by Edna O'Brien
‘Mud in your eye,’ said Doris O’Beirne, who was already unsteady from tippling cider.
‘Well we’re not sure about Lourdes,’ Brogan said. ‘But we’ll get the drawing-room done up anyhow, and the flower-beds put in.’
‘We’ve a drawing-room here,’ Mrs Rodgers said, ‘and no one ever sets foot in it.’
‘Come into the drawing-room, Doris,’ said O’Toole to Mary, who was serving the jelly from the big enamel basin. They’d had no china bowl to put it in. It was red jelly with whipped egg-white in it, but something went wrong because it hadn’t set properly. She served it in saucers, and thought to herself what a rough-and-ready party it was. There wasn’t a proper cloth on the table either, just a plastic one, and no napkins, and that big basin with the jelly in it. Maybe people washed in that basin, downstairs.
‘Well someone tell us a bloomin’ joke,’ said Hickey, who was getting fed up with talk about drawing-rooms and flower-beds.
‘I’ll tell you a joke,’ said Long John Salmon, erupting out of his silence.
‘Good,’ said Brogan, as he sipped from his whiskey glass and his stout glass alternately. It was the only way to drink enjoyably. That was why, in pubs, he’d be much happier if he could buy his own drink and not rely on anyone else’s meanness.
‘Is it a funny joke?’ Hickey asked of Long John Salmon.
‘It’s about my brother,’ said Long John Salmon, ‘my brother Patrick.’
‘Oh no, don’t tell us that old rambling thing again,’ said Hickey and O’Toole, together.
‘Oh let him tell it,’ said Mrs Rodgers who’d never heard the story anyhow.
Long John Salmon began, ‘I had this brother Patrick and he died; the heart wasn’t too good.’
‘Holy Christ, not this again,’ said Brogan, recollecting which story it was.
But Long John Salmon went on, undeterred by the abuse from the three men:
‘One day I was standing in the shed, about a month after he was buried, and I saw him coming out of the wall, walking across the yard.’
‘Oh what would you do if you saw a thing like that,’ Doris said to Eithne.
‘Let him tell it,’ Mrs Rodgers said. ‘Go on, Long John.’
‘Well it was walking toward me, and I said to myself, “What do I do now?”; ’twas raining heavy, so I said to say brother Patrick, “Stand in out of the wet or you’ll get drenched.” ’
‘And then?’ said one of the girls anxiously.
‘He vanished,’ said Long John Salmon.
‘Ah God, let us have a bit of music,’ said Hickey, who had heard that story nine or ten times. It had neither a beginning, a middle nor an end. They put a record on, and O’Toole asked Mary to dance. He did a lot of fancy steps and capering; and now and then he let out a mad ‘Yippee’. Brogan and Mrs Rodgers were dancing too and Crystal said that she’d dance if anyone asked her.
‘Come on, knees up Mother Brown,’ O’Toole said to Mary, as he jumped around the room, kicking the legs of chairs as he moved. She felt funny: her head was swaying round and round, and in the pit of her stomach there was a nice, ticklish feeling that made her want to lie back and stretch her legs. A new feeling that frightened her.
‘Come into the drawing-room, Doris,’ he said, dancing her right out of the room and into the cold passage where he kissed her clumsily.
Inside Crystal O’Meara had begun to cry. That was how drink affected her; either she cried or talked in a foreign accent and said, ‘Why am I talking in a foreign accent?’
This time she cried.
‘Hickey, there is no joy in life,’ she said as she sat at the table with her head laid in her arms and her blouse slipping up out of her skirtband.
‘What joy?’ said Hickey, who had all the drink he needed, and a pound note which he slipped from behind the owl when no one was looking.
Doris and Eithne sat on either side of Long John Salmon, asking if they could go out next year when the sugar plums were ripe. Long John Salmon lived by himself, way up the country, and he had a big orchard. He was odd and silent in himself; he took a swim every day, winter and summer, in the river, at the back of his house.
‘Two old married people,’ Brogan said, as he put his arm round Mrs Rodgers and urged her to sit down because he was out of breath from dancing. He said he’d go away with happy memories of them all, and sitting down he drew her on to his lap. She was a heavy woman, with straggly brown hair that had once been a nut colour.
‘There is no joy in life,’ Crystal sobbed, as the gramophone made crackling noises and Mary ran in from the landing, away from O’Toole.
‘I mean business,’ O’Toole said, and winked.
O’Toole was the first to get quarrelsome.
‘Now ladies, now gentlemen, a little laughing sketch, are we ready?’ he asked.
‘Fire ahead,’ Hickey told him.
‘Well, there was these three lads, Paddy th’Irishman, Paddy th’Englishman, and Paddy the Scotsman, and they were badly in need of a …’
‘Now, no smut,’ Mrs Rodgers snapped, before he had uttered a wrong word at all.
‘What smut?’ said O’Toole, getting offended.’ Smut!’ And he asked her to explain an accusation like that.
‘Think of the girls,’ Mrs Rodgers said.
‘Girls,’ O’Toole sneered, as he picked up the bottle of cream – which they’d forgotten to use with the jelly – and poured it into the carcass of the ravaged goose.
‘Christ’s sake, man,’ Hickey said, taking the bottle of cream out of O’Toole’s hand.
Mrs Rodgers said that it was high time everyone went to bed, as the party seemed to be over.
The guests would spend the night in the Commercial. It was too late for them to go home anyhow, and also Mrs Rodgers did not want them to be observed staggering out of the house at that hour. The police watched her like hawks and she didn’t want any trouble, until Christmas was over at least. The sleeping arrangements had been decided earlier on – there were three bedrooms vacant. One was Brogan’s, the room he always slept in. The other three men were to pitch in together in the second big bedroom, and the girls were to share the back room with Mrs Rodgers herself.
‘Come on, everyone, blanket street,’ Mrs Rodgers said, as she put a guard in front of the dying fire and took the money from behind the owl.
‘Sugar you,’ O’Toole said, pouring stout now into the carcass of the goose, and Long John Salmon wished that he had never come. He thought of daylight and of his swim in the mountain river at the back of his grey, stone house.
‘Ablution,’ he said, aloud, taking pleasure in the word and in thought of the cold water touching him. He could do without people, people were waste. He remembered catkins on a tree outside his window, catkins in February as white as snow; who needed people?
‘Crystal, stir yourself,’ Hickey said, as he put on her shoes and patted the calves of her legs.
Brogan kissed the four girls and saw them across the landing to the bedroom. Mary was glad to escape without O’Toole noticing; he was very obstreperous and Hickey was trying to control him.
In the bedroom she sighed; she had forgotten all about the furniture being pitched in there. Wearily they began to unload the things. The room was so crammed that they could hardly move in it. Mary suddenly felt alert and frightened, because O’Toole could be heard yelling and singing out on the landing. There had been gin in her orangeade, she knew now, because she breathed closely on to the palm of her hand and smelt her own breath. She had broken her Confirmation pledge, broken her promise; it would bring her bad luck.
Mrs Rodgers came in and said that five of them would be too crushed in the bed, so that she herself would sleep on the sofa for one night.
‘Two of you at the top and two at the bottom,’ she said, as she warned them not to break any of the ornaments, and not to stay talking all night.
‘Night and God bless,’ she said, as she shut the door behind her.
‘Nice thing,’ said Doris
O’Beirne, ‘bunging us all in here; I wonder where she’s off to?’
‘Will you loan me curlers?’ Crystal asked. To Crystal, hair was the most important thing on earth. She would never get married because you couldn’t wear curlers in bed then. Eithne Duggan said she wouldn’t put curlers in now if she got five million for doing it, she was that jaded. She threw herself down on the quilt and spread her arms out. She was a noisy, sweaty girl but Mary liked her better than the other two.
‘Ah me old segotums,’ O’Toole said, pushing their door in. The girls exclaimed and asked him to go out at once as they were preparing for bed.
‘Come into the drawing-room, Doris.’ he said to Mary, and curled his forefinger at her. He was drunk and couldn’t focus her properly but he knew that she was standing there somewhere.
‘Go to bed, you’re drunk,’ Doris O’Beirne said, and he stood very upright for an instant and asked her to speak for herself.
‘Go to bed, Michael, you’re tired,’ Mary said to him. She tried to sound calm because he looked so wild.
‘Come into the drawing-room, I tell you,’ he said, as he caught her wrist and dragged her towards the door. She let out a cry, and Eithne Duggan said she’d brain him if he didn’t leave the girl alone.
‘Give me that flower-pot, Doris,’ Eithne Duggan called, and then Mary began to cry in case there might be a scene. She hated scenes. Once she heard her father and a neighbour having a row about boundary rights and she’d never forgotten it; they had both been a bit drunk, after a fair.
‘Are you cracked or are you mad?’ O’Toole said, when he perceived that she was crying.
‘I’ll give you two seconds,’ Eithne warned, as she held the flower-pot high, ready to throw it at O’Toole’s stupefied face.
‘You’re a nice bunch of hard-faced aul crows, crows,’ he said. ‘Wouldn’t give a man a squeeze,’ and he went out cursing each one of them. They shut the door very quickly and dragged the sideboard in front of the door so that he could not break in when they were asleep.
They got into bed in their underwear; Mary and Eithne at one end with Crystal’s feet between their faces.
‘You have lovely hair,’ Eithne whispered to Mary. It was the nicest thing she could think of to say. They each said their prayers, and shook hands under the covers and settled down to sleep.
‘Hey,’ Doris O’Beirne said a few seconds later, ‘I never went to the lav.’
‘You can’t go now,’ Eithne said, ‘the sideboard’s in front of the door.’
‘I’ll die if I don’t go,’ Doris O’Beirne said.
‘And me, too, after all that orange we drank,’ Crystal said. Mary was shocked that they could talk like that. At home you never spoke of such a thing, you just went out behind the hedge and that was that. Once a workman saw her squatting down and from that day she never talked to him, or acknowledged that she knew him.
‘Maybe we could use that old pot,’ Doris O’Beirne said, and Eithne Duggan sat up and said that if anyone used a pot in that room she wasn’t going to sleep there.
‘We have to use something,’ Doris said. By now she had got up and had switched on the light. She held the pot up to the naked bulb and saw what looked to be a hole in it.
‘Try it,’ Crystal said, giggling.
They heard feet on the landing and then the sound of choking and coughing, and later O’Toole cursing and swearing and hitting the wall with his fist. Mary curled down under the clothes, thankful for the company of the girls. They stopped talking.
‘I was at a party. Now I know what parties are like,’ Mary said to herself, as she tried to force herself asleep. She heard a sound as of water running, but it did not seem to be raining outside. Later, she dozed, but at daybreak she heard the hall door bang, and she sat up in bed abruptly. She had to be home early to milk, so she got up, took her shoes and her lace dress, and let herself out by dragging the sideboard forward, and opening the door slightly.
There were newspapers spread on the landing floor and in the lavatory, and a heavy smell pervaded. Downstairs, porter had flowed out of the bar into the hall. It was probably O’Toole who had turned on the taps of the five porter barrels, and the stone-floored bar and sunken passage outside was swimming with black porter. Mrs Rodgers would kill somebody. Mary put on her high-heeled shoes and picked her steps carefully across the room to the door. She left without even making a cup of tea.
She wheeled her bicycle down the alley and into the street. The front tyre was dead flat. She pumped for a half-an-hour but it remained flat.
The frost lay like a spell upon the street, upon the sleeping windows, and the slate roofs of the narrow houses. It had magically made the dunged street white and clean. She did not feel tired, but relieved to be out, and stunned by lack of sleep she inhaled the beauty of the morning. She walked briskly, sometimes looking back to see the track which her bicycle and her feet made on the white road.
Mrs Rodgers wakened at eight and stumbled out in her big nightgown from Brogan’s warm bed. She smelt disaster instantly and hurried downstairs to find the porter in the bar and the hall; then she ran to call the others.
‘Porter all over the place; every drop of drink in the house is on the floor – Mary Mother of God help me in my tribulation! Get up, get up.’ She rapped on their door and called the girls by name.
The girls rubbed their sleepy eyes, yawned, and sat up.
‘She’s gone,’ Eithne said, looking at the place on the pillow where Mary’s head had been.
‘Oh, a sneaky country one,’ Doris said, as she got into her taffeta dress and went down to see the flood. ‘If I have to clean that, in my good clothes, I’ll die,’ she said. But Mrs Rodgers had already brought brushes and pails and got to work. They opened the bar door and began to bail the porter into the street. Dogs came to lap it up, and Hickey, who had by then come down, stood and said what a crying shame it was, to waste all that drink. Outside it washed away an area of frost and revealed the dung of yesterday’s fair day. O’Toole the culprit had fled since the night; Long John Salmon was gone for his swim, and upstairs in bed Brogan snuggled down for a last-minute warm and deliberated on the joys that he would miss when he left the Commercial for good.
‘And where’s my lady with the lace dress?’ Hickey asked, recalling very little of Mary’s face, but distinctly remembering the sleeves of her black dress which dipped into the plates.
‘Sneaked off, before we were up,’ Doris said. They all agreed that Mary was no bloody use and should never have been asked.
‘And ’twas she set O’Toole mad, egging him on and then disappointing him,’ Doris said, and Mrs Rodgers swore that O’Toole, or Mary’s father, or someone, would pay dear for the wasted drink.
‘I suppose she’s home by now,’ Hickey said, as he rooted in his pocket for a butt. He had a new packet, but if he produced that they’d all be puffing away at his expense.
Mary was half-a-mile from home, sitting on a bank.
If only I had a sweetheart, something to hold on to; she thought, as she cracked some ice with her high heel and watched the crazy splintered pattern it made. The poor birds could get no food as the ground was frozen hard. Frost was general all over Ireland; frost like a weird blossom on the branches, on the river-bank from which Long John Salmon leaped in his great, hairy nakedness, on the ploughs left out all winter; frost on the stony fields, and on all the slime and ugliness of the world.
Walking again she wondered if and what she would tell her mother and her brothers about it, and if all parties were as bad. She was at the top of the hill now, and could see her own house, like a little white box at the end of the world, waiting to receive her.
Cords
EVERYTHING WAS READY, THE suitcase closed, her black velvet coat-collar carefully brushed, and a list pinned to the wall reminding her husband when to feed the hens and turkeys, and what foodstuffs to give them. She was setting out on a visit to her daughter Claire in London, just like any mother, except that her
daughter was different: she’d lost her faith, and she mixed with queer people and wrote poems. If it was stories one could detect the sin in them, but these poems made no sense at all and therefore seemed more wicked. Her daughter had sent the money for the air-ticket. She was going now, kissing her husband goodbye, tender towards him in a way that she never was, throughout each day, as he spent his time looking through the window at the wet currant bushes, grumbling about the rain, but was in fact pleased at the excuse to hatch indoors, and asked for tea all the time, which he lapped from a saucer, because it was more pleasurable.
‘The turkeys are the most important,’ she said, kissing him good-bye, and thinking faraway to the following Christmas, to the turkeys she would sell, and the plumper ones she would give as gifts.
‘I hope you have a safe flight,’ he said. She’d never flown before.
‘All Irish planes are blessed, they never crash,’ she said, believing totally in the God that created her, sent her this venial husband, a largish farmhouse, hens, hardship, and one daughter who’d changed, become moody, and grown away from them completely.
The journey was pleasant once she’d got over the shock of being strapped down for the take-off. As they went higher and higher she looked out at the very white, wispish cloud and thought of the wash tub and hoped her husband would remember to change his shirt while she was away. The trip would have been perfect but that there was a screaming woman who had to be calmed down by the air hostess. She looked like a woman who was being sent to a mental institution, but did not know it.
Claire met her mother at the airport and they kissed warmly, not having seen each other for over a year.
‘Have you stones in it?’ Claire said, taking the fibre suitcase. It was doubly secured with a new piece of binding twine. Her mother wore a black straw hat with clusters of cherries on both sides of the brim.
‘You were great to meet me,’ the mother said.
‘Of course I’d meet you,’ Claire said, easing her mother right back on the taxi seat. It was a long ride, and they might as well be comfortable.
