by Edna O'Brien
‘I could have navigated,’ the mother said, and Claire said nonsense a little too brusquely. Then to make amends she asked gently how the journey was.
‘Oh I must tell you, there was this very peculiar woman and she was screaming.’
Claire listened and stiffened, remembering her mother’s voice that became low and dramatic in a crisis, the same voice that said, ‘Sweet Lord your father will kill us’, or, ‘What’s to become of us, the bailiff is here’, or, ‘Look, look, the chimney is on fire.’
‘But otherwise?’ Claire said. This was a holiday, not an expedition into the past.
‘We had tea and sandwiches. I couldn’t eat mine, the bread was buttered.’
‘Still faddy?’ Claire said. Her mother got bilious if she touched butter, fish, olive oil, or eggs; although her daily diet was mutton stew, or home-cured bacon.
‘Anyhow, I have nice things for you,’ Claire said. She had bought in stocks of biscuits, jellies and preserves because these were the things her mother favoured, these foods that she herself found distasteful.
The first evening passed well enough. The mother unpacked the presents – a chicken, bread, eggs, a tapestry of a church spire which she’d done all winter, stitching at it until she was almost blind, a holy water font, ashtrays made from shells, lamps converted from bottles, and a picture of a matador assembled by sticking small varnished pebbles on to hardboard.
Claire laid them along the mantelshelf in the kitchen, and stood back, not so much to admire them as to see how incongruous they looked, piled together.
‘Thank you,’ she said to her mother, as tenderly as she might have when she was a child. These gifts touched her, especially the tapestry, although it was ugly. She thought of the winter nights and the Aladdin lamp smoking (they expected the electricity to be installed soon), and her mother hunched over her work, not even using a thimble to ease the needle through, because she believed in sacrifice, and her father turning to say, ‘Could I borrow your glasses, Mam, I want to have a look at the paper?’ He was too lazy to have his own eyes tested and believed that his wife’s glasses were just as good. She could picture them at the fire night after night, the turf flames green and fitful, the hens locked up, foxes prowling around in the wind, outside.
‘I’m glad you like it, I did it specially for you,’ the mother said gravely, and they both stood with tears in their eyes, savouring those seconds of tenderness, knowing that it would be short-lived.
‘You’ll stay seventeen days,’ Claire said, because that was the length an economy ticket allowed. She really meant, ‘Are you staying seventeen days?’
‘If it’s all right,’ her mother said over-humbly. ‘I don’t see you that often, and I miss you.’
Claire withdrew into the scullery to put on the kettle for her mother’s hot water bottle; she did not want any disclosures now, any declaration about how hard life had been and how near they’d been to death during many of the father’s drinking deliriums.
‘Your father sent you his love,’ her mother said, nettled because Claire had not asked how he was.
‘How is he?’
‘He’s great now, never touches a drop.’
Claire knew that if he had, he would have descended on her, the way he used to descend on her as a child when she was in the convent, or else she would have had a telegram, of clipped urgency, ‘Come home. Mother.’
‘It was God did it, curing him like that,’ the mother said.
Claire thought bitterly that God had taken too long to help the thin frustrated man who was emaciated, crazed and bankrupted by drink. But she said nothing, she merely filled the rubber bottle, pressed the air from it with her arm, and then conducted her mother upstairs to bed.
Next morning they went up to the centre of London and Claire presented her mother with fifty pounds. The woman got flushed and began to shake her head, the quick uncontrolled movements resembling those of a beast with the staggers.
‘You always had a good heart, too good,’ she said to her daughter, as her eyes beheld racks of coats, raincoats, skirts on spinning hangers, and all kinds and colours of hats.
‘Try some on,’ Claire said. ‘I have to make a phone call.’
There were guests due to visit her that night – it had been arranged weeks before – but as they were bohemian people, she could not see her mother suffering them, or them suffering her mother. There was the added complication that they were a ‘trio’ – one man and two women; his wife and his mistress. At that point in their lives the wife was noticeably pregnant.
On the telephone the mistress said they were looking forward, awfully, to the night, and Claire heard herself substantiate the invitation by saying she had simply rung up to remind them. She thought of asking another man to give a complexion of decency to the evening, but the only three unattached men she could think of had been lovers of hers and she could not call on them; it seemed pathetic.
‘Damn,’ she said, irritated by many things, but mainly by the fact that she was going through one of those bleak, loveless patches that come in everyone’s life, but, she imagined, came more frequently the older one got. She was twenty-eight. Soon she would be thirty. Withering.
‘How do?’ her mother said in a ridiculous voice when Claire returned. She was holding a hand mirror up to get a back view of a ridiculous hat, which she had tried on. It resembled the shiny straw she wore for her trip, except that it was more ornamental and cost ten guineas. That was the second point about it that Claire noted. The white price tag was hanging over the mother’s nose. Claire hated shopping the way other people might hate going to the dentist. For herself she never shopped. She merely saw things in windows, ascertained the size, and bought them.
‘Am I too old for it?’ the mother said. A loaded question in itself.
‘You’re not,’ Claire said. ‘You look well in it.’
‘Of course I’ve always loved hats,’ her mother said, as if admitting to some secret vice. Claire remembered drawers with felt hats laid into them, and bobbins on the brims of hats, and little aprons of veiling, with spots which, as a child, she thought might crawl over the wearer’s face.
‘Yes, I remember your hats,’ Claire said, remembering too the smell of empty perfume bottles and camphor, and a saxe-blue hat that her mother once got on approbation, by post, and wore to Mass before returning it to the shop.
‘If you like it, take it,’ Claire said indulgently.
The mother bought it, along with a reversible raincoat and a pair of shoes. She told the assistant who measured her feet about a pair of shoes which lasted her for seventeen years, and were eventually stolen by a tinker-woman, who afterwards was sent to jail for the theft.
‘Poor old creature I wouldn’t have wished jail on her,’ the mother said, and Claire nudged her to shut up. The mother’s face flushed under the shelter of her new, wide-brimmed hat.
‘Did I say something wrong?’ she said as she descended uneasily on the escalator, her parcels held close to her.
‘No, I just thought she was busy, it isn’t like shops at home,’ Claire said.
‘I think she was enjoying the story,’ her mother said, gathering courage before she stepped off, on to the ground floor.
At home they prepared the food and the mother tidied the front room before the visitors arrived. Without a word she carried all her own trophies – the tapestry, the pebble picture, the ashtrays, the holy water font and the other ornaments – and put them in the front room alongside the books, the pencil drawings and the poster of Bengal that was a left-over from Claire’s dark-skinned lover.
‘They’re nicer in here,’ the mother said, apologizing/ for doing it, and at the same time criticizing the drawing of the nude.
‘I’d get rid of some of those things if I were you,’ she said in a serious tone to her daughter.
Claire kept silent, and sipped the whisky she felt she needed badly. Then to get off the subject she asked after her mother’s feet. They were fixing a chiropodist appointment
for the next day.
The mother had changed into a blue blouse, Claire into velvet pants, and they sat before the fire on low pouffes with a blue-shaded lamp casting a restful light on their very similar faces. At sixty, and made-up, the mother still had a poem of a face: round, pale, perfect and with soft eyes, expectant, in spite of what life had brought. On the whites there had appeared blobs of green, the sad green of old age.
‘You have a tea-leaf on your eyelid,’ she said to Claire, putting up her hand to brush it away. It was mascara which got so smeared that Claire had to go upstairs to repair it.
At that precise moment the visitors came.
‘They’re here,’ the mother said when the hall bell shrieked.
‘Open the door,’ Claire called down.
‘Won’t it look odd, if you don’t do it?’ the mother said.
‘Oh, open it,’ Claire called impatiently. She was quite relieved that they would have to muddle through their own set of introductions.
The dinner went off well. They all liked the food and the mother was not as shy as Claire expected. She told about her journey, but kept the ‘mad woman’ episode out of it, and about a television, programme she’d once seen, showing how bird’s nest soup was collected. Only her voice was unnatural.
After dinner Claire gave her guests enormous brandies, because she felt relieved that nothing disastrous had been uttered. Her mother never drank spirits of course.
The fulfilled guests sat back, sniffed brandy, drank their coffee, laughed, tipped their cigarette ash on the floor, having missed the ashtray by a hair’s breadth, gossiped, and re-filled their glasses. They smiled at the various new ornaments but did not comment, except to say that the tapestry was nice.
‘Claire likes it,’ the mother said timidly, drawing them into another silence. The evening was punctuated by brief but crushing silences.
‘You like Chinese food then?’ the husband said. He mentioned a restaurant which she ought to go and see. It was in the East End of London and getting there entailed having a motor-car.
‘You’ve been there?’ his wife said to the young blonde mistress who had hardly spoken.
‘Yes and it was super except for the pork which was drowned in Chanel Number Five. Remember?’ she said, turning to the husband, who nodded.
‘We must go some time,’ his wife said. ‘If ever you can spare an evening.’ She was staring at the big brandy snifter that she let rock back and forth in her lap. It was for rose petals but when she saw it she insisted on drinking from it. The petals were already dying on the mantelshelf.
‘That was the night we found a man against a wall, beaten up,’ the mistress said, shivering, recalling how she had actually shivered.
‘You were so sorry for him,’ the husband said, amused.
‘Wouldn’t anyone be?’ the wife said tartly, and Claire turned to her mother and promised that they would go to that restaurant the following evening.
‘We’ll see,’ the mother said. She knew the places she wanted to visit: Buckingham Palace, the tower of London and the waxworks museum. When she went home it was these places she would discuss with her neighbours who’d already been to London, not some seamy place where men were flung against walls.
‘No, not another, it’s not good for the baby,’ the husband said, as his wife balanced her empty glass on the palm of her hand and looked towards the bottle.
‘Who’s the more important, me or the baby?’
‘Don’t be silly, Marigold,’ the husband said.
‘Excuse me,’ she said in a changed voice. ‘Whose welfare are you thinking about?’ She was on the verge of an emotional outburst, her cheeks flushed from brandy and umbrage. By contrast Claire’s mother had the appearance of a tombstone, chalk white, and deadly still.
‘How is the fire?’ Claire said, staring at it. On that cue her mother jumped up and sailed off with the coal scuttle.
‘I’ll get it,’ Claire said following. The mother did not even wait until they reached the kitchen.
‘Tell me,’ she said, her blue eyes pierced with insult, ‘which of those two ladies is he married to?’
‘It’s not your concern,’ Claire said, hastily. She had meant to smooth it over, to say that the pregnant woman had some mental disturbance, but instead she said hurtful things about her mother being narrow-minded and cruel.
‘Show me your friends and I know who you are,’ the mother said and went away to shovel the coal. She left the filled bucket outside the living-room door and went upstairs. Claire, who had gone back to her guests, heard the mother’s footsteps climbing the stairs and going into the bedroom overhead.
‘Is your mother gone to bed?’ the husband asked.
‘She’s tired I expect,’ Claire said, conveying weariness too. She wanted them to go. She could not confide in them even though they were old friends. They might sneer. They were not friends any more than the ex-lovers, they were all social appendages, extras, acquaintances cultivated in order to be able to say to other acquaintances, ‘Well one night a bunch of us went mad and had a nude sit-in …’ There was no one she trusted, no one she could produce for her mother and feel happy about it.
‘Music, brandy, cigarettes …’ They were recalling her, voicing their needs, wondering who would go to the machine for the cigarettes. Pauline did. They stayed until they’d finished the packet, which was well after midnight.
Claire hurried to her mother’s room and found her awake with the light on, fingering her horn rosary beads. The same old black ones.
‘I’m sorry,’ Claire said.
‘You turned on me like a tinker,’ her mother said, in a voice cracked with emotion.
‘I didn’t mean to,’ Claire said. She tried to sound reasonable, assured; she tried to tell her mother that the world was a big place and contained many people, all of whom held various views about various things.
‘They’re not sincere,’ her mother said, stressing the last word.
‘And who is?’ Claire said, remembering the treacherous way the lovers vanished, or how former landladies rigged meters so that units of electricity cost double. Her mother had no notion of how lonely it was to read manuscripts all day, and write a poem once in a while, when one became consumed with a memory or an idea, and then to constantly go out, seeking people, hoping that one of them might fit, might know the shorthand of her, body and soul.
‘I was a good mother, I did everything I could, and this is all the thanks I get.’ It was spoken with such justification that Claire turned and laughed, hysterically. An incident leaped to her tongue, something she had never recalled before.
‘You went to hospital,’ she said to her mother, ‘to have your toe lanced, and you came home and told me, me, that the doctor said, “Raise your right arm until I give you an injection”, but when you did, he gave you no injection, he just cut into your toe. Why did you tell it?’ The words fell out of her mouth unexpectedly, and she became aware of the awfulness when she felt her knees shaking.
‘What are you talking about?’ her mother said numbly. The face that was round, in the evening, had become old, twisted, bitter.
‘Nothing,’ Claire said. Impossible to explain. She had violated all the rules: decency, kindness, caution. She would never be able to laugh it off in the morning. Muttering an apology she went to her own room and sat on her bed, trembling. Since her mother’s arrival every detail of her childhood kept dogging her. Her present life, her work, the friends she had, seemed insubstantial compared with all that had happened before. She could count the various batches of white, hissing geese – it was geese in those days – that wandered over the swampy fields, one year after another, hid in memory she could locate the pot-holes on the driveway where rain lodged, and where leaking oil from a passing car made rainbows. Looking down into rainbows to escape the colour that was in her mind, or on her tongue. She’d licked four fingers once that were slit by an unexpected razor blade which was wedged upright in a shelf where she’d reached to fin
d a sweet, or to finger the secret dust up there. The same colour had been on her mother’s violated toe underneath the big, bulky bandage. In chapel too, the sanctuary light was a bowl of blood with a flame laid into it. These images did not distress her at the time. She used to love to slip into the chapel, alone, in the daytime, moving from one Station of the Cross to the next, being God’s exclusive pet, praying that she would die before her mother did, in order to escape being the scapegoat of her father. How could she have known, how could any of them have known that twenty years later, zipped into a heated, plastic tent, treating herself to a steam bath she would suddenly panic and cry out convinced that her sweat became as drops of blood. She put her hands through the flaps and begged the masseuse to protect her, the way she had begged her mother, long ago. Made a fool of herself. The way she made a fool of herself with the various men. The first night she met the Indian she was wearing a white fox collar, and its whiteness under his dark, well-chiselled chin made a stark sight as they walked through a mirrored room to a table, and saw, and were seen in mirrors. He said something she couldn’t hear.
‘Tell me later,’ she said, already putting her little claim on him, already saying. ‘You are not going to abandon me in this room of mirrors, in my bluish-white fox that so compliments your bluish-black lips.’ But after a few weeks he left, like the others. She was familiar with the various tactics of withdrawal – abrupt, honest, nice. Flowers, notes posted from the provinces, and the ‘I don’t want you to get hurt’ refrain. They reminded her of the trails that slugs leave on a lawn in summer mornings, the sad, silver trails of departure. Their goings were far more vivid than their comings, or was she only capable of remembering the worst? Remembering everything, solving nothing. She undressed, she told herself that her four fingers had healed, that her mother’s big toe was now like any other person’s big toe, that her father drank tea and held his temper, and that one day she would meet a man whom she loved and did not frighten away. But it was brandy optimism. She’d gone down and carried the bottle up. The brandy gave her hope but it disturbed her heart beats and she was unable to sleep. As morning approached she rehearsed the sweet and conciliatory things she would say to her mother.
