by Edna O'Brien
“That’s a lie,” I said.
“Is it!” he said, and boasted how Michael described Moira’s arrival, her shyness, her chatter, then her capitulation as he removed her coat, her dress, her underclothes, and she lay there with not a stitch. As his advances were now rapid, I knew there was nothing for it but to have a fit. I started to shake all over, to scream, to say disjointed things, indeed to be so delirious that he slapped me on the face and said for Christ’s sake to calm down, that no one was going to do anything to me. We could hear a car in the distance, and as its headlights came around the corner, I ran out and waved frantically. It was the vet, who slowed down, wound the window, and shouted, “What’s up?”
“Nothing’s up,” Tom said, and added that I had a puncture but that he had mended it. When the car drove off he picked up his bicycle and said for a long time he had not had such a fiasco of an evening.
Ours was a silent and a sullen journey home. He cycled ahead of me and never once turned around to see if I followed. As we neared the village, he cycled on downhill, and I got off because my brakes were faulty. I felt full of shame and blunder and did not know what I would say if Mrs. Flynn or the brothers asked me if I had enjoyed myself. I felt disgraced and dearly wished that I could go home there and then.
Michael confronted me in the hall as I was hanging up my coat. He said had I seen a ghost or what, as I was white as a sheet. Soon he guessed.
“The pup, the blackguard,” he said as he brought me into the kitchen. He put me in the big armchair, sat beside me, and started to stroke my hair, all the while iterating what injury he would do to Tom. Suddenly he kissed me, and this kiss being a comfort, he followed it with a shower of kisses, embraces, and fond fugitive words.
“I love you,” I said bluntly.
“Ditto,” he said. His voice and expression were quite different now, young and unguarded. I was seeing the man for whom Moira, Eileen, and a host of girls would tear one another’s eyes out. We heard a stir and he drew back, stood up sharply, and opened the kitchen door very casually, while also winking at me.
“Who goes there?” he said in a stern voice, and then went into the well of the hall, but no one answered. He crossed over into the shop and all of a sudden the kitchen became dark, either because he had interfered with the mains or their electricity plant had gone wrong. I was like someone in a trance. I could feel him coming back by his soft quick steps and then by the glow of a cigarette. Just as I had once imagined the lure of his voice in the dark saying a name, he now said mine, and his arms reached out to me with a sweet, almost a childlike supplicatingness. What had been disgusting and repellent an hour before was now a transport, and there was nothing for it but to be glad; that wild and frightened gladness that comes from breaking out of one’s lonely crust, and just as with the swimmer who first braves the depths, the fear is secondary to the sense of prodigal adventure. He said that he would get some cider and two glasses and that we could go over to the loft, where no one would bother us. Whatever he proposed I would have agreed to. We went out like thieves, and crossing the yard, he picked me up so’s I wouldn’t spoil my shoes.
In the morning he stuck his tousled head out of his bedroom door, and in front of his mother gave me a quick kiss, then whispered, “I’ll be waiting for you.” It was not true, but it was all I wanted to hear, and on the drive home, the blue misted hills, the cold lakes, the songs of the birds, and the shiny laurel hedges around the grand estates all seemed startlingly beautiful and energized, and it was as if they had just been inhabited by some new and invigorating pulse of life.
Ghosts
Three women. They represent defiance, glamour, and a kind of innocence that I miss in my later world. They were all tall and if I had to liken them to anything it would be to those paintings of winter trees, with scarcely a leaf left, trees shorn by the wind.
The first of them went periodically mad, and one day, during one of those bouts, she walked into our kitchen wielding an ash plant. Our back door was always open, and there was an odd Wellington boot against it to keep it ajar. She was called Delia, and at once she struck out at everything she could see. Her consummate anger was vented on our pale elm dresser, and I worried for the beautiful plates that were wedged in along the back. They were plates that my mother had won at a carnival in Coney Island long before. They were the nicest thing in the whole kitchen. They were white china plates with a different flower on each one. The plate I loved most had a strange mauve spiral flower that was not like the flowers that grew in the fields. I feared for all of them, but principally for it. Delia lashed out and said that they were dirty, filthy, said that the whole place was a dive and full of muck and that she was going to see to it that we cleaned our premises. I went in under the table, a place I often resorted to, and where pups or dogs often followed.
On she went, expressing her dislike of our way of life, of my mother’s brown bread—she made horrible faces, as if she were taking cascara—of the oilcloth on the table, of the dust in the brown corduroy cushions on the armchair. As far as we knew, her own house was a pigsty. She lived there with her two brothers and an invalid mother, and no one ever cleaned it. The veterinary surgeon used to say that he had to fumigate himself after he had been to their back kitchen to get hot water or his fee. Their house was called Bracken House, and there was a river nearby. It flooded in the winter, and their fields were swampy. They had an old piano in the sitting room, and there they kept bags of sugar and flour and also a machine in which they pulped mangels and turnips. Their voices were forever raised. That was all we knew about them, and when we children had occasion to pass their gateway, we would run and tell each other that the maddies had come to catch us. Her brother Dinny used to chase girls and ask them into the hay shed to romp. He, too, used to be carted to the asylum.
Now Delia was in our house and behaving as if she were a governess, as if she had a right to open cupboards and object to spilled sugar or spilled oatmeal, and to say “disgusting” and repeat it until she was singing it on a very high wavery note. It was just as well we did not own a piano or have our concertina. The local sergeant had borrowed it for a wedding.
My mother calmed her by sitting her down and giving her a mug of tea and cake. It was a marble cake, and Delia marveled at the three colors that composed each slice. They were like a painting, with more brown than green, the plain egg color in the center acting as a barrier between the two other tempting colors. My mother then showed her the green essence that she had used, and suddenly Delia became soft-spoken and our house became the loveliest nest in the world. She brooded for a moment as she chewed. She chewed very determinedly, as if she were tasting each crumb. She was a thin creature, and she wore high-heeled, laced shoes.
All of a sudden she ventured to say that her mother and father should never have married, because they were misfits. She said that her mother had only married him because he had given her “coaxyorum.” My mother asked what that was, and Delia lowered her head and pointed to the little bottle of essence and asked if she could have a drop. After taking a spoonful of green syrup, she was all soppy and babyish, rubbing her chest in slow circular strokes. “Coaxyorum,” she said, was like that. Long ago, her father had got up on a ladder, had gone into her mother’s bedroom, had given her mother this potion, and before she knew where she was, the mother was being carried down the ladder and into a sidecar and off to the father’s house—in fact, to Bracken House. Her mother’s family had disowned her and never spoke to her again.
Delia became so happy that at dusk she refused to go home. My mother bribed her by putting a hunk of cake in clean greaseproof paper and by giving her a pompon that she had taken a fancy to, but she would not budge. I remember how she clung to the brown polished bars of the chair when our workman tried to shift her, and eventually he had to threaten her with the poker, for by now we were dire enemies again and our house was a pigsty. She flounced off, threw the cake on the cement flags outside, trampled on it, and got into
the cart the workman had brought round, shouting with the utmost vehemence, “We don’t need you, we don’t need you, we don’t bloody need you!” The last I saw of her, she was standing in the cart and then, as he got the mare into a gallop, falling down, but all the while continuing her shout of defiance. “We don’t need you, we don’t bloody need you!”
The next of these women, Nancy, was a dream figure in a long motor coat, and dangling from her arm a lizard handbag with a beautiful amber clasp. I can even now hear it being opened and shut as she would take out her cigarette case or her lace-edged hankie, or look in it for no reason—though perhaps it was to gaze in the little mirror in the side pocket. Every time she came to our house, she brought her own box camera, so her visits and her lovely clothes were all perpetuated, though many of them came out blurred. She was a flirt. I did not know all that it meant, but I knew that she was a flirt. She would look at men, she would drink them in, and then make a movement, or a flurry of movements, with her swallow, and she would gulp as if it were sherbet or lemonade or something fizzy. She came to our house whenever there was a dress dance in the village; she would arrive a day or two before and stay a day or two after.
The day before, she would put oatmeal packs on her face and then a beaten egg white, and my mother and she would laugh and pose as they tried on her clothes. She always brought an attaché case full of style. There would be at least two dance dresses, her fur stole with the dark stripes that seemed in danger of coming alive or purring, two or three purses, dance shoes, and a beautiful perfume spray. I would be let hold it in my hand, let squeeze its soft, thick rubber nozzle, and presently the air of the room would be imbued with this near-religious smell and I, at least, was transported elsewhere. Sometimes she brought clothes that were on approval, and these, being new, were the most coveted and the most beautiful. She brought an astrakhan coat that she and my mother took turns trying on; they must have tried it on ten or fifteen times one wet morning. Then I was allowed to try it on, but at once had to take it off, because it was trailing along the floor, and what with their diversion, the floor had not been swept that day and the tiles were smudged from the dogs and the men. It suited Nancy best. Her hair was auburn and copious, and this brown curly astrakhan was a perfect complement to it. She always brought her curling tongs, and when, before a dance, she started to curl her hair, she would sometimes threaten to put my nose between the two warm pincers. Then her eyes would narrow and she would laugh. She was inscrutable.
She and my mother often discussed possible marriages, though she could see from my mother’s life, and infer from their conversation, that marriage was not an ideal state. Still, each new man that came to the neighborhood was a source of supreme interest to her. Not many new men came, but from time to time there was a change of staff at the bank or at the creamery, or, more rarely, a new curate. In these men she manifested great interest before she had met them at all or had any inkling what they looked like. The local county councillor was too staid for her, but my father would insist that he was a good catch, had good land and a stock of cattle. Nancy dreamed of being a receptionist in a grand hotel, of making friends with people from different walks of life and being snatched up by a foreign count or baron.
She was lazy and stayed in bed till noon. I would bring her tea and toast, and she would get me to pass her the red woolly dressing gown, and then she would lie back with her head lolled against the brass rungs and say what a lazybones she was. I lived in dread that I might see her breasts, but mercifully her nightdress was not sheer. Her toast would be cut in neat fingers by my mother, and they seemed more mouth-watering than anything we might have downstairs. Usually we had to have brown bread, because my mother made it and it was our duty to have plain things. Toast was from shop bread and was a definite luxury. I would eat the crusts that she had left.
The new curate, who had come fresh from the seminary, was the admiration of all. Girls blushed at the mention of his name. Nancy and he became inseparable. They would go to the shops in his baby Ford to get mutton or a sheep’s head or their favorite cigarettes, and when they came back they did not get out of the car immediately but sat laughing and smoking. They chain-smoked. I never saw them touch, but as they walked toward the house, it often was as if they were on the point of touching and therefore all the more tantalizing. Her hand would come out of her coat pocket, or his hand might gesture toward the gate, or lift the rose briar as she stooped and stepped under it, and it needed but one more fraction for them to be in a clasp. Once, each carrying a handle of a wide straw basket, they dropped it, so that the grapefruit, the sugar cubes, and the tins of peas were rolling all over the flagstones. The grapefruit was for him, because my mother said that after the long fast for holy Mass he needed something delicate before he tackled a proper breakfast.
When Nancy was with us, he came to our house directly after Mass and stayed the whole day, until it was time to leave for the evening devotions. They would sit in the kitchen and they would talk and laugh, and Nancy would show him her style. One Sunday, she went so far as to cut his hair. It was quite a ceremony—draping him with the white towel, putting newspaper underneath, and then putting the big rusted brown scissors to his temple and going snip-snip. He was begging her to let him look in the mirror, so that he could see if she was clipping too much, but she laughed and said to trust her. As a joke, she put one of the locks of hair into a little lavaliere that she wore around her neck. The rest was swept up onto a piece of cardboard and tossed over the hedge, as tea leaves might be. He did not like the haircut, said the congregation would now see his big ears, and so she called him Big Ears, and smiled at him, and swallowed intensely. As she commiserated with him, her eyes filled up with the most glistening tears, which she did not shed. They were like glycerine.
Sometimes she and he would call me into the kitchen and ask me to recite or tell some story about the schoolteacher—how she thumped us and called us ugly names—and then just as unaccountably they would ask me to leave the kitchen at once and go outside and not come back till I was called. Those exiles into the garden were agony. They made me think of Christ in Gethsemane, and I would kneel down and ask my Maker to let such agony pass, knowing that it would not. The garden was big and windy: there was just the privet hedge, some devil’s pokers, a few shrubs, and two granite pedestals that served as decoration. They were like giant mushrooms, and one of them had come unstuck from its base. I would shake it, hoping it would fall, yet dreading the fact that it might fall and yearning for a tap on the window or a “yoo-hoo”—the signal that said come back.
The curate escorted her to the Halloween dance, and there their friendship underwent a breach. It seems he stood inside the dancehall door, holding her fur stole, not daring to commit it to the ladies’ room, lest it be stolen or tried on by the woman who minded the coats and who was dopey and lackadaisical. The dance floor was like an ice rink, and the band from County Offaly was reputed to be the best that ever came. Nancy danced with all and sundry, and each time she came to the door she smiled or gave some recognition to the curate, who was taking stock of all the dancers but particularly of her.
For the Ladies’ Choice she asked the county councillor, knowing that it could not give offense to her new admirer. Her new admirer was the crooner, who wore a fawn gaberdine suit and had a lot of oil in his hair. It seems that the moment he caught sight of her in her raspberry-colored dress he stopped singing, in mid-song, let out a whistle, and then pointed the microphone in her direction. After that, he made a point of singling her out when she approached the bandstand, and he sang the song “Jealousy” with a special lady in mind. When the supper break came, she did not go down to the end of the hall and join the curate for lemonade and queen cakes; rather, she sneaked out by an upper door, which was a fire exit, and was followed by the crooner, who providently brought his Crombie overcoat. No one knew for certain what ensued out there, save that they were not on the grounds of the dance hall but had gone along the road and
lurked in a gateway. Nancy herself assured my mother that it was the most harmless little thing—that they sat on the wet wall while the crooner taught her the words of a song she loved. She sang a bit of the chorus of it:
After the had was over
Just at the break of day
Many’s the heart that was aching
If I could read them all
Many’s the heart that was broken
Af … ter the ball.
It could have been the theme song for the injured curate, because he did not wait to see her home. She got a lift on the crossbar of a bicycle and got oil all over her long dress. He did not come the next morning. My mother said that probably he would never come, and became snappy, as she, too, loved his visits, because they lessened the undercurrent of despair that permeated our house.
Nancy said, “Care to bet?” And they bet sixpence. Nancy’s prediction was that he would come on the third day, and so sure was she of this that she postponed going home until then, even though she was needed in the city in her parents’ shop. Her parents owned a confectionery shop in Limerick and sold the most beautiful cakes and buns. When she came to us, she always brought a lemon cake or a chocolate cake, and once there was an almond-flavored cake with almond icing and a little almond chicken. She realized there was some pique on my mother’s part and took to tidying two cupboards and lined them with newspaper. She picked out all the old socks too, and they looked ridiculous on the kitchen table, gray or flecked socks, all looking for a partner and most of them full of holes.
On the third morning, as the dogs ran joyously from the back steps and chased down the fields, she knew—we all knew—that it was he. She ran to the front window to make sure it was his car. My mother volunteered to go to the yard to feed the fowl, and told Nancy to lay a tray and make him feel at home.
