by Edna O'Brien
“You disappeared so suddenly,” the woman said, and Nelly nodded. She had given up her glamorous job for a man, even though she knew she was throwing in her lot with a black heart.
“We might see you in the pub tonight. There’s a singsong,” the woman said, and though smiling, Nelly quivered inwardly. She did not want to meet people, especially those who had known of her in the past; she had put an iron grille over all that, and yet this very encounter was disturbing, as if the weed and bindweed of the past were pushing their way up through the gates of her mind. As she walked on, she found herself remembering her marriage day—two witnesses and a half bottle of champagne. She remembered living in a big, drafty house in the country, and her morning sickness, which at first she did not understand. But it was as if she were recalling a story that had happened to someone else. In a way, she remembered her divorce far better, because she had had to fight. Once, with a solicitor, she had gone to a suburb of London where she hoped a former housekeeper would testify to her having loved her children; a more recent incumbent had sworn affidavits against her and said she was a wicked woman. In that little sitting room in Tooting, waiting for what was going to be crucial, she sat with the solicitor while the mother put her noisy children to bed. There was a terrible smell, something being cooked.
“Is it a horse they’re boiling?” the solicitor said, and she laughed, because she knew he had put himself out of his way to come with her, and that he loved her a little, and that, of course, he would never say so. When the housekeeper came in and kissed her, the kiss itself a guarantee of friendship and loyalty, the solicitor beamed and said, “We’re there … we’re home and dry.” She got her children in the end. Then there were the years of birthdays and train sets and Christmases and measles and blazers that they grew out of, and then their going away to boarding school and the raw pain of that first rupture, that first farewell. Not for ages had she allowed herself such a glut of memory, such detail.
Yet she was not crushed by these things, and quite gaily she asked aloud what happened to that blue dress with the tulip line, and where was the Georgian claret jug that she had bought for a song. Where, oh where?
* * *
UP ON THE ROAD, there were several cars and a loudspeaker announcing something. Although it was loud, it was senseless. She was a long way from the hotel but she had her bearings. She knew she could either turn right to head for the one shop and the telephone kiosk or turn left for her hotel and the new chapel beyond it, which had modern stained-glass windows. She felt hot and her throat was parched—she longed for something. She believed that she longed for lemonade. She could taste it again as she had tasted it in childhood, so sweet and yet so tart. The sun shone with a flourish, and the flowers in the cottage gardens—the dahlias, or the devil’s pokers, or whatever—seemed to be glistening with life. She stopped by a garden where a yearling calf was letting out a loud lament. He had two wounds where his horns had recently been removed. They were full of flies. He tried with his head to toss them away, but they had sunk into the wounds, which were covered with some sort of purple ointment. The animal bawled and tossed and even leapt about, and so moved was she to pity that she began to shout, “Are you there? Are you there?”
Eventually a young man came out, holding a mug of tea. He seemed surprised to have been called.
“He’s itchy,” she said, pointing to the yearling.
“He’s a devil,” the young man said.
“He’s in agony,” she said, and asked if he could do something.
“What can I do?” he said, annoyed that she had summoned him like this.
“I’ll help you,” she said, gently, to coax him.
“I have just the thing,” he said, and he ran to the house and came back with a giant canister of wasp repellent.
“Oh, not that,” she said, grabbing it from him and explaining that the flies would wallow in the wounds and dement the poor animal even more. She made him fetch a strip of cardboard, then hold the beast, which bucked and reared while she edged the flies out, pushing them onto the clay and watching them stagger from their somersaults. The man was so impressed by her expertise that he asked if she was a vet.
“Hold him, hold him,” she said, as there was the second wound that she had to tackle. That done, they drove the animal through a side gate, over some cobbles, and into a dark manger. As the man closed the door, the animal yelled to be let out, its cry saying that daylight, even delirious daylight with flies and pain, was preferable to this dark dungeon.
“I told you he was a devil. He never lets up,” the man said, as he motioned her into the house. There was nobody in there, he assured her, his mother being dead. The few flowers in the flower bed, and the gooseberry bushes, had, as she imagined, been sown by his mother. There was also a ridge of flowering potatoes. He went to England for a time, worked in a car factory there, but he always came back in the summer, because he needed the fresh air. He bought a calf or two and sold them when he left.
“Would you marry me?” he said suddenly. She knew that he did not really mean such a thing, that he meant “Stay for a bit and talk to me.”
“I am married,” she lied.
“You’ve no wedding ring,” he said, and she looked down at her hand and smiled, and said she must have forgotten to put it on. Then she excused herself, saying that she had to be back at the hotel, because of a phone call.
* * *
CAIMIN MET HER at the door. She had had a visitor, a woman. The woman had waited and waited. He handed her a note. It said “Hi. Long time no see. I’ll call back around four. Gertie.” Who was Gertie? Gertrude. She could only think of Hamlet. Suddenly she was shaking. She could not see anyone. She did not want to meet this Gertie, this stranger.
“Tell her I’ve gone … gone,” she said as she flew up the stairs to her room. Even the disgruntled neighbour, who was on his way out, seemed to sense her disquiet. He smiled, and waved a golf club, proudly. She hated the hotel even more now—the awful washbasin, the stained furniture. She hated it not so much for its own pitiable sake as for what it reminded her of—the rooms and landings of childhood, basins and slop buckets that oozed sadness. It seemed as if the furniture of those times, and her failed marriage, and the flies in the raw wounds, and the several mistakes of her life had got jumbled together and were now hounding her, moving in on her in this place. Various suggestions offered themselves, such as to go back to London to her own house and never leave it again, or to go to the house where she was born and exorcise her fury, though she had been back there a few times and was almost indifferent to the sight of it. She saw briars, she saw gates in need of paint, she saw the outside gable wall over which her mother had so lovingly planted a creeper, and she saw the hall door with the padlocks that her brother had put there to keep her and others out. Bastard, she thought, and wished she could scrawl it somewhere for him to see. Her maggot brother.
“This won’t do,” she said, sitting on the bed, reliving old hatreds, fresh and vigorous as when first incurred. Coming back had set off this further welter of rage, like a time bomb.
“What is it?” she asked aloud, wondering what particle in the brain is triggered by some smell, or the wind, or a yearling in pain, or a voice sodden with loneliness that says, without meaning it, “Would you marry me?”
She might have known it: there was a knock on the door, Caimin calling her, saying she had a visitor, saying it with excitement, as if she should be pleased. He had completely misunderstood her instructions, her clamour to be left alone. Out she went, fuming, about to tell him to send the stranger away, but the stranger was standing there beside him—a largish woman in a raincoat, with grey hair drawn back severely in a bun. “Hay fever,” Nelly heard herself saying, to account for the tears, and for the crumpled handkerchief that she was holding. Caimin left them together on the landing and shuffled off like a dog that knows it has done something wrong.
“You don’t remember me,” the woman was saying. She was brea
thless, as if she had run, so eager was she to be there. Bringing her face closer, she allowed Nelly to scan it, pleased to present this challenge. Nelly realized it must be someone from her nearby home. She tried to recall all her school friends, tried to picture them at their desks, or in the choir on Sundays, or in the school photo that they had all received when they left. This face was not among them.
“No,” she said finally, feeling a little baffled.
“I’m Gertie … Mrs. Conway’s niece. She owned the hotel in your town,” the woman said with a nervous smile. Her excitement was fading and she realized that she was not welcome. She began apologizing for barging in, explaining that a woman in the shop said she had seen Nelly Nugent walking on the seashore.
“Mrs. Conway’s niece,” Nelly said, trying not to bristle. Of course. Gertie’s aunt had also owned a house here. They used to come for weekends, had house parties.
“Gertie,” she whispered, remembering the vivid young girl who had come often to stay at her aunt’s hotel. She had served behind the counter like a grownup, and had the opportunity to meet all the men, to flirt with them. Being Gertie, she had snatched the prize of them all.
* * *
YES, SHE REMEMBERED GERTIE. She remembered precisely when she had first seen Gertie—unexpectedly, as it happened. She was about to leave her home village, to go to the town to learn shorthand, and an older girl—Moira, who lived up the country—had promised her a dress that she had become too fat to wear. It was black grosgrain and it had long sleeves—that was all she knew. She walked to Moira’s on a summer’s day, after lunch, and twice had to ask the way, as there was more than one family of the same name. She remembered that she had to cross a stream to get to the house, and, yielding to a bit of fancy because of the sunshine and the thought of the dress, she took off her shoes and dipped her feet in the water, which she felt to be like liquid silver washing over her insteps and toes. The dress fit her perfectly. In fact, it fit her so well and gave her such allure that Moira put her arms around her and, almost in tears, said, “Hold on to your looks, Nell. Whatever you do, hold on to your looks.” That was thirty-odd years ago. Walking down the country road, all alone, she was so sure of herself and her beauty then; she even believed that the trees and the gates and the walls and the brambles partook of it. Along with the dress, Moira had given her an old handbag, in which there was a little mirror with a tortoiseshell frame, and from time to time, she ran the looking glass down the length of the dress to see the flare and the grosgrain reflected.
As she neared the town, she decided to do it. It would have been inconceivable on the way up to the country, but now she was a different person—sophisticated, assured—and anyhow she was going away. She decided to seek him out at his lodgings. It was a house not far from the chapel—one of the five or six terraced houses with a tiled hallway and a stained-glass fanlight over the door that shone ruby or blue or green floating patterns on the floor, depending on the position of the sun. The landlady, a thin and inquisitive woman, answered the timid knock, and upon hearing the request said, “He’s having his tea.” Nelly stood her ground; she had come to see him and she was not going away without seeing him. He was the new teacher in the technical college and had many skills. He was swarthy and handsome and he had made an impression on most of the young girls and the women. Many had boasted of having had conversations with him, and promises to learn tennis from him, or woodwork, or the piano accordion. “I won’t keep him long,” she said to the landlady, who was running her tongue all around her teeth, her upper and her lower teeth, before deciding to consider the request.
He sauntered towards her—his red sweater seeming so dashing—with a puzzled smile on his face. The moment he stood in front of her with that look of pleasant inquiry, she registered two things: that his eyes were a dark green that gave the semblance of brown, and that she was not going to be able to say why she had called on him, had him routed from his tea table. She saw too that his eyes took in every feature of her, that he knew why she had come, knew that she was smitten, knew that she was embarrassed, and felt a certain animal pleasure, a triumph, in those things, and was not in the least bit discomfited. He stood there smiling, studying her face, not in any hurry to break the silence.
“I wondered about your night classes,” she said, even though he, like everybody else, had probably heard the news that she was going to the city to train as a secretary. “I mean, my mother wondered,” she then said, becoming even clumsier by adding that her mother felt that women should be able to take the woodwork class just the same as men.
“Agreed,” he said with that pleased, tantalizing smile. Indeed, one little cautionary part of her recognized him as being rather smug, but it was not enough to dampen the flush of attraction and excitement that she felt towards him. She had felt it for weeks, ever since he came—sighting him on his way to or from Mass, or on his bicycle, or in his tweed jacket with the leather patches on the elbows, or on the hurley pitch in his togs, where he stumbled and fell but always got up again to tackle an opponent. It was obviously time for her to leave, because she had said her piece. Yet she lingered. He put a finger to his teeth where a piece of raisin had stuck. Raisins, he declared, were the bane of his life, as he picked at it assiduously. Then, from the kitchen, she heard his name called: “Vincent … Vince.” It was not the landlady’s voice, it was another voice—coyer and younger. Then, in the doorway, Gertie appeared—a girl a bit older than herself—running her hands up and down the jamb, caressing it and smiling at them. She wore trousers that clung to her. They were of a black hairy stuff, like angora. She was like a cat. Like a cat, she stroked the door, ran her fingers along it as if she were running them over his body. He basked for a moment in the excitement of it, poised as he was between two doting creatures—one assured, the other lamentably awkward.
“Your tea is getting cold,” Gertie said.
“How cold?” he asked, amused.
“So-so cold,” she said saucily.
* * *
“HE ALWAYS TALKED about you,” Gertie was saying to her now, as if she guessed every particle of thought that had passed in a swoop through Nelly’s mind. “When we had a card party or a Christmas party, he always boasted that he knew you. You were a feather in his cap, especially after you appeared on television.”
“How is he? … How are you?” Nelly asked. She remembered hearing about their engagement, their lavish wedding preparations, and especially their coming to this very spot for a prolonged honeymoon. In fact, without her realizing it, in some recess of her mind, this place was always their preserve.
“Oh, he died … Didn’t you know? He died suddenly…” Gertie said very quietly, her voice trailing off, suggesting that there were many other things she would have liked to say, such as what his death had meant to her, and how happy or unhappy their marriage had been.
“He liked the ladies,” she said then. There was something so incredibly gentle about it that all of a sudden Nelly embraced her and invited her to stay and have tea, or a drink, or whatever.
“I can’t,” Gertie said, and explained that a woman friend had driven over with her for the day, and that the woman was outside, waiting in the car. “Another time,” she said. But they both knew that there would probably not be another time.
“And you kept the figure,” Gertie said, then drew her coat open to show her own girth, to pay Nelly a belated compliment. Then she was gone, hurrying down the stairs, the belt and buckle of her open raincoat trailing behind her.
Nelly stood stunned, tears in her eyes. She felt as if doors or windows were swinging open all around her and that she was letting go of some awful affliction. Something had happened. She did not know what it was. But soon she would know. Soon she would feel as she had felt long ago—like a river that winds its way back into its first beloved enclave before finally putting out to sea.
A DEMON
IT WAS a big day. Yes, this was the day they were going to visit her brother in the
monastery and then go on to a convent, sixty miles from there, where her sister was repining and was going to have to be brought home. No one knew exactly what was wrong with her sister. She had had pleurisy, which had lingered, and now the nuns feared that she had tuberculosis. She languished, and would not get out of bed at all. Yet the day itself loomed with a flush of happiness: the monastery and the monks, and their legendary brown bread with tea in the big refectory, and maybe a sight of the silkworms—because, yes, they had silkworms, not that she understood the workings of these creatures—and no doubt a little shop with the most delicate mother-of-pearl rosary beads, as well as the dark, horn ones, and holy pictures of saints and martyrs in tints that made their expressions both fetching and tragic. They would of course pray in the drafty chapel, with the monks in brown all around them, heads bowed, meditating, never stirring to look at the strangers. She might even meet the abbot and kiss his ring; suddenly the thought of kissing the ring of an abbot or a bishop made her shudder with terror that she would take a bite out of it by mistake.
