Amongst Women

  At once Michael joined one of the crowds and took a glass of stout. None of the Moran girls drank. They were as much shocked by the confidence with which Michael moved about among the men as by his actual drinking. Their little brother had grown up without their noticing. He moved loudly among the men as the alcohol went to his head. The men merely turned their backs on the boy’s show of masculinity. Catching his sisters’ stares of disapproval, he waved his glass to them across the floor and started to survey the women.

  He was not a good dancer but he moved and held himself well as his father had done on such barn floors and he gave Nell Morahan his whole attention. Defiantly, when the dance ended, he took her across to the table that had whiskey and stout. In the same spirit she asked for whiskey. To the Moran girls this was shameless, even wanton. She did not care. She knew that they considered themselves above the Morahans of the Plains. She held their baby brother in her experienced hands. He did not flinch from their disapproving stares but, laughing, toasted them in whiskey across the floor. They were forced to turn away into a closed circle.

  Nell Morahan came from a small farm on the high part of the Plains. Her father, Frank Morahan, worked as a day labourer for big farmers all the year round, leaving his family to manage his own poor acres, helping as much as he could on Sundays and long evenings. They were looked down on. None of the children was clever; there was no escape through the schools. Nell went to work as a maid for a solicitor’s family in the town, where she had her first taste of sexual fondling with the sons of the house home on holidays from college, fondling she had no aversion to. Next she went as a shop girl to a small town near Dublin and had a string of boyfriends from the terraces, when an aunt brought her to New York. There, she showed the family trait of a willingness to work, first in an ice-cream factory, next in a dry-cleaning place and finally as a waitress, where she found that her good humour and energy could earn her more in a week than she could save in a year in Ireland. She had lived with an older man but felt used when he showed no sign of keeping promises. In her practical way she left him without much regret or hurt. Now she was twenty-two and home for a few months with money of her own. She had bought clothes and shoes for her brothers and sisters and other useful things for the cottage on the Plains. For herself she bought a small car that she intended to leave with the family. She would take a younger sister with her when she went back to New York. Above all she was determined to show her father a good time and to have a bit of a fling for herself on the side. She was as far from ugliness as she was from beauty and she was young and strong and spirited. Michael Moran was only fifteen but he had good looks and sexual charm. All through her childhood she felt that farms like the Morans’ had a richness and greenness in spite of her father’s tired assertions to the contrary. When Michael crossed the barn floor to ask Nell Morahan to dance it was natural that they should go together.

  ‘You’d think she’d have more to do than cradle snatch,’ Maggie said furiously.

  ‘All I hope is that it doesn’t get to Daddy’s ears,’ Sheila said. The closed, angry circle could only be broken by men crossing the floor to ask them to dance. During the next dances he clowned around the floor. His sisters tried to ignore them but later when they looked for the couple again they were missing from the barn. Though each of the girls had many offers during the dances from men wanting to see them home, they left alone and together. After the last dance had been played and the tired musicians were preparing to play the National Anthem, only Sheila was aggressive enough to cross the floor and ask Michael, ‘Are you coming home with us?’

  ‘No, I have my own lift. You know Nell Morahan?’ Instead of taking her hand Sheila nodded curtly and marched away.

  ‘What’s the matter with her?’

  ‘You’ve stolen her little brother,’ he answered and called after his sisters, ‘Don’t forget to leave the back door open,’ as they left in a tight knot of indignation, pursued by his laughter.

  Nell’s car was parked on the avenue. It was black and sleek and inside it smelled of new leather. Two sisters of Nell’s and her brother sat in the back, Michael with Nell in front. He was fifteen years of age and commanded the world.

  As he chattered to the passengers in the back, she drove to their cottage in the Plains in silence and as she dropped them off she called, ‘I’ll not be long. I’m just leaving Michael home.’ Before she reached the yew tree at the gate she turned up a disused lane and switched off the lights. Already his hand was moving between her thighs as she drove. When she turned to him he came to her too eagerly but soon his young straining body was being steered to do as she wanted and no more. When he reached the first luxuriant peace, she made it seem as if he had reached it all on his own, tousling his hair, saying, ‘You smell lovely. Your skin is so soft,’ and kissing him over and over.

  The back door had been left unlatched. When he came in, the house was dark and silent. Holding his shoes he went without making a sound to his room. But in the morning he had to face his sisters’ furious resentment. Openly and not a little proudly he met their anger. They could not take him for a child any more. Nonchalantly he ate his breakfast as they scolded. There was nothing they could do. They could not risk telling Moran. The very enclosedness of the house ensured that Moran would not hear about it in any other way. When the girls told Rose, she laughed heartily.

  ‘Well, didn’t poor Michael fall on his feet. Who’d ever think it?’

  ‘Look at their ages. We’ll be nothing but a laughing stock,’ they said angrily.

  ‘In a few months there will not be a word about it. Nell will go back to America and that will be that; but don’t bother Daddy with a word,’ she counselled.

  ‘Daddy would soon put manners on the brat.’

  The full resentment turned on Nell Morahan and she kept out of their way. The sisters went only to the local dances. Nell drove with Michael to Longford where they were not known.

  In a week the Christmas holidays were over. The girls went back to work. The house felt empty again. The schools opened.

  Rose called Michael as she had called him on every school morning since she had come to the house and gave him breakfast.

  ‘You seem a little tired this morning, Michael,’ Rose teased, but all he was able to do in response was to rub his eyes.

  He set off for school that morning as usual but he never went to school again. Nell met him in the car at the edge of the town and they drove to the ocean at Strandhill. When they parked at the old cannon on its wooden carriage there wasn’t another car in sight. ‘In summer it’s jammed,’ he said. The tide was far out below the rocks but the waves were mountainous, and white rain blinded the windscreen when the wipers stopped. Nell switched them on again. Crosswinds rocked the car. He found it all exciting and told Nell how good it was compared to the summers Moran had taken a cottage for a fortnight and they had all come here. ‘God, it was boring.’

  ‘How could it be boring by the sea? We always had to work in the fields in the summer,’ she said.

  ‘It was because he was here,’ he laughed uproariously at what he imagined was wit; and then, growing bored, he reached for her. She kissed him and then pushed him away playfully but firmly.

  ‘It’s no good for me in the morning,’ she said.

  He sat sullenly away from her staring out through the semicircle the wipers made on the windscreen at the wild ocean and the long strand, the strand on which he had watched the same ocean encircle and wash away a sand castle he had made with bucket and spade not so many summers before. To Nell’s annoyance he put his feet up on the dashboard and would not take them down. As quickly as the rain had come the sky cleared and it became a different day. A weak sun shone out on the water. They left the car and climbed down over the blackened boulders to the strand. The wind, blowing the whole length of the level strand, tugged at their hair and clothes. He played and romped around her, tried to walk backwards into the wind until he nearly fell over, and then seized her hand
and they both tried to run against the wind. The closer they got to the shelter of the Point the easier it was to walk. Suddenly at the Point itself they were in the shelter of the high dunes at the edge of the golf links and it was like looking back from a still room at all the turbulence of sea and wind they had waded through. This time when he reached for her she came into his arms. Her hair and face tasted of sea spray. Awkwardly they climbed together away from the calm strand, using the coarse tussocks to pull themselves up the slopes of the dunes, their shoes filling with the damp sand as they walked. In a hollow between high dunes they spread out raincoats on the sand and kicked away their shoes. She then, half-kneeling, pulled away her underthings and moved close to him for warmth. He pulled down his clothes over his thighs and entered her as she had shown him on their first night, very gently and a little timidly, in spite of the terrible urging of his need. Above them the wind whipped only at the highest tussocks and the ocean sounded far away. When he entered her for the third time she was ready to search for her own pleasure and he was now able to wait. Such was her strength that he was frightened. She shouted, seized him roughly at the hips, and forced him to move; and when it was over she opened her eyes and with her hands held his face for a quick, grateful kiss he couldn’t comprehend. The weak sun stood high above them. Feeling the damp cold, they dressed, shook the sand out of their shoes and raincoats and climbed back down to the shore. There was not even a dog chasing a stick along the whole empty strand, only several birds walking sedately along the tideline which had now come much further up on the beach. As if they had set out on a journey they felt morally bound to complete, they walked the whole way back past the cannon as far as the ruined church on the opposite point. For all his bravado Michael was full of anxiety. He would still have to go back to Moran with the schoolboy’s bundle of books in a few hours no matter what the glory was of his first-found manhood. Nell by his side had her own worries. In a few weeks she would be back in the Bronx. Michael was too young. You should take what you have while you can, plain country sense told her, but it was not so simple. She always wanted more. The whole empty strand of Strandhill was all around them and they had the whole day. There is nothing more difficult to seize than the day.

  ‘Do you think it’s safe?’ he asked.

  ‘That’s just like a man to ask now,’ Nell said. ‘You have nothing to worry about.’

  They picked dilsk from the rocks below the roofless church and examined several clear pools between the rocks. There was much minuscule life in the pools but no stranded fish.

  ‘I don’t understand what you mean when you say it was boring here. Wasn’t it a change?’

  ‘God,’ he said. ‘You should have been here. He brought a lorry load of turf here to pay for the rent. We had to sell it from door to door. There was no danger of him going door to door selling.’

  ‘That wouldn’t be a big deal when you’re little.’

  ‘It was horrible going round the houses,’ he betrayed the same sense of separateness the father had instilled in the others, which was plainly less than useful when it came to selling turf. ‘You’d feel like crawling into a hole.’

  To get back to the car they had to face into the wind again. They were hungry. All the places along the seafront were closed for the winter and so they drove to Sligo. In Castle Street they found a plain café and had hamburgers and bread and chips with a pot of scalding tea. Then, tired, they wandered around the town. They would have liked to have gone to the Gaiety to see a western with Alan Ladd but they hadn’t time enough. He was very quiet as they drove back and she left him a few miles from the house. Bravely he waved to her as she drove away.

  ‘How was school?’ Rose called as soon as he came in.

  ‘Just the same as ever,’ he answered. He had a habit of switching into his own thoughts while giving the appearance of listening but this evening he followed every syllable of Rose’s good-humoured account of her day.

  ‘Now eat your dinner, Michael.’

  He gathered that they hadn’t heard he had missed school. ‘Thanks, Rose.’

  After a while Moran came in but he didn’t want to talk. A few times he threw a glance in his son’s direction but the boy stayed hidden in a book.

  ‘I want you to give a hand with some sheep,’ he said as he rose to go out.

  ‘When would suit you, Daddy?’

  ‘Now.’

  Moran and the dog had already run the sheep into the yard where they were huddled together, wide-eyed with fear. When Moran and Michael came into the yard they set off in a wild panic until they huddled at bay in another corner.

  ‘They’re so stupid,’ Michael laughed like a child at their panic.

  ‘They’re like some people,’ Moran responded tersely.

  Michael measured the drench into a small bottle. Moran forced it down the sheeps’ throats while Michael held them. Then they turned the sheep on their backs and pared and bathed the small hooves. When they were finished they marked each one with a dab of blue paint before letting it free. There were more than sixty sheep to do and it was slow and monotonous. Michael grew bored and started to make mistakes. Moran almost hit him when he allowed a startled sheep to break loose, knocking Moran aside; and then he dropped the can of drench.

  ‘God, O God, O God. If I could only do this on my own. You can’t pay attention for a minute, can’t watch for a minute what you are doing,’ Moran seized the can violently and poured the measure himself.

  ‘I didn’t ask to do this,’ the boy cried with equal violence.

  ‘Of course you didn’t ask to do any of this. All you’d ever ask to do is sit on your arse and entertain women.’

  ‘I was doing the best I could. I couldn’t help that the can slipped,’ Michael countered.

  ‘Are we going to go on or are you going to whinge all day?’ Moran asked and resentfully they went back to working together again. When it was done Moran watched the sheep quietly stream out of the yard. They wouldn’t have to be touched for another two months. He turned in gratitude to thank the boy. He had forgotten how good two people could be working together. A man working alone was nothing. If the boy wanted to come in with him the two of them could do anything. They could run this place like clockwork. They could in time even take over other farms, a dream he had once had about his eldest son: together they could take over everything.

  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.