by Edna O'Brien
Now I ask you, what would you do? Would you comfort Ita, would you tell her that her sins were of her own imagining? Then might you visit the budding beauty and set her dreaming of the metropolis? Would you loiter with the drunkards and laugh with the women gorging the white bread; would you perhaps visit the grave to say an Ave where Angela, her sister, and the errant husband lie close together, morsels for the maggots, or would you drive on helter-skelter, the radio at full blast? Perhaps your own village is much the same, perhaps everywhere is, perhaps pity is a luxury and deliverance a thing of the past.
BROTHER
BAD CESS TO HIM. Thinks I don’t know, that I didn’t smell a rat. All them bachelors swaggering in here, calling him out to the haggart in case I twigged. “Tutsy this and Tutsy that.” A few readies in it for them, along with drives and big feeds. They went the first Sunday to reconnoitre, walk the land and so forth. The second Sunday they went in for refreshments. Three married sisters, all gawks. If they’re not hitched up by now there must be something wrong; harelip or a limp or fits. He’s no oil painting, of course. Me doing everything for him: making his porridge and emptying his worshipful Po, for God knows how many years. Not to mention his lumbago, and the liniment I rubbed in.
“I’ll be good to you, Maisie,” he says. Good! A bag of toffees on a holy day. Takes me for granted. All them fly-boys at threshing time trying to ogle me up into the loft for a fumble. Puckauns. I’d take a pitchfork to any one of them; so would he if he knew. I scratched his back many’s the night and rubbed the liniment on it. Terrible aul smell. Eucalyptus.
“Lower … lower,” he’d say. “Down there.” Down to the puddingy bits, the lupins. All to get to my Mary. He had a Mass said in the house after. Said he saw his mother, our mother; something on her mind. I had to have grapefruit for the priest’s breakfast, had to de-pip it. These priests are real gluttons. He ate in the breakfast room and kept admiring things in the cabinet, the china bell and the bog-oak cabin, and so forth. Thought I’d part with them. I was running in and out with hot tea, hot water, hot scones; he ate enough for three. Then the big handshake; Matt giving him a tenner. I never had that amount in my whole life. Ten bob on Fridays to get provisions, including sausages for his breakfast. Woeful the way he never consulted me. He began to get hoity-toity, took off those awful trousers with the greasy backside from all the sweating and lathering on horseback, tractor, and bike; threw them in the fire cavalier-like. Had me airing a suit for three days. I had it on a clotheshorse, turning it round every quarter of an hour, for fear of it scorching.
Then the three bachelors come into the yard again, blabbing about buying silage off him. They had silage to burn. It stinks the countryside. He put on his cap and went out to talk to them. They all leant on the gate, cogitating. I knew ’twas fishy, but it never dawned on me it could be a wife. I’d have gone out and sent them packing. Talking low they were, and at the end they all shook hands. At the supper he said he was going to Galway Sunday.
“What’s in Galway?” I said.
“A greyhound,” he said.
First mention of a greyhound since our little Deirdre died. The pride and joy of the parish she was. Some scoundrels poisoned her. I found her in a fit outside in the shed, yelps coming out of her, and foam. It nearly killed him. He had a rope that he was ruminating with for months. Now this bombshell. Galway.
“I’ll come with you, I need a sea breeze,” I said.
“It’s all male, it’s stag,” he said, and grinned.
I might have guessed. Why they were egging him on I’ll never know, except ’twas to spite me. Some of them have it in for me; I drove bullocks of theirs off our land, I don’t give them any haults on bonfire night. He went up to the room then and wouldn’t budge. I left a slice of griddle bread with golden syrup on it outside the door. He didn’t touch it. At dawn I was raking the ashes and he called me, real soft-soapy, “Is that you, Maisie, is that you?” Who in blazes’ name did he think it was—Bridget or Mary of the Gods! “Come in for a minute,” he said. “There’s a flea or some goddamn thing itching me, maybe it’s a tick, maybe they’ve nested.” I strip the covers and in th’oul candlelight he’s like one of those saints that they boil, thin and raky. Up to then I only ventured in the dark, on windy nights when he’d say he heard a ghost and I had to go to him. I reconnoitre his white body while he’s muttering on about the itch, says, “Soldiers in the tropics minded itch more than combat.” He read that in an almanac.
“Maisie,” he says in a watery voice, and puts his hand on mine and steers me to his shorthorn. Pulled the stays off of me. Thinking I don’t know what he was after. All pie. Raving about me being the best sister in the wide world and I’d give my last shilling and so forth. Talked about his young days when he hunted with a ferret. Babble, babble. His limbs were like jelly, and then the grunts and him burying himself under the red flannel eiderdown, saying God would strike us.
The next Sunday he was off again. Not a word to me since the tick mutiny, except to order me to drive cattle or harness the horse. Got a new pullover, a most unfortunate colour, like piccalilli. He didn’t get home that Sunday until all hours. I heard the car door banging. He boiled himself milk, because the saucepan was on the range with the skin on it. I went up to the village to get meal for the hens and everyone was gassing about it. My brother had got engaged for the second time in two weeks. First it was a Dymphna and now it was a Tilly. It seemed he was in their parlour—pictures of cows and millstreams on the wall—sitting next to his intended, eating cold ox tongue and beetroot, when he leans across the table, points to Tilly, and says, “I think I’d sooner her.”
Uproar. They all dropped utensils and gaped at him, thinking it a joke. He sticks to his guns, so much so that her father and the bachelors dragged him out into the garden for a heart-to-heart. Garden. It seems it’s only high grass and an obelisk that wobbles. They said, “What the Christ, Matt?” He said, “I prefer Tilly, she’s plumper.” Tilly was called out and the two of them were told to walk down to the gate and back, to see what they had in common.
In a short time they return and announce that they understand one another and wish to be engaged. Gink. She doesn’t know the catastrophe she’s in for. She doesn’t know about me and my status here. Dymphna had a fit, shouted, threw bits of beetroot and gizzard all about, and said, “My sister is a witch.” Had to be carried out and put in a box room, where she shrieked and banged with a set of fire irons that were stored there. Parents didn’t care, at least they were getting one Cissy off their hands. Father breeds French herds, useless at it. A name like Charlemagne. The bachelors said Matt was a brave man, drink was mooted. All the arrangements that had been settled on Dymphna were now transferred to Tilly. My brother drank port wine and got maudlin. Hence the staggers in the yard when he got home and the loud octavias. Never said a word at the breakfast. I had to hear it in the village. She has mousey hair and one of her eyes squints, but instead of calling it a squint the family call it a “lazy eye.” It is to be a quiet wedding. He hasn’t asked me, he won’t. Thinks I’m too much of a gawk with my gap teeth, and that I’d pass remarks and say, “I’ve eaten to my satisfaction and if I ate any more I’d go flippety-floppety,” a thing he makes me say here to give him a rise in the wet evenings.
All he says is “There’ll be changes, Maisie, and it’s for the best.” Had the cheek to ask me to make an eiderdown for the bed, rose-coloured satin. I’ll probably do it, but it will only be a blind. He thinks I’m a softie. I’ll be all pie to her at first, bringing her the tea in bed and asking her if she’d like her hair done with the curling tongs. We’ll pick elder flowers to make jelly. She’ll be in a shroud before the year is out. To think that she’s all purty now, like a little bowerbird, preening herself. She won’t even have the last rites. I’ve seen a photo of her. She sent it to him for under his pillow. I’ll take a knife to her, or a hatchet. I’ve been in Our Lady’s once before, it isn’t that bad. Big teas on Sundays and fags. I’ll be
out in a couple of years. He’ll be so morose from being all alone, he’ll welcome me back with open arms. It’s human nature. It stands to reason. The things I did for him, going to him in the dark, rubbing in that aul liniment, washing out at the rain barrel together, mother-naked, my bosoms slapping against him, the stars fading and me bursting my sides with the things he said—“Dotey.” Dotey no less. I might do for her out of doors. Lure her to the waterfall to look for eggs. There’re swans up there and geese. He loves the big geese eggs. I’ll get behind her when we’re on that promontory and give her a shove. It’s very slippery from the moss. I can just picture her going down, yelling, then not yelling, being swept away like a newspaper or an empty canister. I’ll call the alarm. I’ll shout for him. If they do smell a rat and tackle me, I’ll tell them that I could feel beads of moisture on my brother’s poll without even touching it, I was that close to him. There’s no other woman could say that, not her, not any woman. I’m all he has, I’m all he’ll ever have. Roll on, nuptials. Daughter of death is she.
THE WIDOW
BRIDGET WAS HER NAME. She played cards like a trooper, and her tipple was gin-and-lime. She kept lodgers, but only select lodgers: people who came for the dapping, or maybe a barrister who would come overnight to discuss a case with a client or with a solicitor.
The creamery manager was the first guest to be more or less permanent. After a few months it was clear he wasn’t going to build the bungalow that he had said he would, and after a few more months he was inviting girls to the house as if it were his own. Oh, the stories, the stories! Card parties, drink, and God knows what else. No one dared ask expressly. Gaudy women, with nail varnish and lizard handbags and so forth, often came, sometimes staying for the weekend. Bridget had devoted the sitting room to him and his guests, choosing to say that whatever they wanted to do was their business.
She worked in the daytime, in a local shop, where she was a bookkeeper. She kept herself very much to herself—sat in her little office with its opaque beaded-glass panelling, and wrote out the bills and paid for commodities, and rarely, if ever, came out to the shop to serve customers. The owner and she got on well. He called her Biddy, short for Bridget, which meant, of course, that they were good friends. Occasionally she would emerge from her glass booth to congratulate a young mother on having a baby or to sympathize with someone over a death, but this, as people said, was a formality, a mere gesture. No one had been invited to her new pebble-dash house, and the twin sisters who called unannounced were left standing on the doorstep, with some flimsy excuse about her distempering the kitchen ceiling. She was determined to remain aloof, and as if to emphasize the point she had venetian blinds fitted.
You may ask, as the postmistress had asked—the postmistress her sworn enemy—“Why have venetian blinds drawn at all times, winter and summer, daylight and dark? What is Bridget trying to hide?” What went on there at night, after she strolled home, carrying a few tasties that the owner of the shop had given her, such as slices of bacon or tins of salmon? It was rumoured that she changed from her dark shop overall into brighter clothes. A child had seen her carrying in a scuttle of coal. So there was a fire in the parlour, people were heard to say.
* * *
PARTIES BEGAN TO TAKE PLACE, and many a night a strange car or two, or even three, would park outside her driveway and remain there till well near dawn. Often people were heard emerging, singing “She’ll be comin’ ’round the mountain when she comes, when she comes.” Such frivolities inevitably lead to mishaps, and there came one that stunned the parish. A priest died in the house. He was not a local priest but had arrived in one of those strange cars with strange registration numbers. The story was that he went up to the bathroom, missed a step as he came out, and then, of course—it could happen to anyone—tripped and fell. He fell all the way down the fifteen steps of stairs, smashed his head on the grandfather clock that was at the bottom, and lay unconscious on the floor. The commotion was something terrible, as Rita, a neighbour, reported. There were screams from inside the house. The creamery manager, it seems, staggered to his car, but was too inebriated to even start the engine; then a young lady followed, drove off, and shortly after, the local curate arrived at the house with the viaticum. An hour later, the ambulance took the priest to the hospital, but he was already dead.
Bridget put a brave face on it. Instead of hiding her understandable guilt, she acknowledged it. She spoke over and over again of the fatal night, the fun that had preceded the tragedy, the priest, not touching a drop, regaling them with the most wonderful account of being admitted to the Vatican—not for an audience, as he had thought, but to see the treasures. “Thousands of pounds’ worth of treasures … thousands of pounds’ worth of treasures!” he had apparently said as he described a picture or a sculpture or a chalice or vestments. Then Bridget would go on to describe how they had all played a game of forty-five, and before they knew where they were it was three in the morning and Father So-and-So rose to return home, going upstairs first. He had had, as she said, glass after glass of lemonade. Then the terrible thud, and their not believing what it was, and the creamery manager getting up from the table and going out to the hall, and then a girl going out, and then the screams. Bridget made it known that she would never forgive herself for not having had a stronger bulb on the landing. At the High Mass for the priest’s remains, she wore a long black lace thing, which she had not taken out since her beloved husband had died.
Her husband had been drowned years before, which is why she was generally known as the Widow. They had been married only a few months and were lovebirds. They had lived in another house then—a little house with a porch that caught the sun, where they grew geraniums and begonias and even a few tomatoes. Her despair at his death was so terrible it was legendary. Her roar, when the news was broken to her, rent the parish, and was said to have been heard in distant parishes. Babies in their cots heard it, as did old people who were deaf and sitting beside the fire, as did the men working out in the fields. When she was told that her husband had drowned, she would not believe it: her husband was not dead; he was a strong swimmer; he swam down at the docks every evening of his life before his tea. She rebelled by roaring. She roared all that evening and all that night. Nobody in the village could sleep. When they found his body in the morning with reeds matted around it, her cries reached a gargantuan pitch. She could not be let to go to the chapel. Women held her down to keep her from going berserk.
Then, some days after he was buried, when the cattle began to trample over the grave and treat it as any old grave, she stopped her keening. Soon after, she put on a perfectly calm, cheerful, resigned countenance. She told everyone that she was a busy woman now and had much to do. She had to write to thank all the mourners, and thank the priests who officiated at the High Mass, and then decide what to do about her husband’s clothes. Above all, she was determined to sell her house. She was advised against it, but nothing would deter her. That house was for Bill and herself—“Darling Bill,” as she called him—and only by leaving it would the memory, the inviolate memory, of their mornings and their evenings and their nights and their tête-à-têtes remain intact.
She sold the house easily, though far too cheaply, and went back up the country to live with her own folks—a brother and a deaf-mute sister. No one in the village heard of her until a few years later, when her brother died and her sister went to an institution. Unable to manage the tillage and foddering, Bridget sold the farm and moved back to the town. She was a changed woman when she came back—very much more in charge of herself. Very much more the toff, as people said. She got a job as a bookkeeper in the shop and started to build a house, and while it was being built many conjectured that she had a second husband in mind. There were rumours about bachelors seen talking to her, and especially one who came from America and took her to the dog track in Limerick a few Saturday nights in a row and bought her gins. The news of her drinking soon spread, and the verdict was that she could bend
the elbow with any man. Hence, being installed in her new house was not the neighbourly affair it might have been. There was no housewarming, for instance; no little gifts of cream or homemade black puddings or porter cake; no good-luck horseshoe on her door. In short, the people ostracized her. She seemed not to mind, having always kept to herself anyway. She had a good wardrobe, she had a good job, and as soon as she started to keep select boarders—only two, or at the most three—everybody remarked that she was getting above herself. Her house was sarcastically called the Pleasure Dome, and sometimes, more maliciously, she was coupled with the song “Biddy the Whore, who lived in a hotel without any door.”
Her first two guests were strangers—men who were doing some survey for the land commission, and whom all the farmers suspected of being meddlesome. They and Bridget became the best of friends—sat outside on deck chairs and were heard laughing; went to Mass together, the last Mass on Sundays; and in the evening imbibed, either at home or in the hotel. When they left, the creamery manager arrived—a big man with wide shoulders and a large, reddish face. He was voluble, affectionate. He touched people’s lapels, particularly women’s, and he was not shy about asking for a kiss. A few of the girls professed to have spurned him. The old maids, who mistrusted him, watched him when he left the creamery at half past five in the evening to see if he would go straight to his lodgings or across to the town to have a pint or two. They would lie in wait behind walls, or behind the windows of their sitting rooms. He rarely mentioned Bridget by name but referred to her as the Landlady, often adding how saucy she was, and what a terrific cook. He was especially fond of her lamb stew, which, as people said, was really mutton stew.
