by Edna O'Brien
“Could you bring up the bellows, please?” he called down to me.
The fire in the bedroom had gone out. It was a large room with a double bed and dark mahogany furniture. Four pillows on the bed—two at either side—caught my eye.
“Well, sometimes I sleep on one side and sometimes I sleep on the other; it makes a change,” he said, divining my thoughts.
“Stay,” he said as he worked the bellows up and down, and caused ashes to rise toward the picture over the fireplace—a naked woman lying on her side.
“I’ll have to be off,” I said, trying to sound casual. A naked woman was no thing to have staring at him every night in his bed. A gust of smoke blew down the chimney into his face and made him cough.
“Could you open the window, please?” he asked as the coughing almost took his breath away. The window was stiff, so I had to tap it; it opened suddenly and unexpectedly, and the sudden draft quenched the candle.
“I’m afraid I have to go home now, it’s eight o’clock,” I said in a slightly hysterical voice as I groped my way toward the door.
“Go,” he said. “But, my dear girl, I haven’t seduced you yet!” He laughed and I thought of a portrait of him downstairs, which looked sinister. I groped for the doorknob (the wind had caused the door to slam) but could not turn it. My hands became powerless. He relit the candle and stood there, near the fireplace, holding it.
“Stop trembling,” he said, and then he said that there was nothing to be afraid of and that he had been joking. I realized that I was being silly and I began to cry.
“There, there,” he said, coming over to pet me. “You are a silly girl.” He bent down and kissed my wet mouth more tenderly than he had ever kissed me before.
We went downstairs and made tea and talked, and then he said that he would take me home. I combed my hair, which had become tossed while he kissed me.
Outside, the stars were fierce with frost, the ground hardened with it, the pine trees very still and very beautiful. In the greenish moonlight I turned to him to say that I did not really want to leave so early. The place looked enchanting in the frost; inside in the study a warm fire blazed behind a guard, the lamp was lowered, and the last record lay on the green baize of the wind-up gramophone, silent.
“I hate going now,” I said, but we had put on our coats and he had brought the car around to the front of the house, and anyhow, he said that we would have to drive slowly because of ice patches reported on the nine o’clock news.
“Back to the village,” he said. It was a phrase he used whenever he drove me home.
6
I went most Sundays after that, and then, one Sunday night I stayed.
I slept in the guest room, where the floor and woodwork had been newly varnished. Everything was a little sticky.
In fact I didn’t sleep, I kept thinking of him. I could hear him whistling downstairs and moving around until after three o’clock. He had left me a magazine to read. It contained a lot of drawings—people with peaked noses and staircases growing out of their ears—which I did not understand. I kept the light on because Anna said a woman had died in that room just before Eugene bought the house. A colonel’s wife who took digitalis pills.
Toward morning I dozed, but the alarm clock went off at seven and I had to get up to go back to work.
“Did you sleep?” he asked. We met going down the stairs, and he yawned and pretended to stagger.
“No, not very well.”
“Nonsense, isn’t it! Two people at opposite wings of the house lying awake. Next time we’ll keep each other company and put a bolster in the bed between us, won’t we?” he said as he kissed me. I looked away. I had been brought up to think of it as something unmentionable, which a woman had to pretend to like, to please a husband.
He brought a rug for my knees and a flask of tea, which I drank in the car, as there was no time for breakfast.
The next Sunday I stayed, and I still went to my own room. I did not want to sleep in his bed; he put it down to scruples, but actually I was afraid. Early the next morning he tapped on my door, and as I was awake I got up, and we went out for a stroll through the woods.
There are moments in our lives we can never forget: I remember that early morning and the white limbs of young birches in the early mist, and later the sun coming up behind the mountain in crimson splendor as if it were the first day of the world. I remember the sudden brightness of everything and the effect of suffused light as the sun came through the mist, and the dew lifted, and later the green of the grass showed forth very vividly, radiating energy in the form of color.
“I wish we could be together,” he said, his arm around my neck.
“Will we be?” I said.
“It seems so natural now, so inevitable, I was never one for necking in backs of cars, it strikes me as being so sick,” he said.
Kissing, or “necking,” as he called it, suited me nicely, but I could not tell him that.
But I could only postpone it until Christmastime.
He invited Baba, Joanna, and Gustav for Christmas dinner, so that I would feel at ease, as his friends terrified me. They were mostly people from other countries who told each other obscure jokes, and I felt that they looked on me as some sort of curiosity brought in for amusement.
It was a pleasant dinner, with red candles along the table and presents for everyone on the tree; Joanna was in her element, she got an old gilt frame to bring home and some logs for the dining-room grate. Baba waltzed with Eugene after dinner to gramophone music, and everybody had plenty to drink.
At midnight the guests went home, but I stayed. It looked quite respectable really, because Eugene’s mother was also staying. She was a frail, argumentative little woman, with a craggy face and a big forehead like his. She coughed a lot.
Eugene helped her upstairs to the guest room (the room I usually slept in) and brought her hot whiskey and a little mug for her teeth. Then he came down and we ate cold turkey and cream crackers.
“I hardly saw you all day, and you looked so pretty at dinner,” he said as we sat on the sheepskin rug in front of the fire, eating. He read to me, poems by Lorca, which I didn’t understand, but he read nicely. He wanted me to read one but I felt shy, sometimes I became very shy in his company. One side of my face got very hot, so I took off one of my red lantern earrings. Raising his eyes from the book, he saw the warm lobe blackened a little by the cheap tin of the earring clip, and he groaned.
“Your ears could go septic,” he said as he examined the red earrings which I had bought on Christmas Eve so that I would look glamorous for him.
“Made in Hong Kong!” he said as he threw them in the fire. I tried to rescue them with the tongs but it was too late; they had sunk into the red ashes.
I sulked for a bit, but he said that he would buy me a gold pair.
“If I didn’t care about you I wouldn’t worry about your ears,” he said. I laughed at that. His compliments were so odd.
“You soft, daft, wanton thing, you’ve got one mad eye,” he said, looking into my eyes, which he decided were green.
“Green eyes and copper hair, my mother wouldn’t trust you,” he said. His mother had cold blue eyes which were very piercing and shrewd. A smell of eucalyptus oil surrounded her.
I lay back on the woolly rug, and he kissed my warmed face.
After a while he said, “Will we go to bed, Miss Potts?” I was happy lying there, just kissing him; bed was too final for me, so I sat up and put my arms around my knees.
“It’s too early,” I said. It was about two in the morning.
“We’ll wash our teeth,” he said, so we went upstairs and washed our teeth. “You’re not washing your teeth properly, you should brush them up and down as well as back and forth.”
I think he just said that to put me at my ease. I had stopped talking and my eyes were owlish, as they always are when I am frightened. I knew that I was about to do something terrible. I believed in hell, in eternal torment
by fire. But it could be postponed.
The bedroom was cold. Normally Anna lit a fire there, but in the excitement of dinner and presents she had forgotten about it.
He undressed quickly and put his clothes on a wing-backed armchair. I stood watching him, too self-conscious to move. My teeth chattered, from fear or cold.
“Hop in before you get cold,” he said as he got something out of the wall press. His long back had one vivid strawberry mark. Dark tufts of hair stuck out from under his arms, and in the lamplight the smooth parts of his body were a glowing honey color.
He got into bed and propped his head on one fist while he waited for me.
“Don’t look at me,” I asked.
He put his hand across his eyes; the fingers were spread out so that there were slits between them. While I undressed, he recited:
Mrs. White had a fright
In the middle of the night,
Saw a ghost, eating toast
Halfway up a lamp post …
Then he asked me to unscrew the Tilley lamp. A trickle of paraffin flowed out from the metal cap and mingled with the toilet water which I had poured on my hands and wrists.
“You’re such a nice plump girl,” he said as I came toward him. The light took a few seconds to fade out completely.
I took off the coat which I had been using as a dressing gown, and he raised the covers up and gathered me in near him.
I shivered, but he thought it was with cold. He rubbed my skin briskly to warm it and said that my knees were like ice. He did everything to make me feel at ease.
“Have you fluff in your belly button?” he asked as he poked fun at it with his fingers. It was one thing I was very squeamish about, and instantly (I began to tighten with fear) my whole body stiffened.
“What’s wrong?” he said as he kissed my closed lips. He noticed things very quickly. “Are you filled with remorse?”
It was not remorse. Even if I had been married I would have been afraid.
“What is it, darling, little soft skin?” If he had not been so tender I might have been brave. I cried onto his bare shoulder.
“I don’t know,” I said hopelessly. I felt such a fool crying in bed, especially as I laughed so much in the daytime and gave the impression of being thoughtlessly happy.
“Have you had some terrible traumatic experience?” he asked.
Traumatic? I had never heard that word before, I didn’t know what to say.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know” was the only sentence which formed itself in my crying brain.
He tried to assure me, to say that I need not worry, that there was nothing to be afraid of, that surely I was not afraid of him. He caressed me slowly and gently, and I was still afraid. Before that, on armchairs, in the motorcar, in restaurants, I touched his hands, kissed the hairs on his wrists, longed for the feel of his fingers on my soft secret flesh, but now everything had changed.
He said that I should talk about it, tell him what exactly appalled me, discuss it. But I couldn’t do that. I just wanted to go to sleep and wake up, finding that it was all over, the way you wake up after an operation.
I lay in his arms crying, and he said that I must not cry and that we would do nothing but have a big, long sleep and wake up full of energy. He was a little quiet. He blamed himself for being so stupid, so unthinking, for not having known that I would be nervous and afraid.
Eventually he turned over on his other side to go to sleep. He took a sleeping pill with a glass of water.
“I’m sorry, Eugene … I do love you,” I said.
“That’s all right, sweetling,” he said, patting my warm bottom with his hand. At least we had got warm.
“I won’t be afraid tomorrow,” I said, knowing that I would.
“I know that,” he said. “You’re just tired; now go to sleep and don’t worry about a thing.”
We joined hands. I wanted to blow my nose, as I could scarcely breathe from all that crying. I was ashamed to blow it, in case it was vulgar.
I went to sleep, mortified.
Sometime toward morning we must have come together again, because I woke up to find myself refusing his love.
Immediately afterward he got up and dressed. I apologized.
“Stop saying you’re sorry,” he said as he drew his braces up. “There’s no need to be sorry, it’s a perfectly natural thing,” he said. He sat on the armchair and put on his socks.
“Are you getting up?” I asked.
“Yes, I often get up at dawn when I don’t sleep very well; I go out for a walk or do some work …”
“It’s my fault.”
“Stop saying it’s your fault, stop worrying,” he said. I was glad that it was too dark for me to see the expression on his face; I could not have looked at him.
He left the room, and later I heard his steps outside on the gravel.
I lay on, and wept. I had never felt so ashamed in my whole life; I felt certain now that he was finished with me because I had been so childish. When daylight came, about half past eight, there were a few stars left in the heavens. They looked wan and faint as stars do in the morning.
“Go home … vanish,” I said to the stars, or to myself, and I got up and dressed when I heard Anna poke the range downstairs. I did not know how I would face her, or Denis or his mother or him. My black, sequinned jumper, which I had thought so charming at the dinner table, seemed idiotic in the early morning. I wished that I could get out of the house and escape back to Joanna’s without being seen. I looked in the mirror. My face was red, blotchy, swollen. Everyone would know!
It began to snow. It came very fast and sudden, and it fell slantwise on the front field but did not lodge there. It melted as it touched the ground. I stuck my head out, hoping that the sleet might change my face, and then I went to the second guest room to toss the bed which I should have slept in. It seemed foolish and sad to have to do such a thing, but Anna was very observant and would have noticed. Under that divan bed I found a box of old toys and torn books.
This hook belongs to Baby Elaine Gaillard, I read on the flyleaf of an animal book. I nearly died. He had never said that he had a child, but I ought to have wondered why he was so tender with Anna’s baby. It made everything worse; I looked at the toys, torn and chewed, and cried over them. The sleet, my red, unslept cheeks, the silly sequinned jumper, the cold green porcelain of an unlit anthracite stove in the room, all seemed to multiply my sense of shame. I sat there, weeping, until Anna knocked on the door to say breakfast was ready.
Down in the kitchen I could not bring myself to look at him. I held my head down. He handed me a cup of tea and said, “Did you sleep well, Miss Caithleen Brady?”
Anna was there, watching.
“Yes, thank you.”
He bent his head and looked sideways at my face, hung in shame. He was laughing.
“I’m very glad that you slept well,” he said as he brought me over to the table and buttered some toast for me.
Later his mother came down and we had breakfast together. She complained about the porridge being lumpy. She lived with a sister in Dublin, and said that there was one thing she could not stand and that was lumpy porridge.
He drove her back around noon and I thought I should go too, but he asked me to stay a while longer, as he said he wanted to talk to me. I stayed.
“See you again, dear,” his mother said as he helped her into the car. She had a shawl over her fur coat and a hot-water bottle for her knees. She looked rather happy, because he had given her whiskey and chocolates and white turkey meat wrapped in butter paper. She liked to be pampered; she was making up for all the years when she had worked as a waitress to rear her son. He was quite distant with her and she was sharp with him. But she liked it when he fussed over her.
When they had gone I went up to the woods. The sleet had stopped and now it rained mildly. I did not know whether I should risk staying another night or not. I was trying to decide—the gently falling rai
n made a background of vague soothing noise for my muddled thoughts. I thought of other woods, dampness, cowslips in a field of high grass, all the imaginary men I had ever talked to and into whose strong arms I had swooned in a moment of ecstatic reconciliation. But I could not decide; I had never made decisions in my life. My clothes had always been bought for me, my food decided on, even my outings were decided by Baba. I walked round and round, touching the damp trees, inhaling the wild smells of the damp wood.
When I heard the car come back I walked toward the house and then I heard him whistle as he came up to the woods to find me. He wore an old brown hat, which made him look rakish, and as he came toward me I knew that I would stay another night and risk making a fool of myself again.
“I’ll stay,” I said instantly, and he was pleased. He said that I looked a lot better since I came out and that rain suited me and that I must always live in rainy country and wear my hair long, like that, and wear a dark mackintosh.
“And I won’t be afraid,” I said as we ran down the wooded hill toward the yard in order to make some tea. He was dying for tea. I did not feel sleepy anymore. We spotted Anna looking at us through his field glasses.
“She’ll break those glasses,” he said, but by the time he got in the house, she had restored them to their brown leather case, which hung on the end of the curtain pole in his study. When he complained, Anna said that he must have been seeing things. He prepared a turkey hash, while Anna and I chopped vegetables.
Before dinner he carried a white china lamp upstairs to the dressing table in his room so that I could make up my face. He stayed there, watching, while I applied pancake makeup with a damp sponge and spread it over my face evenly. It made me pale. In the mirror my face looked round and childlike.
“The old man and the girl,” he said to the spotted mirror, which was wedged at the right angle by a face-cream jar—one of Laura’s no doubt. He debated whether or not he should shave.
