Lantern Slides

by Edna O'Brien

  “We’re getting carried away again,” she said, and shook her head soberly to make him understand. He felt it. His hand on hers now so gentle, like condensation, a hand which she longed to hold on to forever, a keepsake. Never were they so near while also being on the brink of parting. But they were parting properly, decently, as they should have done years ago, and now she loved him in a way that she had not loved him before.

  * * *

  OUTSIDE, THE LIGHT WAS UNSETTLING insofar as it was still bright, but all the streetlights had come on. People in cars, people walking hand in hand, posters on the facings of cable boxes, torn faces, torn half-faces, the red glow of the traffic signals in the distance like heated moons, drivers with set jaws taking issue with God, a white-shirted waiter listlessly hailing a cab, and in the park now—because she had gone in there—the treetops all close together, snuggling, whispering, the hexagonals of light beneath them, haloed by both leaf and drizzle. There was a drizzle that pattered onto the leaves and onto her face, and the fallen leaves bristled like taffeta as she stepped over them.

  “What now, what now?” she asked, and walked with pointless vigour, unable to exorcise the sight of him in his old tweed overcoat, moving away from her, somewhat downcast, somewhat melancholy, but not showing the full hurt. That overcoat must be ten or fifteen years old. She was touched by the thought that he had not bought another, something more plush. Only love makes one notice a thing like that, love, that bulwark between life and death. Love, she thought, is like nature, but in reverse; first it fruits, then it flowers, then it seems to wither, then it goes deep, deep down into its burrow, where no one sees it, where it is lost from sight, and ultimately people die with that secret buried inside their souls.

  Α LITTLE HOLIDAY

  IT WAS A BIG ROOMY HOUSE, about three miles from the nearest village, and it had iron gates, a rutted avenue, a weathercock, and a dilapidated conservatory. For years I had been begging to go there, to spend a holiday with my uncle and his wife. I was nine years old and a holiday was not something I was familiar with, but I imagined that on holiday one underwent some glorious metamorphosis and came home wiser and more worldly. The thing was to be worldly, like the grownups. Going down the rutted avenue, in the front seat of the mail van, I admired the iron gates and the weathercock, but when the driver asked if I was going to spend the whole summer there my heart gave a little lurch.

  Inside, the house was just as my sisters had boasted, but, then, they had gone together and I was alone. There were such relics of grandeur as a stately sideboard with a silver tea set and silver ladles, and a marble fireplace, which, alas, had chicken wire over it to catch the crows’ nests when they fell. Upstairs was worse. As I crossed the threshold of my bedroom, the flowered basin and ewer rattled, everything rattled, and the wind keened like a banshee. The view of the blue-black lake through the window gave me the shudders, worsened by the fact that my aunt was saying I was a lucky girl to be put in the second-best room, with a view of the lake, a panoramic view.

  “Where do you sleep?” I asked. The question was an affront to her whole status. She said they slept in the master bedroom. But where? Across the landing and down some steps. She pointed to it. She then showed me the bathroom—or rather, the WC. It was spotlessly clean, with a slab of pink scouring powder on a saucer on the floor, and in the yellow veined bowl of the lavatory was the name of the maker in puce dye. She said to remember to always wash after I had been to the WC and not to ask impertinent questions, and I knew that I would not be able to stay there and would soon be begging to go home. A bit of snivelling began.

  “Don’t be a mollycoddle,” she said. She brought me outside to get some fresh air into my lungs, as if we had not had fresh air at home—as if the whole country were not full of fresh air and mutinous winds.

  There were very old trees on the grounds, groaning and swaying, their roots bulging like veins, and here and there were primroses that also seemed to fret. She left me in the side yard with a stationery box full of old photographs to amuse myself. Brown and sepia photographs, of her and my uncle, the house in its better days, when the conservatory had a roof, the various grandees who had come during the dapping season, when the mayfly was up. In those days she had kept a few paying guests, because there was not a hotel for thirty miles around. She used to glory in it and tell my mother that guests never tasted home cooking like hers. Roast lamb, roast suckling pig, apple crumble done in the pot oven with coals above and coals underneath to make it crisp, with the center moist the way it should be, and the whole thing served with a butter sauce. Custard sauce was for people like my mother—ignoramuses. For those two weeks, during the dapping season, glory and levity had reigned. The gongs in the kitchen were ringing as the paying guests (they paid a pittance) rang for breakfast, or a jug of warm water to shave, or, in the case of one man, a large whiskey, which his wife begged him not to take. He had to have it, simply had to have it—for the shakes. Afterwards, when he had downed two or three, he sat in the deck chair and astonished everyone by doing the crosswords in record time. As a special, almost unheard-of favour, the mail-van driver would bring the papers very early in the morning so that the guests could read them and the drunk man could do the crosswords. I burst into tears when I saw my mother in one of these photographs, not alone but in a group, in which she seemed set apart—a misunderstood beauty in her box jacket with a very long slim skirt.

  “Use your hanky,” my aunt said as she went by with a pan of mash. Eight or nine turkeys followed her, clucking. Soon my uncle returned from the village, carrying two rush baskets, his hat pulled down over his face. It was spotting rain. I could see he was angry; I could always tell when grownups were angry, either by their gait or the way they pulled their hats stolidly over their faces or the way they walked past and said, “Enjoying yourself, missy.” After he went inside I could hear shouting, and first he and then my aunt came through the back kitchen door threatening to leave while delivering a last volley of complaint and insult. Twice he came out with the baskets, and once flung one of them across the grass, dislodging bread, butter, and tins of salmon. The tins of salmon made me hungry.

  “In the name of Jaysus, can I do anything right, is everything I do wrong,” I heard him say as she gathered up the dispersed goods. I sang to myself, pretending not to hear—sang and hummed, staring at the photograph of my mother in the box jacket, which I knew to be of brownish velvet with ribs of cream in it. My uncle set off with a second basket and was going through the back yard, away from me, when she followed, crying and beseeching, begging him to come back, pulling him by the flap of his raincoat; his raincoat was quite stylish—off-white and rather like a motoring coat. Once they were inside the house, the quarrelling started up again as they each threatened the direst retribution. I did not know how I was going to endure it.

  Hours passed. I could hear the silences followed by the sullen bursts of rage, and still she did not call me in. The dogs were fed, the hens and turkeys closed in for the night, and it was beginning to grow dark. I played with the red fringed tassle of the stationery box, and every few minutes had to pee behind one of the big trees; they were small dribbles such as puppies make in their litter, out of fear. The moon—or, rather, a bit of moon—came up over the boundary of the far field, and the lake water was so dark it no longer resembled a lake, because there was no way of seeing the surface, with its shivers. Corncrake and owl competed. I heard my name and rushed towards the back door. She fussed over me and said they had been so busy, said that not having children they were unaccustomed to looking at the clock and thinking teatime or suppertime or whatever. They ate whenever they pleased.

  “Isn’t that right, Michael Patrick?” she said to my uncle, who was sitting by the fire on a cane chair, the front legs of it off the ground as he tipped backwards and asked if I was good at my lessons. She said I would be having supper alone, as it was way past my bedtime. I said, as forcibly as I could, that at home I went to bed when my mother and fa
ther and everyone else went and that I would not like to be banished upstairs alone. She said it was time for those bad habits to be corrected—time for improvement. She gave me a cup of lukewarm milk and some thick pieces of bread coated with chicken-and-ham paste. I refused to eat. She said who would have supposed what a spoiled child I was. Hadn’t I begged to come? Hadn’t I written a letter? Hadn’t I saved the money for the postage stamp? The milk tasted vile, as if it was milk from a cow who had just calved. She watched me bring my lips to the cup but decline to drink. She eventually lost her temper, poured the milk into an enamel pan, and called in the dogs, who had been whimpering outside the back door but were exultant at this second repast. She said, “All right, then, go hungry,” and laughed, but it was a hard, castigating laugh, and it was not lost on her husband, who winked at me.

  * * *

  MY BEDROOM SEEMED miles away, farther even than it had seemed in daylight. It had an iron bed covered with two grey blankets and a white cotton coverlet. After she left me, I knelt and prayed. I thought that by my violent praying God or the Virgin would do something to alleviate my plight. On the wall there were pictures of Our Lord, the Blessed Virgin, St. Rita, and St. Joseph. The room was dark, but in the moonlight I could recognize these saints, as we had identical holy pictures at home, painted by an Italian who lived in the city and who depicted the sufferings very vividly. I needed to go to the WC, but I was too afraid to leave the room and make the journey down the landing in the dark. At least in the room I felt semi-safe because of all this praying and the saints watching down. She had seen me to bed with a candle but had taken it away, as it was the only one they had and they would need it at their bedtime. What to do.

  Tears. Enough tears to fill the basin and ewer. Enough tears to fill the room. A lake of tears, an indoor lake. I eventually resorted to the unseemly strategy of howling, and as I howled the dogs took up the cue and howled from the outside. The whole place was a cacophony of howling where neither owl nor corncrake stood a chance. When my uncle and his wife came up I was on the floor, imploring to go home or to go to a hospital. At first, my uncle tried to pull me up, to put sense into me, but my hysteria triumphed, and she said there was nothing for it but for him to get on the bicycle to go to the village, to summon the hackney car so that I could be brought home. He muttered that maybe the hackney car was in Dublin or Limerick for some funeral, but I could see that he would go and that in some strange way the misadventure had cheered him, had taken the pall out of the night.

  She helped me to take my clothes and things out of the drawer and put them back in the awful battered suitcase. She was sweet-tempered now, as she lamented the perils of being highly strung. She cited a cousin in our family: whenever she met people, especially good friends, her glands got the better of her and she simply cried buckets. I said I was very sorry for the trouble I was causing.

  “No trouble, darling. No trouble, darling,” she said as she began to change into her good clothes. She changed in front of me. She had carried her clothes in from her room on a hanger. She was not letting me go home alone. She and my uncle would come, as they hadn’t been anywhere since the ploughing match the previous autumn, and I needed coddling and escorting. A fresh fear engulfed me, which was that my own parents would be out rowing or would have gone to bed early, and that visitors would not be welcome. However, I was too frightened to mention it. She carried her shoes and her stockings in from the other room, and while donning them she asked me to redo the plait in her hair. Her hair was not as soft as my mother’s; it was strong and springy, and she smelled of the talcum powder that she had showered over herself before dressing. Then she picked up the plait and wound it over her temples like a sturdy sausage.

  In the car, she was a changed woman, all affability—joking with her husband, saying she had once been a shy violet like me, hopeless in new surroundings, a misfit. She recalled how at twenty-three she had come home from America, back to her folks, and how on the second morning she resolved to leave again, unable to bear the rain and the pigs and the dirt and the misery of it all. It was, as she recalled, that very night that she went to the public house—not to drink, but to see her old friend the owner—when she sighted her future husband playing cards with the lads.

  “And we haven’t spent a day apart since,” she said, to which my uncle lovingly agreed, both of them forgetting the times he went off on a batter, or the two times that she went to a home for her nerves, or the rows they engaged in daily and were known for throughout the parish. The talk was so lively that I now regretted going home, and then, to crown my ambivalence, she gave me a florin so beautifully warm and gleaming that I wished I were back in the bedroom, holding it, praying to the saints and at least waiting until morning to put them to this inconvenience.

  * * *

  AT HOME, my mother accused me of being mental, where-upon my aunt intervened and said to feel my heartbeat and not to be cruel—obviously I was growing, and at “that age,” and full of unknown fears. My father came down with his trousers pulled up over his pajamas and asked what all the commotion was. Upon being told, he said he knew it, he could have predicted it, youngsters were not reared the way he and his brother had been, and were not used to roughing it and being packed off anywhere, to any old relatives. My sisters were upstairs, asleep. The eats that my mother served were not very enticing, simply because, as she said, she had not been expecting anyone, and she wished it were next day, when she certainly would have made a cake, because she hated the house without a bit of fresh cake. My aunt said it was all delicious, although in fact it was stale scones that did not soften even after having been stuck in the oven for five minutes. My aunt told of a married couple who kept the top tier of their wedding cake for a christening, although they had been married fourteen years.

  “I think they could put a knife to it,” my mother said sagely.

  “You said it, ma’am,” my aunt said, and laughed. They never addressed each other by their Christian names, deeming it too familiar. My father and uncle were talking of the harvest, vying with each other as to who would have the best crop of oats. My father had put in three types of corn, wheat, oats, and barley, while my uncle had confined himself to barley and oats.

  “In America they grow sweet corn. It grows on a stump, and they boil it and eat it,” I said to join in.

  “Shut up,” my father said, and by way of sympathy my aunt touched the cuff of my navy jumper. I put the florin on the bread plate and played with it, both to let my parents see that I had been given it and to convey that I was willing to part with it, as indeed I was.

  “That’s too much altogether,” my mother said to my aunt. My aunt said she was sorry that she hadn’t had the chance to make a pie for me or to bring me in a boat on the lake. They marvelled about the air and the beauty down by the lake. It was getting late. Soon they would go. The visit had no ripple to it. Part of me wanted to volunteer to go back with them, while another part admitted that that would be absurd. Either way, I knew that I had lost some part of my parents’ love and God only knows how long it would take to win it back—days, weeks maybe, of slaving and washing up and shining at school. But even then it could come up at any time, this failure of mine, an added incentive for an outburst, another blind grope in which my mother and father were trying to tell each other how unhappy they were.

  LANTERN SLIDES

  “MACHUSLA, MACHUSLA, MACHUSLA MACREE…” Someone would sing that refrain before the night was over; a voice slightly drunk, or maybe very drunk, would send those trenchant lines to all the boisterous hearts who, by midnight, would not be nearly so suave or so self-possessed. At first it did not seem like a song that would be sung there, because this was a smart gathering in a select part of the outskirts of Dublin—full, as Mr. Conroy said, of nobs.

  There were people from the world of politics, the world of theatre, the racing world, and the world of rock music. No rock stars were present, but a well-known manager of one group was there, and, as Mr. Con
roy said, maybe one of his besequinned protégés would storm in later on. As Miss Lawless and Mr. Conroy squeezed into the big hall, she saw a melee of people, well togged, waiters wading about with trays and bottles, and, in a big limestone grate, a turf fire blazing. The surround was a bit lugubrious, like a grotto, but this impression was forgotten as the flames spread and swagged into brazen orange banners. In the sitting room, a further galaxy of people—all standing except for a few elderly ladies, who sat on a chintz-covered banquette in the middle of the room. Here too was a fire, and here the hum of voices that presaged an evening that would be lively, maybe even hectic. The waiters, mostly young men, moved like altar boys among the panting throngs, and so immense was the noise that people asked from time to time how this racket could be quelled, because quelled it would have to be when the moment came, when the summons for silence came.

  Reflected in everything around were the signs of prosperity—hunting scenes in big gilt frames, low tables crammed with ornaments, porcelain boxes, veined eggs, and so forth—and the chandeliers seemed to be chattering, so dense and busy and clustered were the shining pendants of glass. The big flower arrangements were all identical—pink and red carnations, as if these were the only flowers to be found. Yet by looking through the window Miss Lawless could see that lilac was just beginning to sprout, and small white eggcups of blossom shivered on jet-black magnolia branches. It was a nippy evening.