Country Girl: A Memoir

by Edna O'Brien

  Since the fields were empty, Michael took advantage to drive his own horses in, a roan, a brown, and a dun that stood under the chestnut tree, its boughs a plump black suede in the winter light. From the youngest age, Michael loved horses, the feel of them, the smell of them, that and the company of horsemen, riding sidesaddle with his father, as he was brought all over the country on Sunday hunts. He recalled the tally-ho, the farmers in their scarlet jackets, the hounds baying to get going, the sound of the hunting horn so merry, Sundays like Christmas mornings. He went on to be a champion rider and took the world record for bareback jumping, so that their sideboard was stacked with cups, medals, and ribbons.

  Before saying goodbye to Drewsboro and its ghosts, he decided that for Dorothy’s benefit he should once again relate the story of Paddy’s Gold, the horse, whose bizarre adventures had been the talk of the country.

  My nephew Michael Blake competing at the Dublin Horse Show, 1981.

  Paddy’s Gold, sixteen hands in height, a gelding, with a white stripe on his face, belonged to Jack Malone, who lived up the mountains. Jack had Paddy well schooled in gymnastic tricks, taught him the many steps to take so as to get off the ground and the exact spring for a clear jump. It was for the Lunging Competition held in Ballinasloe each October. There, each horse was brought separately into a pen, held on a long rope, and had to clear a succession of jumps, which were a series of oil drums laid on a plinth of porter barrels, and raised higher and higher for the final round of ten horses.

  Paddy’s Gold had excelled himself, and though by rights he was the winner, the two judges, man and wife, deprived him of his laurels, as they intended to buy him. By coming third, his price had dropped. They believed they had a “superstar” in him and that the investment of three thousand eight hundred pounds would convert to a twenty-thousand-pound bonanza in a short time. He was to be collected from Michael’s riding center in a matter of days.

  The couple arrived, along with their cousin, a priest, and with the niceties over, lo and behold, they found that they had forgotten to bring their checkbook. The priest, much to their chagrin, offered to pay, saying they could refund him. Jack took the check and then brought out the obligatory luck penny of twenty pounds from the inside of his cap, which he spat on, before handing it over.

  In less than a week, Michael had a phone call. They had been diddled. Paddy’s Gold was being returned. Paddy’s Gold was not playing ball, was not the “superstar” they had envisaged. Instead of clearing poles and barrels, he was knocking them down. Michael said it was doubtful that Jack would take the horse back, since it was, after all, a commercial venture and business was business. Jack was adamant. He did not want the horse back. “Paddly-Waddly” were his code words when any bit of contention arose. He was not for turning. It fell to Michael to ring the purchaser and suggest that they coax the horse, teach him a few tricks, and give him the impulsion to get off the ground.

  “He’s a no-good pup of a horse,” the man said.

  “He’s evinced a dislike, has he, for the pair of ye?” Michael said.

  “Evinced, my arse” was what he was told, with the blunt reminder that the horse was coming back.

  As they did not know where Jack lived, neighbors were alerted and warned not to give Jack’s whereabouts if a strange couple arrived, and not to take the horse in. Soon, a horse box attached to a jeep was to be seen making its several and unavailing journeys, as the owners tried to navigate narrow laneways and byways, called on farmers in fields and in hay sheds, only to be received gruffly and set upon with dogs. Often they had to drive backward, since the lanes were too narrow to turn the horse box around, and from behind ditches children jeered them.

  Yet that same winter evening, when Michael returned from the chipboard factory where he worked, “dark night,” as he put it, “and pouring rain,” what does he hear but Paddy’s snorting, and long breaths, game as ever. Paddy was installed. His face with the white stripe, bent over the half-door, waiting for his oats. Next morning, the check bounced. Jack was bucking, said they took him for a fool and had never meant to pay him at all. Stasis. Jack did not want the horse, the new owners did not want the horse, and the guards did not want to know. Michael rang the couple, repeating Jack’s demand for a check to be reissued, and reminding them that he would be charging them the given weekly rate for the keep of the horse. Your man at the other end said, “Tough,” and hung up. Proceedings began, and the letters between solicitors became more bilious by the week. Meanwhile, Paddy’s Gold roams the fields happily, nuzzles and noses the other horses, consumes his half-bucket of crushed oats twice daily, and ruminates in his cushy stable at night.

  The case took six months to reach the District Court in Birr, and the judge, citing it as “most bizarre,” ruled that the couple must take back the horse and pay the three thousand eight hundred pounds that was owing. However, no allowance was made for the several hundred pounds it had cost Michael in the interim, and so began the second chapter of the saga.

  “Lock up that horse” was the advice a guard gave him as they left the court, and both he and Jack began their offensive. Michael bought a padlock so that Paddy’s Gold could be locked in, as he worked during the day in the factory. Returning home again, in the proverbial dark night and pouring rain, he saw the new padlock was thrown over the cobbles and Paddy was gone. Jack and himself, as he put it, decided on the “physical route,” the knuckle-dusters. They reckoned that in the coming October, Paddy’s Gold would be entered in the Lunging Competition and they would get their pound of flesh.

  There, on the fair green, on the sandy grass, exactly as they had envisaged it, among a hundred horses, was Paddy’s Gold, now completely indifferent toward them, being led into the pen, head in the air, whence he sallied over all the hurdles in marveling leaps. When the time came for the last round, the crowd pressed against the wire mesh of the pen, watching every sensational second of it, Paddy’s acumen, front legs tucked up to his belly, head and shoulders well down, flicking his back legs for the perfect scale of the jumps.

  The climax then moves to the hubbub of the saloon, with all the necessary embellishments, cheers, swillings, sloshed porter, as the proud owner is held aloft on the shoulders of the ebullient well-wishers and made to drink from the silver cup that is filled with whiskey, little knowing that his nemesis lies in wait. His nemesis is a Serbian, nicknamed Doctor Zhivago, six foot six inches in height, who works in haulage and is hired for the occasion. Michael is nowhere to be seen, he is sitting in the getaway van. Jack, apparently meek, is on his own, drinking a lonely pint, regretful at having let Paddy go. And so the tension mounts, until the pivotal moment when the owner stumbles into the Gents. As he goes in, Doctor Zhivago follows, and Jack crosses to man the door and stop others from entering. The Gents was a small cubicle with a square sink and the one lavatory. In there the two men come face to face, like the protagonists in “Dangerous Dan McGrew.”

  “You owe somebody money—pay up,” the owner was told, at which he drew a blank, and followed it with a compound of effings, and then started to roll his sleeves up for a fight, but instead he was seized and held upside down, his face immersed in a sink of cold water, while also being relieved of the wallet from his inside pocket. Loose change rolled along the tiled floor.

  “We left town fast,” Michael said, with bravado, reliving his enjoyment of the scene in the saloon, men bucking mad, vowing retribution, while they, the three buccaneers, fled with the booty.

  We strolled over to where the horses stood, near-motionless, like circus apparitions. They started then to come toward us, lifting their high haughty heads in curiosity, and as we got nearer, the bay, sensing that I was a stranger, flicked and reflicked her mane, then reared up in the air, Michael following with a “Whoa… whoa” to bring her down. Her flanks glistened, her teeth were bared, and she exuded a warm, jerky breath, her eyes slithering in every direction. He said to stroke her, to make friends with her, but I balked.

  “Go o
n,” he said, and he took my hand and laid it on the nape of her neck, and I could feel her nerviness as I ran my fingers over the knob of bone and down along the face that was almost fleshless, down to the wide crater of the nostrils and the wet pink blubber of her mouth.

  “You’re doing great,” he said, but my heart was going pitter-patter as I remembered horses of long ago, in the stables at night, crashing against their wooden partitions and whinnying to be let free, their pent-up energy so great, so wild, it was as if they would break the door down. The fear they instilled in my mother and me, inseparable from the fear of my father.

  That evening, when we had dinner in a hotel in Galway, the large dining room was not nearly so full as it would have been a year or two before. A few young couples, out for the Friday night, spoke in somewhat muted tones, and the gusts of so many candle flames gave the impression of being in some ancient basilica. As she looked down at the purplish sediment in her wineglass, Dorothy began to cry.

  “When I cry, I have to cry three times,” she said, and attempted a laugh to hide her embarrassment.

  It had something to do with going back, forever the need to go back, the way animals do, the way elephants trudge thousands of miles to return to where the elephant whisperer has lived.

  “We go back for the whisper,” she said, the dreamed-of reconciliation.

  Banquet

  I went to see my first 3-D film. I donned the goggles, which were cumbersome on the bridge of the nose, and sat not knowing what to expect. Suddenly, after the credits, a grassy track is coming through my head and I almost scream. I try to avoid it, shrinking back into the seat, ducking down, but it keeps coming, it loops and forks just as in back roads long ago—memory and reality overlapping. Then there are pillars of jutting stone, a vast cave—as this is Werner Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams. Pillars, carved beasts, horses, bison, rhinoceros are coming through me, into my eyes, into my mouth, and into my mind, just as in childhood, when nothing could be shut out. The figure of a man, Werner Herzog himself, literally appears to walk just above my shoulder, though not touching it, and then he steps onto a platform, wearing a helmet and holding a torch. Appearing in succession are nine or ten others similarly dressed. I want to leave, but these figures and jutting rock bar the way.

  I think if I move to a different seat I could escape them, but to move at all is too alarming. I decide that the only thing to do is to stick it out, and gradually I tell myself to look, to see the wonders on the walls, crystal stalagmites that almost bristle and figures of man and beast, staring out from a distance of thirty thousand years. A woman walks out of a bulge in the stone wall, murmuring, murmuring—a crazed Cassandra or one of the mothers with the Doomsday tidings. It is in fact one of Werner’s team of archaeologists at the edge of the screen, and she is about to fall off. I put my hand out to catch her.

  Ovington Street garden, 2004.

  Blessedly, there is a remission, and the film has moved to the outside of a cave somewhere in Germany. A man dressed in reindeer skins and reindeer fur stands on an incline, when suddenly his right boot aims all the way up to my forehead. He bends and picks up a wooden flute, plays a few notes of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and it is beautiful, more than beautiful to me who knows so little about music, and it allays the fears, long buried but just accidentally brought to life. I think that all I ever wanted was someone to whom I could tell my fears, and from it an imprisoned music would flow.

  Soon after, we are in another cave, and Werner, in that soporific voice of his, which I know from having met him a few times, is telling a story. He points to two footprints on the floor, those of a man and a woman, and asks if the one is following the other in friendship or in assail. He then throws in the thought that since the interior of those caves has changed with time, the footprints may have occurred thousands of years apart from one another. A gasp escapes me. I don’t want them to be thousands of years apart, this man and this woman, I want them to be together.

  It was dusk when I came out onto the King’s Road, the welter of evening time, the violet hour of The Waste Land, except that the sky was pewter and people were rushing in or out from the nearby supermarket. My mind was still full of those caves, unable to imagine the lives lived in them, no more than, when looking at a few stars, I could imagine the black reaches of space beyond. I took to the back streets that, after fifty years of living in London, I was beginning to be familiar with. I passed a terrace of small houses that in daylight I know to be pink and green and blue, the colors of confectionery, and then into a more secluded street, houses set back, some with louvered shutters. Once, on one of those streets, I had written a verse about looking through windows into rooms at evening, lamps, sofas, ottomans, books, and how I had wished to go inside those rooms, inside those lives, forgetting that someone might pass my window and see my red room and have an identical wish to be in it—but I did not allow for that, being “inextricably, caught up in my House of Blindness.”

  I passed the triangular green, with the bench where drunks sometimes sat and sometimes vomited. The windowsill of the pantry where I often bought cakes and fudge to send to a friend in New York was completely bare, except for a small teddy bear placed on a rack in the center.

  Farther along, a woman stopped me and said she hoped I wouldn’t mind, but as we were fellow countrywomen, she would like to shake my hand. She was a retired nurse who also lived locally. In order to get out and about and not mope, as she put it, she had subscribed to walking tours all over London; they cost next to nothing and she met people, all sorts, including widowers who were slow to come to terms with their grief.

  For no particular reason she began to tell me of a rich aunt she had in Dublin, her Aunt Geraldine, who lived in Foxrock. Every spring, faithfully, Aunt Geraldine invited her on a journey to the Burren to see the wildflowers that sprang up between the flags of limestone, the whole place pickled, yes, pickled, with flowers on thin stalks, white, speckled, and blue, the blue of the gentian the most fetching of all. She said what a marvel it was to set out in a pony and trap from a hotel in Lisdoonvarna, to be driven around, and then at intervals to get out and just look at that feast of color. “That blue,” she said, as if it had melted into her. It was also the blue that I had seen in the interior of a mosque in Istanbul and the blue for the Reckitt’s dye that our mothers and our grandmothers put in the tub of rinsing water to freshen the linen and give it a little tint. She said that the thing about those journeys in the pony and trap with Aunt Geraldine was that they stayed with one—the blue flowers, the seats cut into the rocks from the wild Atlantic waves, and always, along the shore a dog chasing a ball.

  She remarked then on how often, in the sixties, she had seen me on those London streets, glamorous, long earrings, a patchwork suede coat, and what a life I must have lived. There were so many “me’s”: the me she had seen; the me that sat on a cushion in Antiquarius market with Isabella, the highland seer, her crystal ball wrapped in layer upon layer of cloth, like a mummy, waiting as I might before the oracle at Delphi; the me that never conquered the fear of swimming, though I had taken lessons in the public baths nearby, from a man who stood on a ledge holding a piece of rope to which I clung, him believing that we were winning even when we were not.

  Before taking my leave of her, I mentioned that I had just seen Cave of Forgotten Dreams. “Aren’t they fabulous?” she said. She had seen the film only yesterday. I said I felt sorry at hearing of footsteps, two humans, perhaps a thousand years apart from one another, never to meet. “It was not two humans, it was not a man and a woman, it was a wolf and a child,” she said quietly, as if she did not want to offend me. Her words struck, like an arrow, and I realized that in there, in that dark chamber, the separate footprints of man and woman had revived in me a love so strong that, though it had not flourished, it had not died either, and so it lived on and on, in that dark suck of secrecy.

  We were about to part, she saying that no doubt our paths would cross again and
I saying I hoped so.

  “But we live here now,” she said.

  “We do,” I said, and it was as if the two countries warred and jostled and made friends, inside me, like the two halves of my warring self.

  At home, I turned on all the lights, including the red lamp in the upstairs room, and it did not seem empty at all, it was full of light, like a room readying itself for a last banquet.