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 shad
e 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.
‘Please don’t do anything to upset Daddy,’ Maggie pleaded as the plane prepared to land.
‘Of course not. I won’t exist today,’ Luke answered.
‘What do you mean by that?’ she asked anxiously.
‘It’s Sheila’s big day. To draw attention to myself would hardly be good manners.’ He wore black shoes, a dark pinstripe suit and a deep red tie and he looked very sober by Michael’s side, whose suit was a flashing blue. They took a taxi from the airport to the church and were the first to arrive. On the empty concrete outside the church if Luke was nervous he showed no sign of it as they waited, smiling reassurances back to each of Maggie’s silent inquiries. Michael appeared to find the whole situation amusing and several times broke into unsuppressed laughter.
‘I’m glad you find everything so funny,’ Maggie said sharply which sent him again into peals of laughter.
‘I can’t take it any other way.’
‘Take what?’ she asked, exasperated.
‘The whole set-up,’ he laughed. ‘The whole bloody lot of us and yer man at the helm.’
‘It’s one way to deal with it,’ Luke said quickly to calm Maggie. ‘I’m sure there are worse ways and worse set-ups.’
The groom and his family were the first to arrive. Sean Flynn introduced them quickly to Maggie and the two brothers.
‘I suppose we should be all going in,’ Sean said.
‘I’ll wait till the bride gets here,’ Luke said and the three waited on. Sheila and Rose and Mona and Moran all came in the same car. Mona was the bridesmaid. After he had embraced Sheila and Mona, Luke shook hands formally with Rose and Moran.
‘I’m glad you got here,’ Moran said darkly.
‘I’m glad to be here.’
‘We better be going in,’ Moran said.
‘We never see you nowadays except at weddings,’ Sheila said to him out of nervousness.
‘Aren’t they the best of all places?’ he responded. ‘Especially when it is your wedding, Sheila.’
‘We better be going in,’ Moran said again.
Sheila took his arm and they walked in silence up the aisle to where Sean Flynn and his brother waited at the altar rail. Only once during the ceremony did the happy couple’s eyes meet and it was in mutual sympathy at what they had agreed to put one another through.
Photos were taken outside the church while the wind blew newspapers about on the concrete and women placed steadying hands on hats and veils. Confetti was thrown. A car with white streamers took them down the road to the Avonmore Hotel. A long diagonal handle crossed the curtained glass of the hotel door.
Inside, a horseshoe desk in the hallway faced the open door to the reception room where a long table was laid. The young priest who had married them sat at the head of the table and the two families faced one another across its narrow board. Sherry or whiskey was offered but most people took orange juice. Those who drank thought it was more polite to take the sherry. Except for the priest’s promptings it was clear that they could have gone from the soup to the chicken to the sherry trifle without pausing for speech or toast. Moran made the longest speech, stressing the importance of the family. There were times when the sense of his own importance seemed to overwhelm him but never sufficiently to lose thread of the grave and carefully crafted speech. His old practice at writing letters stood him in good stead. By the time he sat down there were tears in Rose’s and the girls’ eyes. In contrast, the father of the bridegroom was the picture of acute misery as he stumbled through the whole of one short sentence welcoming Sheila into his family. While he spoke his enormous hand encircled his sherry glass as if it were a stalk of grass.
If there had been a great show of music and drinking and dancing it might have hidden the awkwardness of the occasion. Only the worn face of Sean’s mother was a study of pure emotion. He had been her first boy, her beloved. From an early age she had encouraged him at school, protecting him from the rough work of the farm; at times she had even fed him separately from his brothers and sisters. During the long summers when he came home from boarding school she made sure that he was able to read or go on walks even when his sisters were pressed into farm work. He was her special one. One day she would kneel and watch him raise the Host in the local church and after she was gone he would say Mass for her soul. When he entered the civil service instead of continuing to Maynooth, the disappointment stayed with her like a physical injury for months. Now she was losing him to another woman and he was taking on the mere life of any man with a woman. Her eyes were mutely fastened to him as he was getting ready to leave. When he took her in his arms – ‘Mind yourself, Mother!’ – at last she broke into the relief of tears. She watched the two heads framed in the back window of the car taking them to the airport disappear in the traffic. He did not look back once.
Before Sheila left with her husband she went up to Luke. ‘Now that you have found the way you’ll have to come home more often.’
‘I hope you’ll both be very happy,’ he replied and though she kissed him warmly she made it dear that she knew that he was avoiding answering her.
He was quiet throughout the afternoon,
listening attentively
to anybody who spoke to him, asking polite questions, smiling, raising his glass. He sat between Mona and Michael and as Moran did not look his way there was no difficulty until the meal ended and people were preparing, with relief, to go their separate ways. Moran could be seen to be more obviously avoiding Luke. He stood in a cloud of moral injury. Noticing this, Luke went directly up to Moran. Seeing their brother go straight up to their father, the girls froze in an old fear of violence.
‘I want to thank you.’ Luke said.
‘For what?’ Moran asked.
‘For the meal, the day, for everything.’
‘I hope it never comes to such a state that you have to thank your father for a meal.’
Luke bowed to Rose who was straining close to tears. ‘I have to thank someone.’
‘Aren’t you travelling further than this after all these years?’ Moran asked as his son seemed about to turn away.
‘I have to be back in London this evening.’
‘For what?’
‘I have work to do there.’
‘There’ll be work long after you’re dead and gone.’
‘I know that but it will not be my work,’ Luke said with the first and only hint of firmness that day.
‘God help you,’ Moran said.
‘Goodbye then. If you are ever in London it would be a pleasure to see you.’
‘We’ll not be in London.’ Moran refused his son’s hand.
As he was about to go to the airport Luke said to Maggie, ‘You see, I kept my promise: I did not exist today.’
‘You could have made more of an effort after all this time,’ Maggie said reproachfully. She had left her son with a sister- in-law in London in order to be free to go to the wedding and to Great Meadow for a fortnight afterwards.
‘It was the best I could do,’ he said. ‘I left Ireland a long time ago.’
‘We all left Ireland,’ Michael, who was standing with them, chuckled. ‘I’m afraid we might all die in Ireland if we don’t get out fast,’ and he laughed louder still at his own elaboration. He too was going home to Great Meadow that evening.