‘Well, everything seems settled, then, so, except the date.’ The priest rose when everybody murmured agreement and unlocked the cabinet. He took out five heavy tumblers and a cut-glass decanter of whiskey. There was already a glass jug of water beside the vase of roses in the centre of the big table.
The dance was held on a lovely clear night in September. A big harvest moon hung over the fields. It was almost as clear as day coming to the dance and the hall was full. Most of the older people came just to show their faces and by midnight the dance belonged completely to the young. The Committee left after counting the takings. The postman and the teacher agreed to stay behind to close the hall. They sat on the table near the door watching the young people dance. The teacher had taught nearly all the dancers, and as they paired off to go into the backs of cars they showed their embarrassment in different ways as they passed the table.
‘Now that “Faith, Hope and Charity” are getting into right old playing form,’ the postman nodded humorously towards the empty crates of stout between the three old brothers playing away on the stage, ‘they seem to be losing most of their customers.’
‘Earlier and earlier they seem to start at it these days,’ the teacher said.
‘Still, I suppose they’re happy while they’re at it.’ The postman smiled, and folded his arms on the table at the door, always feeling a bit of an intellectual in these discussions with the hatted teacher, while ‘Faith, Hope and Charity’ launched into the opening bars of ‘A Whistling Gypsy’.
‘No, Owen. No. I wouldn’t be prepared to go as far as that with you, now,’ James Sharkey began.
The Stoat
I was following a two-iron I had struck just short of the green when I heard the crying high in the rough grass above the fairway. The clubs rattled as I climbed towards the sound, but it did not cease, its pitch rising. The light of water from the inlet was blinding when I climbed out of the grass, and I did not see the rabbit at once, where it sat rigidly still on a bare patch of loose sand, crying. I was standing over the rabbit when I saw the grey body of the stoat slithering away like a snake into the long grass.
The rabbit still did not move, but its crying ceased. I saw the wet slick of blood behind its ear, the blood pumping out on the sand. It did not stir when I stooped. Never before did I hold such pure terror in my hands, the body trembling in a rigidity of terror. I stilled it with a single stroke. I took the rabbit down with the bag of clubs and left it on the edge of the green while I played out the hole. Then as I crossed to the next tee I saw the stoat cross the fairway following me still. After watching two simple shots fade away into the rough, I gave up for the day. As I made my way back to the cottage my father rented every August, twice I saw the stoat, following the rabbit still, though it was dead.
All night the rabbit must have raced from warren to warren, the stoat on its trail. Plumper rabbits had crossed the stoat’s path but it would not be deflected; it had marked down this one rabbit to kill. No matter how fast the rabbit raced, the stoat was still on its trail, and at last the rabbit sat down in terror and waited for the stoat to slither up and cut the vein behind the ear. I had heard it crying as the stoat was drinking its blood.
My father was reading the death notices on the back of the Independent on the lawn of the cottage. He always read the death notices first, and then, after he had exhausted the news and studied the ads for teachers, he’d pore over the death notices again.
‘Another colleague who was in Drumcondra the same year as myself has gone to his reward,’ he said when he looked up. ‘A great full-back poor Bernie was, God rest him.’
I held up the rabbit by way of answer.
‘Where did you get that?’
‘A stoat was killing it on the links.’
‘That’s what they do. Why did you bring it back?’
‘I just brought it. The crying gave me a fright.’
‘What will we cook for dinner? You know Miss McCabe is coming tonight?’
‘Not the poor rabbit anyhow. There’s lamb chops and cheese and wine and salad.’
My father had asked me to come to Strandhill because of Miss McCabe. They’d been seeing one another for several months and had arranged to spend August at the ocean. They seemed to have reached some vague, timid understanding that if the holiday went well they’d become engaged before they returned to their schools in September. At their age, or any age, I thought their formality strange, and I an even stranger chaperon.
‘Why do you want me to come with you?’ I had asked.
‘It’d look more decent — proper — and I’d be grateful if you’d come. Next year you’ll be a qualified doctor with a life of your own.’
I had arranged to do postgraduate work for my uncle, a surgeon in Dublin, when my father pleaded for this last summer. I would golf and study, he would read the Independent and see Miss McCabe.
The summer before he had asked me, ‘Would you take it very much to heart if I decided to marry again?’
‘Of course I wouldn’t. Why do you ask?’
‘I was afraid you might be affronted by the idea of another woman holding the position your dear mother held.’
‘Mother is dead. You should do exactly as you want to.’
‘You have no objections, then?’
‘None whatever.’
‘I wouldn’t even think of going ahead if you’d any objections.’
‘Well, you can rest assured, then. I have none. Have you someone in mind?’
‘No, I don’t,’ he answered absently.
I put it aside as some wandering whim until several weeks later when he offered me a sheet of paper on which was written in his clear, careful hand: Teacher, fifty-two. Seeks companionship. View marriage. ‘What do you think of it?’ he asked.
‘I think it’s fine.’ Dismay cancelled a sudden wild impulse to roar with laughter.
‘I’ll send it off, then, so.’
After about a month he showed me the response. A huge pile of envelopes lay on his desk. I was amazed. I had no idea that so much unfulfilled longing wandered around in the world. Replies came from nurses, housekeepers, secretaries, childless widows, widows with small children, house owners, car owners, pensioners, teachers, civil servants, a policewoman, and a woman who had left at twenty years of age to work at Fords of Dagenham who wanted to come home. The postman inquired slyly if the school was seeking a new assistant, and the woman who ran the post office said in a faraway voice that if we were looking for a housekeeper she had a relative who might be interested.
‘I hope they don’t steam the damn letters. This country is on fire with curiosity,’ he said.
Throughout the winter I saw much of him because he had to meet many of the women in Dublin though he had to go to Cork and Limerick and Tullamore as well. In hotel lounges he met them, hiding behind a copy of the Roscommon Herald.
‘You’ve never in your life seen such a collection of wrecks and battleaxes as I’ve had to see in the last few months,’ he said, a cold night in late March after he had met the lady from Dagenham in the Ormond. ‘You’d need to get a government grant before you could even think of taking some of them on.’
‘Do you mean in appearance or as people?’
‘All ways,’ he said despairingly. ‘I have someone who seems a decent person, at least compared to what I’ve seen,’ and for the first time he told me about Miss McCabe.
Because of these interviews I was under no pressure to go home for Easter and I spent it with my uncle in Dublin. I wasn’t able to resist telling him, ‘My father’s going to get married.’