The Dark by John McGahern

didn’t seem to have got much sweetness. But what has your father’s life got to do with your life?
    If you married you would plant a tree to deny and break finally your father’s power, completely supplant it by the graciousness and marvel of your life, but as a priest you’d remain just fruit of the cursed house gone to God.
    If you became a priest, would you not be crazed on your deathbed because of the way you’d cheated your life out of human fulfilment, never to have loved and received love, never to have married in the June of passion. Three months of it would have been a great gift.
    I married when I was passionately in love, would be something to look back on no matter what the present horror. It would be something too to haunt you, you’d always hanker after it, it was the red rose of life, you’d never been even given it for a day.
    Though what was the use, there was no escape. You were only a drifter and you’d drift. You couldn’t carry the responsibility of a decision. You were only a hankerer. You’d drift and drift. You’d just dream of the ecstasy of destruction on a woman’s mouth.
    You were sitting on a green bench in the morning, was that not enough. The sun was blazing clear as glass. Your hands were damp with sweat. A ceaseless hum was droning into the heat. You could take off your coat and tie.
    Six apple trees stood in the garden: three cookers, a honeycomb, Beauty of Bath, apples with the rust of pears and not ripe till the frosts. Jam-jars half full of syrup hung on twinefrom the branches. Wasps circled and circled the rims before they were tempted into the struggling froth of the dead and dying trapped in the sweetness. Some apples had fallen on the ground, shells of flaming colour, rotting brown of the flesh eaten far as the skins. The Beauty of Baths on the tree were cold and sharp, the teeth shivered once they sank in, there was nothing to do but throw it out of sight into the tall cocksfoot along the hedge.
    You left coat and tie with the Penguin on the seat and idled back into the graveyard, alive with bees moving between the small flowers of the graves. There was such heat and nothingness now. A white clover at your feet swayed under the clambering of a sucking bee. You watched it, the trembling flower, the black bee unsteady and awkward on the ruffled whiteness, and suddenly you jumped and trampled bee and flower into the earth of the grave. More were moving between the red and white and yellow heads in the sunshine. You could turn it into a sport, tramp bee after bee down, it’d amuse the morning, you could keep a count, as they grew scarce in the graveyard the stalking’d grow more difficult. Nero used tear wings off flies above Rome once, though what was the use. After all you were in the graveyard in the day.
    This place was such a green prison. The wall of sycamores shut it away from the road. The tall graveyard hedges and the steep furze-covered hill at the back of the house, only one green patch in its centre where a lone donkey grazed, closed it to the fields around, it ran to no horizon. There was little movement. A general noise of machinery came. A car or van went by behind the sycamore screen. Two living voices in conversation drifted from some field. Somewhere a hen cackled with fright. Here was only interest of the graves and names, the verses, the dates, the weeds and withered wreaths, the ghastly artificial roses and lilies under globes of glass. You could make a catalogue of all these, they’d pass the time justas well as the slaughter of bees, whatever either would really do. The day would probably go its own way anyhow.
    The toll of a funeral bell sounded close, after a minute a slow second followed. What was obviously a funeral went past through the sycamores, shod hooves coming clean through the noise of motors. John came towards you out of the house.
    “I was wondering where the bell is ringing from, John.”
    “From the Protestant church, sir. Mr.