by Edna O'Brien
* * *
WHEN I RETURNED to London, it was the ice zones. You looked so self-contained; like a cat, but with quick, close-to-flinching blue eyes that reminded me of aluminum before it is exposed to the weather. While I had been in Greece, you had been with your family in Arizona. You were going to be travelling, you said, first to one place, then another. You had never before discussed your travels. As you sat in my airy room, I asked myself a few predictably base questions. Even as you were making idle conversation about the low humidity in Arizona or the horseback riding that had so relaxed you, I was imagining a little scenario. Perhaps on one of those languid evening rides you saw the woman you were married to in a new light, a little ahead of you on her horse, sauntering, in a dun corduroy outfit, her silhouette a representation of peace and maternity. You saw her and you were suddenly filled with a rekindling of your original love. Suddenly our love seemed too hectic, too feverish. I imagined that you gave yourself a bit of a talking-to, early one morning, by a canyon, and that maybe a friend was with you, a male friend, telling you to count your blessings, be thankful for what you had. A blast of sobriety took hold of you and God only knows how many resolutions you made. You had turned the corner. Life was going to be simple, wholesome. I laughed, and finding me laughing, you cheered up somewhat, believing that I was not going to put my clutches on you. We kissed and embraced and so forth. Upon leaving, you had the audacity to warn me to be good.
When you left, I marched and marched about my room, uncontainable. I thought of a paddock from my childhood, a rectangular paddock with a stone wall around it. Some of the stones had been capsized, because horses were put in there for their daily bout of air—young wild unruly horses that would tramp and tramp, running from one corner to another, berserk, whinnying. This little paddock merely gave them the longing and the incentive to break loose, to get to the larger fields beyond. I saw the paddock and even the odd bit of flaking mortar that was put there to try to weld the loose stones together. I saw the hawthorn in blossom, pink and white lozenges on the spiky black branches. My own room, with its Prussian-blue walls, was like a tomb—a tomb that I wanted to break out of, except that I did not know how.
* * *
AFTER THAT DAY, I don’t know when I next saw you. It was months and months. You called on me, but you were curt, condescending. You had sprained your back and rather waspishly referred to swinging from chandeliers. I knew that a few bitter regrets had possessed you, because you looked racked. You were like those rich city cousins who come to the country one day a year and ask the locals so-called solicitous questions but are already tapping their watches to make sure not to miss the last train. Yet you were softening, showing some ardour, complimenting me. I must have responded too willingly, because all of a sudden you stepped back and announced that we would not be lovers any longer. You did not rule it out to the end of our days, but rule it out you did for the present and the foreseeable future. I felt an odd stab of pity at the way you could so readily restrain yourself. What were we now but ghosts in our lonely cerements? Yet, I knew that it was not over, that another level had been reached.
* * *
I HAD A DREAM OF YOU. It must have been to do with your promotion, that “poisoned chalice,” as you called it, but I could see that you were gleeful about it. You had always felt some of your superiors to be hollow, and had no compunction about saying so. Fearless. On the crest. Unstoppable. You reminded me of a dead relative of mine, a man like you, upright, who ached to be a worldly hero even though his hidden nature was rather mystic.
In the dream you are going to be performing in a play and, as always, you are surrounded. It is in a quadrangle, and I am watching blind girls being led by a bigger blind girl. I have a word with her and she tells me about the play, and adds that she has put my name down to play one of the ghosts. Is it Hamlet, I wonder. I say to myself that inevitably I will be there as a ghost. Then you all file in, you and your entourage, and I run up to a gallery to hide, so as not to embarrass you. It is both church and theatre. There are banners, torches, and a beautiful golden hanging lamp to denote the presence of Christ in the tabernacle. Suddenly there is a clamour, an uproar, shouts of men fighting and scuffling, people saying “No, no,” and presently a man is being dragged out and laid on the aisle. He is your enemy and has been pasting you. Soon he gets up and goes towards the altar, where you are presiding, and he and you have a confab. Perhaps you are trying to make your peace with him. Your eyes are all that I can see, because of your face being lowered. Your poor eyes, they register such strain, such concern, and they are brown rather than blue.
* * *
I RANG YOU just before Christmas. That time when all sorts of sentiments well up. I had the mistaken idea that you might yield, that you might even call on me, and I saw you, oh what idiocy, carrying a branch of mistletoe. The phone call lasted no more than sixty seconds. You had to go.
Across London, celebrations were rife, and I was included in one or two of them, as, indeed, were you. I went to a party—more correct to say I hobbled to a party—and learned that you were at another party with your family, holding hands, eating mince pie, singing carols. I was the unlucky recipient of this information because one of the guests, an unctuous and meddlesome man, had just come from that party and told all and sundry that you were a lot more agreeable than he had imagined. You have, of course, the reputation of being ruthless and possessed of a vaulting ambition.
Later that night, very late, sodden with wine and grief, I looked through a telephone directory for your home number and was dialling it when I happened to be saved by my son, returning from yet another party. Although he did not mention that I was doing something for which I would be ashamed, he conveyed it by coming stealthily into the room and standing there and making some little conversation about a Christmas Eve when we took a holiday sleigh ride in the snow and sang and asked riddles and were regaled by starry air and the crispness of the dry snow smarting under the runners of the sleigh. Christmases are buggers.
I remember another Christmas altogether, when you and I talked on the telephone and you mentioned that your children were so excited with the prospect of presents and overseas visitors that you had to give them aspirin.
“We had to give them aspirin,” you said. “We.” I honestly thought that, with your expertise, you could have come up with something more effective. Anyhow, the night I dialled half of your number was one of those nights that one gets through without knowing how. I call them dead nights, since there is no memory whatsoever of undressing or getting into bed, or drinking from a carafe of water, or dreaming, or howling, or anything.
On Boxing Day, my son drove me a hundred miles to a clairvoyant in Gloucestershire. There was a blinding snowstorm, and encased in his little black sports car I felt—indeed, welcomed the notion—that we might skitter off the road. It was not that I wanted us dead but, rather, I wanted to be taken to another realm. Anyhow, we were lucky, because whenever we skittered we were saved by a grass bank or a gate or a demesne wall. Each time we escaped disaster we ate a boiled sweet as a sort of celebration. The plan was that while I saw this woman who was somehow going to pull out my pain as deftly as the midwife lifts out the slippery child, my son was going to drive in search of some beauties whom he knew, and afterwards he would fetch me to their home and we would have tea and plum cake and cinnamon toast. Comfort. Bliss. Three daughters he knew, and each had something particular and engaging about her. One worked as a florist; one bought and sold Oriental carpets and was a wanderer; one had an infectious laugh that was sometimes like a jennet’s and sometimes like a nanny goat’s.
“We might even stay the night,” he said, having a twofold thought—one the pleasure of such an event and the other the glaring fact that we were taking our lives in our hands by being out at all. There was a certain bravura in the way he went with the skids, allowing the car, like a willful animal, to pursue its own course and then patting the steering wheel when things settled dow
n again. Madness. Madness.
The clairvoyant told me that you would have been scornful of my childish nature. By saying “would have” she already put you in the past tense, a goner. She told me incidental things—something about a maypole, a bridesmaid’s bouquet, and the name of an English town where I had never set foot. As it happened, the beauties were unable to receive us, having a house chockablock with friends and cousins from all over the country; even the nursery was full up. We had tea in the hotel in the market square. The lounge, as they called it, was quite crowded. Families with their relatives; some of them in wheelchairs, others quite listless. There was a huge oil painting on the wall depicting hunters togged in brown coats, their dogs beside them. I was able to stare at a pointer with long liver-coloured ears and two retrievers who by their gums and gnashed teeth showed their naked relish. The pointer had a cruel flexed gaze in his eye. The prone feathered birds scattered about were like the thoughts within my head.
* * *
THAT CHRISTMAS PASSED, and the next, and the next, and so on, for I don’t know how many years. Someone told me that he saw you at a Midnight Mass in the country looking very handsome, whereas you yourself had told me you were going to the Canaries with your family to get some sun. One doesn’t know whom to believe. It got to be that any mention of you sent me dashing to other latitudes.
I went to Rumania to a spa that was also a hotel. Small bedrooms, each with a concrete terrace, adjoined other bedrooms and other terraces, where at the weekends Rumanians drowned their sullenness by drinking well into the night. Not a yodel or a ballad or even a refrain. On Sunday, lumpen women sitting in the lobby looking out at a few low rosebushes. A young girl asked me if I would give her my walking shoes and was piqued to learn that I would not. She kept pestering me. Another young girl asked me to buy her a bottle of whiskey. It was for the doctor who had delivered her baby.
Starvation inside and out. I had such a disgust towards the food—minced meat of some kind, with cabbage and scarcely boiled eggs—and this, mark you, was hotel fare. God only knows what the poor wretches ate in their own kitchens.
Not a single smile except on a poster, and then it was fairly unconvincing—a buxom woman in a bolero with more a crease than a smile. One evening there was a Gypsy orchestra in the dining room, and as each Gypsy came and sawed Strauss from his violin he whispered a request for a cigarette or a drink. Their wives had stationed themselves at the end of the dining room, fearing perhaps that their men would be wooed by some foreign nymphomaniac.
Each morning I had an injection which was supposed to rejuvenate me. Yes, I had you in mind when I went there. The rest of the day one was left to one’s own devices. I would walk through the grounds, past a tennis court to a little allotment, where I was lured by the sight of a few vegetables and one small clump of white-and-lilac phlox that had the most startling effect, like flowers despatched from the moon. There was a woman working there, tending the vegetables, but she always dashed into her little hut when I appeared, determined to avoid me. She had in all about a kilo of tomatoes that were changing from green to red, nuggets of edible amber. She also had a few zucchini lying limply on their stalks, and several ridges of potatoes. The cabbages had been cut off; only the stumps were left. Alongside, there were other allotments, and on Sundays their owners would come and sit between their bits of vegetation and have a sort of picnic. I don’t know why, but I was drawn back there day after day. Her incarceration made my own seem ridiculous, but love is a prison, too, according to the sages.
On my last day but one, when I went there I offered the woman my blue folding umbrella. She looked at me through her thick-lensed glasses as if I were mad and then ran into her little hut and pushed the door to—a wooden door, the wood the colour of a donkey. I did something quite silly; I opened the umbrella and put it inside the fence on the cindered path. A picture of absurdity—a bright-blue umbrella with little golliwogs on its perimeter.
* * *
THERE ARE THOSE who either wittingly or unwittingly try to make me forget you, scrap you. For instance, at lunch yesterday a friend went to great lengths to describe a painting which she felt I ought to see. It depicted a woman, probably a personable woman, sitting and waiting for someone, while at the margin of the painting stands a man, a suitor, whom she cannot or does not notice. My friend tried to tell me in all good faith how I was wasting my life by waiting. We were in a restaurant; she and her husband were visiting London and had invited a few friends for lunch. She said that when she married him she did it only as a stopgap, until Mr. Right came along. Now she loved him as if he were Mr. Right, which he was. She was wearing pearls and knobbled pearl earrings and she had grey-blue eyes. A pearled light issued from her, and it was like looking into one of those paperweights that are filled with falling snow.
She was trying to jolt me. She pointed to the surroundings—the lacquered walls, the potted palms, the mélange of people—and she said, “Look, they’re out there, lots of them. Just grab one of them while there’s still time.” I looked. There were all kinds of people—young families, lovers, not-so-young women with hats and sultry makeup, and Oriental waiters trying in vain to answer the several demands of the hungry lunchtime throngs. All I could say to her was that if I had to wait for you, which I had, then wait I would.
“Bullshit,” she said, but in a friendly way.
She tried to buoy me up by suggesting ways we could make money—the jewellery business, for instance, or a wine bar. That was another thing. I had been improvident in waiting for you, buying fal-lals and all that, even buying a watercolour that I thought you would like. A doorway in Venice suspended above the canal.
“I want you to be happy,” she said. Her husband ate quickly and then she wanted him to eat the remainder of her lunch. He refused. She kept begging him and proffering forkfuls of mashed Dover sole.
“Please,” he said, and blushed like an altar boy. She kept insisting. I thought he was going to leave.
You see, everyone is holding on. Just. If their skins were peeled off, or their chest bones opened, they would literally burst apart.
* * *
OF COURSE I heeded what the woman in the restaurant had said. I began to ask myself why I waited. I thought that maybe it was something to do with my ancestors, one female ancestor in particular, some kind of expiation towards her. Are you like that? You once mentioned to me that you admired some Turkish warrior who achieved renown before he was thirty, but that was when you were young, bombastic.
She was a Bridget. An aunt. In my supplication I’m a bit like her. She wore knitted things, even knitted stockings, and I think she possessed one Sunday coat throughout her whole life. She was a widow at thirty, her husband having been shot by the Black and Tans. To make matters worse, her husband was partly on the side of the foe, since he worked for the constabulary and was something of a scab. Things get very twisted in this world, don’t they; nothing is clear-cut. There he was blown to bits by the foe and yet not a hero, not a man for whom a ballad would be made up, or whose tragic fate would be an inspiration for other young men. Bitter. Bitter. She didn’t have a little row of medals on a cloth tab to show to her son, or a letter from a dignitary to put in a frame. Anyhow, she carried on, saved the hay, fed the suckling calves, milked, churned, and was even so good-tempered as to make beautiful patterns out of the butter and to adorn the surfaces with little peaks, a tour de force. Each night, after reciting the Rosary, she spoke tenderly—nay, erotically—to her dead husband. She cared for her son, brushed the nap of his fawn coat to make it smooth again, saved the leather buttons that fell off a sleeve for a future emergency, made jam, plum and greengage, the latter being a great novelty.
Food was her little indulgence, her sin. Each night, after the Rosary and the paeans to her beloved, she made hot milk, to which she added sugar, and then she dunked bits of loaf bread in the milk and sucked and sucked as if she were sucking the bread of life. When she retired to bed she carried her china chamber
pot up the stairs, and went to sleep and dreamed no doubt of things bad and good: her kine, the pet names she had given them, and the one tree of greengages—the green, she once envisaged, like globes clinging to an oval stone.
Other women complained of hallucinations or pulled down their bloomers on the chapel road, but not her; she kept toiling and moiling, she crooned, she forked the steaming manure onto the heap and with buckets of rainwater washed out the mangers. When her son went to college, she wept, wrote the weekly letter, and at Halloween sent a parcel containing apples, nuts, and her specialty, porter cake. She fretted over how to pay the fees and paid them somehow, in fits and starts. Then catastrophe struck. Her animals contracted foot-and-mouth disease and died, their legs buckling under them, slobber oozing from their mouths. Neighbours rallied with jugs of milk and a flitch of pork or bacon when they killed a pig, but to her what was worst of all was the deserted farmyard—not even a goose or a little pullet to keep her company, nothing but empty outbuildings, a hay shed gapingly empty, a dairy smelling of disinfectant, the churn idle, a silence that grated on her second by second.
But joy comes to all. Joy came to her when years later her son decided to come home from England and bring back his bride. It was as if she herself were embarking on marriage as she prepared for the great event. She made a straw hat and decked it with clusters of artificial violets, dusted over with a haze of white, making them look like real violets that had just had their first coat of frost. God knows where she got them. At the wedding she drank sherry and in a high quavering soprano voice sang “My Cottage Home by Lough Sheelin’s Side.” Not the most suitable song for a joyous occasion—a dirge, really—but the guests, or at least some of them, were as happy to cry as to laugh. They swallowed their tears with the same relish as the thin beef-tea soup. It was not a Type A breakfast; more a Type D or E.
