Amongst Women (21 page)

‘It may not be natural but it’s true.’

‘So you’re not going home?’

‘No.’

‘Well then. You can forget about asking us to that famous dinner in your place,’ Maggie said with confrontational sarcasm.

‘I’m sorry then,’ Luke rose and offered them his goodbye. He lingered uncomfortably for a moment but when they made no answer he shrugged and walked out of the bar.

‘You sure come from an odd family. I think your father is easier than that brother of yours. I can’t see the two of them having much to say to one another,’ Mark said as soon as Luke left.

‘Daddy is not near as hard as that,’ Maggie protested on the point of tears.

‘They’re welcome to one another.’

‘Daddy is different. He has his ways. I never thought Luke would get so hard. I hope you don’t think
I’m
odd.’

‘I don’t think you’re a bit odd. And I’m going to enjoy this next pint. You can’t enjoy a drink with someone watching you like that.’

That Luke had refused again to go to Great Meadow went through the house in days but it was not allowed to reach Moran. Together the three girls found it unacceptable. They had assumed that time and distance would smooth all but the most angular of differences and they now feared that too much time had already passed. Beneath all differences was the belief that the whole house was essentially one. Together they were one world and could take on the world. Deprived of this sense they were nothing, scattered, individual things. They would put up with anything in order to have this sense of belonging. They would never let it go. No one could be allowed to walk out easily.

‘Are you sure you put it to him right?’ Sheila demanded. ‘He seemed sensible enough at your wedding.’

‘Mark was with me. Ask him if you want to. Oh, Luke can be very charming – excuse me – when he’s not asked to do what he doesn’t want.’

‘Aren’t we all?’ Sheila responded. In the frustration the sarcasm showed clearly.

‘There’s no need to tell Daddy. He’d just get upset,’ Rose said when she was told.

As a last resort the girls decided to send Michael to speak to Luke. They arranged to meet. Luke offered lunch and picked an Italian place near to where Michael worked. The luxury of the restaurant was a treat for Michael and he was excited and laughing. He shared his sisters’ sense of family: to have lunch with his brother in such a place was important.

Luke asked about his work, his exams, if there was any help he wanted. All was well, Michael answered; nothing could be done until he qualified. They enjoyed the food, the luxury, the wine, the sense of privilege where all gathered in a fleeting act of restoration; and they had nothing to deal or sell.

‘Was it all right?’ Luke asked at the end of the meal.

‘You could get used to it,’ Michael laughed. ‘It would be very easy. I have to state though that I’m here on a mission.’

‘What mission?’

Michael raised his hand in mock defence. ‘The sisters sent me. I’m supposed to ask you to go home to Great Meadow.’

‘For what?’

‘Because Daddy wants to see you.’

‘Well, I don’t want to see Daddy.’

‘I’ve said my bit. I’m not saying another word.’

‘The man is mad. Or that’s how I remember him.’

Michael found this so funny that his sudden shout of laughter attracted the attention of nearby tables.

‘I’m serious,’ Luke said. ‘There are lunatics, right? There are fathers who must have lunatic sons. There must be sons who have lunatic fathers. Either I’m crazy or he is.’

Michael found this so funny that he drew several looks.

‘Take it easy,’ Luke warned. ‘You continue to go home. You know more about it now than I do.’

‘Daddy’s all right now. He’s old. He can’t do feck-all any more. You don’t have to heed him. Only for Rose I don’t know how he’d manage.’

‘I see no reason to go back there. I found it hard enough to get out of the damned place.’

‘Then don’t go. I’ll just tell them you won’t.’

‘They’ll love that.’

‘So what?’ Michael asked.

‘So what!’ Luke repeated and called for the bill and paid.

Outside on the pavement, the busy street teaming around them, Michael said, ‘I suppose I’m sort of fond of the old bastard in spite of everything.’

‘I’m not. That’s the trouble.’

‘He can be all right,’ Michael said as they separated. In the frail way that people assemble themselves he, like the girls, looked to Great Meadow for recognition, for a mark of his continuing existence.

When Michael brought word from the meeting Maggie was suspicious that it would be the same message she and Mark had received.

‘He was nice about it. He bought me a slap-up lunch but he doesn’t want to go home.’

‘I suppose he just turned you round to his way of thinking.’

‘No. I told him I was fond of Daddy in spite of everything. He thinks Daddy’s a lunatic. He put it so cool and precise, it nearly killed me.’ Freed from the constraint of the restaurant, he roared with laughter.

‘I don’t know which of the two of you is the worse,’ Maggie said, which only increased Michael’s laughter.

Maggie had her first child, a son, that summer and she and Mark took him to Great Meadow a month later. To Maggie’s intense disappointment Moran evinced little interest in his grandson. Only with great pressing did he agree to be photographed with the baby in the front garden.

‘Who wants to look at an old thing like me?’ he complained and there was no teasing in the complaint.

‘That baby is too young for travelling,’ Moran said to Rose. ‘They’d be better to hold on to their money and stay in their own house.’

‘You know young mothers. They imagine the sun shines down on their child.’

‘Shines out of their mouths and arses,’ Moran answered sourly, and during the visit he was more drawn to Mark than to the woman and child. Mark was flattered by the attention and liked to engage Moran in man-to-man conversation. Inevitably it came round to Moran’s sons.

‘Michael is young and just thinks of girls but he’ll settle down. There’s far more nature in him than in Luke,’ Mark said, though he disliked Michael. ‘Luke is different. You’d never know what he is thinking. He’s turning himself into a sort of Englishman.’

‘Does he ever talk of coming home? You’d think he’d mention something like that after all these years.’

‘We put it to him, me and Maggie, that he should go home, but he said he wouldn’t.’

‘Did he give any reason?’

‘He said he had no interest in family matters, if you can believe that.’

‘Does he see people much?’

‘Mostly English. People he works with. He’s always busy. I told you, Michael, he has made himself into a kind of Englishman. He sees an English girl. I don’t know whether she’s girlfriend  or wife or mistress or what. They seem to be living together.’

‘I’m sure I don’t want to know about it, Mark. There are people who say we have had other existences than our present life. If that is so I must have committed some great crime in that other existence. That is all I can put Luke down to.’

As they were waiting on the station for the train to take them back to London Moran said to Maggie while Mark was getting cigarettes for the journey, ‘I’ve learned to appreciate Mark. He seems to take an interest in our family.’

During and after the visit Moran began to spend much of his time in bed in a lethargy of spirit rather than any illness. The hay had been saved. There was no real work in the fields. It was enough for Rose to throw her eye twice a day over the cattle. If there was anything wrong she would tell Moran, and they kept only dry cattle now. They were healthy and fat, ankle- deep in aftergrass.

It was the time of year Rose waited for, the rush and anxiety of the summer over, the hardness of winter not yet in. There was a great sense of space and time about the house. She was able to prepare her flowerbeds in the front garden for the winter, leaving the door open so that she was sure of hearing Moran if he called. In the orchard she picked the last of the plums and gathered some of the apples. Mona and Sheila came from Dublin every weekend. When they had the chores done she would sit with the two girls over a coffee and a cigarette, a few floating specks of dust showing in the stream of quiet sunshine that poured through the window. A few times they chatted for so long that it annoyed Moran and he shouted at them from the room.

The weekend visits allowed Rose to visit her own house by the lake, leaving Moran in the girls ‘care. This was a gentle renewal. There had been years when she felt that she had abandoned her own house for Great Meadow. She did not take the car. ‘I’m afraid Daddy would not be long in bed if he heard I hit something with the car!’ She cycled and always she brought plums and apples and jam in the cane basket on the handlebars. ‘Daddy used to think I was taking half the house with me when I went after we were first married. Now he never notices that I go with anything,’ she said to the girls.

‘Why do you think he doesn’t?’ Sheila smiled as she asked. It was so quiet that it was hardly teasing.

‘I don’t know. I suppose he’s used to it now. Daddy is strange,’ she said.

‘Daddy is growing old,’ Sheila said matter of factly to Mona when Rose had cycled out of hearing and Mona caught her breath as if afraid and then nodded.

He never gave any explanation as to why he took to his bed at that time. No one dared question him either. It was as if it were quite normal to stay in bed without illness for part of a late summer and normal again to rise and go about the house and fields as if he had never taken to his bed.

That winter Sheila announced her engagement to Sean Flynn and after that she did not come home very often. The excuse she made was that she and Sean were househunting. As if to make up for her absences Mona came alone every single weekend. Far more independent than Maggie, Sheila became engaged without benefit of Moran’s approval. Sean was easygoing, anxious to be liked and Moran saw him too as no threat. Sheila had governed the relationship from the beginning but she was quick to bridle at the offhand way Moran dealt with Sean on their last visit.

In much the same way as she had wanted to go to university, she set her heart on a white wedding in June at the little village church. This Moran could not face. He would have to lead her up the aisle in front of people he spent his life avoiding, invite some of them to the reception in the Royal Hotel and pay for them to eat and drink. This he would not endure.

‘It’d be simpler if she got married in Dublin,’ Rose found a way out for him. She was frightened that he would refuse point-blank to attend and this wedding couldn’t be hidden away in London. ‘We wouldn’t have to invite everybody. There’d just be the two families. And we don’t have to go to the Shelbourne or Gresham. There are many small hotels. Round Harcourt Street they’d cost even less than the Royal,’ Rose explained to Moran.

‘Maybe that’s the way we’ll have to do it then. I don’t know why people have to go to all this fuss to be married. Wasn’t the way we were married good enough for anybody?’

‘You can forget that, Daddy. All the girls nowadays want a big day. Who can blame them? They see everybody else with style and want the same for themselves,’ Rose said.

Sheila cried a little when she discovered that she would not be making vows at the same altar rail at which she had received her Confirmation and First Communion, would not be coming out of the church into the shade of those great evergreens that had guarded her childhood. But she wanted Moran at her wedding. Faced with the choice, she wanted Moran more than any particular altar rail or beloved trees. ‘Anyhow I never see those trees without thinking of Guinea Flanagan.’ She spoke of a boy who got his name by climbing into the trees and imitating the wild cries of the guinea fowl while her class waited for the priest to come down the avenue in dry winter evenings when they were being prepared for Confirmation.

‘Maybe it is just as well not to be reminded of something as silly as that on your wedding day,’ she persuaded herself but her resentment surfaced when she invited Luke to her wedding without consulting anybody.

Rose managed to get Moran to leave the farm for a few days. A relative of hers agreed to look after the stock while they were away. They stayed with a brother of Rose’s in Dublin and the evening before the wedding Sheila took them out to look over the new house she and Sean had bought. It was a low, detached bungalow in a new estate of a couple of hundred bungalows exactly the same, the front gardens still raw with concrete. Already in some of the back gardens lines of nappies fluttered. Inside, the house had carpets and curtains and neat inexpensive furniture. Sheila showed off each room – stating the price of each piece of furniture – with touching pride.

‘Aren’t you the girl that set herself up comfortably from the very beginning?’ Rose embraced her in congratulation.

‘Sean is worried we spent too much,’ Sheila confided.

‘Don’t pay a bit of attention,’ Rose whispered. ‘Men are all like that. Get everything you need while you have the chance.’

Moran walked through the house that looked like an empty stage waiting for their lives together to begin, plainly searching for something to say but at a loss. ‘It must have all come to money,’ he said at last.

‘I’m afraid we’ll be paying for it for the rest of our lives,’ Sheila answered awkwardly.

‘Well I hope you’ll be happy here. If you are happy that’s all that counts. You can have as much of everything that’s going but if you’re not happy it’s all useless,’ he said. He was anxious to get away.

‘You see, Daddy is no sooner in any place but he wants to be out the door again,’ Rose teased him about what was equally true of herself.

At the door Sheila finally told them that Luke was coming to the wedding. Rose was startled and looked to Moran at once. His face clouded over at the news and was grave.

‘I’m glad you invited him,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t like to think that any member of my family was ever excluded from a family gathering,’ but his step was far from joyous as he walked away from the house.

Luke and Maggie and Michael flew over together to the wedding. Luke was flying back to London the same evening. Both Michael and Maggie had taken a few days off and were going down to Great Meadow.