There was talk and laughter as soon as he left the bar, all of it concentrated on his dealings, but no discussion as to why he exercised such a fascination.
“There’s not a whit of difference between John Quinn and any of us. He’s perfectly normal except that he’s that bit slightly oversexed,” one man argued. The remark was met with much ribald banter. Luke Henry turned his face to the shelves to hide his amusement.
In the car on the way home, Kate asked, “Does John Quinn believe his own speeches?”
“John Quinn doesn’t care what he says or does. All he cares about is himself and what goes down, what works.”
“If the speech stood in the way of John winning it’d get short shrift,” Jamesie answered seriously and quietly.
“The women would get short shrift as well if they didn’t come up with the goods,” Mary said.
“You can say that ten times over,” Jamesie added.
Jamesie’s good spirits seemed inexhaustible, but they were taken away in late November. There were no shouts from the alder at the gate when he came to the house, no rattling of the glass in the porch. They had never seen him look so low. He held a letter in his hand.
“Read this,” he thrust a letter into Ruttledge’s hand.
The black cat with the white paws was sleeping against a cushion in the rocking chair. Reaching out his great hand, he lifted her unceremoniously on to the floor and sat heavily down.
Ruttledge saw that he was upset, nakedly so. The letter was from Johnny. As Ruttledge read, the only sounds were water filling an upstairs tank and the ticking of a clock.
The letter was short, its burden clear. Ford had demanded redundancies in their Dagenham plant. The union wasn’t able to protect the likes of Johnny any longer. They had negotiated a lump sum as severance payment and a small pension. He wanted to return home and live with Mary and Jamesie as they had lived before he left for England.
“What are you going to do?”
“We don’t know,” he said in anguish.
“Do you want him home?”
“Mary,” he thrust out his hands. “Mary says she’d go out of her mind if he was back in the house again. She hasn’t slept a wink since the letter came.”
“What do you feel?”
“If he was to come home, if he was in the house, we’d have to leave. It’s hard enough for the fortnight he comes every year. If he was in the house for good … I don’t know what we’d do. We can’t turn him away like a dog either.”
“Have you told Jim?”
“Jim’s in Dublin. He wouldn’t want to know. What does he do at any time but pick up Johnny from the airport, leave him back. Jim wouldn’t want to know. Johnny and Lucy never got on. What do you think, Kate?”
“I don’t know what to think, Jamesie. It’s a real dilemma.”
They could not live with him and they could not be seen — in their own eyes or in the eyes of others — to refuse him shelter or turn him away. The timid, gentle manners, based on a fragile interdependence, dealt in avoidances and obfuscations. Edges were softened, ways found round harsh realities. What was unspoken was often far more important than the words that were said. Confrontation was avoided whenever possible. These manners, open to exploitation by ruthless people, held all kinds of traps for the ignorant or unwary and could lead into entanglements that a more confident, forthright manner would have seen off at the very beginning. It was a language that hadn’t any simple way of saying no.
“If that’s how you feel, you should be open and straight about it from the very beginning,” Kate said after Jamesie had spoken. “It wouldn’t be fair in the long run to Johnny either. It’d be hell for everybody.”
“What are we to do?”
“Write to him.”
“What can we say? Mary hasn’t slept since the letter came. There hasn’t been a tap of work done round the place.”
“You’ll have to speak straight.”
“We wouldn’t know what to say. We wouldn’t know where to begin.”
“He’ll write it for you,” Kate said, looking carefully at Ruttledge. “Then it can be copied and sent. That’s his trade,” she smiled. “That’s what he gets paid for.”
“Would you write it? Would you do it for us?” Jamesie asked.
“Of course I would. But wouldn’t it be better to get Jim to write? He’d write it just as well or better.”
“No,” Jamesie thrust out his hand in a sign that his anxiety was lifting. “Jim wouldn’t want to be involved. He’s in Dublin. It’s not his business.”
“Then I’ll write it,” Ruttledge said. “I’ll write it and bring it round the lake this evening.”
“The educated man for it,” Jamesie said in relief. “It was Mary who said to cross the lake. ‘They’ll come up with something,’ she said. The educated man can think of anything. He’s not like you and me, Kate,” he rubbed his hands gleefully together.
“That’s because he had to go to school longer than you and me. He had to go because he was slower,” Kate laughed.
“Shots! Shots, Kate!” he laughed in pure delight now.
“You’ll need a whiskey after that,” Kate said with affection.
“God never loved a coward, Kate,” he replied in kind.
He began to relax and expand as he drank. Anybody walking into the room would have found it hard to imagine the anxiety, the blackness of a few minutes before. “Did you ever hear of the crowd who couldn’t write and had to send a letter to America?” he asked.
“No.”
“In those days if you couldn’t write you went to the schoolmaster, who charged a fee like a lawyer. When he had it all down on paper, the master read the letter back to them. They seemed satisfied enough but didn’t say much and he asked if they’d like to add a PS. They wanted to know at once if there’d be an extra charge for the PS. When told there wasn’t they said, ‘Go ahead. It’ll look better. Write this PS: Please excuse bad writing and spelling.’ You’d love to see the master’s face — it could have been old Master Glynn — when that comeoutance was delivered. ‘Please excuse bad writing and spelling,’ ” he repeated. “Lord bless us but there were some awful poor people going about then.”
“Maybe they knew well what they were doing,” Ruttledge said.
“That’d be even better, but no. They didn’t know. They heard it read out in other letters and wanted to get as good a value as the other crowd. They didn’t want to be left behind.”
They walked him past the alder tree down to the lake.
“I’ll write the letter and bring it round this evening.”
“God bless you,” he said with emotion.
“There won’t be any charge.”
“That’s all right. Never had any intention of paying anyhow,” he replied as he walked away.
Ruttledge roughed out a simple letter, explaining the situation clearly but softening it enough to give Johnny room, suggesting that when he thought about the idea more he’d see how hopeless it was from his own point of view. Without a car or telephone and far from town he’d be stranded now beside the lake. Everything was more or less gathered in for the winter. They sent him their love and were already looking forward to seeing him next summer, like in all the other summers.
Late that evening he walked around the lake with the drafted letter. It was cold along the shore. Except for the holly and small oaks all the trees were completely bare. The palest of moons was above the lake. Wildfowl scattered from the reeds. The heron rose and flapped lazily out along the shore. There must have been many herons here since they first came to the house but the same bird seemed to lead them out whenever they left and to rise again to lead them in when they were returning home. It would be a hard and a lonely place for Johnny to come home to, he reassured himself as he walked.