Amongst Women by John McGahern

defend what was usually insupportable. Mona was quiet, hardworking and extremely stubborn, anxious to be agreeable; but once she took up a position – or got caught in one – she was obstinately immovable and this had often brought her into conflict with Moran. Rose’s coming to the house had smoothed their lives and allowed them to concentrate everything on school and study, which, above all, they saw as a way out of the house and into a life of their own.
    Eventually a letter arrived from London in response to Moran’s exasperated inquiries about his elder son. The information could hardly have been more ordinary. Maggie had seen him nearly every day at first. Now she saw him much less. When he first came, he had worked on various building sites. Now he worked in offices of the Gas Board, and was studying accountancy, mostly at night, though the Board gave him one day off each week to attend classes. Also he had become friendly with a Cockney man, older than he, who had been a french polisher and who now sold reproduction furniture to antique shops from a van. He mentioned some plan they had of buying old houses and converting them into flats for sale.
    ‘You see, it didn’t take him long to find the riff-raff,’ Moran said.
    ‘He seems to be working hard enough and studying,’ Rose tried to reassure him as always from a careful distance.
    ‘He’d do that all right but look at what he’s getting mixed up with as well.’
    ‘It may be just talk,’ she ventured edgily.
    ‘How does anything start but in talk?’
    Outwardly it had been the easiest and quietest of times that the house had ever known but the unease did not go away. Increasingly Moran could be seen in the fields staring idly at some task he should be completing.
    The fierce rush of hay was over. The apples were ripening on the trees in the garden. Their eyes were turning towards winter. Rose was beginning to go regularly again to her mother’s house. The cane basket on the handlebars of her bicycle was always full on leaving the house and full again with things from her mother’s house when she came back.
    ‘I see there’s hardly a day nowadays that Rose doesn’t go to her relations,’ Moran said to Sheila and Mona one Saturday they brought him a flask of tea into the fields. ‘She seldom goes empty-handed.’ Rose had asked them to take the flask out to him at four. They knew she took bread to her mother, jam she had made from the blackcurrants at the foot of the garden but the basket always came back heavy with fresh eggs, a bunch of carrots from the bog, plums that they loved, sweet hard yellow apples.
    ‘We don’t know,’ Sheila answered carefully.
    ‘How do you not know? Haven’t you both eyes in your heads?’
    ‘She brings things back.’
    ‘Only stuff they’d have to throw out otherwise!’
    They knew that the accusation was untrue. They remained obstinately silent, abject looking as well, the camouflage they had learned to use for safekeeping.
    ‘Would you like us to tie the sheaves, Daddy?’ Mona asked.
    ‘That’d be a great push,’ he said.
    All the girls were skilled at farm work, work they had done since they were very young. Quickly the rows were gathered into sheaves and tied. They loved the sound of swishing the sheaves made as they were stooked, the clash of the tresses of hard grain against grain, the sight of the rich ears of corn leaning delicately out on the shoulders of the stooks.
    ‘That was great,’ Moran said. ‘What’s left is only trimming. I can do that myself. I am sure ye have books,’ he added with unusual thoughtfulness.
    ‘Thanks, Daddy.’
    ‘Thanks yourselves.’ And then he added, ‘We could get on topping without her.’
    It was not so much that she took things from the house – though his racial fear of the poorhouse or famine was deep – but that she left the house at all. Any constant going out to another house was a threat. In small things it showed. The shaving water was