Amongst Women (13 page)

But in spite of his words there was a fuss about their success. They had done so well that the convent put photographs of the two girls in the local paper. Moran came back from the post office to tell them that Annie and Lizzie had been singing their praises.

‘I told them it was nothing. What else had the girls to do but study? Anybody could do it who got their chance. They nearly beat me,’ he said to the whole house, much pleased with what he had said.

The girls looked at him with wide-eyed hurt. They felt that he had let them down in front of others.

‘They’ll think that you are running down your own children.’ Rose articulated what they felt.

‘If I was to praise the girls in the post office, being Irish they would
have
to cut them down to size,’ Moran argued. ‘Since I didn’t give them any praise, Annie and Lizzie had to do the praising instead. That way they think twice as much of the girls than if I had praised them myself.’ He was very pleased with his own astuteness.

‘It would have been better if he had praised us no matter what anyone said,’ Sheila said when the girls were alone with Rose, disappointed that he had failed to support them in public no matter what his intentions were.

‘Well, that’s the way Daddy is,’ Rose argued. ‘He probably thought that’s what would please you most. He’s so proud of you all. He thought that he might do you harm if he allowed it to show.’

The solid offer of a place in the Department of Lands came for Mona and a similar job in the Department of Finance for Sheila. The offers came among a number of other lesser positions that the girls had applied for.

‘To those that have shall be given too much. To those that have nothing shall be given a kick in the arse,’ Moran responded to the luxury of the choices. He assumed both girls would take the civil service jobs. Then a scholarship to university came in for Sheila. Suddenly the whole world was wide open to her.

‘I’m saying nothing. I want to stand in nobody’s way. She has to make up her own mind. Tonight we’ll all have to pray for her guidance,’ Moran said.

She played with the choices during the remaining days allowed her, knowing in her heart that she would be forced to take the safe path into the civil service. She went to the convent for advice. Sister Oliver pressed her to grasp her chance and go to university. Sheila argued the hesitations and objections she already felt surrounded by, which were, essentially, Moran’s lack of support but the nun pressed her to think about it.

‘I was talking to Sister Oliver. She wants me to forget about the civil service and to go to university,’ she said as soon as she got home.

‘Go to university?’ Moran repeated.

‘I won the scholarships,’ she asserted spiritedly.

‘Would the scholarships pay for everything?’

‘They’d pay for most of it.’

‘Where would the rest come from?’

‘I could work during the holidays.’ She felt under great pressure.

‘What would you study at university?’

‘I’d like to do medicine.’

‘How long would that take?’

‘The most of seven years.’

‘Physician heal thyself,’ he muttered in a half-overheard aside and went out.

Sheila could not have desired a worse profession. It was the priest and doctor and not the guerrilla fighters who had emerged as the bigwigs in the country Moran had fought for. For his own daughter to lay claim to such a position was an intolerable affront. At least the priest had to pay for his position with celibacy and prayer. The doctor took the full brunt of Moran’s resentment.

Sheila withdrew into angry silence. There were moments when she thought of looking for outside help but there was really no one she could turn to. Maggie had barely enough to live on. She considered writing to Luke in London – she had even taken notepaper out – but realized that it would be directly confronting Moran. She could not bring herself to do it.

Throughout, Moran did not attempt to influence Sheila directly but his withdrawal of support was total.

After two days Sheila announced truculently, ‘I’m not going to the university. I’ll take the civil service.’

‘I didn’t want to stand in your way, that’s why I said nothing but I can’t help thinking it is closer to your measure.’

‘How?’ Her anger brought out his own aggression.

‘How, what? How, pig, is it?’ he demanded.

‘What do you mean, Daddy? I didn’t understand what you said, that’s all,’ she was quick to change but she refused to withdraw.

‘You’d understand quick enough if you wanted to. You know the old saying there’s none more deaf than those who do not want to hear.’

‘I’m sorry. I just didn’t understand, Daddy.’

‘Going for medicine is a fairly tall order, isn’t it? Even with scholarships it takes money. I consider all my family equal. I don’t like to see a single one trying to outdistance another.’

‘I didn’t say anything like that. I just said what I’d like to do,’ she said brokenly, with bitterness.

‘That’s right. Blame me because the world isn’t perfect,’ Moran complained equally bitterly. ‘Blame, blame. No matter what you do. Blame is all you get in this family.’

Mona stayed out of the turmoil. She was on her certain way into the civil service from the beginning. Full of hidden violence, she was unnaturally acquiescent, fearful that her own unyieldingness  would be exposed and its consequences violent.

Once Sheila was securely set towards the civil service as well, as if out of weakness or guilt Moran began courting her with vague, tentative offers; if she were desperate to go to university they could still look into ways of how it could be managed and they would try to manage it somehow no matter how hard it was. She refused. She knew the offers would disappear again the very moment she tried to take them up.

The week before they were going to Dublin he went with the two girls and Rose to Boles in the town.

‘You must get what you want. You have to be able to hold your heads as high as anybody else in Dublin. Get the good stuff. The Morans are too poor to afford cheap shoes. There will be money after us when we are gone.’ Rose did not take him at his word. She spent carefully. ‘You didn’t spend half enough when you got the chance,’ he said when he saw the bill.

He was plainly suffering because he had denied Sheila her chance of university but he could not have acted in any other way, perhaps through race fear of the poorhouse or plain temperament.

‘Don’t worry, Daddy,’ Mona said. ‘You did everything you could for us. You did far too much.’ Sheila nodded in vigorous agreement.

That evening, after Sheila and Mona had left for Dublin, Michael said resentfully, ‘They’re all gone now.’ After Luke and then Maggie had left for London there were still enough people to dull the heartache and emptiness but now that all the girls had gone it was as if the whole house had been cleaned. ‘It’s not fair.’

‘That’s life, I’m afraid, Michael,’ Rose said.

‘How will they fare without us?’ his face was soft with tears.

‘How will we fare without them?’ Rose said. ‘They’ll manage, please God. We all have to manage somehow.’

‘They shouldn’t all be gone.’

Moran looked from his son’s face to his wife’s but his own remained expressionless. When he got up from his chair he was already spilling the beads from their black purse into his palm. ‘We’d be better if we’d say our prayers.’

The newspapers were put down, the chairs dragged into place but there was so much space on the floor that the three kneeling figures, Moran erect at the table, Rose and Michael bent at the chairs, looked scattered and far apart. There was an uneasy pause, as if waiting for Mona, at the beginning of the Third Mystery. Moran hurried into the Fourth. Rose too was hesitant as she started the Fifth Mystery. A wind was swirling round the house, sometimes gusting in the chimney, and there was an increasing sense of fear as the trees stirred in the storm outside when the prayers ended. For the first time the house seemed a frail defence against all that beat around it.

The prayers had done nothing to dispel the sense of night and stirring trees outside, the splattering of rain on the glass.

As Moran solemnly replaced his beads in the purse Michael complained again. ‘The house feels awful with everybody gone.’ Rose looked from Moran to the boy and back again to Moran and held her peace.

‘They’re gone anyhow,’ Moran said. ‘They have good jobs. I’ll expect they’ll be sending us money before long. We’ll all be rolling,’ Moran said half-jokingly; and as Michael started to sob he touched his thick curly hair. ‘They’ve mollied you for far too long. You’ll have to grow up and fight your corner.’

‘We’ll make tea. There’s fruit cake as well as bread and jam. I’m worn out with all the go of the last days,’ Rose said.

After Rose and the boy had gone to bed he sat on his own by the raked fire, sitting motionless, staring down at the floor. When he did get up to go to the room he looked like someone who had lost the train of thought he had set out on and had emptied himself into blankness, aware only that he was still somehow present.

Though it was in its late September glory Michael lost all interest in his garden; the falling petals stayed unswept and the flowers wilted and fell into a tangled mess. Several times Rose tried to prod him towards the garden but after a short time he would just stand in it, disheartened, looking on at the disorder before moving away. The girls had praised his green hands. His involvement in the little garden was not strong enough to survive  without their praise.

He had few outside interests. He did not play football or any team games nor did he fish or hunt or swim. Knowledge and information he was able to pick up without effort and he always came close to the top of his class without appearing to study. Except for maths he showed no interest in any one subject above another and his liking for mathematics seemed to stem from the fact that it came to him so easily while others struggled. With the girls gone, his main distraction and society had gone, for out of Moran’s sight he had loved to tease and play with them and they with him. He was as tall at fifteen as he would ever be and though he would never have Moran’s dramatic good looks he was handsome. After his sisters left, he discovered that he was attractive to women but it was to older women that he was drawn. From Moran he inherited a certain contempt for women as well as a dependence on them but it did not diminish his winning ways. The one drawback was his lack of money. To go about with young women he needed money and Moran would not part with any.

He went to Rose. She gave him a little money but grew alarmed when he began to come home late at night. When she got out of bed, anxious to see that he was all right, she discovered that he smelled of drink. At school he began to earn money by doing difficult maths exercises for slower boys. Moran had been listless about the house since the girls had gone but once he discovered that Michael was coming home late at night he acted decisively. Without a word of warning he bolted every door and window in the house and waited up.

When he heard the latch of the back door being raised, he was dozing in darkness. Then he heard various windows being tried. Softly he went to the back door and drew the bolt and as soon as he heard returning footsteps he opened the door.

‘This is a nice hour,’ he said.

‘I was in town. I couldn’t get a lift back. I had to walk.’

‘What were you doing in town?’

‘There was a dance.’

‘Did you ask to go to the dance?’

‘No.’

‘No
what
? No, pig!’

‘No, Daddy.’

Moran beckoned him to come in and as he was passing him in the narrow hallway he seized him and struck him violently about the head. ‘I’ll teach you to come in at this hour! I’ll teach you to go places without asking! There must have been drink at this hooley as well!’

Sheltered by his sisters, Michael was unused to any blows and angrily cried out as soon as he was struck. There would have been a violent struggle but for Rose’s appearance.

‘What an hour to come in at, Michael! You have Daddy up worried about you the whole night.’

‘I couldn’t get a lift. He hit me,’ the boy cried.

‘You haven’t seen the end of this by half. I’ll teach you one good lesson. Nobody’s coming into this house at any old hour of the night they like while I’m in charge here.’

‘Everybody’s tired now. We’ll get to bed. Anything that has to be gone into can be gone into in the morning,’ Rose said.

Moran glared at her. He seemed about to brush her out of the way to seize the boy but drew back. ‘You can thank your lucky stars the woman’s here.’

‘He hit me,’ the boy sobbed.

‘And I’ll damn well show you what it is to be hit the next time you come into the house at this hour. You’re not going to do anything you like while I’m here.’

‘I’ll go away,’ the boy shouted self-pityingly.

‘Everybody’s tired. Look at the time it is. You can’t be coming in at this time. You had poor Daddy and everybody else worried to death about you,’ Rose scolded and managed to shepherd both men to their rooms without further trouble.

‘I’ll see that gentleman in the morning,’ Moran warned. ‘He needn’t think he’s getting away with anything in this house.’

Rose got him away to school early in the morning but it was only a postponement. During the weekend Michael had the good sense to stay well in the background and Mona and Sheila came from Dublin for the weekend, which postponed any confrontation further still. Moran was so taken up with the girls and their life in Dublin that he hardly noticed him.

These visits of his daughters from London and Dublin were to flow like relief through the house. They brought distraction, something to look forward to, something to mull over after they had gone. Above all they brought the bracing breath of the outside, an outside Moran refused to accept unless it came from the family. Without it there would have been an ingrown wilting. For the girls the regular comings and goings restored their superior sense of self, a superiority they had received intact from Moran and which was little acknowledged by the wide world in which they had to work and live. That unexamined notion of superiority was often badly shaken and in need of restoration each time they came home. Each time he met them at the station his very presence affirmed and reaffirmed again as he kissed them goodbye. Within the house the outside world was shut out. There was only Moran, their beloved father; within his shadow and the walls of his house they felt that they would never die; and each time they came to Great Meadow they grew again into the wholeness of being the unique and separate Morans.