Amongst Women (12 page)

‘I think it’s time to say the Rosary,’ he said earlier than usual, taking out his beads. They put newspapers down and knelt. This night Moran enunciated each repetitious word with a slow clarity and force as if the very dwelling on suffering, death and human supplication would scatter all flimsy vanities of a greater world; and the muted responses giving back their acceptance of human servitude did not improve his humour. The coughing, the rustling of the newspapers, the rasp of coat buttons on table or chair exasperated his brooding. The high spirits round the tea table had gone. Then, like a shoal of fish moving within a net, Rose and the girls started to clear the table, to brush away crumbs, to wash, to dry, to return each thing to its own place, all done with a muted energy; whispers, jokes, little scolding asides – ‘No, that goes in the other place’ or reminisce how they had made the same mistake before in order to soften any harshness in the scold, bending low in apologetic laughter. Ingratiating smiles and words were threaded in and out of the whole whirl of busyness. Amid it all was their constant awareness of Moran’s watching presence, sharpening everything they did with the danger of letting something fall and break and bring the weight of his disapproval into the small chain. All their movements were based more on habit and instinct and fear than any real threat but none the less it was an actual physical state. They would wash up the same way even if they were not watched.

As looking down from great heights brings the urge to fall and end the terror of falling, so his very watching put pressure on them to make a slip as they dried and stacked the plates and cups. There were several alarms, bringing laughing giggles of relief when they came to nothing. Then they quietly washed and dried their own hands and returned to the general room. Moran sat on, brooding in the car chair, his thumbs idly revolving  around one another.

‘I think we should have a cup of tea,’ Rose said with jollying encouragement towards Moran but when he only looked back out at her she just continued talking as she got kettle and teapot. ‘Maggie will want an early night. I know how tired she must be after the journey. That night boat is the worst of all, and the waiting.’ Whether it was the suggestion or pure tiredness Maggie was yawning as if in her support.

The girls rose late the following morning. Moran had gone out already into the fields. During the long luxurious breakfast Maggie told Rose and Sheila and Mona more details of her life in London than she was able to the night before – the parties, the dances, the different bands and singers, the boys she met, her girlfriends.

Rose had her own girlhood in Glasgow to share. Mona and Sheila were so poised on the edge of their own lives that they listened as if hearing about the living stream they were about to enter. After the long breakfast the three girls went out to visit Moran in the fields.

They had worked so hard as children in the fields that each field and tree had become a dear presence, especially the hedges. Maggie looked for the old damson tree by McCabe’s, the crab and wild cherry. The sky overhead was cloudless. No wind stirred. Small birds flitted in the shade of the branches and bees were crawling over the red and white clover. They found Moran by the sound of malleting. He was replacing broken stakes in a barbed-wire fence in one of the meadows. The sight of his daughters in sleeveless dresses was relief from the lonely tedium of the work.

‘I’m planning to knock this meadow before the evening is out,’ he told them before they left and joked, ‘You’ll have to harden your hands before you leave.’

‘They are not that soft, Daddy.’

As they walked away from him through the greenness, the pale blue above them, Maggie said, her voice thick with emotion, ‘Daddy is just lovely when he’s like that.’

‘There’s nobody who can hold a candle to him,’ Mona added. The girls in their different ways wanted to gather their father and the whole, true, heartbreaking day into their arms.

By evening Moran’s mood had completely turned again. He changed his boots and clothes in downcast silence and ate without speaking. Whatever was bothering him was gnawing at him as he ate. They knew him so well that everyone fell into a hush and appeared to move around him on tiptoes.

‘Do you ever see that brother of yours at all?’ he asked without looking up as he finished, drawing his chair roughly back from the table.

‘I do but not all that much.’

‘How do you mean not all that much?’

‘He met me at the station …’

‘God, don’t you think I know that?’

‘He came out to the hospital every weekend after I first came but since then it’s only every so often he comes out. Once I met him in the West End and we went to the pictures.’ Maggie wanted to please and pacify him on this her holiday at any cost.

‘How does he look?’

‘He looks fine. He looks no different than when he was here.’

‘Did you mention when you wrote that he is in with some Cockney riff-raff?’

‘It’s something to do with converting old houses. I’m not certain what it is.’

‘Believe me, he wouldn’t tell what it is.’

‘He goes to night school though,’ she defended uneasily.

‘Doing what?’

‘Accountancy. He’ll be qualified before too long.’

‘Does he ask about us at all?’

‘He asks if we have any news.’

‘Does he ever talk about coming home?’

‘No.’

‘And did he not send any word to anybody when he knew you were coming home?’

‘Yes. He sent word. He wishes everybody the best.’

‘God, I don’t know what’s wrong with this house,’ Moran rose, preparing to go out. ‘Getting information from anybody is like trying to extract teeth.’

‘We don’t know any more than that,’ Maggie protested to Rose after he had gone. ‘I told Daddy everything we know about Luke.’

‘Don’t worry,’ Rose hushed. ‘Daddy’s like that. He takes all these things far too seriously.’

When he came in for the night some hours later he was still agitated and fretting. ‘I don’t know,’ he said as he sat to the table. ‘I don’t know what I did to deserve it. I don’t know why things can’t be the same in this house as in every other house in the country. I don’t know why it is always
me
that has to be singled out.’

Rose fussed discreetly around him but he could not remain the centre of attention for long. Maggie was going to a dance and she was taking Mona and Sheila. All three girls were dressing  and their youthful excitement pulsed through the house. Rose too was caught up in the preparations.

‘Be careful,’ Moran advised when he kissed each of them in turn as they were ready to leave. ‘Be careful never to do anything to let yourselves or the house down.’

‘We’d never do that, Daddy.’

‘Enjoy yourselves,’ Rose advised them simply.

After they had gone a complete silence that only reflected itself settled down like lead and was broken only by the sound of Moran removing his boots to go to bed early.

The next morning the girls woke to the incessant clatter of the mowing arm circling the big meadow. Moran had started to mow. All hands would be needed. Whatever leisure the holidays had promised was now ended. The whole house would be consumed by the fever of haytime, the fear of broken weather until every wisp was won.

‘The big meadow is down. It’ll be all hands on deck from now on,’ Moran told the girls as they sat over a late breakfast. He was happy and relieved that the first part of the mowing was completed without any breakage.

‘It’ll be great if the rain keeps off,’ Rose said.

‘It might take the edge off the dancing,’ Moran teased. ‘You’ll be too tired to dance tonight anyhow.’

‘That might not be a bit of harm!’ they smiled back.

As soon as the dew had been burned off the grass, the whole house was in the hayfield, shaking out the heavy tangled lumps of grass the tedder had missed with the fork, raking what was light in from the edges. Towards evening, when the grass started to take on the dry crackle of hay, it was as if the small handshakings were springing up in the meadow. The weather did not look like breaking. Moran put the mowing arm back on the tractor and cut the second and third meadows. They had most of the big meadow up by nightfall. By then every muscle ached, and it was with deep gratitude that they turned at last to drag their feet towards the house. ‘There’ll surely be no dancing tonight.’ ‘You can say that twice over.’

They were stiff as boards the next morning. When they moved, every muscle ached but by midday they were in the fields again. Rose and Michael brought tea and sandwiches out to the field. Moran was either mowing a new field or tossing the field ahead of them with the tedder but he joined the band of girls under the shade of one of the big beeches when Rose came with the basket and can.

‘It can’t be helped, it must be done,’ he said after they had eaten and rested. Rose gathered up what was left of the sandwiches of tinned salmon and sardines. The girls rose stiffly in the green shade and turned to the sunlit meadow. Maggie and Mona were good workers. They worked silently, hardly ever looking up. Sheila hated the work. She complained of blisters on her hands and was forever making forages to the house to escape the backbreaking tedium. The boy worked in fits and bursts, especially in response to praise from Rose. Other times he stood discouraged until shouted at by Moran to do more than just stand there occupying bloody space with everybody killing themselves. Then he would lift his fork angrily and pretend to work. Rose alone was able to laugh and chat away with Maggie and at the same time get through more work than anybody else in the field.

For five whole glaring days they worked away like this, too tired and stiff at night to want to go anywhere but to bed. They had all the hay won except the final meadow when the weather broke. The girls never thought they would lift their faces to the rain in gratitude. They watched it waste the meadows for the whole day.

‘To hell with it. We’re safe now anyhow. If we don’t get the last meadow itself it will do for bedding. Only for the whole lot of you we’d not be near that far on,’ Moran was able to praise.

‘It was for nothing, Daddy.’

‘It was everything. Alone we might be nothing. Together we can do anything.’

Rose put down a big fire against the depression of the constant rain. Everybody in the house loved to move in the warmth and luxury of it, to look out from the bright room at the rain spilling steadily down between the trees. When they moved away from the fire to the outer rooms the steady constant drip of rain from the eaves in the silence was like peace falling.

Now they could dance with a clear conscience. The big regatta dances in the huge grey tent down by the quay in Carrick were just beginning but there were so few days left of the holiday that Maggie preferred to spend them about the house chatting with Rose or her sisters around the fire or talking with Michael out in the front garden among his flowerbeds; and sometimes during long breaks in the rain they would go out to where Moran was tidying up in the meadows.

By the time Maggie had to go back to London they had never felt closer in warmth, even happiness. The closeness was as strong as the pull of their own lives; they lost the pain of individuality within its protection. In London or Dublin the girls would look back to the house for healing. The remembered light on the empty hayfields would grow magical, the green shade of the beeches would give out a delicious coolness as they tasted again the sardines between slices of bread: when they were away the house would become the summer light and shade above their whole lives.

‘If we don’t do well in the exam, if we don’t get anything here,’ Sheila blurted out, as they said goodbye outside the front garden while Moran waited with the engine running to drive Maggie to the station, ‘you may see us in London soon enough.’

Such was their anxiety during the two days that were left before the exam results were due that Mona and Sheila found it hard to eat or sleep.

‘Waiting is the worst,’ Rose said sympathetically as she saw them struggling with food. ‘Once you see what’s in the envelopes everything will be all right.’

‘I don’t know. I don’t know,’ Sheila said impatiently.

‘They might be dreadful.’

‘No they won’t. Nothing is so bad as having to imagine.’

So as not to have to watch the empty road for the postman on the day that the results were due each girl went separately deep into the fields but they weren’t able to stay alone for long; and each time they came back to the road it was still empty. When at last they did see him coming they had to follow his slow path from the road, watch him lean his bicycle carefully against the wall under the yew and plod slowly up between the two rows of boxwood. Moran who had been watching as anxiously as the two girls met him at the wooden gate. They stood chatting across the gate for what seemed an age until Moran faced the house with the two envelopes tantalizingly held out. Unable to stand it any longer, Sheila went up to him and before he had time to react seized both envelopes, feverishly  tearing open her own and handing the other to Mona, who appeared almost unable to take it. Mona watched Sheila more devour than read the results. Moran was so taken aback by the way Sheila had seized the envelope from his hand that he stood in amazement.

‘They’re good! They’re more than I ever thought … Read them.’ Without knowing quite what she was doing she thrust them roughly towards Moran.

‘Why haven’t you even opened yours?’ She turned to Mona. She took the letter from her hands and opened it. ‘You’ve done great too,’ she hugged her sister and they wheeled one another round on the garden path until the flowerbeds were in danger. Both girls had done well but Sheila had done brilliantly.

‘This is great,’ Rose said. ‘We’re very proud.’

Moran, reacting to the exhibition of high spirits, said firmly, ‘I think we’ll have to consider everything.’

‘What do you mean
consider?
’ Sheila’s voice quavered.

‘We’ll have to consider where it will all lead to,’ he said. ‘And what we can afford. Making too much fuss of anything never brings luck.’