The Collected Stories

by John McGahern

  ‘Less than a year. I was in Maynooth for a long time.’

  ‘Were you studying for the priesthood?’

  ‘That’s what people mostly do there,’ he said drily. ‘I left with only a couple of months to go. It must sound quite bad.’

  ‘It’s better than leaving afterwards. Why did you leave?’ she asked with formidable seriousness. It could not be turned aside with sarcasm or irony.

  ‘Because I no longer believed. I could hardly lead others to a life that I didn’t believe in myself. When I entered Maynooth at eighteen I thought the whole course of my life was settled. It wasn’t.’

  ‘There must be something,’ she insisted.

  ‘There may well be, but I don’t know what it is.’

  ‘Was it because you needed … to be married?’

  ‘No, not sex,’ he said. ‘Though that’s what many people think. If anything, the giving up of sex – renunciation was the word we used – gave the vocation far more force. We weren’t doing anything easy. That has its own pride. We were giving up an idea of pleasure for a far greater good. That is … until belief started to go … and then all went.’

  ‘You don’t believe in anything at all, then?’ she said with a gravity that both charmed and nettled.

  ‘I have no talent for profundity.’ He had spoken more than he had intended and was beginning to be irritated by the turn of the conversation.

  ‘You must believe in something?’ she insisted.

  ‘ ’Tis most certain. Have not the schoolmen said it?’ he quoted to tease gently, but saw she disliked the tone. ‘I believe in honour, decency, affection, in pleasure. This, for instance, is a very good steak.’

  ‘You don’t seem bitter.’ This faint praise was harder to take than blame.

  ‘That would be stupid. That would be worst of all. How is the lamb?’

  ‘It’s good, but I don’t like to be fobbed off like that.’

  ‘I wouldn’t do that. I still find it painful, that’s all. I’m far too grateful to you. I think you were very brave to come here.’ He started to fumble again, gently, diffidently.

  ‘I wasn’t brave. It was what I wanted.’

  ‘Not many women would have the courage to propose an hotel.’

  ‘They might be the wise ones.’

  It was her turn to want to change the direction of the conversation. A silence fell that wasn’t silence. They were unsure, their minds working furiously behind the silence to find some safe way to turn.

  ‘That man you were in love with,’ he suggested.

  ‘He was married. He had a son. He travelled in pharmaceuticals.’

  ‘That doesn’t sound too good for you.’

  ‘It wasn’t. It was a mess.’

  They had taken another wrong turning.

  It was still raining heavily when they came from the grill. They had one very slow drink in the hotel bar, watching the people drink and come and go before the room and night drew them.

  In the morning he asked, ‘What are you doing today?’

  ‘I’ll go back to the hospital, probably try to get some sleep. I’m on night duty at eight.’

  ‘We didn’t get much sleep last night.’

  ‘No, we didn’t,’ she answered gently enough, but making it plain that she had no interest in the reference. ‘What are you doing?’ she changed the subject.

  ‘There are three buses back. I’ll have to get one of them.’

  ‘Which one?’

  ‘Probably the twelve o’clock, since you’re going back to the hospital. When will we meet again?’ he asked in a tone that already took the meeting for granted.

  She was half dressed. The vague shape of her thighs shone through the pale slip as she turned towards him. ‘We can’t meet again.’

  ‘Why not?’ The casualness changed. ‘Is there something wrong?’

  ‘Nothing. Nothing at all. The very opposite.’

  ‘What’s the matter, then? Why can’t we meet?’

  ‘I was going to tell you last night and didn’t. I thought it might spoil everything. After all, you were in Maynooth once. I’m joining an Order.’

  ‘You must be joking.’

  ‘I was never more serious in my life. I’m joining next Thursday … the Medical Missionaries.’ She had about her that presence that had attracted him in the dancehall; she stood free of everything around her, secure in her own light.

  ‘I can’t believe you.’

  ‘It’s true,’ she said.

  ‘But the whole thing is a lie, a waste, a fabrication.’

  ‘It’s not for me and it wasn’t once for you.’

  ‘But I believed then.’

  ‘Don’t you think I do?’ she said sharply.

  ‘To mouth Hail Marys and Our Fathers all of your life.’

  ‘You know that’s cheap. It’ll be mostly work. I’ll nurse as I nurse now. In two years’ time I’ll probably be sent to medical school. The Order has a great need of its own doctors.’

  ‘Wasn’t last night a strange preparation for your new life?’

  ‘I don’t see much wrong with it.’

  ‘From your point of view, wasn’t it a sin?’ He was angry now.

  ‘Not much of a one, if it was. I’ve known women who spent the night before their marriage with another man. It was an end to their free or single life.’

  ‘And I was the goodbye, the shake-hands?’

  ‘I didn’t plan it. I was attracted to you. We were free. That’s the way it fell. If I did it after joining, it would be different. It would be a very great sin.’

  ‘Perhaps we could be married?’ he pressed blindly.

  ‘No. You wouldn’t ask so lightly if we could.’

  ‘We wouldn’t have much at first but we would have one another and we could work,’ he pursued.

  ‘No. I’m sorry. I like you very much, but it cannot be. My mind has been made up for a long time.’

  ‘Well, one last time, then,’ he cut her short.

  ‘Hadn’t we the whole night?’

  ‘One last time.’ His hands insisted: and as soon as it was over he was sorry, left with less than if it had never taken place.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  After they had paid downstairs, they did not want to eat in the hotel, though the grill room was serving breakfast. They went to one of the big plastic and chrome places on O’Connell Street. They ate slowly in uneasy silence.

  ‘I hope you’ll forgive me, if there’s anything to forgive,’ she said after a long time.

  ‘I was going to ask the same thing. There’s nothing to forgive. I wanted to see you again, to go on seeing you. I never thought I’d have the luck to meet someone so open … so unafraid.’ He was entangled in his own words before he’d finished.

  ‘I’m not like that at all.’ She laughed as she hadn’t for a long time. ‘I’m a coward. I’m frightened of next week. I’m frightened by most things.’

  ‘Why don’t you take an address that’ll always find me in case you change your mind?’

  ‘I’ll not change.’

  ‘I thought that once too.’

  ‘No. I’ll not. I can’t,’ she said, but he still wrote the address and slipped it in her pocket.

  ‘You can throw it away as soon as I’m out of sight.’

  As they rose he saw that her eyes were filled with tears.

  They now leaned completely on those small acts of ceremony that help us better out of life than any drug. He paid at the cash desk and waited afterwards while she fixed her scarf, smiled ruefully as he stood aside to allow her the inside of the stairs, opened the large swing-door at the bottom of the steps. They walked slowly to the bus stop. At the stop they tried to foretell the evening’s weather by the dark cloudy appearance of the sky towards the west. The only thing that seemed certain was that there’d be more rain. They shook hands as the bus came in. He waited until all the passengers had got on and it had moved away.

&nb
sp; The river out beyond the Custom House, the straight quays, seemed to stretch out in the emptiness after she had gone. In my end is my beginning, he recalled. In my beginning is my end, his and hers, mine and thine. It seemed to stretch out, complete as the emptiness, endless as a wedding ring. He knew it like his own breathing. There might well be nothing, but she was still prepared to live by that one thing, to will it true.

  Thinking of her, he found himself walking eagerly towards the Busarus … but almost as quickly his walking slowed. His steps grew hesitant, as if he was thinking of turning back. He knew that no matter how eagerly he found himself walking in any direction it could only take him to the next day and the next.

  Eddie Mac

  The summer Annie May Moran came to work for Mrs Kirkwood was the great year of St Michael’s football. The team had reached the Final of the Senior Cup for the second year running. Eddie Mac was their star, their finest forward. He worked for the Kirkwoods and lived in the three-roomed herdsman’s cottage at the end of the yard, its galvanized roof sprayed the same shade of green as the stables. The two Kirkwoods, father and son, old William and young Master William, went to Roscommon to watch the Final. They barely understood the game and were not touched by the wild fever that emptied the countryside on that late August Sunday: ‘We went because Eddie was playing. His father would have enjoyed this day, had he stayed.’

  Annie May helped Mrs Kirkwood set the dinner table in the front room that afternoon while the game was being played. Mrs Kirkwood went to particular care with the linen and silver, and the best set of bone china was on display. The Nutleys of Oakport, the oldest and last of her local friends, were coming to dinner that evening. When she was satisfied with the arrangement of the room and had checked the food, she took her book and sat in the rocking chair in the library, where, looking out on the lawn and white paling and the winding avenue of copper and green beech, she rocked herself to sleep as she did every day at this hour.

  Exploding cans of carbide, random shouts and cheers and whistles as fires were lit on the hills and on every cross on the roadways woke her early. St Michael’s had won the Senior Cup for the first time since its founding. She rose and came down to Annie May in the kitchen. ‘It’s an unmitigated disaster,’ she confided to the servant girl. ‘It was bad enough last year, and they lost. What’ll it be like now that they have won?’

  ‘Eddie was the hero,’ William Kirkwood announced when they returned from Roscommon. ‘The two goals he scored in the second half won the game – it broke the other team’s heart. They carried him on their shoulders all around the field with the cup at the end.’ Annie May coloured as he spoke. She was already in love with the young herdsman who had yet to acknowledge her presence in the house.

  A week later, the big silver cup arrived in Kirkwood’s yard on its round of the parish, the red and green ribbons streaming from the handles. Again Eddie Mac was hoisted on shoulders and carried aloft with the cup to his own door. Inside the small house the cup was filled to the brim with whiskey. Cheers rang out as each person drank from the cup. A large bonfire was set ablaze in the middle of the yard. A melodeon started to play.

  ‘It’s so childish,’ Mrs Kirkwood complained in the big house. ‘We can abandon any hope of sleep tonight.’

  ‘They’re entitled to the night,’ her husband argued. ‘It’s a pity Eddie’s father isn’t around. He would have greatly enjoyed the night. They’ve had a famous victory.’

  ‘And they use it to get drunk! Is that a way to celebrate decently? Listen to that din down in the yard.’

  ‘I think you are too hard on them, Elisabeth,’ William Kirkwood countered gently.

  At that time, Annie May was too young to go to the dances and Eddie Mac had not yet the reputation of a womanizer. He went with the one girl, Kathleen Duignan. She was tall and dark and they looked like brother and sister. As the Duignans owned land, they were a class above the Macs, and when Kathleen Duignan went to England at Christmas it was thought she had thrown Eddie over. He was never to go with another girl for so long.

  A few months later, a torn knee in spring training was to end his football glory. Without him the team struggled through the early rounds of the championship, and when he returned for the semi-final he played poorly. The injury did not affect his walk but showed as soon as he tried to sprint or leap. His whole game was based on speed and anticipation. He had neither taste nor appetite for the rough and tumble. Now that his deadly grace was gone, his style of hanging back till the last moment looked like cowardice. As soon as it was plain that the cup was about to be lost, Eddie was taunted and jeered every time he went near the ball by the same people that had chaired him shoulder high from the field the year before. On the surface he showed no feeling, and walked stone-faced from the field; but on the following Wednesday, the evening every week he walked to the village to collect his copy of the Herald and to buy in a few groceries, he put his studded boots, football socks, togs, bandages in his green and red jersey, and by drawing the sleeves round and knotting them tightly made it a secure bundle, which he dropped in the deepest arch as he crossed the bridge into the village, only waiting long enough after the splash to be certain it had sunk.

  A gentle and even more final end came that September to Mrs Kirkwood. She had gone with her book to sit in the rocking chair in front of the library window ‘in the one hour of the day selfishly my own’. When she did not come down to the kitchen at her usual time, Annie May waited for half an hour before going up to the front room. The chair was still imperceptibly rocking before the window, but the book had fallen, and when she called there was no answer. An intense stillness was in the room. Even the spaces between the beech trees down the rich avenue seemed to gaze back in their emptiness, and she ran shouting for help to the yard.

  The formal heart of the house, perhaps the heart of the house itself, stopped with Mrs Kirkwood. William Kirkwood and his son seemed only too glad not to have to go out to dinner any more, and they no longer received people at the house. They took all their meals in the big kitchen and did not dress up even on Sunday. Old William’s sole interest for years had been his bees. Now he was able to devote himself to them exclusively; and his son, who had lost money introducing a new strain of Cheviots to the farm and running it according to the tenets of his agricultural college, let it fall back into the hands of Eddie Mac, who ran it on the traditional lines of his father before him, not making money but losing none. All Master William’s time now turned back to a boyhood fascination with astronomy, and he pursued the stars with much the same gentle, singular dedication as his father accorded the bees, ordering books and instruments, entering into correspondence with other amateur astronomers. He spent most clear nights out in the fields examining the stars through a long telescope fixed on a tripod.

  Freed from Mrs Kirkwood’s disapproval of all that went on in the village, Annie May was now able to go to the dances. She was large and plain but had her admirers, young men off farms – and some young no longer but without any sense of their ageing, who judged cattle from the rear and preferred a good armful to any lustre of eye or line of cheekbone or throat. Her eyes were still only for Eddie Mac, but he did not even smile or nod to her in the hall. She would see him standing among the other men at the back of the hall, smoking lazily as his eyes went over the girls that danced past. Sometimes he just stood there for the whole night, not taking any girl out to dance, but when he did almost always that girl went with him. If the girl turned him down, unlike the other men, he never went in pursuit of another but quietly retraced his steps to the back of the hall, and soon afterwards he would leave alone. In those years, ‘Who will Eddie Mac try tonight?’ was one of the excitements of the dancehall. He seldom went with the same girl twice.

  There was a later time, after it was clear that Annie May was likely to be running the big Georgian house for a very long time, when he would ask her to dance because it was politic. ‘As an oul neighbour with another oul neighbour,’ he woul
d joke; but she was cooking him his midday meal now, which he took with the Kirkwoods in the kitchen. He knew that he could have her whenever he wanted, but her ample, wholesome looks were too plain and they lived and worked too close to one another.

  Then came another time when the nights Eddie Mac could dance with one girl and expect her to go with him disappeared. Nights came that saw him take girl after girl out, and none would have him. It was not so much that his dark good looks had coarsened but that he had become too well known over the years in this small place. And a night eventually found him dancing with Annie May, no longer ‘as an oul neighbour with another oul neighbour’ but as man and woman. The air was thick with dust that had been carried in on shoes and beaten into a fine powder; the yellow light gentle from the tin reflectors behind the row of paraffin lamps around the walls. The coins had been already counted into a neat stack of blue paper bags on the card table at the door.

  ‘I suppose I can hardly ask to leave you home since we are going to the same old place anyhow,’ he proposed almost ruefully, and she found herself blushing all over. It was what she had never dared to hope in all the years.

  They passed together through the village, the music from the dancehall still following them; but then the national anthem beat stridently in the night air, and suddenly all was silent. Here and there cautious whispers of lovers drifted from the shelter of walls. The village was mostly sleeping. One thin line of yellow along the blind told that there was after-hour drinking in Charlie’s. A man keeping a lookout for the law cast an exploratory cough in their direction at Shivnan’s forge, but they went by in silence. As they crossed the stone bridge from the dancehall, they saw the lights of bicycles slowly scattering. Below them, the quiet river slid out in silence towards the level sedgelands and the wilder Shannon.

  ‘Now that they’ve stood up like fools for the Soldier’s Song they can all go home in peace,’ Eddie Mac remarked.

  After a mile, they left the road and took the path through the fields to the house. It was a dark, windless night, without moon or star, but they could both walk this path in their sleep.