by Edna O'Brien
“Chrissake, go in,” Baba said. She was walking behind me, dragging the big suitcase across the concrete. She hit the back of my leg with the case and I knocked on the door. Molly let us in. She was a little cold. They must have told her not to be friendly.
Mr. Brennan and Martha and my father were in the breakfast room. I didn’t look at any of them directly but I saw that Martha was uneasy. She had a handkerchief in her hand and it was shaking.
“A nice thing. You filthy little—” my father said, coming forward. He was trying to think of a word bad enough to describe me. He had his hand raised, as if he was going to strike me.
“I hate you,” I said suddenly and vehemently.
“You stinking little foul-mouth,” and he struck me a terrific blow. I fell and hit my head on the edge of the china cabinet, and cups rattled inside in it. My cheek was smarting from the blow.
Mr. Brennan rushed across the room and drew up his sleeves.
“Leave her alone,” he said, but my father was about to strike me again.
“Take your hands off her,” Mr. Brennan shouted, as he tried to pull my father away. I stood up, and edged over toward Martha.
“I’ll do what I like to her,” my father threatened. He was in a raging temper, and I could see him grind his false teeth. He tried to pursue me, but Mr. Brennan caught him by the shoulders and led him to the door.
“Get to hell out of here,” he said.
“You can’t do this to me,” my father protested.
“Can’t I!” said Mr. Brennan, as he reached for my father’s brown hat and placed it sideways on his head.
“I tell you, you won’t get away with this,” my father said, but Mr. Brennan chucked him out and banged the door in his face. Out in the hall, we could hear him cursing and swearing, and he beat the door with his fists, because Mr. Brennan had turned the key from the inside.
“Go home, Brady,” Mr. Brennan said, and within a few seconds we heard him go out the hall door. I was crying, of course, and Martha and Baba were pale and shocked.
The homecoming we had dreaded was over. Instead of it being about us, and the dreadful thing we wrote, it was a scene between Mr. Brennan and my father. I knew then that Mr. Brennan hated my father, and had always hated him.
“Sit down,” Mr. Brennan said to Baba and me. We sat on the couch and looked imploringly at Martha.
“Mammy, what about some tea?” Mr. Brennan said to her, and she smiled vaguely. At least he was reasonable.
“Hello, I didn’t say hello to you,” she said to me as she passed by my chair. She touched the top of Baba’s hair tenderly.
“Well, now,” said Mr. Brennan, when she had gone out.
“We hated it, we hated it; we love home,” I said to him. Baba had said nothing since we came into the room. She had her head lowered and her hands clasped, as if she were praying. She was determined not to help.
“We’re sorry, we hated it,” I said again, and I repeated, “We love it here.” He smiled faintly to himself and shook his head. He was touched. Somehow the possibility that we had done this because we were lonely seemed fair and reasonable to him.
“But why didn’t you tell me?” he asked, and I was thinking of an answer when the phone rang. He had to go off urgently to the mountains, because there was a sow dying, and we were left to drink the tea and talk to Martha.
Later that evening, I was sitting on the couch in the front room when Mr. Brennan came back. He came in to talk to me. It was dusk. We could see the silver gleaming on the sideboard, and there was a smell of hyacinths in the room.
“Declan is doing well at school,” he said. I knew exactly what he was thinking.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Brennan. I really am.”
“You know, Caithleen, ‘tis a great pity. You were clever at school. You would have gone far. Why did you undermine your whole future?” He held my hand while he was asking me.
“Don’t ask me,” I said.
“I know why,” he said. His voice was calm, and his hand was soft and warm. He was a good and gentle man.
“Poor Caithleen, you’ve always been Baba’s tool.”
“I like Baba, Mr. Brennan. She’s great fun and she doesn’t mean any harm.” It was true.
“Ah, if one could only choose one’s children,” he said sadly. A lump came in my throat, and I knew all the things that he was trying to tell me. And it seemed to me that life was a disappointment to him. The years of driving over bad roads at night, crossing fields with the light of a lantern to reach some sick beast in a drafty outhouse, had been a waste. Mr. Brennan had not found happiness, neither in his wife nor in his children. And the thought came to me that he would have liked Mama as his wife and me as his daughter. I felt that he was thinking so himself.
There was a light knock on the door. He said, “Come in.” It was my father. Martha must have told him that we were in the sitting room.
“Good evening.” He spoke cheerfully, as if nothing awkward had happened. “Grand evening.” Mr. Brennan clicked on the light. The electricity had come since we were home last time. The friendly lamplight made a shadow on the mantelpiece. It was a white china lamp with a china shade on it. Pure and enchanting, like a child’s First Communion veil. It was an old-fashioned oil lamp that Mr. Brennan had adapted for electricity.
“You wouldn’t want to mind me. I might shout or anything, but ‘tis all over in three minutes,” my father said to both of us, and Mr. Brennan said, “Oh, let’s forget it.” I said nothing. Father sat down and took two pounds out of his coat pocket.
“Here,” he said, throwing them over onto my lap. I thanked him and sat there glumly while they talked. But the talk was strained, and neither one liked the other anymore.
Behind the china lamp there was a postcard. It was of a dancing girl. A Spanish dancer, in a big red hooped skirt and a white blouse with puffed sleeves. I went over and picked it up to look at it. Mr. Gentleman’s handwriting was on the back, and it said, Best wishes to all of you. It had a foreign stamp. I ran out of the room.
“Molly, Molly,” I called. She was upstairs getting ready to go out. She had a boyfriend now.
“Come up,” she answered. I went up and stuck my head in her door. She was bathing her feet in a basin of steaming water.
“I’m crippled with corns,” she said. Her room was small and there was linoleum on the floor.
“Molly, where’s Mr. Gentleman?” I asked. I couldn’t wait and lead up to it casually, though I meant to.
“Off sunning himself,” she said. My heart stopped.
“Why?”
“Mrs. Gentleman’s nerves are at her, and they’re gone off on a cruise to the Mediterranean.” I was vexed and jealous and guilty all at once. But at least it was lucky that he wasn’t there to hear of our disgrace. Because he was very polite in his own way and he would have been shocked by our behavior.
13
I was free to go to another convent because my scholarship was still valid, but Mr. Brennan was sending Baba to Dublin to take a commercial course and I said that I would go, too. I promised my father that I would do examinations to get into the civil service, but meanwhile I was going to work in a grocery shop.
I answered an advertisement in the paper and got a job as shop assistant with a man named Thomas Burns. Jack Holland gave me a glowing reference, which said that I had served my apprenticeship with him. The reference was full of adjectives and flowery talk, and he signed it Jack Holland, Author and Spirit Merchant.
“Of course, Caithleen, if ever you change your mind … It’s a lady’s privilege,” he said as he licked the brown business envelope and sealed it by pressing it with his fist.
“Thank you, Jack,” I said. “I’ll think about it.” It was a lie, but it kept him happy. His mother was still dying, and the jubilee nurse came two days a week now to wash her. He went over and opened the wooden drawer of the till. It was stiff and only opened halfway. He stuck his hand far in, to where the notes were kept, and took ou
t a pound, folding it into a small square.
“For your perusal,” he said, stuffing it down inside my blouse. One of the sharp edges of the square pricked my skin, but I was thankful and I let him shake my hand three or four times in return, and stroke my hair. His stroke was clumsy.
When I came out, I went to O’Brien’s drapery and bought some materials for a blouse and a pinafore dress, and went down the street to the dressmaker’s. She came to the door with a bunch of plain pins between her teeth and loose white threads all over her dress. “Come in,” she said. She was about to eat her lunch. The three geraniums on the windowsill were just beginning to flower. Two were vivid red and the other was white. The leaves gave the kitchen a nice greenhouse smell.
“Makes them grow,” she said, putting the tea leaves from the breakfast on the geranium plant. She rinsed the teapot and made some fresh tea.
“And how do you come to be free, this time of year?” she asked in her buttering-up voice. She lived alone and was the town gossip. She knew when unmarried girls were in trouble, even before they knew it themselves. The priest’s housekeeper and she discussed everything, and everyone, under the sun.
“There’s an epidemic in the convent,” I said. Baba and I had agreed on the same story. Not even our parents wanted it known that we were expelled.
“How terrible. Is it a bad one now? And ‘tis a wonder that the young Jones one from up the mountain isn’t home.”
“No. Mountainy girls don’t get this particular epidemic,” I said. She gave me a wicked eye. She was from the mountains herself and cycled there every second Sunday to see her father. She used to bring tins of fruit and a jar of calf’s-foot jelly in the canvas bag on the back of her bicycle.
“Have this,” she said, handing me a cup of tea and a slice of shop sponge cake. Afterward she measured me.
“You have a bit of a pot belly,” she noted. She wanted to get some dig at me. I showed her the postcard, so that she could copy the blouse exactly. She looked at the writing on the back.
“Didn’t the Gentlemans go off real sudden,” she said.
“Did they?” I asked. She wrote my measurements in a notebook, and I left soon after. She didn’t see me out, which meant that she was vexed with me. She expected me to talk about the Gentlemans. I hoped she wouldn’t ruin my two pieces of material out of spite.
It was one of those clear, windy days which we get around that part of the country, with a fine strong wind blowing and clouds sailing happily by. It was clear and windy and airy, and I was happy to be alive. The wind was blowing in my face, so I pushed my bicycle up the hill. I left it inside the Brennans’ gate and walked over the road to see my own home. There were French nuns there now. Only five or six of them, with a mistress of novices in charge of them. Young nuns came from the mother house in Limerick to spend their spiritual year in our large, secluded farmhouse.
The old gateway was abandoned, with nettles growing around it. The nuns had made a new gateway, with concrete piers on either side and concrete walls curving out from the piers. The avenue, which had been one of weeds and loose stones and cart tracks, was now tarmacked and steamrolled, and easy to walk on. Some of the trees around the house were cut, and the white, weather-beaten hall door was painted a soft kindly green. The curtains of course were different, and Hickey’s beehive was gone.
“Our Mother is expecting you,” said the little nun who answered the door.
She went off noiselessly down the carpeted hall. The room that was once our breakfast room seemed utterly strange. I felt that I had never been there before. There was a writing desk in the corner where the whatnot had been, and they had added a mahogany mantelpiece.
“You are welcome,” the Mother said. She was French, and she didn’t look half as severe as the nuns in the convent. She rang a bell to summon the little nun and asked her to bring some refreshments. I got a glass of milk and a slice of homemade cake that was decorated with blanched almonds. It was difficult chewing the food while she watched me, and I hoped that I didn’t make a noise while I ate.
“And what are you planning to be?” she asked.
Grocer’s apprentice, I thought of saying, but instead I said, “My father hasn’t decided yet.” It sounded pretty impertinent, because Molly had told me that Mother Superior helped my father get over his drinking bouts. She brought down flasks of beef tea when he was in bed, and gave him little books to read prayers from. She took a tiny blue medal out of her pocket and handed it to me. That night I pinned it to my vest and always wore it there after that. Mr. Gentleman laughed when he came to see it, months later.
“You might care to see the kitchen?” she asked, and I followed her out to the kitchen. There were white presses built in along the walls, and the wood range had been replaced by an anthracite cooker. In the kitchen garden outside, there were six or seven young nuns walking singly, with heads lowered as if they were meditating. I was waiting to hear Bull’s-Eye chase the hens off the flag, but of course there were no hens to chase. The visit upset me more than I had expected, and things that I thought I had forgotten kept floating to the surface of my mind. The skill with which Hickey set the mousetraps and put them under the stairs. The smell of apple jelly in the autumn, and the flypaper hanging from the ceiling with black flies all over it. Flitches of bacon hung up to smoke. The cookery book on the window ledge stained with egg yolk. These small things crowded in on me, so I felt very sad going down the drive.
On the way down I thought I ought to go into the gate lodge and see my father. I lifted the latch, but the door was locked. And I was just going out the gate, feeling very relieved, when I heard him call, “Who’s there?”
He opened the door and was lifting his braces up onto his shoulders. He was in his bare feet.
“Oh, I was lying down for an hour. I had a bad aul headache.”
“Go on back to bed,” I said. I was praying that he would.
“Not at all. Come on in.” He shut the door behind me. The kitchen was small and smoky, and the little white lace half-curtain on the window was the color of cigarette ash. There were three enamel mugs on the table with tea leaves in each of them.
“Have a cup o’ tea,” he said.
“All right.” I filled the kettle from the bucket on the floor, and spilled some water of course. I’m always clumsy when people are watching me do something. He sat down and put on his socks. His toenails needed to be cut.
“Where were you?” he asked.
“Up home.” It would always be home.
“Whojusee?”
I told him.
“Was she asking for me?”
“No.”
“Her and I are the best of friends.”
“They have the house lovely,” I said, hoping that it would make him feel guilty.
“The grandest house in the country,” he said. “I don’t miss it at all,” he said then. And I thought of my mother at the bottom of the lake, and how enraged she’d be if she could only hear him.
“Anyhow, I was robbed of it,” he said, scratching his forehead.
So that’s the story, I thought.
“How were you robbed?” I asked impertinently.
“Well, I was, you know. They all said when I inherited it from my grand-uncle that I wouldn’t have it long. And they did their best to get me out of it.”
So that was the story now. And to strangers and people going the road in summertime, he’d scratch his forehead, point to the big house, and tell them that he was robbed of it. I thought of Mama, and I could see her shaking her head woefully. Always when I was with him, I thought of Mama.
The kettle boiled and water bubbled from the spout. I looked around for the teapot.
“Where’s the teapot?”
“Oh, a cup will do the finest. It makes lovely tea,” and he instructed me to empty the tea leaves out of the enamel mugs. He told me how much tea to put into each mug, and then I poured the boiling water into them and put them on a hot coal to draw. I added m
ilk and sugar to his, but couldn’t stir it, for fear of disturbing all the tea leaves at the bottom. Mine looked like boiled turf.
“Isn’t that a marvelous cup o’ tea I made,” he said. I made, I thought.
“ ‘Tis all right,” I answered. Why was I so halting? I couldn’t bring myself to be friendly.
“Finest tea in the country. The Connor girls were down here gathering mushrooms last year and they came in out of a shower, so I gave them a cup of that tea. They said they never drank anything like it.” I smiled and tried to look agreeable.
“Where’s Bull’s-Eye?”
“He’s gone. He got poisoned.” Soon there would be nothing good left from the old life.
“How did he get poisoned?”
“There was strychnine down for foxes and he took it.”
“You should have complained about that,” I said. I was angry.
“Complain! Is it me to complain? Sure I never bothered anyone in my life.” I searched desperately for something to say. Quickly.
“Any news of Hickey?” I asked. I hadn’t heard from him for two Christmases. Maisie said that he was engaged to someone, but we never heard whether he got married or not.
“Is it that fella? I never trusted him. Too good a time he had, wiping my eye like everyone else.” I looked into the cluster of tea leaves in the bottom of my mug and tried to foresee my future. I was looking for romance, thinking that next week I would be in Dublin, free from it all. He coughed nervously. He was going to say something important. I trembled.