by Edna O'Brien
She would like the house. It had simplicity despite its grandeur. A white house with green shutters and a fanlight of stone over each of the three downstairs entrances. A sundial, a well, a little chapel. The walls and the ceilings were a milky blue, and this, combined with the sea and sky, had a strange hallucinatory effect, as if sea and sky moved indoors. There were maps instead of pictures. Around the light bulbs pink shells that over the years had got a bit chipped, but this only added to the informality of the place.
We would take a long time over supper. Petals would drop from the tree; some might lodge on the stone table, festooning it. The figs, exquisitely chilled, would be served on a wide platter. We would test them with our fingers. We would know which ones when bitten into would prove to be satisfactory. She, being native, might be more expert at it than I. One or the other of us might bite too avidly and find that the seeds, wet and messy and runny and beautiful, spurted over our chins. I would wipe my chin with my hand. I would do everything to put her at ease. Get drunk if necessary. At first I would talk, but later show hesitation in order to give her a chance.
I changed into an orange robe and put on a long necklace made of a variety of shells. The dog was still loose in order to warn me. At the first bark I would have him brought in and tied up at the back of the house, where even his whimpering would be unheard.
I sat on the terrace. The sun was going down. I moved to another chair in order to get the benefit of it. The crickets had commenced their incessant near-mechanical din and the lizards began to appear from behind the maps. Something about their deft, stealthlike movements reminded me of her, but everything reminded me of her just then. There was such silence that the seconds appeared to record their own passing. There were only the crickets and, in the distance, the sound of sheep bells, more dreamlike than a bleat. In the distance, too, the lighthouse, faithfully signaling. A pair of shorts hanging on a hook began to flutter in the first breeze, and how I welcomed it, knowing that it heralded night. She was waiting for dark, the embracing dark, the sinner’s dear accomplice.
My servant waited out of view. I could not see her, but I was conscious of her the way one sometimes is of a prompter in the wings. It irritated me. I could hear her picking up or laying down a plate, and I knew it was being done simply to engage my attention. I had also to battle with the smell of lentil soup. The smell, though gratifying, seemed nothing more than a bribe to hurry the proceedings, and that was impossible. Because, according to my conjecture, once I began to eat the possibility of her coming was ruled out. I had to wait.
The hour that followed had an edgy, predictable, and awful pattern—I walked, sat on various seats, lit cigarettes that I quickly discarded, kept adding to my drink. At moments I forgot the cause of my agitation, but then recalling her in dark clothes and downcast eyes, I thrilled again at the pleasure of receiving her. Across the bay the various settlements of lights came on, outlining towns or villages that are invisible in daylight. The perfection of the stars was loathsome.
Finally, the dog’s food was brought forth, and he ate as he always does, at my feet. When the empty plate skated over the smooth cobbles—due to my clumsiness—and the full moon, so near, so red, so oddly hospitable, appeared above the pines, I decided to begin, taking the napkin out of its ring and spreading it slowly and ceremoniously on my lap. I confess that in those few seconds my faith was overwhelming and my hope stronger than it had ever been.
The food was destroyed. I drank a lot.
Next day I set out for the village, but took the sea road. I have not gone the cliff way ever since. I have often wanted to, especially after work, when I know what my itinerary is going to be: I will collect the letters, have one Pernod in the bar where retired colonels play cards, sit and talk to them about nothing. We have long ago accepted our uselessness for each other. New people hardly ever come.
There was an Australian painter whom I invited to supper, having decided that he was moderately attractive. He became offensive after a few drinks and kept telling me how misrepresented his countrymen were. It was sad rather than unpleasant, and the servant and I had to link him home.
On Sundays and feast days girls of about twenty go by, arms around each other, bodies lost inside dark commodious garments. Not one of them looks at me, although by now I am known. She must know me. Yet she never gives me a sign as to which she is. I expect she is too frightened. In my more optimistic moments I like to think that she waits diere, expecting me to come and search her out. Yet I always find myself taking the sea road, even though I most desperately desire to go the other way.
Irish Revel
Mary hoped that the rotted front tire would not burst. As it was, the tube had a slow puncture, and twice she had to stop and use the pump, maddening, because the pump had no connection and had to be jammed on over the corner of a handkerchief. For as long as she could remember, she had been pumping bicycles, carting turf, cleaning out houses, doing a man’s work. Her father and her two brothers worked for the forestry, so that she and her mother had to do all the odd jobs—there were three children to care for, and fowl and pigs and churning. Theirs was a mountainy farm in Ireland, and life was hard.
But this cold evening in early November she was free. She rode along the mountain road, between the bare thorn hedges, thinking pleasantly about the party. Although she was seventeen, this was her first party. The invitation had come only that morning from Mrs. Rodgers of the Commercial Hotel. The postman brought word that Mrs. Rodgers wanted her down that evening, without fail. At first, her mother did not wish Mary to go, there was too much to be done, gruel to be made, and one of the twins had earache and was likely to cry in the night. Mary slept with the year-old twins, and sometimes she was afraid that she might lie on them or smother them, the bed was so small. She begged to be let go.
“What use would it be?” her mother said. To her mother all outings were unsettling—they gave you a taste of something you couldn’t have. But finally she weakened, mainly because Mrs. Rodgers, as owner of the Commercial Hotel, was an important woman and not to be insulted.
“You can go, so long as you’re back in time for the milking in the morning; and mind you don’t lose your head,” her mother warned. Mary was to stay overnight in the village with Mrs. Rodgers. She plaited her hair, and later when she combed it, it fell in dark crinkled waves over her shoulders. She was allowed to wear the black lace dress that had come from America years ago and belonged to no one in particular. Her mother had sprinkled her with Holy Water, conveyed her to the top of the lane, and warned her never to touch alcohol.
Mary felt happy as she rode along slowly, avoiding the potholes that were thinly iced over. The frost had never lifted that day. The ground was hard. If it went on like that, the cattle would have to be brought into the shed and given hay.
The road turned and looped and rose; she turned and looped with it, climbing little hills and descending again toward the next hill. At the descent of the Big Hill she got off the bicycle—the brakes were unreliable—and looked back, out of habit, at her own house. It was the only house back there on the mountain, small, whitewashed, with a few trees around it and a patch at the back which they called a kitchen garden. There was a rhubarb bed, and shrubs over which they emptied tea leaves, and a stretch of grass where in the summer they had a chicken run, moving it from one patch to the next every other day. She looked away. She was now free to think of John Roland. He had come to their district two years before, riding a motorcycle at a ferocious speed; raising dust on the milk cloths spread on the hedge to dry. He stopped to ask the way. He was staying with Mrs. Rodgers in the Commercial Hotel and had come up to see the lake, which was noted for its colors. It changed color rapidly—it was blue and green and black, all within an hour. At sunset it was often a strange burgundy, not like a lake at all, but like wine.
“Down there,” she said to the stranger, pointing to the lake below, with the small island in the middle of it. He had taken a wrong turning.
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Hills and tiny cornfields descended steeply toward the water. The misery of the hills was clear, from all the boulders. The cornfields were turning, it was midsummer; the ditches throbbing with the blood-red of fuchsia; the milk sour five hours after it had been put in the tanker. He said how exotic it was. She had no interest in views herself. She just looked up at the high sky and saw that a hawk had halted in the air above them. It was like a pause in her life, the hawk above them, perfectly still; and just then her mother came out to see who the stranger was. He took off his helmet and said, “Hello,” very courteously. He introduced himself as John Roland, an English painter, who lived in Italy.
She did not remember exactly how it happened, but after a while he walked into their kitchen with them and sat down to tea.
Two long years since; but she had never given up hoping—perhaps this evening. The mail-car man said that someone special in the Commercial Hotel expected her. She felt such happiness. She spoke to her bicycle, and it seemed to her that her happiness somehow glowed in the pearliness of the cold sky, in the frosted fields going blue in the dusk, in the cottage windows she passed. Her father and mother were rich and cheerful; the twin had no earache, the kitchen fire did not smoke. Now and then she smiled at the thought of how she would appear to him—taller and with breasts now, and a dress that could be worn anywhere. She forgot about the rotted tire, got up, and cycled.
The five streetlights were on when she pedaled into the village. There had been a cattle fair that day and the main street was covered with dung. The townspeople had their windows protected with wooden half-shutters and makeshift arrangements of planks and barrels. Some were out scrubbing their own piece of footpath with bucket and brush. There were cattle wandering around, mooing, the way cattle do when they are in a strange street, and drunken farmers with sticks were trying to identify their own cattle in dark corners.
Beyond the shop window of the Commercial Hotel, Mary heard loud conversation and men singing. It was opaque glass, so that she could not identify any of them, she could just see their heads moving about inside. It was a shabby hotel, the yellow-washed walls needed a coat of paint, as they hadn’t been done since the time De Valera came to that village during the election campaign five years before. De Valera went upstairs that time and sat in the parlor and wrote his name with a penny pen in an autograph book, and sympathized with Mrs. Rodgers on the recent death of her husband.
Mary thought of resting her bicycle against the porter barrels under the shop window, and then of climbing the three stone steps that led to the hall door, but suddenly the latch of the shop door clicked and she ran in terror up the alley by the side of the shop, afraid it might be someone who knew her father and would say he saw her going in through the public bar. She wheeled her bicycle into a shed and approached the back door. It was open, but she did not enter without knocking.
Two town girls rushed to answer it. One was Doris O’Beirne, the daughter of the harness maker. She was the only Doris in the whole village, and she was famous for that, as well as for the fact that one of her eyes was blue and the other a dark brown. She was learning shorthand and typing at the local technical school, and later she meant to be a secretary to some famous man or other in the government, in Dublin.
“God, I thought it was someone important,” she said when she saw Mary standing there, blushing, beholden, and with a bottle of cream in her hand. Another girl! Girls were two a penny in that neighborhood. People said that it had something to do with the limewater that so many girls were born. Girls with pink skins and matching eyes, and girls like Mary, with long, wavy hair and gorgeous figures.
“Come in or stay out,” said Eithne Duggan, the second girl, to Mary. It was supposed to be a joke, but neither of them liked her. They hated shy mountainy people.
Mary came in, carrying cream which her mother had sent to Mrs. Rodgers as a present. She put it on the dresser and took off her coat. The girls nudged each other when they saw her dress. In the kitchen was a smell of cow dung from the street, and fried onions from a pan that simmered on the stove.
“Where’s Mrs. Rodgers?” Mary asked.
“Serving,” Doris said in a saucy voice, as if any fool ought to know. Two old men sat at the table eating.
“I can’t chew, I have no teeth,” said one of the men to Doris. “ ’Tis like leather,” he said, holding the plate of burned steak toward her. He had watery eyes and he blinked childishly. Was it so, Mary wondered, that eyes got paler with age, like bluebells in a jar?
“You’re not going to charge me for that,” the old man was saying to Doris. Tea and steak cost five shillings at the Commercial.
“ ’Tis good for you, chewing is,” Eithne Duggan said, teasing him.
“I can’t chew with my gums,” he said again, and the two girls began to giggle. The old man looked pleased that he had made them laugh, and he closed his mouth and munched once or twice on a piece of fresh shop bread. Eithne Duggan laughed so much that she had to put a dishcloth between her teeth. Mary hung up her coat and went through to the shop.
Mrs. Rodgers came from the counter for a moment to speak to her.
“Mary, I’m glad you came, that pair in there are no use at all, always giggling. Now, first thing we have to do is to get the parlor upstairs straightened out. Everything has to come out of it except the piano. We’re going to have dancing and everything.”
Quickly Mary realized that she was being given work to do, and she blushed with shock and disappointment.
“Pitch everything into the back bedroom, the whole shootin’ lot,” Mrs. Rodgers was saying, as Mary thought of her good lace dress and of how her mother wouldn’t even let her wear it to Mass on Sundays.
“And we have to stuff a goose, too, and get it on,” Mrs. Rodgers said, and went on to explain that the party was in honor of the local Customs and Excise Officer, who was retiring because his wife won some money in the sweep. Two thousand pounds. His wife lived thirty miles away at the far side of Limerick, and he lodged in the Commercial Hotel from Monday to Friday, going home for the weekends.
“There’s someone here expecting me,” Mary said, trembling with the pleasure of being about to hear his name pronounced by someone else. She wondered which room was his, and if he was likely to be in at that moment. Already in imagination she had climbed the rickety stairs and knocked on the door and heard him move around inside.
“Expecting you!” Mrs. Rodgers said, and looked puzzled for a minute. “Oh, that lad from the slate quarry was inquiring about you, he said he saw you at a dance once. He’s as odd as two left shoes.”
“What lad?” Mary said, as she felt the joy leaking out of her heart.
“Oh, what’s his name,” Mrs. Rodgers said, and then to the men with empty glasses who were shouting for her, “Oh, all right, I’m coming.”
Upstairs Doris and Eithne helped Mary move the heavy pieces of furniture. They dragged the sideboard across the landing, and one of the casters tore the linoleum. She was expiring, because she had the heaviest end, the other two being at the same side. She felt that it was on purpose: they ate sweets without offering her one, and she caught them making faces at her dress. The dress worried her, too, in case anything should happen to it. If one of the lace threads caught in a splinter of wood, or on a porter barrel, she would have no business going home in the morning. They carried out a varnished bamboo whatnot, a small table, knickknacks, and a chamber pot with no handle which held some withered hydrangeas. They smelled awful.
“How much is the doggie in the window, the one with the waggledy tail?” Doris O’Beirne sang to a white china dog and swore that there wasn’t ten pounds’ worth of furniture in the whole shebeen.
“Are you leaving your curlers in, Dot, till it starts?” Eithne Duggan asked her friend.
“Oh, def,” Doris O’Beirne said. She wore an assortment of curlers—white pipe cleaners, metal clips, and pink plastic rollers. Eithne had just taken hers out, and her hair, dyed blond, stood out
, all frizzed and alarming. She reminded Mary of a molting hen about to attempt flight. She was, God bless her, an unfortunate girl, with a squint, jumbled teeth, and almost no lips; like something put together hurriedly. That was the luck of the draw.
“Take these,” Doris O’Beirne said, handing Mary bunches of yellowed bills crammed on skewers.
Do this! Do that! They ordered her around like a maid. She dusted the piano, top and sides, and the yellow and black keys; then the surround and the wainscoting. The dust, thick on everything, had settled into a hard film because of the damp in that room. A party! She’d have been as well off at home, at least it was clean dirt attending to calves and pigs and the like.
Doris and Eithne amused themselves, hitting notes on the piano at random and wandering from one mirror to the next. There were two mirrors in the parlor and one side of the folding fire screen was a blotchy mirror, too. The other two sides were water lilies painted on black cloth, but like everything else in the room it was decrepit.
“What’s that?” Doris and Eithne asked each other as they heard a hullabaloo downstairs. They rushed out to see what it was, and Mary followed. Over the banisters they saw that a young bullock had got in the hall door and was slithering over the tiled floor, trying to find his way out again.
“Don’t excite her, don’t excite her, I tell ye,” said the old toothless man to the young boy who tried to drive the black bullock out. Two more boys were having a bet as to whether or not the bullock would do something on the floor, when Mrs. Rodgers came out and dropped a glass of porter. The beast backed out the way he’d come, shaking his head from side to side.
Eithne and Doris clasped each other in laughter, and then Doris drew back so that none of the boys would see her in her curling pins and call her names. Mary had gone back to the room, downcast. Wearily she pushed the chairs back against the wall and swept the linoleumed floor where they were later to dance.
