by Anne Enright
I was nominally attached to a good woman who lived in a rundown house between the hill and the strand; who washed my clothes, fed me and let me go – perhaps because of some old debt she owed my father, perhaps for a small fee. As far as I can remember, I was a brave child. (It is not the loss of innocence that I regret, but the loss of that courage.) I swam in the deep, underwater world of childhood, my limbs playing in the shattered light of the sea. I loved the cold shock, diving off the cliffs, my body growing numb as I prised free the starfish that hid in the crevices, or teased the nervous mouths of translucent sea anemones. I chatted easily and dangerously with the visitors to the town, with a friendliness that came as second nature to the daughter of a publican. Old men with whiskey breath would lift me on to the bar counter, tip the wink to my father for a bag of crisps and call me ‘princess.’
It was the summer of my eleventh year. I was grown wild – more reckless in the sea, more brash with the locals and coy with the tourists, who filled the town with their white, bared flesh. My father picked on a young boy called Diarmuid to help behind the bar, some distant relative from Galway with (I can’t continue this for much longer) … with the black hair and fine, blunt cheekbones of a Connemara man. Daddy gave over the storeroom to house the boy and slept again in his old room, treading carefully and with a sense of unfamiliarity over the wooden boards. His presence there was light, but unsettling. He brought back the ghost of my mother with him.
I must stop. ‘Ghost,’ ‘flesh,’ ‘fine, blunt cheekbones,’ these words are all strangers to me. I am trying to construct a childhood, so I can pick my way through it for dues. ‘Felix came because’ … because in the summer of my eleventh year, my father hired a boy called Diarmuid. Any other boy would have done, any other childhood. The secret must be in the style. If I must choose some way of lying to myself, I thought, this might be the most appropriate. Take on the cadences of an old roué in a velvet smoking jacket, cashmere socks, and a degree of barefaced and thoughtful dignity that is not permitted to the rest of mankind. But look at me. I am a woman of fifty-one years of age, in a suburb of Dublin; not exactly sitting with rollers in my hair, but certainly subject to the daily humiliation of coffee-morning conversation and the grocer’s indifference. I buy winter coats in Clery’s sale. I have a husband. Every year we drive to the same guesthouse in Miltown Malbay. There has been no tragedy in my life, you might say, apart from the ordinary tragedies of life and death that Ireland absorbs, respects and buries, without altering its stride. In my clean, semi-detached house there are only a few sordid clues; my daughter’s empty bedroom, a doll without a head, one broken arrow from a boy’s bow, that sits like so much junk at the back of the coal house. Where is the poetry in that?
I have always been struck by the incongruous picture of an old woman with a pen in her hand. Is it not slightly obscene, Ms Lessing, to show your life around like that? Of course your neighbours are rich, they respect you, they are proud to have you living nearby. They don’t watch you in the street and say, ‘Why write about orgasms, when you look like that?’
Middle-aged women write notes to the milkman, not suicide notes. When they die, they do so quietly, out of consideration for their relatives and friends. And then there is the subject of perversion. Old women are never perverts. They may be ‘dotty’ or ‘strange’, poor things, they may, and often do, ‘suffer from depression’, but they emphatically do not feel up boys in public parks. Their lust is a form of maimed vanity, if it exists at all. It is not the great sweeping torment of the poet. It is not love. The only thing we suffer from is the menopause (‘Let me tell you something, Iris dear, the change of life is a blessing … when he stops … you know, wanting things in the middle of the night.’ I want I want I want). I want I want I want. I am not an hysteric. I am a woman of ten and a half stone with a very superior brain. I do not know what the word ‘maternal’ was ever supposed to mean.
So it is back to the smoking jacket and the man with refined hands who translates Baudelaire for a hobby; the man with a bubble of hot poison in his loins and a super-voluptuous flame permanently aglow in his subtle spine, poor fella, may he rest in peace, God bless him. It is back to the summer I fell asleep (in fact a bout of glandular fever) and Diarmuid, who is no lamia, but a man I met in the street the other day, short, fat, his ‘Connemara bones’ laced with a filigree of hot purple veins. Incidentally, I too have read my Poe and Proust, my Keats and Thomas Mann. Who cares? None of them chased things that were real. My boy-child was real – does that mean that I am not a poet? Oh, but I am. I am a poet not quite in curlers, because I make the poets’ claim that ‘Form … ja wesentlich bestrebt ist, das Moralische unter ihr stolzes und unumschranktes Szepter zu beugen.’ You see. In a woman who dresses from Clery’s sale, such tactics can only be childish.
* * *
The summer when I was eleven was hot, salty and golden. I would come out of the sharp light of the street and into the pub, lean my cheek against the worn dark wood of the bar, and watch Diarmuid. The wood was soaked with the smell of every old hand that had worn it smooth, and Diarmuid smelt of old men too, his clothes saturated with smoke and spilt porter. But under the clothes he smelt alive. My father did not object to my proximity to the boy – he was too busy scrutinizing him for signs of another kind of fall and with it, the excuse to put him back on the train, back to the rocky fields and sour crop of the family farm. But Diarmuid kept his small hands clean. He spoke like an old man to the customers, neither overly familiar nor reserved. He wiped the counter constantly in wide, smooth circles and he rinsed the cloth out every hour. His small body was steady and sure, with the singular grace of a young boy whose limbs have not yet betrayed him into awkwardness. But he knew that he was being watched, and when my father turned away from him, disgusted by his virtue, I would catch the flicking eye and the wild incomprehension of a horse at the start. We never spoke.
It seems to me now, with plenty of adult, if somewhat perfunctory sex behind me, that I did not know what I was feeling then, or even that I was feeling at all. I now know what it is to ache, and how to free that ache by some mechanical means – I am speaking, I suppose, of my husband, of whom it must be said, I became very fond. And you will excuse my tone, I remain prissy about mere sex, though I would go from the coffee-morning euphemism that was conjugation with my husband, straight to the mordant touch and cool, shy eyes of Felix, who recreates in me, and refines beyond endurance, that first passion. Perhaps passion is the wrong word. The sight of Diarmuid made my limbs feel large, as though I were sick. My whole body emptied itself out of my eyes when I looked at him. Objects became strange, and made me clumsy. At night the sheets felt as though they were touching me, and not the other way around.
So one afternoon, with the place deserted, I slid under the flap that guarded the space behind the counter, and I pressed my hot, flat body wordlessly against his. It was a matter of instinct only. The brittle, swollen feeling in my skin broke and melted away. It was several days before we learned how to kiss.
I took some tins from the shelf, poured a can full of new milk into a bottle that had once contained stout, and corked it firmly. I took my blue cotton frock and the red Sunday dress, wrapped the food in them and secured the bundle with my father’s best funeral tie. We found our separate ways in the dark to the flat rock that lies fallen at the end of the headland to the north of Killogue. The feelings of the week before seemed very strange as we stood and watched each other. I laid my cardigan in the shelter of the slab of rock and lay down on it. After a silence that went on forever Diarmuid lay down with me.
What do you want? ‘The sceptre of his passion’? ‘My deep, throbbing heart’? Descriptions of the sexual act always pain me. I am reminded of a book published by a vanity press in the United States, where the hero puts – no, slides his hand into ‘the cleft of readiness’ and finds ‘the nub of responsiveness.’ And, in fact, that description will do as well as any other. We fooled around, like children. There was n
o technical consummation, though some pain. We didn’t have a clue, you could say. That was all.
Why bother? We all have had our small, fumbling initiations on dirty sofas or canal walks. Why bother to remember, when it is our business to look for the better things in life, and our duty to forget. (‘A bunch of baby carrots please, and a pound of potatoes, isn’t it a nice day, thank God,’ the last words spoken by this atheist, pervert and hopeless cook.) Sentiment is all very well (wedding cake), even large emotions – so long as they are mature (sound of baby’s first cry, the look of love in paralysed husband’s grateful eyes). But what about passion? Passion is the wrong word. I are speaking of the feeling that hits like a blow to the belly in ordinary places. See that woman in a headscarf stop dead on the footpath, her mouth shaping to form a word. But before she remembers what it is, the image is tucked away, the shopping bag is changed from one hand to the other, and she walks on. What kind of images collect in an old woman’s head?
My moment of passion was a cold one. I woke up just before the dawn, a white light spreading over the bay turning the sea to a frosted blue, and a shivering in my body that scarcely left me intact. Every organ was outlined with a damp pain and I could sense every muscle and bone. I couldn’t feel the ground, or the clothes on my back. I was floating inside my numb skin like the jelly of an oyster, and my shell seemed to have sprouted some extra limbs. They were Diarmuid’s. He lay in my arms asleep, and a perfect, empty, blue freedom was all around. The sun had not yet risen. I was already feverish.
School settled over me like a blanket when you are sick. Up at seven, silence till eight, Mass, breakfast, class. I didn’t want to speak and there was no room for friends. Instead, I showed off to the nuns as though they were the old men in my father’s bar; my hand was permanently up in the air, my poems were read out at assembly.
I was allowed special access to books, and my religion essays were scattered with references to St John of the Cross, Julian of Norwich, even Kierkegaard. You may not think that it is possible, but yes, it is possible to be so clever at sixteen, and then to ignore it. And I was the cleverest of them all. The other girls whispered about escape into town, while I read under the sheets. I thought about Diarmuid, but not for long, there was no relief in it. I decided to become a nun, decided to become a writer, decided finally, to become nothing at all. I lost my faith, in the best male tradition, but did not consider its loss significant. There was something about the nuns that made individual lives seem inconsequential, and I admired them for it. What I wrote, I burned and forgot.
Daddy died the summer I left school – he had only held out for the sake of the fees – and so I was free to turn down my university scholarship, despite Sr Polycarpe’s pleading, and three novenas from my English, biology and maths teachers respectively. I took a flat on the Pembroke Road and a secretarial job. I also took a boy from the office home with me one night and woke up to find that he had fallen in love. We got over the embarrassment with a small wedding, me in a blue suit and pill-box hat, a light veil of netting at the front. When we went to France on our honeymoon, I pretended not to speak French. This is why, I suppose, I am plagued with travel sickness and we spend our holidays now on the Irish coast.
My husband is a good man, and I love him, though not in the usual way. By this I mean that he is kindly, not that he is dull – I have learned to find interest in the expected. I should write about my daughter too, I suppose, except that this confessional mode agitates and bores me. Something, somewhere, marked my life out like this. I make up childhoods to try and explain. Nevertheless, I do not change. I gave birth to a daughter and I did not change.
One morning (a writer’s lie this, like all other ‘realizations’), one morning, it could be said, I looked in the mirror and found that I was middle aged.
Do you understand? I looked in the mirror and found that I was middle aged. The relief was overwhelming. My anonymity was crystallized, my life since Diarmuid was staring me in the face, tepid and blank. Everything had dropped away – I could do anything now. What interests me, I thought, is not life, the incidents that fill it, not images or moments, but this central greyness. I saw that I was ready. It was into this greyness that Felix would drop, like a hard little apple into the ripe ground.
Felix was only a boy that I loved. Will you believe that I did not harm him, that I made him happy? And not only with sweeties. I knew his mother, a proud, vulgar woman, and had shared my pregnancy with her, putting to rest her useless fears about breech births and extra chromosomes. I even (the irony of it!) placed my hand on her tight belly in the seventh month, a gesture that in our semi-detached world belongs to the husband alone. There was the little nugget of Felix, wrapped up in the silt of her body. I sometimes wonder whether I corrupted him then with that touch, whether my voluptas was sent through his transparent limbs, turning them into the clean, radiant flesh that was to possess me before he was fully grown.
In the meantime, I was the woman up the road and my daughter was his friend. They played doctors and nurses on the front porch, I suppose. Recently I dug over their dolls’ graveyard. I took some pleasure in their growing, though grazed knees and the simple, sloppy cruelty of children hold little charm for me. Felix was quiet – even then, you could not tell his arrogance, his animal calm, from the shyness of other small boys. In retrospect, he was probably beautiful, and I kissed him sometimes, as children need to be kissed. (Was I a bad mother? Oh no.) When I regret all those wasted caresses, I comfort myself with the fact that I could not have known. Looking at myself as I was, I can only see what those two children saw, a solid, transparent shape that wasn’t quite flesh, but ‘mother’ – the creature that was wrapped about them like certainty.
When gradually things began to change between them, I did not notice that either, and would have found it tedious if I had. My daughter started slamming doors and stealing lipsticks. One afternoon she came home crying and hid up in her bedroom. I was attacking the hall with the vacuum cleaner, hoping that the noise would disturb the concentration her self-pity seemed to require, when the knock came at the door. There was Felix on the doorstep, a grown boy, with an indifferently guilty look on his face, and his overlarge hands thrust into his pockets. Little Miss Madam opened her bedroom door and shouted down the stairs, ‘You’ve spoilt everything!’
What a charming scene! I looked at Felix (he smelt of gutting rats and climbing trees) and he looked back at me and laughed with an innocent, evil sense of complicity. That same cold dawn broke over my body and I had to shut the door.
Please believe me, I waited for months. I did not touch him, but carried instead a deep, hard pain in the bowl of my pelvis. I became clumsy again, everything I reached for fell to the floor and the kitchen was a mess of fragments. All that I saw opened up the ache, and I wanted the whole world inside me, with Felix at its centre, like a small, hard pip. The loss of dignity was wonderful, ghastly. I mimicked my daughter at the bathroom mirror, and haunted the fitting rooms of increasingly expensive shops. I put sex back into my appearance; brittle enough, but real. His sharp boy’s eyes, meanwhile, became blank again. Perhaps he was waiting too, though it seemed that when he looked at me, he saw nothing at all. I only had to touch him to become real.
He came to the house one day when she was out. I sat him in the kitchen on the promise of her return. I made a cup of tea and the impudent child held the silence and looked bored, while one knee knocked and rubbed against the table leg. I set down the mug of tea and the Eden-red apple on the table before him and then … I leaned over and touched him, in a way that he found surprising.
Small, dirty, strange. Felix’s eyes focused on me and it was like falling down a tunnel. He put his hand on my arm, to stop me, or to urge me on, and the pain I carried inside me like a dead child dropped quietly, burning as it went.
This was just the first time. There was a second, a third, a fourteenth. I might describe them – I have the words for it – but your prurience does not interes
t me; neither does your disbelief.
Our subterfuges became increasingly intricate, snatching an hour here or there while I pushed my daughter out to hockey practice, piano lessons, even horse riding. Lucky girl. Meanwhile Felix and I pressed out the sour honey of the deepest ecstasy that man or beast has ever known. And while she bounced along on rattle-backed, expensive old nags, while my husband fretted over mislaid returns and his secretary’s odour, I wrapped Felix, insensate with pleasure, in the fleshy pulp of my body where he ripened, the hard, sweet gall inside the cactus plant.
Then, of course, she found the letter:
Dear auntie Iris,
Mammy is sick and I can’t come today.
Love
Felix.
PS Larry Dunne was talking about sex again today enough to make you puke. He says he has been putting it into Lucy down the road but I just had to laugh because he obviously hasn’t seen any of that and was just blowing. I nearly said about you but I didn’t. Don’t worry.
I never throw hysterics. So how could I have reared such an hysterical child? She gave up the riding lessons, the hockey, the piano, and became a large, uncultured lout. She rang him night and day, she wept in his bedroom. She lived at our throats and by the time she left, he had turned into a large, normal young man. He went to discos, he wanted to get into the bank. I met his mother on the street one day; she boasted of his many girlfriends, and complained that they never lasted long. I can imagine why.
