By the Lake Read online

  “I’d still be careful.”

  “No, lad, no. The bees won’t bother me.”

  He disappeared into the orchard, his cap worn jauntily back to front. His shoulders and back beneath the dirty white shirt were large and powerful but so perfectly proportioned that their strength was concealed.

  Ruttledge continued creosoting. There was a mindless pleasure in brushing the dark liquid into the wood in the heat and the light breeze from the lake. In the far distance, the bucket of a mechanical digger clanged and pushed and clanged again.

  Patrick Ryan’s re-emergence into this slow mindlessness was like the eruptions of air that occur in the wheaten light of mown meadows in a heatwave. Dried grass and leaves, and even bits of sticks, are sent whirling high in a noisy spinning cylinder of dust and violent air, which then as quickly dies, to reappear like a mirage in another part of the meadow. With one hand he held up his trousers as he tried to run. His free hand swung his cap in a wild and furious arc as he attempted to beat away his tormentors. Whirling round to face the attacking bees, he beat out to left and right, but it was to no avail: he swung the cap round his head in a smaller despairing arc as he turned again and ran. The barely manageable trousers were bunched awkwardly around his ankles and with every fighting step he threatened to fall over. At the foot of the ladders he turned and stood. With his cap he beat away the single bees that zoomed in like dive-bombers. There was nothing Ruttledge could do. He had to beat away stray bees that came at him high on the ladder. A bee became entangled in his hair. Only very gradually did the attacks cease. At the foot of the ladders Patrick Ryan was slumped low but his breathing was growing easier. “Double fuck those for fucken cunts of bees,” he cried out.

  A buzzing came from his hair. With his cap he pummelled and crushed his head until the buzzing stopped. Ruttledge helped him search his shirt and trousers. There were even bees in his shoes. When Ruttledge shook free a number of bees trapped beneath the collar of his shirt, he called out angrily, “Why didn’t you kill the fuckers?”

  “There was no need.”

  “They should be all killed. They shouldn’t be let around any house. I was sitting there with my trousers down thinking about the world to come when they came down on me like a fucken cloud.”

  “Are you in much pain?”

  “I tell you, lad, I wouldn’t swap the pain for a place in heaven,” he grinned savagely. “It’ll pass. Everything does if you can wait long enough.”

  “There’s Blue in the house.”

  “It’ll do no good. We’ll give them no heed. They’ll go in their own time.”

  “We’ll dodge into the house for a break. They’ll be more settled when we come back. I could do with a drink of water,” Ruttledge said.

  It was cool within the house. The dark light was restful. No matter how Kate pressed Patrick Ryan, he would not allow her to examine or treat the stings.

  “Not a blessed thing will do any good. Pay them no heed. Treat yer man if he wants,” he brushed all offers aside.

  “My few stings are nothing,” Ruttledge said.

  “Give me a good glass of whiskey instead,” Patrick Ryan said. A large glass was poured. He wanted neither water nor lemonade. “Yer Irishman’s morphine. May we all meet up in heaven. Am I having no company?” He raised his glass in salutation.

  “It’s too hot and I’m not in pain.” Ruttledge poured himself a small measure as a gesture and added much water. Kate had tea.

  The pain forced Patrick Ryan to move and shift as he drank but his humour was improving by the minute. “They came down on me like a cloud,” he said. “The noise was worse than the darkness. No matter where you ran or turned they were around your head and you couldn’t beat them away.”

  “I’m sorry. I should have warned you,” Kate said. “I never saw them so angry. I couldn’t handle them, even with all the gear.”

  “It wasn’t your fault, Kate. Yer man here warned me but I paid no heed.”

  He constantly moved and shifted on the chair as he spoke. He talked as if talk itself could ease the pain. He drank quickly and appeared not to notice when Kate refilled his glass.

  He talked of a mowing accident that happened when he was a child. A man had been mowing a meadow with a young horse when the blade cut through a nest of wild red bees. The young horse was nervous. They say the bees can smell fear. They lighted on the poor horse. The man was luckily flung clear when the horse bolted. In no time the horse made bits of the shafts and traces before dropping down stone dead. Patrick Ryan had never laid eyes on the man or set foot in the meadow but he could see the man sitting on the single-bar mowing machine and the young horse and the big trees of an enclosed meadow as real, as real as if he had been there.

  “The past and present are all the same in the mind,” Kate said. “They are just pictures.”

  “Are you sure you haven’t been drinking, Kate?” Ruttledge asked.

  “It must be the aspirins and the Blue,” she said and winked.

  Patrick Ryan was so concentrated that the little exchange passed unnoticed.

  “There were red bees and black bees. We used to raid the nests in the meadows and suck the honey. The red bees were the wickedest. The rotary mowers and the bag stuff took all the nests out of the meadows,” Patrick Ryan said as he rose gingerly. “If we have any more of that painkiller we’ll be falling from ladders. We’ll go back to work in the name of God and his Blessed Mother.”

  Outside, the bees were still flying around but they were no longer attacking. Patrick Ryan kept changing his weight from foot to foot on the rungs of the ladder but he never complained, all the time keeping up a flow of jokes and stories as if speech alleviated pain. In the silences, he whistled and recited nonsensical refrains and blasphemies. Solicitous enquiry was brushed aside.

  “They are nothing. In another hour they won’t even be heard tell of. They’ll be clean forgot.”

  A sudden sharp cough and a loud deliberate scraping of shoes on the gravel drew their eyes to a man wheeling a girl’s bicycle towards the house, a cane basket on the handlebars. A pattern of knitted wool like a tea cosy covered the saddle. His head was bent low as if he was more animal or circus clown than man, his shoes lifting slowly to make exaggerated, comical steps over the gravel. His suit was a worsted blue. A red tie hung low. The bottoms of his trousers were stuffed into dark socks. His grey hair was darkened with oil and combed flat out across a receding hairline. As he wheeled the bicycle closer, his walk became slower and even more exaggerated, like an animal pawing uncertain ground.

  “Johnny’s home! Johnny’s home from England!” Patrick Ryan cried.

  Under the iron posts Johnny drew himself to his full height, pushed the bicycle away, where it wheeled perilously around before falling short of one of the posts, clicked his heels together, and saluted. “Reporting for duty,” he called out.

  The pain inflicted by the bees was cast aside as Patrick Ryan hurried down the ladder to go towards his old friend. “Johnny. You never lost it, me oul’ comrade.” They clasped hands high like athletes in victory and then held them still as if about to begin a trial of strength.

  “They’re all fucked,” Johnny sang.

  “Except our Ellen,” Patrick Ryan took up as they danced round and round with clasped hands held high.

  “And she’s, and she’s, and she’s,” they sang out as they swung. “And she’s in Castle—Castlepollard,” they sang as they came to a breathless stop and cheered.

  “You’re welcome home. Welcome home from England.”

  “Great to be home. Great to see yous all so well.”

  “You’re welcome home, Johnny,” Ruttledge took his hand.

  “Great, great to see you. Herself is well?”

  “She’ll be delighted to see you.”

  “I heard only yesterday,” Patrick Ryan said.

  “It was all alphabetical,” Johnny said. “Jamesie met the train per usual in Johnny Rowley’s car. We stopped at several bars. When
we got home Mary hopped the sirloin on the pan and it was like butter. Jamesie fell asleep at the Stanley and burned his forehead while we were eating. The scutching Mary gave him would do your heart good. In short, it was all quite alphabetical and couldn’t be done any better. I borrowed Mary’s bicycle here to cycle over to see yous all. It’s great to see everybody looking so well.”

  “You are still at Ford’s in Dagenham?”

  “Still at Ford’s. In the canteen, hoovering up, keeping the toilets clean. You’d hardly call it work.”

  “It must be better than being on the line,” Patrick Ryan said.

  “The line was terrible. It did the old ears no good,” he indicated a pale plastic hearing aid attached to his left ear. “That’s how I got moved to the canteen.”

  “You made the mistake of your life when you left here. You were in paradise and didn’t know it. You went and threw it all away.”

  “Maybe I did make a mistake,” Johnny assented blankly as if blankness alone could turn aside the judgement. “Anyhow it’s done now.”

  “Patrick shows none of us any mercy,” Ruttledge said by way of comfort.

  “I tell the truth and ask no favours.”

  “The truth isn’t always useful.”

  “Tell me what is.”

  “Kindness … understanding … sympathy maybe. I’ll tell Kate Johnny is here. She’ll want to get a few things ready.”

  “Tell her to go to no trouble. I only cycled over to see that you are all well.”

  “Go in,” Patrick Ryan said roughly to Ruttledge. “And tell her we’ll not be in for a while.”

  “They’re still here?” Johnny said when Ruttledge had gone.

  “As large as life.”

  “I never thought they’d last out. Every year I came home expecting to find them gone.”

  “They’re expanding,” Patrick Ryan gestured ironically towards the four iron posts holding the squares and rectangles of wood. “I think we better make up our minds that they’ll be here now like the rest of us till the hearse comes. They even bought more land, as if they hadn’t enough.”

  “I heard. Are they making any better shape of it?”

  “They’d pass. You know yourself that you have to be born into land. That brother of yours kept them afloat in the beginning. Everything round the place are treated like royals. There’s a black cat in there with white paws that’d nearly get up on its hind legs and order his breakfast. You’d not get thanked now if you got caught hitting it a dart of a kick on the quiet. The cattle come up to the back of the house and boo in like a trade union if the grass isn’t up to standard. They reseeded meadows and had to buy sheep to crop the grass. They even got to like the sheep. There’s no more stupid animal on God’s earth. There’s an old Shorthorn they milk for the house that would nearly sit in an armchair and put specs on to read the Observer. The bees nearly ate the arse off me an hour ago. She draws all that she sees. She even did a drawing of me.”

  “What was it like?”

  “You wouldn’t hang it up on a wall now,” he said with a laugh. “You wouldn’t know whether I was man or beast.”

  “She probably wears the britches. In England it’s the women that mostly wears the britches. The men are too washed out to care.”

  “Let me tell you. They’ll all wear the britches wherever they’re let. I’ve seen it all in house after house. That pair in there are different. They never seem to go against one another. There are times when they’d make you wonder whether they are man and woman at all.”

  “Strange to think of all the people that went out to England and America and the ends of the earth from this place and yon pair coming back against the tide.”

  “People had to go. They had no choice. You went and had no need to go.”

  “I know. I know. I know.”

  “You’d be on the pig’s back now, lad, if you’d stayed.”

  “We’d all be rich if we knew the result of tomorrow’s races.”

  “All around could see at the time and yet you couldn’t see.”

  “All around didn’t count. We better, I suppose, in the name of God, go into the house.”

  “Wait a minute,” Patrick Ryan said and proceeded to gather his tools—a spirit level, metal measuring tape, set square, a saw, a hammer, various chisels—into a brown hold-all.

  “Another thing that brought them here was the quiet. Will you listen to the fucken quiet for a minute and see in the name of God if it wouldn’t drive you mad?”

  As if out of a deep memory of timing and ensemble playing, both men flung themselves into a comic, exaggerated attitude of listening, a hand cupped behind an ear, and stood as frozen as statues in a public place.

  In the held minute, the birds seemed to sing more furiously in their branches. Bees laboured noisily between the stalks of red and white clover. Cattle lowed down by the lakeshore. Further away, cars and lorries passed on the main road and from further away still came the harsh, heavy clanging of a mechanical shovel as it cleared a hedgerow or dug the foundations of a house. As suddenly as they launched themselves into this burlesque of listening and stillness, they danced noisily free, cheered, clapped their hands and, taking one another’s raised arm, danced awkwardly round and round an iron post.

  They were both out of breath and Johnny looked distressed, sweating profusely but wonderfully revived in spirit. “We better go in before we do any more damage,” he fought for breath as he laughed.

  “If we stay out here any longer they might think we were talking about them,” Patrick Ryan said.

  They went noisily into the house.

  “You’re welcome home, Johnny.”

  “Great to be home, Kate. Great to see yous all well.”

  A damp tea towel covered squares of sandwiches. She took the towel from the yellow platter and placed it on a chair between the two men. Ruttledge poured rum from a dust-covered bottle into a glass and added blackcurrant concentrate.

  “Rum and black,” Johnny said as he took the glass. “You shouldn’t have gone to so much trouble. A whiskey would have done just as well.”

  “The bottle nearly waits for you from one year to the next. Very few around take rum except maybe one or two at Christmas.”

  “As soon as I walk into the Prince of Wales they hop up the rum and black on the counter before the regulars have even time to lift their glasses,” Johnny said.

  “I don’t know where you got the taste,” Patrick Ryan said. “You even drank rum before you left.”

  Ruttledge poured Patrick Ryan a large glass of whiskey and added water from the brown jug. Kate shook her head to his silent enquiry. He poured himself a whiskey and drank with the men.

  “Good health.”

  “And more again tomorrow, with the help of God, as Jamesie says.”

  “Good luck and cheers.”

  “ ‘Lord, son, don’t cheer in here or we’ll get put out,’ as Pee Maguire said to his English son-in-law after buying him his first pint down in the pub,” Patrick Ryan joked.

  As none of the men had reached for the sandwiches, Kate handed the platter around while the glasses were being refilled.

  “These sandwiches are beautiful, Kate,” Johnny said.

  “It’s great to see you home, Johnny,” Kate repeated.

  “Johnny here was the best shot this part of the country ever saw,” Patrick Ryan said. “When all the guns were going left and right all he had to do was raise his gun for the bird to fall like a stone.”

  “Nowadays I wouldn’t hit the back of a house,” Johnny said. “A few summers ago I took up Jamesie’s gun against a few grey crows. I couldn’t hit a thing.”

  “It would still come back with practice.”

  “I doubt that. It’s gone,” he said simply. “Patrick here was the best this part of the country has ever seen in the plays. He was the star.”

  “I would have been nothing without the others,” Patrick could not hide his pleasure. “All of us were good. The two of us pla
yed off one another. There was many who said you couldn’t pick between us.”

  “In Athlone when we won the Confined Cup it was Patrick who was singled out. I was sometimes mentioned in dispatches but I never won anything.”

  “It’s matterless who won or didn’t win. We all won in Athlone and weren’t sober for a whole week.”

  Warmed by the rum and whiskey and the memory of the lost halls, both men felt an intensity of feeling and affection that the passing day could not long sustain.

  “How is England?” Patrick Ryan demanded roughly.

  “England never changes much. They have a set way of doing everything there. It’s all more or less alphabetical in England.”

  “Not like this fucken place. You never know what your Irishman is going to do next. What’s more, the chances are he doesn’t know either.”

  “Everybody has their own way. There are times when maybe the English can be too methodical,” Johnny said.

  “No danger of that here. There’s no manners.”

  “Some people here have beautiful manners,” Kate protested.

  “Maybe a few,” Patrick Ryan admitted grudgingly. “But there’s no rules. They’re all making it up as they sail along.”

  “Are you still in the same house in England?” Ruttledge asked.

  “The same house. On Edward Road. A room on the top floor. Sometimes it’s a bit of a puff to climb the stairs but it’s better than having someone over your head. I had a room in Fairlop once and there was a Pole in the room overhead. Lord bless us you’d swear he was on death row, up and down, up and down, even in the middle of the night, it’d nearly start you walking yourself. The room on Edward is a good-size room with a big window. You can watch the lights come on in the Prince.”

  Suddenly, as if he was seeing Johnny’s high room for the first time and able to look all the way down Edward Road from the big window to the Prince of Wales, Patrick Ryan was drawn to the room in the same way he was drawn to strangers and started asking about the room and the house and the people in the other rooms.

  “I’m sure I told it all before. I’m going on five years in the room on Edward Road,” Johnny said.