by Edna O'Brien
“A great girl, the best friend I ever had,” he says. Wedged among the suits in the cupboard is the dark frieze coat that belongs to the bygone days, to his youth. Were she to put her hand in a pocket, she might find an old penny or a stone that he had picked up on his walks, the long walks he took to stamp out his ire. He says to look in the beige suitcase, which she does. It is already packed with belongings, summer things, and gallantly he announces that he intends to visit the young nun again, to make the journey across the sea, telling how he will probably arrive in the middle of the night, as he did before, and Sister Declan and a few of the others will be waiting inside the convent gate to give him a regal welcome.
“I may not even come back,” he says boastfully. On the top shelf of the wardrobe are various pairs of socks, and handkerchiefs—new handkerchiefs and torn ones—empty whiskey bottles, and two large framed photographs. He tells her to hand down one of those photographs, and for the millionth time she looks at the likeness of his mother and father. His mother seems formidable, with a topknot of curls, and a white laced bodice that even in the faded photograph looks like armour. His father, who is seated, looks meeker and more compliant.
“Seven years of age when I lost my mother and father, within a month of each other,” he says, and his voice is now like gravel. He grits his teeth.
What would they have made of him, his daughter wonders. Would their love have tamed him? Would he be different? Would she herself be different?
“Was it very hard?” she asks, but without real tenderness.
“Hard? What are you talking about?” he says. “To be brought out into a yard and put in a pony and trap and dumped on relations?”
She knows that were she to really feel for him she would enquire about the trap, the cushion he sat on, if there was a rug for his knees, what kind of coat he wore, and the colour of his hair then; but she does not ask these things. “Did they beat you?” she asks, as a form of conciliation.
“You were beaten if you deserved it,” he says, and goes on to talk about their rancour and how he survived it, how he developed his independence, how he found excitement and sport in horses and was a legend even as a young lad for being able to break any horse. He remembers his boarding school and how he hated it, then his gadding days, then when still young—too young, he adds—meeting his future wife, and his daughter knows that soon he will cry, and talk of his dead wife and the marble tombstone that he erected to her memory, and that he will tell how much it cost and how much the hospital bill was, and how he never left her, or any one of the family, short of money for furniture or food. His voice is passing through me, the daughter thinks, as is his stare and his need and the upright sprouts of steel-coloured hair and the overpink plates of false teeth in a glass beer tumbler. She feels glued to the spot, feels as if she has lost her will and the use of her limbs, and thinks, This is how it has always been. Looking away to avoid his gaze, her eyes light on his slippers. They are made of felt, green and red felt; there are holes in them and she wishes that she had bought him a new pair. He says to hand him the brown envelope that is above the washbasin. The envelope contains photographs of himself taken in New Mexico. In them, he has the air of a suitor, and the pose and look that he has assumed take at least thirty years off his age.
* * *
AT THAT MOMENT, one of the senior nuns comes in, welcomes her, offers her a cup of tea, and remarks on how well she looks. He says that no one looks as well as he does and proffers the photos. He recounts his visit to the States again—how the stewardesses were amazed at his age and his vitality, and how everyone danced attendance on him. The nun and the daughter exchange a look. They have a strategy. They have corresponded about it, the nun’s last letter enclosing a greeting card from him, in which he begged his daughter to come. From its tone she deduced that he had changed, that he had become mollified; but he has not, he is the same, she thinks.
“Now talk to your father,” the nun says, then stands there, hands folded into her wide black sleeves, while the daughter says to her father, “Why don’t you eat in the dining room, Dad?”
“I don’t want to eat in the dining room,” he says, like a corrected child. The nun reminds him that he is alone too much, that he cries too much, that if he mingled it would do him some good.
“They’re ignorant, they’re ignorant people,” he says of the other inmates.
“They can’t all be ignorant,” both the nun and the daughter say at the same moment.
“I tell you, they’re all ignorant!” he says, his eyes glaring.
“But you wouldn’t be so lonely, Dad,” his daughter says, feeling a wave of pity for him.
“Who says I’m lonely?” he says roughly, sabotaging that pity, and he lists the number of friends he has, the motorcars he has access to, the bookmakers he knows, the horse trainers that he is on first names with, and the countless houses where he is welcome at any hour of day or night throughout the year.
To cheer him up, the nun rushes out and shouts to a little girl in the pantry across the way to bring the pot of tea now and the plate of biscuits. Watching the tea being poured, he insists the cup be so full that when the milk is added it slops over onto the saucer, but he does not notice, does not care.
“Thank you, thank you, Sister,” he says. He used not to say thank you and she wonders if perhaps Sister Declan had told him that courtesy was one way to win back the love of recalcitrant ones. He mashes the biscuits on his gums and then suddenly brightens as he remembers the night in the house of some neighbours when their dog attacked him. He had gone there to convalesce from shingles. He launches into a description of the dog, a German shepherd, and his own poor self coming down in the night to make a cup of tea, and this dog flying at him and his arm going up in self-defence, the dog mauling him, and the miracle that he was not eaten to death. He charts the three days of agony before he was brought to the hospital, the arm being set, being in a sling for two months, and the little electric saw that the county surgeon used to remove the plaster.
“My God, what I had to suffer!” he says. The nun has already left, whispering some excuse.
“Poor Dad,” his daughter says. She is determined to be nice, admitting how wretched his life is, always has been.
“You have no idea,” he says, as he contrasts his present abode, a dungeon, with his own lovely limestone house that is going to ruin. He recalls his fifty-odd years in that house—the comforts, the blazing fire, the mutton dinners followed by rice pudding that his wife served. She reminds him that the house belongs to his son now and then she flinches, remembering that between them, also, there is a breach.
“He’s no bloody good,” he says, and prefers instead to linger on his incarceration here.
“No mutton here; it’s all beef,” he says.
“Don’t they have any sheep?” she says, stupidly.
“It’s no life for a father,” he says, and she realizes that he is about to ask for the guarantee that she cannot give.
She takes the tea tray and lays it on the hallway floor, then praises the kindness of nuns and of nurses and asks the names of the matron, so that she can give her a gift of money. He does not answer. In that terrible pause, as if on cue, one crow alights on a dip of barbed wire outside the window and lets out a series of hoarse exclamations. She is about to say it, about to spring the pleasant surprise. She has come to take him out for the day. That is her plan. The delay in her arrival at the nursing home was due to her calling at a luxurious hotel to ask if they did lunches late. When she got here from London, late the previous night, she had stayed in a more commercial hotel in the town, where she was kept awake most of the night by the noise of cattle. It was near an abattoir, and in the very early hours of the morning she could hear the cattle arriving, their bawling, their pitiful bawling, and then their various slippings and slobberings, and the shouts of the men who got them out of the trailers or the lorries and into the pens, and then other shouts, indeterminable shouts of men. She
had lain in the very warm hotel room and allowed her mind to wander back to the time when her father bought and sold cattle, driving them on foot to the town, sometimes with the help of a simpleton, often failing to sell the beasts and having to drive them home again, with the subsequent wrangling and sparring over debts. She thinks that indeed he was not cut out for a life with cattle and foddering but that he was made for grander things, and it is with a rush of pleasure that she contemplates the surprise for him. She has already vetted the hotel, admitting, it is true, a minor disappointment that the service did not seem as august as the gardens or the imposing hallway with its massive portraits and beautiful staircase. When she visited to enquire about lunch, a rather vacant young boy said that no, they did not do lunches, but that possibly they could manage sandwiches, cheese or ham. Yet the atmosphere would exhilarate him, and sitting there in the nursing home with him now, she basks in her own bit of private cheer. Has she not met someone, a man whose very voice, whose crisp manner fill her with verve and happiness? She barely knows him, but when he telephoned and imagined her surrounded by motley admirers, she did not disabuse him of his fantasy. She recalls, not without mischief, how that very morning in the market town she bought embroidered pillowcases and linen sheets, in anticipation of the day or the night when he would cross her bedroom doorway. The thought of this future tryst softens her towards the old man, her father, and for a moment the two men revolve in her thoughts like two halves of a slow-moving apparition. As for the new one, she knows why she bought pillow slips and costly sheets: because she wants her surroundings not only to be beautiful for him but to carry the vestiges of her past, such sacred things as flowers and linen, and all of a sudden, with unnerving clarity, she fears that she wants this new man to partake of her whole past—to know it in all its pain and permutations.
* * *
THE MOMENT has come to announce the treat, to encourage her father to get up and dress, to lead him down the hallway, holding his arm protectively so that the others will see that he is cherished, then to humour him in the car, to ply him with cigarettes, and to find in the hotel the snuggest little sitting room—in short, to give him a sense of well-being, to while away a few hours. It will be a talking point with him for weeks to come, instead of the eczema or the broken arm. Something is impeding her. She wants to do it, indeed she will do it, but she keeps delaying. She tries to examine what it is that is making her stall. Is it the physical act of helping him to dress, because he will, of course, insist on being helped? No, a nun will do that. Is it the thought of his being happy that bothers her? No, it is not that; she wants with all her heart to see him happy. Is it the fear of the service in the hotel being a disappointment, sandwiches being a letdown when he would have preferred soup and a meat course? No, it is not that, since, after all, the service is not her responsibility. What she dreads is the intimacy, being with him at all. She foresees that something awful will occur. He will break down and beg her to show him the love that he knows she is withholding; then, seeing that she cannot, will not, yield, he will grow furious, they will both grow furious, there will be the most terrible showdown, a slanging match of words, curses, buried grievances, maybe even blows. Yes, she will do it in a few minutes; she will clap her hands, jump up off the chair, and in a singsong voice say, “We’re late, we’re late, for a very important date.” She is rehearsing it, even envisaging the awkward smile that will come over his face, the melting, and his saying, “Are you sure you can afford it, darling?” while at the same moment ordering her to open the wardrobe and choose his suit.
Each time she moves in her chair to do it, something awful gets between her and the nice gesture. It is like a phobia, like someone too terrified to enter the water but standing at its edge. Yet she knows that, if she were to succumb, it would not only be an afternoon’s respite for him, it would be for her some enormous leap. Her heart has been hardening now for some time, and when moved to pity by something she can no longer show her feelings—all her feelings are for the privacy of her bedroom. Her heart is becoming a stone, but this gesture, this reach will soften her again and make her, if not the doting child, at least the eager young girl who brought home school reports or trophies that she had won, craving to be praised by him, this young girl who only recited the verses of “Fontenoy” in place of singing a song. He had repeatedly told her that she could not sing, that she was tone-deaf.
Outside, the clouds have begun to mass for another downpour, and she realizes that there are tears in her eyes. She bends down, pretending to tie her shoe, because she does not want him to see these tears. She saw that it was perverse not to let him partake of this crumb of emotion, but also saw that nothing would be helped by it. He did not know her; he couldn’t—his own life tore at him like a mad dog. Why isn’t she stirring herself? Soon she will. He is talking non-stop, animated now by the saga of his passport and how he had to get it in such a hurry for his trip to America. He tells her to fetch it from the drawer, and she does. It is very new, with only one official entry, and that in itself conveys to her more than his words ever could: the paucity and barrenness of his life. He tells how the day he got that passport was the jolliest day he ever spent, how he had to go to Dublin to get it, how the nuns tut-tutted, said nobody could get a passport in that length of time because of all the red tape, but how he guaranteed that he would. He describes the wet day, one of the wettest days ever, how Biddy the hackney driver didn’t even want to set out, said they would be marooned, and how he told her to stop flapping and get her coat on. He relives the drive, the very early morning, the floods, the fallen boughs, and Biddy and himself on the rocky road to Dublin, smoking fags and singing, Biddy all the while teasing him, saying that it is not a passport that he is going for but a mistress, a rendezvous.
“So you got the passport immediately,” the daughter says, to ingratiate herself.
“Straightaway. I had the influence—I told the nuns here to ring the Dáil, to ring my T.D., and by God, they did.”
She asks the name of the T.D., but he has no interest in telling that, goes on to say how in the passport office a cheeky young girl asked why he was going to the States, and how he told her he was going there to dig for gold. He is now warming to his tale, and she hears again about the air journey, the nice stewardesses, the two meals that came on a little plastic tray, and about how when he stepped out he saw his name on a big placard, and later, inside the convent gate, nuns waiting to receive him.
Suddenly she knows that she cannot take him out; perhaps she will do it on the morrow, but she cannot do it now; and so she makes to rise in her chair.
He senses it, his eyes now hard like granite. “You’re not leaving?” he says.
“I have to; the driver could only wait the hour,” she says feebly.
He gets out of bed, says he will at least see her to the front door, but she persuades him not to. He stares at her as if he is reading her mind, as if he knows the generous impulse that she has defected on. In that moment she dislikes herself even more than she has ever disliked him. Tomorrow she will indeed visit, before leaving, and they will patch it up, but she knows that she has missed something, something incalculable, a moment of grace. The downpour has stopped and the sky, drained of cloud, is like an immense grey sieve, sieving a greater greyness. As she rises to leave, she feels that her heart is in shreds, all over the room. She has left it in his keeping, but he is wildly, helplessly looking for his own.
STORM
THE SUN GAVE to the bare fields the lustre of ripened hay. That is why people go, for the sun and the scenery—ranges of mountains, their peaks sparkling, an almost cloudless sky, the sea a variety of shades of blue, ceaselessly flickering like a tray of jewels. Yet Eileen wants to go home; to be more precise, she wishes that she had never come. Her son, Mark, and his girlfriend, Penny, have become strangers to her, and though they talk and go to the beach and go to dinner, there is between them a tautness. She sees her age and her separateness much more painfully here
than when at home, and she is lost without the props of work and friends. She sees faults in Penny that she had not noticed before. She is irked that a girl of twenty can be so self-assured, irked at the languid, painstaking way Penny applies her suntan oil, making sure that it covers each inch of her body, then rolling onto her stomach imploring Mark to cover her back completely. At other times Penny is moody, her face buried in a large paperback book with a picture of a girl in a gauze bonnet on the cover. There are other things too: when they go out to dinner Penny fiddles with the cutlery or the salt and pepper shakers, she is ridiculously squeamish about the food and offers Mark tastes of things as if he were still a baby.
* * *
ON THE THIRD NIGHT, Eileen cannot sleep. On impulse she gets out of bed, dons a cardigan, and goes out on the terrace to plan a strategy. A mist has descended, a mist so thick and so opaque that she cannot see the pillars and has to move like a sleepwalker to make her way to the balustrade. Somewhere in this sphere of milky white, the gulls are screaming, and their screams have a whiff of the supernatural because of her not being able to see their shapes. A few hours earlier, the heavens were a deep, a hushed blue, studded with stars; the place was enchanting, the night balmy and soft. In fact, Penny and Mark sat on the canvas chairs looking at the constellations while waiting and hoping for a falling star so that they could make a wish together. Eileen had sat a little apart from them, lamenting that she had never been that young or that carefree. Now, out on the terrace again, staring into the thicket of mist and unnerved by the screaming gulls, she makes herself a firm promise to go home. She invents a reason, that she has to do jury duty; then, like a sleepwalker, she gropes her way back to bed.
