by Edna O'Brien
“I was just looking out to see where we were,” I said, hating myself for being so cowardly.
“You’ve traveled this long enough to know where you are.”
He lit a cigarette, and by some manner of means stayed awake for the rest of the journey. A hackney car met us at our own, dimly lit station. I had sent my aunt a telegram earlier in the evening.
Our kitchen was as dismal as I had remembered it—old clothes of Dada’s across a chair, a faded piece of palm stuck behind the picture of the Sacred Heart and before it a small red lamp burning. We put him to bed, and my aunt then lectured me, as I knew she would.
She made some tea and we ate the remains of a Christmas cake which was kept in a rusty biscuit tin. It was awful, but I ate it to please her. She rambled on and on about the good education I’d had, and the shock it was for my father to get such a letter.
Later she stole his shoes and hid them, so that he could not go out the next day and raise the wind for more drink. We said the Rosary aloud.
We could not go to bed, in case he might set fire to the blankets; so we sat there, and after a while she dozed on the card chair. It was a chair my mother got for cigarette coupons before the last war. I was four or five when the war began, and it meant nothing to me except that the cigarette people stopped putting coupons in the packages and we got no more of those folding chairs with the green canvas seats.
While she dozed, I planned what I would do—leave on the first bus the following morning, before my father woke up. I knew that it was disloyal to her, but I was determined to go back to Eugene, Eternal Damnation or not.
I counted my money, counted the hours, heard her snore slightly, and sometimes from my father’s room I heard a moan or the gluggle of drink being poured. He had left the light on.
I was going away again, going away forever.
9
Toward morning my aunt sat up and rubbed her startled eyes with the back of her hand.
“What are you doing?” she asked. I had my coat on and I was applying makeup in front of the smoky glass of the Holy Picture. It was her makeup, as I had forgotten my own. I had found yellow powder in an old envelope and a worn puff beside her prayer book. There was lipstick, too, which looked as if it would give you disease, as it was dried up and smeared with hairs. My aunt must have found it somewhere, as she never used lipstick herself. I was applying it, when she spoke to me.
“I’m getting ready,” I said as casually as possible.
“Ready for what?” she asked, running her hand through her gray hair, which was broken in many places from having been burned too often with a curling tongs.
“I’m going back,” I said. “I have to go back to my job.”
“You can’t do that,” she said, “run out and leave me,” and she staggered up. “Don’t go, don’t leave me,” she pleaded. “He’ll kill me,” she said. “To find you gone.” There were tears in her tired eyes. A life of tears. She had had her own sorrows. Her young love had been shot one morning on the Bridge of Killaloe, during the time of the Black and Tans. She remained loyal to her murdered love and kept a picture of him in a gold locket on her neck. It was impossible to leave her; she was too nice and had made too many sacrifices.
“I’ll stay,” I said wearily. Her arms came around me and I felt her damp eyes on my neck.
It was New Year’s Day and we should have gone to Mass, but she said that God would forgive us, as we had to stay and look after my father.
Then we heard cows lowing as they went toward the yard gate, and Maura pounded on the back door. She was a local girl who came to milk morning and evening.
“Mam, are you up?” she called as she lifted the latch and stuck her head in. She grinned from behind new steel-rimmed spectacles.
“Welcome home,” she yelled to me. She always yelled, no matter how near to her you were; she spoke as if against the force of a terrible wind.
“There’s a calf hanging out of the cow dead,” she said to my aunt.
“Who’s dead?” my aunt said, raising her eyes to the ceiling. Maura’s simplemindedness appalled her.
“The calf is hanging out of the cow dead,” Maura repeated, thrilled at having something important to relate. Then she said that she’d go for the vet, and before we could stop her she ran off. I wanted to go because Mr. Brennan, the vet, was Baba’s father and I knew that he would help me or that his wife, Martha, would. I thought of their pretty house, with white rugs on the maple floor and a picture of Baba and me on the gray wall. I called Maura back, but she did not heed me. She ran pounding across the front field, sometimes taking great leaps off the ground and letting forth a yell of satisfaction.
We went out to see what was wrong.
In daylight the place looked more desolate. The privet hedge had yellowed from some disease and the wild-rose shrubs were trampled. Cows came in and out over the sagging paling wire.
“There’s black frost,” my aunt said. Two tea towels spread out to dry had frozen stiff. Walking past the empty rusted water tank, my aunt said, “Do you remember long ago?”
Hickey, our workman, used to stand there on summer evenings, admonishing the cows to drink up. The cows—which belonged to Jack Holland mostly—now drank from cement troughs, farther down.
As Maura had told us, a calf’s head hung from the cow. The poor cow was moaning and lashing her tail, but there was nothing we could do for her until Mr. Brennan came. My aunt ran back to get hot oatmeal, and while she was away, the bus for Limerick passed at the front gate. I cried two solitary tears, knowing that I was doomed to stay among the dead thistles.
The cow would not take the oatmeal, and she kept trying to turn her head around, to see the dead calf.
When Mr. Brennan came, he got Maura and my aunt to drive her slowly to the yard, and he followed on in his motorcar, taking care to avoid the tree stumps and hillocks of grass on the way.
Walking back alone, I sighed at the sadness of the damp, dilapidated house, and wondered if there was, as my aunt had said, a curse which had been put upon it. Jackdaws flew in and out of the various chimneys. Dada was in the kitchen, searching for his shoes. Nervously I got them from the coal scuttle and dusted the slack off them with a new goose wing.
“They must have fallen in,” I said.
“Fallen in!” He took his hat off the dresser and did not wait to hear about the sick cow. He wanted to get out for a drink.
I laid the table for breakfast. The teaspoons were tarnished and they smelled funny. In Mama’s day there were boards in the cutlery drawer marking a division for knives, forks, spoons. Now everything was jumbled in there, cutlery, the old scissors, hairy twine, a tin opener, butter papers that had gone rancid, and cow horns. They kept cow horns for pouring paraffin oil or machine oil and dosing cattle.
“And how are you, hadn’t time to shake hands with you,” Mr. Brennan said as he came down later on to wash his hands. I poured water from the kettle into a tin basin and got a clean towel.
“Thanks,” he said, looking at me sharply. He came to the point quickly; I tried to talk about Baba, but he interrupted me, “I saw that letter your father got.”
“It’s funny how people want to believe the worst,” I said, without knowing how I said it.
“I’m very, very disappointed in you,” he said. “I thought I could rely on you.”
I felt that I had lost him as a friend, but I thought that his wife, Martha, would help me, as she professed to understand about men and love. I was glad therefore when he suggested that I go home with him, to collect penicillin for the sick cow.
Martha was arranging a bowl of roses when we got into their centrally heated hallway.
“Here she is,” Mr. Brennan said, showing distaste, and left us together.
“My goodness, Caithleen, you’ve grown half a foot.” She shook hands with me. Tim Hayes, the hackney-car owner, must have said that I came home, because she was not surprised to see me.
“Nice flowers,” I said, feelin
g uncomfortable. Mr. Brennan had given me another lecture in the car.
“Yes, smell them.” They were plastic roses which had been sprayed with some sort of perfume.
“Aren’t they pretty?” she said. They were sickening.
“Baba all right?” she asked casually.
“She’s fine.”
In the kitchen, she made me a cup of tea. They had papered the walls with new striped paper, so I admired it. We had a cigarette.
“Tell me all the news,” she said. I sat at the end of the table and told her about Eugene. I just said that we met a couple of evenings a week and had dinner, and that he was very nice and very good-looking.
“You’d like him,” I said to soften her. Her expression did not change, but she blinked a lot.
“Will you help me to get away from here,” I said desperately.
“Help you!” she exclaimed, and blew cigarette smoke deftly from her delicate nostrils. She laughed nervously, almost as if she were enjoying it. “But you must be mad, to think of a man like that. It’s out of the question!”
“Oh, please, please, you must listen to me,” I pleaded.
She said unflinchingly, “Baba’s father and I agree that you should not see this man again.” This was the Martha who once drank gin-and-it with commercial travelers!
I laid my head on the plastic-topped table and began to cry loudly, as I had cried when I was small and was not allowed to wear one of Mama’s georgette dresses for fun.
“Sssh, ssh, the boss is coming in now, don’t let him catch you crying,” she said, taking out a silk handkerchief which she had tucked in the gold bracelet of her tiny wristwatch.
“I’ll pray for you, honestly. If you ask God, He’ll help you to bear it.” She seemed to have got very religious.
Mr. Brennan had tea with us, and Martha talked of her visit to Oberammergau the previous summer.
“It would do you good to see those people,” she said. “All the men leave their hair uncut for months beforehand, not knowing which one will be destined to play the part of Christ.” She bowed her head as she said “Christ.”
One small part of me listened for safety’s sake, but the rest of my mind puzzled over how I might get away.
Mr. Brennan said something. I didn’t hear it. I just saw him frown at me.
“She’s upset,” Martha explained.
“She’ll be all right; she’ll get over it in a month or two,” one or the other of them said.
I was about to scream, but then I saw the expression in their eyes and I laughed instead, to confuse them.
Walking home with the penicillin, I remembered the look in their eyes—bitter, determined. Martha had said that I should stay home and I could go to the technical school with her and learn crocheting and tapestry.
I walked very quickly. Above me the clouds raced across a rainy sky and lakelike patches of blue showed between them.
Stay at home! Who was going to be the first to say that I should enter a convent? Why did everybody hate a man they’d never met? All those unhappily married people wanted to be sure that I came home and had it happen to me?
Mad Maura hid behind our wall, watching for me, and I knew with a sinking feeling that my aunt had put her there and had probably paid her sixpence to do it.
Nothing much else happened that day, except that my aunt called me aside and asked in a whisper if there was anything wrong with me. She seemed doubtful when I said no.
“But there isn’t,” I insisted, outraged by the indelicacy of her question. I thought of how I had failed him in the big, soft bed and I almost laughed at the irony of it.
In the late afternoon I cycled to the village for groceries. My father forgot about housekeeping money when he drank, so I had to spend some of the three pounds which I had stolen out of his pocket in Joanna’s hall stand.
The sun had come out after a shower; the wet road gleamed and the hedges sparkled as if diamonds had been thrown on them.
I bought rashers, tea, chicken-and-ham paste, peaches, and then on an impulse I bought a stale iced cake that was going cheap, in the hope that it would cheer us up.
In the village I was sure people stopped to look, wanting to kill me with savage stare-you-out eyes. And schoolchildren began yelling something. Had my father been going round showing the letter to everyone?
“Divorce is worse than murder,” my aunt had always said—I would never forget it; that and their staring disapproval.
I rang Mr. Gentleman’s number to ask for a seat to Dublin, but his wife answered the telephone.
“Who’s speaking, please?” she asked, and I dropped the phone in terror and rushed out of the booth. The postmistress, who had been listening in at the switchboard, rebuked me for doing such a thing. I never liked her. Once when I was young she asked me if Martha and Mr. Brennan slept in twin beds or not. I had not told her. She never forgave me.
I bought two letter cards so that I could write to Baba and Eugene, and then I hurried up the street to intercede for help from Jack Holland. His pub was closed, the shutters up. In the fading light I read an inked sign under the knocker which said: GONE ON ARCHAEOLOGICAL EXPLORATION. BACK AT EIGHT.
I couldn’t stay, because my aunt was waiting for the tea, so I went on home. Cycling in the dusk, with the bag of messages knocking against my knee, I thought of Eugene. Sometimes a clear and sudden image of him came to disturb me. I saw the skin of his chest, a little reddened underneath the hairs where he had scratched it. I cycled near the ditch to avoid a herd of cows straggling home to be milked.
Then a car came toward me. Its Old World shape told me that it might be Mr. Gentleman, so I got off the bicycle, threw it in the ditch, and hailed the car. It drove by, but had to slow down anyhow because of the cows. I ran after it, breathless. It was Mr. Gentleman.
“I was looking for you,” I said when he wound the window down.
“Caithleen!” he said, astonished. I hadn’t seen him for two years. He looked thinner, more haggard, but his face still had that strange holy-picture quality that made me think of moonlight and the chaste way he used to kiss me.
“Yes, I’m home,” I said. I rested my elbows on the car window, and my face was almost on a level with his.
“And how is the world using you?” he asked casually. You’d think that we had met only the day before. I put it down to shyness, because he was always shy and slow to start a conversation.
“Not too bad,” I said. I didn’t want to tell him the whole story there and then, in case it might hurt his feelings. But did he know it already? Everyone seemed to. Anyhow, I knew that he’d ask me to sit in, and maybe take me for a drive.
“I didn’t see you in ages,” I said, recalling with shame all the letters I had written to him at his office in Dublin.
“I’ve been very busy, a hundred and one things, you know how it is.” His voice was the same as ever, a bit foreign (he was half French) and very gentle.
“Yes. I often wondered what happened?” I said. He had persuaded me to go with him to Vienna for a few days, and on the evening that we were to go, he just did not come to collect me.
He looked at me sadly, his face made more plaintive by dusk, and he said, “It was all for the best really, we would have regretted it.”
“I wouldn’t have,” I said truthfully.
He frowned, and I knew that he was indeed bitterly ashamed of the times we had been together, in each other’s arms, kissing, and saying “I love you.”
“You’re young,” he said. “Young people do a lot of foolish things.”
“It wasn’t foolish. That was the nicest time in my whole life …”
He sat up suddenly and took a quick breath. “You’re a very—foolish—little—girl, do you know that?”
“You’re ashamed of me?”
“No, no, no,” he said with the same impatience as of old. I heard that “no, no, no” when I asked him to write in my autograph book, and when I wanted to keep his red setter dog for one night, s
o as to feel close to him.
“Home for long?”
“Not very long, I’m getting engaged,” I said, wanting to hurt him then.
“Does your father know?”
I heard my voice going hysterical. “We’re going to have a big wedding, caterers from Limerick coming out… .”
“That’s great news,” he said, and smiled as he looked at his wristwatch and talked about having to go.
“Let me know what present you’d like,” he said, and his small white hand groped on the dashboard for the car key. He turned the engine on.
“ ‘Bye,” he said, with a touch of the old wounded solitude in his expression. He always gave the impression that he did not want to leave you, but that fate, or duty, or family forced him away. I don’t think I said anything as he drove off.
I knew that he went to the parish priest’s house on Wednesdays to play bridge. It was a custom which had arisen in the last year since Mr. Gentleman got religious again and carried a big missal to Mass, so local gossip said.
Picking up the bicycle, I walked on toward home, indifferent as to whether my aunt waited for tea or not. Night had fallen and I was guided by a full moon. I was trembling with anger and could not cycle. I thought of Mr. Gentleman with his pale face, his beautiful, loveless eyes, and I thought of how I used to think he was God. I wished I had some way of hurting him, because of his falseness.
The moon made the fields and ditches startlingly bright. Some cows lay under trees, chewing the cud, and one was wheezing. The moon threw my shadow ahead of me, and sometimes I was able to overtake it with the front wheel of my bicycle.
“What kept you?” my aunt called as she came toward me, coughing. She suffered from bronchitis.
“Nothing,” I said. I felt sick and angry with her, and with everyone.
“We hadn’t a bit of tea, I thought you wouldn’t be so long,” she said as I wheeled the bicycle around the house and threw it against the side wall. She said that Dada had not come in yet.
We made tea, and opened a tin of peaches, but we ate without enjoyment.
