by Edna O'Brien
I wouldn’t mind a large gin, followed by another, to blur the old perceptions, as Kate would say. I tore over here in a taxi, and the driver, a fairly hefty and erudite Semite, insisted on talking to me, raving to me about bikinis. Bikinis! A famous TV announcer frequenting a public bath wore a white bikini with black squares which showed off her nubile figure to advantage. This was some years ago, before she was famous, but nevertheless he saw her and had a conversation with her.
“Funny how these things happen!” he said. I wanted to say, “Nothing’s funny, buster,” but he wouldn’t stop proclaiming, he was like a fucking gramophone, full of himself and the sagacity of his opinions.
I have availed myself of the service of two flunkies. They’re from foreign parts, Pakistan or maybe even somewhere farther. They’re certainly not Turks. I gave them a fiver and explained that I would need a coffin carried, when the train gets in. They seem to have grasped it. They are speaking in their mother tongue or their father tongue, or whatever the fuck tongue it is. It’s unmusical. They’re probably discussing the cricket match or else their tea break. They look at me from time to time as if to size me up. I think they think it’s all a bit forlorn. In their country there would be wailing now, flocks of relatives beating their chests; in my country, too, and Kate’s. What the hell ever happened to all the relatives we had? I can’t picture her, I don’t want to, I mean I don’t even know if they’ve put a nightgown on her, or a habit or some damn thing. I bet they keep habits in that kind of place in case of emergency. They were dead matter-of-fact about it, and dead insolent. They didn’t want a hearse there. A hearse would put the afflautused matrons off their kilter, as they swanned around in their pink and apricot morning gowns. She’d gone to a health farm to recoup. Recoup! She flipped. I suppose all that starvation, and time to think, brought her face to face with brass tacks, realized she was on her ownio, Good Shepherd wasn’t coming. Oh, Kate, why did you let the bastards win … why buckle under their barbaric whims? I’m terrified that she’ll appear to me some night, maybe when I’m out in the garden smelling the phlox, or she’ll be plonked on my bidet in ashes and loincloth, telling me some dire thing such as repent. Repent what. People are fucking gangsters. It costs more to run into a motorcar than a person.
The most hilarious thing has happened. A fawn collie dog has broken free from its owner, has chased across, and is barking up at the Welsh come-hither hills. Now, if that isn’t Mother Nature asserting herself, what is. There’s a crowd cheering and the dog is so fucking carried away that it’s on its hind legs doing a turn. Next to the Welsh hills there is a pack of wolves baying at a crescent of gold that is supposed to be a package of cigarettes. Underneath their midnight-blue hooves there’s a government health warning about tar. Fucking absurdity. I’ve had to have a second carton of wish-wash tea. The waitress looks as if she came from the blackest hole on earth. There’s layers of black pigment behind her skin, and you wouldn’t be surprised if her blood was treacle black. She’s surly, she wields the teapot way above the plastic cups—they’re the color of communion wafers, for God’s sake—and she veers from one cup to the next with a vengeance. She’s sloshing tea all over the goddamn counter. I bet she wouldn’t mind the three-minute warning. She might start a great, earth-shattering yodel, express herself as she twigged to the fact that time was running out and she’d better speak her mind and her fucking enmity. I’ve nothing particular against blacks, they’re limberer in the buttocks, probably be all right if they were let drowse under the yamyam trees all day. I met one that I liked—you won’t believe it but he was called Snowie. Earlier in the year Durack and I weren’t hitting it off; I mean, there were more fisticuffs than normal, so he sent me on a holiday to one of those tropical islands—cocoa, sunsets, sugarcane, and all that. I had my own little villa and a team of girls to sweep up. They were always sweeping. I don’t know what the hell they could sweep, but they were at it from six in the morning, swish-swosh, swish-swosh. They held themselves very well; chest out like coconuts, arses very comical, very imperious. They cooked me my breakfast and stood behind the table while I ate it. A third one would bring me the local paper. It was a gas—a plethora of crimes. I was following the story of one Esmeralda, who threw Lysol on her common-law man and was a wizard at the old art of evasion. A great procrastinator was Esmeralda. In the court she excelled herself: “He lashed me with broom on my back. The broom break. He jump on me and bite me on my stomach. I get serious.” Every time I asked them if they knew old Esmeralda, they started to laugh. She could be their cousin, for God’s sake.
The leisure began to get to me. I felt the old gurgles, minnows in the cunt, and thought, Bingo, this is it, I’m alive again, I wouldn’t mind a bit of the soft anvil under the thatch. Plenty of opportunity; young fellows walking around, swaggering, their do-dahs agog and smatterings of blarney: “Enjoy you the sea. Enjoy you the scenery.” I thought, Why not, no bloody discussion, no “Should we, shouldn’t we, my wife, your husband, do you love me, do I love you” garbage. I decided that I would pick out some winsome fellow and invite him to my villa in the erogenous siesta hour. Only time when they weren’t sweeping. There were lots of studs around selling T-shirts and necklaces and postcards, spouting the “enjoy you” lark. I would sit on the beach and cogitate. Nothing like cogitating a harmless fuck. Big branches swaying, the sea full of sparkle, no one to nag or natter to me. I forgot Durack, I forgot the fishmongers, I forgot our pickled-pine kitchen and whether the sofa needed fucking reupholstering, I even forgot my own telephone number. I forgot our bi-weekly dinner parties, with people drinking too much and suddenly taking umbrage, tearing into one another, frothing, all their fucked-up aggression coming out over some irrelevant thing like who they were going to vote for, or who should be Prime Minister. Poor Durack, I didn’t miss him at all. I even mused over getting him a present of a pair of the girls with their bracelets and their insouciance. Durack and I were man and wife again, but I wouldn’t say I saw the celestial heights often, more the nadir, usually a bit too much to drink and bamboozling myself into thinking it was James Dean, or James Dean’s double, or someone like that. “Little Mother,” he called me. Little mother for the one illegitimate kid that I had, a girl that had a will of her own and a mind of her own from the second she was born. Vomited the milk I gave her, rejected me, from day one, preferred cow’s milk, solids, anything. She left home before she was thirteen, couldn’t stand us. She liked him better than me, but that’s because she could twist him around her little finger and always did. The first pony he got her, he led it into her bedroom Christmas morning and let it stay there. You can guess the consequences, you can imagine what a nervous pony in a confined space does, but she and Durack loved it, thought it was the funniest thing, took photos of it with her new Polaroid. The pony was called Horace. I’m not a mother like Kate, drooling and holding out the old metaphorical breast, like a warm scone or griddle bread. She stood up to me, my little daughter, Tracy. At five years of age she walked into my bedroom and said, “You better love me or I’ll be a mess.” She could ride a motorcycle before she was ten, and she was able to wheedle Durack into giving her a huge insurance policy so she’d be independent. She’s pretty enough except for the clothes she wears, either dungarees three times too large or shorts that leave nothing to the imagination. She had glasses with pink frames that look like lollipops. When I told her she was illegitimate she just looked at me and said, “I’ve always known.” No sentiment in her. She has oodles of friends. They all flock to her pad, and they drink Southern Comfort, eat chocolates, and discuss sex: how boring or how unboring sex is. They’re worldly as hell. I forgot her, too, as I sat envisaging the transports of the afternoon—on the floor, as I imagined it, or on one of the sloping latticed sun chairs, with my hands bound or something to give it a whiff of coercion. I thought, We’re lonely buggers, we need a bit of a romp so as not to feel that we’re walking, talking skeletons. Kids don’t do really; at least not when they grow up, and that
was Kate’s mistake, the old umbilical love. She wanted to twine fingers with her son, Cash, throughout eternity. The rupture had to come sometime, the second rupture, because of course the first one came when her hemlock husband took him away and she had to fight to get him back. At first she hadn’t the spunk to fight, but then it came to her, the old lioness tenacity—and she got geared for battle. Her solicitor nearly adopted her, gave her hot lunches and a book token at Christmas. The kid was back in England with his father in a boring toad-in-the-hole suburb. Even the au pair girl left, saw he was a brigand or couldn’t adhere to his rules; he was a great one for rules, he’d tell you how to breathe. The night before the court case the father took the kid into his study and told him, man to man, that his mother was bonkers, certifiable, and that except for him being such a ministering angel, she would never have had a child at all. You’d think he’d given birth to it. The nub of it was that he was getting the kid to write a letter to the judge to say that he wanted to be with his father. He had pen, ink, a sheaf of notepaper, and melting sealing wax with which to seal the proclamation. Instead the kid wrote “Putney”—where she lived, a dump with an attic window so that you had to get up on a chair to get a view of the old lugubrious Thames. When she got the damn custody, she and the kid went to the Savoy for lunch. He had no tie, naturally, but they loaned him one, and he ate mutton and steamed pudding and was like a little man. All in the past now, like our fucking hand-to-mouth youth and our big brazen scenarios.
I’d nearly given up when he came around the corner like a panther. Old Snowie. I had talked to him a couple of times, and given him the eye, the old Portia, fair-speechless messages. He was carrying this pile of T-shirts, all with bits of palm or a sail painted on the chest. I just smirked at him and went straight through the double doors to the bedroom, knowing he’d follow. I heard him shut the door.
“Lock it,” I said. I was afraid my garrulous little attendants might be eavesdropping, or that one of them might turn out to be his sister or his wife or any damn thing, and that I would find myself in the old Esmeralda situation with broomstick over back. While I was drawing the bamboo blind he came up behind me, like a cat. He didn’t whip my clothes off, he stole them off. Not that I minded. Then he put a big hand, it was as big as one of these palm leaves, over my eyes and splayed it and drew me back toward the old bed where I had lain solo for six intemperate nights. There he was, towering over me, naked, mahoganied, a chest matted with hair, eyes that looked a hell of a lot brighter because of the dark, and what did he do but take a pile of petals he had brought and strew them all over my stomach. Hibiscus and bougainvillea. Red and white trumpets, no less. Prodigious. Could be Sportsman of the Year. I thought, Give me the olden days, give me the primitive thrust, forget the guilt-ridden drips, the see-you-anon swains, the Jekyll-and-Hyde hubbies. Best few hours of my life. I felt like Jezebel, for God’s sake. A long way from Tipperary. Flowers on my stomach, love bites, the works. Another thing, we didn’t speak a word, nothing to break the damn spell. A blacksmith under the thatch. The old love bites. Afterward he began to walk about the room, and I thought that maybe he wanted something, that maybe he wanted money, or for me to buy a consignment of the T-shirts.
“I’ll pay you whatever you want,” I said, and he stopped smiling and he had a look I’ll never forget. He looked angry and at the same time crushed.
“ ‘Pon my word,” he said, and then he shook his head and laughed, but it was a sarcastic kind of laugh. He said every tourist was the same, that they only thought money, that they thought all things could be bought, even the colors of the sea. I felt stupid, I felt like a pimp. I said we were that way from getting robbed and rooked, from queueing and shoving and slandering and pretending and cutthroating in what passes for civilized society. I was damn near crying.
“ ‘Pon my word, you silly,” he said, and he laughed, but his pique was gone. I really wanted to give him something, a keepsake, so I picked up an ashtray and handed it to him, and what did he do, only fill it with water and put it outside for the doves. They came in hordes that day and the next day and the day after, and their shit is indigo. Must be some damn fruit they eat. He came, too, and brought flowers, shells, fertility symbols, one supposed to be him and one supposed to be me. I used to think, I’ll be nice to Durack when I go home, I’ll be lovey-dovey, I’ll be able to transport myself back to the hectic old siesta rides. We were supposed to go on a little jaunt, Snowie was going to borrow a friend’s motorcar, probably a jalopy, and drive me to a part of the island that was much more rugged. Rugged! He had all the jargon of the brochures. We were going to suck sugar from the damn cane and lie in this rugged field, but it was not to be, as Kate would say. The following morning, when I lay on a mat slathered in jelly and coconut oil, trying to make myself a bit sultry, my two little maids came tripping across and I knew there was something up, because they weren’t laughing, and one pushed the other ahead to deliver the message. It was a telegram. It was home. At first I thought that Durack had got wind of my iniquity through some damn ludicrous fluke. It said: FRANK SUFFERED STROKE COME HOME. DECLAN.
Thought he was drunk, they did. He drove into a stationary milk float and sent bottles and cartons skeetering all over the street. The police were called and they thought it, too. There he was at the wheel, laughing. When the policeman asked him where he lived, he mumbled that he knew where he lived but that he didn’t want to go there because his wife was not at home, had done a flit. Then they took a breath test, and to their great surprise it didn’t show green; which surprises me, because there must be a surplus of malt and blended whiskey in every pore of his body. When I got back the next afternoon and took one look at him in the hospital, I knew it, I knew he’d lost his marbles. A fucking vegetable. His eyes were vacant and he was like a black sheep sitting there in National Health pajamas, waiting for me. I wanted to run away, go to the airport, go straight back and work as a waitress or a beachcomber or anything. He was in a ward with about twenty people, people with shaven heads and bandaged faces, most of them nearly as gaga as him. He was trying to be friendly. He gave me a package of cigarettes and told me to go around and offer one to everyone, he even wanted me to offer one to a man in an oxygen mask. There I was in my pink cotton trouser suit, and my tan, feeling like a fucking imposter and knowing that I wouldn’t be doing flits again, I’d be whiling the time attending to him, reading articles on rehabilitation, getting him to recognize a shoe from a sock. The next day when I went in, he was wiping his eyes with a big spotted handkerchief. He must have had it in his pocket when they took him in. Some young doctor, some impudent bastard, told him that he’d never come out, that he was on Death Row. I gave him the old platitudes, told him he’d be all right, told him a whole host of things that weren’t true, sops for the old morale, straws really. I discharged him a few days later, brought in a suit of clothes and left a note on the bed telling them to get in touch with our doctor. On the way home he insisted that we go to the pictures.
“Pictures, pictures,” he kept saying as we whizzed around Marble Arch in a beige taxi that was doing eighty miles an hour, the driver being infuriated at having to go out to Wimbledon. The crocuses were coming up; I saw them in a fucking whirl, the very same as if I were at a fun fair on the Big Wheel. We got out, paid, and went in to see A Thousand and One Dalmatians. I wished it was a fucking comedy we’d gone to, because he was crying most of the time, and even his crying is botched. He blurps, because he can’t discharge the fucking tears through the ducts of the two eyes. It’s the same with laughing. He laughs crooked, too.
When we got home he looked at the house, ran around it, began to kiss it, put spittle on his finger and daubed it like some medieval rite. Then he looked at the stump of the magnolia tree and cried. He’d had it cut down one day in a fit, had this fegary there were chaffinches in it spying.
“We’ll plant another,” I said. I’m a demon now for the old platitudes and the everything-is-rosy refrain. I send to nurseries for c
atalogues and read them to him, and plan all the herbaceous delights. Wanted to be with me all the time, nestling. He’d think that I had gone and he’d tell me that Baba had gone when I was there in the kitchen making fucking potato cakes and barley soup to remind him of his martyred mother and all that Mavourneen mush. I was full up to the gills with guilt and pity and frustration. He’d stand up in the middle of the dinner and put the soup tureen on his head, or he’d go out and piss ceremoniously from the hall doorstep, and laugh and ask me to come and see. Oh, sweet Jesus, all the rows and all the belting and all the hoodwinking and all the bitterness reduced to this, to his beseeching look, to his dependence on me, like a spaniel. He’d ask for pen and paper and write me a letter:
I love you, do you here. Answer me now.
I would nod, but he didn’t want me to nod, he wanted me to write a letter so we’d be passing notes like two dummies, with him getting excited and pawing and slathering.
“An old soldier, Baba,” he would say … “An old soldier” …
He went down to the shops one day, or rather, I drove him down, and then he told me to scoot, said he wanted to be alone, wanted to do something in private. I thought that he was going to buy me an eternity ring or some damn thing, but you won’t believe it, he went to a shop that sells lace garters, suspenders, and various titillations, aids to the old connubial doldrums. Brought back two dirty books. One for him and one for her, so’s we could cuddle. Weird, making love or half-love to a man with the most of his body banjaxed and to see his eyes struggling for performance. I realized that I didn’t hate him anymore and that maybe I never hated him. There we were, like two Mohawks on our chintz sofa, perusing these things so as to work up to a steamy crescendo. My manual featured a pert maid with bobbed hair, frilly cap, and white apron tending to a hulk who had his hand on her crotch, and his had bevies of buxom Victorian ladies, in their boudoirs, with their bums jutting out and your all-time, mustached Romeo leering above a screen. All the time I was hoping the damn doorbell would ring and that one of our friends, who are rabid for the corporal works of mercy, would arrive with homemade marmalade or a novena. St. Jude, patron of hopeless causes. No such bloody luck. Paid me court. Compliments. Said my skin was the same as when we first met. It’s all that fucking rainfall where we grew up, soaking into us. The same with Kate. Her skin hadn’t changed a bit, but by God her nerve ends had.
