by Edna O'Brien
The actor, it seemed, had also taken a liking to the young man whom Ivan had thrown the falsies to, and now holding a folded scroll, he leant over the wrought iron, looked down directly at the man, brandished the scroll, and said, “It’s bigger than that, darling.” At once the locals got the gist of the situation and called on him to come down so that they could beat him to a pulp. Enthused now by their heckling, he stood on the wobbly parapet and began to scold them, telling them there were some naughty skeletons in their lives and that they couldn’t fool him by all pretending to be happily married men. Then he said something awful: he said that the great Oscar Wilde had termed the marriage bed “the couch of lawful lust.” A young guard arrived and called up to the actor to please recognize that he was causing a disturbance to the peace as well as scandalizing innocent people.
“Come and get me, darling,” the actor said, and wriggled his forefinger like a saucy heroine in a play. Also, on account of being drunk he was swaying on this very rickety parapet.
“Come down now,” the guard said, trying to humour him a bit, because he did not want the villagers to have a death on their hands. The actor smiled at this note of conciliation and called the guard “Lola,” and asked if he ever used his big baton anywhere else, and so provoked the young guard and so horrified the townspeople that already men were taking off their jackets to prepare for a fight.
“Beat me, I love it,” he called down while they lavished dire threats on him. Ivan, it seemed, was now enjoying the scene and did not seem to mind that the actor was getting most of the attention and most of the abuse. Two ladders were fetched and the young guard climbed up to arrest the three men. The actor teased him as he approached. The doctor followed, vowing that he would give them an injection to silence their filthy tongues. Barry had already gone in, and Ivan was trying to mollify them, saying it was all clean fun, when the actor put his arms around the young guard and lathered him with frenzied kisses. Other men hurried up the ladder and pushed the culprits into the bedroom so that people would be spared any further display of lunacy. The french doors were closed, and shouting and arguments began. Then the voices ceased as the offenders were pulled from the bedroom to the room downstairs, so that they could be carted into the police van which was now waiting. People feared that maybe these theatrical villains were armed, while the women wondered aloud if Barry had had these costumes and falsies and things, or if the actors had brought them. It was true that they had come with two suitcases. The Liddy girl had been sent out in the rain to carry them in. The sergeant who now arrived on the scene called to the upper floor, but upon getting no answer went around to the back of the house, where he was followed by a straggle of people. The rest of us waited in front, some of the opinion that the actor was sure to come back onto the balcony, to take a bow. The smaller children went from the front to the back of the house and returned to say there had been a terrible crash of bottles and crockery. The dining room table was overturned in the fracas. About ten minutes later they came out by the back door, each of the culprits held by two men. The actor was wearing his green suit, but his makeup had not been fully wiped off, so that he looked vivid and startled, like someone about to embark on a great role. Ivan was in his raincoat and threatening aloud to sue unless he was allowed to speak to his solicitor. He called the guards and the people “rabble.” The woman who had fainted went up to Barry and vehemently cursed him, while one of the town girls had the audacity to ask the actor for his autograph. He shouted the name of the theatre in Dublin to which she could send for it. Some said that he would never again perform in that or any theatre, as his name was mud.
When I saw Barry waiting to be bundled into the van like a criminal, I wanted to run over to him, or else to shout at the locals, disown them in some way. But I was too afraid. He caught my eye for an instant. I don’t know why it was me he looked at, except perhaps he was hoping he had a friend, he was hoping our forays into drama had made a bond between us. He looked so abject that I had to look away and instead concentrated my gaze on the shop window, where the weighing scales, the ham slicer, and all the precious commodities were like props on an empty stage. From the corner of my eye I saw him get into the big black van and saw it drive away with all the solemnity of a hearse.
LONG DISTANCE
AH, THE SNUG LITTLE HIDEAWAY with its cushions and its inscrutable Buddha, dim lights like scalloped stars in various niches, and the gleam of the fire on the red-brown leather upholstery. So warm, so mischievous. Winter was almost upon them. Yet the glow of the fire and that boyish smile on his newly shaven face, smiling the smile of infancy and boyhood and puberty and manhood, eating the nuts, the salt occasionally on his lips like a bit of frost which he licked as he would have licked her hands gladly. How long was it? He probably had forgotten. A party, a chance thing had brought them together again. Ah, that first time. Vertigo at the top of the staircase in a ponderous London club with portraits everywhere of gouty faces, faces bespeaking lust and disgust, and how they whispered though they were strangers. “Swift as the lightning in the collied night,” she had said to him. Such a peculiar thing to say, but he saw it as an anthem. Now he was telling her that he had learned a proverb; it was this, that the eyes are in the fingertips. He had learned it in the Far East; he often went. He worked all over the world designing hotels and airports and helicopter launches, and he employed God knows how many, but he still had a boyish quality and was saying, “Is that dress new?” as if they had met just yesterday or at most last week. There wasn’t a trace of bitterness in his voice or in his eyes, the grey eyes with the tenderest flinch. He had probably quite forgotten how it had ended, forgotten the late-night calls, the mad curses she had visited on him, the cold rodent glances he gave her when they met once at a summer party. He was conscious again, as if for the first time, of her radiance, this woman in a black dress, composed and at the same time reeking wildness.
Of course much was concealed. There was behind that composed face of hers, with its high patch of blush, another being, in some ways more beautiful, in some ways more ugly, and certainly more hungry, sucking him in, drawing him in, in, in, if only for the moment, if only for that hour while they were together. He would have whisked her away anywhere, given her anything; he was her slave through and through.
What was he telling her? Yes, how he had learned to ski and how exhilarating it was, a new thing, and now he had two hobbies instead of one: his boats and the ski slopes. Oh yes, and he had named his boat after a saint. He did not say if she had crossed his mind in the intervening years, but she must have, an image now and then: a thread of vexation about the bitter bilious letter she’d sent to his home and which was read, oh yes read; and the nicer moment too, at a house party, at dusk in a grand house, all the ladies weighted with jewels, and catching sight of someone just like her with a flower in her hair, a bit of bougainvillea picked off a tree; or being alone in a strange city and looking out onto a harbour with its necklace of lights, lights glinting—so many eyes stuck into the mountain of night—and wishing she would appear by his side. Oh yes, he would have thought of her, not often, but at those tenderest of moments when he forgot work and forgot ambition and put aside the little gnawing dream he had to run the world and listened to his truer self.
She too had, of course, remembered him, but gradually stamped upon it, foot upon foot, grinding it zealously into any piece of earth or street she stood upon, burying it, burying him, clothes, shoes, braces, wallet, and all. He had come in dreams, always retransported to her original terrain, always alone, on a wall or a headland or standing on a pathway under a tree, a priestly figure waiting to chastise her, not quite welcoming her, but not dismissing her either.
“Did you ever dream of me?” she asked lightly, in a bantering way.
“All the time,” he said in the softest of voices. Now, what did that mean? What was he saying? Were they good dreams, bad dreams, crowded dreams? In those dreams were they united, or were they apart, like those Japan
ese figures on a plate in which the lovers are perpetually divided by cruel waters? She also wanted to ask if, when he dreamt of her, he saw her in her happy guise, all aglow, or with a pulpy, tear-stained, supplicant face. It meant so much to her to know that little thing, the consistency of the image of her that roamed his mind. She didn’t ask. How had she spent the summer? In every question and every remark tossed back and forth between lovers who have not played out the last fugue, there is one question and it is this: “Is there someone new?” The old entanglements of course remain like milestones and can be countenanced, but someone new can make an upheaval. That someone new might be the one to put a sledgehammer to those milestones, reduce them to rubble.
She was telling about her holiday, the grandeur of it, a bay of course, yachts, canny people who talked always of hobbies and resorts, things they could share out in the open, never talking about the things they had in their vaults, their jewellery, or their money, or their savage secrets. She was describing it: her own little bungalow, a personal maid called Lupa, who became so devoted to her that when she scrubbed the floors and made the bed and stacked it with a compilation of pillows and sausage-shaped chenille cushions, she lingered. Then what did Lupa do next? She took to washing the faces of the flowers outside, washing each as if it were a baby’s face, first with a damp cloth and then with a less damp cloth and then with a dry cloth, pulling off dead leaves as she went, putting them into a pile, and then getting a dustpan to shovel up the dead leaves, sweeping slowly, slowly, reluctant to go.
What she did not tell him was that on one of those days, during one of those several sweepings, she had shed tears, many tears. They had simply gushed out of her in a huge flow, like blood. Were they for him? Partly. But they were also for life, its heartlessness and her qualms about losing something incarnate in herself. Lupa, who was hovering, saw these tears, crossed, and stood in front of her, pulling down the lower lid of one of her own eyes to emphasize that she understood. Maybe she was saying that it was no joke to be a maid, irking to be fated to work for people who spoke only three or four words and these three or four words were Breakfast, Immediately, Iron, Wash. The moment had etched itself. There were three urns with plumbago flowers, water making fretful shadows on a bit of white wall, a lizard clinging to it, inanimate as a piece of jade. The maid was disappointed in her, yes, truly; tears were for the starving, not for ladies who had bowls of fruit to gorge from and a four-poster ornamented with porcupine quills.
* * *
HE DID NOT HAVE TO ORDER THE NEXT DRINK. They came quietly, surreptitiously, the previous undrained glasses carried away. What a lovely time she was having, almost as enchanting as the first time, except that she was a little braver now and a little warier and much more assured and determined to tell him those lighthearted tales about her travels, about seeing men one night chase a butterfly because it was not lucky, and stamp on it, and then a drive home through lonely countryside with all the houses shuttered up, the jalousies closed to give the appearance of dollhouses, the inmates asleep, and the mountain itself girdled in white mist; like a presence it was, so that one thought of a Santa Claus roaming about. Then she found herself describing the beautiful painting, red and gold, the colours still seeming moist, seeming to seep, though it was centuries old. It was the Last Supper, the faces at the table grave, shrewd, and austere, and not necessarily devout, and then a distance away—the supper table was outdoors—a woman with half-torn garb, also red but muddied; a prostitute on the ground with a baby in her arms. Had someone thrown her out there, or had she come back to supplicate, or had she chosen that position for herself in order to debase herself in front of those grave, shrewd, austere faces? Or was it that at last she had given up because disease had struck her?
* * *
IT WAS NOT WHAT HE AND SHE WERE SAYING that mattered, it was what they were thinking. They were merely skimming the surfaces of the years, hiding all the urgent parts of themselves, she hiding the vengeances that indeed she had conceived because she had been jilted, and he believing that she had betrayed him with that bilious letter. She would insist that her betrayal was because of his betrayal, and so on. Tit for tat. Maybe that was why she thought of that painting, that above any other, a woman cast aside by judicious men. Luckily he was not able to read her thoughts, because he had begun to describe a hotel in Thailand where he had recently stayed. He went on about the beauty, the harmony, the uncanny way in which people served without seeming servile.
“You can get anything … anything,” he said, conveying his own amazement.
“Even love?” she said, picking up the cue. He smiled. He had wanted to get her to that word and had achieved it so easily, so insouciantly had he steered her to it.
“Love … you have to bring yourself,” he said in a teasing way. It only took a minute, or was it five minutes, to tell her that he was going back there soon and he was going alone and nothing would please him more than to take her and to show her the city. For one who was not overly lyrical, he went on about the flowers, flowers in the trees, flowers in the drinks, and then the flower-coloured floating dresses that the women wore. The streets she could picture too, narrow and with little vehicles, little tuk-tuks, that people travelled around in, and of course the vivid colours and the all-prevailing courtesy. Yes, it would be charming and she knew it. He would be at his best. They would meet there. He would meet her off the plane, he in a light suit, a different suit, and help her into a car, or maybe one of those little tuk-tuk machines, but probably a car, and point out things as they drove along, then take her to the hotel and up to a suite that was spacious, and they would stand in that big room, timid, timid as flowers, virgin lovers in that land of flowers, everything ordained.
Every bit of her wanted to say yes. Her eyes said it and the eyes at the tips of her fingertips said it and the flesh at the back of her throat ached at the thought of these new sensations. It was a place she had always wanted to visit, as if self-discovery awaited her there. The women, she believed, had something to teach her. A vein of patience perhaps. It beckoned. She was awakening. The image that floated into her head was a field of grass overwhelmed by wind, each blade veering in the same direction, powerless. He was taking out his diary. It was an invitation to take her own out, because after all she was a busy woman too. His touch on her knee was like a little electric shock, but pleasant. If only they could go, there and then. If only he stood up and he carried her off.
Yet her answer was firm. She knew what she must say. The little beads of ecstasy in her throat were turning to tears, salt tears. It came back in a blinding guttural flash, the pain when he had left, the savagery of it, his deafness to her pleas, his refusal even at Christmas to answer a telephone call, his forgetting her address, the address at which he had called in daylight and in dark and had once flung clay up at her window; he had forgotten that address, simple as it was. How she hated these thoughts rearing up in her, but she had no control over them; they consumed her. It was not that she hated him; she did not hate him, but that old grudge, like a bit of flint in the ground, had come up to confront her. His eyes were so soft, his face so pale and gentle, his manner so suppliant that she longed to say yes, yes.
“It’s not possible,” she said, but in a tone of voice so suggestive and so laden with innuendo that it really was saying, “There is another whom I cannot leave.”
“Even if you tried?” he said, his eyes smarting now because he couldn’t abide the merest rejection. Also, he was taken aback.
“Even if I tried, it wouldn’t be possible,” she said, and a whole landscape of flowers and silk saris and tuk-tuk machines passed before her like dizzying images seen from a speeding train. He leant over to the table beside them and took the plate of nuts and began to eat ravenously. She wanted to take his hand and tell him why. It would have saved everything. She put her hand on the sofa and at that moment he drew back his, his white fingers curling away from hers like the tail of a white mouse receding into wainscotting. H
e had come with this gift, this offering, these days wrenched from his life, and she had spat on it. He looked around as he always did when he became irate and said they hadn’t done a damn thing to the room in years, they hadn’t even given it a lick of paint.
“Let’s have another drink,” she said.
“You can have one,” he said as he rose, adding that he did not see why he should sit around and have her tell him why she did not want to go away with him. She must redeem it, she must. She jumped up and saw that he was cold now, disapproving, like those disciples in the painting.
“But you see why I can’t go,” she said openly.
“No, I don’t see,” he said, even more irritable.
“Because I would have to come back … We would have to come back,” she said, no longer afraid of her emotions, no longer raving about bays and bougainvillea, but reaching right down to the root of the love or the lingering love that was there, hauling him out of himself, shedding the lies and the little pretences, forsaking the wobbly balustrade that had been theirs.
