by Edna O'Brien
The children used to have parties too, birthday parties, where all the glasses of diluted orange would be lined up on the tray, and the piles of paper hats towered into a cone; and later meringue crumbs would be sent flying about the place and some children would be found crying because they had not gone to the lavatory. It was worst when they left to go away to boarding school—empty rooms, empty beds, and two bicycles just lying there in the shed. They would come home for holidays and there would be the usual bustle again, various garments left on the various steps of the stairs, but it was always as if they were visitors, and gradually the house began to have something of the chilliness of a tomb.
But she met the holy man, and having talked to him at length, and hearing his creed, she asked him to join her, to come under her roof. The very first evening, however, she had a premonition, because when he arrived at the appointed hour, and with his rucksack, she saw that he had a black scarf draped over his head, and when she caught sight of him in the doorway he looked like nothing so much as a harlot, his Asiatic features sharply defined, his eyes like darts and full of expectation. They sat by the fire; she served the casserole, bringing a little table close for him to balance his plate on. He even drank some wine. He told her of his daydream to go by boat down the French canals, throughout the length of a summer. When the time came to retire it seemed to her that he let out some sort of whimper.
Once in her bedroom, she locked her door and began to tremble. She had just embarked on another catastrophe. On his way to bed he coughed loudly, and it seemed to her that he lingered on the landing, just outside her door. She was inside, cringing, listening. She seemed to be always listening, cringing, in some bed, or under some bed, or behind some pile of furniture, or behind a door that was weighed down with overcoats and trench coats. She seemed to be always the culprit, although in truth the other person was the killer.
In the morning the holy man slipped a note under her bedroom door to say she was to join him the moment she wakened, as they did not want to lose a moment of their precious time together. She greeted him coldly in the kitchen, but already she could see that he was hanging on her words, on her looks, and on her every gesture. After three days it was intolerable. His sighs filled the house, and the rooms that were tolerably cheerful with flowers and pretty objects, these too began to accumulate a sadness. She found herself hiding, anywhere, in the lavatory, in the garden shed, in the park, even though it was bitter cold. He would rush with a towel and slippers whenever she came in and had some mush ready, which he insisted she eat. He called her “Angel” and used this endearment at every possible moment. The neighbors said he would have to go. She knew he would have to go.
The day she told him, he said it was his greatest fear realized, that of becoming happy at long last—his wife had died ten years before—only to be robbed of it. He broke down, said how he had dreamed of bringing her up the French canals, of buoying her with cushions so that she could see the countryside, loving her and caring for her and lulling her to sleep.
On the day of his departure he wrote a note saying that he would stay in his room, his “hole,” as he called it, and not bother her, and not require any food, and leave quietly at four as arranged. At lunchtime she called him to partake of a soup she had made. He was in his saffron robe, all neat and groomed, like a man about to set out on a journey. But he was shivering, and his eyes had a veil over them, a heavy veil of tears. He sat and dragged the spoon through the thick potato soup, and at first she thought that it must be some way of cooling it, but as the time went by she saw that it was merely a ploy to fiddle with it, like a child.
He did not say a word. She clapped her hands and, much too raucously, said, “Hey diddle diddle, the cat and the fiddle, the cow jumped over the moon; the little dog laughed to see such sport, and the dish ran away with the spoon.” He looked at her as if she had gone mad. She said, “Please don’t take it so badly.” He said she was the second person he had ever loved, said how his wife had been a European, too, sired in a dark wet country, a lover of rain and a lover of music. He loved nothing Asiatic, nothing related to his own land, not even the sunshine or the bright colors or the smells that pervaded the air of Bombay. His destiny was his dead wife, and now her.
Anger overtook her so that she wanted to beat him with the spoon, grind his face into the mush of soup, she wanted to humiliate him. When she was clearing away the dishes, he said again that he would stay in his “hole” and leave quietly at four. But when the clock struck she waited for his footsteps on the stairs, and then along the hall, but she waited in vain. She prayed to God that he would go.
At five she decided that he must have killed himself; before going up, she took the precaution to call in the neighbor. Together they climbed the stairs, smoking vigorously, manifesting a display of courage. He was sitting in the middle of the floor with his rucksack on, his head lowered. He appeared to be praying. He said “Angel” and how he must have lost track of time. Then he said that it was too late to go and that he would postpone his departure until the morrow.
Eventually she had to call the police; upon leaving he handed her a note which said that he would never get in touch with her, never ever, but telling her where he would be at each and every given hour. He was taking employment as cook, and he wrote his employer’s number, stressing that he would be there at all hours, except when he intended to travel by bus, two afternoons a week, to take guitar lessons. Then he gave her the various possible numbers of the guitarist, who had no fixed abode. Next morning another letter was slipped under the door, and so each morning faithfully until he died seven days later. She refused to admit her guilt.
Soon after, she decided to have the renovations done—kitchen and living room made into one, a big picture window, to afford a grander view of the river, and a stained-glass window in which a medley of colors could interact as they did in the church windows seen long ago. The cubes and the circles and the slithers of light that had fascinated her in childhood were still able to repossess her at a moment’s flounder. Like the knots, and the waits, and the various sets of chattering teeth. Other things, too—shouts, murmurs, screams, an elderly drunk falling down a stair, his corpse later laid out in an off-white monkish habit, on a wrought-iron bed, and she herself being told that he had died of pneumonia, that he had not died of a fall.
So many puzzling things were said, things that contradicted one another. They congratulated you for singing, then told you never to open your gob again as long as you lived. Your tongue was not your friend, it was too thick and unwieldy, it doubled back in your throat, it parched, it longed for lozenges. Yes, rows, and the prefaces to rows, and thumpings and beatings and the rash actions of your sister, the flighty one, going out at night, winter night, with blue satin knickers on, which she had stolen, going to a certain gateway, to cavort with a traveling creamery manager, coming in long after midnight and trying desperately not to be heard, but being heard and thrashed fiercely.
For some curious reason creaks are more pronounced in the dark, and her sister was always heard and always badly punished, so that there were cries after midnight and don’t, don’t, don’t. Her sister bled on that stair; then soon after her mother, her father, a clergyman, and two other important men interrogated her about her private life. Her sister denied everything, just stayed there, glued to the damp area of the stairs. Then the next day, her mother, her sister, and she walked along a hedged road, and every minute her sister was cross-examined, and every minute she denied the accusations and said she was a virgin. They were on their way to another doctor, a doctor who did not know them. When they passed an orchard, the little apples were already formed on the trees and they were desperately bright, but hard and inedible. Her sister had been found to have lied—had tried to abort herself, was sent to the Magdalen laundry for the five remaining months, and had her bitter confinement there.
But there had been consoling things, too—treats. On Sundays a trifle left to set on the other side of
the stained-glass panel, a trifle in a big pudding bowl, left down on tiles to cool. She would go down the stairs in her nightdress, creep, go through the glass door, squat on those tiles, and scoop out some of the lovely cold jollop with her hands, and swallow it. It was cakey. Later it would be covered over with a layer of whipped cream, then sprinkled with hundreds and thousands—sparklets which would shine away as they were being swallowed. She never got a walloping for that misdemeanor, because in her mother’s eyes she was a little mite. On the other hand, her father punished her for everything, particularly for sleeping in her mother’s bed. When her father got in, she tried not to look, not to listen, not to see, not to hear, and not to be. She moved over to the wall, smelled the damp of the paper, and could even smell the mortar behind the paper. There were mice in that room. They scuttled. Shame, shame, shame. Always for one second, a dreadful swoon used to overwhelm her, too. Her bones and every bit of her dissolved. Then she contracted and steadied herself.
After her father went back to his own bed, she and her mother ate the chocolate sweets, little brown buttons. They used to melt on the tongue, like Holy Communion. They were so soothing and so satisfying after the onslaught. Then the worst was over for a week or so, until it happened again.
On one side of the bed was a lattice, and when a finger was put through, it was like a finger being dispatched into space. Fingers alone could do nothing, but fingers seamed to knuckles, belonging to palms, to wrists and to arms, could stir cakes or pound potatoes, or shake the living daylights out of someone, out of one’s own self. One’s lights were in there, residing, not as an illumination, but as offal. Lights that were given to dogs, to curs, and did not show the way as did a lamp or a lantern.
Saturday mornings were languor time. Her mother brought her tea and fingers of toast. The sun would be streaming through the blind, making shapes and gestures, warming the weeping, historied walls, the dark linoleum would be lit up, the dust rambling all over it, the dust an amusement in itself, while out on the landing the sun beamed through a stained-glass window, resulting in a different pattern altogether. Happily she munched on those fingers of toast. Even the stone hot-water bottle that had gone cold became a source of pleasure as she pressed on it with her feet and pushed it right down to the rungs of the brass bed and threatened to eject it. When her father threatened her with the slash hook, her nostrils went out like angel’s wings, and she sped with prodigal speed over three marsh fields to a neighbor’s house, to one of the cottagers who was stirring damson jam, while at the same time giving her husband a bath in the aluminum tub. They laughed at her because of the way she shook and asked if perhaps she had seen the banshee.
“No, pet, no one can help you, you can only help yourself,” the neighbor had said. Was that true? Would that always be true?
She went into her empty bathroom. The woodwork was as new and blond as in a showroom, and the bar of almond-shaped soap hanging from the tap asked to be used. She whispered things. She looked at the shower, its beautiful blue trough and the glass-fronted door. They had taken a shower together, she and a new man, a hulky fellow. She hung his shirt over the glass door to serve as a sort of screen. She came and came. He was so good-looking, and so heavy, and so warm, and so urgent as he pressed upon her that she thought she might burst, like fruit. It was such a pity that he turned out to be crass. “Let’s get married,” he said at once.
She brought him to Paris, and in the hotel room he made himself at home, threw his belongings about, started to swagger, ordered the most expensive champagne, and booked two long-distance telephone calls. Her children were in the adjoining suite. They had not wanted him to come, but remembering the pleasure in the shower, that full knob of flesh inside her, truer, more persuasive than words or deeds, the scalding half happiness, she had let him accompany them, knowing she could not afford it, knowing that he would cadge. The moment he used her toothbrush she knew. She went out to the chemist to buy another, and he said what a pity that she hadn’t bought him some after-shave.
She could not sleep with him again. She went down and reserved another room for him, a cheaper room. They quarreled disgracefully. He picked up the telephone and asked the telephonist would she like him to come down and fuck her. He said he was “bad news” but that bad news traveled like wildfire. He moved to the other room but would not leave them alone. He followed them wherever they went, and hence the visit was ruined. He rang her saying he was a health officer and had to look at her cunt. He ordered the costliest wines from the cellars, and she was certain he would steal furniture or linen. It was a beautiful hotel with circular rooms, and little separated balconies on each landing, affording a view into the well of the hall. The bathroom was like a sitting room, with even a chaise for lying on, and the walls were a lovely warm pink. It was a dry paint, like a powder, and the walls were warm to nestle against. She sat on the chaise and very formally cursed him.
In the maid’s room she stood over the washbasin. That was one room she had neglected. The washbasin was an eyesore. Would the new people have it mended or have it removed? The new owner was a doctor, and there would be a sign chalked up on the pavement saying DOCTOR—IN CONSTANT USB. The Spanish maid had been a nice girl but a slut. She used to do old-fashioned things like plait her hair at night, or press her clothes by putting them under the mattress. They used to talk a lot, were chatterboxes. The first day the maid arrived was in January, and the children were playing snowballs and had just acquired a new dog. The new dog left little piddles all over the floor, tiny yellow piddles, no bigger than a capsule, and the dinner was especially special because of the new girl, and the children were as bright as cherries, what with the exercise and having been pasted with snowballs and the excitement of a new dog.
The girl had had a mad father who broke clocks, and a mother who pampered her. She came from a small town in the north of Spain, where there was nothing to do in the evenings except go for a walk with other girls. The girl ironed her hair to straighten it, and took camomile tisane for her headaches. They exchanged dreams. In the mornings she used to go to the girl’s room, sit at the foot of the bed, and take a long time deciding what she should wear that day.
The girl began to dream in English, dreamed of cats, shoals of cats, coming through the window, miaowing, and of herself trying to get the latch closed, trying to push them back. The girl got spoiled, stayed in bed three or four certain days of each month, left banana skins under her pillow, neglected her laundry, and never took the hairs out of her brush or comb. Eventually she had to go. Another parting. So also the little dog, because although house-trained, he developed a nervous disease which made him whine all the time, even in sleep, and made him grit his little teeth and grind them, and grind most things.
It was not long after that something began to go awry. She got the first sniff of it, like a foretaste, and it was a sniff as of blood freshly drawn. Yet it was nothing. There was a space where the small bay window had been. The builder had hung a strip of sacking there, but she was certain something would come through, not simply a burglar, or wind, or rain, but some catastrophe, some unknown, a beast of prey. Whenever she entered that room she felt that something had just vacated it. A wolf, she thought. It made people laugh. “A wolf,” they said, “the proverbial big bad wolf.” She rummaged through her old books for a copy of Red Riding Hood but could not find it. She could remember it. It was a cloth book with serrated edges. The edges were cut carefully, so that the book did not ravel. She saw the little specks of cloth that had been ripped out, in a heap on the floor, colored like confetti.
When the big new window was delivered, that hall door had to be taken off its hinges. Six men carried it through, each one bossing the other, telling the other to get a move on, to move on, for Christ’s sake, to do this, to do that, to watch it, watch it. She saw it break into smithereens a hundred times over, but in fact it wasn’t until it was in, and well puttied, that she realized what a risk they had taken. She opened a bottle of whiskey,
and they drank, looking out at the river, which happened on that day to have the sheen and consistency of liquid paraffin. It was like a bright skin over the brown water. She imagined spoons of it being donated to loads of constipated tourists who went by on the pleasure boats.
Naturally, there was a party to christen the room. Would that have been the time that he brought the insolent girl, who had a dog called Kafka, or was that another time? They were all jumbled together, those parties, those times, like the dishes stacked on the long refectory table, or the bottles of wine, or the damp gold champagne labels, or the beautiful entrées. Perfection and waste.
She placed two men together, whereupon one took offense, thinking he was assumed to be a homosexual. She had to bring him out into the garden and in the moonlight solemnly tell him that she had not been sensitive, that she was careless, a bad hostess. He was full of umbrage. He said he should not have come. She knew that he would never be invited again. A foreign woman stayed on, and they drank a bit and picked at the food and drank more, and lay down on the mat by the dying fire. Even the embers were gray. She puffed on it, and slowly one coal came to life, then another. Without thinking about it, she began to caress the woman and soon realized that she was well on the way to seducing her.
