by Edna O'Brien
Her son’s bride—an Emily, no less—proved to be moody, and insisted that she and her husband sit in the parlour alone after supper while Mother-in-Law commanded the kitchen. A dead husband had been a different matter. Vaults do not open. Graves do not burst their seams of clay and yield up a moving hand or a shinbone or even a gaze. To have a son, a darling son, on the other side of the varnished door, in her very own abode, and not be able to speak to him or hand him a mug of tea or consult him about next day’s weather was a cross that she felt she could not bear.
Eventually she would crawl up to bed and cry, through the bolster into the very ticking. More than once in the night she would get up and hold the chamber pot aslant so in the next room they would not be mindful of her indiscretion, because to her all bodily functions were an indiscretion. She heard raised voices most nights from that next room, and their unhappiness hurt her far more than their happiness could ever have. She thought that maybe she should intervene, and occasionally she murmured about the suitability of her own death, but had to admit to herself that she was not ready for it. Devout she may have been and stainless in soul, but she feared death. Who doesn’t? Don’t I? Don’t you?
So the poor woman listened night after night to the voices of the newlyweds and pondered. Sometimes she heard a door slam as if one or the other was on the point of leaving, and sometimes she heard silence, the sullen silence of two people awake but too proud to solicit forgiveness. Then again she heard tender voices, the meshing of limbs, the mew of the woman and the savage yodel of the man who in daylight was her mild son.
One rainy morning her son asked her if he could talk to her and he gestured to the front door.
“Mother of Jesus, he is going to evict me,” she said to herself as she followed, trying to gauge from the gait of his long spattered trenchcoat what his mood was. The hem of his coat was hanging, and she felt ashamed that she had not stitched it. They went to the hay shed, to be out of the rain, and as he leaned against the haystack he rolled a cigarette and said nothing. No melting words about parting being such sweet sorrow.
“Mother,” he said, and it was the very same as if her own dead mother had called her name and were about to rebuke her for having stolen a bun or only half milked a cow.
“Mother,” he said again.
“John,” she said, the tears welling up. Where would she go? She would have to live in a potato pit or take a room with some lonely neighbour.
“Emily’s upset,” he said.
“Oh,” she said, as if that were something that just could not be countenanced. “Is there anything I can do to help?”
Leaping to this friendly cue, he proceeded to tell her how insecure Emily felt, how banished, how it was no joke for Emily to leave Birmingham and bury herself in a mountainous swamp, in a bog. Worst of all, Emily felt herself to be an interloper, a mere lodger in the house where she ought to be mistress. Much more was said concerning Emily’s early life, her difficult boozing father, the sudden death by drowning of one of Emily’s sisters.
She had already in her mind given them the whole place, lock, stock, and barrel, and that night, when they had a friendly drink around the blazing fire, it was she who was the interloper in her own home. Though they drank each other’s health with homemade elder wine, she must have had some intimation that the next equinox she would be going down the road carrying a bag, two baskets, and an oil lamp.
She took lodgings in a house in a village nine miles away—a house with mildewed walls, so damp it was like a lime kiln; her fingers became like crooks, ludicrous prongs doubled over in prayer and still more prayer, as if her suffering were going to be efficacious, which it was not.
* * *
THERE CAME A DAY—don’t ask me when—that you returned. Quite by surprise. You were a bit wound up. You had had an argument with the powers that be over your position and you were full of combat. You ate all before you. Olives, salami, taramasalata. The fact that you were not eating bread gave you reason to suppose that you could eat everything else to excess.
“Always more,” you said ruefully, like a little boy, as you dunked a soup spoon of taramasalata onto a blade of chicory, then five or six more disks of Hungarian salami. It was sliced very thin, the specks of fat in it like crushed seed pearl. Then it was time to nestle, to come together. We had such a way with one another, so tender, like neighbouring icicles melting. But time had run out, your morning’s argument had kept you longer than you meant, and now you were due back at work, bells were summoning you, inner bells and outer ones. I was sitting, as it happened, on the top step of the staircase, on that short piece that joined two landings. It was high summer. We had a habit of moving about a lot, some sort of ruse so as not to oppress one another. You came out in your light-blue summer suit and you smiled and you said, “Do you want me to take you on the stairs?”
“Yes,” I said, simulating a brazenness, and you thought about it and decided that the time was too short and announced that you would come back on the morrow. I stayed in the same place, on the top step of that short flight of stairs, facing an opaque window that had a border of red stained glass, in which there were little birds and crescents, like jellies inside two spheres of liquid red. You never allowed me to see you out, lest we be spotted, lest you be compromised. Sometimes it rankled and sometimes it didn’t.
I raised the window up until the bottom half was level with the top, and through the lower space I looked out at summer, the tired, sunstruck, breathless air, the plane tree with both its foliage and its bobbins. I imagined biting on one of them, cracking the shell to get to the inner flesh, to get to the source, breaking my eyeteeth. Yes, there are times when we are not that far from the jungle. To calm myself I thought of something beautiful, virginal, and it was the white icing on a Christmas cake, a vast castellation, and I thought of the mother who fashioned it with her damp spatula, working on it to create valleys, peaks, a pinnacle to be gazed at, so beautiful that it cried out not to be eaten, and I wished that I had known you then. Ah yes, that was the rub of it—that we were children together from the beginning, the very beginning, and for all eternity.
You had left your tie. It sprawled over the back of the chair, resting on my white cardigan, two uneven tongues of blue spattered with black spots, and I looked at it with such conviction, as if you had just gone upstairs and were soon to come down again, discussing what we might do for dinner. I heard you. I did. I heard your footsteps. I thought maybe you had hidden or come in through the skylight, the way some lovers do to surprise the beloved. It was as bad as that.
* * *
DO YOU RECALL THE TIME I met you on a train by chance about a year later? You were with your children. You all ate heartily; you ate fried eggs and bacon and chips and washed it all down with plastic cups of coffee. Then you used the little plastic stirrer to pick your teeth as you pointed knowingly to a big house on a hill or a motorbike track or an oncoming train. Naturally we would not be staying together when we got to the destination, so I asked if there was a walk, a bracing walk where I could get rid of the city cobwebs. You warmed to this. You drew me a little picture. You said I was to take the ferry; I was to cross over to the next county, and on arrival I would come upon a beautiful domain which was open to the public. Your children sensed how interested in me you were because of your drawing the picture, because of your saying, “I’d be interested to know how you get on.”
I took the ferry next day. It was pouring with rain and there was a lashing wind. When I landed there was a tea shop cum antique shop, and I saw a little something that I yearned to give you. It was a ship within a bottle—an ivory ship encased in this bottle that seemed to have been rinsed in Reckitt’s blue. The shop was closed. I went up the garden path through the turnstiles and into the public gardens along with all the other tourists. The rain had ceased, but it was shivering cold. The daffodils were out, two kinds—the very yellow ones that look like butter and the whitish ones like milk. Their petals were pitiful. Childr
en were running in all directions, imagining this was their private garden, and grownups would stop in front of something to voice their admiration.
I felt a pang when I came on the house. A big house, majestic in its design. I recall it as being pink, but that may be a misconception. By pink I merely mean warm—a welcome, a glow. I fancied that you were up there waiting to receive me, while in fact I knew that you were elsewhere, with your children. They must have been surprised by your behaviour on the train, by your largesse. You threw money at them to go and get more eats. You were liberality itself. Showing both them and me how chivalrous you could be. A knight.
* * *
ANOTHER SEASON ALTOGETHER. Mellow ripeness, et cetera. The chestnuts shiny as an admiral’s boots, their undersides a wandering creamy colour. It was just coming up to Remembrance Day. I snatched the poppy from the lapel of your tweed coat and looked at it, its crinolined edges and its functional wire stalk, and then I put it on my mantel.
“You will have to get another,” I said.
“I’m afraid I still love you,” you said almost balefully, as if you were having to say it in front of a whole class.
“In your heart of hearts?” I asked, and you nodded. I don’t remember much else. We were sad and utterly understanding, the way people are in such situations. Ours was a small tragedy in comparison with the big ones, the world gone off the rails, righteous chants of madmen, rapine, pillage; ordinary mortals, feeling as insignificant as gnats. When you were leaving, you embraced me and you said, “A lot has been said, a lot has been said.” We left it at that.
* * *
ATROCIOUS SOLITUDES. Supermarkets on Sunday, each customer with his or her own purchase—a pack of strong brown ale, a twisting vermillion sausage, like a snake, two pork chops under cellophane. I went to get a stamp to send you a valentine. They didn’t sell stamps. “Maybe you would have one in the till,” I said to the girl.
“I said we don’t sell stamps,” she said. Pinched. Shrewish. White as an albino. No thought at all for anyone’s plight. You wouldn’t be taking her for a stroll down by the Salley Gardens. Do you ever take fancies to girls in shops?
* * *
THAT TIME I met you in a friend’s apartment was very odd, very unsettling. I got there before you. I brought big bunches of summer flowers—stock and sweet William, things like that. When I arrived, there was a smell of cats and cat pee that I shot to the three windows and opened them—so much so that the curtains, not snowy white, mark you, billowed into the room as if it were some theatre or opera house. Yet neither the breeze nor the flowers did anything to abate the horrible pong of cats. I imagined you noticing as you came through the door and thinking what Bolshie friends I had.
I agreed to meet you there because I had a team of builders refacing the outside of my crumbling house. For months I could not look out of the window without seeing a trouser leg or a face or a spattered overall, and I thought of you having to come there and feel compromised or spied upon. Anyhow I did not risk it. You came to the strange address. For once, you showed a bit of deference; in short, you did not comment on the smell or ask if there was someone in the other room. We talked politely, and then, at one moment, fearing that I was going to get up and go to you, to embrace you or something, you put your hand out and said, “Sit, stay sitting!” As if I would embrace you, not having done so for many a year. Yet when you were leaving we did cling to one another like two dying creatures—dying of what?
Still, I was glad that you were leaving. It is not that one cannot bear the parting; it is really that one cannot bear the meeting, because of so many constraints. I kept trying to form a picture of you in the armchair in which you sat, as a keepsake. You had your legs stretched forward and you were somehow defenceless, like a warrior home from battle who has thrown all his armour at his feet. I could feel my heart going pitapat, pitapat while I was making so-called sensible conversation. I was going away. Far away. I was busy telling you, and myself, what a good thing it was, a golden opportunity. You took down numbers, the various numbers where I would be. It was understood that we might meet in that other country. Might. You were dashing off to buy a wedding present for someone who was going overseas to marry. I suggested a print, a print of Big Ben or the Thames or something historic. Meanwhile, I had that picture of you in my mind, my secret Odysseus returned from his wandering, reunited with his wife, his retinue, his dog. We said goodbye, three or four or five times; we clung, we fumbled for words. To think that it happened as cleanly as that.
WHAT A SKY
THE CLOUDS—dark, massed, and purposeful—raced across the sky. At one moment a gap appeared, a vault of blue so deep it looked like a cavity into which one could vanish, but soon the clouds swept across it like trailing curtains, removing it from sight. There were showers on and off—heavy showers—and in some fields the water had lodged in shallow pools where the cows stood impassively, gaping. The crows were incorrigible. Being inside the car, she could not actually hear their cawing, but she knew it very well and remembered how long ago she used to listen and try to decipher whether it denoted death or something more blithe.
As she mounted the granite steps of the nursing home, her face, of its own accord, folded into a false, obedient smile. A few old people sat in the hall, one woman praying on her big black horn rosary beads and a man staring listlessly through the long rain-splashed window, muttering, as if by his mutters he could will a visitor, or maybe the priest, to give him the last rites. One of the women tells her that her father has been looking forward to her visit and that he has to come to the front door several times. This makes her quake, and she digs her fingernails into her palms for fortitude. As she crosses the threshold of his little bedroom, the first question he fires at her is “What kept you?” and very politely she explains that the car ordered to fetch her from her hotel was a little late in arriving.
“I was expecting you two hours ago,” he says. His mood is foul and his hair is standing on end, tufts of grey hair sprouting like Lucifer’s.
“How are you?” she says.
He tells her that he is terrible and complains of a pain in the back from the shoulder down, a pain like the stab of a knife. She asks if it is rheumatism. He says how would he know, but whatever it is, it is shocking, and to emphasize his discomfort he opens his mouth and lets out a groan. The first few minutes are taken up with showing him the presents that she has brought, but he is too disgruntled to appreciate them. She coaxes him to try on the pullover, but he won’t. Suddenly he gets out of bed and goes to the lavatory. The lavatory adjoins the bedroom; it is merely a cupboard with fittings and fixtures. She sits in the overheated bedroom listening, while trying not to listen. She stares out of the opened window; the view is of a swamp, while above, in a pale untrammelled bit of whey-coloured sky, the crows are flying at different altitudes and cawing mercilessly. They are so jet they look silken, and listening to them, while trying not to listen to her father, she thinks that if he closes the lavatory door perhaps all will not be so awful; but he will not close the lavatory door and he will not apologize. He comes out with his pajamas streeling around his legs, his walk impaired as he goes towards the bed, across which his lunch tray has been slung. His legs like candles, white and spindly, foreshadow her own old age, and she wonders with a shudder if she will end up in a place like this.
“Wash your hands, Dad,” she says as he strips the bedcovers back. There is a second’s balk as he looks at her, and the look has the dehumanized rage of a trapped animal, but for some reason he concedes and crosses to the little basin and gives his hands, or rather his right hand, a cursory splash. He dries it by laying the hand on the towel that hangs at the side of the basin. It is a towel that she recognizes from home—dark blue with orange splashes. Even this simple recollection pierces: she can smell the towel, she can remember it drying on top of the range, she can feel it without touching it. The towel, like every other item in that embattled house, has got inside her brain and remained the
re like furniture inside a room. The white cyclamen that she has brought is staring at her, the flowers like butterflies and the tiny buds like pencil tips, and it is this she obliges herself to see in order to generate a little cheerfulness.
“I spent Christmas Day all by myself.”
“No, Dad, you didn’t,” she says, and reminds him that a relative came and took him out to lunch.
“I tell you, I spent Christmas Day all by myself,” he says, and now it is her turn to bristle.
“You were with Agatha. Remember?” she says.
“What do you know about it?” he says, staring at her, and she looks away, blaming herself for having lost control. He follows her with those eyes, then raises his hands up like a suppliant. One hand is raw and red. “Eczema,” he says almost proudly. The other hand is knobby, the fingers bunched together in a stump. He says he got that affliction from foddering cattle winter after winter. Then he tells her to go to the wardrobe. There are three dark suits, some tweed jackets, and a hideous light-blue gabardine that a young nun made him buy before he went on holiday to a convent in New Mexico. He praises this young nun, Sister Declan, praises her good humour, her buoyant spirit, her generosity, and her innate sense of sacrifice. As a young girl, it seems, this young nun preferred to sit in the kitchen with her father, devising possible hurley games, or discussing hurley games that had been, instead of gallivanting with boys. He mentions how the nun’s father died suddenly, choked to death while having his tea, but he shows no sign of pity or shock, and she thinks that in some crevice of his scalding mind he believes the nun has adopted him, which perhaps she has. The young nun has recently been sent away to the same convent in New Mexico, and the daughter thinks that perhaps it was punishment, perhaps she was getting too fond of this lonely, irascible man. No knowing.
