By the Lake (6 page)

“None of the children ever forgot his appearance at the school. He knocked very politely before lifting the latch and coming into the classroom, the heavy hobnailed boots loud on the hollow boards. His voice was dripping with politeness. ‘Excuse me now, children, for interrupting your lessons but I have just a few little words to say to your mistress here that won’t take long.’

“Naturally the children were delighted and sat up in the desks, all full of ears. ‘Sorry to be taking time away from the lessons, Mistress, but my two little girls came home crying from school yesterday evening. Their hands were so swollen they weren’t able to hold their spoons to eat the dinner. They were still crying when it was time for them to go to their bed. You might have noticed now, Mistress, that they weren’t at school today.’

“What could she say? John Quinn had her cornered. The children were drinking in every word. John Quinn’s voice couldn’t have been sweeter. He was like a cat purring over a saucer of milk.

“ ‘Now, Mistress, if this ever happens again I’m afraid it’ll go a lot further than this and it could be that when the courts are finished with the case you could be looking for another position.
That’d be a pity to happen in a small place like this where everybody is happy and getting on well together. It can bring in bad feelings between people. And sometimes these are hard to forget. Now my pair of little girls are coming back to school tomorrow and nothing like that must ever happen again. Don’t as much as lay a hand on those little girls. That’s all I have to say for now. I won’t take another minute away from the good lessons.’

“As he went with the hobnailed boots back down the hollow boards between the rows of desks, he spoke to the children. ‘Excuse me now, children, for interrupting your lessons but I had a few little important words that had to be said to your mistress. Now go back to your books and work hard and pay heed to everything your mistress tells because that’s how you’ll learn to get on well in the world and be happy and make your poor parents happy. Excuse me now, children. I’ll not take another minute from your lessons.’

“Missus Kilboy hadn’t said a single word throughout. As soon as John Quinn left she went to the Master’s room and they both went out into the porch where the children couldn’t see or hear. They were a long time in the porch and when Missus Kilboy came back the children could see she had been crying.

“None of the Quinns were ever beaten after that but they weren’t given much attention or schooling either. The teachers were afraid of John Quinn and that was their way of dealing. He came back to the school more than once to complain that his children were being overlooked and cold-shouldered but there was nothing he could prove. Let nobody try to best the guards or the doctors or teachers. They have their own ways of getting back at you.

“It didn’t seem to hold any of the Quinn children back. They were strong for their years and as soon as they got to fourteen or sixteen they all hit for England. They got on the best there. A few of them are said to be millionaires and they all think the
world of John Quinn. Many more normal parents aren’t thought nearly as well of or as honoured by their children.

“He didn’t bother much with women while he had the children. He was too busy and too well known around, and to go into a houseful of small children with John Quinn at the head of affairs wasn’t much of a draw for any woman. When the children were thinning out he started. He got them from newspapers and magazines and agencies. He got women from all over. You’d be surprised at how many poor people are going round the world in search of a companion and John Quinn was the boy to find them: ‘Gentleman Farmer with Lakeside Residence’ was his calling card. I seen severals. There were no beauties but they say he got money from some of them and I saw them buy a world of groceries for the house while John waited next door in the pub with his bottle of stout.

“Missus O’Brien he definitely sold. He had her for several months until he tired of her and a replacement no doubt was lined up. She was a great housekeeper who had worked for a rich family in the North. They thought a sight of her and keep in touch with her to this very day. She was a little bit innocent, that’s all that was wrong with her. She’d believe anything you’d tell her and she adored John Quinn. However he engineered it, he got her to marry Tom O’Brien, who was hardworking and looking for a woman, and money changed hands. They were wonderfully happy and still are. In no time she had the place shining, with hens and geese about the yard, and they got a bathroom and washing machines and the whole show. John Quinn wasn’t one bit pleased it turned out so well—he’s like your dog—and felt he should have got more money. Those rich people she worked for visit her every year and take her and Tom O’Brien out to a big meal and drinks in the Central in town.

“The strange thing is that she is still as sweet as ever on John Quinn. A few months back Tom O’Brien was in hospital and in
no time John Quinn was around. She was delighted to see him and had the welcome of the world. John was in his element, being fed royal, his eye out for whatever else was going. It was the neighbours who ran him, warning him not to darken the place again till Tom got out of hospital. She wasn’t one bit pleased when she got to know what happened. If anything was to happen to Tom he’d be in there like a shot in the morning and as sure as day she’d have him.”

“Would the priest not have some say?”

“None. Early on he called to the house but he was wasting his breath. Nobody could best John Quinn. He delights in taking every woman he has up into the front seat of the church, genuflecting and allowing her into the seat first, kneeling in adoration. You’d have to die at the performance. Then as soon as Mass is over he takes the woman up to the candleshrine. They light two small candles. The two of them together light a third candle and then set the candle on the spikes between their own two candles. The third candle is for a wish, ‘Always wish for something good and happy for yourself, Maura. There’s no use in a star falling and no one seeing it and no one making a wish. Always wish something for yourself.’ You’d nearly die. If John Quinn was ever an actor our Johnny and even Patrick Ryan would be only trotting after him. And the ladies lap it up—good-o.”

“And that’s the sort of church you’re trying to get me to return to,” Ruttledge said.

“The fellow doesn’t go to church for religion,” Mary said dismissively. “He only goes to see shows like John Quinn. It’d be a poor lookout if people were to follow him to church.”

Jamesie enjoyed the chastisement, but then countered, “We go to the door of the church anyhow, which is more than can be said for some others present whose names will not be mentioned,” he intoned loftily.

“Why did John Quinn marry if he could have all those other women without benefit of ceremony?”

“I’m surprised at you asking. There could be only one reason. He thought she had money. Maybe as well he was finding it that bit harder to get women. Like the rest of us he’s getting no younger. His name as well was probably going ahead of him. He was getting too well known.”

“And
had
she money?”

“I think she had but John didn’t get his hands on any. She wasn’t that foolish. She may have parted with some things but she didn’t part with money.”

“That fella,” Mary said with disapproval, but went on to say, “John always had horses. He had a white stallion then. When the odd mare used to come to the house he’d order the wife out to the yard to watch the performance. ‘Natural and healthy, what God intended,’ he’d say. The flat-bottomed boat he keeps below in the reeds is a living danger. Of course he had her out in the boat. He could be trying to get the money out of her. I’m sure she wasn’t far from the truth when she asked was he thinking of throwing her in. A lot he cared about the birds and the blue mountain and the swans sailing.”

“Why would he regale us with the poetry?”

“Because he thought it would suit, that it would go down well. It might help get Kate here on his side. John would watch mice at a crossroads,” Mary said with the same dismissiveness as she described Jamesie’s churchgoing.

“Anyhow it wasn’t long till she left. The brother took her back. I don’t think John got a farthing, which was a God’s charity. They were decent, quiet people who minded their own business. They had no idea what John was like. Somebody was telling me not long ago that the poor thing isn’t all that well.”

“If anything were to happen to her, John will be marching up the aisle again. Mark my words,” Jamesie said.

“He’d be trying anyhow whether he’d succeed or not. He’s a pure disgust,” Mary said.

“Look how he’s beating around. See how he’s round to Kate looking to get women from England.”

“He’ll not get very far with Kate,” she said.

“The poor fella is only doing his best. He’s contributing to the race. Like the rest of them he’s only trying to find his way to the boggy hollow,” Jamesie rubbed his hands together, slyly looking out of hooded eyes.

“You, you,
you
—are a pure disgust as well!” Mary said, and added, “No wonder Lucy can’t stand this fella!”

Lucy was his daughter-in-law, and Jamesie went quiet as if struck. She was one of the few people he had never been able to charm; it was a deep sore. “Some of these ones would want you tailor-made. Some of these ones are just too precise,” he said, and they were all too fond of him to say another word until he recovered and a path was found out of the silence.

The Shah rolled round the lake with the sheepdog in the front seat of the car every Sunday and stayed until he was given his tea at six. Some days during the week he came in the evenings as well. On dry Sundays he loved to walk the fields, and to look at the cattle and sheep and the small wooded island out in the back lake where the herons nested, and to look across the lake to the acres of pale sedge of Gloria Bog, which ran like an inland sea until it met the blue of the lower slopes of the mountains where his life began, the stunted birch trees like small green flowers in the wilderness of bog.

When it was raining or there was little to be done, he was content to sit in the house. Often he sat in silence. His silences were never oppressive and he never spoke unless to respond to something that had been said or to say something that he wanted to say. Throughout, he was intensely aware of every other presence, exercising his imagination on their behalf as well as on his own, seeing himself as he might be seen and as he saw others. Since he was a boy he had been in business of some kind but had never learned to read or write. He had to rely on pure instinct to know the people he could trust. This silence and listening were more useful than speech and his instinct was radar-sharp. His manners had once been gentle and hidden with everybody but to some extent the gentleness had been discarded as he grew in wealth and independence. With people he disliked he could be rough. People or places that made him ill at ease or uncomfortable he went to great lengths to avoid. When caught in such situations his manners would turn atrocious, like a clear-sighted person going momentarily blind. Where he blossomed was in the familiar and habitual, which he never left willingly. The one aberration of his imaginative shrewdness was a sneaking regard for delinquents, or even old villains like John Quinn, whose activities excited and amused him, as they tested and gave two fingers to the moral world.

All his family, dominated by the mother, had been hardworking, intelligent, humorous, sociable. Across from the three-roomed cottage, the whitethorns had been trained to make an arch into the small rose garden, and a vine of roses covered the whitewashed wall when few houses on the mountain had more than the bare necessities. They also kept bees, had a small apple garden, ground coffee from dried and roasted dandelion roots; and when they got some money a room would be added to the house rather than building another outhouse to keep more fowl or animals.

He alone in the family escaped school. A dedicated but ill-tempered schoolmaster, who had been instrumental in his older brother and sister becoming the first to win scholarships out of these mountains, had given him a bad beating during his first year at school. No amount of coaxing or threats could get him to return. At twelve, he made his first shillings by borrowing the family horse to draw stones to make a road to the new national school where his sister taught. His first job was in a local sand and gravel pit, where he learned to weld and fix machinery; soon, he was driving a sand lorry for the pit, and then purchased an old lorry of his own, drawing merchandise to and from the Belfast and Dublin docks. On the potholed roads it was more important to be a good mechanic than a driver, and by his early twenties he had four lorries of his own. At the outbreak of the war he switched into tillage contracting and made serious money.

Seeing compulsory tillage about to disappear with the ending of the war, he sold out early, preserving and increasing the money he had made. For a few years he had a sawmill before buying the railway station, its land and buildings and some miles of track, when the small branch line was closed. In the middle of a long recession it went cheaply and he had to borrow very little. A bank manager he knew from the town card school gave him the loan, which he quickly repaid by dismantling and selling off the track, rails and sleepers and buildings that he didn’t want. At thirty, he owned a small empire and had no debts at a time when only the old established traders, the priests, the doctors, the big farmers had money and all the trains to the night boats were full. From such a position many men of his age would have expanded; he contracted. The only regular employment he gave was to a young boy, taciturn and intelligent, from a house close to his own on the same part of the mountain. Whenever he needed other workers he employed casual labour. When what
was left of the railway line was broken up and sold off or stored, he began to buy old lorries, tractors, farm machinery to sell for spare parts and to put down fuel tanks. And when the four small railwaymen’s cottages that had come to him with the station became vacant, he installed bachelors he knew who had grown too old to work their mountain farms and wanted to move into the town. He charged them no rent and in return they helped about the sheds and in the big field of scrapped machinery on the edge of the town, while they were able. They were all silent, withdrawn people who spoke little, but seemed to understand one another perfectly and to get on well together without talking. When they died or had to go into the Home, he replaced them from the same stock, much as he replaced the black-and-white sheepdogs he was attached to. He did not drink or smoke and his fondness for cards was profitable. His luxuries were the new, expensive cars he liked to drive and the big meals he enjoyed every day in the hotel. With thick curly brown hair, an alert, pleasant appearance, his manner easy and assured, he was attractive to women in spite of an unconcealed, long-held determination to avoid marriage as he had avoided school. When he had the lorries on the road, he had several girls, all of them small and pretty; and then after a few years there was just the one girl, small too and pretty, Annie May McKiernan, and for nine years they went out together, meeting on the same two evenings every week.