By the Lake (29 page)

They were all in the house, a blue light flickering in the window. Inside the netting wire the brown hens were already closed in for the night.

They were watching
Blind Date
. The two dogs were seated in armchairs and looked possessively at Ruttledge as if he might cause their removal. Mary rose at once to kiss him but Jamesie stayed glued to the screen, watching an attractive young girl in a provocative dress standing beside the hostess of the show in front of a large audience. Behind a screen sat three youths. The screen hid them from the girl but not the audience. Whichever youth the girl picked would spend a week with her in a luxury hotel, with a chauffeured car and candlelit dinners. To help the girl make her blind choice, each boy in turn had to answer questions put to them by the hostess about their hobbies, occupations, the cooking and music they liked, their sexual preferences. Even the most pedestrian question contained a sexual innuendo. Each answer was greeted with catcalls and laughter. The salacious enjoyment of the audience was obvious in both the responses to each question and the girl’s reactions, particularly when the answer revealed a disparity between the boy’s perception of himself and how he was perceived by the girl or the audience.

Mary was annoyed by what she took as Jamesie’s discourtesy but Ruttledge assured her that he was glad to watch.

“This fella is like a child,” she said. “He goes wild for eejity stuff like this. You wouldn’t know whether the crowd or him was the worse disgrace. Cattle round a bulling cow in the middle of a field would be more decent.”

At last, the girl made her blind choice. The boy she picked came out nervously from behind the screen to huge applause while the cameras searched out every reaction the boy and girl betrayed at this their first meeting. The hostess turned to question them but by now Jamesie had lost interest. He reached out and turned the set off.

“I’m happy to watch it to the end,” Ruttledge said.

“No, no,” he raised his hand. “They are just a crowd of eejits. Mary, pour us a drink.”

“It’s all just a cover-up for sex,” Mary said contemptuously as she reached for glasses and the bottle of Powers. “They all want it and they’re all afraid. That’s why they are killing themselves laughing. Soon they’ll be watching it on television instead of doing anything themselves.”

“Oh they’ll do it too,” Jamesie protested. “They’ll want to practise what they see.”

“You’d think he’d have more sense—and the age he is!” Mary said.

“Good soldiers never die,” he said as he raised his glass. “Good health. Good luck. More again tomorrow. The crowd lying below in Shruhaun aren’t drinking any drinks today.”

“I wrote this to Johnny,” Ruttledge said as he placed the letter on the table. A silence fell as complete as the blankness of the television screen. Mary took the letter and read it in the silence of the ticking clocks while one of the dogs turned round in the chair and sighed as he dropped into a more comfortable rest. After Mary had read the letter, she handed it at once to Jamesie, her eyes fixed on his face.

“You. You read the letter.”

“No. No. The eyes are too poor. Read it out loud.”

“The eyes can see plenty when they are not wanted to see. You, Joe. You read it for him.”

“Change anything you want. Change the whole thing or don’t send it at all,” Ruttledge said as he read.

“It’s perfect,” Mary said. “We’ll change nothing. I’ll copy every word out as it stands.”

“What if he doesn’t take to it?” Jamesie asked anxiously.

“It’s matterless whether he takes to it or not,” Mary said fiercely. “He can’t come home. We’d all have to leave.”

“You don’t want him coming home thinking everything will work out. It wouldn’t even be fair,” Ruttledge said.

“A pity these things ever have to come up between people,” Jamesie’s eyes went from face to face.

“This fella would never face anything unless there was someone to stand behind him with a stick,” Mary said with an edge. “I haven’t slept since the letter came and he’s been wandering round in a haze.”

“Like a kittymore’s hen,” he tried to joke but she would not be deflected.

“This fella gets all excited every summer when Johnny is coming. The place is done up. The best sirloin is ordered. Then what does he do when Johnny
does
come home? He disappears. Who has to put up with him? Listening to the old stories that everybody around has long forgot. You’d think the place hadn’t changed since he left. It’s easy for you to talk,” Mary accused.

“He was too old when he went to England,” Jamesie said defensively.

“It’s a hard story,” Ruttledge said.

“He might as well have tied a stone round his neck and rowed out into the middle of the lake,” Jamesie said, and a silence fell in which the ticking and the striking of the clocks were very loud.

“It’s terrible what people will go to hell for …” Mary spoke out of the long silence.

“Change anything you want in that letter,” Ruttledge said as he rose.

“Not a word will be changed. It’ll be copied out word for word and sent in the morning.”

Jamesie looked from face to face, unsure and troubled. For a long while, like a painfully held breath, he seemed on the verge of saying something but then quickly reached for his cap and walked Ruttledge out to the lake. The two dogs abandoned their chairs to follow them. The moon was bright and clear above the lake, the line of the path sharp in yellow light. There was a cold wind.

“What if he doesn’t heed the letter? He can be as stubborn and thick as my father, God rest him,” Jamesie said.

“You won’t hear another word once he reads the letter.”

“Please God,” Jamesie prayed fervently. “The worst of those old bachelors is that they have nobody to please but themselves and then when they get old nobody wants them and they have to try to get their head in somewhere.”

“We may not be all that much better off when our time comes.”

“Still we have our own house. We haven’t to be trying to get in anywhere,” Jamesie said.

They had reached the top of the hill above the lake. “I think the winter is here,” Ruttledge said, drawing his overcoat tight against the bitter wind.

“It’s been here for weeks. You can quit talking.”

At the top of the hill they parted, though Jamesie was prepared to accompany him down to the lake. A river of beaten copper ran sparkling from shore to shore in the centre of the lake. On either side of this bright river peppered with pale stars the dark water seethed. Far away the lights of the town glowed in
the sky. His own footsteps were loud. When he came to the corner of the lake, the heron rose out of the reeds to flap him lazily round the shore, ghostly in the moonlight. On such a night a man could easily want to run from his own shadow.

There came unceasing rain and wind. Some days the rain was flecked with snow but the lake was always changing, making even the downpours varied. The cattle and sheep were housed. None were calving or lambing or sick. They did not take much tending. Hedges were thinned for firewood during breaks in the rain. There was plenty of time for reading. A few writing commissions came. Trips were made to town, to Luke Henry’s bar, to the Thursday market across the border in Enniskillen, to the coal pits in Arigna for trailerloads of low-grade, inexpensive coal. Bill Evans was bundled up like a mummy between the wellingtons and the shiny black sou’wester hat when he came for tea and cigarettes on the way to the lake. If he was hungry he called out for food. On Thursdays he became lord of the bus. Nobody had seen Patrick Ryan for a time though the part of the country and the people he was working for were known.

The burden of putting round the winter disappeared for days in a great flare of excitement, rumour and conjecture. John Quinn had been away for less than a month in his wife’s place in Westmeath when he returned home. He had been driven out by the woman’s sons. He went there and then to the doctor, the priest, the solicitor, the guards. None of them was interested in his cause. The family was well off and respectable. The doctor examined his bruises and said his injuries weren’t serious and wrote him a prescription. The priest advised him to offer it all up as prayers and penance. The local solicitor told him he was far more likely to be sued and prosecuted than to succeed in an action if he insisted in pressing a case. They had been hardworking, decent people who had never been tainted by scandal.
The guards took a statement but told him they had no intention of pressing charges as it was purely a civil matter.

The wife had gone to live with one of her sons. John Quinn’s few possessions had been dumped on the street.

In Longford he broke the journey to go to another doctor and to spend the night in the hotel. When he was leaving the next morning, he refused to settle his account and ordered them to send his bill to his solicitor. There was a serious law case pending and the solicitor would settle everything, he informed the hotel.

He went to the solicitor to try to sue his wife and was presented with the hotel bill. None of the several solicitors he approached would touch the case. Then he caused a stir in the mart by turning up to bid for several cattle, eventually buying a bull calf though his land was let on the eleven months.

“That little calf won’t be taking a bladeen of grass away from the decent man that’s looking after the land till next summer and he’ll be a little interest to myself over the winter now that I’m back again among good friend and neighbours.”

In this mill of rumour and conjecture John Quinn was not slow to speak for himself. He walked into Luke Henry’s bar when it was full at the end of a late-night Saturday shopping and stood at the counter, a wronged man nursing a careful bottle of stout, declaring how happy he was to be back again among good neighbours.

“I have put the whole matter in the hands of my solicitor and am expecting proper redress through the courts,” he said to anybody who would listen. “In the meantime I have taken to writing ladies again. This time we can have no blessing of church but we’ll have our own blessing and the blessing of good neighbours which may turn out even luckier.”

Some managed to remain wonderfully straight-faced. Others assured him how glad they were to see him home and
that he shouldn’t blame himself in any respect whatsoever. Nobody in the wide world could have done more or tried harder to rescue what turned out to be a sinking ship. In fact, when everything was considered fully and turned over, he had been a veritable martyr to the cause. Extending out from John Quinn, the net of hypocrisy and lies had become as consistent as truth, encircling him.

Johnny wrote that he completely understood what a bad move it would be for him to think of coming home. He had been in a low mood when he wrote and was thinking of writing back to them even before he got their letter. In the short time since then everything had more or less fallen into place and was now completely alphabetical. When he told Mister Singh that Ford had made him redundant and he would have to look for a cheaper room or move to another part of London where light work was obtainable, Mister Singh wouldn’t hear. Recently Mister Singh had bought a terrace of Victorian houses overlooking the Heath that ran into Epping Forest and was turning them into apartments for professional and business people—doctors, nurses, accountants, secretaries, a different class entirely to the Fusiliers.

Johnny was to be a sort of porter or Mister Singh’s stand-in. He would keep the stairs and landings polished and clean and he would do light repairs when anything went wrong in the apartments. In return, he would have a small weekly wage and a rent-free flat in the basement. When he totted it all up one evening before going out to the Prince of Wales, he reckoned he would be better off money-wise at the end of the week than he was in the very best days on the line at Ford’s. He was staying put until he went up as per usual to the Connors in Birmingham for Christmas and was then moving to Leytonstone as soon as he got back after the Christmas. Everything seemed to have worked out perfectically alphabetical.

“It couldn’t have been planned better,” Ruttledge said as he handed back the letter. It was written with care and it brought a small world to life.

“It’s great,” Mary said, her eyes gleaming. “He fell on his feet. The poor fella deserved some bit of luck in England.”

“That letter you wrote worked,” Jamesie said.

“It worked powerfully,” Mary said. “It couldn’t have worked any better.”

“Johnny thinks the world of Mister Singh,” Jamesie said. “And Mister Singh stood by him in the end.”

For many years now, Jim had been pressing his parents to come and spend Christmas in Dublin.

“He’d look nice in Dublin,” Mary used to joke.

“There’d be much worse there already,” Jamesie would counter happily. “You don’t have to worry.”

After many hesitations and changes of mind, Jamesie and Mary decided to go to Dublin for Christmas. The Ruttledges would look after the animals and the place while they were away. The letter they received from Johnny was decisive in their going.

The gaiety of spirit grew as Christmas approached. Holly with rich red berries and trailing ivy was picked from the hedges to decorate rooms. Nets of many-coloured small electric lights were draped over Christmas trees and winked from porches. Mary made a plum pudding and baked a Christmas cake to take to Dublin.