The Collected Stories

by John McGahern

  ‘They’re nearly all gone now anyhow, God have mercy on them. Is me Oisín i ndiadh na feinne,’ he laughed.

  ‘Wouldn’t you think when they’re so full of religion that they’d have shifted themselves this far to see you?’ It was open criticism of his family.

  ‘No, not at all. It’s too far.’ He lifted his hand as if to clear the harshness which seemed to take on an unpleasant moral note in the face of this largeness of spirit. ‘No one in their right mind travels so far to follow losing teams. And this is a losing team.’ He started to laugh again but was forced to stop because of coughing. ‘Still, I’ve known the whole world,’ he said when he recovered.

  Johnny justified Brother Benedict’s account of his ability to Colonel Sinclair by winning a scholarship to university the following year.

  ‘You’ll be like the rest of the country – educated away beyond your intelligence,’ was the father’s unenthusiastic response, and they saw very little of one another over the next few years. Johnny spent vacations in England working on building sites and in canning factories around London. A good primary degree allowed him to baffle his father even further by continuing postgraduate study in psychology, and he was given a lectureship in the university when he completed his doctorate. Then he obtained work with the new television station, first in an advisory role, but later he made a series of documentary films about the darker aspects of Irish life. As they were controversial, they won him a sort of fame: some thought they were serious, well made, and compulsive viewing, bringing things to light that were in bad need of light; but others maintained that they were humourless, morbid, and restricted to a narrow view that was more revealing of private obsessions than any truths about life or Irish life in general. During this time he made a few attempts to get on with his father, but it was more useless than ever. ‘There must be rules if there’s to be any fairness or freedom,’ he argued the last time they met.

  The tide that emptied the countryside more than any other since the famine has turned. Hardly anybody now goes to England. Some who went came home to claim inheritances, and stayed, old men waiting at the ends of lanes on Sunday evenings for the minibus to take them to church bingo. Most houses have a car and colour television. The bicycles and horses, carts and traps and sidecars, have gone from the roads. A big yellow bus brings the budding scholars to school in the town, and it is no longer uncommon to go on to university. The mail car is orange. Just one policeman with a squad car lives in the barracks.

  The tide that had gone out to America and every part of Britain now reaches only as far as a bursting Dublin, and every Friday night crammed buses take the aliens home. For a few free days in country light they feel important until the same buses take them back on Sunday night to shared flats and bed-sits.

  Storage heaters were installed in the church in the village because of the dampness but the damp did not leave the limestone. The dark evergreens shutting out the light were blamed and cut down, revealing the church in all its huge, astonishing ugliness amid the headstones of former priests of the parish inside the low wall that marked off a corner of Henry’s field. The damp still did not leave the limestone, but in spite of it the church is full to overflowing every Sunday.

  As in other churches, the priest now faces the people, acknowledging that they are the mystery. He is a young priest and tells them that God is on their side and wants them to want children, bungalow bliss, a car, and colour television. Heaven is all about us, hell is in ourselves and in one moment can be exorcized. Many of the congregation chat with one another and read newspapers all through the Sacrifice. The words are in English and understandable. The congregation gives out the responses. The altar boys kneeling in scarlet and white at the foot of the altar steps ring the bell and attend the priest, but they no longer have to learn Latin.

  No one beats a path to the presbytery. The young priest is seldom there and has no housekeeper. Nights, when he’s not supervising church bingo, he plays the guitar and sings at local hotels where he is a hit with tourists. He seldom wears black or the Roman collar. To show how little it means to him, one convivial evening in a hotel at Lough Arrow he pulled the collar from his neck and dropped it into the soup. When the piece of white plastic was fished out amid the laughter, it was found to have been made in Japan.

  A politician lives outside the village, and the crowd that once flocked to the presbytery now go to him instead. Certain nights he holds ‘clinics’. They are advertised. On clinic nights a line of cars can be seen standing for several hundred yards along the road past his house, the car radios playing. On cold nights the engines run. No one thinks it wasteful any more. They come to look for grants, to try to get drunken driving convictions squashed, to get free medical cards, sickness benefit, to have planning application decisions that have gone against them reversed, to get children into jobs. As they all have votes they are never ‘run’.

  The Protestants have all gone, but the church in Ardcarne is still opened once a year. No one attends it now. There was a move to have the famous Purser windows taken out and installed in a new church being built in the North of Ireland. This was prevented by the conditions of the endowment. They have not been vandalized.

  Sir Cecil and Lady King-Harmon bought a stud farm outside Dublin. The Land Commission took over the estate and split it into farms, preserving the gardens and woods and walks immediately around the house as a forest park. The roofless shell of the Chapel-of-Ease stands by the boathouse. Within, lovers scratch their names on the stone. Pleasure craft ply the lake and its islands with day trippers all through the summer. The tall Nash shell stood for a few years above the lake until it was condemned as dangerous, and dynamited. A grey concrete lookout tower, looking cold and wet even in the sun, was built in its place.

  In every house across the countryside there glows at night the strange living light of television sets, more widespread than the little red lamps before the pictures of the Sacred Heart years before.

  The Sergeant’s son came with a television crew to make a film for a series called My Own Place. He was older than when his father first came to the barracks. The crew put up in the Royal, and the priest was invited to dinner the first night to counter any hostility they might run into while filming. It showed how out of touch the producer was with the place. He should have invited the politician.

  The light was good the next morning, and they decided to begin filming at the old Georgian parsonage in Ardcarne. They hoped to go from there to the Protestant church and the burial place of the King-Harmons, and then to the village if the light held. They would be doing well if they got through all that in one day. They set up the cameras and microphones under the beech trees on the avenue where once he had happily burned leaves for the Sinclairs. It would be a dull film. There would be no people in it. The people that interested him were all dead.

  ‘Take two, cut one.’ The clapboard was brought down and the continuity girl lifted her stopwatch. The Sergeant’s son started walking slowly down the grass-grown avenue into the camera.

  ‘After the war, Colonel Sinclair and his wife came home from London to this parsonage. His father had been the parson here. It must have looked much as it looks now when they first came. They restored it, house and garden and orchard and paddocks and lawn. I think they were very happy here, but now all is wilderness again.’

  The camera panned slowly away from the narrator to the house, and continued along the railings that had long lost their second whiteness, whirring steadily in the silence as it took in only what was in front of it, despite the cunning hand of the cameraman: lingering on the bright rain of cherries on the tramped grass beneath the trees, the flaked white paint of the paddock railing, the Iron Mountains smoky and blue as they stretched into the North against the rim of the sky.

  Like All Other Men

  He watched her for a long time among the women across the dancefloor in the half-light of the afternoon. She wasn’t tall or beautiful, but he couldn’t take his eye
s away. Some of the women winced palpably and fell back as they were passed over. Others stood their ground and stared defiantly back. She seemed quietly indifferent, taking a few steps back into the thinning crowd each time she found herself isolated on the floor. When she was asked to dance, she behaved exactly the same. She flashed no smile, gave no giddy shrug of triumph to betray the tension of the wait, the redeemed vanity.

  Nurses, students, actors and actresses, musicians, some prostitutes, people who worked in restaurants and newspapers, night-watchmen, a medley of the old and very young, came to these afternoon dances. Michael Duggan came every Saturday and Sunday. He was a teacher of Latin and history in a midlands town forty miles from Dublin, and each Friday he came in on the evening bus to spend the whole weekend round the cinemas and restaurants and dancehalls of O’Connell Street. A year before he had been within a couple of months of ordination.

  When he did cross to ask her to dance, she followed him with the same unconcern on to the floor as she had showed just standing there. She danced beautifully, with a strong, easy freedom. She was a nurse in the Blanchardstown Chest Hospital. She came from Kerry. Her father was a National Teacher near Killarney. She had been to these afternoon dances before, but not for a couple of years. Her name was Susan Spillane.

  ‘I suppose everybody asks you these questions,’ he said.

  ‘The last one did anyhow.’ She smiled. ‘You’d better tell me about yourself as well.’ She had close curly black hair, an intelligent face, and there was something strange about her eyes.

  ‘Are your eyes two different colours?’

  ‘One eye is brown, the other grey. I may have got the grey eye by mistake. All the others in the house have brown eyes.’

  ‘They are lovely.’ The dance had ended. He had let her go. It was not easy to thread a way through these inanities of speech.

  A girl could often stand unnoticed a long time, and then it was enough for one man to show an interest to start a rush. When the next two dances were called, though he moved quickly each time, he was beaten to her side. The third dance was a ladies’ choice, and he withdrew back into the crowd of men. She followed him into the crowd, and this time he did not let her slip away when the dance ended. It was a polite convention for women to make a show of surprise when invited for a drink, of having difficulty making up their minds, but she said at once she’d love a drink, and asked for whiskey.

  ‘I hardly drink at all, but I like the burnt taste,’ and she sipped the small measure neat for the two hours that were left of the dance. ‘My father loves a glass of whiskey late at night. I’ve often sat and had a sip with him.’

  They danced again and afterwards came back to the table, sipped the drinks, sat and talked, and danced again. Time raced.

  ‘Do you have to go on night duty tonight?’ he asked as it moved near the time when the band would stand and play the anthem. He was afraid he would lose her then.

  ‘No. I’m on tomorrow night.’

  ‘Maybe you’d eat something with me this evening?’

  ‘I’d like that.’

  There was still some daylight left when they came from the dancehall, and they turned away from it into a bar. They both had coffee. An hour later, when he knew it was dark outside, he asked awkwardly, ‘I suppose it’s a bit outrageous to suggest a walk before we look for a place to eat,’ his guilty smile apologizing for such a poor and plain admission of the sexual.

  ‘I don’t see why not.’ She smiled. ‘I’d like a walk.’

  ‘What if it’s raining?’ He gave them both the excuse to draw back.

  ‘There’s only one way to find out,’ she said.

  It was raining very lightly, the street black and shining under the lamps, but she didn’t seem to mind the rain, nor that the walk led towards the dark shabby streets west of O’Connell Street. There they found a dark doorway and embraced. She returned his kisses with the same directness and freedom with which she had danced, but people kept continually passing in the early evening dark, until they seemed to break off together to say, ‘This is useless,’ and arm in arm to head back towards the light.

  ‘It’s a pity we haven’t some room or place of our own,’ he said.

  ‘Where did you spend last night?’ she asked.

  ‘Where I stay every weekend, a rooming house in North Earl Street, four beds to the room.’

  It was no place to go. A dumb man in the next bed to his had been very nearly beaten up the night before. The men who took the last two beds had been drinking. They woke the dumb man while they fumbled for the light, and he sat up in his bed and gestured towards the partly open window as soon as the light came on. Twice he made the same upward movement with his thumb: he wanted them to try to close the window because of the cold wind blowing in. The smaller of the two men misinterpreted the gesture and with a shout fell on the man. They realized that he was dumb when he started to squeal. She didn’t laugh at the story.

  ‘It’s not hard to give the wrong signals in this world.’

  ‘We could go to a hotel,’ she said. He was stopped dead in his tracks. ‘That’s if you want to, and only – only – if I can pay half.’

  ‘Which hotel?’

  ‘Are you certain you’d want that? It doesn’t matter to me.’ She was looking into his face.

  ‘There’s nothing I want more in the world, but where?’ He stood between desire and fear.

  ‘The Clarence across the river is comfortable and fairly inexpensive.’

  ‘Will we see if we can get a room before we eat or afterwards?’ He was clumsy with diffidence in the face of what she had proposed.

  ‘We might as well look now, but are you certain?’

  ‘I’m certain. And you?’

  ‘As long as you agree that I can pay half,’ she said.

  ‘I agree.’

  They sealed one another’s lips and crossed the river by the Halfpenny Bridge.

  ‘Do you think we will have any trouble?’ he asked as they drew close to the hotel.

  ‘We’ll soon find out. I think we both look respectable enough,’ and for the first time he thought he felt some nervousness in her handclasp, and it made him feel a little easier.

  There was no trouble. They were given a room with a bath on the second floor.

  ‘I liked very much that you gave your real name,’ she said when they were alone.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It seemed more honest …’

  ‘It was the only name I could think of at the time,’ and their nervousness found release in laughter.

  The bathroom was just inside the door. The bed and bedside lamp and table were by the window, a chair and writing table in the opposite corner, two armchairs in the middle of the room. The window looked down on the night city and the river. He drew the curtains and took her in his arms.

  ‘Wait,’ she said. ‘We’ve plenty of time before going out to eat.’

  While she was in the bathroom he turned off the light, slipped from his clothes, and got into the bed to wait for her.

  ‘Why did you turn out the light?’ she asked sharply when she came from the bathroom.

  ‘I thought you’d want it out.’

  ‘I want to see.’

  It was not clear whether she wanted the light for the practical acts of undressing or if she wanted these preliminaries to what is called the act of darkness to be free of all furtiveness, that they should be noted with care like the names of places passed on an important journey.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, and turned on the bedside lamp. He watched her slow, sure movements as she stepped from her clothes, how strong and confident and beautiful she was. ‘Do you still want the light on?’ he asked as she came towards him.

  ‘No.’

  ‘You are beautiful.’ He wanted to say that her naked beauty took his breath away, was almost hurtful.

  What he had wanted so much that it had become frightening she made easy, but it was almost impossible to believe that he now rested in the s
till centre of what had long been a dream. After long deprivation the plain pleasures of bed and table grow sadly mystical.

  ‘Have you slept with anyone before?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes, with one person.’

  ‘Were you in love with him?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Are you still in love with him?’

  ‘No. Not at all.’

  ‘I never have.’

  ‘I know.’

  They came again into one another’s arms. There was such peace afterwards that the harsh shrieking of the gulls outside, the even swish of the traffic along the quays, was more part of that peace.

  Is this all? Common greed and restlessness rose easily to despise what was so hard come by as soon as it was gained, so luckily, so openly given. Before it had any time to grow there was the grace of dressing, of going out to eat together in the surety that they were coming back to this closed room. He felt like a young husband as he waited for her to finish dressing.

  The light drizzle of the early evening had turned into a downpour by the time they came down, the hotel lobby crowded with people in raincoats, many carrying umbrellas.

  ‘We’re guaranteed a drowning if we head out in that.’

  ‘We don’t need to. We can eat here. The grill is open.’

  It was a large, very pleasant room with light wood panelling and an open fire at its end. She picked the lamb cutlets, he the charcoaled steak, and they each had a glass of red wine.

  ‘This has to be split evenly as well,’ she said.

  ‘I don’t see why. I’d like to take you.’

  ‘That was the bargain. It must be kept.’ She smiled. ‘How long have you been teaching?’