Lantern Slides

by Edna O'Brien

  * * *

  SOON THE CREAMERY MANAGER, whose name was Michael, acquired a steady girlfriend called Mea. Mea was a bank clerk from the city, and she came in her car at weekends and stayed two nights. He would splash himself with eau de cologne on the evenings she was expected, and was to be seen traipsing in front of the house, so eager was he to see her. They never kissed on the steps but always went inside and left some of the local snoopers, especially the women, demented with curiosity as to what happened next. She could, as Bridget told the shopkeeper, who then told it to everyone else, twist Michael around her little finger. She was subject, it seemed, to the most fitful moods—sometimes bright as a hummingbird, other times professing to have a headache or a sinus or a stomachache, and refusing even to speak to him. Once, she locked herself in her bedroom and did not come out for the whole evening. She ate like a bird, bleached her hair with egg yolk and lemon, and cut a great dash at Mass or devotions, always managing to have a different hat or a different headscarf each Sunday. It was noticed that she hardly prayed at all—that she looked around, summing up the people, sneering at them—and that she was not certain when were the times to stand and when were the times to kneel, but would look around to gauge what others were doing.

  “Ah, it’s her sweet mystery … her sweet mystery,” Michael had told Bridget, who had told the shopkeeper, who had, of course, told others. Before long, Mea and Michael were engaged, and Mea was coming not only two nights a week but three nights a week, and driving all around with him to see if there were any uninhabited houses or bungalows, because of course they would want their own place. Each week, as well, she bought some item of furniture, usually something bulky—a mirror or a wardrobe or a whatnot or a bureau—and he was heard to say that she was furniture mad. In jest he would ask the men why he was putting a rope around his neck.

  They were to be married in June, but one evening early in May there was a rift. Michael broke it off. It happened at the hotel, just as the crowd was wishing them well and making innuendos about the patter of little feet. Michael was very drunk—his drinking had got heavy over the past few weeks—and suddenly he turned to Mea and said, very candidly and almost tearfully, that he could not go through with it. She was to keep the ring; he wanted everything to end in good faith. She slapped him, there and then, three times on the cheek in front of everyone. “How dare you,” she said with the acerbity of a governess, and then she ran out and he followed, and soon they drove off down the Shannon Road—no doubt to patch things up, as people said. But Michael was adamant. The engagement was broken off.

  She left that night, and Michael hid for three days. He went back to the creamery, drawn and unshaven, and on that Friday he learned of her suit for breach of promise by reading of it in the weekly newspaper. There were photos of him and Mea, mention of some little lovey-dovey exchanges, and even a photo of Bridget, who Mea said had had too much influence over him and was probably responsible for the rift. Mea also talked about her broken heart, the several plans she had made, the house that she envisaged, the little rose garden, then discussed her bottom drawer, which was full of linen and lavender sachets and so on. Above all, she bemoaned the fact that her romantic future with any other man was out of the question; in short, that her life was destroyed. Michael received a solicitor’s letter, consulted his local solicitor, and was said to have paid her a hefty compensation. Then he went on the batter for a few weeks and was carted to the Cistercian monastery, and finally came home looking thinner and much more subdued. “A gold digger, a gold digger, that’s what she was,” Bridget would say whenever Mea’s name was mentioned, and in time the matter was forgotten.

  * * *

  IT WAS PERCEIVED—first by the postmistress, then by another woman, who spoke about it to several others—that Bridget and the creamery manager were flirting openly. Soon after, they were seen holding hands as they took a walk down the Chapel Road after Benediction. They had lingered in the chapel, allowing the others to leave. It was the sacristan who saw them, and ran and told it in the town, once she had recovered from her fright. People asked if she was certain, or if she had not imagined it. “That I may drop dead if it’s not true,” she said, putting her hand to the grey wool cardigan that covered her sunken bosom.

  The inappropriateness of this was more than they could stomach. After all, she was a widow, and she was a woman in her forties, who ought to know better. Neighbours began to watch more carefully, especially at night, to see how many lights went on in the upstairs rooms—to see if they had separate bedrooms or were living in mortal sin. The less censorious said it was a flash in the pan and soon he would have another beauty in tow, so that all, all were flabbergasted the morning Bridget stood in the doorway of the shop and announced her engagement. To prove it, a lozenge of blue shimmered on her finger, and her eyes were dancing as the people gaped at her.

  Before long, Bridget bought a car, and Michael gave her driving lessons on the Dock Road, the very road where her husband had walked to his death. Michael stopped soliciting young girls, even the young buttermaker in the creamery, and told strangers how happy he was, and that up to now all the women he had known were mere bonbons, and that this was It.

  Her happiness was too much for people to take; they called her a hussy, they predicted another breach of promise, they waited for the downfall. Some of the older women went to the parish priest about it, but when they arrived the parish priest was in such a grump about the contributions towards a new altar that he told them to pull their socks up and try to raise money by selling cakes and jellies and things at a bazaar. He suspected why they had come, because the creamery manager had gone to him alone, and stayed an hour, and no doubt gave him a substantial offering for Masses.

  To put a good complexion on the engagement period, a youngster was brought to Bridget’s house from the country, a boy so daft that he dug up the tubers of the irises in mistake for onions—in short, no chaperon. They were to be married in December, which left Bridget two months to pack up her job and prepare her trousseau. She was always to be seen flying in her red car now, a menace to pedestrians and cattle that strayed on the roadside. To ingratiate herself, as they said, she offered people lifts to the city, or offered to do errands for them. Some, being weak, accepted these favours, but not the diehards. A few of the men, it is true, praised her, said what spunk she had. She was much older than Michael, and moreover, she had got him off the booze; he drank only wine now—table wine.

  A week before the wedding, the pair went to the local pub, which they had got out of the habit of doing, and stood drinks to everyone. The shopkeeper, proposing the toast, said he knew that Biddy and Michael had everyone’s blessing. People clapped, then someone sang. Then Biddy, being a little tipsy, tapped her glass with her engagement stone and said she was going to give a little recitation. Without further ado, she stood up, smiled that sort of urchin smile of hers, ran her tongue over her lips, another habit, and recited a poem entitled “People Will Talk.” It was a lunge at all those mischievous, withered people who begrudged her her little flourish. It may have been—indeed, many people said that it was—this audacious provocation that wreaked the havoc of the next weeks. Had she confided in a few local women, she might have been saved, but she did not confide; she stood aloof with her man, her eyes gleaming, her happiness assured.

  * * *

  IT NEVER CAME TO LIGHT who exactly had begun it, but suddenly the word went round, the skeleton that had been lurking for years—that her husband had not drowned by accident, he had taken his own life. His predicament, it was said, was so grinding that he saw no way out of it. He went down to the docks that evening, after yet another hideous row with her, pen and paper in his pocket, and wrote his farewell note. It was in his trousers pocket before they handed it to her. Why else had she roared for three days, they asked, and why was she unfit to attend her own husband’s funeral or the High Mass? Why else did she recover so soon but that she was a wicked, heartless harlot? The creamery man
ager, they predicted, would be a scapegoat once the marriage vows were exchanged. First one person whispered it, then another, and then another; the story slipped from house to house, from mouth to mouth, and before long it reached Bridget’s appalled ears. As if that were not shock enough, she received one morning an anonymous letter saying that her husband-to-be would know of her skeleton shortly. She flung the letter into the stove, then tried in vain to retrieve it. Luckily, Michael was still upstairs, asleep in his own room. It was then that she made her first mistake—she ran around trying to bribe people, asking them not to mention this terrible rumour, not to tell the creamery manager, for God’s sake not to tell. The more she tried to quash the talk, the more people concluded her guilt. She lost all composure. She could be seen in her bare feet or in her nightgown running up the road to meet the postman, to ward off any other dreadful bulletins.

  After that morning, she dared not let Michael go anywhere alone, in case someone told him. She knew, or at least clung to the belief, that no one at work would risk telling him, for fear of being fired on the spot. But in the street or on the way to Mass or at the pub—these were the danger zones, and for weeks she followed him everywhere, so that he began to show signs of impatience and said that she was a hairy Molly, clinging to him. Her looks, which had improved since the engagement, took a turn for the worse, and she was what she once had been—a scraggy older woman, with thin hair and skin that was much too yellow.

  Michael saw that she was distraught, but did not understand it. It seems he told the young buttermaker that his missus had got the jitters and the sooner they got married the better. Even while he was saying this, his missus-to-be was grasping at any straw. She confided in the shopkeeper, who advised her to tell Michael, but she broke down and even flared up, mistrusting her one friend. “Why not take the bull by the horns and tell him straight out?” he had said. She couldn’t. He would jilt her. Had he not already jilted a younger and comelier girl, and was she, Bridget, not haunted by that same prospect? It was then that she remembered the old woman who had lived across the road from her husband and herself and had later moved back to the country. She would go to find this woman, who would swear that she had never heard a voice raised, and that in fact Bridget and her first husband used to sit on the sun porch in the evening, among the geraniums and the begonias, whispering, holding hands, canoodling.

  * * *

  THEN A LITTLE RESPITE CAME. Michael decided to go home to his own folks for a week, and that was a godsend. They would then meet in Limerick, with a small sprinkling of relatives, and there they would be married in the Augustinian church. One of the friars was a friend of Michael’s, and he had already made the arrangements. Because of the breach-of-promise episode, it was going to be a very hushed-up affair.

  Before leaving, Michael tackled her. He sat her in the little armchair by the kitchen stove, where they had often, so often, joked and cuddled. He asked her if perhaps she was having second thoughts about things, if perhaps she did not love him. Her eyes filled up with tears. She said, “No, no, Michael … no.” She was so in love, she confessed, that she was afraid that it would go wrong. Then he kissed her and reproved her for being a daft little hen of a woman, and they waltzed around the kitchen, promising things that they would do when they were married, like putting a skylight in the kitchen, and getting a new range so that she did not have to dirty her fingers with the ashes and clinkers. He loved her little hands, he said, and he kissed them. “Num, num,” he said, as if he were eating them, as if they were jam tarts.

  As she told the shopkeeper later, they had a blissful farewell. He tried to coax out of her what she was planning to wear at the wedding, but she sang dumb. “I sang dumb,” she said, and described how she ran upstairs to get the old fox collar, with its little foxy snout and beady eyes, and threatened him with it, went “Yap, yap, yap.” They played hide-and-seek, they laughed, they teased one another, but on no account would she allow him into the room where her trousseau was stored—her voile gown and her satin shoes, and her piles of new undies, and the fleecy bed jacket. Their farewell was so tender that Michael even debated if he should cancel his journey. “God blast it, I’m over twenty-one,” he said. But she persuaded him to go, insisted. She knew it was essential that he be away from this place, where any mischief-maker could say, “I believe your intended wife drove her first husband to his death.” She could not risk it. There was something about Michael, although she never told him this, that reminded her of her first husband: They were both childlike and affectionate, and they both had gruff tempers but were quick to apologize—to lay a bar of chocolate or a hanky on the pillow as an appeasement. She loved them in much the same way—the same gushing, bubbly, childish way that she had loved at twenty—and miraculously, her love was reciprocated.

  * * *

  THE DAY AFTER HE LEFT, Bridget set out to see the old woman. She was cheerful in the town when she stopped to buy petrol. She even told the young attendant that she was thinking of throwing a party, and asked if he would like to come. “Deffo” was what he claimed to have said.

  No one of us ever knew what ensued with the old woman, because it was on the way back that it happened. It was a treacherous bit of road, always known to be; it twisted, then straightened, then forked suddenly and ridged under a thick canopy of beech trees. Lorries and cars had crashed there so often that people said there was a curse on that stretch. A witch had once lived nearby—a witch who defied the hierarchy and concocted pagan cures from herbs. People wondered if the aftermath of this witch was not the cause of all these disasters, and holy water had been sprinkled there many a time by the priests.

  It was after dark when the accident happened. Bridget had gone to the old woman, and afterwards had gone to a hotel in the nearest town and treated herself to a drink. It may have been that she went to the hotel to celebrate, to taste for the first time the joy, as well as the certainty, of her future. Maybe the old woman had said, “I’ll tell them how happy you and Bill were,” or had cried, remembering that other time, when she was not old, when she did not have cataracts in her eyes, when the nice young couple invited her across the road for a glass of stout or a cup of tea. Or maybe the old woman had forgotten almost everything and just shook and stared. Whatever took place was never known, but in the hotel where Bridget drank the gin-and-lime and bought the crisps she chattered with the owner and asked him for his card, saying that she would be coming back there with her husband for a dinner. The locality, she said, was lucky for her, and she felt she owed it a little recompense. Half an hour later, she was around a tree, the car up on its hind legs, like an animal, her face on the dashboard, askew, her eyes wide open.

  Some workmen who had been tarring the road heard the screech of the crash, and ran from a little caravan where they were cooking supper. None of them knew her. Two stayed while the third went to the lodge of a big house to ask to use the telephone. The woman in the gate lodge was a bit strange and did not want to let them in, so they had to go up to the big house, and quite a long time passed before the ambulance and the guards came. But the consensus was that she had died on the spot. She was brought back to the local hospital, where a young nurse laid her out in white. The mourners who came the next day were surprised, even aghast, that her face was so beautifully smooth, without cuts or gashes. It was makeup, they claimed, perfect makeup, and what a scandalous thing to adorn a corpse.

  Michael knelt beside her and roared intemperately, as she had once roared, leaving no one in doubt that he loved her passionately. At the grave he tried to talk to her, tried to stop them from lowering the coffin. He knew everything now; he knew her plight and was helpless to do anything about it. She had quite a large funeral, but beneath the prayers and the murmurs were the whispers of how drunk she had been when she got into that car. They said her face had been disfigured, but that some silly nurse had made her look presentable, had doctored the truth, sent her to her Maker with this monstrous camouflage—some chit of a nurse, as
dissolute as Bridget herself had been.

  EPITAPH

  WHEN FIRST I MET YOU I thought it too good to be true. I was incredulous when I found that you, too, were smitten. You would ring me up and ask what I was wearing. You were espoused to satin and to velvet. Other times you would ring up and put the phone down, just to hear my voice. You probably thought it was a mere lark. One does think that, as a precaution. But you were lost and you knew it.

  It was on a Greek island that I began to have some premonition of your slipping away from me. It was there I felt most permeated by you, even though you were absent. I hid. If people called, or threatened to call, I locked the door that led to the garden, and hence the house, and I lay on one of the straw mats and imagined I was holding you, hour after hour, cradling you, conversing, subject to the most eerie intimacy, as if you had come to rest in the roost of my mind, like a hen at night folded up in its own feathers. There were boats in the harbour, boats festooned with fairy lights and furled with flowers; there were dawns, blistering heat, golden evenings, a medley of stars, yet through them all I lay and basked and rocked back and forth to both the absence and the certainty of you.