Jamesie.”

  “Will do,” he responded jauntily, his English accent showing.

  “I suppose you have many calls to make.”

  “Not too many, Kate. Just a few and there are fewer every year. That’s why it’s great to see everybody so well.”

  Patrick Ryan picked up his bundle of tools. Johnny wheeled the girl’s bicycle. The two men seemed to fall into spirited conversation as they went downhill to the corner of the lake. Twice they paused. There was the clear ring of laughter in the voices.

  Once all the timbers were creosoted the frame stood like a dark, ungainly skeleton high on the four posts. As Ruttledge was tidying up, Kate passed outside the ladders to check that the hive roofs hadn’t been dislodged in the disturbance of the previous day. The bees were working quietly.

  On Sunday the black Mercedes rolled round the shore, bringing an enormous box of chocolates wrapped with blue ribbon for Kate and a small metal box with handles. The metal was the colour of grass and mud and looked like military surplus.

  “I see the cathedral is coming along,” the Shah said as he eased himself out of the front seat.

  “Probably it’ll stay that way for a while now. He’s gone again. God knows when he’ll be back.”

  “I told you long ago he should be run.”

  “I’d say yes to that,” Kate said.

  “Now you’re talking.”

  He handed Kate the chocolates and she thanked him, protesting that it was too much.

  “That’ll do you now,” he said. “It’s not one bit too much.”

  “What’s in the strange box?” Ruttledge asked.

  “I’m going on a bit of a holiday and leaving this here,” he announced as he placed the metal box on the table. He had never gone on holiday, unless three days many years before on Lough Derg counted as a holiday. From time to time he would recall how much he had suffered: the cold, the wet, the lack of sleep, the never-ending circle of prayer in bare feet, the hunger, the sharp stones. “If hell is anything like it I’m sticking to the straight and narrow.” The one hot Sunday or two he drove to the ocean at Bundoran every year to wallow in the waves and lie in the sun until he was burned pink hardly counted as holiday.

  “I’m going to Donegal, to Burtonport,” he said. “I’m bringing Monica and the children. The poor thing needs taking out of herself.”

  Monica was his favourite niece, a tall, dark-haired, intelligent woman with four children. Her husband had been a successful businessman, extrovert and popular, an overweight, gentle giant of a man. They had made a striking couple. “He was warned and gave no heed and paid the price. He just keeled over,” the Shah said with some satisfaction, as he too had been warned about his weight. The difference was that he had started to eat grapefruit in the morning, the one meal he never cared for, as someone told him they reduced weight. He bought them by the boxful. They did not affect his weight but they allowed him to enjoy the enormous meals he ate in the Central with a clear conscience. “I told him about the grapefruit but all he did was laugh. He learned.”

  The couple had been close. In spite of the sudden loss, Monica had taken over the parts of the business she could handle while bringing up the children and sold off other parts she felt she couldn’t manage on her own.

  “She’s doing middling,” he admitted reluctantly. “There’s too many around her. She needs to get away.”

  “What have you in the box?”

  “Money.”

  “Why isn’t it in the bank?”

  “There’s enough money in the bank,” he said defensively. “The tax man has a habit of peeping into banks.”

  “What are you going to do with it?”

  “Leave it here till I get back,” he said, and placed a key beside the box.

  “How much is there?”

  “There must be near thirty thousand,” he admitted reluctantly.

  “We are going to count it,” Ruttledge said decisively. The Shah protested, but Ruttledge was determined: he would not allow room for suspicion.

  In the bedroom, with the curtains drawn, they counted out the money like a pair of thieves. The metal box contained more than forty-three thousand pounds.

  “You could buy a house and land with this. You could get married. You could start a life. You could go to Africa or America,” Ruttledge said as he prepared to put the box away. “It’s there like strength.”

  “It’s better than the other fella having it, anyhow,” the Shah agreed uncertainly; and Ruttledge decided not to protest or joke any further.

  There was no time to walk the fields. The time had disappeared in the slow counting.

  He ate in silence from a large white plate: sausage, rasher, grilled halves of tomato, mushrooms, onion, black pudding, a thin slice of liver, a grilled lamb chop. From another plate he drew and buttered slices of freshly baked soda bread. By his chair the sheepdog sat in patient expectation. As always, the movements of the Shah’s hands were delicate.

  “Is it all right?” he enquired politely when he finished.

  “Of course,” Kate nodded and he gave what was left on the plate to the sheepdog.

  With an audible sigh of satisfaction he reached for the slice of apple tart, the crust sprinkled with fine sugar. He poured cream from a small white jug. He drank from the mug of steaming tea. “God bless you, Kate,” he said as he rose and reached for his cap. “You’ll not see me now for a while.”

  “Have a great time in Burtonport.”

  “I doubt if it’ll be great,” he said, “but we’ll be there anyhow.”

  With little warning the weather broke, not in the usual summer showers but in a sustained downpour, with rumbles of distant thunder and quick lightning flashes above the fields and lake. The black cat grew agitated and cowered in a corner by the cooker, protected by the rocking chair. Out in the wet air the sound of water rushing towards the lake was loud in all the drains. When the storm ended, the broken weather continued with high winds and showers.

  The days disappeared in attendance on small tasks. The fly struck the lambs a second time. An old sheep was found on her back, two small lambs by her side: if she had remained as she was their life was gone. When righted, she staggered around in a circle and fell a number of times. Once she regained her balance, she checked that the lambs were hers before allowing them the joyous frenzy of their suck. Weeds had to be pulled in the garden; carrots, lettuce, onion, beets, parsnips were thinned; the beanstalks supported, the peas staked, the potato stalks and the fruit trees sprayed. These evenings they ate late. In the soft light the room seemed to grow green and enormous as it reached out to the fields and the crowns of the trees, the green banks and the meadow and trees to enter the room with the whole fullness and weight of summer.

  “It’s ages since we’ve seen Mary and Jamesie,” Kate said one evening. “Why don’t we walk round the lake? Johnny must have gone back to England by now.”

  Below the Ruttledges’ stood the entrance to t
he house where Mary had grown up on the edge of the lake, its stone walls and outhouses hidden in the tall trees. In the middle of the living room an ash tree had taken root where they had played cards and said the Rosary in the evenings before raking the ashes over the red coals; but it was still easy to see what a charming, beautiful place the living house had been, a stone’s throw from the water. The blue of the pieces of broken delph in the shallows of the lake out from the piers even spoke of prosperity and ease. Cherry and apple and pear trees grew wild about the house, and here and there the fresh green of the gooseberry shone out of a wilderness of crawling blackthorn. Hundreds of daffodils and white narcissi still greeted each spring by the lake with beauty, though there was no one near at hand to notice.

  As a schoolgirl Mary had fallen in love with Jamesie and had eyes for no other man. He used to come round the shore on his battered bicycle. She was always waiting. Their courtship could not have been more different from the harsh lesson Johnny had received.

  On their marriage she moved to Jamesie’s house across the lake. Jamesie’s father left the upper room where he had slept since his own marriage, to take up Jamesie’s single bed in the lower room, across from where Johnny slept beneath the window.

  Vases of flowers appeared on windowsills and tables. There were touches of colour in bedspreads and chair coverings she brought with her from her own house. Linen for the beds was washed and aired and ironed and changed regularly. The meals were suddenly delicious after the old rough cooking. The house had always been cleanly kept but now it sparkled.

  For years she had waited for him. Now she was with him. This was her new life, but in her joy she discovered a fresh anxiety. She had to leave that other house she also loved, her father and her young brother. In spite of their insistence that they could manage, she baked bread for the two houses and brought the loaves around the lake a couple of times a week.

  Every Thursday her father drove into town in the pony and trap. When he had the shopping done he went to Hoy’s Hotel, which was owned by his cousin, and drank several glasses of their best whiskey, an eighteen-year-old White Powers, while engaged in agreeable conversation with Mister Hoy about politics and the political party to which they both belonged. Then the pony took him home. Unless there was wind or heavy rain he was always seen to be asleep in a corner of the trap as they passed between the two bars in Shruhaun. There was so little traffic on the roads, his nature so unassuming and easygoing, his little weakness so well known, that this quiet passage drew no more attention than affectionate smiles of recognition. No one even shouted a mischievous greeting. Generally, he woke coming in round the shore, the pony’s pace quickening in anticipation of being released from the trap and watered and given hay and oats. If the quick change of pace hadn’t woken him, he would be quickly shaken awake by the rutted road.