Civil & Strange

by Clair Ni Aonghusa

  She met his unwavering stare with a look of disdain. “Don’t use that tone of voice to me! It’s disgusting. How could you talk to your wife that way?”

  “You mightn’t mind it too much when you get used to it.”

  “Don’t corrupt your tongue by talking that way.”

  “Why did you agree to be married if that’s the case? Didn’t you know that sexual intercourse is part and parcel of marriage?”

  She shook her head. “Bodily lusts. Carnality. The thought of it disgusts me.”

  “Come on,” he cajoled. “We have to be companions to each other.”

  She turned away. “I know there has to be some of it,” she said. “It’s unpleasant to even think about. The main business is the running of the farm and passing it on to the next generation.” She sat calmly before him in the other chair, confident of her power.

  “The marriage isn’t consummated. We could have it annulled. That’d bring us back to square one.”

  She blinked quickly a few times, as if in shock. Then she recovered herself. “You wouldn’t have the guts for that. You’d have to face down people at home and have them all talking about you. You’d know there’d always be sniggering and speculation. Sure, your mother wouldn’t stand for it.” She smiled her thin-lipped smile but there was no friendliness in it.

  She’d outmaneuvered him and played him for a fool. She and his mother could augment each other’s pride. They could connive against him, the man.

  He was overcome by a feeling of rage. He wanted to hit her. His arm ached to whack her or throttle her. He could send her flying. The force of the blow would upend her chair and she’d be propelled against the wall. He pictured her on the floor, stunned, imagined taking her by force, imposing himself on her. He felt sickened by these thoughts. No, he wouldn’t belittle himself by hitting her. He wouldn’t bully her into submission. He looked at her in disgust. She looked ugly. Whether it was because of what she had said, or because of the unflattering light, he didn’t care. He would always be repulsed by her.

  “Why did you want this marriage?” he asked.

  She frowned. Perhaps the question had never occurred to her. Marriage, any suitable marriage, was enough for her. Whom she married was immaterial.

  “Didn’t you realize that you’d be expected to be a wife?”

  “A wife!” she spat. “Don’t upbraid me for that. I know I’m not the one you wanted. I know full well that I’m second best for you.”

  Such resentment, such sanctimonious intransigence, made him sick. “Hardly even second best,” he said cuttingly. “If it weren’t for my mother, you’d never have got a look-in. Tenth best, tenth rate is what I think you are, and that’s only because there isn’t any competition.”

  Just a slight inclination of her head indicated that he had got through to her. That had torn it. He had done it. There would be no mending of fences.

  He had to get out of this situation and away from her. He jumped to his feet, knocking over his chair, and rushed out of the room. He hardly noticed where he was going.

  What if he disowned her? He knew the arguments against that. Her reputation would be damaged. Soiled goods. That’s what they’d say. What did he care about that? He’d be shut of her. In his heart he knew that he had to care. She was tenacious. She might sue him for breach of promise.

  He looked about and realized that he was on the beach. He kicked a few pebbles and scattered them, grabbed a smooth flat stone and skimmed it across the top of the water. It bounced and hit the surface twice before it sank. He picked up another stone and aimed it.

  His mother wouldn’t back him. That the marriage was a sham would be of little import. He knew what it would boil down to with her. The preservation of outward appearances was paramount in all her dealings with the world.

  He considered walking into the sea, the dark, dark sea. What would be the point of that? He knew he’d turn around and come out again. He had only one good suit and he was wearing it. He’d have the problem of explaining how it got wet, and the trouble of attempting to dry it.

  He walked up from the scrunching shingle across the road to the hotel and spent the night on a seat in the lounge. The bar was long closed. One of the waitresses woke him. At her urging, he ate a full Irish breakfast. The girl seemed sorry for him. She was very attentive to his needs. He knew she guessed that things hadn’t gone well in the bedroom. Such occurrences were common in those days. She didn’t know the half of it. She couldn’t comprehend what he had tied himself to.

  He spent the next day in a bar in the city center. At night he walked back to Salthill and again slept in a chair. The following morning he paid the bill and she came down for breakfast. She deposited the packed cases in the hall, and he threw them into the boot. They maintained a hostile silence all the way home, even when the engine overheated and they had to wait for it to cool. The first words she spoke were to his mother.

  Eight

  KITTY SWEEPS INTO Ellen’s house. As always, she looks fresh. “Hello, darling,” she says, holding her daughter at arm’s length. “Let me look at you. I think you’ve lost weight. That’s a blessing. At least you’re wearing a decent ensemble this morning. You’re perfectly capable of looking like a tramp. What time is this wretched funeral?”

  “After eleven o’clock Mass.”

  They air-kiss each other’s cheeks — a carefully controlled maneuver — and Kitty springs away from contact. Almost four weeks have passed since Ellen’s return to Ballindoon following their first Christmas alone together in Dublin. During the enforced isolation of the holiday, they found themselves in unending opposition. Kitty reproached Ellen on a daily basis for moving to Ballindoon, and Ellen countered by going out a lot. The predictable quarrel erupted the day before New Year’s Eve when Kitty claimed that the least Ellen could do for her was to spend more time in her company and less socializing with Maureen and other friends.

  “Funeral Masses are always so late,” Kitty complains, sitting at the kitchen table and looking about. “Still, it could have been midday. Thank God for small mercies.” She purses her lips in a critical fashion. “Your place is a bit bare, isn’t it? There’s hardly a stick of furniture. It’s possible to overdo the minimalism, you know. You haven’t gone all Buddhist or contemplative, have you? I hope not.” Kitty is a repository of small talk, a bottomless reservoir of commonplace sentiments on any subject. It’s as though no topic holds her interest for long. She and Ellen have never indulged in any mother-daughter confidences, and if she has any deep convictions, Ellen has yet to discover them. They are disconnected and unaligned, Ellen thinks, clinging tenuously to a relationship that could easily fall apart.

  There was a time when Kitty’s actions concerned Ellen greatly. All through her childhood and teenage years her mother produced various men friends, claiming them to be cousins or in-laws who, nevertheless, shared her bedroom for weeks or months before departing on good or bad terms, or simply suddenly absenting themselves — sometimes taking monetary souvenirs or mementoes with them — never to be mentioned again. As a teenager, Ellen worried about the fallout from others branding her mother a slut. She knew that priests had stopped denouncing wrongdoers from pulpits but that didn’t stop her worrying about repercussions arising from Kitty’s behavior. However, Kitty led a charmed life and no such difficulties ever arose. As she aged her supply of admirers thinned somewhat, although the aging process has been kind to Kitty and makes few depredations on her appearance. She’s a slim and elegant woman in her early sixties, today dressed smartly in a deep blue dress and light cream coat. Her simply styled short hair is dyed a light brown and her makeup, though minimal, has been carefully applied. The scent of her perfume pervades the kitchen. “Christy’s parking the car on the main street,” she says.

  Ellen’s internal organs contort. “What! Christy! You said Christy, didn’t you? What’s he doing here? How come? I don’t understand. I mean, there’s absolutely no need for him to be here.” She paces about
in an agitated fashion. “He’s not coming into this house,” she declares.

  Kitty sends an exasperated look her way. “Don’t be ridiculous, Ellen. Calm down. If he’s not allowed in, then we’ll turn right round and drive back to Dublin. Don’t be cross. He’s being such a sweetheart. Offered to drive me down when I rang him. My old jalopy is in for repairs so he insisted on giving me a lift.” She stands up. “I have to do a little tour of the house, dear. I want to see what’s what.”

  Ellen stirs herself and leads Kitty into the front room. Kitty moves about briskly. “Oh, my dear, this is still very drab. But the conservatory is such a good idea. See what a difference color on the walls makes. That’s a nice shade of yellow. I know conservatories are being built all over the place now, but this one is properly positioned.” She peers into the garden. “You haven’t done much out there, have you? It’s a jungle.”

  Suddenly Christy joins them, and the room darkens. For Ellen, he’s the focus of energy-sapping negativity. She says nothing but she can’t bring herself to look at him. He moves as if to embrace her, but she sidesteps him, and he smiles sheepishly when he sees her scowl.

  Kitty turns. “Grace under pressure,” she says, her face taut. “Be civil, Ellen!”

  Ellen recovers quickly. Grace under pressure — one of her mother’s favorite sayings, almost her motto for life. “Hello, Christy,” she manages. “Want a cup of tea or coffee? Tea is very big in these parts. Why don’t you show him around, Kitty? Have a look yourself.” She’s delighted that her delivery is pat.

  In the kitchen she breathes in deeply, trying to remember a yoga instructor’s directions about how to control one’s reactions through controlling one’s breath. “If the breathing’s right, then you’re all right.” She hears the shrill of her mother’s voice conducting a full tour of the house and pours water into the kettle, only to realize that it’s already full. “Shit,” she mutters as she tries to catch the overflow with a cloth. The water drips onto the floor. She mops up furiously. Damn Kitty, damn her interfering nature, and damn and doubly damn Christy for not having the sense to stay away.

  Kitty shows Christy into the kitchen. “I like this room. It’s rural but not twee. I love the handles on the units, they remind me of an apothecary’s shop.”

  “When were you last in one of those?” Ellen asks.

  Christy stands at a remove from Ellen, his hands jammed into his jacket pockets, his shoulders frozen in a shrug, lips shaped into a grimace that could be a smile. Seeing him like this, hunched and round-shouldered, separated from his normal milieu and without his usual props, makes him look vulnerable, like a mouse poking its quivering, alert nose out into the world. There’s something deeply offensive about his pale weak face. Once, she thought him good-looking, but now that she knows how lily-livered he is, she finds him distasteful.

  “Nice place,” he says. “I wouldn’t mind it myself.”

  Ellen sighs noisily but bites down on a sharp rejoinder. She must keep herself under control. She calculates that she’ll have to tolerate their company for more than an hour before they’ll be able to set off for the funeral Mass. It’ll be hard work, grueling really, but she reckons she can endure anything for an hour.

  “Where’s the jacks?” Christy asks.

  Ellen signals the direction of the downstairs toilet. “What did you think you were playing at by bringing him down?” she snaps at Kitty when he’s gone.

  “Bringing Christy down?” Her mother feigns puzzlement. It’s one of her standard tactics.

  Ellen explodes. “Don’t try the innocent with me. I’m up to all your tricks, remember? Did it ever occur to you that it wasn’t the thing to drag him along, that he’s the very last person you should have brought? We’re not separated all that long. What were you thinking? Did you lose your reason? Don’t you dare tell people who he is!”

  Kitty removes her coat and hands it to Ellen, who accepts it automatically. “Hang that up, would you, darling?” she says and arranges the skirt of her dress to sit down. “Don’t be ridiculous, Ellen. I’m not going to pretend he’s a stranger. People know he exists. Anyway, it’s difficult enough for me to remember day-to-day things, never mind the nuisance of a deceit. We’re not part of a farce.”

  “Don’t introduce him to anybody outside the family then! I’ve managed not to mention him. It just complicates everything.”

  Christy returns and Kitty invites him to sit at the table. Ellen hangs up Kitty’s coat in the hall. For a second she contemplates slashing its quality lining. Instead she rests her head against the coat for a few moments. Her forehead feels hot. She’s sure that her face is flushed. On her return to the kitchen she slams a plate of sandwiches and cut cake on the table in front of them. The plate survives. “There’s a reception in the pub after the burial,” she says.

  Kitty nods, but then she and Christy are discussing how soon they will be able to make a getaway after the funeral. They are easy and intimate with each other, full of casual banter and practiced phrases, with Kitty — a dedicated flatterer of men — chuckling flirtatiously every so often. Their calm demeanor maddens Ellen. It’s an affront to her. Her jaw aches from clamping it down on intemperate words.

  “We’d better show up at the pub. Wouldn’t do to skip off after the burial,” Christy concludes.

  Kitty sighs. “There’s no avoiding it.”

  Ellen sits away from them and listens. She watches Kitty push the sandwiches toward Christy and hears him laugh at something she says. Their voices sound far away, as if the volume has been turned down. She can’t tune in to their wavelength. There’s even a static buzz in her ears.

  Christy faces Ellen, his pasty face intent. “How long does the business in the pub last?” he asks.

  “The immediate thing with food goes on for about an hour. Then it thins out.”

  “Quite the local bumpkin, eh, Ellen?” Kitty says. “You know it all.”

  “Sit here, Ellen. I’ve poured coffee,” Christy says, doing his best to be gracious. Somehow she manages to comply. He pushes the milk toward her and offers her a sandwich. He’s deferential, his head low by way of apology. He’s taller than she remembers and wears his clothes better. It’s odd to be on the receiving end of his conviviality, disconcerting even, like viewing different presentations of him on a split screen and being unable to choose the definitive version.

  “I never expected you to turn up, Christy,” she says. “Last person on earth I thought would be eating sandwiches in my kitchen.”

  “Told Kitty I’d give her a lift as she’d no other way of getting here. Should have thought through the ramifications, I know. Sorry. Anyway, how are you, Ellen?” His voice compels her to be civil.

  “I’m well.” She hopes she says it with conviction. “Yourself?”

  “Can’t complain.”

  “He’s had dreadful luck since you two split up,” Kitty says. She fiddles with a bit of cake on her plate.

  “Is that so?”

  “Yes, the agency folded and he lost his job. Luckily, he had the apartment all sorted out — no mortgage — so that’s a blessing.”

  “That’s a shame, Christy. I’m sure you’ll pick up something.”

  “Let there be no panic, I always say. Something will turn up. I’d have jumped ship if I’d realized that the place was going to close down, but it happened suddenly. I’m not destitute or anything. It’s no trouble to pick up bits and pieces of part-time work. There’s always a need for a good PR man. A bit of slack between jobs is natural. I’ll just have to wait it out.”

  Ellen nods. “You’ll be fine,” she says coldly.

  Kitty darts an irritated glance at Ellen. “How’s Matt coping? How’s he taking it? I always thought that he and Julia were mismatched.”

  “He’s not great.”

  “Years since I last saw him,” Kitty says, patting her hair. “Is he still as dashing as ever? Brendan was a fine man but he wasn’t a smasher like his brother.”

  “Smasher
, Mum? That word is so passé. You should get your terms up-to-date. You’ll have to judge his looks for yourself. You’ll see him soon enough. He wants us to sit in the same pew as the family.”

  “That doesn’t include me,” Christy says.

  “No, no, not you, just Mum and me.”

  “Why can’t Christy —” Kitty begins, but a shake of Ellen’s head silences her. “Oh, I suppose not.” She shudders. “If we must.” She leans forward in her chair and places a hand on Ellen’s elbow. “And it’s only because you insisted that I agreed to come. I’m sure I could have found some excuse to get out of it.”

  “You’re dreadful, Mum. Absolutely dreadful.”

  “Call me Kitty. Don’t call me Mum. I don’t want people guessing my age.”

  “I’ll tell them you had me in your teens.”

  Kitty looks around. “Burying yourself down here. It’s madness really. Don’t you agree, Christy?”

  He coughs a few times and manages not to answer, looks as if he’d choose to be anywhere but in Ellen’s kitchen. “Would you listen to what you’re saying, Mum? You’re interfering again. It’s none of your business.”

  “Surely I’m entitled to my opinions?”

  “Certainly, but that doesn’t mean you have to express them.”

  “It’s not right that my only child is living so far away from me. Why don’t you move back to Dublin? You and Christy should hook up together again. I can’t understand why you didn’t make even the teeniest effort to patch things up.”

  Ellen thumps the table and her mother gives a theatrical start. “Mum, back off. Stay out of things that are none of your business. Since when did you become the great advocate of the moral order?”