Amongst Women

  ‘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.’

  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.

  Th
e 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.

&
nbsp; ‘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.