By the Lake

by John McGahern

  “I’d be delighted to go in the morning,” he said.

  “Many think that and then are hurt.”

  “I’d glory. I’d sit in the station house and look across. I’d be at my pure ease.”

  “Then you are all right,” Ruttledge said.

  “Will he be able for it though?” he asked again.

  “Of course he will. That is unless he takes to the drink in a big way or something like that.”

  “Oh Lord,” he said. “That’d be the last straw.”

  When Ruttledge told Frank Dolan that the loan had been secured and that it was the Shah who had advanced the money, he went stone silent. Only when pressed if he still wanted to go ahead did he respond.

  “I certainly do. They complain about him a lot but he’s far from the worst. They are a lot worse themselves,” he said.

  September and October were lovely months, the summer ended, winter not yet in. The cattle and sheep were still out on grass, the leaves turning.

  The little vetch pods on the banks turned black. Along the shore a blue bloom came on the sloes. The blackberries moulded and went unpicked, the briar leaves changed into browns and reds and yellows in the low hedges, against which the pheasant could walk unnoticed. Plums and apples and pears were picked and stored or given around to neighbours or made into preserves in the big brass pot. Honey was taken from the hives, the bees fed melted sugar. For a few brilliant days the rowan berries were a shining red-orange in the light from the water, and then each tree became a noisy infestation of small birds as it trembled with greedy clamouring life until it was stripped clean. Jamesie arrived with sacks of vegetables and was given whatever he would take in return.

  When the All-Ireland finals in Croke Park were live on television, Ruttledge walked round the lake to watch the match with Jamesie. Jamesie poured whiskey and Mary made tea and sandwiches. The irregular striking of the clocks from every quarter of the house throughout the match served as a cool corrective to the excited commentary. The team Jamesie supported nearly always won, his support completely based on which of the teams he thought most likely to win and provide a triumphant, satisfying ending to the year. Once they lost, it was as if his judgement had been impugned.

  “No use,” he thrust out his hands. “They should have been ashamed to turn out. It wasn’t worth even looking at.”

  When the match ended and was talked over for a while, Ruttledge and Jamesie, accompanied by the two dogs, walked out to the lake.

  “Thanks for the game. It was great fun,” Ruttledge said.

  “The right team won this year anyway,” he remarked complacently.

  “We’ll watch it again next year.”

  “With the help of God,” Jamesie said firmly as they separated.

  The shore was dry, the fallen leaves rustling against his tread. Not until he reached the alder at the gate did he see the Mercedes stationed in front of the porch. Once he entered the house, he could hear his uncle chatting happily with Kate.

  “Will he be able for it, Kate? That’s the sixmarker!”

  They were discussing the sale and transfer of the business. As he listened to the two voices he was so attached to and thought back to the afternoon, the striking of the clocks, the easy, pleasant company, the walk round the shore, with a rush of feeling he felt that this must be happiness. As soon as the thought came to him, he fought it back, blaming the whiskey. The very idea was as dangerous as presumptive speech: happiness could not be sought or worried into being, or even fully grasped; it should be allowed its own slow pace so that it passes unnoticed, if it ever comes at all.

  The leaves started to fall heavily in frosts, in ghostly whispering streams that never paused though the trees were still. They formed into drifts along the shore. Jamesie could now see everything that went on around the Ruttledges from the brow of his own hill. Traceries of branches stripped of their leaves stood out against the water like veins. Under each delicate rowan tree lay the pale rowan stones, like droppings. In the cold dry weather the hedges were thinned for firewood, the evenings rent with the whining rise and fall of other chain saws similarly working. In this new weather, sounds travelled with a new cold sharpness.

  The streetlights were already lit in the town when people gathered for the late Saturday shopping. The Ruttledges generally went with Jamesie and Mary and had a drink in Luke Henry’s after the shopping was done. One Saturday night they met up with Patrick Ryan in the bar. As they had not met for a long time he was at his most charming but would not go home with them. He had driven into the town with other people and they were waiting for him somewhere else.

  Into another Saturday evening in Luke’s John Quinn walked.

  “It’s a beautiful thing to see good neighbours out enjoying themselves and getting on peaceable and well together as if they belonged to the same happy family and having a little sociable drink together at the end of the shopping,” he greeted the bar. “A bottle of stout, Luke. It’s good for the health and even better with a little raw egg.”

  “We could get you that too, John,” Luke glanced mischievously beyond the partition where the groceries were sold.

  “I know that, Luke, and thank you but there is a time and a place for everything, even the raw egg in the little glass of stout.”

  “You have let the land, John?” Jamesie enquired innocently. “Yes, Jamesie, I have let the land on the eleven months at a fair rent to a good decent man who’ll look after it as if it was his own until I’m in a position to take it back. Yes, I’ve been up in Westmeath quite a bit, a great rich part of the country with very industrious hard-working people. We’re getting on far better now than could be expected but of course these things take time and can’t be rushed. But I expect to be going up there permanently before too long. If everything works out as God intended the two of us could be still as happy as larks in the clear air moving between the two places and even crossing for stays to the children in England, who took a great shine to her and she to them. Of course it’s much better and happier if these things are settled agreeably and peaceably but of course when you get married there’s a matter of the law as well and people have rights,” he warned darkly. “Anyhow, either way I expect to be moving permanently for a time to Westmeath in the not too distant future. And so I have let the land.”

  “We wish you health and happiness and long life, John.”

  “Not faulting any of the company, I’ll be leaving you now. When a man is deprived of his helpmate there are many things he has to attend to on his own.”

  There was talk and laughter as soon as he left the bar, all of it concentrated on his dealings, but no discussion as to why he exercised such a fascination.

  “There’s not a whit of difference between John Quinn and any of us. He’s perfectly normal except that he’s that bit slightly oversexed,” one man argued. The remark was met with much ribald banter. Luke Henry turned his face to the shelves to hide his amusement.

  In the car on the way home, Kate asked, “Does John Quinn believe his own speeches?”

  “John Quinn doesn’t care what he says or does. All he cares about is himself and what goes down, what works.”

  “If the speech stood in the way of John winning it’d get short shrift,” Jamesie answered seriously and quietly.

  “The women would get short shrift as well if they didn’t come up with the goods,” Mary said.

  “You can say that ten times over,” Jamesie added.

  Jamesie’s good spirits seemed inexhaustible, but they were taken away in late November. There were no shouts from the alder at the gate when he came to the house, no rattling of the glass in the porch. They had never seen him look so low. He held a letter in his hand.

  “Read this,” he thrust a letter into Ruttledge’s hand.

  The black cat with the white paws was sleeping against a cushion in the rocking chair. Reaching out his great hand, he lifted her unceremoniously on to the floor and sat heavily down.

  Ruttledge saw that
he was upset, nakedly so. The letter was from Johnny. As Ruttledge read, the only sounds were water filling an upstairs tank and the ticking of a clock.

  The letter was short, its burden clear. Ford had demanded redundancies in their Dagenham plant. The union wasn’t able to protect the likes of Johnny any longer. They had negotiated a lump sum as severance payment and a small pension. He wanted to return home and live with Mary and Jamesie as they had lived before he left for England.

  “What are you going to do?”

  “We don’t know,” he said in anguish.

  “Do you want him home?”

  “Mary,” he thrust out his hands. “Mary says she’d go out of her mind if he was back in the house again. She hasn’t slept a wink since the letter came.”

  “What do you feel?”

  “If he was to come home, if he was in the house, we’d have to leave. It’s hard enough for the fortnight he comes every year. If he was in the house for good … I don’t know what we’d do. We can’t turn him away like a dog either.”

  “Have you told Jim?”

  “Jim’s in Dublin. He wouldn’t want to know. What does he do at any time but pick up Johnny from the airport, leave him back. Jim wouldn’t want to know. Johnny and Lucy never got on. What do you think, Kate?”

  “I don’t know what to think, Jamesie. It’s a real dilemma.”

  They could not live with him and they could not be seen—in their own eyes or in the eyes of others—to refuse him shelter or turn him away. The timid, gentle manners, based on a fragile interdependence, dealt in avoidances and obfuscations. Edges were softened, ways found round harsh realities. What was unspoken was often far more important than the words that were said. Confrontation was avoided whenever possible. These manners, open to exploitation by ruthless people, held all kinds of traps for the ignorant or unwary and could lead into entanglements that a more confident, forthright manner would have seen off at the very beginning. It was a language that hadn’t any simple way of saying no.

  “If that’s how you feel, you should be open and straight about it from the very beginning,” Kate said after Jamesie had spoken. “It wouldn’t be fair in the long run to Johnny either. It’d be hell for everybody.”

  “What are we to do?”

  “Write to him.”

  “What can we say? Mary hasn’t slept since the letter came. There hasn’t been a tap of work done round the place.”

  “You’ll have to speak straight.”

  “We wouldn’t know what to say. We wouldn’t know where to begin.”

  “He’ll write it for you,” Kate said, looking carefully at Ruttledge. “Then it can be copied and sent. That’s his trade,” she smiled. “That’s what he gets paid for.”

  “Would you write it? Would you do it for us?” Jamesie asked.

  “Of course I would. But wouldn’t it be better to get Jim to write? He’d write it just as well or better.”

  “No,” Jamesie thrust out his hand in a sign that his anxiety was lifting. “Jim wouldn’t want to be involved. He’s in Dublin. It’s not his business.”

  “Then I’ll write it,” Ruttledge said. “I’ll write it and bring it round the lake this evening.”

  “The educated man for it,” Jamesie said in relief. “It was Mary who said to cross the lake. ‘They’ll come up with something,’ she said. The educated man can think of anything. He’s not like you and me, Kate,” he rubbed his hands gleefully together.

  “That’s because he had to go to school longer than you and me. He had to go because he was slower,” Kate laughed.

  “Shots! Shots, Kate!” he laughed in pure delight now.

  “You’ll need a whiskey after that,” Kate said with affection.

  “God never loved a coward, Kate,” he replied in kind.

  He began to relax and expand as he drank. Anybody walking into the room would have found it hard to imagine the anxiety, the blackness of a few minutes before. “Did you ever hear of the crowd who couldn’t write and had to send a letter to America?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “In those days if you couldn’t write you went to the schoolmaster, who charged a fee like a lawyer. When he had it all down on paper, the master read the letter back to them. They seemed satisfied enough but didn’t say much and he asked if they’d like to add a PS. They wanted to know at once if there’d be an extra charge for the PS. When told there wasn’t they said, ‘Go ahead. It’ll look better. Write this PS: Please excuse bad writing and spelling.’ You’d love to see the master’s face—it could have been old Master Glynn—when that comeoutance was delivered. ‘Please excuse bad writing and spelling,’ ” he repeated. “Lord bless us but there were some awful poor people going about then.”

  “Maybe they knew well what they were doing,” Ruttledge said.

  “That’d be even better, but no. They didn’t know. They heard it read out in other letters and wanted to get as good a value as the other crowd. They didn’t want to be left behind.”

  They walked him past the alder tree down to the lake.

  “I’ll write the letter and bring it round this evening.”

  “God bless you,” he said with emotion.

  “There won’t be any charge.”

  “That’s all right. Never had any intention of paying anyhow,” he replied as he walked away.

  Ruttledge roughed out a simple letter, explaining the situation clearly but softening it enough to give Johnny room, suggesting that when he thought about the idea more he’d see how hopeless it was from his own point of view. Without a car or telephone and far from town he’d be stranded now beside the lake. Everything was more or less gathered in for the winter. They sent him their love and were already looking forward to seeing him next summer, like in all the other summers.

  Late that evening he walked around the lake with the drafted letter. It was cold along the shore. Except for the holly and small oaks all the trees were completely bare. The palest of moons was above the lake. Wildfowl scattered from the reeds. The heron rose and flapped lazily out along the shore. There must have been many herons here since they first came to the house but the same bird seemed to lead them out whenever they left and to rise again to lead them in when they were returning home. It would be a hard and a lonely place for Johnny to come home to, he reassured himself as he walked.

  They were all in the house, a blue light flickering in the window. Inside the netting wire the brown hens were already closed in for the night.

  They were watching Blind Date. The two dogs were seated in armchairs and looked possessively at Ruttledge as if he might cause their removal. Mary rose at once to kiss him but Jamesie stayed glued to the screen, watching an attractive young girl in a provocative dress standing beside the hostess of the show in front of a large audience. Behind a screen sat three youths. The screen hid them from the girl but not the audience. Whichever youth the girl picked would spend a week with her in a luxury hotel, with a chauffeured car and candlelit dinners. To help the girl make her blind choice, each boy in turn had to answer questions put to them by the hostess about their hobbies, occupations, the cooking and music they liked, their sexual preferences. Even the most pedestrian question contained a sexual innuendo. Each answer was greeted with catcalls and laughter. The salacious enjoyment of the audience was obvious in both the responses to each question and the girl’s reactions, particularly when the answer revealed a disparity between the boy’s perception of himself and how he was perceived by the girl or the audience.

  Mary was annoyed by what she took as Jamesie’s discourtesy but Ruttledge assured her that he was glad to watch.

  “This fella is like a child,” she said. “He goes wild for eejity stuff like this. You wouldn’t know whether the crowd or him was the worse disgrace. Cattle round a bulling cow in the middle of a field would be more decent.”

  At last, the girl made her blind choice. The boy she picked came out nervously from behind the screen to huge applause while the cameras searche
d out every reaction the boy and girl betrayed at this their first meeting. The hostess turned to question them but by now Jamesie had lost interest. He reached out and turned the set off.

  “I’m happy to watch it to the end,” Ruttledge said.

  “No, no,” he raised his hand. “They are just a crowd of eejits. Mary, pour us a drink.”

  “It’s all just a cover-up for sex,” Mary said contemptuously as she reached for glasses and the bottle of Powers. “They all want it and they’re all afraid. That’s why they are killing themselves laughing. Soon they’ll be watching it on television instead of doing anything themselves.”

  “Oh they’ll do it too,” Jamesie protested. “They’ll want to practise what they see.”

  “You’d think he’d have more sense—and the age he is!” Mary said.

  “Good soldiers never die,” he said as he raised his glass. “Good health. Good luck. More again tomorrow. The crowd lying below in Shruhaun aren’t drinking any drinks today.”

  “I wrote this to Johnny,” Ruttledge said as he placed the letter on the table. A silence fell as complete as the blankness of the television screen. Mary took the letter and read it in the silence of the ticking clocks while one of the dogs turned round in the chair and sighed as he dropped into a more comfortable rest. After Mary had read the letter, she handed it at once to Jamesie, her eyes fixed on his face.

  “You. You read the letter.”

  “No. No. The eyes are too poor. Read it out loud.”

  “The eyes can see plenty when they are not wanted to see. You, Joe. You read it for him.”

  “Change anything you want. Change the whole thing or don’t send it at all,” Ruttledge said as he read.

  “It’s perfect,” Mary said. “We’ll change nothing. I’ll copy every word out as it stands.”

  “What if he doesn’t take to it?” Jamesie asked anxiously.

  “It’s matterless whether he takes to it or not,” Mary said fiercely. “He can’t come home. We’d all have to leave.”

  “You don’t want him coming home thinking everything will work out. It wouldn’t even be fair,” Ruttledge said.