Amongst Women (11 page)

‘You are all up a bit before your time. You could have stolen another few minutes,’ she said as if the evening had never happened. She poured their tea and sat with a cup of her own by the fire, chatting away as easily as she did every morning. ‘No danger of your brother ever getting up too early,’ she said and went to call Michael. When he came into the room, sleepy and rubbing his eyes, he too stared as if not able to believe how like all other mornings the morning was. Nothing seemed to have changed.

Moran stayed in bed until late that day, disappearing silently into the fields after eating. When the children came back from school they found that still nothing had changed. Moran was in a rage about tools and a barrow that had been left out in the rain and complained about how much money was being wasted heedlessly about the house all the time.

‘Why does he always have to go on like that?’ Sheila was emboldened from what she saw the night before to ask Rose when Moran had gone out again.

‘Daddy worries. He worries a great deal about the house.’ Rose said it with such empathy that all criticism was stopped. All they could do was to look at her but no one could read Rose’s face and they turned back to their books. They were only weeks away from the examinations halls. So much work still had to be done, so much work had to be gone over again. The chance-throw of the exam would almost certainly determine the quality of much of the rest of their lives. Sheila especially had dreams of university. Much could be won, a great deal more could be lost, and there was always England.

At this time Moran ordered an enormous load of lime that blocked the avenue. To cut down on expense he did not get the big factory spreaders but started to spread it himself with tractor and shovel. For days he backed the little transport box into the huge mound and went up and down the fields in lines, stopping the tractor every few yards to scatter the lime, tossing each shovelful on the wind for the white dust to be blown out over the grass. No matter how carefully he sliced each shovelful in an arc out on the wind, there were certain unpredictable gusts that lifted the grains and blew them back towards the tractor so that by evening his clothes were filthy with lime, his face and hands as white as chalk, accentuating the inflamed red round his eyes. The theatrical paleness of his face and hands pleased him. ‘I’m a boody man,’ he pretended to chase Rose and the children with his old charm. Rose was delighted, the clowning bringing relief back into the house after the hidden battle. It would never be over but Rose’s place in the house could never be attacked or threatened again. ‘I’m a boody man. I’m a boody man,’ he made playful sallies to left and right while everybody pretended to back away, shouting and laughing.

As the days went by and the busy little transport box seemed to be making only slow way into the huge heap of lime, he no longer eased it out on the blade of the shovel for the wind to take it but scattered it anywhere out of sight, anywhere to be rid of it. More often because of his impatience, it blew back in his face, dusting him all over. Each night he would be more red-eyed, hardly able to drag his feet with tiredness, his face caked white with lime, lime in his eyes and ears and nostrils, his throat dry, lime thick through his hair and clothes and when he sat down to the table he felt as if he were eating lime.

The blindman’s buff of ‘I’m the boody man’ was gone and they served his tiredness with careful silence. Rose bent over him with pure attention.

‘Do you think it will rain?’ he asked Rose.

‘The forecast is for the same dry hard weather for days.’

‘If it rains,’ he said gloomily, ‘if it rains that heap will set like mixed concrete and we’ll never be rid of it’; and though there was no sign of a break in the weather he covered the slowly diminishing heap at night with clear plastic, weighted down with stones.

The girls were now too close to their exam, too anxious to do more than lift their faces to him, but out of the tiredness and filth of lime he could be seen looking often at their heads bent over the lamplit pages in what looked close to melancholy and sunken reflection.

‘I was in the eighth class in Moyne,’ he said and named four boys in the same class. ‘It was as far as you could go in Moyne. I was there for two years. All the others went on to be priests. Joe Brady became a Bishop in Colorado. He died two years ago. I used to write to him till then. You couldn’t go further than the eighth class without going on to be a priest.’

‘Even if you had money?’ Rose asked.

‘No one had money round Moyne,’ he smiled, aching with tiredness, filthy and white with lime. ‘We were all good in the eighth class in Moyne but I was the best in maths.’ He named the others who shone in different subjects. ‘They all went on to be priests and then the Troubles started and I left too. Strange, to this day I have never met a priest who wasn’t afraid to die. I could never make head or tails of that. It flew in the face of everything.’

‘If it had been a different time you’d have been a doctor or an engineer,’ Rose said.

‘I wouldn’t have been a doctor,’ he shivered with tiredness, ill at ease by the very suggestion of a shape other than his own. ‘These lassies will be worn out with all this study,’ Moran changed.

‘No, Daddy. We’re just going over something again for the exam.’

‘We’ve had good weather for weeks now. You’re all day inside in school. You should take your books into the fresh air.’ He returned to it again and again, the good weather held and they were compelled eventually to go outside. They went to Oakport Woods, leaving their bicycles at the big iron gate, and walking with their books over the grass to the belt of trees along Oakport Lake. The late May sun burned overhead. It would be cool and dark within the wood and there was a cold spring.

‘I don’t know why he had to rout us out. We have wasted all this time getting here. We’d study better at home,’ Sheila complained crossing the fields.

‘That’s him,’ Mona answered. ‘He’s never content with things the way they are.’

They passed the delicate white blossoms of wild cherry, Sheila striding along in angry resentment, Mona following in her shadow. The light of water showed through the tree trunks as they drew close to the narrow wood along the lake but once on the fringe of the trees they lost all resentment at the sight of the thick floor of bluebells beneath the trees. To advance further into the wood was to trample on the colour blue.

‘There must be thousands.’

‘There’s millions!’

Their feet left clear tracks through the floor of bluebells as if on dark snow, the soft stems crushing to pulp under their feet. At the well they left their books and went down to the shore. The water was still. Summer had not yet replaced the wheaten reeds of winter with green along the edges. Out in the lake the gulls wheeled and scolded above their young on the pile of reeds ringed with rocks that formed Seagull Island. There was no boat any longer in Nutley’s boathouse. Some boards had been torn from the side and its black paint of tar had turned pale.

‘I don’t like this place,’ Sheila said.

‘Do you remember when we used to go with Daddy in the boat on Saturdays?’

‘How could I forget!’ Sheila said derisively.

Before getting down to their books they searched out a hollow straw and leaned flat across the spring to drink the water which was famed for its coldness. It was as if by drinking from the cold spring they were hoping to appease some spirit of the place so that it wouldn’t turn unfriendly to their studies; but they could not settle as they tried to read and make notes. A fly landed on a nose. A pure white butterfly tossed about in the light on the edge of the lake. Bees were moving about on the bluebells. A wren or robin scrambled about in a clump of thorns and seemed to be scolding.

‘This is a joke,’ Sheila closed her book. ‘I can’t take in a word here. I’m going home. What can he say? It’s too close to the exam to waste time.’

‘He can’t say that we didn’t make an attempt.’ Mona too was glad to leave.

‘We should have known better,’ came the exasperated response.

Even Sheila grew a little afraid as they drew close to the house. Coming home so early might seem to be confronting Moran.

‘You are almost back before you left.’ He met them at the gate and was smiling. ‘There’s nothing like the lake and the open air for powdering through the lessons.’

‘We got nothing done, Daddy.’ Sheila hung her head despondently low.

‘I’m surprised. I thought when I saw the pair of you coming that you had just raced through everything,’ Moran laughed. There was no reason to be afraid; on the contrary, he was delighted.

‘There were too many things to look at, Daddy,’ Mona said apologetically.

‘Ye are making excuses now,’ he teased. ‘You’re just no good and weren’t able to make yourselves get down to it.’

After they had gone in and resumed their grind in the usual places, Rose came out to him and said gently, ‘You were terrible, Daddy, to make them go down to the lake.’

‘What’s so terrible about it?’ he laughed, still in good humour. ‘It’s fresh air, isn’t it? They need to be rooted out of themselves from time to time. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. They’ll appreciate the inside of the house far better now.’

This small disturbance did not deflect them for long. They read and reread, often looking quite abstracted, memorizing passages silently, their eyes far off; and when ideas eluded or baffled them they would turn to one another for help, each sister seeming to draw strength and comfort from the other’s closeness.

Moran felt so outside their circle of concentration that he had to resort to tiptoeing into the room in an exaggerated parody of someone trying to enter unheard but his only audience was the boy, and that not often, and laughter only lifted the girls’ heads from their books for a forgotten moment.

Each of these clear days of scattered apple and white pear tree blossom moved inexorably towards the first day when they set out without books and came home in the evening showing the pink or blue papers they had tested themselves against in the examination hall.

‘How do you think you did?’ Moran was waiting anxiously to ask each evening.

‘We don’t know, Daddy. The nun thinks we didn’t do too bad.’

‘Never mind. We’ll always have enough to eat here anyhow,’ he said, feeling vulnerable in the face of the power that rested in the hands of the outside.

Then, suddenly, the exams were over. They could put their books away. But, instead of the freedom and ease they had longed for, all they felt was emptiness where once all was tension and work. They had to pass idle days of waiting that stretched ahead to an eternity of weeks in August.

‘You don’t have to worry about anything,’ Moran said constantly. ‘You don’t have to worry about a single thing.’

In early July the waiting was broken by the excitement of Maggie coming home for the first time since she had left for London. She was coming home for three whole weeks and by the time she left for London again the exam results would be nearly due.

Rose had already started to paint the main room of the house during the first exam. The freed girls helped her finish it, scrub tables and chairs. The old furniture was left outside in the sun to air. They scrubbed white the boards of the floor and the old brown flagstones of the hallway took on a damp glow. Michael’s front garden was beautiful with stock, beds of sweet william and marigolds that took greedily the sun from the other flowers – pansies, roses and lilies. Moran washed and polished the car, even cleared rusted machinery from around the house. He was more excited than anyone else and continually cracked jokes.

On the arrival day he considered going to meet Maggie in Carrick but he was afraid that he might miss her and decided to go to Boyle. He left alone before the train reached Carrick. Against Rose’s chidings he went in his old working clothes as if, perversely, to deny that the day was special in any way. ‘She’ll have to take me as she finds me. She’s back in the country now.’ After he left everyone was glued to the clock.

‘The train is coming into Carrick!’

The waiting silence was broken by, ‘I’d say the train is leaving Carrick now,’ and they all went to the fields behind the house to catch a glimpse of the train as it passed. They heard the diesel engine, the quick rattle of the wheels on rails and then the caterpillar of carriages that rose above the stone walls, the small windows flashing in the sun as they were quickly drawn across their view and gone. Then they all moved to the front of the house to watch the road and wait.

They were so intent on watching every car that they failed to pick up Moran’s until it was turning slowly in the gate under the yew tree. Moran looked stern and self-conscious as he drove up the short avenue. Maggie burst into tears at the sight of the house and the small familiar crowd waiting for her outside the wooden gate of the garden. Everyone embraced blindly and kissed one by one.

‘You are such a handsome one now,’ Rose looked her up and down with pleasure.

‘What do you think of an old fellow like myself turning up to meet such a grand lassie?’

Rose laughed and there was a general scramble to carry the baggage into the house.

In the house Maggie unpacked the presents she brought: a brilliant red woollen scarf for Rose, a brown V-necked pullover for Moran; Sheila and Mona were handed silken headscarves and Michael a saffron tie to go with his hair. She also brought him seeds with pictures of the flowers on the packets.

‘Do you think they will grow here?’ he asked, impressed that they had come all the way from London.

A big box of soft-centred chocolates was handed round. Tea was made. She was the centre of the table. They asked her greedily about London.

‘What’s Luke like now?’ Sheila burst out.

Silence fell at once. Everyone looked towards Moran who held his own pained silence.

‘He’s just the same,’ Maggie said and continued on about the nurses’ home while Sheila bit her tongue.

Such was the excitement and focus on Maggie that in spite of Rose’s care to draw him into the conversation Moran began to feel out of it and grew bored.