Amongst Women

  ‘They’ve gone to the house.’ he was told evasively.

  ‘What for?’

  ‘They didn’t say. They just went.’

  After only an hour Sean’s hands were blistered and raw. The girls’ hands were blistered too but they knew how to handle the tools. When Sean rose from the midday tea and sandwiches he was so stiff he could hardly move. He told Sheila – of all the girls she had most resented this work as a child – and she led him to a separate row where they could gather at their own speed. Alone they were happy. They were so absorbed in one another that they seemed to be unaware of the others pitching and gathering furiously in rows only a few yards away. They exchanged whispers, laughing as they leaned their foreheads together and then Sean tipped Sheila slyly sideways into the little pile of hay they had gathered. She rose blushing and flustered, still hardly aware of the others, and soon they were laughing together as before. As a defence against the couple the others tried to shut them out by driving themselves harder but already they were flagging in the still heat of the midday. Sheila and her husband were crossing the fence on the edge of the field before they were noticed leaving. They walked hand in hand. When they thought the copper beech hid them from the meadows Sean drew Sheila towards him by the shoulder and kissed her long on the mouth. Everyone in the field except Moran saw them kiss by the copper beech and then go arm in arm towards the house. No one spoke in the intense uneasiness, but they were forced to follow them in their minds into the house, how they must be shedding clothes, going naked towards one another …, as the forks sent a rustle through the drying hay. They hated that they had to follow it this way. It was more disturbingly present than if it were taking place in the meadow before their very eyes. It was even there when they tried to shut it out. ‘You’d think they could have waited,’ Michael said quietly, in agreement with the resentment he felt all about him. It was as if the couple were together disregarding the inviolability of the house, its true virginity, with a selfish absorption.

  ‘Mark has friends in London, the Creegans. We were at their wedding,’ Maggie said. ‘Once when Mark was away I went to visit them and missed the last train. They had one room and a large bed. I wanted to sleep on the floor but Rita wouldn’t hear of it. She insisted I sleep next to her on the outside of the bed, Creggie in at the wall. After a long time I heard Creggie say, “Is she asleep?” and Rita, “Can’t you wait?” I was afraid to breathe. The shaking was awful. Someone’s leg touched me and I had to stuff the bedclothes in my mouth. I nearly died.’

  ‘Poor Maggie,’ Rose said with humour as well as sympathy. ‘The things you have to put up with once you leave home.’

  As soon as Moran stopped the tractor the haymakers split into separate groups. Rose and Moran worked together. Mona and Maggie gathered in for Michael to build a separate row. They built at much the same pace. Michael was now stronger in the meadow than Moran. The haycocks started to spring up faster in the rows than at any time since morning.

  ‘That pair must intend spending the rest of the day in the house,’ Moran said irritably after a long while.

  ‘Sean’s hands were all blistered. I’m afraid the meadow was a bit of a shock,’ Rose tried to make light of their absence.

  ‘He wasn’t much use though the poor fellow tried his best. He was brought up to be the priesteen.’

  When the couple did come back to the meadow they were washed and combed and dressed in new clothes. Sheila brought a can of sweetened tea. Everyone drank from the can and avoided looking at them or meeting their eyes except for Moran.

  ‘Sean’s hands are blistered from the forks. We’re going over to Mrs Rodden for tea.’ Sheila’s voice quavered as she explained.

  ‘Mrs Rodden will have many a story to tell,’ Rose was the only one to speak to them as they left.

  Sheila was defiant and determined not to be bullied. In a simple way she was already staking out her position within the family. She would belong to the family but not on any terms. She knew instinctively that she could not live without it: she would need it, she would use it, but she would not be used by it except in the way she wanted.

  ‘Were you told about the moonlight bathing parties at Kil- ronan when she was young?’ Rose asked when they came back from the tea.

  ‘We were,’ Sheila said. ‘And how they did everything then that the smart ones think they are doing now for the first time.’

  It had grown cooler in the meadow. The couple tried to help but they were not wanted. Everybody was too tired to talk. So that they did not feel ostracized Rose asked them to help bring more tea and sandwiches from the house.

  The shadows of the beech trees lengthened across the rows and they worked on without knowing what they were doing, pitching and sweeping mechanically. Sometimes they would be so tired that they would find themselves just standing in the field, staring up the rows in a trance. It was relief and peace when the light began to fail and when they found their clothes becoming damp they stopped. The sky looked safe. When they were fresh again in the morning they would get what was left up in a few hours; then they would have an easy day heading and tying down the cocks. Moran and Michael were the last to leave the meadow.

  ‘God bless you, son. That was a great day.’

  Out on the road passing cars had their headlamps on. Across the road, somewhere in the demesne, a single pigeon was still cooing its hoarse throaty call as they dragged their feet through the orchard to the lighted house.

  In the morning they all ached but there was no rush of work. Around noon, slowly and leisurely, they put what was left of the rows into cocks. The weather held. Then they raked and tidied, combing and heading the haycocks already up, tying them down with binder twine. At the weekend the weather broke. As the warm rain swept across the fields and beat against the windows there was just time enough to savour the safety of the hay in the meadows, the rain slipping down the combed sides of the cocks. They did not need good weather any more. In a week or two they could be taken to the shed between showers on any windy day. Rose and Moran would have to do that alone.

  As soon as the rain came the house began to scatter. A telegram came for Maggie to go back to London. Her son was not well and she left at once. During the rearing of hay it was as if she had almost forgotten that she had ever gone away from Great Meadow and married. All the others except Michael went with her to the airport. He stayed on alone for most of a week, helping Moran at odd jobs round the house during the part of the day he was out of bed and they got on well together. The evening he left, Rose said reflectively to Moran before they knelt for the Rosary, ‘I suppose it’ll be long before the house is ever as full again.’

  Moran looked at her as if it were wrong or unlucky to say such things. The house was to be as full again only once more.

  Nothing but the years changed in Great Meadow. Rain came down outside for days at a time as Rose moved carefully about within. When the soaked ground dried in hard winds and Moran moved slowly about outside she had breathing space again.

  Weekends there was excitement in the house, for Mona now came home from Dublin almost every one. The most beautiful of the girls never married. She had many admirers and kept company with a number of men, bringing several of them home with her for weekends – quiet, deferential, generally older men, content to move within the authority of her beauty without making any serious demands; and if they did they were let go at once. As none of the men posed any threat to Moran he was always amiable, sometimes charming, for he seldom had new company and he seemed to enjoy the casual companionship. Though Mona’s visits were the least noticed or talked about in the house, they too, in time, came to be depended on completely. She became the most reliable link with the outside world that increasingly shadowed their lives.

  Maggie had a second child in London at the same time that Mark O’Donoghue lost his job and she came home to Great Meadow with the two children, planning to stay six months. Mark remained in London to look for a better job and to save for a d
eposit on a house. Moran did not welcome the move. While she was in the house he spent days in the fields or sheds and the atmosphere was tense when he and the young children were together inside the house. She left after two months, too proud and dependent to blame anything connected to Great Meadow for her early departure. She planned to return for the usual three weeks in summer. Back in London Maggie discovered that Mark had drunk everything he had earned while she was away and no money was saved. She put the children into day-care and went back to nursing full time. From then on she would always have her own money.

  ‘Maggie and her children went back to London. They were welcome to stay with Rose and me under this roof as long as necessary,’ Moran wrote in a letter. ‘But I am very glad to see her go back to Mark. A wife’s place is with her husband.’

  Sheila came regularly too to the house but her visits were the most circumspect. She came with Mona on weekends with Sean or when Maggie was home from London. She had three children in three years and the perfect excuse when Moran complained she came less often than the others. Her old resentment of Moran was quick to show whenever he began to assert himself. She could not bear to hear him shout at any of her children.

  ‘You’d think those children were brought up in a field,’ he roared at her during one visit when their uninhibited playfulness got on his nerves.

  ‘Well, they’ll go back to that field,’ she met him angrily, rounded up the children and left.

  ‘There was no need to take a few shouts all that seriously,’ Moran said but she never again brought her children to the house except for very brief visits. They were clever and confident. She did not want that confidence damaged in the way she felt her own had been. She knew that her loyalty was probably ambiguous, that the deepest part of herself was bound to her sisters, this man and house. That could not be changed; but she wanted no part of it for her children: doors would be open to them that had been locked to her, their lives would be different.

  In a more sporadic way Michael too kept returning. Generally he arrived unannounced. Moran had given up trying to bend him to his will and was content to leave him to his own devices, glad to see him at all. Some gestures and mannerisms were clearly taken from the father but his nature was not dark. There were times he came and threw himself willingly into the work of the farm, getting through as much work in a day as Moran would in a week on his own and then he would leave as suddenly as he had come. ‘He helped me on the bog. He brightened the whole week for Rose and myself. Michael was marvellous,’ Moran wrote to Maggie after one sudden visit.

  In much the same way as he had stopped school and left Great Meadow he married. In Dublin he had turned to his sisters, in London to his brother.

  ‘What does she want?’ Luke asked when Michael told him that he had met an English girl, a teacher, and that she was pregnant.

  ‘She wants to marry me, of course.’

  ‘What do you want to do?’

  ‘I’m not sure. She’s twenty-eight.’

  ‘That doesn’t matter if you’re fond of her. You can live together till the child is born if you’re not sure. Then you both can make up your minds what you want to do.’

  ‘She’d never agree to that. She’s English but she’s Catholic. In ways they are far stricter than we are.’

  ‘She can’t be all that strict,’ Luke said drily but changed when he saw his brother’s discomfort. ‘What do you like about this girl?’

  ‘I never met anybody before who made me feel important,’ Michael said emotionally and it was the older brother’s turn to be embarrassed.

  ‘Do you think it will be all right to get married?’ Michael asked.

  ‘Of course I do. If that is what you both want.’

  ‘Should I ask our father anything?’

  ‘Not unless you want to. I’d just go ahead if I were you. What’s her name?’

  ‘Ann Smith. The sisters won’t like it, that’s for sure,’ he chuckled happily.

  She was a swarthy, handsome woman, definite in her ways and clearly infatuated with Michael. Her entire English family turned out as a solid front for the wedding and that day all the Morans, in their different ways, were made to feel what they were – immigrants. Mona and Sheila came over for the wedding. All the girls took against Ann Smith. They searched for flaws but the real flaw was that they saw her as an interloper who would never be allowed within their own closed circle. She was the immigrant within the family. Michael took her straight from the wedding to Great Meadow.

  Because of his youth and history and general unpredictability the news that Michael was marrying an English teacher was received with humorous incredulity.

  ‘Poor Michael,’ Rose laughed affectionately. ‘I find it hard to see him shaping up as head of a house.’

  ‘The likes of him often does the best,’ Moran supported. They both took to Ann Smith and would not listen to the girls’ criticisms.

  ‘She’s a good sensible age. It wouldn’t do if Michael – God forgive me – got some skit like himself. She was busy doing degrees and diplomas till now. She’ll be able to support them both while he gets his qualifications. When you come to think of it didn’t the poor fellow fall on his feet?’ Rose argued with humorous affection.

  ‘If she suits Michael I am quite sure she suits me,’ Moran stated. ‘As far as I’m concerned she’s just another daughter.’ The girls listened in silence to what they could never accept. They had been brought up to keep the outside at an iron distance and now their father was welcoming it into the house.

  Moran had grown noticeably careless about his dress, he who had always dressed with as much care for town or church as if he were stepping out to take on the world and it took all of Rose’s watchful eyes to keep him presentable. They had two pensions now, the old age added to the military. Whether the hay was won or lost grew matterless. The bulk of the cattle was sold before the grass died and the few that were left managed on what they could get under hedges about the fields. A fall of snow that set their neighbours worrying about sheds and fodder became a pleasant break that helped time pass. In the stall world, the white Plains glittering above them, they cut down small trees that were covered with ivy and they stood glowing from the exercise in the dry air to watch cattle tear hungrily at the dark ivy leaves. They had plenty of money now, Rose kept reminding him, and they did not need to slave at land any longer. They had more money than they needed, more money than they could spend, more money now than they had life but this did not give Moran any rest. Often in the evenings he spent hours calculating what he had, what was being spent, what losses were accumulating.

  He took to writing letters again. There wasn’t a week he didn’t write to Maggie in London or to Michael. He still went to the post office to post letters and collect mail but Rose drove him there and waited outside in the car. Annie and Lizzie continued to run the post office and it still shone. Their aversion to dirt had now acquired the force of law and anybody with dirty boots or wellingtons no longer tried to enter but conducted their business from outside, the door opened for their orders and money to be handed in and opened again for groceries or letters or change to be handed out to them by the clean-heeled customers waiting within. The floor was incredibly worn but it had taken on the soft glowing white of endlessly scrubbed deal. Annie and Moran observed a careful neutrality in one another’s presence. By now they knew one another too well but once he left the little room he was no longer safe. Few were.

  ‘How is Mr Moran nowadays?’ a customer asked slyly as soon as he left.

  ‘Not well. He was never well but he was always good at taking care of himself, God bless him,’ Annie held her head low over the book of stamps until the ripple of appreciative laughter died. ‘They say there wasn’t a thing wrong with him when their place flooded last week but he hadn’t time to think about himself for two whole days.’

  The burst of laughter was so carelessly dismissive that it seemed to destroy at once an idea that Moran had tried to impose with fe
rocious will all his life.

  In case the laughter could spread to her own authority Annie was quick to rein it in. ‘Maybe he isn’t all that well any more. I’m afraid he is going now like the rest of us, God help us all.’

  ‘Do you remember when we first met at Annie’s?’ Rose said out of memory and affection one wet evening they were driving away from the post office.

  He did not answer. She changed the gears awkwardly to slow down while crossing the narrow bridge. ‘God, Oh God, woman, can’t you concentrate on what you’re doing? Haven’t I told you day in, day out to put your foot all the way down to the floor if you don’t want to tear the guts out of the gearbox.’ His aversion to the past was as strong as ever and their early life together was now the past.

  ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t think.’

  ‘Well, start to think now. Did you ever think, I’d like to ask. Blessed will be the day when you do start to think.’ His exasperation blazed on its own impetus and she did not challenge. She drove slowly on in the rain, wishing the car would never reach Cox’s Hill when she would have to change gears again.

  One wet day it was she who proposed that they go to Strandhill for the day. She hoped to allay his restlessness. He scoffed at the idea at first but then suddenly agreed to go. They took a flask of tea and sandwiches. They walked part of the links. They looked at shops. They sat in the car, drank tea and watched the ocean falling. Before they left he insisted playfully that they walk down to the tideline. There he stooped to put his hand in the last spent run of a wave and brought it to his lips to taste the salt and then gave it to Rose to taste as well.

  ‘Well, that was a nice outing.’ There was a note of relief in Rose’s voice when they got home.

  ‘It was better than being cooped up in the house all day for nothing.’

  On the next outing they went north across the border to Enniskillen. Increasingly they leaned on these outings to escape the claustrophobia of the interminable day. They were shut up in days. Gradually they visited all the towns and places Nell Morahan and Michael had passed indolent days in years before.