Amongst Women (16 page)

Michael had gone into the house without asking Moran’s leave. Bitterly he closed the field gate on the sheep. Then he checked that the cattle were tended for the night. When he came in he found Michael changed and standing confidently in front of the fire.

‘You were fairly quick away,’ Moran said. ‘I turned round to say something to you as I was letting out the sheep and there was no longer sight or light.’

‘I thought we were finished.’

‘You might have asked.’

‘I didn’t think there was any need. I thought we were finished.’

‘It’d be natural manners but I don’t imagine there’d be any use expecting anything like manners round this place,’ Moran said.

Outside the window the fields were darkening rapidly. Rose bustled reproachfully round Michael at the fire and he moved away to the table. Demonstratively he had books and writing materials out on the table.

‘I’ve warm socks for you here, Daddy. There’s a change of underwear in the hot press. You’ll feel better once you get out of the old duds.’

Moran took off his wellingtons and sat in the big car chair in his stockinged feet. He stirred when she spoke but continued staring vacantly out into the empty space of the room and didn’t answer. ‘Who cares anyhow?’ he muttered to himself. ‘Who cares? Who cares anyhow?’

Though they had just spent the day together, Michael and Nell arranged to meet again that night. She would wait for him in the car at the Rockingham gates. Michael could not leave the house until the Rosary was said. He chaffed while he waited but there was nothing he could do. To leave the house before prayers were said would invite certain confrontation. This night Rose had to remind Moran that the prayers had not yet been said. By the time he put the newspaper down on the cement and dropped to his knees at the table Nell was already sitting in her car outside the big gateway. Michael suffered keenly the incongruity of his position – a man with a woman by the sea in the early day and now a boy on his knees on the floor. When it came to his turn to recite the Third Decade he gave it out stridently. The tone drew a sharp glance from Moran but he did not intercept the prayers. He waited until he had risen from his knees to say, ‘That was a peculiar way you had of giving out your Decade.’ Violence between the man and the youth was just a flint-spark away. ‘To my poor ears it showed a certain lack of respect.’

‘I meant no disrespect,’ Michael backed away.

‘I’m very glad to hear it. People who get too hot under the collar generally get a cooling.’

Michael didn’t answer. He didn’t even risk saying that he was going out. He slipped outside, taking his coat on the way and pulling it on in the darkness while he ran to the gates. Though he was over an hour late Nell was still waiting in the car when he reached the gates.

The next morning they drove again to Sligo. This time they saw the western at the early matinée in the Gaiety. During the following weeks they drove to every place around they ever wanted to see, even as far as Galway. They drove to Mullingar and Longford. In Ballymote they stood together in front of every shop window in the town. On a clear Thursday they crossed the border and walked hand in hand between the long rows of stalls in Enniskillen. Beside the gates of the mart she bought him a cheap wristwatch from an Indian stall. He had never owned a watch of his own before. Though it was winter they drove many times to the ocean, to Rosses Point and Mul- laghmore and Bundoran as well as to the wild strand at Strandhill. He arrived back each time with his books to Rose and Moran just as it was starting to get dark.

Sheila and Mona came from Dublin for the weekend. This time Michael hid rather than flaunted what was going on. They were suspicious of him but they had to be back at their office desks on Monday and hadn’t time enough to find out. Moran’s isolation meant that no one had come to him and no one was going to risk letting anything slip to Rose when she went to the shops.

For Nell these weeks were the best of her life, weeks she would look back on as a lost happiness she had strayed into at the wren-boys’ dance in the barn. Yet somehow, mysteriously, it had slipped out of her grasp. Throughout the affair she was the more responsible of the two. That she had never gone to school a day longer than the legal requirement and had worked all her life with her hands made her value education more than those to whom it was open. ‘Are you sure you’re not ruining everything by skipping school like this?’

‘I’m finished with school. I’m not going back. This has nothing to do with it.’ The fiercest urge was to break out of his life as it was. He could not endure his life in the house any longer. By going the way he was going the crisis was certain to come from without. By doing what he was doing he was certain to bring it on. Not until then would it have to be faced.

‘You’ll never get the chance of school again,’ she said.

‘You’ll never get anything again,’ he responded bitterly.

‘What will you do then?’

‘Maybe I could go back to America with you?’

She looked at his childish egotism and innocence and bent towards him in a wildness of wishing; but her commonsense told her that it could never be, that all the world was against it.

‘You’d not find it easy in America,’ she said.

‘I’d manage,’ he laughed confidently. ‘If we can’t go to America why don’t we drive to Sligo?’

They spent all of the next day in Sligo but their days together were running out. Nell’s money was almost gone. She began to feel a little guilty that she had spent so much of her time and money on Michael instead of on her own family though he was not hard on money and any bits of money of his own he got his hands on he spent it all on her.

‘I’ll have to be going soon, Michael,’ she said to him one night as they sat in the car watching a white moon above Lough Key casting a bright roadway on the choppy waters.

Without warning he began to cry, not sure whether he was crying for his own loss or for Nell, having to leave this quiet place and face back to the uncaring world of America, She took him in her arms, cradling him, brushing back his hair until he turned towards her.

‘You should go back to school,’ she told him. ‘That way you’ll have a better job later on in your life.’

‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m finished with school.’

‘What’ll you do?’

‘Maybe I could go out to you in America before long?’ he asked again. It fell with such a sweetness that she did not want to question further or to see or think what they were doing beyond this hour or if they were doing anything at all.

If he was waiting for his mind to be made up for him by provoking action from without, it came with alarming speed the following evening. Nell and he had crossed the border to Enniskillen for the Thursday market that morning. He had come home as usual with his books around six. Moran was seated very still in the car chair. Rose was bustling round the house. There was no place set for his meal at the table. Before a word was spoken he sensed that he was in danger.

‘We had a visitor today,’ Moran said.

‘Who?’

‘Relax,’ Moran said sarcastically. ‘Your friend Brother Michael from the school. He came out to inquire about you. He thought you were sick. It seems you’ve not been seen in school since Christmas.’

‘I wasn’t able to go to school any more,’ he began to cry.

‘And why, may I inquire?’

‘I couldn’t face it any more.’

‘We are surprised at you, Michael,’ Rose said.

‘How did you spend your time?’

‘I just stayed away.’

‘Where did you go?’

‘Just here and there.’

‘Where’s here-and-there? I never heard of it.’

‘Around the town, just here and there.’ He felt cornered.

‘You try to lie and bluff as well! I made a few inquiries after the Brother went. I discovered Miss Morahan that’s home from America has been chauffeuring you round the entire country.’

There was no point in any further answers.

‘I don’t know why you did it to us, Michael,’ Rose said.

‘Rose and myself feed you, give you a roof above your head, send you to school and that’s the thanks we get.’

Michael was silent. The pauses between the sobs were longer.

‘You have nothing to say. You’re not even sorry.’

‘I’m sorry,’ he sniffed.

‘I’m afraid you’ll have to be taught a lesson as well. I want you to go to your room, take off your clothes and I’ll see you there in a few minutes. Maybe we can still sort this business out just between the two of us.’ So quiet and authoritative was Moran’s voice that Michael actually moved to go to the room; suddenly he realized what he was being asked to do and stopped.

‘No!’ the boy shouted in fear and outrage.

‘You’ll do what I say if you want to stay on in this house.’ Moran moved with great quickness from the chair but the boy was too strong. He easily parried his father’s lunge and ran from the house.

‘He’ll have to come back,’ Moran breathed heavily. ‘And when he does that gentleman will have to be taken within one inch of his life.’

He did not think of going back. He walked all the way to Morahan’s, high on the Plains. The car was outside their asbestos-roofed cottage. A younger sister of Nell’s came to the door and asked him in.

‘No, thanks, Brigid,’ he flashed a wan smile. ‘I want to see Nell.’ And when she came to the door he said, ‘He found out about the school. He was like a madman. He could kill someone. I ran away.’

‘Are you going to go back?’

‘I’m going to England,’ he said decisively. ‘If I could get to Dublin the crowd there would give me the fare. I wonder if you’d loan me the money for the train.’

‘When does it go?’

‘In the morning.’

‘Where will you stay till then?’

‘I’ll find somewhere, some shed or some place,’ he said dramatically.

‘Are you sure you want to go like this?’

‘I’ll hitch if you can’t give me the fare.’

‘I’ll drive you to Dublin,’ she said. ‘Won’t you come into the house while I’m getting ready?’

‘I don’t want to face into the house the way I am.’

‘You better sit in the car.’

He sat in the car and played the radio, fiddling with the knobs. Fits of rage and fear would shake him every time he thought of Moran, then change to self-pity. By the time Nell came he was tired of playing the radio. She was dressed up and carried a suitcase which she put in the back of the car.

They drove past the house and school, through Longford and Mullingar, towns they had been happy in for whole days. Now only the bars were open, the lighted streets wintry and empty, the silent rows of parked cars funereal along the sidewalk.

‘He told me to go to the room. He told me to take off all my clothes and wait for him in the room. I ran out of the house.’

‘He must be crazy.’

‘Once he made Luke take off all his clothes in the room. We heard the sound of the beating.’

‘Would Luke help you if you got to London?’

‘I know he would. Luke always did whatever he said he would do.’

‘There’s no use going to your sisters at this hour. We might as well stay the night in a hotel. I’ll get you to your sisters early in the morning,’

‘Would they let us stay the night in a hotel?’

‘As long as it is a
big
hotel they won’t mind,’ she laughed. ‘As long as we can pay.’

‘Are you sure it won’t be too much?’

‘Next week I’ll be in America,’ she said.

‘I’ll write to you,’ he said and she just pressed his knee as she drove through Enfield. After Maynooth she told him to watch out for hotels. On the outskirts of the city the West Country looked large and nondescript and they had vacancies. Accentuating her American accent she paid in cash and the girl in reception hardly looked at them as they filled the forms and were handed the room keys. The room was plain but comfortable. As soon as they saw the room they both realized how ravenous they were. Downstairs the dining room was empty but still open. ‘We might as well treat ourselves this evening.’ Nell encouraged him to pick whatever he wanted from the menu. She had steak, he an enormous mixed grill with chips. They had to wait longer for the food to be served in the empty dining room than it took them to eat. Unused to such places, Michael spoke in whispers. Only when he laughed did his voice ring out.

All through the night they made love. The anxiety of his years soon gave way to tenderness and great gratitude. Each time that she thought he was at last slipping into sleep he would come into her again. She received him as if he were both man and child, his slenderness cancelled by strength, his unsureness by pride; and she took him too each time as if she were saying a slow and careful farewell to a youth she herself had to work too hard ever to have had when she was young. Not until morning did they fall into a sleep of pure exhaustion and as soon as she woke she roused him and drove him to the part of the city where his sisters lived.

‘I’ll write,’ he said in the empty morning street.

‘You have the address?’

‘I have.’ He tapped his jacket.

‘I’ll write as well.’

‘You’ll see me in New York.’ He rapped the hollow roof of the car with his fist as a signal of affection before the car moved away.

The whole street appeared to be sleeping. A milkman delivered bottles to doorsteps from an electric float, the motor whirring when it moved. He was a long time knocking before there was any sound at all within the house where Sheila and Mona lived. Then an upstairs window opened. Mona leaned out in her nightclothes. Her surprise vied with total disbelief.

‘What are
you
doing here?’ she demanded.

‘I ran away,’ he said.

‘What are you coming here for?’

‘I’m going to England.’

‘I’ll come down,’ she said and closed the window.

He heard her speak rapidly to someone in the room, probably Sheila. It seemed a very long time before anyone came to the door. They were both dressed when the door opened.

‘How did you get this far?’ Sheila demanded.

‘I hitched.’

‘In the middle of the night?’

‘I got several small lifts and then a milk lorry took me in this morning,’ He told them the story of how he ran away much as he had told Nell but he did not mention her at all. ‘He told me to go to the room and take off my clothes and wait for him there.’