by Edna O'Brien
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To Antoinette
“Each human life must work through all the joys and sorrows, gains and losses, which make up the history of the world.”
THOMAS MANN
“OFF IN THE STILLY NIGHT”
IT IS A SMALL SOMNOLENT VILLAGE with a limestone rock that sprawls irregularly over the village green, where sprouts a huge beech tree along with incidental saplings that meander out of it. Picturesque, you might say. Life has a quiet hum to it. You are passing through, on your way to somewhere livelier. You would never dream that so many restless souls reside here, dreaming of a different destiny. As you enter you see a stone, Roman-type church, one of the oldest in the land, a graveyard adjoining it and, on the tombstones, huge white lozenges of lichen that look bold, if not to say comic. In contrast a ball alley next door is green and oozes damp from years of rain. This is a rainy hamlet, being on the Gulf Stream. You would rarely come across anyone playing handball, except perhaps on Sundays, when a few youths, having trampled over grave plots and flower domes, take it into their heads to give themselves another bit of diversion by pegging a ball or some stones at the green lamenting cement. However, they soon tire of that and move on to amuse themselves with old cars or old motorcycles.
The effect when you first enter is of a backwater where souls and bodies have fallen prey to a stubborn tedium. You will find dogs, many of them mongrels, chasing each other over the ample green or snoozing in the sun. In the grocery shop the prevailing smell will be of flour and grain stuff, and if you are lucky you might find bananas or grapes, but most likely you will have to settle for apples. You could be tempted by a wide open-faced biscuit, like the face of a clock, studded with dark brown raisins. You would not suspect that in the big house with the wrought-iron gateway and the winding overgrown avenue a wife went a little peculiar, lost her marbles. It is said that it was her sister’s fault, her sister, Angela. After spending many years in a convent, Angela, to the chagrin of her order and her relatives, upped and left, and came to live with Margaret in the big house. At first she hid, even from Margaret’s husband, but gradually when her hair grew she emerged from her bedroom and eventually ventured down to the drawing room, to give a tinkle on the piano. It is said that it was there the husband, Ambrose, first saw her in a secular outfit, because of course he had seen her as a nun. Ambrose, who was something of a fop, was immediately captivated by her beauty and the slenderness of her frame inside a long brown velvet dress that buttoned down the center and had a flare. Anything can happen to three people who languish in a house, a big house, a damp house, a house with gongs on the kitchen wall and many dank passages which could do with a lick of paint but for a chronic shortage of money. People can drive each other mad in such circumstances. Angela ate like a bird, gardened, and played the piano in the evenings. Also she sang. She sang “Oft in the Stilly Night” and “There’s a Bridle Hanging on the Wall.” In the summer evenings, with the bow window open, her voice could be heard by children or people milking in the fields nearby and it was thought to be rather screeching. The gardener who went there once a week to do a bit of scything stole their gooseberries and refused to oil the hinges of the lych gate or do any extra favours because they never invited him indoors or offered him a cup of tea, being too stuck-up. Neighbours said he had every right to take the gooseberries and plagued him for a little can for themselves. They were very sweet gooseberries, yellow, translucent.
The sisters, Angela and Margaret, quarrelled a lot; at times so bitterly that Angela’s belongings were flung out the window—dresses, a corset, her prayer book and beads, and the fur tippet which she wore at Mass and which sported the narrow and knowing face of a little fox. Ambrose, however, always intervened and Angela was dragged back from the avenue or even beyond the gate if she had ventured so far. No one knew or could imagine how peace was restored, what strategies of sweetness or authority Ambrose had had to resort to. What was rumoured was that he and Angela cuddled in the kitchen garden. Many people had seen them or had boasted about seeing them, and many wondered why his wife did not throw him out, since it was she who owned the house. Ambrose was something of a gentleman and shunned work. Soon as he married Margaret—the plainer sister—he rented out the land for grazing and spent his time on more dilatory pursuits, such as keeping bees and making elder-flower wine. Ambrose knew so little about country matters that he was the butt of a standing joke. He had a sick beast which was too feeble to stir from its manger. He called on some locals, hoping to save himself the expense of a veterinary surgeon, and they simply turned the beast around to see if a bit of exercise might help. Ambrose, reentering the manger after a suitable interval, said to the two men, “Her eyes are brighter,” whereas in fact he was contemplating her rear. The two men drank liberally on the joke and, as time went by, embellished it.
Not long after Angela came to live there, tales of the unhappy trio began to trickle out and speculation was rife indeed, some locals even promising to steal over the high wall into the kitchen garden to get a gawk through the drawing room window. No one ever visited there, because Margaret was fiendishly thrifty and often returned to the shop with a package of bacon, to say there was one rasher short. Luck was not on their side. Angela grew ill, got thinner, was obliged to see a specialist, and learned that she was struck down with a wasting disease. Sympathies changed quite drastically, and her good points—her singing, her devoutness at Mass, and her taste in dressing—were now promulgated. She died in June and had a quite presentable funeral. Her brother-in-law followed her before a month was out and this, of course, substantiated the clandestine love story. Margaret became an object of pity, received gifts of jam and shortbread, and was invited to card games which she did not attend. Margaret herself was an invalid a few years later, crippled with rheumatoid arthritis. At first she could move about with a stick and in the post office many were eager to discuss the pain with her and to suggest cures, all of which were useless. Eventually she was housebound.
The jubilee nurse called once a week and let herself in by the back kitchen door, which was on the latch. It was she who reported that Margaret had repaired to the bridal room, where a dormant love for her husband burgeoned and was reaching fantastic proportions. His name was constantly on her lips, stories about their courtship, the food he liked, and the idealization of her until the day of his death. Local women also called, but Margaret could not hear the knocker, which was rusty, and so she remained banished in that bridal room with the baize-covered shutters, unable to admit the visitors that she longed for, muttering prayers, saying her husband’s name, and at times getting confused in the day of the week, wondering if the jubilee nurse was due or not.
* * *
YOU WOULD NOT KNOW, either, that in the main street, in the row of imitation-Georgian houses, many fracases lurk. There is an unfortunate woman who scrubs and cleans for a living while her husband skulks in woods to assault girls and women. Some he does not have to assault, so
me wanton ones it is said go there, dally, and allow themselves to be hauled into thickets or bracken or verdure. A kindly girl, Oonagh, takes in washing, starches sheets and tablecloths to such a stiffness that they are like boards. Her clothesline is never free of sheets, tablecloths, serviettes, and even more private garments. Nearby a lady who has the audacity to keep tinkers actually admits them into her house and allows them up to her bedrooms, five or six to a room. Her hallway smells foul, and no wonder. Many a Monday morning she is shaking bedspreads and eiderdowns from a top window and neighbours shout caustic things, not directly to her, but to each other so that she can hear. The Flea Hotel is the nickname of her crumbling premises. A respectable lady who lives in the cut stone house with the bow window was the victim of one of those tinkers, who stole her shoes. They were tan brogue shoes which she had decided to dye brown. While they were drying, a hussy had come begging, but was not received despite incessant knocking and pleading about the babe in her arms. In pique she helped herself to the shoes. She was caught not long after, found by the sergeant at some sort of regatta where she was telling fortunes, squatting down on a bit of red velvet, giving the impression of an Eastern sage, and wearing the shoes. In the court her accuser, a married woman dressed in a black coat with Persian lamb trimming down the front, lost her heart for retribution, remembered somehow her own childhood, her dire poverty, her ancestors having been evicted from the fertile plains and having to flee to a mountain abode, repented having reported the thing at all, and asked the judge in tearful tones to overlook it and to exercise clemency. The judge, who did not like this sort of interruption on a busy day—there was an anteroom full of people with cases waiting to be heard—asked her tetchily to be a little more circumspect in the future about clemency and to save her contrition for the confessional. As the shoes were handed over, the married woman begged that the tinker woman be let keep them, but of course such a request was impossible and she left the court carrying them in her hand limply, as if she would drop them the moment she got outside. The tinker woman was given a sentence of seven days and nights in the country gaol, which could be reprieved if she paid a fine of fifty pounds. This of course was impossible and sent all the tinkers on a wild binge around the town, cursing and vowing vengeance.
* * *
IN ANOTHER HOUSE, a nervous priest who has been defrocked sits most of the day. The scandal is so great it can hardly be mentioned. His nerves are cited as the reason, but one who has travelled far has come back with a murky secret, in short, claiming that the priest had an eye for the ladies. Anyhow, he cannot say Mass, does not even serve at High Masses, and is seen on the hospital roads on Sundays walking with his mother. They gather branches to decorate their living room. They are the only people who call it by that name, as all others say parlour or drawing room, and they are the only people who put flowers and branches indoors. One small clemency meted to the young priest is that insanity runs in the family since a cousin hanged himself from a tree, years back.
* * *
YES, YOU WOULD PASS HOUSES where there are drunks, where husbands on the day they get their pay packets do not come home till well after midnight, their wives accosting them on the top of the stairs or at the bottom of the stairs or wherever; and there are houses with bachelors whose rooms have never had a woman’s hand to them and hence are dusty and somewhat inhospitable. You will pass various families with young children and another family which keeps horses and ponies and has had the misfortune to have one of its horses bolt out into the main road and be killed by a motorist, who then set out to sue the family for negligence. “Spliced her in half,” the young son of the family is fond of saying, as a pathetic reenactment of the restless mare—and her mad, bolting mare is described again and again.
You will find a former music teacher who no longer takes pupils but still keeps the sheet music on her piano to prove her former prowess, and who allows her little bantam hens the run of her house. Not far away, you will find a gentleman who was for a time like any common convict in Australia doing penal servitude, but has now returned to his roots. His crime was that he fired a shot at a barmaid who refused to serve him a drink after hours, and unfortunately was a good shot and killed her. He no longer drinks but lives in semi-solitude, playing patience in the evening. There is a doting couple too, because of course every village has a doting couple. These are a childless pair who make their own butterscotch and resort to the most extreme endearments at all hours, even at breakfast time. When the husband goes to work in the forestry his wife stealthily follows soon after on her bicycle, stationing herself behind the high limestone wall at the edge of the forest to make sure that her husband does not talk or mingle with any of these passing young wanton women.
* * *
THERE IS TOO, in the house with the gorgeous geraniums on the porch, a budding beauty, plump, not too plump, eyes navy and limpid, eye sockets like inkwells in which this enticing navy stuff swills about, eyes ready for love. She reads magazines and cuts out the tips about hair and beauty and figure and so forth. There are children galore, housed in the school most of the time and utter nuisances during holiday time. There is a saddler’s from whose doorway the pleasant smell of new leather and linseed oil drifts out, and not far away a shoemaker with the more fetid smell of sweat and old leather. That place is a jumble of old shoes heaped in an immemorial pyre. Then three mornings a week there is the heartening smell of fresh bread, when a van comes from the big city and trays of loaf bread, rock buns, and tea cakes are carried into the shop. Hunger grips the village—women in the middle of washing or ironing hurry across, often with their aprons still on, often without the money, eager to collar one of those long, soft loaves that are the food of life.
“I’ll pay you later” or “I’ll pay you Friday” is often heard as they hasten back to their own kitchens to devour the sacramental fare. In the snug room of the bar, there are already at that hour one or two early topers drinking slowly, methodically, recognizing that the day has just begun, and here too gossip is rife, but in more measured tones. In this dark precinct that smells of porter, old porter and freshly drawn porter, the light is dim because of the fawn blind being permanently drawn, for privacy’s sake, and the men, when they at length do decide to address each other, try to escape small matters of their own environment and discuss world topics from items they have gleaned in the newspapers. The furniture here is brown, the counter traced again and again with the circle of the glasses, circles that loop into one another like the circles in the core of a tree.
The loaves of bread that have been snapped up are devoured by housewives at home who lather them with jam or pickles or whatever, anything to give the morning a bit of zest, and soon it’s time to put on the dinner and women hurry into their back gardens to cut a head or two of cabbage, then wash it to free it of clay and slugs and put it on to boil for the dinner, which is served midday, usually with bacon. Nice big greasy dinners for some, for others scraps. Children in front gardens eating bits of bread and sugar, mild activity around lunchtime, people to-ing and fro-ing and the dogs on the village green yelping over a bone or territory or some distemper. Then a lull until teatime. Older people dozing, and from the school window, if it is open, the chants from the children either yelling or reciting in unison.
In the evenings the smell of the yew trees and the pine trees seems to be more pronounced, especially after rain. These grow in profusion in the church grounds, some that were planted many years ago and some that have seeded themselves. Across the road from the church you will see a two-storey stone house, you cannot avoid it. It was once painted blue but is now a dim replica of that colour. The garden is a disgrace. Everything is rampant: trees, shrubs, briars all meshed together in some mad knot, not only obscuring the path, but travelling right up along the windows, so that no one can see in. In there is Ita. Ita was once a paragon in this hamlet, the most admired devout person there. Along with looking after her brother and having a few hens and chickens and milking
the cows, she looked after the church; she was the sacristan. The church was at once her sanctuary and her flower garden.
Outside, and due to the inclemency of the weather, the blue cut stone may have imparted a lugubriousness to passersby, but inside all was gleaming, as befits a place which houses God. The sanctuary lamp, perpetually alight, was of Paduan silver hanging low on lattice chains, its bowl pierced with holes, containing the inner red bowl in which the sacred oil first glugged, then swayed; here too floated the wick with its tongue of sacred flame bespeaking the presence of Christ. Each time that Ita McNamara stepped inside she not only genuflected, she fell in front of the altar and prayed to God to sweeten her bitter cup, and God did.
It is many years now, but the memory of it is lasting. The missioners were due. The altar had to be sumptuously decked. She did not despair, she knew she would not have to resort to bits of evergreen and shrub because the Protestant spinsters would leave a sheaf of flowers in the porch, ample as a sheaf of corn. They were the only people who gardened, others had not the time or the will for such fal-lalling; others grew potatoes, cabbages, and turnips, but not flowers or flowering trees; maybe a bit of wild honeysuckle might be found threading its way through the eaves or a few devil’s pokers defying the sodden aspect of a forlorn front garden, but a profusion of flowers, no. People had too much to do, trying to keep body and soul together, to eke out an existence. It was June when the catastrophe happened to Ita. “Satan’s net,” it was fancifully christened by the cookery teacher, who reminded the shocked faithful that many mystics in the Middle Ages had shown such symptoms and that Ita could have been saved had there been a sensible doctor in the place. Before her downfall was her rhapsody. The flowers that she had been expecting were indeed in the chapel porch, and a prodigal bunch it was. She ran back to her own house to get extra vases, possibly uttering a prayer for the poor heathens, hoping a bolt of lightning would strike them, as it did Saul of Tarsus. Her fears for their damnation were no secret. She confessed once that her own flesh scorched at the thought, that she itched under the armpits and in her joints, it was as if live coals had been placed there, off a tongs. She often asked people to remember them in their prayers, so that they would not be perpetually lost, banished behind the gates of Hell, among the self-loathing, howling hordes.
