by Edna O'Brien
“Here, Jesus, we might as well have this much,” she said, pulling a guest towel, two tomatoes, and a jar of chicken and ham paste from somewhere inside her dress.
“How in the hell did you get them?”
“When I went out with Reg. He fell asleep, so I went rooting around the house; these condiments were in a press in the kitchen.” She handed me a tomato. I wiped it on the sleeve of my coat and bit it. It was sweet and juicy and I was glad of it, because I was thirsty after all that drink.
“What happened to you?” she asked.
“What happened to me! That fellow should be shot,” I said.
“Carrying on like a bloody lunatic; why didn’t you slap his face?”
“Did you slap Reginald?”
“No, I didn’t. We’re going steady. I like him.”
“Is he married?” I asked.
“Could we be going steady if he was married?” she said sharply.
“He looks married,” I said, but I didn’t care. I was happy. It was all over and here we were walking up the pavement under the trees at one o’clock. Tomorrow was Sunday, so I could sleep late. I danced a little, because I was so happy and the tomato was nice and life was just beginning.
There was a small black car parked farther up. It seemed to be outside our gate or the gate next to ours. As we came nearer I saw the window being lowered, and when we got up to it I saw that it was him. He smiled, moved over to the window near the curb, and opened the door. I came forward to meet him.
“Oh, Mr. Gentleman,” Baba said, surprised.
“Hello,” I said. He looked very tired, but he was pleased to see us. You could see by his eyes that he was pleased. They were excited-looking.
“This is a shocking hour of the night to be coming home,” he said. He was looking at me.
“Shocking,” said Baba as she went in the gate. She didn’t bother to close it, and it gave a clank.
“Leave the key in the door,” I called. I got into the car and we sat near one another. The gear lever was in the way of our knees, so we got out and sat in the back. His face was cold when he kissed me.
“You’ve been drinking,” he said.
“Yes, I have. I was lonely,” I said.
“Me too. Not drinking but lonely,” and he kissed me again. His lips were cold, beautifully cold like the ice in the cocktail glasses.
“Tell me everything,” he said, but before I could talk or before he could listen we had to embrace each other for a long time. Once during a kiss I opened my eyes to steal a look at his face. The streetlight was shining directly on the car. His eyes were closed tight, his lashes trembling on his cheeks, and his carved, pale face was the face of an old, old man. I closed my own eyes and thought only of his lips and his cold hands and the warm heart that was beating beneath the waistcoat and the starched white shirt. It was then I remembered to take off my coat and show him my blouse. He pushed up the dancing sleeves and kissed my arms from the wrist to the elbow, in a row of light, consecutive kisses.
“Will we go somewhere?” he asked.
“Where?”
“Let’s drive out and look at the sea.”
We got into the front seat and drove off.
“Were you long there, waiting?” I asked.
“Since midnight. I asked your landlady when you’d be back.”
“You sent me no postcard from Spain,” I said.
“No,” he said matter-of-factly. “But I thought of you most of the time.”
He caught my hand. His clasp was at once delicate and savage. Then when he kissed me, my body became like rain. Soft. Flowing. Amenable.
And though it was nice to sit there facing the sea, I thought of us as being somewhere else. In the woods, close together, beside a little stream. A secret place. A green place with ferns all about.
“And you got expelled?” he remarked.
“Yes, we wrote a bad thing,” I said. I blushed, wondering if Martha had told him exactly.
“You funny little girl,” he said, and smiled. At first I was indignant at his calling me a funny little girl, and then I found his words sweet. Everything after that was touched with sweetness and enchantment.
That was how I came to see dawn rising over Dublin Bay. It was a cold dawn and the sea desolately gray underneath. We had been sitting there for hours, talking and smoking and embracing. We had admired the green lights across the harbor; we had gazed at each other in the partial darkness, and we had said lovely things to one another. Then dawn came; the green lights went out quite suddenly as one white seagull rose into the sky.
“Would you like it if it was moonlight all day long?” I said.
“No. I like the mornings and the daylight.” His voice was dull and sleepy and remote. He was gone from me again.
He backed the car toward the sand dunes, which were half covered with grass, and turned it around, quickly and skillfully. We drove over the smooth sand. The tide was coming in, and I knew that it would wash away the marks of the wheels and I would never be able to come back and find them. We were quiet and strange. It was always like that with Mr. Gentleman. He slipped away, just when things were perfect, as if he couldn’t endure perfection.
He left me at my own gate. I wished that I could ask him in for breakfast. But I was afraid of Joanna.
“Are we friends?” I said anxiously.
“We are,” he said, and he smiled at me. We made a date for Wednesday.
“Are you going off home now?” I asked.
“Yes.” He looked sad and cold, and I wanted to tell him so.
“Think of me,” he said as he drove off.
Joanna was cooking sausages when I went in, and she blessed herself when she saw me. I ate my breakfast and went straight to bed. That was the first Sunday I missed Mass.
18
Gradually, in the weeks that followed, Baba and I became strangers. I went out with Mr. Gentleman as often as he was free, and she met Reginald every night. She didn’t even come home from class in the evenings, and she wore her best coat going out in the morning.
“Go to rot,” Joanna said at the breakfast table when she saw our faces pale for want of sleep and our fingers brown from nicotine.
“Go to hell,” Baba said. Her cough was getting worse and she had got thinner.
Three days later she told me that she had to go to a sanatorium for six months. Reginald had made her have an X-ray and it was found that she had tuberculosis.
“Oh, Baba,” I said, going around to her side of the table to put my arms around her. Why had we become strangers? Why had we been sharp and secretive in the last few weeks? I put my cheek close to hers.
“Christ, don’t, there’s probably germs floating everywhere around me,” she said, and I laughed. Her face was pale now, and the boyish bloom was going off it. She looked older and wiser in the last few weeks. Was it Reginald? Or was it her sickness? She got her belongings ready.
“I’m leaving some clothes here and don’t you be sporting them every damn day,” she said as she put two summer dresses back on a hanger.
Later on, Reginald’s car hooted outside the gate and I called up to ask her if she was ready.
I helped her into her tweed coat in the hallway. The lining of one sleeve was all ripped, but finally we got her arm in. She stood for a minute, very small and thin, with a deep flush in both cheeks. Her blue eyes were misted over with the beginnings of tears and she bit at her bottom lip to try and stop herself from crying. Then she put on some pinkish lipstick and smiled at herself bravely in the hall mirror.
Joanna took off her apron in case Reginald should come in.
“I’ll visit you as often as I can,” I said to Baba. She was going to a sanatorium in Wicklow and I knew that I couldn’t afford the bus fare more than once a week. Mr. Brennan was to pay £3 a week for her there.
“Smoke like hell when you come, so’s you won’t get any goddamn bugs around the place,” she said. She was still smiling.
Gustav and Joanna
said goodbye to her, and Reginald brought out the case and put a rug around her when she got into the car. He was very attentive to her and I was beginning to like him.
I waved to the car and she waved back. Her thin white fingers behind the glass waved to the end of our friendship. She was gone. It would never be the same again, not even if we tried.
Joanna went upstairs to spray disinfectant all over the room, and she grumbled about having to wash the blankets again, when they had been washed only a few months before. The way she grumbled, you’d think Baba went and got the tuberculosis on purpose.
The bedroom was tidy but deserted. Baba’s makeup and the huge flagon of perfume Reginald gave her, these were gone, and the dressing table was bare. She left the blue necklace on my bed with a note. It said: To Caithleen in remembrance of all the good times we had together. You’re a right-looking eejit. It was then I cried for her, and thought of all the evenings we walked home from school and how she used to set dogs after me and write dirty words on my arm with indelible pencil.
I was fidgety and bit my nails because I had to ask Joanna a favor.
“Joanna, can I have a friend in the drawing room tonight?”
“Mein Gott, you give the house a bad name. The ladies next door, they say, ‘What kind of girls you got, keeping disgrace hours?’ “
“He’s rich,” I said. I knew this would impress her. Joanna had some notion that if a rich man came into the house, he’d leave five-pound notes under the tablecloth, or forget his overcoat on purpose and leave it behind for Gustav. She was simple that way. I could see the look of hope that came into her stupid blue eyes when I said that he was rich. Finally she said yes, and I began to get ready for my date.
It is the only time that I am thankful for being a woman, that time of evening when I draw the curtains, take off my old clothes, and prepare to go out. Minute by minute the excitement grows. I brush my hair under the light and the colors are autumn leaves in the sun. I shadow my eyelids with black stuff and am astonished by the look of mystery it gives to my eyes. I hate being a woman. Vain and shallow and superficial. Tell a woman that you love her and she’ll ask you to write it down so that she can show it to her friends. But I am happy at that time of night. I feel tender toward the world, I pet the wallpaper as if it were white rose petals flushed pink at the edges; I pick up my old, tired shoes and they are silver flowers that some man has laid outside my door. I kissed myself in the mirror and ran out of the room, happy and hurried and suitably mad.
I was late and Mr. Gentleman was annoyed. He handed me an orchid that was two shades of purple—pale purple and dark. I pinned it to my cardigan.
We went to a restaurant off Grafton Street, and climbed the narrow stairs to a dark, almost dingy, little room. It had red-and-white-striped wallpaper, and there was a black-brown portrait over the fireplace. It was in a thick gilt frame, and I wasn’t sure whether it was a portrait of a man or a woman, because the hair was covered with a black mop cap. We sat over near the window. It was half open; the nylon curtains blew inward and brushed the tablecloth lightly and fanned our faces. As usual we were very shy. The curtains were white and foamy like summer clouds, and he was wearing a new paisley tie.
“Your tie is nice,” I said stiffly.
“You like it?” he asked. It was agony until the first drink came, and then he melted a little and smiled at me. Then the room seemed charming, with its lighted red candle in a wine bottle, on the table. I shall never forget the pallor of his high cheekbones when he bent down to pick up his napkin. He patted my knee for a second and then looked at me with one of his slow, intense, tormented looks.
“I feel hungry,” he said.
“I feel hungry,” I said. Little did he know that I had eaten two shop buns on my way to meet him. I loved shop buns, especially iced ones.
“For all sorts of things,” he said, as he scooped some melon with a spoon. He reminded me of the melon. Cool and cold and bloodless and refreshing. He twined his ankles around mine under the big linen tablecloth and the evening began to be perfect. Candle wax dripped onto the cloth.
We drove home after eleven and he was pleased when I asked him in. I was ashamed of the hallway and the cheap carpet on the stairs. There was a stale, musty smell in the drawing room when we first went in. He sat down on the sofa and I sat on a high-backed chair across the table from him. I was happy from the wine and I told him about my life and how I fell in the dance hall and went upstairs to drink minerals for the rest of the night. He was amused, but he didn’t laugh outright. Always the remote, enchanting smile. I had drunk a lot and I was giddy. But the tiny remaining sober part of me watched the rest of me being happy and listened to the happy, foolish things that I said.
“Come over near me,” he asked, and I came and sat very quietly beside him. I could feel him trembling.
“You’re happy?” he said, tracing the outline of my face with his finger.
“Yes.”
“You’re going to be happier.”
“How?”
“We’re going to be together. I’m going to make love to you.” He spoke in a half whisper and kept looking uneasily toward the window, as if there might be someone watching us from the back garden. I went over and drew the blind, as there were no curtains in that room. I was blushing when I came back to sit down.
“Do you mind?” he asked.
“When? Now?” I clutched the front of my cardigan and looked at him earnestly. He said that I looked appalled. I wasn’t appalled really. Just nervous, and sad in some way, because the end of my innocence was near.
“Sweetling,” he said. He put an arm around me and brought my head down on his shoulder, so that my cheek touched his neck. Some tears of mine must have trickled down inside his collar. He patted my knees with his other hand. I was excited, and warm, and violent.
“Do you know French?” he asked.
“No. I did Latin at school,” I said. Imagine talking about school at a time like that. I could have killed myself for being so juvenile.
“Well, there’s a French word for it. It means … an … atmosphere. We’ll go away to the right atmosphere for a few weeks.”
“Where?” I thought with horror of the bacon-and-egg hotels across the central towns of Ireland with ketchup dribbles on the relish bottles and gravy stains on the checkered cloth. And rain outside. But I might have known that he would be more careful. He always was. Even to the extent of parking his car right outside the restaurants where we ate, so that no one would see us walking up the street to the car park.
“To Vienna,” he said, and my heart did a few somersaults.
“Is it nice there?”
“It’s very nice there.”
“And what will we do?”
“We’ll eat and go for walks. And in the evenings we’ll go up to eating places in the mountains and sit there drinking wine and looking down at the town. And then we’ll go to bed.” He said it quite simply, and I loved him more than I would ever love a man again.
“Is it good to go?” I asked. I just wanted him to reassure me.
“Yes. It’s good. We have to get this out of our systems.” He frowned a little, and I had a vision of coming back to the same room and the same life and being without him.
“But I want you for always,” I said imploringly. He smiled and kissed me lightly on the cheeks. Kisses like the first drops of rain. “You’ll always love me?” I asked.
“You know I don’t like you to talk like that,” he said, playing with the top button of my cardigan.
“I know,” I said.
“Then why do you?” he asked tenderly.
“Because I can’t help it. Because I’d go mad if I hadn’t you.”
He looked at me for a long time. That look of his which was half sexual, half mystic; and then he said my name very gently. (“Caithleen.”) I could hear the bulrushes sighing when he said my name that way, and I could hear the curlew, too, and all the lonesome sounds of Ireland.
; “Caithleen. I want to whisper you something.”
“Whisper,” I said. I put my hair behind my ear and he held it there because it had a habit of falling back into its old place. He leaned over and put his mouth close to my ear and kissed it first and said, “Show me your body. I’ve never seen your legs or breasts or anything. I’d like to see you.”
“And if I’m not nice, then will you change your mind?” I had inherited my mothers suspiciousness.
“Don’t be silly,” he said, and he helped me take off my cardigan. I was trying to decide whether to take off my blouse or my skirt first.
“Don’t look,” I said. It was difficult. I didn’t like him to see suspenders and things. I peeled off my skirt and everything under it, and then my blouse and my cotton vest, and finally I unclasped my brassiere, the black one, and I stood there shivering a little, not knowing what to do with my arms. So I put my hand up to my throat, a gesture that I often do when I am at a loss. The only place I felt warm was where my hair covered my neck and the top part of my back. I came over and sat beside him and nestled in near him for a little warmth.
“You can look now,” I said, and he took his hand down from his eyes and looked shyly at my stomach and my thighs.
“Your skin is whiter than your face. I thought it would be pink,” he said, and he kissed me all over.
“Now we won’t be shy when we get there. We’ve seen one another,” he said.
“I haven’t seen you.”
“Do you want to?” and I nodded. He opened his braces and let his trousers slip down around his ankles. He took off his other things and sat down quickly. He was not half so distinguished out of his coal-black suit and stiff white shirt. Something stirred in the garden, or was it in the hall? I thought what horror if Joanna should burst in in her nightgown and find us like two naked fools on the green velveteen couch. And she would shout for Gustav, and the ladies next door would hear her, and the police would come. I looked down slyly at his body and laughed a little. It was so ridiculous.
“What’s so funny?” He was piqued that I should laugh.