A Pagan Place

by Edna O'Brien

  The closer Lizzie came to you the more you edged to the wall. It was a damp wall and it smelt like a lime kiln. In her sleep she gnashed her teeth and that was a sign of worms but she was too old to have worms. Through the skylight you could see the moon. It was full and monstrance shaped. The moon seemed to be shining down on you expressly and though you looked back at it you were immune to its magic, thinking only of them.

  Your mother sent a dispatch for her Sunday coat, her beads and a change of underclothes. Ambie fetched them, brought you on the crossbar of the bicycle. Going uphill you both got off and walked. You always gauged his wants, a second before he voiced them. In that way he found you ideal, said he would take you anywhere, around the world on a tandem, a bicycle made for two.

  After she’d kissed you your mother asked if you’d been good at school. Ambie brought her letters. One was a repeat of a bill with a red sticker at the end and the other was from the Prior of the Monastery to say your father was there and doing very nicely. She said Blast it. She said why hadn’t Ambie opened the letters and then she could have gone straight home and not had the bother of sending for her Sunday things. He said how was he to know but that it was a love letter, confidential. They wrangled for a bit.

  Your aunt tackled the pony and trap and the three of you set out for home. Ambie went ahead, on his bicycle. Your mother yelled after him to get the stove lit. There was the same moon but you took stock of it now and tried to give it nose and eyes and features, to make it personable. Going up hills your aunt told you sit back to assist the balance and going downhill she held the reins very taut especially when the pony tried to gallop. Your mother was nervous. You didn’t talk much, just saluted people that passed by and commented on the nice night. There was not a puff of wind. It had rained all day and the air was soft and when a match was struck it didn’t have to be shielded. Men going by struck matches. The pony farted from time to time and your aunt made a joke, said Beg Pardon on its behalf. When you passed premises on the road that were supposed to be haunted you blessed yourself and closed your eyes.

  You beamed when you got out to open the gate. Your aunt declined an invitation to come up. The line of water that had clung to the spears fell in one swoop and drenched your insteps through your ankle socks. You only opened half of it. When they kissed, your aunt said that she would miss their chats. There was always someone made lonely.

  Going up the fields you told your mother about Lizzie’s hair falling out and about the medicines she took and your mother put her arm around you and said one’s health was everything. She slipped on a little mound of grass and thought she had broken her wrist. One hand was in her pocket, and had taken the brunt of the fall. When you took it out you expected to see it detached but it was all in one piece and even though she yelled when you pressed the knuckles she was laughing and frivoling. It took time to get the stove going. She broke up a butter box. It was like giving someone a tanning the way she put the wood across her knee and used brute force on it. To get the kindling bits she had to resort to the hatchet which she was not enamoured of. As soon as she’d put a match to the fire you listened for the draught, listened for that thundering roar, spoke to it, egged it on.

  A fly and a flea and a flue

  Were in prison so what could they do?

  Said the fly let us flee

  Said the flea let us fly

  So they flew through a flaw in the flue.

  It was a grand reunion. Your mother put the hat with the veil on. Your father was tentative, bowed down with mortification, lost for words. He looked at you and said you’d grown and was it so that your hair was a shade lighter. You had treated it to a rinse of camomile flowers to try to induce it to be blonde. The older you got the more you aped Emma, you wanted to be blonde like Emma, to be a whitehead, to have a watch, to have a cyst, to have a shorthand speed of ninety words per minute.

  A monk with a beard received you. He had a brown habit with very spacious pockets. There was nothing in them. They were not gaping. He was in charge of the vegetable garden. It was a policy that a monk or a priest with an aptitude for one thing was obliged to take up another occupation altogether, for humility’s sake. You wondered if he had had a beard when he was out in the world or if he had gone to hurling matches and hollered.

  Priests passed back and forth, carrying buckets, carrying books and jotters, all in a hurry, all on their way to their respective duties. From a classroom you could hear the chanting of Latin words and you were delighted to be missing school. When one particular priest passed by your father said aloud that he must be the bravest man in the land because he had been singled out from a whole community of brave men to go up and bless the spire of the new church. He pointed. You looked up. It was a stone spire, grey at the bottom, blue where it caught the sun and after that no colour at all only a dark shaft of stone in the sky. Scaffolding was still up. The brave priest did not smile or make any acknowledgement of the fact that your father had praised him. He was on silence.

  They were all on silence most of the time and you imagined that probably they formed friendships which did not depend on speech, a smile, or a look, or something of their belongings, exchanged. The monk said that the priest had once been a bit of a playboy and was now a luminary to the entire order. He took two strawberries from his big brown pocket. They were joined together by a sprig of green. You held them, not wanting to eat them. Your mother said wasn’t it marvellous to be able to grow strawberries in such an inclement country and the monk said that anything could be done with a bit of patience and application. Your father said it was no longer a question of potatoes and cabbage. The monk said not at all, on the contrary, that with cloches one could be adventurous, nay exotic. You asked what were cloches.

  The monk led you across the grounds to the garden gate and when you looked through you saw a long row of little glass houses, in a straight line, with metal girds around them to keep them from breaking. Your father said to tell the honest truth he himself hadn’t known what cloches were and wasn’t it a good thing you had asked. Your mother gasped, said ignorance was the bane of mankind. She added womankind in case your father might think she was having a dig at him, although they were all smiles and he said sorry if out of forgetfulness he went up the path ahead of her.

  The strawberries had stained your hands, made them fragrant and caused black specks to lodge between the folds of your fingers. You ate them. The monk gave him a medal with a saint’s face engraved on either side and a booklet with prayers addressed to St Jude, patron of hopeless cases. He accepted them slavishly, cried. Your mother was reduced to tears. Big slow tears coursed down her cheeks under the veiling and then just in the nick of time she put out her tongue and caught each one and brought it back into her mouth.

  They thanked the monk for everything, his prayers, the walk, the strawberries, the opportunity to see the cloches. Your mother left a small offering to be put towards the debt involved in the building of the new chapel. Exalted though she was by prayers and tears she got out a pencil and an old envelope and asked the monk to repeat the ingredients and the method for the dessert they had been given after lunch. It was called Charlotte Russe. She said she would call it Finbar Russe in honour of the monk who had made it. The moment the car drove off the monk lowered his head and put his cowl up and you took that to be an indication that he was retreating into silence again. You felt very sorry for him even though his life had all the serenity that your mother and father’s lacked.

  Your father sat in front and you were in the back next to your mother and on your other side there was a big cold space where nobody sat. Going around corners you fell on her and going around other corners she fell on you and you both exclaimed and laughed. Your father held the strap that was fitted to the side of the car and asked the driver if he knew what cloches were, asked very cocksure. He was delighted at being able to describe them.

  When the car crossed from one county to the next your father knew although it was not writte
n up. He knew the fence or the stone wall, or the tree, or whatever it was that marked the boundary between one county and the next. If there was something in particular that he pointed to, you tried to focus it but your stomach began to sway and your head too and the sway interfered with your vision. Excitement got the better of you. Each time when he said Look, you got dizzy and couldn’t see.

  The counties were all different. Some had good land and two-storey houses. There was one house in particular that caught your fancy. It had creeper on the walls and in the grounds white statues that looked to be made of marble. The driver said that the owner was a dipsomaniac. He said that one of her children had died from a wrong injection and had been buried in the back garden, and that dogs were buried there too and had gravestones. Your mother said that money wasn’t everything.

  You passed cottages too, and small-holdings and trees of every denomination and walls and ruins and tar barrels bedecked with flags indicating that men were working on the road, although they weren’t. Sometimes your father sang a few bars of a song and often stopped abruptly to tell some story about some man in one of the towns you passed through. He knew everything about those towns and their inhabitants and you thought that for a drunk he had gleaned a lot on his travels. He told stories about men, friends of his, up to mischief, trying to escape for the day from their wives or trying to get in with the gentry and follow the hunt and be served glasses of sherry, before and after, on nippy mornings.

  The driver said that in the house with the statues there had been a marquee hired once, for a party and how one of the guests ran his motor car through it for a bet. He said someone’s legs got mangled but as far as he knew it was a member of the staff and not a guest. When there was a silence it was not hurtful, it was only that your father was waiting for something else to crop up in his mind. The driver and he were without a match, so they kept smoking, each one taking it in turns. Your father had a nice stock of cigarettes, not having been at home to use his quota for a while. Your mother brought them for him, the six large packets in their yellow boxes with cellophane round them.

  When you got into your own county you saw first the lake and on it the island where your family were buried and the littler islands all around. The lake and the road were adjoining. You could see the reeds and the wind rustling them. Some had brown seed pods and some had not. Reeds always looked miserable. You drove through a valley where it was as dark as inside Jacksie’s forge. Then you parted from the lake. It was down below, in a dip and miniature. Your mother said if that wasn’t panoramic she’d eat her hat. Your father looked at the various haysheds to see what farmers had the hay in. He was not jealous at the fact that some were better husbanders than he.

  In the village people gaped, to make certain it was him coming home. The ball alley looked gloomy because there was no one in it. Only on Sundays did it have a crowd. The inside was plastered and ugly whereas the outside was a nice stone, but the inside had to be plastered for the ball to bounce. Lizzie had washed the sleeping suit that she had loaned you. It was on the clothesline flapping back and forth. It was a blue silk pyjamas and when she first came home from Australia it was a novelty, it and a case that matched, both of which she showed to people when she was showing her dresses and her shoes and her ermine stole. The wind ballooned the legs and it was like seeing a person with very large thighs on a trapeze seeing it buffet back and forth.

  At the first clink of the gate the dogs raced down the field and when they saw your father they got deranged altogether and he had to wind the window down to let them jump up and lick his fingers.

  Part Two

  The pencil was so sharp it ate a hole in the page. You were making a list. You wrote the words with a flourish. Raspberry, strawberry, blackcurrant jam.

  She said wait a minute, to remember you weren’t skipping. You often skipped to that, raspberry strawberry blackcurrant jam, tell me the name of my young man, A-B-C-D-E-F-G. You always tripped deliberately at J because you had a hunch that you were going to marry a man called John. After jams you put down lemonade. Then sardines. Then pickles.

  She jumped up, countermanding, said there were pickles. They were not individual pickles, not chunks of cauliflower or cucumber that you could identify, but a mush, and a vile shade of yellow. She said the makers were esteemed. He said he’d soon see. He couldn’t undo the top and finally had to resort to doing it with the aid of the door. He held the jar between the jamb and the partially opened door, then tried to force the door closed, until she said he would break it. He snarled at her. Summoning up anger. Your novena was that they may never fight again. She took the jar and opened it with her bare hands, the brass spiral flew off. She lifted a speck onto her little finger and asked you to sample it. It was savoury. You crossed out pickles, put several lines through it, horizontal, then vertical to make sure it wasn’t legible.

  She was economizing. She wanted to buy blinds with slats. She had seen them in Hilda’s house, had admired them and later in the presence of your father went into raptures over them, said how they would never fade or flitter like the canvas ones she had. They made stripes along the floor, stripes of light and stripes of shadow. You didn’t like them, because you couldn’t see out properly, the world outside got divided up into segments, the sky got reduced. She was determined to get them, she even voiced the hope that Emma might contribute, that Emma might very well club in for such an innovation. Emma liked the modern things.

  The doors of the three downstairs rooms were open and bits of wood wedged in under the window sashes where the cord had gone. In one room there was lemonade, in another a fruit cake, in another cold mutton, all in honour of Emma. You put rhododendrons in a bowl, one big flower in each bowl, one for Emma’s bedroom, and one for the room where the tea-table would be laid. She said they would wither and have to be thrown out but she was too occupied to be really vexed. They were big and waxy like stars come down to bloom. She was making fillings for sandwich cakes.

  In Emma’s bedroom the tin of cling peaches was in the cupboard where it had lain for years and years, ever since the music teacher had given it to Emma as a prize. No one had permission to open it. First thing when she got home Emma always said Are my peaches there? and ran to look and in the bedroom she stood before the oval mirror and touched her hair with a silver-backed brush that was also hers, and which your mother allowed no one else to appropriate. Your mother told Ambie to make certain and sure that the bicycle was in good trim. When Emma came home she went to the village four or five times a day and sometimes for no errand at all. She changed her clothes before each journey and that was why she was called a fashion-plate.

  In the midst of the preparations the Major came to talk about a horse that he was considering for training. When your mother saw his car she groused but your father went down the avenue to meet him which was always an index of a welcome. The Major wore tweed plus-fours and a cap that matched. Your mother said she wasn’t interrupting her duties to dance attendance on any major.

  Your father brought him to the room where the cake was, and inquired after his wife. The Major and his wife were separated but your father always asked how she was. The Major’s voice reverberated all over the house. He said yes, that as it was such a nice morning he wouldn’t be saying no to a drop of paddy, but only a wee drop. Your father called you aside and said to fly for it on the bicycle. He had no money. He told you which pub to go to, the nearest one; a terrible ordeal, because he and the publican were at war over a bill of long duration.

  The publican was in his stocking feet when you got there, he kept erratic hours. He was sweeping the floor and had already sprinkled it with tealeaves, to keep the dust down. He was a bachelor. The thing that caught your eye as always was an advertisement for headache pills that showed a woman frowning fearfully and beside it a hand-printed new sign No tick today but free drinks here tomorrow. You took it to pertain to your father, personally. He didn’t have to ask what you wanted, he saw the bottle in your hand.
Once there had been an iron tonic in it and part of the label remained. He poured the whiskey from a big bottle through a paper funnel into the iron tonic bottle. He hadn’t bothered to rinse it. You said it was for your mother for a cake. He approved of your mother, said she was like the violet, shy.

  You said Emma was coming home. He said Emma must be a woman now. You thought that by a woman he might mean a whole series of personal things; being lonesome et cetera, things you shied away from. The cork he chose was too small and fell into the whiskey bottle. He left it there and got another cork but wrapped paper round it to make it plump. He simply raised one eyebrow when you said could it go down in the book till next week. He was not put out. He asked if you knew that Americans were mining for gold in the other end of the county and you said how you’d read about it and how you’d like to see gold while it was still dust and before it was fashioned into a ring or a brooch. For no reason he said head or hearts and gave you the opportunity of winning sixpence.

  It was a bravura ride downhill towards home. The bicycle ran away with you and you came a cropper and crashed into the ancient wall that supported one of your own gates. You screamed. Then squat and spraddled between the front wheel of the bicycle you steadied yourself and saw that the whiskey was intact. You kept a firm grip on it. Luckily none of the Wattles appeared. Your chin and elbow were grazed. It took some time for blood to flow.

  Going up the avenue you pushed the bicycle and almost at once your father came out of doors and waved you on. You dropped the bicycle and ran. He said why hadn’t you cycled and you said you didn’t know. While he poured the whiskey your mother left off from icing the cake, in trepidation as to what might happen. He poured hurriedly and his hand was shaking. The cork in the bottle impeded his flow and he blasted the publican for being so careless. He poured half, looked at it in the glass, then poured the remainder and your mother closed her eyes with relief, knowing that the temptation had passed.