The Country Girls Trilogy and Epilogue: The Country Girls / Girl with Green Eyes / Girls in Their Married Bliss

by Edna O'Brien

  We went to bed long after midnight. He limped upstairs while I followed behind with the Tilley lamp and wondered foolishly if I was likely to drop it and set fire to the turkey-red carpet.

  “So we both need a father,” he said. “We have a common bond.”

  He did not make love to me that night. We had talked too much, and anyhow, he was stiff from having been kicked.

  “There’s no hurry,” I said.

  He petted my stomach and we said warm, comforting things to lull each other to sleep.

  15

  On Monday afternoon Eugene’s solicitor drove out from Dublin. We had a fire in the sitting room, as we were expecting him. He was an austere, red-haired man with sandy eyebrows and pale blue eyes.

  “And you say these people assaulted Mr. Gaillard?” he asked.

  “Yes. They did.”

  “Did you witness this?”

  “No, I was under the bed.”

  “The bed?” He raised his eyebrows and looked at me with cold disapproval.

  “She’s getting it all garbled, she means the spare bed in my study,” Eugene explained quickly. “She hid under it when they came, because she was afraid.”

  “Yes, a bed,” I said annoyed with both of them.

  “I see,” the lawyer said coldly as he wrote something down.

  “Are you married, Miss—ah …?”

  “No,” I said, and caught Eugene smiling at me, as much as to say, You will be.

  Then the solicitor asked me what was my father’s Christian name and surname, and the names of the others and their proper addresses. I felt badly about being the cause of sending them solicitor’s letters, but Eugene said that it had to be.

  “It is just routine,” the solicitor said. “We will warn them that they cannot come here again and molest Mr. Gaillard. You are quite certain that you are over twenty-one?”

  “I am quite certain,” I said, adopting his language.

  Then he questioned Eugene, while I sat there looping and un-looping my hanky around my finger. Eugene had made notes of the whole scene which led up to their attacking him. He was very methodical like that.

  I brought tea, and fresh scones with apple jelly and cream, but even that did not cheer the solicitor up. He talked to Eugene about trees.

  He left shortly after four, and I waved to the moving motorcar, out of habit. It was getting dark and the air was full of those soft noises that come at evening—cows lowing, the trees rustling, the hens wandering around, crowing happily, availing themselves of the last few minutes before being shut up for the night.

  “Well, that’s that,” Eugene said as we came back into the room, and he felt the teapot to see if the tea had gone cold.

  “They won’t trouble us again,” he said, pouring a half-cup of strong tea.

  “They’ll trouble us always,” I said. Recounting the whole incident had saddened me again.

  “They’ll have to accept it,” he said; but two mornings later I had a wretched letter from my aunt.

  Dear Caithleen,

  None of us has slept a wink since, nor eaten a morsel. We are out of our minds to know what’s happening to you. If you have any pity in you, write to me and tell me what are you doing. I pray for you night and day! You know that you always have a welcome here, when you come back. Write by return and may God and His Blessed Mother watch over you and keep you pure and safe. Your father does nothing but cry. Write to him.

  Your Aunt Molly

  “Don’t answer it,” Eugene said. “Do nothing.”

  “But I can’t leave them worrying like that.”

  “Look,” he said, “this sentimentality will get you nowhere; once you make a decision, you must stick to it. You’ve got to be hard on people, you’ve got to be hard on yourself.”

  It was early morning and we had vowed never to begin an argument before lunch. In the mornings he was usually testy, and he liked to walk alone for an hour or two before talking to me.

  “It’s cruel,” I said.

  “Yes,” he said. “Kicking me with hobnailed boots is cruel. If you write to them,” he warned, “they will come here, and this time I leave you to deal with them.” His mouth was bitter, but that did not stop me from loving him.

  “All right,” I said, and I went away to think about it. Out in the woods everything was damp; the trees dripped and brooded, the house brooded, the brown mountain hung above me, deep in sullen recollection. It was a lonely place.

  In the end I did nothing but have a cry, and by afternoon he was in better humor.

  That night he said, “We’re going into town tomorrow.” And taking a spare wallet from a drawer, he put notes in it and gave it to me. His initials were in gold on the beige-colored leather, and he said it had been a present from someone.

  “We’ll buy you a ring and one or two other things,” he said; and then as he had his back to me, hefting a big log onto the fire, I peered into the wallet and counted the number of notes he had given me. There were twenty in all.

  Next day, walking down Grafton Street in a bitter wind, I felt as if people were going to accuse me of my sin in public.

  “Bang, bang,” he said, shooting our imaginary enemies, but I was still afraid, and glad to escape into a jeweler’s shop.

  We bought a wide gold ring and he put it on me in the shop—”With this expensive ring, I thee bed,” he said, and I gave a little shiver and laughed.

  We bought groceries and wine and two paperback novels and some notepaper. I asked him in the bookshop if he was very rich.

  “Not very,” he said. “The money is nearly gone, but I’ll get your dowry or I’ll work …” There was some talk about his going to South America in the spring to do a documentary film on irrigation for a chemical company. And already I worried about whether he would bring me or not.

  He had a haircut in a place that was attached to a hotel. He left me in the lounge, sipping a whiskey-and-soda, but the minute he was out of sight I gulped the drink down and fled to the cloakroom in case anyone should recognize me. I washed my hands a few times and put on more makeup, and each time I washed my hands the attendant rushed over with a clean towel for me. I suppose she thought that I was mad, washing my hands so often, but it passed the time. My ring shone beautifully after washing and I could see myself in it when I brought my hand close to my face.

  I must stop biting my nails, I thought as I pressed the cuticles back, and remembered the time when I was young and bit my nails and thought foolishly that once I became seventeen I would grow up quite suddenly and be a lady and have long, painted nails and no problems. I gave the gray-haired attendant five shillings, and she got very flustered and asked if I wanted change.

  “It’s all right,” I said. “I got married today.” I had to say it to someone. She shook my hand and tears filled her kind eyes as she wished me a long life of happiness. I cried a bit myself, to keep her company. She was motherly; I longed to stay there and tell her the truth and have her assurances that I had done the right thing, but that would have been ridiculous, so I came away.

  Fortunately, I was back in the lounge, sitting in one of the armchairs, when I saw him return. Even after such a short absence as that, I thought when I saw him, How beautiful he is with his olive skin and his prominent jawbone.

  “That’s done,” he said as he bent down and brushed his cheek against mine. He had had a shave, too.

  I had put on a lot of perfume and he said how opulent I smelled. Then, as a celebration, we crossed the hall to the empty dining room and we were the first to be served dinner that night. He ordered a half bottle of champagne, but when the waiter brought it in a tub of ice, it looked so miserable that he sent it back again and got a full bottle. I asked to be given the cork and I still have it. It is the only possession I have which I regard as mine, that cork with its round silver top.

  We touched glasses and he said, “To us,” and I drank, hoping that I would stay young always.

  That night was pleasant. His face lo
oked young and boyish because of the haircut, and I had a new black dress, bought with the money he gave me. In certain lights and at certain moments, most women look beautiful—that light and that moment were mine, and in the wall mirror I saw myself, fleetingly beautiful.

  “I could eat you,” he said, “like an ice cream,” and later when we were home in bed, he resaid it, as he turned to make love to me. He twisted the wedding ring round and round my finger.

  “It’s a bit big for you, we’ll get a clip on it,” he said.

  “ ‘Twill do,” I said, being lazy and feeling mellow just then from champagne and the reassurance of his voice in my ear, as he smelled the warm scent of my hair.

  “That ring has to last you a long time,” he said.

  “How long?”

  “As long as you keep your girlish laughter.”

  I noticed with momentary regret that he never used dangerous words like “forever and ever.”

  “Knock, knock, let me in,” he said, coaxing his way gently into my body.

  “I am not afraid, I am not afraid,” I said. For days he had told me to say this to myself, to persuade myself that I was not afraid. The first thrust pained, but the pain inspired me, and I lay there astonished with myself, as I licked his bare shoulder.

  I let out a moan, but he kissed it silent and I lay quiet, caressing his buttocks with the soles of my feet. It was very strange, being part of something so odd, so comic: and then I thought of how Baba and I used to hint about this particular situation and wonder about it and be appalled by our own curiosity. I thought of Baba and Martha and my aunt and all the people who regarded me as a child, and I knew that I had now passed—inescapably—into womanhood.

  I felt no pleasure, just some strange satisfaction that I had done what I was born to do. My mind dwelt on foolish, incidental things. I thought to myself, So this is it; the secret I dreaded, and longed for … All the perfume, and sighs, and purple brassieres, and curling pins in bed, and gin-and-it, and necklaces had all been for this. I saw it as something comic and beautiful. The growing excitement of his body enthralled me—like the rhythm of the sea, So did the love words that he whispered to me. Little moans and kisses, kisses and little cries that he put into my body, until at last he expired on me and washed me with his love.

  Then it was quiet; such quietness; quietness and softness and the tender limp thing like a wet flower between my legs. And all the time the moon shining in on the old brown carpet. We had not bothered to draw the curtains.

  He lay still, holding me in his arms; then tears slowly filled my eyes and ran down my cheeks, and I moved my face sideways so that he should not mistake the tears because he had been so happy.

  “You’re a ruined woman now,” he said, after some time. His voice seemed to come from a great distance, because in hearing his half-articulated words of love I had forgotten that his speaking voice was so crisp.

  “Ruined!” I said, re-echoing his words with a queer thrill.

  I felt different from Baba now and from every other girl I knew. I wondered if Baba had experienced this, and if she had been afraid, or if she had liked it. I thought of Mama and of how she used to blow on hot soup before she gave it to me, and of the rubber bands she put inside the turndown of my ankle socks, to keep them from falling.

  He moved over and lay on his back and I felt lonely without the weight of his body. He lit a candle, and from it he lit himself a cigarette.

  “Well, a new incumbent, more responsibility, more trouble.”

  “I’m sorry for coming like this, without being asked,” I said, thinking that “incumbent” was an insulting word; I mixed it up with “encumbrance.”

  “It’s all right; I wouldn’t throw a nice girl like you out of my bed,” he joked, and I wondered what he really thought of me. I was not sophisticated and I couldn’t talk very well or drive a car.

  “I’ll try and get sophisticated,” I said. I would cut my hair, buy tight skirts and a corset.

  “I don’t want you sophisticated,” he said, “I just want to give you nice babies.”

  “Babies—” I nearly died when he said that, and I sat up and said anxiously, “But you said that we wouldn’t have babies.”

  “Not now,” he said, shocked by the sudden change in my voice. Babies terrified me—I remembered the day Baba first told me about breast feeding, and I felt sick again, just as I had done that day walking across the field eating a packet of sherbet. I got sick then and hid it with dock leaves while Baba finished the sherbet.

  “Don’t worry,” he said, easing me back onto the bed, “don’t worry about things like that. It will come out all right in the end. Don’t think about it, this is your honeymoon.”

  “The bed is all tossed,” I said, in an effort to get my mind onto something simple. But we were too comfortable to get up and rearrange it. He reached to the end of the bed for his shirt and his undershirt, which was inside it. I helped him put it on and kissed the hollow between his shoulder blades, recalling their apricot color in daylight.

  “Are you hungry?” I asked, when he lay down. I was wide awake and wanted to prolong the happiness of the night.

  “No, just sleepy.” He yawned, and lay on the side nearest to me.

  “I was a good girl,” I said as he put his hand on my stomach.

  “You were a marvelous girl.”

  “It’s not so terrible.”

  “No more chat out of you,” he said, “go to sleep.” I could feel my stomach rising and falling gently under the weight of his hand.

  “What’s your diaphragm?” I asked.

  “Meet you outside Jacob’s at nine tomorrow night, Miss Potbelly.” He was asleep almost as he spoke, and slowly his hand slid down off my stomach.

  I did not expect to sleep, but somehow I did.

  When I woke the room was bright and I saw him staring at me.

  “Hello,” I said, blinking because of the bright sunshine.

  “Kate,” he said, “you look so peaceful in your sleep. I’ve been looking at you for the past half hour. You’re like a doll.”

  I moved my head over onto his pillow so that our faces were close together.

  “Oh,” I said with happiness, and stretched my feet. Our toes stuck out at the end of the tossed bed. He said that we ought to have another little moment before we got up and washed ourselves; and he made love to me very quickly that time, and it did not seem so strange anymore.

  In the bathroom we washed together. We couldn’t have a bath because the range had not been lit and the water was cold. It was freezing-cold water which came from a tank up in the woods and I gasped with the cold of it, and the pleasure of it, as he dabbed a wet sponge on my body.

  “Don’t, don’t,” I begged, but he said that it was good for the circulation.

  He washed that part of himself without taking off his clothes again; he just rained the rubber tube that was fixed to the end of the cold tap on it, saying that it had had a monk’s life.

  “Have to make up for lost time,” he said as I dabbed it dry with a clean towel and asked, unwisely, if he loved me.

  “Lucky you don’t snore,” he said, “or I’d send you back.”

  “Do you love me?” I asked again.

  “Ask me that in ten years’ time, when I know you better,” he said as he linked me down to breakfast and told Anna that we had got married.

  “That’s great news,” she said, but I knew that she knew we were lying.

  16

  The days took on a pattern then. We slept until ten or eleven, got up and had a light breakfast. During breakfast Eugene read letters, and sometimes he read them aloud to me. They were mostly letters about his work, and it seemed certain now that he would have to go to South America for a few weeks, to make the picture on irrigation. There did not seem much chance that he would be able to take me.

  “Anyhow, it won’t be until April or May,” he said, “so let’s enjoy this lovely day and not worry about what’s to come. This is lif
e, this now, this moment of you and me eating boiled eggs.”

  After breakfast we usually went for a walk. It rained a lot up there, but we did not mind the rain. He showed me oak apples and badger holes, and things I had never noticed before. He loved being out, along the hedges, among the trees, watching the river.

  “Look,” he sometimes said, and I would turn, expecting to find a person, but it would be an animal, often a deer, or a shaft of intense green light between the trees. The sky forever changed color—slate-black, blue-black, blue, and white-green. He clowned to amuse me, becoming an old man by hunching his shoulders and letting his gloves dangle, so that the wagging fingers looked like those of a withered man.

  We did some work on the farm—put stones back on a wall, mended a fence, drove cattle from one field to the next.

  “It looks as if you’re going to stay, Kate,” he said, one day out on the hill.

  “I’ll stay a few more weeks,” I said. I loved being with him and being in his bed, but I missed going to the pictures with Baba.

  In the afternoons he worked at his desk, while I helped Anna to prepare dinner. We had stew and potatoes baked in wood ashes, and sometimes watercress soup. On Sundays we had wine with our meal, and cashew nuts and fruit on Thursdays, the day the groceries were delivered. He liked frugality and did not eat very much.

  After dinner if he still wanted to work (he was preparing a short film for the BBC on spring in Ireland), Anna and I went for a walk, after she had put her baby to bed. She came to like those walks up the drive to the road, telling me loudly the secrets of her private life. Her cherished ambition was to become a cook in a big house, but she had met Denis at a dance and they spent their first night in a hedge. Much, much later of course.