The Love Object

by Edna O'Brien

  They went to Mass on Sunday, but it was obvious that Claire was not in the habit of going: they had to ask the way. Going in, her mother took a small liqueur bottle from her handbag and filled it with holy water from the font.

  ‘It’s always good to have it,’ she said to Claire, but in a bashful way. The outburst had severed them, and they were polite now in a way that should never have been.

  After Mass they went – because the mother had stated her wishes – to the waxworks museum, saw the Tower of London and walked across the park that faced Buckingham Palace.

  ‘Very good grazing here,’ the mother said. Her new shoes were getting spotted from the damp, highish grass. It was raining. The spokes of the mother’s umbrella kept tapping Claire’s, and no matter how far she drew away, the mother moved accordingly, to prong her, it seemed.

  ‘You know,’ the mother said. ‘I was thinking.’

  Claire knew what was coming. Her mother wanted to go home; she was worried about her husband, her fowls, the washing that would have piled up, the spring wheat that would have to be sown. In reality she was miserable. She and her daughter were farther away now than when they wrote letters each week and discussed the weather, or work, or the colds they’d had.

  ‘You’re only here six days,’ Claire said, ‘And I want to take you to the theatre and restaurants. Don’t go.’

  ‘I’ll think about it,’ the mother said. But her mind was made up.

  Two evenings later they waited in the airport lounge hesitant to speak, for fear they might miss the flight number.

  ‘The change did you good,’ Claire said. Her mother was togged out in new clothes and looked smarter. She had two more new hats in her hand, carrying them in the hope they would escape the notice of the customs men.

  ‘I’ll let you know if I have to pay duty on them,’ she said.

  ‘Do,’ Claire said, smiling, straightening her mother’s collar, wanting to say something endearing, something that would atone, without having to go over their differences, word for word.

  ‘No one can say but that you fitted me out well, look at all my style,’ the mother said smiling at her image in the glass door of the telephone box. ‘And our trip up the river,’ she said. ‘I think I enjoyed it more than anything.’ She was referring to a short trip they’d taken down the Thames to Westminster. They had planned to go in the opposite direction towards the greenness of Kew and Hampton Court but they’d left it – at least Claire had left it – too late and could only go towards the city on a passenger boat that was returning from those green places.

  Claire had been miserly with her time and on that particular evening she’d sat at her desk pretending to work, postponing the time until she got up and rejoined her mother, who was downstairs sewing on all the buttons that had fallen off over the years. And now the mother was thanking her, saying it had been lovely. Lovely. They had passed warehouses and cranes brought to their evening standstill yellow and tilted, pylons like floodlit honeycombs in the sky, and boats, and gasworks, and filthy chimneys. The spring evening had been drenched with sewerage smell and yet her mother went on being thankful.

  ‘I hope my mad lady won’t be aboard,’ the mother said, trying to make a joke out of it now.

  ‘Not likely,’ Claire said, but the mother declared that life was full of strange and sad coincidences. They looked at each other, looked away, criticized a man who was wolfing sandwiches from his pocket, looked at the airport clock and compared the time on their watches.

  ‘Sssh … sssh …’ Claire had to say.

  ‘That’s it,’ they both said then, relieved. As if they had secretly feared the flight number would never be called.

  At the barrier they kissed, their damp cheeks touched and stayed for a second like that, each registering the other’s sorrow.

  ‘I’ll write to you, I’ll write oftener,’ Claire said, and for a few minutes she stood there waving, weeping, not aware that the visit was over and that she could go back to her own life now, such as it was.

  Paradise

  IN THE HARBOUR WERE the four boats. A boat named after a country, a railroad, an emotion and a girl. She first saw them at sundown. Very beautiful they were and tranquil, white boats at a distance from each other, cosseting the harbour. On the far side a mountain. Lilac at that moment. It seemed to be made of collapsible substance so insubstantial was it. Between the boats and the mountain a lighthouse, on an island.

  Somebody said the light was not nearly so pretty as in the old days when the coastguard lived there and worked it by gas. It was automatic now and much brighter. Between them and the sea were four fields cultivated with fig trees. Dry yellow fields that seemed to be exhaling dust. No grass. She looked again at the four boats, the fields, the fig trees, the suave ocean, she looked at the house behind her and she thought, It can be mine, mine, and her heart gave a little somersault. He recognized her agitation and smiled. The house acted like a spell on all who came. He took her by the hand and led her up the main stairs. Stone stairs with a wobbly banister. The undersides of each step bright blue. ‘Stop,’ he said, where it got dark near the top, and before he switched on the light.

  A servant had unpacked for her. There were flowers in the room. They smelt of confectionery. In the bathroom a great glass urn filled with talcum powder. She leaned over the rim and inhaled. It caused her to sneeze three times. Ovaries of dark-purple soap had been taken out of their wrapping paper and for several minutes she held one in either hand. Yes. She had done the right thing in coming. She need not have feared, he needed her, his expression and their clasped hands already confirmed that.

  They sat on the terrace drinking a cocktail he had made. It was of rum and lemon and proved to be extremely potent. One of the guests said the angle of light on the mountain was at its most magnificent. He put his fingers to his lips and blew a kiss to the mountain. She counted the peaks, thirteen in all, with a plateau between the first four and the last nine.

  The peaks were close to the sky. Farther down on the face of the mountain various juts stuck out, and these made shadows on their neighbouring juts. She was told its name. At the same moment she overheard a question being put to a young woman, ‘Are you interested in Mary Queen of Scots?’ The woman whose skin had a beguiling radiance answered yes over-readily. It was possible that such a radiance was the result of constant supplies of male sperm. The man had a high pale forehead and a look of death.

  They drank. They smoked. All twelve smokers tossing the butts on to the tiled roof that sloped towards the farm buildings. Summer lightning started up. It was random and quiet and faintly theatrical. It seemed to be something devised for their amusement. It lit one part of the sky, then another. There were bats flying about also, and their dark shapes and the random gentle shots of summer lightning were a distraction, and gave them something to point to. ‘If I had a horse I’d call it Summer Lightning,’ one of the women said, and the man next to her said how charming. She knew she ought to speak. She wanted to. Both for his sake and for her own. Her mind would give a little leap and be still and would leap again, words were struggling to be set free, to say something, a little amusing something to establish her among them. But her tongue was tied. They would know her predecessors. They would compare her minutely, her appearance, her accent, the way he behaved with her. They would know better than she how important she was to him, if it were serious or just a passing notion. They had all read in the gossip columns how she came to meet him; how he had gone to have an X-ray and met her there, the radiographer in white, committed to a dark room and films showing lungs and pulmonary tracts.

  ‘Am I right in thinking you are to take swimming lessons?’ a man asked, choosing the moment when she had leaned right back and was staring up at a big pine tree.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, wishing that he had not been told.

  ‘There’s nothing to it, you just get in and swim,’ he said.

  How surprised they all were, surprised and amused. Asked where she ha
d lived and if it were really true.

  ‘Can’t imagine anyone not swimming as a child.’

  ‘Can’t imagine anyone not swimming, period.’

  ‘Nothing to it, you just fight, fight.’

  The sun filtered by the green needles fell and made play on the dense clusters of brown nuts. They never ridicule nature, she thought, they never dare. He came and stood behind her, his hand patting her bare pale shoulder. A man who was not holding a camera pretended to take a photograph of them. How long would she last, It would be uppermost in all their minds.

  ‘We’ll take you on the boat tomorrow,’ he said. They cooed. They all went to such pains, such excesses to describe the cruiser. They competed with each other to tell her. They were really telling him. She thought I should be honest, say I do not like the sea, say I am an inland person, that I like rain and roses in a field, thin rain and through it the roses and the vegetation, and that my sea is dark as the shells of mussels, and signifies catastrophe. But she couldn’t.

  ‘It must be wonderful,’ was what she said.

  ‘It’s quite, quite something,’ he said, shyly.

  At dinner she sat at one end of the egg-shaped table and he at the other. Six white candles in glass sconces separated them. The secretary had arranged the places. A fat woman on his right wore a lot of silver bracelets and was veiled in crepe. They had cold soup to start with. The garnishings were so finely chopped that it was impossible to identify each one except by its flavour. She slipped out of her shoes. A man describing his trip to India dwelt for an unnaturally long time on the disgustingness of the food. He had gone to see the temples. Another man, who was repeatedly trying to buoy them up, threw the question to the table at large: ‘Which of the Mediterranean ports is best to dock at?’ Everyone had a favourite. Some picked ports where exciting things had happened, some chose ports where the approach was most beguiling, harbour fees were compared as a matter of interest; the man who had asked the question amused them all with an account of a cruise he had made once with his young daughter and of how he was unable to land when they got to Venice because of inebriation. She had to admit that she did not know enough ports. They were touched by that confession.

  ‘We’re going to try them all,’ he said from the opposite end of the table, ‘and keep a log book.’ People looked from him to her and smiled, knowingly.

  That night behind closed shutters they enacted their rite. They were both impatient to get there. Long before the coffee had been brought they had moved away from the table and contrived to be alone, choosing the stone seat that girdled the big pine tree. The seat was smeared all over with the tree’s transparent gum. The nuts bobbing together made a dull clatter as of castanets. They sat for as long as courtesy required, then they retired. In bed she felt safe again, united to him not only by passion and by pleasure but by some more radical entanglement. She had no name for it, that puzzling emotion that was more than love, or perhaps less, that was not simply sexual although sex was vital to it and held it together like wires supporting a broken bowl. They both had had many breakages and therefore loved with a wary superstition.

  ‘What you do to me,’ he said. ‘How you know me, all my vibrations.’

  ‘I think we are connected underneath,’ she said, quietly. She often thought he hated her for implicating him in something too tender. But he was not hating her then.

  At length it was necessary to go back to her bedroom because he had promised to get up early to go spear-fishing with the men.

  As she kissed him good-bye she caught sight of herself in the chrome surface of the coffee flask which was on his bedside table – eyes emitting satisfaction and chagrin and panic were what stared back at her. Each time as she left him she expected not to see him again; each parting promised to be final.

  The men left soon after six, she heard car doors because she had been unable to sleep.

  In the morning she had her first swimming lesson. It was arranged that she would take it when the others sat down to breakfast. Her instructor had been brought from England. She asked if he’d slept well. She did not ask where. The servants disappeared from the house late at night and departed towards the settlement of low-roofed buildings. The dog went with them. The instructor told her to go backwards down the metal step ladder. There were wasps hovering about and she thought that if she were to get stung she could by-pass the lesson. No wasp obliged.

  Some children who had been swimming earlier had left their plastic toys – a yellow ring that craned into the neck and head of a duck. It was a duck with a thoroughly disgusted expression. There was as well a blue dolphin with a name painted on it and all kinds of battleships. They were the children of guests. The older ones, who were boys, took no notice of any of the adults and moved about, raucous and meddlesome, taking full advantage of every aspect of the place – at night they watched the lizards patiently and for hours, in the heat of the day they remained in the water, in the early morning they gathered almonds for which they received from him a harvesting fee. One black flipper lurked on the floor of the pool. She looked down at it and touched it with her toe. Those were her last unclaimed moments, those moments before the lesson began.

  The instructor told her to sit, to sit in it, as if it were a bath. He crouched and slowly she crouched too. ‘Now hold your nose and put your head under water,’ he said. She pulled the bathing cap well over her ears and forehead to protect her hair-style and with her nose gripped too tightly she went underneath. ‘Feel it?’ he said excitedly. ‘Feel the water holding you up?’ She felt no such thing. She felt the water smothering her. He told her to press the water from her eyes. He was gentleness itself. Then he dived in, swam a few strokes and stood up shaking the water from his grey hair. He took her hands, and walked backwards until they were at arm’s length. He asked her to lie on her stomach and give herself to it. He promised not to let go of her hands. Each time on the verge of doing so she stopped: first her body, then her mind refused. She felt that if she were to take her feet off the ground the unmentionable would happen. ‘What do I fear?’ she asked herself. ‘Death,’ she said, and yet it was not that. It was as if some horrible experiences would happen before her actual death. She thought perhaps it might be the fight she would put up.

  When she succeeded in stretching out for one desperate minute he proclaimed with joy. But that first lesson was a failure as far as she was concerned. Walking back to the house she realized it was a mistake to have allowed an instructor to be brought. It put too much emphasis on it. It would be incumbent upon her to conquer it. They would concern themselves with her progress, not because they cared, but like the summer lightning or the yachts going by it would be something to talk about. But she could not send the instructor home. He was an old man and he had never been abroad before. Already he was marvelling at the scenery. She had to go on with it. Going back to the terrace she was not sure of her feet on land, she was not sure of land itself; it seemed to sway, and her knees shook uncontrollably.

  When she sat down to breakfast she found that a saucer of almonds had been peeled for her. They were sweet and fresh, re-invoking the sweetness and freshness of a country morning. They tasted like hazelnuts. She said so. Nobody agreed. Nobody disagreed. Some were reading papers. Now and then someone read a piece aloud, some amusing piece about some acquaintance of theirs who had done a dizzy newsworthy thing. The children read the thermometer and argued about the pencilled shadow on the sun dial. The temperature was already in the eighties. The women were forming a plan to go on the speedboat to get their midriffs brown. She declined. He called her into the conservatory and said she might give some time to supervising the meals because the secretary had rather a lot to do.

  Passion flower leaves were stretched along the roof on lifelines of green cord. Each leaf like the five fingers of a hand. Green and yellow leaves on the same hand. No flowers. Flowers later. Flowers that would live a day. Or so the gardener had said. She said, ‘I hope we will be here to see one.’ �
��If you want, we will,’ he said, but of course he might take a notion and go. He never knew what he might do, no one knew.

  When she entered the vast kitchen the first thing the servants did was to smile. Women in black, with soft-soled shoes, all smiling, no complicity in any of those smiles. She had brought with her a phrase book, a notebook and an English cookery book. The kitchen was like a laboratory – various white machines stationed against the walls, refrigerators churtling at different speeds, a fan over each of the electric cookers, the red and green lights on the dials faintly menacing as if they were about to issue an alarm. There was a huge fish on the table. It had been speared that morning by the men. Its mouth was open; its eyes so close together that they barely missed being one eye; its lower lip gaped pathetically. The fins were black and matted with oil. They all stood and looked at it, she and the seven or eight willing women to whom she must make herself understood. When she sat to copy the recipe from the English book and translate it into their language they turned on another fan. Already they were chopping for the evening meal. Three young girls chopped onions, tomatoes and peppers. They seemed to take pleasure in their tasks, they seemed to smile into the mounds of vegetable that they so diligently chopped.

  There were eight picnic baskets to be taken on the boat. And armfuls of towels. The children begged to be allowed to carry the towels. He had the zip bag with the wine bottles. He shook the bag so that the bottles rattled in their surrounds of ice. The guests smiled. He had a way of drawing people into his mood without having to say or do much. Conversely he had a way of locking people out. Both things were mesmerizing. They crossed the four fields that led to the sea. The figs were hard and green. The sun played like a blowlamp upon her back and neck. He said that she would have to lather herself in sun-oil. It seemed oddly hostile, his saying it out loud like that, in front of the others. As they got nearer the water she felt her heart race. The water was all shimmer. Some swam out, some got in the rowing boat. Trailing her hand in the crinkled surface of the water she thought it is not cramp, jellyfish, or broken glass that I fear, it is something else. A ladder was dropped down at the side of the boat, for the swimmers to climb in from the sea. Sandals had to be kicked off as they stepped inside. The floor was of blond wood and burning hot. Swimmers had to have their feet inspected for tar marks. The boatman stood with a pad of cotton soaked in petrol ready to rub the marks. The men busied themselves – one helped to get the engine going, a couple put awnings up, others carried out large striped cushions, and scattered them under the awnings. Two boys refused to come on board.