The Love Object

by Edna O'Brien

  ‘And we have to stuff a goose too and get it on,’ Mrs Rodgers said, and went on to explain that the party was in honour of the local Customs and Excise Officer who was retiring because his wife won some money in the Sweep. Two thousand pounds. His wife lived thirty miles away at the far side of Limerick and he lodged in the Commercial Hotel from Monday to Friday, going home for the weekends.

  ‘There’s someone here expecting me,’ Mary said, trembling with the pleasure of being about to hear his name pronounced by someone else. She wondered which room was his, and if he was likely to be in at that moment. Already in imagination she had climbed the rickety stairs and knocked on the door, and heard him move around inside.

  ‘Expecting you!’ Mrs Rodgers said, and looked puzzled for a minute. ‘Oh, that lad from the slate quarry was inquiring about you, he said he saw you at a dance once. He’s as odd as two left shoes.’

  ‘What lad?’ Mary said, as she felt the joy leaking out of her heart.

  ‘Oh, what’s his name?’ Mrs Rodgers said, and then to the men with empty glasses who were shouting for her. ‘Oh all right, I’m coming.’

  Upstairs Doris and Eithne helped Mary move the heavy pieces of furniture. They dragged the sideboard across the landing and one of the castors tore the linoleum. She was expiring, because she had the heaviest end, the other two being at the same side. She felt that it was on purpose: they ate sweets without offering her one, and she caught them making faces at her dress. The dress worried her too in case anything should happen to it. If one of the lace threads caught in a splinter of wood, or on a porter barrel, she would have no business going home in the morning. They carried out a varnished bamboo whatnot, a small table, knick-knacks and a chamber-pot with no handle which held some withered hydrangeas. They smelt awful.

  ‘How much is the doggie in the window, the one with the waggledy tail?’ Doris O’Beirne sang to a white china dog and swore that there wasn’t ten pounds’ worth of furniture in the whole shibeen.

  ‘Are you leaving your curlers in, Dot, till it starts?’ Eithne Duggan asked her friend.

  ‘Oh def.,’ Doris O’Beirne said. She wore an assortment of curlers – white pipe-cleaners, metal clips, and pink, plastic rollers. Eithne had just taken hers out and her hair, dyed blonde, stood out, all frizzed and alarming. She reminded Mary of a moulting hen about to attempt flight. She was, God bless her, an unfortunate girl with a squint, jumbled teeth and almost no lips; like something put together hurriedly. That was the luck of the draw.

  ‘Take these,’ Doris O’Beirne said, handing Mary bunches of yellowed bills crammed on skewers.

  Do this! Do that! They ordered her around like a maid. She dusted the piano, top and sides, and the yellow and black keys; then the surround, and the wainscoting. The dust, thick on everything, had settled into a hard film because of the damp in that room. A party! She’d have been as well off at home, at least it was clean dirt attending to calves and pigs and the like.

  Doris and Eithne amused themselves, hitting notes on the piano at random and wandering from one mirror to the next. There were two mirrors in the parlour and one side of the folding fire-screen was a blotchy mirror too. The other two sides were of water-lilies painted on black cloth, but like everything else in the room it was old.

  ‘What’s that?’ Doris and Eithne asked each other, as they heard a hullabulloo downstairs. They rushed out to see what it was and Mary followed. Over the banisters they saw that a young bullock had got in the hall door and was slithering over the tiled floor, trying to find his way out again.

  ‘Don’t excite her, don’t excite her I tell ye,’ said the old, toothless man to the young boy who tried to drive the black bullock out. Two more boys were having a bet as to whether or not the bullock would do something on the floor when Mrs Rodgers came out and dropped a glass of porter. The beast backed out the way he’d come, shaking his head from side to side.

  Eithne and Doris clasped each other in laughter and then Doris drew back so that none of the boys would see her in her curling pins and call her names. Mary had gone back to the room, downcast. Wearily she pushed the chairs back against the wall and swept the linoleumed floor where they were later to dance.

  ‘She’s bawling in there,’ Eithne Duggan told her friend Doris. They had locked themselves into the bathroom with a bottle of cider.

  ‘God, she’s a right-looking eejit in the dress,’ Doris said. ‘And the length of it!’

  ‘It’s her mother’s,’ Eithne said. She had admired the dress before that, when Doris was out of the room, and had asked Mary where she bought it.

  ‘What’s she crying about?’ Doris wondered, aloud.

  ‘She thought some lad would be here. Do you remember that lad stayed here the summer before last and had a motor-cycle?’

  ‘He was a Jew,’ Doris said. ‘You could tell by his nose. God, she’d shake him in that dress, he’d think she was a scarecrow.’ She squeezed a blackhead on her chin, tightened a curling pin which had come loose and said, ‘Her hair isn’t natural either, you can see it’s curled.’

  ‘I hate that kind of black hair, it’s like a gipsy’s,’ Eithne said, drinking the last of the cider. They hid the bottle under the scoured bath.

  ‘Have a cachou, take the smell off your breath,’ Doris said as she hawed on the bathroom mirror and wondered if she would get off with that fellow O’Toole, from the slate quarry, who was coming to the party.

  In the front room Mary polished glasses. Tears ran down her cheeks so she did not put on the light. She foresaw how the party would be; they would all stand around and consume the goose, which was now simmering in the turf range. The men would be drunk, the girls giggling. Having eaten, they would dance, and sing, and tell ghost stories, and in the morning she would have to get up early and be home in time to milk. She moved towards the dark pane of window with a glass in her hand and looked out at the dirtied streets, remembering how once she had danced with John on the upper road to no music at all, just their hearts beating, and the sound of happiness.

  He came into their house for tea that summer’s day and on her father’s suggestion he lodged with them for four days, helping with the hay and oiling all the farm machinery for her father. He understood machinery. He put back doorknobs that had fallen off. Mary made his bed in the daytime and carried up a ewer of water from the rain-barrel every evening, so that he could wash. She washed the check shirt he wore, and that day, his bare back peeled in the sun. She put milk on it. It was his last day with them. After supper he proposed giving each of the grown-up children a ride on the motor-bicycle. Her turn came last, she felt that he had planned it that way, but it may have been that her brothers were more persistent about being first. She would never forget that ride. She warmed from head to foot in wonder and joy. He praised her as a good balancer and at odd moments he took one hand off the handlebar and gave her clasped hands a comforting pat. The sun went down, and the gorse flowers blazed yellow. They did not talk for miles; she had his stomach encased in the delicate and frantic grasp of a girl in love and no matter how far they rode they seemed always to be riding into a golden haze. He saw the lake at its most glorious. They got off at the bridge five miles away, and sat on the limestone wall, that was cushioned by moss and lichen. She took a tick out of his neck and touched the spot where the tick had drawn one pin-prick of blood; it was then they danced. A sound of larks and running water. The hay in the fields was lying green and ungathered, and the air was sweet with the smell of it. They danced.

  ‘Sweet Mary,’ he said, looking earnestly into her eyes. Her eyes were a greenish-brown. He confessed that he could not love her, because he already loved his wife and children, and anyhow he said, ‘You are too young and too innocent.’

  Next day, as he was leaving, he asked if he might send her something in the post, and it came eleven days later: a black-and-white drawing of her, very like her, except that the girl in the drawing was uglier.

  ‘A fat lot of good, that is,’ said h
er mother, who had been expecting a gold bracelet or a brooch. ‘That wouldn’t take you far.’

  They hung it on a nail in the kitchen for a while and then one day it fell down and someone (probably her mother) used it to sweep dust on to, ever since it was used for that purpose. Mary had wanted to keep it, to put it away in a trunk, but she was ashamed to. They were hard people, and it was only when someone died that they could give in to sentiment or crying.

  ‘Sweet Mary,’ he had said. He never wrote. Two summers passed, devil’s pokers flowered for two seasons, and thistle seed blew in the wind, the trees in the forestry were a foot higher. She had a feeling that he would come back, and a gnawing fear that he might not.

  ‘Oh it ain’t gonna rain no more, no more, it ain’t gonna rain no more; How in the hell can the old folks say it ain’t gonna rain no more.’

  So sang Brogan, whose party it was, in the upstairs room of the Commercial Hotel. Unbuttoning his brown waistcoat, he sat back and said what a fine spread it was. They had carried the goose up on a platter and it lay in the centre of the mahogany table with potato stuffing spilling out of it. There were sausages also and polished glasses rim downwards, and plates and forks for everyone.

  ‘A fork supper’ was how Mrs Rodgers described it. She had read about it in the paper; it was all the rage now in posh houses in Dublin, this fork supper where you stood up for your food and ate with a fork only. Mary had brought knives in case anyone got into difficulties.

  ‘’Tis America at home,’ Hickey said, putting turf on the smoking fire.

  The pub door was bolted downstairs, the shutters across, as the eight guests upstairs watched Mrs Rodgers carve the goose and then tear the loose pieces away with her fingers. Every so often she wiped her fingers on a tea-towel.

  ‘Here you are, Mary, give this to Mr Brogan, as he’s the guest of honour.’ Mr Brogan got a lot of breast and some crispy skin as well.

  ‘Don’t forget the sausages, Mary,’ Mrs Rodgers said. Mary had to do everything, pass the food around, serve the stuffing, ask people whether they wanted paper plates or china ones. Mrs Rodgers had bought paper plates, thinking they were sophisticated.

  ‘I could eat a young child,’ Hickey said.

  Mary was surprised that people in towns were so coarse and outspoken. When he squeezed her finger she did not smile at all. She wished that she were at home – she knew what they were doing at home; the boys at their lessons; her mother baking a cake of wholemeal bread, because there was never enough time during the day to bake; her father rolling cigarettes and talking to himself. John had taught him how to roll cigarettes, and every night since he rolled four and smoked four. He was a good man, her father, but dour. In another hour they’d be saying the Rosary at her house and going up to bed: the rhythm of their lives never changed, the fresh bread was always cool by morning.

  ‘Ten o’clock,’ Doris said, listening to the chimes of the landing clock.

  The party began late; the men were late getting back from the dogs in Limerick. They killed a pig on the way in their anxiety to get back quickly. The pig had been wandering around the road and the car came round the corner; it got run over instantly.

  ‘Never heard such a roarin’ in all me born days,’ Hickey said, reaching for a wing of goose, the choicest bit.

  ‘We should have brought it with us,’ O’Toole said. O’Toole worked in the slate quarry and knew nothing about pigs or farming; he was tall and thin and jagged. He had bright green eyes and a face like a greyhound; his hair was so gold that it looked dyed, but in fact it was bleached by the weather. No one had offered him any food.

  ‘A nice way to treat a man,’ he said.

  ‘God bless us, Mary, didn’t you give Mr O’Toole anything to eat yet?’ Mrs Rodgers said as she thumped Mary on the back to hurry her up. Mary brought him a large helping on a paper plate and he thanked her and said that they would dance later. To him she looked far prettier than those good-for-nothing towns-girls – she was tall and thin like himself; she had long black hair that some people might think streelish, but not him, he liked long hair and simple-minded girls; maybe later on he’d get her to go into one of the other rooms where they could do it. She had funny eyes when you looked into them, brown and deep, like a bloody bog-hole.

  ‘Have a wish,’ he said to her as he held the wishbone up. She wished that she were going to America on an aeroplane and on second thoughts she wished that she would win a lot of money and could buy her mother and father a house down near the main road.

  ‘Is that your brother the Bishop?’ Eithne Duggan, who knew well that it was, asked Mrs Rodgers, concerning the flaccid-faced cleric over the fireplace. Unknown to herself Mary had traced the letter J on the dust of the picture mirror, earlier on, and now they all seemed to be looking at it, knowing how it came to be there.

  ‘That’s him, poor Charlie.’ Mrs Rodgers said proudly, and was about to elaborate, but Brogan began to sing, unexpectedly.

  ‘Let the man sing, can’t you,’ O’Toole said, hushing two of the girls who were having a joke about the armchair they shared; the springs were hanging down underneath and the girls said that any minute the whole thing would collapse.

  Mary shivered in her lace dress. The air was cold and damp even though Hickey had got up a good fire. There hadn’t been a fire in that room since the day De Valera signed the autograph book. Steam issued from everything.

  O’Toole asked if any of the ladies would care to sing. There were five ladies in all – Mrs Rodgers, Mary, Doris, Eithne, and Crystal the local hairdresser, who had a new red rinse in her hair and who insisted that the food was a little heavy for her. The goose was greasy and undercooked, she did not like its raw, pink colour. She liked dainty things, little bits of cold chicken breast with sweet pickles. Her real name was Carmel, but when she started up as a hairdresser she changed to Crystal and dyed her brown hair red.

  ‘I bet you can sing,’ O’Toole said to Mary.

  ‘Where she comes from they can hardly talk,’ Doris said.

  Mary felt the blood rushing to her sallow cheeks. She would not tell them, but her father’s name had been in the paper once, because he had seen a pine-marten in the forestry plantation; and they ate with a knife and fork at home and had oil cloth on the kitchen table, and kept a tin of coffee in case strangers called.

  She would not tell them anything. She just hung her head, making clear that she was not about to sing.

  In honour of the Bishop, O’Toole put ‘Far away in Australia’ on the horn gramophone. Mrs Rodgers had asked for it. The sound issued forth with rasps and scratchings and Brogan said he could do better than that himself.

  ‘Christ, lads, we forgot the soup!’ Mrs Rodgers said suddenly, as she threw down the fork and went towards the door. There had been soup scheduled to begin with.

  ‘I’ll help you,’ Doris O’Beirne said, stirring herself for the first time that night, and they both went down to get the pot of dark giblet soup which had been simmering all that day.

  ‘Now we need two pounds from each of the gents,’ said O’Toole, taking the opportunity while Mrs Rodgers was away to mention the delicate matter of money. The men had agreed to pay two pounds each, to cover the cost of the drink; the ladies did not have to pay anything, but were invited so as to lend a pleasant and decorative atmosphere to the party, and, of course, to help.

  O’Toole went around with his cap held out, and Brogan said that as it was his party he ought to give a fiver.

  ‘I ought to give a fiver, but I suppose ye wouldn’t hear of that,’ Brogan said, and handed up two pound notes. Hickey paid up, too, and O’Toole himself and Long John Salmon – who was silent up to then. O’Toole gave it to Mrs Rodgers when she returned and told her to clock it up against the damages.

  ‘Sure that’s too kind altogether,’ she said, as she put it behind the stuffed owl on the mantelpiece, under the Bishop’s watchful eye.

  She served the soup in cups and Mary was asked to pass the cups around.
The grease floated like drops of molten gold on the surface of each cup.

  ‘See you later, alligator,’ Hickey said, as she gave him his; then he asked her for a piece of bread because he wasn’t used to soup without bread.

  ‘Tell us, Brogan,’ said Hickey to his rich friend, ‘what’ll you do, now that you’re a rich man?’

  ‘Oh go on, tell us,’ said Doris O’Beirne.

  ‘Well,’ said Brogan, thinking for a minute, ‘we’re going to make some changes at home.’ None of them had ever visited Brogan’s home because it was situated in Adare, thirty miles away, at the far side of Limerick. None of them had ever seen his wife either, who it seems lived there and kept bees.

  ‘What sort of changes?’ someone said.

  ‘We’re going to do up the drawing-room, and we’re going to have flower-beds,’ Brogan told them.

  ‘And what else?’ Crystal asked, thinking of all the lovely clothes she could buy with that money, clothes and jewellery.

  ‘Well,’ said Brogan, thinking again, ‘we might even go to Lourdes. I’m not sure yet, it all depends.’

  ‘I’d give my two eyes to go to Lourdes,’ Mrs Rodgers said.

  ‘And you’d get ’em back when you arrived there,’ Hickey said, but no one paid any attention to him.

  O’Toole poured out four half-tumblers of whiskey and then stood back to examine the glasses to see that each one had the same amount. There was always great anxiety among the men, about being fair with drink. Then O’Toole stood bottles of stout in little groups of six and told each man which group was his. The ladies had gin and orange.

  ‘Orange for me,’ Mary said, but O’Toole told her not to be such a goody, and when her back was turned he put gin in her orange.

  They drank a toast to Brogan.

  ‘To Lourdes,’ Mrs Rodgers said.

  ‘To Brogan,’ O’Toole said.

  ‘To myself,’ Hickey said.