by Edna O'Brien
It was impossible to relish the food because of the struggle with conversation and anyhow the plates were soon swept away to make way for the series of courses. Individual soufflés were passed around and everyone cheered. On one side of me was the bath fiend and on the other a very officious man. He kept insisting upon how well everything was served, drew attention to the lilies, the crests on the cutlery, the goblets. Then in brimful tones he told me about an evening in Poland in somebody’s flat, eating cold ham and dill pickle while the whole household wept. Then there was a dissertation about striptease in Hamburg, knickers or maybe it was knicker-bockers, and the feats of animals and men. Now and then the Duke, who was next to the hostess, would raise his chin and purse his lips at me. It did not go unnoticed.
I watched their mouths, I watched their tongues, like tentacles, I watched their jaws, I could visualise my own. I had no business being there. The other lady at the table was sharp-bosomed and evenly tanned and she kept aiming her cleavage at the men like she was holding a motto to them. She vied with me for their attention, and the way it was I didn’t want to be intruded upon at all. I would have loved it if most of them scarpered and there were only a select few at different tables, the courses very slowly presided over, everything ordained, music, and then upon the arrival of the desserts, the warm crêpes and the cold chantillies, some singer or some harper to come and transport us until dawn, until the extinguishment of all the candles, until we were carriaged home drowsy, but glad.
A Highlander asked me out on the balcony. Said he was suffering from his post-prandial lust. A young fellow, face a bit pitted, wearing his clan’s kilt. He asked what I did. I said I was a lady of leisure which tickled his fancy. We were confronting a piece of very suggestive statuary which was artfully lit and to which he was drawing my attention. “You’re a wee baster,” he said, the oaf.
“Let’s slip away to a night club,” he said.
“Now, now, me wee lecher, no lady snatching,” said the Duke, and they had a bit of friendly wrangling about the Highlander’s seat to which he lured innocent girls and fed them bees-wax and haggis. The moment we were alone the Duke kissed me, and whispered in my ear about the Widow Fusby, my garters, my hourglass waist – a thing I do not have. He said everyone thought I was adorable, especially Helen, talked about my charisma.
Then very solemnly he took my hand and proposed to me. He said he wasn’t getting any younger and that neither was I and why didn’t we do the sensible thing and take the plunge. I froze. I’d never heard anything so incongruous, me and him.
“I couldn’t,” I said.
“Now Mary, Mary, quite contrary,” he said, wagging a finger and he talked about my little flambeau and our ripping times together and our stunts. He who had been in the trenches and had seen cities sacked and seen pregnant women with bayonets put through them, and he couldn’t be on his tod.
“No Bert,” I said. I foresaw it all, the aubergine linen, the compost heap, the June, the July roses, Bridge nights, having to dress up, in gowns, in jodhpurs, in tweeds, the merry protocol. A whole new itinerary of lies and foils. I shook my head.
“But soon you will be on the shelf,” he said. That nettled me.
“So will you,” I said.
“If it doesn’t work out you can always take a lover, a peasant, a brute.”
“Is that what your other wives had to do?” I said, resenting the aspersions about peasants. The very same as if I’d clobbered or unmanned him. He shook at the gills.
“No fool like an old fool,” he said, and withdrew into the room where they were calling his name to discuss with him the requiem music for the canary.
Old Slyboots McCall came forward with the kilt to his face to drown some of his laughter. It seems the Duke was in no position to propose to me, having a wife in the country, a woman with a withered arm. And the other wives, the beautiful Tilly, and the horsewoman Sufi, were mere figments, invented creatures. I wanted to go in and congratulate him, and tell him he was a man after my own heart, a fancifier. I kept postponing it until in the end I was sloshed and not able to do it at all. I was brought home by the man who had witnessed all those tears in Poland.
*
I have had a game of snowball. Very erratic it was but livening. I never swore so much. All those young nippers getting the better of me, pelting me. I have a group from the block of flats, who invite me to their houses. “Come up for a glass of cider,” they say. One has a boa constrictor and she feeds it one live mouse per week. I said I wouldn’t touch it for a hundred pounds, she said she would touch it for nothing and wore it bracelet fashion around her wrist. She’ll end up in a funfair.
The first day I met them they were under trees, cowering. There was something secretive about them. I heard them before I saw them, I heard the twiglets snap. Then I saw their shoes, their knee socks, those little spindles that were their legs. Three girls, two with brown eyes and one with blue. They came forward, stooping, to greet me. They were inside the railings and I was outside. It is a little garden in the middle of the Common, a little private place, sequestered. How they smiled. They smiled with the eyes and the rest of their faces were quite still, nearly impassive, but the eyes were shining, and agog. They were baking, they said. They had acorns as food and kindling wood in a very ramshackle pile. They couldn’t stop smiling. It was like laughter that they couldn’t control. One of the brown-eyed children had little gold sleepers in her ears and was called Conchita. There was one bit of shrub in blossom, climbing over a wire arch. The flowers were tiny and yellow, little yellow clocks dotted at intervals on the green curving branch, and still I would have sworn I smelt lilac, bushes of it, as after rain, the smell of wet lilac drowning, permeating everything. I had just bought an eiderdown in a junk shop. It was patchwork and hung from the ceiling in such a way that squares of it were close to the ceiling and other squares dipped down like balloons. There was also a picture of St Teresa, with her June roses, but I could only afford the eiderdown.
I could have eaten their smiles. They didn’t just stop and start, they kept it up as if there were torches inside them, torches that would not go out. They seemed to be drinking me. They pretended to light a fire. Then they knelt around that conflagration, putting acorns on, taking them off, pretending to be getting burnt, pretending to eat, playing mother and father and house. They invited me in but I couldn’t, I had one of my dates, one of my liaisons.
In the morning there was a plait of leaves on the outside mat. They were all bound together to represent something, I don’t know what. Some of the stems had been slit to thread other stems through them so that it was a weave, and when I lifted it up nothing fell, leaves merely sagged a little, the way the eiderdown had. They came back about noon and said did I want my car washed, knowing full well that I am a pedestrian. The moment they got inside this house they ran round as if it were grounds or a ruin and they were pulling out everything and in no time sliding down the banister, fiddling with the fire extinguishers to siphon them. One of them broke a sugar bowl and we put it together again, piece by piece, the very same as if it wasn’t broken. I’m going to glue it. You can’t imagine their lilts. They were mad for the sugar I had, the coffee sugar. I had to put crystals on their tongues and then they competed as to who could hold it longest in the mouth without melting or crunching it between the teeth. They come on Saturdays. Sometimes we go out, we tramp off, a safari, through the Common and, if you please, I am supposed to teach, take classes out in the freezing cold, tell them about the magic rites of plants and about herbs and pond life, and what gods and what goddesses had for their emblems. Times like that I am forgetful and laughing. Later on we will picnic, and have a summer school, a hedge school as they say. They are intending to mitch.
*
My next Romeo after Dr Flaggler was a Finn. Had the air of a chieftain. Turned fish eyes into fish bait, and the flesh itself into a luscious stew. Had ideals, wanted to introduce market gardening to those who lived in the Archipelago
, wanted those lonely creatures to grow lettuces and fennel and strawberries. Very carnal. Always roscid and rosy for him. It is a wonder where the nectars of women lurk at slack times, the mateless eras. No sleeping at all, only a doze before the fresh violations, and the Finn murmuring his sea shanties. He said the sea is not dark at all because he had gone down, there were flowers down there, a different breed, brain and branch coral, figures like dolomites, fauna golden and bewitching plus spitfires and xiphios and playing fish. Beautiful his attentions, his assaults. Jade gate, Jade gate, Jade gate. He had a bit of Chinese lore. But in everything else he was a Viking, a sailing man, a sea man, a dark winding eel. His favourite animal the boar. Liked it all ways, somersaults, a maiden’s closed purse, the old podicum sursum, the romp, the wrangling brandlebuttock. Saw women and girls as related to water, sedges, pools, whirls, creatures that invited him in. He’d have gone with old Scylla across the Styx, he’d have gone anywhere then. He carried a little torch in the back of vehicles, to be able to have a close look at me at any moment, my lips, the brown of my eyes, my teeth. We were to motor all over the world, or rather be motored, and have blinds fitted to the windows so that at any moment we could couch down and with his hands that were capable as butter pats, he could smack me into any shape or crenellation. Malleable I was. In the quiet after, I used to snuggle down, hearing about the islands and the fishermen, the kind of boats they rowed, their take of herrings, the spirits they drank and the dragons and sea-serpents that they feared.
He had a blind wife. A pianist by profession, she practised for four hours each morning and by an open window, despite the weather. The day I met him he was carrying a wicker basket, full of fish, all black and teeny, all squirming, their little eyes like pinheads, the same shade of red as ladybirds, a bright coral. He plunged them into a big saucepan and there they were milling about but milling to no avail. We were on a houseboat, a party of people. There was someone taking photographs, so perhaps it exists somewhere, the likeness of that day, an early day in summer, a breeze, the rustle of the reeds, the Finn in a bath towel, like a Sultan, the brine on his arms, the black crustaceans of shellfish changing to red under the influence of boiling water, various flavours of spirit, and the gallant way he jumped in to rescue a man from drowning. The man was drunk and swore reams at him and said he had not wanted to be rescued. That was after he had received the kiss of life. “Then jump again,” the Finn said, matter-of-factly. The drunk sat on the quayside flanked by his drunk friends. All together, they projected their invective upon the waters. Nine grey men upon the quay, nine shadows upon the waters. The rescued one put out his begging bowl which was his cloth cap. Not one of them was without a bottle and a knife.
The Finn followed me to the land where the King has piles. Gala days, carnival, kissing and joking and kipping between meals, the Finn expanding, more than one man, a clan of men, an Eisteddfod, one of the ancients, in things and finikins, surrounding the bones of the house, ambushing, words soft, blasphemous, loud, incantatory; balls sacheting, breeches down, buttons, cracked leather buttons rolling all over the floor, the Finn making grunting sounds, the execrations and then the little bits of slop, the same words as in an autograph book – love and violets and always and ever and now; the Finn drawing the drapes, donning a nightshirt like Old King Cole, feeling the bedcovers, climbing, saying Heigh ho and the sea shanties. A kind of embargo, the billow, the bruises, the bites, tossed, and turned, inside out, raucous, dulcet, a pandemonium, rumps rearing, slathering, words, wet words, tongues, coals, baskets of fire, and devil’s pokers going through.
And yet there were the intervals that had to be filled in, the gaps, the times when people say to themselves “What am I doing here?” or “What is my partner thinking?” He broke up boxes for kindling and whittled some into spindles. He stacked the logs. With his knife he sculped, made little manikins and mermaids and little boats and oars. He bought slices of steak, thin as parchment, dipped them in oil and cooked them on the open fire. He presented them to me on a long fork, the toasting fork, and watched while I chewed. The oil dripped all over the place, it was in little drops, in droplets, with a rainbow skin. The fresh fillings fell out of my teeth but I chewed and I smiled, the way happiness ordains it. Nearness, farness. How long more would he stay? Yet there was hope, voiced hopes, like beacons in the dark. He would bring me to the sea-girt isles, I would meet those men who fished and drank, see their galleons, listen to them lusting for women on their nights away, the one in particular who said that when he had a head-cold his handkerchief resembled a starfish. Women and starfish and the Baltic nights. I would stay there, copulate, be his gilly, his sea cow. He carved his initials on the table, the mete-board. We did not talk about his wife, except on one point. I asked if she was blind from birth. I still don’t know. He said that in one of her dreams she turned him into Santa Claus and that he was dressed in a garish red. That gave me the impression that they were close, that they exchanged dreams in the morning when they first surfaced. In sleep he ground his teeth. He cried. He went to the travel bureau and confirmed his return booking.
There followed the letter – “I am slowly finding out that I am in love with you.” A long silence. The time when love burrows. He and his wife went south to take the sun. I headed for there. Impetuous those days and also I had saved a bit of cash. One morning in the land of Spain, after a torrent, and with the earth still upturned, and the terraces in a state of near collapse, I waited for him. It was a new hotel and they were plastering and doing last-minute things because it was due for inauguration within a week. The atmosphere was very hectic, with men pushing wheelbarrows, and men hammering and the scaffolding anything but sound, while outside, the gardeners with plastic cement sacks caped over their shoulders, planting petunias for the great day. So sweeping were the pools of water that the petunias moved away as on floats, not settling anywhere in particular, just ambling about in the water like crusts of balsa boats. There was a conference of musicians and one who rolled his pupils incessantly came to tell me that they had made an earth-shattering discovery, that Toscanini had the same wavelength as Bach. He was telling everyone, even the workers. I was afraid that his eyes would pop out of his head. The taxi driver came back wearing leggings, which means he popped in home on his way. I read a typed note – “My husband is away, he will be back perhaps next week, perhaps not.” It was signed with her Christian name, Tora. I wondered, who had read it out to her, who had transcribed? I wanted ridiculously to send her back something, a grain of sugar folded up in a tiny twirl of paper. So that was that.
In the unfinished dining-room there were only four guests, the waiter, two chess players and myself. I got drunk on rum. That used to be his drink. The waiter offered me the loan of a bath to sleep it off in, a sunken marble. I slept with a towel over me, dreamt, dreamt of a sea-shore with coloured canvas shoes laid out but adhering to a pattern that was both beautiful and eerie. I was barefooted in the dream, like Lil in her schooldays.
When the time came to waken me the old waiter splashed cold water all over my cheeks and smiled and stuck out his tongue. He had changed into a jacket, green velvet, neat little darns on it. I declined his kiss. He said I could not blame him for trying, I said “No blame, no blame, no.” There ought to be crèches where poor people can go when their glands ignite, just as there are wailing walls, and temples to chant in. At home in the night, there was an earthquake that came all the way from Gibraltar. It shook the foundations of the little villa that I’d been loaned, and the walls wept and the plywood doors swelled. I could not get out of the bedroom. I pulled, pushed, shoved and eventually had to bolt through the window. Up on the highway a lorry driver gave me a lift. He was a very corpulent driver with a wheeze. I knew that the Finn was somewhere, behind some window or wall of a ghastly urbanisation, reinstated in the arms of his blind wife. In the first lit-up town that we came to I jumped down and the lorry driver hooted at me for not having given him warning. At the airport I bought cultured pea
rls and soap in black crêpe-paper wrapping. It was a beautiful flight, ethereal up there, away from everything, the eddies of air, blue light, the clouds like down asking to be danced upon.
He wrote, some time later.
Impossible to see you
now – cannot leave
NEXT TIME
Always next time
Next time
next time
next time
Next time
is now last time,
I post this to you directly.
I answered it in one fell swoop.
“I sit here hating you. If I have said I loved you, dismiss it. When one sees the bright postcard happiness one spits on it, the puny possible has always belonged to others as indeed it does to you now. You have a wife, blind, blonde, you say, I hate her. I would tear her limb from limb as does the dog the bunny rabbit, and eat her, and presently vomit her, so as not to give her the satisfaction of my digestive juices. You came from her to me. You cur. I professed to love you. It was all lies, junk. That is my slavery, my gift for untruth, histrionic, rather like inheriting moles or an aquiline nose. Forget it, Buster.”
I picked up that slang in New York, where I once went to promote Coose. That was in my prime. Very laughable. My task was to lure the unfortunate exiles back to the Old Bog Road, the trout streams and the potlatch ceremonies. Met a police chief who told me straight out he was a gun-nut. He had four revolvers in his pocket, a six-footer, whose wife didn’t buggy whatever buggy is. They all said the same things – “Kiss my ass” and “Ohboyohboyohboy” and “Nope” and “Gawd” and “Poignant”. Most of the time I was plastered, from drinking new concoctions. Another nut with leaflets told me I wasn’t fit to be a rucksack on Bessie Smith’s ass. More ass. Neither was he. There were turkey sandwiches in all the delicatessens although it was nowhere near Christmas. I saw a sign in a lavatory which said, “I came into the world crying and I’ve been crying ever since.” It was signed Emily. It was done with very yellow excreta, fresh and mealy. When I came back to my table and told my escort – an advertising mogul – you’d think I’d given him a garland. He brightened and proceeded to tell me that when his wife had cancer of the brain, and his lady-love had cancer of the body, only then, filled as they were with tubes and physic, bound for death, only then could he fuck them at all. I must have smiled because he said what a nice smile I had, what a nice little curling lip, and he invited me home so that he could take pictures, for his album. All his family had ended up in incinerators. I baulked. I could feel a spot of cancer creeping into me like mist or verdigris and I am no one for being bed-ridden.
