Free Amongst Women by John McGahern Page B

Moran entered the room silence and deadness would fall on them; and if he was eating alone or working in the room – setting the teeth of a saw, putting a handle in a broken spade on a wet day, taking apart the lighting plant that never seemed to run properly for long – they always tried to slip away. If they had to stay they moved about the place like shadows. Only when they dropped or rattled something, the startled way they would look towards Moran, did the nervous tension of what it took to glide about so silently show. Rose had noticed this and she had put it down to the awe and respect in which the man she so loved was held, and she was loath to see differently now. She had chosen Moran, had married him against convention and her family. All her vanity was in question. The violence Moran had turned on her she chose to ignore, to let her own resentment drop and to join the girls as they stole about so that their presences would never challenge his.
    He came in very late, wary, watchful. The cheerfulness with which Rose greeted him he met with a deep reserve. She was unprepared for it and her nervousness increased tenfold as she bustled about to get his tea. Sheila and Mona were writing at side tables; Michael was kneeling at the big armchair, a book between his elbows, as if in prayer, a position he sometimes used for studying. All three looked up gravely to acknowledge their father’s presence; but, sensing his mood at once, they buried themselves again in their schoolwork.
    ‘Where’s Maggie?’ he demanded.

    ‘She went to visit some friends in the village.’
    ‘She seems always to be on the tramp these days.’
    ‘She’s going around mostly saying goodbye to people.’
    ‘I’m sure she’ll be missed,’ he said acidly.
    Rose poured him his tea. The table was covered with a spotless  cloth. As he ate and drank she found herself chattering away to him out of nervousness, a stream of things that went through her head, the small happenings of a day. She talked out of confusions: fear, insecurity, love. Her instinct told her she should not be talking but she could not stop. He made several brusque, impatient movements at the table but still she could not stop. Then he turned round the chair in a fit of hatred. The children were listening though they kept their eyes intently fixed on their school books.
    ‘Did you ever listen carefully to yourself, Rose?’ he said. ‘If you listened a bit more carefully to yourself I think you might talk a lot less.’
    She looked like someone who had been struck without warning but she did not try to run or cry out. She stood still for a long moment that seemed to the others to grow into an age. Then, abjectly, as if engaged in reflection that gave back only its own dullness, she completed the tasks she had been doing and, without saying a word to the expectant children, left the room.
    ‘Where are you going, Rose?’ he asked in a tone that told her that he knew he had gone too far but she continued on her way.
    It galled him to have to sit impotently in silence; worse still, that it had been witnessed. They kept their heads down in their books though they had long ceased to study, unwilling to catch his eye or even to breathe loudly. All they had ever been able to do in the face of violence was to bend to it.
    Moran sat for a long time. When he could stand the silence no longer he went briskly into the other room. ‘I’m sorry, Rose,’ they heard him say. They were able to hear clearly though he had closed the door. ‘I’m sorry, Rose,’ he had to say again. ‘I lost my temper.’ After a pause they thought would never end they heard, ‘I want to be alone,’ clear as a single bell note, free of all self-assertiveness. He stayed on in the room but there was nothing he could do but withdraw.
    When he came back he sat beside the litter of his meal on the table among the three children not quite knowing what to do with himself. Then he took a pencil and paper and