by Edna O'Brien
“It’s the color of the pale part of my orchid,” I said, and I looked over at my orchid, which was still pinned to my cardigan. I touched it. Not my orchid. His. It was soft and incredibly tender, like the inside of a flower, and it stirred. It reminded me when it stirred of a little black man on top of a penny bank that shook his head every time you put a coin in the box. I told him this, and he kissed me fiercely and for a long time.
“You’re a bad girl,” he said.
“I like being a bad girl,” I replied, wide-eyed.
“No, not really, darling. You’re sweet. The sweetest girl I ever met. My country girl with country-colored hair,” and he buried his face in it and smelled it for a minute.
“Darling, I’m not made of iron,” he said, and he stood and drew his trousers up from around his ankles. When I got up to fetch my clothes, he fondled my bottom and I knew that our week together would be beautiful.
“I’ll make you a cup of tea,” I said after we had dressed ourselves and he had combed his hair with my comb.
We went out to the kitchen on tiptoe. I lit the gas and filled the kettle noiselessly by letting the water from the tap pour down the side of the kettle. The refrigerator was locked because of Herman’s fits of night hunger, but I found a few old biscuits in a forgotten tin. They were soft but he ate them. After the tea he left. It was Friday so he was making the long journey down the country. On week nights he stayed in a men’s club in Stephen’s Green.
I stood at the door and he let down the window of the car and waved good night. He drove away without making any noise at all. I came in, put my orchid in a cup of water, and carried it upstairs to the orange box beside my bed. I was too happy to go to sleep.
19
Some men came and lopped the trees that skirted the pavement. They left nothing but the short fat branches, which somehow looked obscene. The feathery branches were gone and the buds, too. It was the wrong time of year to lop trees and I could never understand why they did it then, unless it was because people had complained about the light being shut out from their sitting rooms.
But I was so happy I hardly noticed the trees. We were going away together. He was going on one airplane to London and I was following on the next one. He said it was better that way, in case we should be seen at the airport.
I was so happy and he was happy, too. Sitting in the drawing room for hours, I used to look at his face, his bony ascetic face, with his fine nose and his eyes that were always saying things, eyes that flashed amber because of the yellow lampshade on the table lamp. Some nights I put on the electric heater and I was afraid Joanna would smell it upstairs.
“You know what worries me?” he said, catching my hands and stroking them.
“Your low blood pressure, or maybe your age?” I said, smiling.
“No,” and he gave me a gentle slap on the face.
“What then?”
“The coming back. Being separated.”
But I didn’t think about that. I only thought of going.
“Did you ever go before?” I asked nervously.
“Don’t ask me that.” He was frowning a little. His forehead was yellow-white, as if he had lemon juice instead of blood under his skin.
“Why not?”
“It’s pointless, really. If I say yes, it will only make you sad.”
And already I was sad. No one would ever really belong to him. He was too detached.
“I’ll watch you as you come down the airplane runway,” he said. Then he got out his diary and we tried to fix a date. I had to go out of the room to think; not every week suited me, and I couldn’t think when his arms were around me. Finally we settled on a week, and he made a note of it in pencil.
In the days that followed I thought only of it. When I was washing my neck, I made a soap lather for him, and when I was weighing sugar in the shop, I was singing to myself. I gave children free sugar barleys and I bought Willie a dickey bow for his Sunday shirt. Going along the street I talked to myself all the time. Arranging conversations between us, smiling at everyone; helping old women to cross the road and flirting with bus conductors.
A few little things worried me. I had to ask for the week off. Mr. Burns was easy to handle, but sleepy-eyed Mrs. Burns could read your mind.
Also, I had stopped going to Mass and confession and things. But most of all, I hadn’t enough underwear. I wanted a blue flowing transparent nightgown. So that we could waltz before we got into bed. To tell you the truth, I always shirked a little at the actual getting into bed.
Mama had nice nightgowns, but I had left them in the drawers, and I didn’t know if my father got them before the furniture was auctioned. I could have written to ask him, but at the thought of him my heart started to race. I hadn’t written for six weeks and I didn’t want to write anymore. Mr. Gentleman mentioned that my father had flu, and that the nuns were looking after him.
Then I thought of asking Joanna. Joanna and I had got very friendly since Baba went away. I helped with the washing up, and we went to the pictures one night after tea. Joanna laughed so much that she was snorting in the back of her nose and the couple near us were horrified.
“I’m going to Vienna,” I said as we walked home through the fresh spring night. There was a smell of night-scented stock. She linked me and I was uncomfortable about this. I hate women linking me.
“Mein Gott! For what?”
“With a friend,” I said carelessly.
“A man?” she asked, opening her eyes very wide and looking with astonishment, as if men were monsters.
“Yes,” I said. It was easy talking to Joanna.
“The rich man?” she asked.
“The rich man,” I added; and a sudden anxiety came to me about paying my fare and my hotel bill. Did he expect me to pay my own?
“Good. It is beautiful there. The opera, lovely. I remember my brothers spending me a night at the opera for my twenty-one birthday. They gave me a wristwatch. Fifteen-carat gold.” It was the nearest Joanna ever got to being nostalgic. I was still worrying about the money for the airplane ticket.
“Will you loan me a nightgown?” I asked.
She said nothing for a moment and then she said, “Yes. But you must be very careful. It is from my own honeymoon. Thirty years old.” I blanched a little and held the gate open for her. Gustav was at the door with his hands stretched out, like a man begging for alms. There was something wrong.
“Herman. He do it again, Joanna,” he said. Joanna shot in the door and rushed up the stairs. She took two steps at a time and you could see the legs of her knickers. A torrent of German ascended ahead of her. I heard her rattle the doorknob of Herman’s room, and then knock on the door and pound it and call, “Herman, Herman, you leave this night,” and Herman said nothing. But when I went up, there seemed to be crying from behind his door. He had been in bed all day with flu.
“What’s wrong?” I thought they were all mad.
“His kidneys. He has kidney trouble. The best hair mattress and my good pure linen sheets,” Joanna said. We stood in the narrow landing waiting for him to open his door and Joanna began to cry.
“Leave him, Joanna, until morning.” Gustav came up and stood on the step where the stairs turned left. She cried more and talked about the mattress and the sheets, and you could see that Gustav was embarrassed because of her. She took off her white knitted coat and picked loose hairs off the collar.
I went into my own room and in a few minutes she came in after me. She had the nightgown in her hand. It was folded in tissue paper, and as she opened the paper camphor balls kept falling out and rolling onto the floor. It was lilac color and it was the biggest nightgown I’d ever seen. I put it on and looked like a girl playing Lady Macbeth for the Sacred Heart Players. I was shapeless in it. I tied the purple sash tight around the waist, but it was still hickish.
“Lovely. Pure silk,” she said, fingering the deep frill that fell over my hand and almost covered it.
“Lovely,”
I agreed. He would smell the camphor and sneeze for the entire week and go home trying to remember which of his grandaunts I resembled. Still, it was better than nothing.
“Show Gustav,” she said, arranging it so that it fell in loose pleats from around the waist. She held it up while I went down the stairs, as if I were wearing a wedding dress.
Gustav got red and said, “Very smart.”
“You remember, Gustav?” she said. She was grinning at him.
“No, Joanna.” He was reading the advertisements in the evening paper. He said that Herman would have to go and they would get a nice proper gentleman.
“You remember, Gustav?” she said, going over to him. But Gustav said no as if he wanted to forget. Joanna was hurt.
“They are all the same,” she said, as we prepared the tray for supper. “All men, they are all the same. No soft in them,” and I thought of something very soft about my Mr. Gentleman. Not his face. Not his nature. But a part of his soft, beseeching body.
“Mind you not fill up with baby,” she said. I laughed. It was impossible. I had an idea that couples had to be married for a long time before a woman got a baby.
I kept the nightgown on during supper because I had my other clothes under it. We sat very late looking through all the advertisements, and finally Gustav found one that was suitable.
“Italian musician requires full board in foreign household,” and he got the ink off the sideboard and Joanna spread a newspaper over the velvet cloth, then unlocked the china cabinet and took out a sheet of headed stationery. It was locked because Herman was in the habit of stealing sheets of it to write to his mother and his sisters.
There was a skin on my cocoa and I lifted it off with my spoon. The cocoa was cold.
Gustav put on his glasses and Joanna got him the old fountain pen that had no top on it. One they found out on the road. It wrote like a post-office pen.
“What date is it, Joanna?” he asked. She went over to the calendar on the wall and looked at it, screwing up her eyes.
“May 15,” she said, and I felt myself go cold. The morning paper was on the tea trolley and I reached over the back of my armchair and picked it up. There on the very first page under the anniversaries was a memorium for my mother. Four years. Four short years and I had forgotten the date of her death; at least I had overlooked it! I felt that wherever she was she had stopped loving me, and I went out of the room crying. It was worse to think that he had remembered. I recalled it in my head, the short, simple insertion, signed with my fathers name.
“Caithleen.” Joanna followed me out to the hall.
“It’s nothing,” I said over the banisters. “It’s nothing, Joanna.”
But all that night I slept badly. I tucked my legs up under my nightgown and was shivering. I was waiting for someone to come and warm me. I think I was waiting for Mama. And all the things I am afraid of kept coming into my mind. Drunk men. Shouting. Blood. Cats. Razor blades. Galloping horses. The night was terrifying and the bathroom door kept slamming. I got up to close it around three and filled myself a hot-water bottle from the hot tap. It wasn’t my own, and I knew that if Baba were there now she’d warn me that it would give me some damn disease like athlete’s foot or eczema or something. I missed Baba. She kept me sane. She kept me from brooding about things.
I went back to bed, and Joanna woke me with a cup of tea just after eight o’clock. When I opened my eyes she was drawing back the curtains to let the sun in. I looked up at the cracked gray ceiling and wasn’t afraid anymore. We were going away the following Saturday.
I drank the tea, fondled my stomach for a while, and as soon as I heard Herman move next door, I jumped out, so as to have the first of the bathroom.
20
The next week flew. I plucked my eyebrows, packed my case, and bought postcards, so that I could send some to Joanna. I was afraid that I mightn’t get to buy any there. I washed my hairbrush and put it out on the windowsill to dry and borrowed two of Baba’s dresses. Writing to Baba, I told her I had flu, but said nothing about borrowing the dresses or about going away. You couldn’t trust Baba.
On Thursday morning there was a letter from Hickey which had been readdressed from the Brennans’. He said that he was arriving in Dublin on the mail boat the following Tuesday and asked me to meet him. He didn’t say whether he was married or not and I was curious to know. His spelling had improved. Of course I had to send him a telegram to say I couldn’t manage it. The thought came to me that I was foolish and disloyal, not only to Hickey, who had been my best friend, but to Jack Holland and Martha and Mr. Brennan. To all the real people in my life. Mr. Gentleman was but a shadow, and yet it was this shadow I craved. I sent the telegram, instantly made myself forget about Hickey, and thought of our holiday in Vienna.
I could see myself sitting up in bed with a big breakfast tray across my lap. I could see the tray and the cups and a brown earthenware dish that was warmed. I would lift the lid off the dish and find fingers of golden toast that the butter had soaked right into. Sometimes in my fantasy he was asleep and I was wakening him by tickling his forehead; and then at other times he was awake and drinking a glass of orange juice. I thought Saturday would never come.
It came and it was raining. The rain upset my plans. I was to wear a white feather hat and I could not possibly let it get wet. It was a lovely hat that fitted tight to the head, and the feathers curved down over my ears and gave my face a soft, feathered look.
When I was leaving the shop at four, Mr. Burns gave me my wages and a pound extra for the journey home. I had told them there was an aunt dying.
“Good God, you can’t go out in that rain,” he said.
“I’ll miss my train if I don’t.” So he went into the hallway and found me an old umbrella. A godsend. I could wear my hat now. I almost kissed him. I think he expected me to, because he smoothed the brown hairs of his mustache.
“Bye, miss,” Willie said, as he held the door for me. It was lashing rain outside. It pelted against my legs and my stockings got drenched. Joanna had tea ready, and she loaned me a little phrase book that had English and German words in it.
“Mind you not lose,” she warned me. I put it in my handbag.
“I not charge while you’re away,” she said, beaming at me. Everything was working out marvelously. The new lodger was coming that evening so Joanna was happy.
“Mein Gott, you are so lovely,” she said when I came downstairs in my black coat and my white feather hat.
I had made my face pale with pancake makeup and darkened my eyelids with green mascara.
The long coils of auburn hair fell loosely around my shoulders, and though I was tall and well developed around the bust, I had the innocent look of a very young girl. No one would have suspected that I was going off with a man.
I had put my gloves in my bag, so that they wouldn’t get wet. They were white kid gloves of Mama’s. There were stains of iron mold where they buttoned at the wrist but otherwise they were lovely.
It was still raining when I came out. It was awkward trying to manage the suitcase and the umbrella as well as carry my handbag. A telegram boy went by on a motorcycle and spattered my stockings, so I swore after him. I got a bus immediately and was there twenty minutes too early.
We were meeting outside an amusement palace on the quays. It was convenient for him to pick me up there, as he came from his office, but neither of us had thought of the rain when we fixed the place.
I stood in the porchway that led to the sweetshop and put my case down. My hands were wet, so I wiped them on the lining of my coat. In at the back of the shop there were slot machines and a room where boys played snooker. They were all dressed alike, in colored jerseys and tight-fitting tartan trousers. They all needed haircuts.
The rain had got less. It was only spotting now. I looked at my watch, his little moth-gold watch; he was ten minutes late. The church bells from the opposite side of the Liffey chimed seven. I looked at all the cars as they came up th
e quays.
At half past seven I began to get anxious, because I knew that his plane went at half past eight and mine left shortly before nine o’clock. I sat on the edge of my suitcase and tried to look absorbed as the longhaired boys went in and out to play snooker. They were passing remarks about me. I began to count the flagstones on the lane nearby. I thought, Hell come now, while I’m counting, and I won’t see the car drive up to the curb and he’ll have to blow the hooter to call me. I knew the sound of the hooter. But I counted the flagstones three times and he hadn’t come. It was nearing eight and there were pigeons and seagulls walking along the limestone wall that skirted the river Liffey.
“Are you waiting for someone?” the woman from the sweetshop called out to me. She was fat and her hair was dyed blond.
“I’m waiting for my father,” I said. “We’re going away somewhere.”
“Come in and sit down,” she said. I went in and sat on a wicker chair. It squeaked when you sat on it. I bought a bottle of orange, just to pass the time, and drank it through a straw. Every few minutes I came out to look. I was getting anxious now, and when he came I’d tell him how anxious and frightened I’d been. I went across the road to look at a Guinness barge that was going up the river. The river was brown and filthy, and the top of the wall was spattered white from all the bird droppings. His small black car came buzzing up the quay, and I ran to the edge of the footpath and waved. But the car went by. It was exactly like his, except that the registration number was not the same. I went back to finish my orange.
“Kill you, wouldn’t it,” the blond woman said to me. Her name was Dolly. The boys playing snooker called her that and were fresh with her.
My whole body was impatient now. I couldn’t sit still. My body was wild from waiting. The streetlights came on outside, the wet bulbs gave out a blurred yellow light, and the street took on that look of night mystery that I always love. The raindrops hung to the iron bars that held up the gray awning; they clung to it for a while and then they dropped onto a man’s hat as he went by. I think it was then that I admitted to myself for the first time that he just might not be coming. But only for the shadow of a second did I allow myself to think it. I bought a woman’s magazine and looked for my horoscope. The magazine was a week old so my horoscope was of no help.