By the Lake Read online

  ACCLAIM FOR JOHN MCGAHERN’S

  By the Lake

  “The most perfect novel I’ve read in years.”

  —Malcolm Jones, Newsweek

  “Ireland’s finest living fiction writer.… A gripping, poignant book.”

  —Chicago Tribune

  “This is the Irish temper, free of all the caricatures.… Writing this true, this unaffected—no wonder we celebrate the Irish.”

  —The Dallas Morning News

  “Wonderful.… No body of water has been so lovingly revered since Henry David Thoreau went to the woods.””

  —The Christian Science Monitor

  “Has the appeal of a letter from home.… Wonderfully engaging.”

  —Newsday

  “McGahern’s characters step in time with the gentle rhythms of the land, with the flowering of the whitethorn, the hum of the bees in clover and the annual migrations of the birds.… His lyrical, almost painterly evocation of the activities he knows so intimately is well-displayed here.”

  —The Washington Post

  “McGahern enchants with simplicity and eloquence. Before we are aware he has done it, let alone how, we are drawn into his corner of remote rural Ireland, its characters and their lives.”

  —The Baltimore Sun

  “McGahern’s luminous threnody to the particulars and permutations of aging and change is captured in prose of the utmost simplicity and precision, keenly alert to the rhythms of lives lived close to the bone and in quiet harmony with the natural world.”

  —Kirkus Reviews (starred)

  “This great and moving novel, which looks so quiet and provincial, opens out through its small frame to our most troubling and essential questions.”

  —The Guardian

  “This is a book to surrender yourself to. If you give in to its measured ebb and flow, you will find yourself in an intense, poetic world in which the simplest objects … take on a quiet but magical luminosity.”

  —The Economist

  “One of Ireland’s most stupendous prose stylists, with an uncanny knack of homing in on the definitive moment, the illuminating detail.”

  —The Independent

  “This beautiful novel … bestows on the reader one of the principal gifts of fiction: that of having one’s experience enlarged by a process of intense, almost resistless sympathy. Through intense concentration on the local, McGahern has again found a route to the universal.”

  —The Times Literary Supplement

  JOHN MCGAHERN

  By the Lake

  John McGahern is the author of five highly acclaimed novels and four collections of short stories. His novel Amongst Women won the GPA Book Award and the Irish Times Award, was short-listed for the Booker Prize, and was made into a four-part BBC television series. He has been a visiting professor at Colgate University and at the University of Victoria, British Columbia, and was the recipient of the Society of Authors’ Award, the American-Irish Award, and the Prix Étrangère Ecureuil, among other awards and honors. His work has appeared in anthologies and has been translated into many languages. He died in 2006.

  ALSO BY JOHN MCGAHERN

  The Barracks

  The Dark

  Nightlines

  The Leavetaking

  Getting Through

  The Pornographer

  High Ground

  Amongst Women

  The Collected Stories

  All Will Be Well

  Play

  The Power of Darkness

  FIRST VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL EDITION, APRIL 2003

  Copyright © 2002 by John McGahern

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published in Great Britain as That They May Face the Rising Sun by Faber & Faber Limited, London. Originally published under the present title in hardcover in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, New York, in 2002.

  Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage International and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  The Library of Congress has catalogued the Knopf edition as follows: McGahern, John.

  By the lake : a novel / by John McGahern.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 0-679-41914-4

  1. Eccentrics and eccentricities—Fiction.

  2. Villages—Fiction. 3. Ireland—Fiction.

  I. Title.

  PR6063.A2176 B9 2002

  823′.914—dc21

  2001050258

  Vintage ISBN: 0-679-74402-9

  eBook ISBN: 978-0-8041-5319-5

  Author photograph © Jerry Bauer

  www.vintagebooks.com

  v3.1

  To Madeline

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  First Page

  The morning was clear. There was no wind on the lake. There was also a great stillness. When the bells rang out for Mass, the strokes trembling on the water, they had the entire world to themselves.

  The doors of the house were open. Jamesie entered without knocking and came in noiselessly until he stood in the doorway of the large room where the Ruttledges were sitting. He stood as still as if waiting under trees for returning wildfowl. He expected his discovery to be quick. There would be a cry of surprise and reproach; he would counter by accusing them of not being watchful enough. There would be welcome and laughter. When the Ruttledges continued to converse calmly about a visit they were expecting that same afternoon, he could contain himself no longer. Such was his continual expectation of discovery that in his eavesdropping he was nearly always disappointed by the innocence he came upon.

  “Hel-lo. Hel-lo. Hel-lo,” he called out softly, in some exasperation.

  “Jamesie!” They turned to the voice with great friendliness. As he often stole silently in, they showed no surprise. “You are welcome.”

  “Ye are no good. I have been standing here for several minutes and haven’t heard a bad word said about anybody yet. Not a bad word,” he repeated with mocking slowness as he came forward.

  “We never speak badly about people. It’s too dangerous. It can get you into trouble.”

  “Then ye never speak or if you do the pair of yous are not worth listening to.”

  In his dark Sunday suit, white shirt, red tie, polished black shoes, the fine silver hair brushed back from the high forehead and sharp clean features, he was shining and handsome. An intense vividness and sweetness of nature showed in every quick, expressive movement.

  “Kate.” He held out an enormous hand. She pretended to be afraid to trust her hand to such strength. It was a game he played regularly. For him all forms of social intercourse were merely different kinds of play. “God hates a coward, Kate,” he demanded, and she took his hand.

  Not until she cried, “Easy there, Jamesie,” did he release his gently tightening grip with a low crow of triumph. “You are one of God’s troopers, Kate. Mister Ruttledge,” he bowed solemnly.

  “Mister Murphy.”

  “No misters here,” he protested. “No misters in this part of the world. Nothing but broken-down gentlemen.”

  “There are no misters in this house either. He that is down can fear no fall.”

  “Why don’t you go to Mass, then, if you are that low?” Jamesie changed the attack lightly.

  “What’s that got to do with it?”

  “You’d be like everybody else round here by now if you went to Mass.”

  “I’d like to attend Mass. I miss going.”

  “What’s keeping you, then?”
/>   “I don’t believe.”

  “I don’t believe,” he mimicked. “None of us believes and we go. That’s no bar.”

  “I’d feel a hypocrite. Why do you go if you don’t believe?”

  “To look at the girls. To see the whole performance,” he cried out, and started to shake with laughter. “We go to see all the other hypocrites. Kate, what do you think about all this? You’ve hardly said a word.”

  “My parents were atheists,” Kate said. “They thought that all that exists is what you see, all that you are is what you think and appear to be.”

  “Give them no heed, Kate,” he counselled gently. “You are what you are and to hell with the begrudgers.”

  “The way we perceive ourselves and how we are perceived are often very different,” Ruttledge said.

  “Pay no heed to him either. He’s just trying to twist and turn. Thought pissed in the bed and thought he was sweating. His wife thought otherwise. You’ll get on good as any of them, Kate.” He took pruning shears from his pocket and placed them on the table. “Thanks,” he said. “They were a comfort. Pure Sheffield. Great steel.”

  “I bought them from a stall in the Enniskillen market one Thursday. They weren’t expensive.”

  “The North,” he raised his hand for emphasis. “The North is a great place for bargains.”

  “Would you like a whiskey, Jamesie?” she asked.

  “Now you’re talking, Kate. But you should know by now that ‘wilya’ is a very bad word.”

  “Why bad?”

  “Look at yer man,” he pointed to where Ruttledge had already taken glasses and a bottle of Powers from the cupboard and was running water into a brown jug.

  “I’m slow.”

  “You’re not one bit slow, Kate. You just weren’t brought up here. You nearly have to be born into a place to know what’s going on and what to do.”

  “He wasn’t brought up here.”

  “Not too far off, near enough to know. He wasn’t at school but he met the scholars. Good health! And more again tomorrow,” he raised his glass. “The crowd lying below in Shruhaun aren’t drinking any drinks today.”

  “Good luck. What’s the news?”

  “No news. Came looking for news,” he cried ritually, and then could contain his news no longer: “Johnny’s coming home from England. He’s coming home this Tuesday. Mary got the letter.”

  Every summer his brother Johnny came home on holidays from the Ford factory at Dagenham. He had left for England twenty years before and never missed a summer coming home.

  “I’d be glad to run you to the station,” Ruttledge offered.

  “I know that well, and thanks, but no, no.” He raised the hand again. “Always go in Johnny Rowley’s car. Jim is meeting Johnny at the airport and putting him on the train. Jim is taking time off.”

  Jim was Jamesie and Mary’s only child, who had been clever at school, had entered the civil service, where he had risen to a high position, and was married with four children in Dublin.

  “There was a time Johnny spent the night with Jim and Lucy in Dublin.”

  “Not any more. Johnny and Lucy don’t pull. He’s not awanted. It’s better, better by far the way it is. I’ll meet the train with Johnny Rowley. We’ll have several stops on the way from the station. When we get to the house, Mary will put the sirloin down. You can’t get meat in England. You’d just love to see Johnny’s face and the way he says ‘God bless you, Mary’ when she puts the sirloin in front of him on the table.”

  The house and the outhouses would be freshly whitewashed for the homecoming, the street swept, the green gates painted, old stakes replaced in the netting wire that held Mary’s brown hens in the space around the hayshed. Mary would have scrubbed and freshened all the rooms. Together they would have taken the mattress from the bed in the lower room, Johnny’s old room, and left it outside to air in the sun. The holy pictures and the wedding photographs would be taken down, the glass wiped and polished. His bed would be made with crisp linen and draped with the red blanket. An enormous vase of flowers from the garden and the fields—roses and lilies and sweet william from the garden, foxglove and big sprays of honeysuckle from the hedges—would be placed on the sill under the open window to sweeten the air and take away the staleness and smell of damp from the unused room. The order for the best sirloin would already have been placed at Caroll’s in the town. The house couldn’t have been prepared any better for a god coming home to his old place on earth.

  “Johnny was the best shot this part of the country has ever seen. On a Sunday when all the guns gathered and they’d be blazing away, all Johnny had to do was to raise his gun for the bird to fall like a stone. He had two of the most beautiful gun dogs, Oscar and Bran, a pointer and a red setter. He had the whole world at his feet,” Jamesie said. “He didn’t have to lift a hand. All he had to do was go round and oversee what other men were doing. Yes, he could be severe enough and strict, too, in his own way … too exact when it wasn’t needed. The whole country was leaving for England at the time and if any of them had a hope of Johnny’s job there’d be a stampede worse than for a gold rush back from England. If anybody had told us what was going to happen we wouldn’t have believed them. We’d have laughed.

  “He went after Anna Mulvey. He and Anna were the stars in The Playboy that got to the All-Ireland Finals in Athlone the year before but neither of them was fit to hold a candle to Patrick Ryan. He had Donoghue the solicitor in town down to a T as—I forget rightly who it was … Patrick had the whole hall in stitches every time he moved. Johnny was wild about Anna. We were sure Anna left for England to get away from Johnny. The Mulveys were well off and she didn’t have to go. Then when she wrote to Johnny that she missed him and wanted him to come to England I don’t think his feet touched the ground for days. We wanted him to take sick leave and go and test the water and not burn all his bridges but he wouldn’t hear. If he’d heeded our words he could be still here.”

  “Why would Anna write for him to come to England when she wasn’t serious or interested?”

  “She was using him. She could be sure of adoration from Johnny. She had only to say the word and she’d get anything she wanted.”

  “That was wrong,” Kate said.

  “Right or wrong, fair or foul, what does it matter? It’s a rough business. Those that care least will win. They can watch all sides. She had no more value on Johnny than a dog or a cat.

  “Poor Bran and Oscar. The gun dogs were beautiful. They were as much part of Johnny as the double barrel, and they adored him. The evening before he left he took them down to the bog with the gun. They were yelping and jumping around and following trails. They thought they were going hunting. I remember it too well. The evening was frosty, the leaves just beginning to come off the trees. There wasn’t a breath of wind. You’d hear a spade striking a stone fields away, never mind a double-barrel. There was just the two shots, one after the other. We would have been glad to take care of the dogs but he never asked. I wasn’t a great shot like Johnny but I would have kept the gun and the dogs. They were beautiful dogs. That evening a man came for the gun and another for the motorbike. He had sold them both. You’d think he’d have offered me the gun after all the years in the house. I’d have given him whatever he wanted.”

  “Why didn’t you ask to buy the gun?”

  “No. I’d not ask. I’d die before I’d ask.”

  “Why?”

  “He might think I wanted the gun for nothing. I didn’t mind the gun so much though it was a smasher. It was the poor dogs that killed me—and Mary … far worse. She adored the dogs.

  “Johnny took the train the next evening. That was the move that ruined his life. He’d have been better if he’d shot himself instead of the dogs.”

  “Wasn’t it a courageous thing compared to what happens in most of our lives? To abandon everything and to leave in the hope of love?”

  “No, Kate. You don’t know what you’re saying. He didn’t know what
he was doing. He’d have gone into a blazing house if she asked. Compared to what he saw in her he put no value on his own life. He thought he couldn’t live without her.”

  “Why was she using him if she didn’t want him?”

  “You must know, Kate. You’re a woman.”

  “There are as many different kinds of women as there are men.”

  “Mary says the same,” he struck the arm of the chair for emphasis. “Johnny’d have bought her drinks, cigarettes, God knows what, we don’t know, and he gave her money. He had a lot of money when he went to England and he’d have given her the clothes off his back if she asked. He’d be at her every beck and call. We heard afterwards that Anna went to England after Peadar Curren and got burned. I suppose Johnny put her back on her feet after the gunk she got with Peadar and then she got rid of him. Johnny didn’t come home that first summer but came without fail every summer since.”

  “Was Anna mentioned when he came?”

  “Never once. We don’t even know how it ended. Then we heard she married a policeman in London who turned for her.”

  “Converted to Catholicism,” Ruttledge explained. “Turned his coat. I’d have turned my coat for you, Kate, but I had no coat to turn by that time, and you never asked.”

  “Spoken like a true heathen. They’ll all turn, Kate. If they have to pick between their religion and the boggy hollow, they’ll all turn,” he laughed exultantly.

  “We’ve all been in Johnny’s place, except maybe not to the same extent,” Ruttledge said.

  “Speak for yourself, Mister Ruttledge. I haven’t been there,” Jamesie said.

  “Then you haven’t been far.”

  “I’ve never, never moved from here and I know the whole world,” he protested.

  “You’re right, Jamesie. Pay no heed to him,” Kate said.

  “What do you think, Kate?”

  “I think women are more practical. They learn to cut their losses. They are more concentrated on themselves.”