by Edna O'Brien
“Have an orange?” he said, taking two out of the cut-glass bowl on the dining-room table. He smiled and saw me to the door. There was a certain slyness about his smile, and as he shook my hand I had an odd sensation, as if someone were tickling my stomach from the inside. I crossed over the smooth lawn, under the cherry trees, and out onto the tarmac path. He stayed in the doorway. When I looked back the sun was shining on him and on the white Snowcemmed house, and the upstairs windows were all on fire. He waved when I was closing the gate and then went inside. To drink elegant glasses of sherry; to play chess, to eat soufflés and roast venison, I thought, and I was just on the point of thinking about tall eccentric Mrs. Gentleman when Jack Holland asked me another question.
“You know something, Caithleen?”
“What, Jack?”
At least he would protect me if we met my father.
“You know many Irish people are royalty and unaware of it. There are kings and queens walking the roads of Ireland, riding bicycles, imbibing tea, plowing the humble earth, totally unaware of their great heredity. Your mother, now, has the ways and the walk of a queen.”
I sighed. Jack’s infatuation with the English language bored me.
He went on: “ ‘My thoughts on white ships and the King of Spain’s daughter’—except that my thoughts are much nearer home.” He smiled happily to himself. He was composing a paragraph for his column in the local paper—”Walking in the crystal-clear morning with a juvenile lady friend, exchanging snatches of Goldsmith and Colum, the thought flashed through my mind that I was moving amid …”
The towpath petered out just there and we went onto the road. It was dry and dusty where we walked, and we met the carts going over to the creamery and the milk tanks rattled and the owners beat their donkeys with the reins and said, “Gee-up there.” Passing Baba’s house I walked faster. Her new Pink-Witch bicycle was gleaming against the side wall of their house. Their house was like a doll’s house on the outside, pebble-dashed, with two bow windows downstairs and circular flower beds in the front garden. Baba was the veterinary surgeon’s daughter. Coy, pretty, malicious Baba was my friend and the person whom I feared most after my father.
“Your mam at home?” Jack finally asked. He hummed some tune to himself.
He tried to sound casual, but I knew perfectly well that this was why he had waited for me under the ivy wall. He had brought over his cow to the paddock he hired from one of our neighbors and then he had waited for me at the wicker gate. He didn’t dare come up. Not since the night Dada had ordered him out of the kitchen. They were playing cards and Jack had his hand on Mama’s knee under the table. Mama didn’t protest, because Jack was decent to her, with presents of candied peel and chocolate and samples of jam that he got from commercial travelers. Then Dada let a card fall and bent down to get it; and next thing the table was turned over sideways and the china lamp got broken. My father shouted and pulled up his sleeves, and Mama told me to go to bed. The shouting, high and fierce, came up through the ceiling because my room was directly over the kitchen. Such shouting! It was rough and crushing. Like the noise of a steamroller. Mama cried and pleaded, and her cry was hopeless and plaintive.
“There’s trouble brewing,” said Jack, bringing me from one world of it more abruptly to another. He spoke as if it were the end of the world for me.
We were walking in the middle of the road and from behind came the impudent ring of a bicycle bell. It was Baba, looking glorious on her new puce bicycle. She passed with her head in the air and one hand in her pocket. Her black hair was plaited that day and tied at the tips with blue ribbons that matched her ankle socks exactly. I noticed with envy that her legs were delicately tanned.
She passed us and then slowed down, dragging her left toe along the blue tarred road, and when we caught up with her, she grabbed the lilac out of my arms and said, “I’ll carry that for you.” She laid it into the basket on the front of her bicycle and rode off singing, “I will and I must get married,” out loud to herself. So she would give Miss Moriarty the lilac and get all the praise for bringing it.
“You don’t deserve this, Caithleen,” he said.
“No, Jack. She shouldn’t have taken it. She’s a bully.” But he meant something quite different, something to do with my father and with our farm.
We passed the Greyhound Hotel, where Mrs. O’Shea was polishing the knocker. She had a hairnet on and pipe cleaners so tight in her head that you could see her scalp. Her bedroom slippers looked as if the greyhounds had chewed them. More than likely they had. The hotel was occupied chiefly by greyhounds. Mr. O’Shea thought he would get rich that way. He went to the dogs in Limerick every night and Mrs. O’Shea drank port wine up at the dressmaker’s. The dressmaker was a gossip.
“Good morning, Jack; good morning, Caithleen,” she said over-affably. Jack replied coldly; her business interfered with his. He had a grocery and bar up the street, but Mrs. O’Shea got a lot of drinkers at night because she kept good fires. The men drank there after hours and she had bribed the police not to raid her. I almost walked over two hounds that were asleep on the mat outside the shop door. Their noses, black and moist, were jutting out on the pavement.
“Hello,” I said. My mother warned me not to be too free with her, as she had given my father so much credit that ten of their cows were grazing on our land for life.
We passed the hotel, the gray, damp ruin that it was, with window frames rotting and doors scratched all over from the claws of young and nervous greyhounds.
“Did I tell you, Caithleen, that her ladyship has never given a commercial traveler anything other than fried egg or tinned salmon for lunch?”
“Yes, Jack, you told me.” He had told me fifty times, it was one of his ways of ridiculing her; by lowering her he hoped to lower the name of the hotel. But the locals liked it, because it was friendly drinking in the kitchen late at night.
We stood for a minute to look over the bridge, at the black-green water that flowed by the window of the hotel basement. It was green water and the willows along the bank made it more green. I was looking to see if there were any fish, because Hickey liked to do a bit of fishing in the evenings, while I waited for Jack to stop hedging and finally tell me whatever it was that he wanted to say.
The bus passed and scattered dust on either side. Something had leaped down below; it might have been a fish. I didn’t see it, I was waving to the bus. I always waved. Circles of water were running into one another and when the last circle had dissolved he said, “Your place is mortgaged; the bank owns it.”
But, like the dark water underneath, his words did not disturb me. They had nothing to do with me, neither the words nor the water; or so I thought as I said goodbye to him and climbed the hill toward the school. Mortgage, I thought, now what does that mean? and puzzling it over, I decided to ask Miss Moriarty, or better still to look it up in the big black dictionary. It was kept in the school press.
The classroom was in a muddle. Miss Moriarty was bent over a book and Baba was arranging the lilac (my lilac) on the little May altar at the top of the classroom. The smaller children were sitting on the floor mixing all the separate colors of plasticine together, and the big girls were chatting in groups of three or four.
Delia Sheehy was taking cobwebs out of the corners of the ceiling. She had a cloth tied to the end of the window pole, and as she moved from one corner to another, she dragged the pole along the whitewashed walls and the dusty, faded, gray maps. Maps of Ireland and Europe and America. Delia was a poor girl who lived in a cottage with her grandmother. She got all the dirty jobs at school. In winter she lit the fire and cleaned the ashes every morning before the rest of us came in, and every Friday she cleaned the closets with a yard brush and a bucket of Jeyes Fluid water. She had two summer dresses and she washed one every second evening, so that she was always clean and neat and scrubbed-looking. She told me that she would be a nun when she grew up.
“You’re late, you’re going to be
killed, murdered, slaughtered,” Baba said to me as I came in. So I went over to apologize to Miss Moriarty.
“What? What’s this?” she asked impatiently, as she lifted her head from her book. It was an Italian book. She learned Italian by post and went to Rome in the summertime. She had seen the Pope and she was a very clever woman. She told me to go to my seat; she was annoyed that I had found her reading an Italian book. On my way down Delia Sheehy whispered to me, “She never missed you.”
So Baba had sent me to apologize for nothing. I could have gone to my desk unnoticed. I took out an English book and read Thoreau’s “A Winter Morning”—”Silently we unlatch the door, letting the drift fall in, and step abroad to face the cutting air. Already the stars have lost some of their sparkle, and a dull leaden mist skirts the horizon”—and I was just there when Miss Moriarty called for silence.
“We have great news today,” she said, and she was looking at me. Her eyes were small and blue and piercing. You would think she was cross, but it was just that she had bad sight from overreading.
“Our school is honored,” she said, and I felt myself beginning to blush.
“You, Caithleen,” she said, looking directly at me, “have won a scholarship.” I stood up and thanked her, and all the girls clapped. She said that we wouldn’t do much work that day as a celebration.
“Where will she be going?” Baba asked. She had put all the lilac in jam jars and placed them in a dreary half circle around the statue of the Blessed Virgin. The teacher said the name of the convent. It was at the other end of the county and there was no bus to it.
Delia Sheehy asked me to write in her autograph album and I wrote something soppy. Then a little fold of paper was thrown up from behind, onto my desk. I opened it. It was from Baba. It read:
I’m going there too in September. My father has it all fixed. I have my uniform got. Of course we’re paying. It’s nicer when you pay. You’re a right-looking eejit.
Baba
My heart sank. I knew at once that I’d be getting a lift in their car and that Baba would tell everyone in the convent about my father. I wanted to cry.
The day passed slowly. I was wondering about Mama. She’d be pleased to hear about the scholarship. My education worried her. At three o’clock we were let out, and though I didn’t know it, that was my last day at school. I would never again sit at my desk and smell that smell of chalk and mice and swept dust. I would have cried if I had known, or written my name with the corner of a set square on my desk.
I forgot about the word “mortgage.”
3
I was wrapping myself up in the cloakroom when Baba came out. She said “Cheerio” to Miss Moriarty. She was Miss Moriarty’s pet, even though she was the school dunce. She wore a white cardigan like a cloak over her shoulders so that the sleeves dangled down idly. She was full of herself.
“And what in the hell do you want a bloody coat and hat and scarf for? It’s the month of May. You’re like a bloody Eskimo.”
“What’s a bloody Eskimo?”
“Mind your own business.” She didn’t know.
She stood in front of me, peering at my skin as if it were full of blackheads or spots. I could smell her soap. It was a wonderful smell, half perfume, half disinfectant.
“What soap is that you’re using?” I asked.
“Mind your own bloody business and use carbolic. Anyhow, you’re a country mope and you don’t even wash in the bathroom, for God’s sake. Bowls of water in the scullery and a facecloth that your mother made out of an old rag. What do you use the bathroom for, anyhow?” she said.
“We have a guest room,” I said, getting hysterical with temper.
“Jesus, ye have, and there’s oats in it. The place is like a bloody barn with chickens in a box in the window; did ye fix the lavatory chain yet?”
It was surprising that she could talk so fast, and yet she wasn’t able to write a composition but bullied me to do it for her.
“Where is your bicycle?” I asked jealously, as we came out the door. She had cut such a dash with her new bicycle early in the morning that I didn’t want to be with her while she cycled slowly and I walked in a half-run alongside her.
“Left it at home at lunchtime. The wireless said there’d be rain. How’s your upstairs model?” She was referring to an old-fashioned bicycle of Mama’s that I sometimes used.
The two of us went down the towpath toward the village. I could smell her soap. The soap and the neat bands of sticking plaster, and the cute, cute smile; and the face dimpled and soft and just the right plumpness—for these things I could have killed her. The sticking plaster was an affectation. It drew attention to her round, soft knees. She didn’t kneel as much as the rest of us, because she was the best singer in the choir and no one seemed to mind if she sat on the piano stool all through Mass and fiddled with the half-moons of her nails: except during the Consecration. She wore narrow bands of sticking plaster across her knees. She got it for nothing from her father’s surgery, and people were always asking her if her knees were cut. Grown-ups liked Baba and gave her a lot of attention.
“Any news?” she said suddenly. When she said this I always felt obliged to entertain her, even if I had to tell lies.
“We got a candlewick bedspread from America,” I said, and regretted it at once. Baba could boast and when she did everybody listened, but when I boasted everybody laughed and nudged; that was since the day I told them we used our drawing room for drawing. Not a day passed but Baba said, “My mammy saw Big Ben on her honeymoon,” and all the girls at school looked at Baba in wonder, as if her mother was the only person ever to have seen Big Ben. Though, indeed, she may have been the only person in our village to have seen it.
Jack Holland rapped his knuckles against the window and beckoned me to come in. Baba followed, and sniffed as soon as we got inside. There was a smell of dust and stale porter and old tobacco smoke. We went in behind the counter. Jack took off his rimless spectacles and laid them on an open sack of sugar. He took both my hands in his.
“Your mam is gone on a little journey,” he said.
“Gone where?” I asked, with panic in my voice.
“Now, don’t be excited. Jack is in charge, so have no fears.”
In charge! Jack had been in charge the night of the concert when the town hall went on fire; Jack was in charge of the lorry that De Valera nearly fell through during an election speech. I began to cry.
“Oh, now, now,” Jack said, as he went down to the far end of the shop, where the bottles of wine were. Baba nudged me.
“Go on crying,” she said. She knew we’d get something. He took down a dusty bottle of ciderette and filled two glasses. I didn’t see why she should benefit from my miseries.
“To your health,” he said as he handed us the drinks. My glass was dirty. It had been washed in portery water and dried with a dirty towel.
“Why do you keep the blind drawn?” Baba said, smiling up at him sweetly.
“It’s all a matter of judgment,” he said seriously, as he put on his glasses.
“These,” he said, pointing to the jars of sweets and the two-pound pots of jam, “these would suffer from the sunshine.”
The blue blind was faded and was bleached to a dull gray. The cord had come off and the blind was itself torn across the bottom slat, and as he talked to us Jack went over and adjusted it slightly. The shop was cold and sunless and the counter was stained all over with circles of brown.
“Will Mama be long?” I asked, and soon as I mentioned her name he smiled to himself.
“Hickey could tell you that. If he’s not snoring in the hay shed, he could enlighten you,” Jack said. He was jealous of Hickey because Mama relied on Hickey so utterly.
Baba finished her drink and handed him the glass. He sloshed it in a basin of cold water and put it to drain on a metal tray that had GUINNESS IS GOOD FOR YOU painted on it. Then he dried his hands most carefully on a filthy, worn, frayed towel, and he winked at me.
“I am going to beg for a favor,” he said to both of us. I knew what it would be.
“What about a kiss each?” he asked. I looked down at a box that was full of white candles.
“Tra la la la, Mr. Holland,” Baba said airily, as she ran out of the shop. I followed her, but unfortunately I tripped over a mousetrap that he had set inside the door. The trap clicked on my shoe and turned upside down. A piece of fatty bacon got stuck to the sole of my shoe.
“These little beastly rodents,” he said, as he took the bacon off my shoe and set the trap again. Hickey said that the shop was full of mice. Hickey said that they tumbled around in the sack of sugar at night, and we had bought flour there ourselves that had two dead mice in it. We bought flour in the Protestant shop down the street after that. Mama said that Protestants were cleaner and more honest.
“That little favor,” Jack said earnestly to me.
“I’m too young, Jack,” I said helplessly, and anyhow, I was too sad.
“Touching, most touching. You have a lyrical trend,” he said, as he stroked my pink cheek with his damp hand, and then he held the door as I went out. Just then his mother called him from the kitchen and he ran in to her. I clicked the latch tight, and came out to find Baba waiting.
“Bloody clown, what did you fall over?” She was sitting on an empty porter barrel outside the door, swinging her legs.
“Your dress will get all pink paint from that barrel,” I said.
“It’s a pink dress, you eejit. I’m going home with you, I might feck a few rings.”
“No, you’re not,” I said firmly. My voice was shaky.
“Yes, I am. I’m going over to get a bunch of flowers. Mammy sent over word at lunchtime to ask your mother could I. Mammy’s having tea with the archbishop tomorrow, so we want bluebells for the table.”
“Who’s the archbishop?” I asked, as we had only a bishop in our diocese.
