by Edna O'Brien
“Afraid, love, we’re closing up now,” Dolly said. “Wouldju like to come in and sit in the kitchen for a while?”
I thanked her but said I’d rather not. He might come unknown to me. She took the money out of the cash register, counted it, and put it into a big black purse.
“Good night, love,” she said as she closed the door after me. I sat in the porch. People passed by, with heads lowered. Gray, sad, indiscriminate people, going nowhere. Two sailors passed and winked at me. They kept looking back, but when they saw that I wasn’t interested, they walked on.
It rained on and off.
I knew now that he wasn’t coming; but still I sat there. An hour or two later I got up, picked up my things, and walked despondently toward the bus stop in O’Connell Street.
Joanna rushed out when she heard the gate squeak. Her hands were raised; her fat, greasy face was beaming. The lodger had arrived.
“A real gentleman. Rich. Expensive. You like him, he is so nice. Real pigskin gloves. Gut suit, everything,” she said.
“Come, you meet him.” She caught hold of my wet wrist and tried to coax me. Then she saw that I was crying.
“Oh, a telegram. One came. You had just gone, but I could not follow now because my new man was coming and I could not go out of the house, for fear of he arriving and find nobody.” She was hoping that I wasn’t cross. I took off my hat and threw it on the hall stand. It was a wet, gray hen by now.
“I am sad for you. It is all for best,” Joanna said, as she nodded toward the room.
I opened the telegram. It said:
EVERYTHING GONE WRONG. THREATS FROM YOUR FATHER. MY WIFE HAS ANOTHER NERVOUS BREAKDOWN. REGRET ENFORCED SILENCE. MUST NOT SEE YOU.
It was not signed and it had been handed in at a Limerick post office early that morning.
“Come, meet my nice new friend,” Joanna pleaded, but I shook my head and went upstairs to cry.
I cried on the bed for a long time, until I began to feel very cold. Somehow one feels colder after hours of crying. Eventually I got up and put on the light. I came downstairs to make a cup of tea. The telegram was still in my hand, crumpled into a ball. I read it again. It said exactly the same thing.
After I’d put the kettle on the gas, I went automatically to get my cup off the dining-room table, as Joanna always laid the breakfast things before going to bed. As I came to the door, I heard a sound from within. I peeped around the side of the door and looked straight into the face of a strange young man who was holding a brass instrument in one hand and a polishing rag in the other.
“I’m sorry,” I said, picked up my cup off the table, and ran straight out of the room. My face must have been a nice sight. Blotchy from crying.
When I had made the tea, I recollected that he must think it a very odd house, so I went down the hall and called in, “Would you like a cup of tea?” I didn’t want him to see my face again.
“No English speak,” he said.
God, I thought, as if it makes any difference to whether you’d like tea or not.
I poured him a cup and brought it in.
“No English speak,” he said, and he shrugged his shoulders.
I came out to the kitchen and took two aspirins with my tea. It was almost certain that I wouldn’t sleep that night.
The
Lonely
Girl
1
It was a wet afternoon in October, as I copied out the September accounts from the big gray ledger. I worked in a grocery shop in the north of Dublin and had been there for two years.
My employer and his wife were country people like myself. They were kind, but they liked me to work hard and promised me a raise in the new year. Little did I know that I would be gone by then, to a different life.
Because of the rain, not many customers came in and out, so I wrote the bills quickly and then got on with my reading. I had a book hidden in the ledger, so that I could read without fear of being caught.
It was a beautiful book, but sad. It was called Tender Is the Night. I skipped half the words in my anxiety to read it quickly, because I wanted to know whether the man would leave the woman or not. All the nicest men were in books—the strange, complex, romantic men; the ones I admired most.
I knew no one like that except Mr. Gentleman, and I had not seen him for two years. He was only a shadow now, and I remembered him the way one remembers a nice dress that one has grown out of.
At half past four I put on the lights. The shop looked shabbier in artificial light, too; the shelves were dusty and the ceiling hadn’t been painted since I went there. It was full of cracks. I looked in the mirror to see how my hair was. We were going somewhere that night, my friend Baba and me. My face in the mirror looked round and smooth. I sucked my cheeks in, to make them thinner. I longed to be thin, like Baba.
“You look like you were going to have a child,” Baba said to me the night before, when I was in my nightgown.
“You’re raving,” I said to her. Even the thought of such a thing worried me. Baba was always teasing me, although she knew I’d never done more than kiss Mr. Gentleman.
“It happens to country mopes like you, soon as you dance with a fellow,” Baba said, as she held an imaginary man in her arms and waltzed between the two iron beds. Then she burst into one of her mad laughs and poured gin into the transparent plastic tooth mugs on the bedside table.
Lately Baba had taken to carrying a baby gin in her handbag. We didn’t like the taste of gin and tonic so much, but we loved the look of it; we loved its cool blue complexion as we sprawled on our hard beds, drinking and pretending to be fast.
Baba had come back to Joanna’s boardinghouse from the sanatorium, and it was like the old days, except that neither of us had men. We had dates of course—no steady men—but dates are risky.
Only the Sunday before, Baba had had a date with a man who sold cosmetics. He came to collect her in a car painted all over with slogans: GIVE HER PINK SATIN, LOVELY PINK SATIN FOR THAT SCHOOL-GIRL BLOOM. It was a blue, flashy car and the slogans were in silver. Baba heard him honk and she looked out to see what kind of car he had.
“Oh, Holy God! I’m not going out in that circus wagon. Go down and tell him I’m having a hemmoridge.”
I hated the word “hemmoridge,” it was one of her new words to sound tough. I went down and told him that she had a headache.
“Would you like to come instead?”
I said no.
On the back seat there were advertisement cards and little sample bottles of “pink satin face lotion,” packed in boxes. I thought he might offer me a sample, but he didn’t.
“Sure you wouldn’t like to see a show?”
I said that I couldn’t.
Without another word he started up the car and backed out of the cul-de-sac.
“He was very disappointed,” I said when I got back upstairs.
“That’ll shake him. Feck any samples? I could do with a bit of suntan stuff for my legs.”
“How could I take samples with him sitting there in the car?”
“Distract him. Get him interested in your bust or the sunset or something.”
Baba is unreasonable. She thinks people are more stupid than they are. Those flashy fellows who sell things and own shops, they can probably count and add up.
“He hardly spoke two words,” I said.
“Oh, the silent type!” Baba said, making a long face. “You can imagine what an evening with him would be like! Get your mink on, we’re going to a hop,” and I put on a light dress and we went downtown to a Sunday-night dance.
“Don’t take cigarettes from those Indian fellows with turbans, they might be doped,” Baba said.
There was a rumor that two girls were doped and brought up the Dublin mountains the week before.
Doped cigarettes! We didn’t even get asked for one dance; there weren’t enough men. We could have danced with each other, but Baba said that was the end. So we just sat there, rubbing the gooseflesh
off our arms and passing remarks about the men who stood at one end of the hall sizing up the various girls who sat, waiting, on long benches. They never asked a girl to dance until the music started up, and then they seemed to pick girls who were near. We moved down to that end of the hall, but had no luck there either.
Baba said that we ought never go to a hop again; she said that we’d have to meet new people, diplomats and people like that.
It was my constant wish. Some mornings I used to get up convinced that I would meet a new, wonderful man. I used to make my face up specially and take short breaths to prepare myself for the excitement of it. But I never met anyone except customers, or students that Baba knew.
I thought of all this in the shop as I gummed red stickers on any bills which were due for over three months and addressed them hurriedly. We never posted bills, because Mrs. Burns said it was cheaper to have Willie, the messenger boy, deliver them. Just then he came in, shaking rain from his sou’wester.
“Where were you?”
“Nowhere.”
As usual at that time of evening, he and I had a snack, before the shop got busy. We ate broken biscuits, raisins, dried prunes, and some cherries. His hands were blue and red with cold.
“Do you like them, Will?” I said as he made a face at my new white shoes. The toes were so long that I had to walk sideways going upstairs. I had put them on because Baba and I were going to a wine-tasting reception that night. We read about it in the papers and Baba said that we’d crash it. We had crashed two other functions—a fashion show and a private showing of a travel film of Ireland. (All lies, about dark-haired girls roaming around Connemara in red petticoats. No wonder they had to show it in private.)
At half past five, customers began to flock in on their way from work, and around six Mrs. Burns came out, to let me go off.
“Very stuffy here,” she said to Willie. A hint to mean that we shouldn’t have the oil heater on. Stuffy! There were drafts everywhere, and a great division between the floor and the wainscoting.
I made my face up in the hall and put on rouge, eye shadow, and lashings of Ashes-of-Roses perfume. The very name Ashes-of-Roses made me feel alluring. Willie sneaked me a good sugar bag, so that I could bring my shoes in the bag and wear my Wellingtons. The gutters were overflowing outside, and rain beat against the skylight in the upstairs hall.
“Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do,” he said as he let me out by the hall door, and whistled as I ran to the bus shelter a few yards down the road. It was raining madly.
The bus was empty, as there were very few people going down to the center of the city at that hour of evening. It was too early for the pictures. There were toffee papers and cigarette packages on the floor, and the bus had a sweaty smell. It was a poor neighborhood.
I read a paper which I found on the seat beside me. There was a long article by a priest, telling how he’d been tortured in China. I knew a lot about that sort of thing, because in the convent where I went to school the nun used to read those stories to us on Saturday nights. As a treat she used to read a paper called The Standard. It was full of stories about priests’ toenails being pulled off and nuns shut up in dark rooms with rats.
I almost missed my stop, because I had been engrossed in this long article by the Irish priest.
Baba was waiting for me outside the hotel. She looked like something off a Christmas tree. She had a new fur muff and her hairdo was held in place with lacquer.
“Mother o’ God, where are you off to in your Wellingtons?” she asked.
I looked down at my feet and realized with desolation that I’d left my shoes on the bus.
There was nothing for it but to cross the road and wait for the bus on its return journey. It was an unsheltered bus stop and Baba’s hairstyle got flattened. Then, to make everything worse, my shoes were not on the bus and there was a different conductor. He said that the other conductor must have handed them in to the lost property office on the way to his tea.
“Call there any time after ten in the morning,” he said, and when Baba heard that, she said, “Turalu,” and ran across the road back to the hotel. I followed dispiritedly.
We had trouble getting into the banquet room, even though Baba told the girl at the entrance that we were journalists. She rooted in her bag for the invitation cards and said that she must have forgotten them. She said they were pink cards edged with gold. She knew because the girl at the door held a pile of them in her hand and flicked their gold edges impatiently. Baba’s hands trembled as she searched, and her cheeks looked flushed. The two spots of rouge on her cheekbones had been washed unevenly by the rain.
“What paper do you represent?” the girl asked. A small queue had gathered behind us.
“Woman’s Night,” Baba said. It was what she planned to say. There is no such magazine.
“Go ahead,” the girl said grudgingly, and we went in.
As we walked across the polished floor, my rubber boots squeaked loudly and I imagined that everyone was staring at me. It was a very rich room—chandeliers alight, dusky-blue, velvet curtains drawn across, and dance music playing softly.
Baba saw our friend Tod Mead and went toward him. He was a public-relations officer who worked for a big wool company and we had met him at a fashion show a few weeks before. He took us for coffee then and tried to get off with Baba. He affected a casual world-weary manner, but it was only put on, because he ate loads of bread and jam. We knew he was married but we hadn’t met his wife.
“Tod!” Baba hobbled over to him on her high heels. He kissed her hand and introduced us to the two people with him. One was a lady journalist in a big black hat and the other a strange man with a sallow face. His name was Eugene Gaillard. He said, “Pleased to meet you,” but he didn’t look very pleased. He had a sad face, and Tod told us that he was a film director. Baba began to smirk and show her dimples and the gold tooth, all at once.
“He made So-and-So,” Tod said, mentioning a picture I’d never heard of.
“A classic documentary, a classic,” the lady journalist said.
Mr. Gaillard looked at her earnestly and said, “Yes, really splendid; shatteringly realistic poverty.” His long face had an odd expression of contempt as he spoke.
“What are you doing now?” she asked.
“I’ve become a farmer,” he told her.
“A squire,” Tod corrected.
The lady journalist suggested that she go out there someday and do an article on him. She was nicely dressed and reeked of perfume, but she was over fifty.
“We might as well get some red ink,” Baba told me. She was disappointed because neither of the men had offered to get it for her. I followed her across toward the long row of tables which were placed end to end along the length of the room. There were white cloths on each table and waiters stood behind, pouring half glasses of red and white wine.
“They weren’t very pally,” Baba said.
Their voices reached me and I heard Tod say, “That’s the literary fat girl I was telling you about.”
“Which one?” Eugene Gaillard asked idly.
“Long hair and rubber boots,” Tod said, and I heard him laughing.
I ran and got myself a drink. There were plates of water biscuits but I couldn’t reach them and I felt hungry, having had no tea.
“Literary fat girl!” It really stabbed me.
“Your fashions are original—rubber boots and a feather hat,” Eugene said behind my back, and I knew his soft voice without even turning around to look at him.
“You brave coward,” he said. He was tall, about the same height as my father.
“Its nothing to laugh at—I lost my shoes,” I said.
“But it is so original, to come in your rubber boots. You could start a whole trend with that kind of thing. Have you heard of the men who can only make love to girls in their plastic macs?”
“I haven’t heard,” I said sadly, ashamed at knowing so little.
“Tell me about
you,” he said, and I felt suddenly at home with him, I don’t know why. He wasn’t like anyone I knew; his face was long and had a gray color. It reminded me of a saint’s face carved out of gray stone which I saw in the church every Sunday.
“Who are you, what do you do?” he asked, but when he saw that I was shy, he began to talk himself. He said that he had come because he met Tod Mead in Grafton Street and Tod dragged him along.
“I came for the scenery—not the wine,” he said, looking around at the gilt wall brackets, the plush curtains, and at a tall, intense woman with black earrings who stood alone near the window. If only I could say something interesting to him.
“What’s the difference between white wine and red wine?” I asked. He wasn’t drinking.
“One is red and one is white.” He laughed.
But Baba came along, with the white muff and a bunch of potato crisps.
“Has Mary of the Sorrows been telling you a lot of drip about her awful childhood?” She meant me.
“Everything. From the very beginning,” he said.
Baba started to frown, then quickly gave one of her big false laughs and moved her hands up and down in front of her eyes. “What’s that?” she asked. She did it three times, but he could not guess it.
“Past your eyes—milk—pasteurized milk. Ha, ha, ha.” She told Eugene Gaillard that she worked on the lonely-hearts column of Woman’s Night and had a great time reading hilarious letters.
“Only yesterday,” she ran on, “I had a letter from a poor woman in Ballinasloe who said, ‘Dear Madam, My husband makes love to me on Sunday nights and I find this very inconvenient as I have a big wash on Mondays and am dog-tired. What can I do without hurting my husband’s feelings?’
“I told Mrs. Ballinasloe,” Baba said, “ ‘Wash on Tuesdays.’ “ She threw her little hands out to emphasize the simple way she dealt with life’s problems, and he laughed obligingly.
