Country Girl: A Memoir

by Edna O'Brien

  The cocktail party, to which the assistant matron insisted I go, was at noon. She said that I might meet people I had not met for a long time, an old beau perhaps, “love’s sweet refrain” once more. With this in mind, I had to get ready. Shoes were out of the question, but I had new striped angora socks, which a lovely friend called Therese had left downstairs for me, being too reticent to come up. Getting dressed was no mean feat. From a stick that had a flipper hook at one end, I had to negotiate donning the socks, then pulling the red silk kimono on over the hospital gown. Staff had gone to great lengths decorating the corridor. Stars of Bethlehem, swags of holly and lamé-crested cards all but concealed the various drawings of vertebrae, injured shoulders, and buckled knees. Most patients had gone home for Christmas, and the gathering was composed mainly of staff, who were off duty and in a high state of merriment, bedecked with paper hats and comparing the trinkets which they had acquired from their crackers. A house doctor looked absurdly forbidding in felt antlers, which were a gift from a “grateful patient” in Lapland. One of the anesthetists wore a white mask with a blood-red gash for lips and held a card which read, “Here comes the vampire.” There were very few guests. A young Arab woman with long jet-black hair, sloe eyes, and a large emerald pendant was surrounded by her cohorts. They drank Coca-Cola. The other visitor, seated in the best armchair, was a stout Englishwoman, expounding on the deteriorated state of the country. She had fallen in her kitchen the day before, simply getting down that silly tin of sardines, and what with her maid gone and the floor slippery, she had come a cropper. More than an hour elapsed before the ambulance came, and she was brought to a hideous National Health hospital, kept waiting for hours in a room full of foreigners, a ghastly Babel. Worse, she had been kept there overnight, and with a missionary zeal she announced, “I now know what it is like to be in prison, having spent one night in a National Health hospital.” She was now where she should have been in the first instance, in a hospital of which she was actually a trustee, and she was also on her second, if not to say third, glass of champagne. The conversation then turned to the Queen’s Speech, one of the nurses saying that we would probably be on the plum pudding at that point, having had our first course, roast turkey and trimmings, and we would be in mellow mood. The battle-ax begged to differ. She would not be in mellow mood. She would not even listen to it—as a monarchist all her life, she could not bear to think that her beloved Queen had sold out to Europe. The doctor with the felt antlers tried to remonstrate with her, saying it was not the Queen’s decision, whereupon she requested her crutches and rose like a general about to survey the troops.

  I had hobbled back to my room when a visitor was announced. It was the writer Andrew O’Hagan, a new friend, who in a matter of two years had become a steadfast one. He brought the snow in with him; it was on his shoulders and on his eyelashes, so perfectly crested it might have been applied with curling tongs. He had walked miles in the snow, having earlier gone to Mass, where the singing of the choir brought him back to the scenes of his childhood, the family allowance book, his mother with four boys and a useless husband, an advertisement for Bell’s whiskey on top of Central Station in Glasgow with the beguiling “Afore ye go.” He had brought loads of presents: candles, gloves, a bottle of double malt, and a jigsaw puzzle with a picture of Emily Brontë in a tiled interior of pale brown and sepia, like a replica of the work of one of the Dutch masters. Emily Brontë, with her size-three shoes, said to have the mind of a navigator, instead remained in one place and navigated the perplexities of the crooked heart. He poured himself a little malt and discovered still another present in his Santa Claus bag. I asked him why it was that we, who had known hardship, were so profligate, and he thought about it and said that maybe it was because Saxon big brother made us Celts believe that we were “wee.” I asked for a song, and he sang Robert Burns’s “Where the Bonnie Lassie Lives,” as various nurses put their heads through the door to nod their approval.

  It was evening time, and after turning down my bed, Irina, a nurse from Eastern Europe, wondered if she might sit for a few minutes. She was lonely. She would have liked to have gone home, but home was five hours on the express train and cost much monies, which she could not afford. She was saving for the little house in her dream that was in her own country, and the other dream was of man, perfect man, coming to her. She had a boyfriend whom she loved, but he go live with other woman, but that other woman now tell him, “Go, go,” because he fall for still other woman. She cried then and dried her eyes and apologized for crying and cried more, saying, “I have peace, but I have lonely.” Seeing the books and notebooks and pens on my bedside table, she asked almost in invocation, “Madam, please write book for men about love, because they do not understand it as womans do.”

  I had not the heart to tell her that great love stories told of the pain and separateness between men and women.

  I had left north London and moved back to a rented house in Chelsea, walking the back streets that I knew, past the small terraced houses with cottage gardens and enclaves of green, seed pods and pollen blowing all over the place, people sneezing, idlers exchanging the odd word. One pensioner from the nearby barracks would be in a wheelchair, while his companion went to get groceries, proud of his scarlet jacket, his tasseled hat, and a green paper swizzle, a bauble that he waved. He would say the same thing at intervals, “In Wales,” giving Wales the mythic resonance of Troy.

  PART THREE

  The Blank Page

  The words would not come, and I would remember when they had come and it had been so effortless, the rapid, handwritten pages of this story or that. I had brought Zig pens specially from America that were lucky and were also photo-safe, acid-free, waterproof, archival quality, light-fast, fadeproof, and nonbleeding. But they did not suffice. Henry James said that these lapses or intermissions or spirals of depression, or whatever they might be called, “were good for [his] genius,” but I was more inclined to agree with Virginia Woolf, who in one of her shriven states had said that she should go to John Lewis and get a dress made, nearing madness. I reread the books that I loved, the old ones and a few of the new ones that had something of the timbre of the old ones. I kept a diary. I read with misgivings that only the very young and the very mad keep diaries. There were jangled entries—the “Poisoned Flower of the Borgias,” “Pluto’s Dark Door,” Nietzsche’s “We possess art, lest we perish of the truth.” All very edifying and useless.

  Sometimes I went to speak to students at universities or colleges where I was supposed to be imparting nuggets of wisdom. I brought Kafka to read to them and told them how Kafka had said a book must be the ax to the frozen seas inside us. In Hull the wind from the North Sea, with a wet spray to it, hurled against the windowpanes, which shook and shivered, naked to the world. In the almost empty dining room, the talk came round to the blank page and the places writers flee to in the belief that it will help them to write. One of the lecturers had just returned from Lapland, a Boadicea on her sled, driving four huskies through the snows, chopping her own wood, making her own fire, setting up her own tent. Each night, before settling down to sleep, she looked out at the silent, silver, blanketed night that became the substance of her dream, in which she conceived a fairy tale that was an astonishment to her, but that alas vanished at the very moment of her wakening.

  I thought of the numerous futile journeys that I had made in desperation. Who in her right mind would go to a small house in the country of England, in bleak winter, for the ministrations of a guru who claimed to have gleaned the secrets of the libido from East and West? He wore white, white robes and a white turban and was waited upon by a bevy of ex-wives and current mistresses, who addressed him as “Guru This” and “Guru That.” Taking his cue, perhaps, from Wilhelm Reich, he was clearly an advocate of the orgasm, insisting on nudity for massages, where he pressed his being on the various chakras for added intensity and panted more than was reasonable. All that was needed was an orgone box. I had years b
efore sat in one under the supervision of a Norwegian doctor.

  In that small country house we were three patients, a friendly woman who ran a restaurant, a woman who coughed, and myself. The walls were paper-thin. One could hear the coughing at night and the giggles from the more private quarters, where the guru and his harem lived.

  We drank juice with a concoction of minerals and vitamins, which was supposed to dispel hunger, which indeed it did. Since it was raining, we spent most of our time in the sitting room, the smell of burning joss sticks wafting in from the hall, little to say to one another as we read our horoscopes in out-of-date magazines. After two listless nonwriting days, I decided to cut my stay short. This did not go down well. The female brigade warned how distressing it would be for their guru, and he himself tried to persuade me to stay, saying I had not given his methods their due respect. In the train I felt I had been let out of school, and ordered a quarter-bottle of Australian white wine that was lukewarm.

  The spa in Austria was different, more austere. One went for the “cure” and everything revolved around that. The dining room looked out onto a lake, with hotels distinctive as castles ranged on the opposite side, and the steep mountain slope was covered with evergreens that ran all the way to the summit, where the mountain dipped and soared, shutting out the last bit of lilac sky. Patients were advised to chew their spelt bread forty times until it reached the consistency of a puree. We sat at tables of four, Austrians, Germans, English, and myself, chewing the bread and pondering, perhaps, our digestive systems, or whether to have the mild or strong Epsom salts before retiring. I looked up the German word for saliva and copied it into my notebook. Talking was discouraged, and so was reading. The girls who waited on us were dressed in Tyrol costumes and little half-aprons, were polite but stern about our regime, so that there was no question of an extra rice cake.

  After the main lights had been turned out, knowing I wouldn’t sleep, I simply sat and looked at fish in a tank, endlessly moving, the water rippling as they darted through it. They fought. Skirmishes of all kinds, then a brief truce as they landed on bits of bark or pebble, establishing their territory and regrouping for battle.

  I gave them names. Saddam Hussein was striped and strutting. George Bush was a lackluster figure with his braggart cohorts. Vladimir Putin occupied a millionaire corner, with minions fencing around him. There was one angelic coral creature, its fins quivering, whom I called Emily Dickinson, trapped among the totalitarians.

  Fasting led to lethargy and whiffs of hallucination. In the afternoons I would sit out of doors, my virgin notebooks on the bench beside me and a copy of Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain. Some patients sat on folding chairs, others had retired after the frugal lunch of rice cake and savory spread to have a compress of warm chamomile flowers, while a few heroic ones set off on bicycles or cross-country skis. I sat before a fountain. From a stone gourd, a corolla of water rose, then plashed down the sides into a font that for a moment held the gift of melting moonstone rings. I was trying to meditate, to become one with the water, but instead I was hoarding a few impressions for some story or other that I might write.

  Low borders of privet hedging enclosed squares of grass, and orange flowers, which I took to be dwarf marigolds, bloomed listlessly. There was one birch tree, onto which a whole forum of small brown birds would converge and linger, never once roused to song. The kitchen was to the rear of where I sat, and the smell of roast, of which I would not be partaking, was galling. Patients who remained on after the “cure” were given delicious meals, once the punishing regime had expired, but I could not wait to leave. Even Thomas Mann seemed ponderous.

  One afternoon a young girl, whom I sat next to each morning at the sitz baths, was leaving for England and I waited with her outside until her taxi arrived. I inquired about the building across the street and learned to my mounting excitement that it was the bar and restaurant for members of the nearby golf club. My spirits rose. I would go there quietly at six-thirty and treat myself to one glass of wine, prior to the bowl of clear soup which that evening was being added to my diet. I confided my plot to her. She gripped my arm and said on no account must I risk it. A Russian oligarch and his party had been to the spa, had betaken themselves to the restaurant one evening, availing of steaks and champagne, only to find on their return that they were escorted to their rooms and made to pack immediately, since they had broken the rules of the clinic.

  After she left, I looked at the flyleaf of my new notebook and saw where I had copied out a line of Joseph Brodsky’s: “The discarding of the superfluous is in itself the first cry of poetry.” By having written nothing at all, I was approaching poetry.

  Some evenings a young man from the town came to see to the fish. He would clean the tank, scatter something in the water, and talk to them before covering them in for the night with a dark cloth. I would try to engage him. What did they eat? When did they mate? Did they sleep in the darkness? And he would simply smile and say, “My English no good.”

  Yet on the morning that I was leaving, he left a handwritten letter, with the title “My Fish Family”:

  Sex, food, war, that their life. Fish always watch for enemy. Every one watching for who is strongest. Striped one always on stone. Blue always on wood. Littlest fish born in this tank, his father the yellow born in Lake Malawi. His mother unknown. All fish, they cruising all day long. Hundreds, thousands of meters. Males fight. Females not fight as much. The more colorful the more the fighter. Easier to survive without color. Male sees female shivering and wants to be great man for her. Then dance. Male dig a hole in sand floor, then swim to female for her interest and she follow. Female lay eggs on sand and take in mouth for three and a half weeks. Eggs secure there. After four weeks baby fishes they swim. When lights go out all cruise less but never fully sleeping, never fully still. You ask if I have favorite. The lapis blue. She called Ahli. She very beautiful with blue body and white stripe on head. But all are beautiful and needing best care. Do not forget us. Caretaker Michael

  My hopes buoyed when the invitation came to the villa in Mallorca. I had been to the island years before, in springtime, when the almond trees were in full flower, and my memory of it was of a flowering paradise, with windmills dotting the hilltops. A young girl from Ghana, whom I called Ophelia, had got me the invitation, since she had done the interior decorating for the owner. She would come with me, staying for the weekend, and then I would be alone for twelve days to write.

  From Palma airport we took a taxi, and as it fell dark, she began to fret about the directions once we left the motorway. Side roads became narrower and narrower, the countryside unfamiliar, with here and there a light from a house set far back in a field, little bumpy bridges, then narrower roads, more tracks, and after almost two hours of mounting suspense, she said, “Eureka, eureka,” as she sighted a hoarding with a huge picture of a wild cat.

  “El gato, el gato,” she said, and told the driver to make a left fork down a dirt road, which he did so hurriedly that we could hear the loose pebbles hopping off the bonnet. Then a third “Eureka” as we arrived at the green gates that led to the avenue and the finca.

  There were two entrances, but because of our luggage, she decided we would go by the courtyard entrance, and as she turned the big key in the lock and still more slowly pushed in a wooden door with its iron beveling, I recalled the erotic interiors of Luis Buñuel. An anteroom with a metal sink in one corner led to the salon itself, which was shadowy, high arches following one upon the other and stretching to a wrought-iron staircase beyond. She groped for lights. There were leather chairs and sofas and illustrated books and a long wooden table, where I could spread out my notes and get down to work. It was cold as a mausoleum. In the huge fireplace that skirted one wall, the bole of a tree had been placed on a bed of white ash, numerous small saplings jutting from it.

  To get to the boiler we groped our way through a series of rooms, some lit, some not, and there was a Ping-Pong table, tennis racque
ts, brand-new motorcycles, and a boiler that seemed to have expired. The pilot light was quenched. Beside it was a wooden olive press, the wrought-iron handle upright, like a compass without destination. Back in the living room, we rolled newspaper into balls and idiotically flung them on the top of the unbudgeable bole of wood, believing it would warm us. She found the wine cellar and returned, triumphant, with a bottle of vintage claret, which in a halfhearted manner we vowed to restore.

  Before going up to bed I got out all my notebooks and glanced at the scattered things I had written, mere jottings that bore no relation whatsoever to the work I had come to do.

  The bedroom was even icier than the downstairs. I kept saying “Ca’an D’Or” to myself as if it were a mantra and warming my hands on it. This was another villa belonging to the owner, where we could go the next day, as it had all the amenities: heat, light, and an electric stove that had actually been fitted. It took some doing to get the curtains to overlap, but enveloped in a white duvet, I got into bed and had a heart-to-heart talk with myself, debating whether or not I should leave with Ophelia on the Sunday.

  A sort of milkiness gauzed the sky, and soon I got up and I went outside to survey my surroundings and watch the sun come up. Olive and lemon groves all around. The olive trees, bent and gnarled, warts and bulges on their limbs, yet their leaves, tapered and silvery, letting out little whispery rustles. The terraces that ran up the fields in tiers were perfectly husbanded, and beyond them the pine woods, dense and pathless, to the range of gray-white mountains, the sierras, whose summits glistened with snow. To the rear of the villa there were low stone walls, and crouched under one, as if it had just escaped from a Damien Hirst formaldehyde tank, was a sheep, stunned, silent, with not a bleat from it. This would be my companion.