Country Girl: A Memoir

by Edna O'Brien

  I went back to the country to fetch them, and that night we stayed with Trix Craig in north London, a woman I had met at the parties given by Dr. Jerry Slattery, a Cork man who saw to it that all Irish people, but especially actors and writers, met one another under his roof. Trix made apple fritters for the tea, and we played ludo afterward, and the children and I slept on a blown-up rubber bed that she put in the sitting room. They had no idea as to what was going to happen. She gave me a fiver to replenish my funds, which were running low. In the taxi from Wimbledon station, they fretted about catching at least the second half of The Man from U.N.C.L.E. They argued fiercely over the plot, so I could not reasonably work out who was the good agent or who was the bad agent, the Russian or the American, except I did glean that they had ganged together, were in some HQ in New York above a tailor’s shop, where they waited to confront the enemy who coveted their weapons. I told them that I would not be coming in, that their father and I had amicably agreed to separate, but this news was secondary to the cliff-hanging moment of the two agents above the tailor’s shop in New York.

  As the taxi pulled up, they ran in through the open door, throwing their coats down and making for the dining room, where the television stood in one corner. Their father remained in the doorway, smiling a cold, mad smile. He was thanking me. He said, “Thank you, Edna, you have just legally deserted them,” and with that, he closed the door. Forever after, I have associated the closing of that door with the closing of a lid of a coffin.

  It was September and the first few leaves had fallen; a few clogged the grille of his vintage Railton car. A thin fog filled the gulleys at the side of the common and drove itself onto the road in random shadowy pockets as I stopped on the bridge to think. There was really nothing to think about, only the irrefutable fact that I had deserted them. Legally. I leaned over the bridge and looked down at the dark sheet of water, where, in summer, men on camp stools patiently plied their fishing rods. Looking as I might into a ravine, I cried my numb and balked fury. I still believed that something dramatic might happen, that the children might have escaped and be running down the road toward me. I would see that bridge only one more time in my life.

  It was a question of where to go. The money I had borrowed had almost run out. I had a few shillings, but not enough to take a room, should I see signs farther on that said BED AND BREAKFAST. Although we had lived in London for almost four years, I knew so little of it, the wine bar in Fleet Street, the huge conference room in my publisher’s office, the local doctor’s waiting room, and the school gates. I did not have enough money to get back to north London and the blown-up rubber bed.

  I found that I was walking toward Putney, as Ted Allan lived there. In the streets I could skulk behind other people, but it was on the long stretch of Wimbledon Common that the fears multiplied. Little sounds. Little scurries in the grass. A clump of high fern was alive with creatures, and as I ran from it, I almost lost a shoe in the tangle. All the fears and foreboding of night were contained in that night, that walk, the streetlamps at the edge of the common too far apart, and peril in every fat shadow. I think I would have liked to die, yet something drove me on.

  Putney High Street had more bustle, people in cafés, others queuing outside the cinema, and from somewhere the warm vinegary smell of chips.

  I walked as far as the bridge, where the beams from the lamps shot down through the fog into the water. Somewhere on that bridge, in 1787, Mary Wollstonecraft, the feminist philosopher, feeling rejected by her lover Gilbert Imlay, soaked her skirts and threw herself from the bridge, but ended up being ignominiously dredged from the mud. From where I stood I could see the blocks of flats where Ted Allan lived, but I was not sure whether his was one of the lit or one of the dark windows. This was my one sanctuary for that night.

  At the corner of the street, before the turning for Deodar Road, there was an auction room, and for at least a quarter of an hour I stared in at secondhand furniture, not knowing why.

  Ted Allan was not home, so I knocked on the door across the landing. A woman called Beth opened it, and I remembered having met her briefly on the day I came to mediate with Ernest, believing things might be resolved. Without my having to explain anything, she understood and drew me in. While perhaps not being as palatial as I recall it, that room seemed to me to be the warmest, safest, and most inviting room in the world. The rays from the table lamps and a tall brass floor lamp picked up the mother-of-pearl grains in a black table and the rich, soft pile of the several rugs.

  To be admitted as I was and told I could spend the night weakened all the strength in me, far more than the frightened walk had done, and so I blurted it all out, the overnight stay in north London, the loan of the fiver, the taxi ride, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., and the children’s running into the hallway, oblivious of the fact that I had just deserted them. She sat me down, gave me wine, and talked. Life was a bitch. Love also was a bitch. Later on, she made up the divan bed that was under the window and then covered it with a handmade quilt that had all the beautiful patterns and motifs of her native Canada. She said, yes, she knew, she understood, knew it all down to its savage guts, and then, embracing me, said, “With this kind of stuff, pet, there is no one in the whole wide world that can help you.”

  The picture window looked out on the Thames, and the lights from the flats on the far side gleamed and sent pillars down into the water that broke and meshed in a haphazard dance. The theme of my next novel came to me then. That is the mystery about writing: it comes out of afflictions, out of the gouged times, when the heart is cut open. I heard Baba’s declamatory voice and her intemperate words as she dilated on their lives and their ruined marriages: “It’s not the vote women need, we should be armed.”

  I rented a room for twenty-nine shillings a week in a house along the road and wrote my novel, often in transit on the bus, when I went to meet the children at school or at Wimbledon station, where they came on Saturdays: I sometimes had to wait for an hour or more, as their father relished the fact that I would get agitated and think that they might not be coming at all. They would fly out of the Railton and run to where I stood. He and I did not speak, and all communications were now by letter, which Carlo, being the elder, had the task of handing to me.

  The novel, which I called Girls in Their Married Bliss, was deemed not as lyrical as my earlier works, but with the money and the help of an accountant called Walter, at Woodfall Films, I was able to buy a tiny cottage up the street which I furnished with bits and pieces from the auction room that I had stared into on the night of the fog.

  They were allowed to stay three nights a week with me, and sometimes four, depending on their father’s whim. By their woebegone expressions when I met them, it was clear that there were lamentable tales to tell, but they didn’t tell them, and in recompense for that grim time, there was extra pocket money and comics and sweets and all the things that were forbidden in the other house. We called it the “Other House.”

  Then, briefly, my near-empty life had a sparkle. I knew it would only be for a night. It had all the ingredients of a ballad, a wild man riding by, a damsel, if not exactly in obvious distress, was certainly in waiting, and the setting a grand room in Mayfair with high ceilings and long windows that opened onto a wrought-iron balcony. Though I have lived in London for over fifty years, the name Mayfair still conjures up a region plush with promise and privilege. The party was being given by the American producer Charlie Feldman, and I was brought along by the photographer Sam Shaw, who was working on his latest film. I was wearing a short-sleeved sheer dress in ice blue, my going-out dress for that summer. It was its second outing, its first having been something of a disappointment. That was when I had met the singer Richie Havens through Sam Shaw, and was captivated by his rendering of the lines “She takes just like a woman… but she breaks just like a little girl.” Afterward we met him, and he invited me to his hotel in Park Lane for the following evening. When I arrived, the concierge handed me a letter, t
he wording still so very clear, still etched on my memory: “I am not here, I have made two promises both to transpire on the same mountain.” What mountain, what promises? I asked myself as I walked back across the marble floor through the revolving door and out into the busy street.

  Feldman had approached me to do a rewrite on a script of Mary McCarthy’s novel The Group, but I felt I was not experienced enough and turned it down. Nevertheless, he invited me to a summer party, where it was thought Robert Mitchum might or might not turn up.

  Except that he did, arriving with his cohorts amid gales of laughter. He then passed through into the throng, and seizing his audience, he continued with the joke he had been telling all the way up the street from the Dorchester. He was wearing a soft brown hat on the back of his head, in deliberate guise of a hoodlum, and he looked even more handsome than when I had seen him in films. Robert Mitchum, in person. He crossed the room to where I was standing, took my bare arm, and said, “I bet you wish I was Robert Taylor, and I bet you never tasted white peaches.” It was clear that he was going to take me home, regardless of my situation. He gave himself for a little while to his various acolytes, male and female, debunking his own legend of being known as the actor either with the gun or without the gun, then, suddenly, nodded and called out to me, “Let’s go… baby,” and we left.

  Out in the street we paused to take a look at each other; my hair under the streetlamp looked redder than it was, and reminded him of an actress he knew, who had had her hair dyed for a movie and willed it to grow naturally red ever after. One of the bewitchers, he said, and laughed. There were visits to a few hostelries along the way to the Dorchester, then a pub in Mayfair, its lights beguiling as a brothel, then to a less fancy one where, unrecognized, he took turns with the men at a game of darts. When I turned on the light in my modest house in Putney and he saw the small, varnished table and kitchen chairs, guessing that I was impecunious, he said we should go back to the antique shops in King’s Road the next day and get the place fitted out.

  Taciturn in film, he was a fluent talker in life, proud of hailing from Norwegian seafarers on his mother’s side and laboring men on his father’s side, the father who had been crushed to death in a railroad accident in North Carolina. He wasn’t like a movie star at all, more like a street poet, with that hectoring charm. He ran through his crowded life: digging ditches, being part of a chain gang, spending a week in a county jail in California for possession of marijuana, and being lucky to have known a few lovely ladies along the way. I played my favorite records, Tommy Makem, Ewan MacColl, and he sang the words back and we danced all the way up the stairs into the tiny bedroom, a white gauze curtain billowing in through the open window, we with all the shyness of besotted strangers in syrupy songs.

  In the morning the hammering on doors and windows might have been that of the Macbeth porters. The film company had tracked him down to my house, and a tentative young man had arrived, saying that Mr. Mitchum was supposed to have been at Shepperton Studios some hours earlier. He dressed at his ease, kissed me several times, and, recalling his brief stint as a ghost-writer to an astrologer, he read my hand and with joking sincerity said, “We’ll meet again… my lovely,” and then he was gone.

  It was almost a year later when, from the top of a number 14 bus, I was seized with an irrational and remaindered fit of jealousy. Passing Wimbledon Common, with which I had so many associations—the dreary walks when married, the fearful walk that night I left home, and once, an impromptu game of snowball—suddenly through the window I caught sight of my husband’s car. The hood was down, and sitting next to him there was a young woman, her hair flying in the breeze, the very picture for a perfume or cigarette advertisement. I ran down the stairs of the bus and jumped off, only to find that his car had sped out of sight. After I had collected the children, I left them on the swings on the common, saying I would be back in a few minutes. Turning the key, which I still had, I let myself in. I felt like a criminal. What was I looking for? The woman’s name. My husband’s feelings for her. Her feelings for him. The evidence was there on the desk. They had found each other through a newspaper advertisement, and I also learned her name and the hamlet in Suffolk where she lived. In the logbook that was also on the desk, no longer needing to be locked, he had written a glowing description of her character; she was, as he put it, a kind, intelligent, thoughtful human being, free of insanity and literary ambition.

  That night, after I got a babysitter, my friend Beth drove me to the address where we believed the girl lived. It was a long drive: pubs were closed in high streets, gates and shutters were down, then out into the country where lorries were parked in lay-bys, their drivers fast asleep, and there was one eating house with a crazy, gaudy light and a sign that said, OPEN EVERY DAY OF THE YEAR. Parts of the journey were countryside with trees or saplings, and other parts bare ground full of litter, with here and there a lonely telephone kiosk. Long, long after that we arrived in that landscape where the low land stretched out to meet the sea, land and sea as one, empty and whitish and with a forlornness that was telling me my journey was in vain. We arrived in the small town that was fast asleep. The houses were all of a piece, dotted in between with a coffee shop, a bookshop, a cake shop with a huge wedding cake in the window, and a shop that sold secondhand clothes. At the end of that street I saw Ernest’s gray vintage Railton car. It stood out, so stately, so incongruous, parked there, with a small rime of mist on it too. This was the evidence I required to get custody, it was within a whisker of me, except suddenly I did not know what to do. I became very agitated. Beth had brought a small amount of gin in a tonic-water bottle and we each had a slug while we debated the next course of action. She said that she could pose as a detective and storm in there, but then decided it was too dangerous and too dumb. How impulsive and unthinking the whole episode had been. I went to the phone booth at the end of the street and looked up the woman’s number. Surprised to find it, I dialed, and after a few minutes a voice answered and she simply said, “Fuck off.”

  Custody

  “I crave leave to refer to my petition therein…” Pomp and circumstance. I am entering one of the great legal institutions of England, which I know of only through reading Charles Dickens. A large notice reads PROBATE: DIVORCE: ADMIRALTY, and I go through a courtyard to Court No. 23, Case No. 10706. I had come to get custody of my children. It sometimes recurs in a dream, that solemn room, a handful of people, the judge in a suit and white shirt, sitting on the bench, his clerk sitting directly beneath him, and in the dream the judge is looking at me, trying to decide whether I am or am not a suitable parent.

  After three years of a precarious arrangement, with the children spending some nights in my house and some in their father’s, things worsened, his thesaurus of rules and stipulations ever increasing and impossible to abide by. They must not be driven in any private motorcar, they must not be bathed by either adult or minor, they must not be allowed into the room where I wrote, since my writing now reeked of the perverts and lunacy of Krafft-Ebing. I was repeatedly warned that if I rocked the boat by even one fathom, he would emigrate with them to New Zealand, where his sister lived.

  Then, in the post, a dossier of over six thousand words arrived. An obituary, charting our relationship from the day he had lifted me from behind the shop counter, thinking he had procured a decent, honorable companion but instead had found a “vainglorious monster, divested of all human traits,” who had destroyed everyone and everything she touched, including her own bartered children. It ended by saying, “If you run to lawyers and courts, I will fight you. I am absolutely determined about that and I will fight you in my own way. Foul deeds beget foul deeds. A hundred thousand Arab children need a cup of milk a day to save their lives. The address of Oxfam is in the telephone book, you might still have time to save yourself.”

  My solicitor, Bernard Main, was of the old school, courteous, slightly absentminded, his desk a jungle of papers and folders, scummed in dust, reminisc
ent of Bleak House and its forlorn petitioners. He wore a worn, oatmeal-colored tweed jacket with leather patches on the elbows, and for street wear he donned one exactly the same, but he seemed not to notice the similarity. We had been on a bit of a mission, hoping to find a few friendly people who would swear to the fact that I was not a monster, a nutcase, a nymphomaniac, or insane. My husband had compiled a dossier from evidence he accrued from the local doctor, the headmaster at Hill Cross School, and the Irish girl who had worked for us.

  Bernard and I were in a cold tiled hallway in a house in south London. A woman I knew from home had agreed to be a character witness. We were escorted into a small sitting room full of toys, where half a train set snaked around the curb of a fireplace and there was a hatch door to the kitchen, where the wails of one child were being drowned out by the yells of other children.