Amongst Women by John McGahern Read Free Book Online Page B

the Arigna coal lorry. There must have been twenty men on the back of the lorry in masks and carnival costumes. With the money they gathered from different houses, they bought ham, loaves and butter, lemonade, whiskey and half-barrels of porter to hold a big dance in Kirkwood’s barn that night. Everyone around was invited.
    As soon as they came into the house a melodeon started to play and two fiddles took up in perfect tune; then bagpipes played alone. Young men danced Rose Brady and the girls round the kitchen. There were whoops and cheers, mock kissing attempts, challenges to put names on the masked faces and then a song.
    ‘The two of you will have to come to the Major’s tonight,’ the man who gathered the money said.
    ‘Maybe we will,’ Moran responded. ‘Maybe we will.’
    Moran gave them a pound, Rose took a red ten-shilling note from her handbag and they left in the same whirl as they had entered, dancing and singing all the way out to the lorry. An eerie silence descended over the house as the lorry left for the next house.
    ‘Are we going to the dance?’ Rose asked Moran as she left.
    ‘What would be seen there but the same old crowd making fools of themselves?’
    ‘It’s Christmas.’
    ‘Do you want to go?’
    ‘I’d like to very much.’
    He went reluctantly. There was an air of great jollity and freedom, even of outright licence, at the wren-boys’ dance in Kirkwood’s barn. Moran didn’t feel easy. The air of friendliness was the kind that he disliked most. The wren-boys who had gone from house to house on the lorry all day were now scrubbed and combed, playing away cheerfully on raised planks. Even though there was a sharp frost outside, couples could be seen stealing away from the dance and returning a half-hour or so later, always a little crestfallen until they had danced again, danced their way back into good cheer. Moran hardly spoke to anybody and reacted roughly to any jostling as he danced with Rose on the warped floor. Rose was anxious, feeling that he had lived in the stone house with too much responsibility for too long. He had not been able to go out and be at ease with people. What she did not know was that Moran, with his good looks and military fame, had once been king of these barn dances and now that he had neither youth nor fame would not take a lesser place. He would not take part at all.
    Rose had come to the dance to claim their place as a couple among the people in this loose, Christmas carnival. She was determined to remain. She smiled and chatted with everybody around her. She took tea. She danced with neighbours and men she had gone to school with. She forced Moran to dance and by the night’s end she was worn out by the single effort. He had given her no help throughout the night but it did not lessen her love.
    In the car, leaning her head on his consenting but exasperated shoulder, she said, ‘We don’t have to be like the rest of the people round here. We don’t have to go out together for years. There’s nothing in the way of our getting married, and I love you, Michael,’
    ‘When do you want to get married?’
    ‘This year. Before the summer. If there was something in our way it would be different.’
    ‘There’s the children to consider.’
    ‘I’d not be in the way of the children. I could only be of help.’
    ‘When do you want to be married then?’
    ‘We have nothing to stop us before Lent.’
    ‘It’d be too rushed,’ he said. ‘It’ll have to be after Lent.’
    ‘The week after Easter then.’ She set the time and was too happy to notice that he was more like a man listening to a door close than one going towards his joy.
    ‘We’ll have the wedding breakfast in the Royal. There won’t be need to invite many,’ she proposed carefully some days later.
    ‘I don’t want anything in an hotel.’
    ‘We have to have some place for a reception,’ she argued.
    ‘Haven’t we two houses of our own?’
    ‘I don’t think they’d like