‘You might as well come into my place for a cup of tea or something,’ he said eventually. ‘You have a good hour yet to go till your lunch.’
His house was empty and he made the tea himself. ‘They can try as hard as they are able but they can’t harm me now,’ he began slowly as he made the tea. ‘In another two years Oliver will be qualified. By that time, the pair of girls will be on their way into the civil service or training college. That summer we’ll buy the car. We could buy it now but we decided to wait till we can do it right. It’ll be no secondhand. That summer we’ll take the first holiday since we were married. We’ll drive all round Ireland, staying in the best hotels. We’ll not spare or stint on anything. We’ll have wine, prawns, smoked salmon, sole or lobster or sirloin or lamb, anything on the menu we feel like, no matter what the price.’
I was beginning to think that people grow less spiritual the older they become, contrary to what is thought. It was as if some desire to plunge their arms up to the elbow into the steaming entrails of the world grew more fierce the closer they got to leaving. It was a very different dream to the young priest’s, cycling round Ireland with a copy of the Rambles all those years ago.
‘Have you noticed Eileen O’Reilly?’ he changed as we sat with the cups of tea.
‘She’s very pretty,’ I said.
Eileen O’Reilly worked in one of the solicitor’s offices. She was small and blonde with a perfect figure. I thought she’d smiled at me as she passed on a bicycle during a lunch hour. She was standing on the pedals to force the bike across the hill.
‘If I was in your place, I’d go for her,’ he said wistfully. ‘She has no steady boyfriend. I do surveying for her office and we always have a joke or an old flirt. When I brought up your name a few days back she blushed beetroot. I can tell she’s interested in you. In two years Oliver will be qualified and I’ll have no more need of the surveying. I could hand it over to you. You’d not be rich, but with the fees on top of the teaching you’d be very comfortable for a young man. You could well afford to marry. I’d not leave her hanging around long if I was in your boots. In two years’ time if you stayed on at the school here and married Eileen I’d give you the surveying. There’s nothing to it once you get the knack of the chains.’
High Ground
I let the boat drift on the river beneath the deep arch of the bridge, the keel scraping the gravel as it crossed the shallows out from Walsh’s, past the boathouse at the mouth, and out into the lake. It was only the slow growing distance from the ring of reeds round the shore that told that the boat moved at all on the lake. More slowly still, the light was going from the August evening.
I was feeling leaden with tiredness but did not want to sleep. I had gone on the river in order to be alone, the way one goes to a dark room.
The Brothers’ Building Fund Dance had been held the night before. A big marquee had been set up in the grounds behind the monastery. Most of the people I had gone to school with were there, awkward in their new estate, and nearly all the Brothers who had taught us: Joseph, Francis, Benedictus, Martin. They stood in a black line beneath the low canvas near the entrance and waited for their old pupils to go up to them. When they were alone, watching us dance, rapid comment passed up and down the line, and often Joseph and Martin doubled up, unable or unwilling to conceal laughter; but by midnight they had gone, and a night of a sort was ours, the fine dust from the floor rising into the perfume and sweat and hair oil as we danced in the thresh of the music.
There was a full moon as I drove Una to her home in Arigna in the borrowed Prefect, the whole wide water of Allen taking in the wonderful mysteriousness of the light. We sat in the car and kissed and talked, and morning was there before we noticed. After the harshness of growing up, a world of love and beauty, of vague gardens and dresses and laughter, one woman in a gleaming distance seemed to be almost within reach. We would enter this world. We would make it true.
I was home just before the house had risen, and lay on the bed and waited till everybody was up, then changed into old clothes. I was helping my father put up a new roof on the house. Because of the tiredness, I had to concentrate completely on the work, even then nearly losing my footing several times between the stripped beams, sometimes annoying my father by handing him the wrong lath or tool; but when evening came the last thing I wanted was sleep. I wanted to be alone, to go over the night, to try to see clearly, which only meant turning again and again on the wheel of dreaming.
‘Hi there! Hi! Do you hear me, young Moran!’ The voice came with startling clarity over the water, was taken up by the fields across the lake, echoed back. ‘Hi there! Hi! Do you hear me, young Moran!’
I looked all around. The voice came from the road. I couldn’t make out the figure at first, leaning in a broken gap of the wall above the lake, but when he called again I knew it was Eddie Reegan, Senator Reegan.
‘Hi there, young Moran. Since the mountain can’t come to Mahomet, Mahomet will have to come to the mountain. Row over here a minute. I want to have a word with you.’
I rowed slowly, watching each oar-splash slip away from the boat in the mirror of water. I disliked him, having unconsciously, perhaps, picked up my people’s dislike. He had come poor to the place, buying Lynch’s small farm cheap, and soon afterwards the farmhouse burned down. At once, a bigger house was built with the insurance money, closer to the road, though that in its turn was due to burn down too, to be replaced by the present mansion, the avenue of Lawson cypresses now seven years old. Soon he was buying up other small farms, but no one had ever seen him work with shovel or with spade. He always appeared immaculately dressed. It was as if he understood instinctively that it was only the shortest of short steps from appearance to becoming. ‘A man who works never makes any money. He has no time to see how the money is made,’ he was fond of boasting. He set up as an auctioneer. He entered politics. He married Kathleen Relihan, the eldest of old Paddy Relihan’s daughters, the richest man in the area, Chairman of the County Council. ‘Do you see those two girls? I’m going to marry one of those girls,’ he was reported to have remarked to a friend. ‘Which one?’ ‘It doesn’t matter. They’re both Paddy Relihan’s daughters’; and when Paddy retired it was Reegan rather than any of his own sons who succeeded Paddy in the Council. Now that he had surpassed Paddy Relihan and become a Senator and it seemed only a matter of time before he was elected to the Dáil, he no longer joked about ‘the aul effort of a fire’, and was gravely concerned about the reluctance of insurance companies to grant cover for fire to dwelling houses in our part of the country. He had bulldozed the hazel and briar from the hills above the lake, and as I turned to see how close the boat had come to the wall I could see behind him the white and black of his Friesians grazing between the electric fences on the far side of the reseeded hill.
I let the boat turn so that I could place my hand on the stone, but the evening was so calm that it would have rested beneath the high wall without any hand. The Senator had seated himself on the wall as I was rowing in, and his shoes hung six or eight feet above the boat.
‘It’s not the first time I’ve had to congratulate you, though I’m too high up here to shake your hand. And what I’m certain of is that it won’t be the last time either,’ he began.