Country Girl: A Memoir

by Edna O'Brien

  Yet he did not go home when he was discharged, but returned to my house, and so it was as before, except that it wasn’t.

  June: the month that Virginia Woolf said mothers of Pimlico gave suck to their young. I wished that we would have a child and mentioned some women I knew who had had children in their forties. I wished for that. We were walking home from a party in Chelsea Embankment, discussing the guests and the humbug and the high-flown conversation, when I decided to get the key to the gate that led into the square, so that we might sit on a bench and talk, to prolong the night. One small thing had rankled. As we were leaving, a friend of his from his university days, who was now famous, asked for his phone number when in London, and pointing to me, he said, “I am with Madam for the moment,” which stung me.

  A new moon, silverish, its shaven rim the color of sulphur, and the smell of the lilac heady from thundershowers that had gone on all evening. There, on that bench, I am hearing words that I never wanted to hear and had never expected to hear.

  “I will telephone you every day of my life from now on,” he is saying. But this is an exit line, I say to myself, excusing it on the fact that he had had a drink too many and seeing his old friend, now famous, had revived his youthful days, his exuberant hopes and boat rides on the river Cam. Surely he was not serious. Yes, he was. He had decided earlier in the evening that it could not be. He was, he said, going home only briefly, and then to Germany, to places where the great poets that he had so admired had lived and that, when he was younger, had given him the rash idea that he too could be a poet. We sat there and cried at the fact that we were so suited and yet were on the brink of parting.

  I waken very early the next morning and decide on a walk. A walk would be a salutary thing. In the Fulham Road, idiotically, I look in the window of an antique shop, where I knew he had looked and seen the very same things, a silvered tapestry, a gun chest, a prayer chair, and a faded green velvet portière. I felt the longer I stayed out, the greater the likelihood that things would have righted themselves.

  Coming back into my own sitting room, I saw it, the stone of the green ring that I had taken off the night before reflected in the metal of his latch key, which he had left on the mantelpiece. He was gone. Nevertheless, I ran upstairs, thinking he might still be there, but it was not so. His favorite tarnished cigarette lighter was on the bedside table, and since its flickers were a matter of chance, believing that, if the flame caught on, all was well, I struck it and took a cigarette from the packet that he had also left. I probably smoked that cigarette. I had to keep moving. Into the garden, where even the roses seemed aghast, back into the house, going to the hall door to open it, to look outside, then to shut it again. Then I sat down and maintained an almost catatonic calm for the first half of the day, until the savage truth asserted itself again.

  I remembered that his was an evening flight to Ireland and that he would be still in London, probably gone to visit the woman friend who had found the rib of my hair on his lapel. I looked her number up in the telephone book, and when she answered and I spoke, I could hear her calling him affectionately. He did come to my house, as I had begged, but I realized what a violation it was. The engine of the taxi was throbbing, as he had obviously asked the driver to wait. He was another person altogether, cold and perfunctory. The married man on his way home.

  I waited and hoped, remembering all of it, and would humiliate myself by contacting a male friend of his for news of any kind, and then one day I wrote the vengeful Medea letter that is the inverse side of love.

  At home for the annual holiday, I was unable to conquer the bouts of tears. My mother noticed this, and as we were folding a candlewick bedspread together, the flaps hiding now her face, now mine, she remarked that I was giving a bad and unwholesome example to the children, who had hoped to enjoy themselves. Later she called Carlo into the breakfast room on the excuse of carrying out a tray and asked him what was the matter with his mother and was she at fault about something. She knew it concerned love and she resented it. Since I had left my husband in 1962, twelve years before, she feared for the life of dissipation which she imagined I was living. Every letter of hers referred to it. She wrote:

  You will always have my love and affection and never bother again with men outside of meeting them in everyday life or for work. I pray for you and each day of my life, I go down on my knees and ask Christ that you remember the words of St Paul, “Flee fornication.”

  I had turned forty, and I believed that by my mother’s willing of it I would not find love again. Sylvia Plath had named it “the bone and sinew of [her] curse,” and an au pair called Aurora, who had lived with us in Putney, then returned to Spain to get married and in a letter said, “Love is a malady of the heart.” According to Gilbert White, the natural historian, love and hunger are the “great motives of the brute creatures,” and the brute creature in me mourned Jay for many years.

  The second prophesied love affair was even more vertiginous. When I think of it, I think of the first and last day that I met this Lochinvar, and yet the dimensions of it far exceeded those two pivotal occasions. It was at a party in a room in Pall Mall that emanated power, as did he. We shared our mutual admiration for Dylan Thomas, and I did not notice whether the walls were in gold or sienna, or that the marble columns had the rose, shamrock, and thistle emblems of the territories, so smitten was I. On my way out I asked for a booklet, to have a souvenir of the surprise encounter, and it was there that I read of the marble columns and the emblems of the territories.

  On his first visit to my house Lochinvar said what every woman yearns to hear: “I will know you for a long time.” With those words I pictured my marvelous future opening up before me, and nothing would have daunted me. I was on the high trapeze at the commencement of love, while not being totally blind to how things would transpire—surprise meetings, canceled meetings, devouring jealousies, the rapture and the ruptures of an affair. I should here say that I lack the cunning and the dissimulation necessary for a normal affair. I incline more toward the extremities of the Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva, for whom love was both a transport and a purgatory. With Pasternak she had exchanged quatrains of eternal kinship, forever believing that the pain and torment could be discharged into poetry. Then it was Rilke, her Orpheus, who for her was the entire Rhine, the language they exchanged being the language of angels. They never met. In a last letter sent from St. Giles, when he was already dying, she suggests that he look on a map and pick a large town in France where she, a pauper, would meet him. It was not answered. Marina, by her own admission, created situations of isolating love so that she could write about it. James Joyce put it more bluntly, when after his dalliance with Amalia Popper, he wrote, “It will never be, write it.”

  Meanwhile, there was the vertigo of the affair, the many twists and turns, the reconsidered wisdoms, trade winds blowing hot and cold and hot again. It is impossible to capture the essence of love in writing, only its symptoms remain, the erotic absorption, the huge disparity between the times together and the times apart, the sense of being excluded. I remember a woman friend telephoning me to describe a party at which Lochinvar was the principal guest, and his running a comb through his hair as he passed a mirror in the hallway, and how all the ladies fawned over him. I would have walked on water to be there. Perhaps I wanted love too much ever to reconcile it with everyday life.

  The worst time was the summer, summer when analysts leave their poor patients stranded and lovers go abroad on family holidays. It so happened that we were both going to Italy, though separately. The same sun beating down on both of us, on roofs and cupolas, on the jagged rocks along the narrow paths down to the sea and on the leaves of the olives that hung motionless and limp.

  I had been invited by Gore Vidal to his villa, La Rondinaia, near Ravello. To get to the actual villa one had to walk, from the gate, a long avenue reminiscent of the one in Last Year at Marienbad, with a series of tiny steps. In moonlight, yes, it was moonlight, the
white house on the bluff of the high rocks, overlooking the bay of Amalfi, was the enchanted castle. My suitcase was heavy, since I had been invited to another house in Tuscany, and not knowing the protocol, I brought every stitch of clothing that I had and too many pairs of shoes and too many books. It would be heavier by the time I left Italy, a testimony to my pining condition, which I think Gore sensed, as on the last morning, when he and I were leaving to take a train to Rome and I was clambering down flights of stairs with the suitcase, he called up in his inimitable voice, “Do I hear Sisyphus again?”

  My bedroom was huge and the last word in sumptuousness. When Gore’s companion Howard showed me up, he reamed off the names of the famous who had slept there, and I particularly remember the names Tennessee Williams, Johnny Carson, and Bianca Jagger, and wondered if at siesta time they too might have wept on the pale green silk of the embroidered bedspread or leaned over the balcony, dispatching curses and endearments to an absent one.

  The gardens the following morning, terraced and stretching for miles, were like those out of the Song of Solomon, hedges of aloe and box, pomegranate trees, fallen blossom, and the air veiled and silvery, as the sprinklers were all on. Such light. Such rightness. Such ripeness. And yet I was in moping mood, remembering that all across Italy in blistering heat tourists, including Lochinvar, were setting out, equipped with guidebooks and sun hats, scaling the high steps to the great cathedrals, or to the piazza in Siena for the Palio, as bareback riders outcouraged each other, or in Florence queuing to see Michelangelo’s David. Michelangelo, another mendicant in the love department, who wished that his skin be flayed to make a garment or a sandal for his beloved.

  I decided to walk to the town and do a bit of modest sightseeing, so that Lochinvar and I could compare our Italian sojourn when next we met. It was about a two-mile walk, and undone by the heat, I went into the big church in the square to mouth a few prayers, relieved by its relative darkness and its hush, away from the searing brightness from which there was no escape. I prayed that I just might bump into him and, in the next breath, wished that he was dead. Loving moments intermingled with aggrieved ones. Dangling, dangling. “I won’t see you again, unless I yield to temptation.”

  The church was almost full, women old and not old, staring straight ahead at the altar, and still others caressing the various statues, pleading with them in whispers. There were, as well, vases of fresh flowers and withered flowers in different nooks, pink roses going milky white. From the sacristan I learned, also in whispers, that, around the Feast of the Assumption, the miracle happened. “Miracolo, miracolo,” she called it. The coagulated blood of the Martyr was expected to liquefy, and if it did not, it augured ill for the crops. There it was, in a glass reliquary, dark red in color like a piece of resin or sealing wax, and there were the faithful, staring at it, waiting for those first drops of shed blood heralding the Annunciation. The south of Italy, according to Gustav Herling, is “addicted to miracles as lonely people are to dreams,” and they were all there, all these women, and I was one of them.

  Sometimes I went outside to have a glass of fizzy water in the café, and then I would repair to an antique shop that also dealt in bric-a-brac and wander from room to room, looking at the price tags. Having gone in so often, I felt that I must buy something, and insanely decided on a set of fire irons, already envisaging the autumn and the fires I would light to rewelcome my lover. The set consisted of heavy brass tongs, a matching poker, a shovel, and two brass stands to rest these implements on. They were wrapped in various pieces of old newspaper, and it was clear that they would not all fit in the suitcase: some ingloriously would be hanging from the strap, making my arrival in the next villa humbling. It was the thud of that suitcase as I clambered down the stairs on the last morning that caused Gore in his sonorous voice to call up, “Do I hear Sisyphus again?” guessing that it was the age-old love sonata.

  The miracle had not happened by the time I left, but I was certain that it would, what with all that mashing on bone and beads, the heaving sighs and the heaving chests and the faces, so imploring. It was certain to hasten the miracolo that would in some way extend to me, as it did.

  It was on a train in England, about two weeks later, when my lover and I met, bumped into one another, he returning from the refreshment car with a brown paper bag that was leaking and I on my way there. It was where two carriages joined that we collided, the tracks rattling, the cars pitching about unsteadily as the train hurtled like mad through the countryside, where harvests could be glimpsed through the grimed window. Thrown together and apart; it was clear that summer absence and halfhearted resolve to end it had been in vain and we were starting afresh, all over again.

  One morning I wakened to find that I was broke. I should have foreseen it, what with not writing regularly and keeping myself in readiness. It was my accountant who informed me of my situation, a City man, who put his bowler hat carefully on a side table. Broke. “But I have this house” was my reply. The house, he informed me, was not as valuable as I had thought. Prices were falling, and what had been worth X number of pounds would soon be minus X. How had it happened? I knew how it had happened. Love, generosity, the pipe dream. I was one of the foolish virgins who had not seen to it that her oil lamp was kept full. As with the two-headed Janus, before my eyes I saw Lochinvar’s thankful expression each time I opened the door to him, and now his grieving expression as that door would be forever shut. We had known only a fraction of each other, but that fraction was sacred. I had fooled myself, living on emotional crumbs and now the inhabiter of Yeats’s bitter words—I had “fed the heart on fantasies/The heart’s grown brutal from the fare.”

  The estate agent was of the petit-snobbish brigade, suggesting I get a shears to the honeysuckle; then he tapped walls and window frames and through a skylight crawled halfway out to have a look at the roof. He re-emerged dusting his hands, saying that things were in reasonably good nick, but by the way he drawled over the word “reasonably” I knew it meant a reduction in the asking price.

  The house sold quickly and for a song, and I betook myself to the wider and lonelier vistas of north London. Strangely enough, on the day the movers came, I was busy and buoyant. I watched as the piano was lifted from a trolley, then lowered on stout white straps to the floor of the van and wrapped in blankets, just as I had seen our nervy greyhound Lil before a race, covered in a tartan rug. Petrov’s chandelier was placed in a tea chest and swaddled in asbestos. I even dug up a magnolia tree that flowered early, the white flowers cupped and neat like a bantam’s egg.

  In the new flat my friend and future neighbor, Robin Dalton, had brought a picnic, and we laid a cloth out on the floor and tacked black paper to the window, and there was no end to the resolutions that I was making.

  But harmony would be short-lived. All the wallpaper, which I had barely noticed, was gloomy, a dark aubergine, and a dog, a Labrador, barked ceaselessly in the communal garden. Within twenty-four hours the magnolia tree that I planted had been dug up and left at the bottom of the outside stairs that ran down to the gardens. Later there was a letter from the secretary of the residents’ association, informing me that no such liberties as the planting or spoliation of trees or shrubs were permitted.

  It was at a dinner in the Gay Hussar restaurant in Soho, meeting with the other judges for the Evening Standard’s annual awards drama, that I admitted to my loss. These were volatile affairs, everybody at first marveling at how quickly the year had gone, looking forward to the roast duck and applesauce that was the specialty of the house, all affability until the judging started, and then it was acrimony and table-thumping. According to one of the journalists, “rumor” had it that Lochinvar was seen carrying a fish pie, going into the cottage of a mistress in Dorset. I knew that he was telling it to puff himself up, and I also knew it was a lie. At that moment I believed more than ever that it was not over, that Lochinvar would be waiting for me, that our love had in it the lastingness of myth.

  I
t was after midnight and bitterly cold when I came out. Without a thought, I asked the taxi driver to go to Carlyle Square and recognized my error only when I climbed the front steps and saw a milk bottle beside the foot scraper, with a note thrust into it. It was not my house anymore.

  Each day, at my desk, I looked out at the communal gardens, at the hole from where the magnolia tree had been dug up, the steep flights of steps down from each of the tall houses, and heard the Labrador, who would be left outside by its owner, barking, barking, well nigh to dementedness. I had lost my Cherry Orchard, something I would rue for a long time, if not to say forever. I loved a man who did not know me as I really was.

  It was a refrain that I would hear again and again from many a woman, but never did I hear it more poignantly put than at Christmas in King Edward VII Hospital in London, where I had gone for a hip operation. An alloy of metal and ceramic, five inches long, had been inserted in my hip bone, and on the bed was an open book, with exercises recommended for when I went home—leg swings, knee bends, and foot lifts.

  Time and responsibility had been beautifully deferred. I thought of mothers in the shires, wrapping presents, stuffing birds, at near-breaking point when there was yet an elaborate dinner to be cooked, as I listened to the sweet chimes of the bells from various churches, extolling the festive day that it was. It had been snowing in the night, and the world outside was a veritable Christmas card, the side street and the slanted slates of the houses covered in a soft, powdery snow, with a bluish tint to it.

  The atmosphere in the hospital was festive. A nurse wearing a huge red earring that flashed on and off like a traffic signal had brought me tea very early, and nailed to my door was a small wicker basket with chocolates, a miniature Christmas cake, and a miniature port wine, gifts from the hospital, wishing me a Happy Recovery. There was also a book of jokes in alphabetical order, and I read at random a Hollywood producer’s verdict on Esther Williams as an actress: “Wet she’s a star, dry she ain’t.”