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John McGahern

Amongst Women

Amongst Women

As he weakened, Moran became afraid of his daughters. This once powerful man was so implanted in their lives that they had never really left Great Meadow, in spite of jobs and marriages and children and houses of their own in Dublin and London. Now they could not let him slip away.

‘You’ll have to shape up, Daddy. You can’t go on like this. You’re giving us no help. We can’t get you better on our own. ’

‘Who cares? Who cares anyhow?’

‘We care. We all care very much. ’

They all came at Christmas. After Christmas, Mona, the one girl who had not married, came every weekend from Dublin. Sometimes Sheila got away from her family to come with her and she drove down for a few hours as well as now and again in the middle of the week. The air fare from London was too expensive for Maggie to come regularly. Michael, their younger brother, had promised to come from London at Easter but Luke, the eldest, still would not come. All three girls planned to come to revive Monaghan Day. They had to explain to their stepmother Rose what Monaghan Day was. She had never heard of it in all her time in the house.

The end-of-February fair in Mohill was Monaghan Day. McQuaid came every year to the house on Monaghan Day. He and Moran had fought in the same flying column in the war. McQuaid always drank a bottle of whiskey in the house when he came.

‘If we could revive Monaghan Day for Daddy it could help to start him back to himself.

‘I’m sure Daddy was far from delighted to see a bottle of whiskey drank in the house,’ Rose was doubtful about the whole idea.

‘He never minded McQuaid drinking the whiskey. You wouldn’t get McQuaid to the house without whiskey. ’

They clung so tenaciously to the idea that Rose felt she couldn’t stand in their way. Moran was not to be told. They wanted it to come as a sudden surprise — jolt. Against all reason they felt it could turn his slow decline around like a Lourdes’ miracle. Forgotten was the fearful nail-biting exercise Monaghan Day had always been for the whole house; with distance it had become large, heroic, blood-mystical, something from which the impossible could be snatched.

Maggie flew over from London on the morning of the Day. Mona and Sheila met her at Dublin Airport and the three sisters drove to Great Meadow in Mona’s car. They did not hurry. With the years they had drawn closer. Apart, they could be breathtakingly sharp on the others’ shortcomings but together their individual selves gathered into something very close to a single presence.

On the tides of Dublin or London they were hardly more than specks of froth but together they were the aristocratic Morans of Great Meadow, a completed world, Moran’s daughters. Each scrap of news any one of them had about themselves or their immediate family — child, husband, dog, cat, Bendix dishwasher, a new dress or pair of shoes, the price of every article they bought — was as fascinating to each other as if it were their very own; and any little thing out of Great Meadow was pure binding. Together they were the opposite of women who will nod and nod as they pretend to listen to another, waiting for the first pause of breath to muscle in with the growing pains and glories of their own house, the impatience showing on their faces as they wait. Mullingar was passed and they felt they had hardly said a word to one another. At the hotel in Longford they broke the journey to have tea and sandwiches, and just as the winter light began to fail they were turning in the open gate under the poisonous yew tree.