by Edna O'Brien
“Baba is a funny girl,” he said to me, still smiling. As if I ought to rejoice! It was my joke. I read it in a magazine one day when I had to wait two hours in the dental hospital to have a tooth filled. I read it and came home and told Baba, and after that she told it to everyone. Baba had got so smart in the last year—she knew about different wines, and had taken up fencing. She said that the fencing class was full of women in trousers asking her home for cocoa.
Just then Tod Mead came up waving an empty glass.
“The drink is running out, why don’t we all go somewhere?” he said to Eugene.
“Those are two nice girls you found,” Eugene said, and Baba began to hum, “Nice people with nice manners that have got no money at all …”
“All right,” Eugene said. “We’ll have dinner.”
On the way out, Baba ordered twelve bottles of hock to be sent COD to Joanna, our landlady. The idea was that, having tasted the wine, people would order some. I knew that Joanna would have a fit over it.
“Who is Joanna?” Eugene asked, as we moved toward the door. We waved to the lady journalist and one or two other people.
“I’ll tell you about her at dinner,” Baba said.
My elbows touched his, and I had that paralyzing sensation in my legs which I hadn’t felt since I’d parted from Mr. Gentleman.
2
We had dinner in the hotel. Eugene left word with one of the page boys that he would be in the dining room if there should be a telephone call for him. All through dinner I felt anxious and wished that he would be called, so that he could go away and then come back to us. Needless to say, I thought it must be a woman.
We had thin soup, lamb cutlets coated in bread crumbs, and French-fried potatoes. He didn’t eat much. He had a habit of pulling his sleeves down over his wrists. His wrists and hands were hairy. Black, luxuriant hairs. Baba never stopped talking. I didn’t say much, I couldn’t balance the pleasure of seeing him and talking at the same moment. He said that I had a face like the girl on the Irish pound note.
“I never had a pound note long enough to look at it,” Baba said.
“You look at it next time,” he said, and then the waiter came over and refilled our glasses with wine. I felt very happy and the food was nice.
“Mister Gay Lord, Mister Gay Lord,” a page boy called. My heart jumped with pain and relief.
“You, you, you,” I said to him, and Baba kicked me to stop being so excited and making a fool of myself. He excused himself and went out very slowly.
He looked nice from the back: tall and lean, with a bald patch on the very top of his head.
“He’s a smasher,” Baba said.
“Rich!” Tod added, and smiled peculiarly. He was jealous of something, I felt.
“He’s a good catch,” Baba said.
“Har, har, har,” Tod said, but I knew by the look in his small blue eyes that he withheld something. It occurred to me that maybe Eugene was engaged or married.
When he came back we tried to pretend that we had not been discussing him.
“I’m very sorry,” he said, “but I shall have to leave you. I have to go out to the airport and see someone off, to America. It’s important, otherwise I would not do this.”
My heart sank and Baba dropped her spoon full of ice cream back on the glass dish. I think she said “Oh.”
Tod stood up, very worried, thinking, I suppose, that he might have to pay the bill.
“Actually I have to be getting along myself, Eugene. Little old Sally is expecting me in for tea,” and he got red around the collar as he spoke. “I’ll run you out to the airport, it’s on my way.”
I nearly died, thinking that Baba and I might have to pay for the dinner by washing up for the next ten or eleven years, but Eugene paid it all right.
He shook hands, apologized, and left us there to drink a liqueur with our coffee. The waiters looked puzzled—the men’s departure and my rubber boots made them think we were very eccentric.
“Jesus, just our luck,” Baba said when they had gone.
“I suppose lots of women have died for him,” I said.
“He’s classy,” she said. “I’d like to get going with him.”
All I wondered was, would we ever see him again.
“We could write to him,” Baba said. “You could draft a letter and I’d sign it.”
“Saying what?”
“I don’t know.” She shrugged, and read the menu. There was a notice printed at the bottom of the menu which said that clients could inspect the kitchen if they wished.
“Let’s do it for gas,” Baba said.
“No.” I had no inclination to do anything but just sit there and sip coffee and beckon to the puzzled waiter to bring more when my cup was empty. Would we see him again, ever?
“Hold on for your life,” Baba said at last, “I have a marvelous idea.” She suggested that we buy tickets for a dress dance and invite him. She said that we could pretend that we got the tickets for nothing, or had won them at a raffle or something.
“We’ll get you a partner, Tod or the Body or something.” The Body was a friend of hers who trained greyhounds in Blanchardstown. His real name was Bertie Counihan, but we had nicknamed him the Body because he hardly ever washed. He said washing harmed the skin. He was big and broad-shouldered, with black curly hair and a happy, reddish face.
We did exactly as Baba planned. At the end of the week (when I got paid) we bought four tickets for a grocers’ dance which was to be held in Cleary’s ballroom in October. Then we got Eugene’s address from Tod and drafted a letter to him. Neither of us paid Joanna that week.
We waited anxiously for his reply, and when it came I nearly cried. He wrote and told Baba that he hadn’t danced for years and feared that he would be dull company at such a jolly outing. Very politely, he declined.
“Christ, we’re done for,” Baba said as she handed me the letter. His handwriting was difficult to make out.
“Oh, God!” I said, more disappointed than I had expected to be. All my hopes had hinged on that dance, on seeing him again.
“What a life,” I said. We had the tickets but no men, no money, no dance dresses.
“We’ll have to go, we can’t bloody well let those tickets go to waste,” Baba said.
“We’ve no fur coat,” I said. Often when we went downtown at night to look at people going into dress dances, we saw that most of the women had fur coats or fur stoles over their long dresses.
“We’ll rent dresses from that place in Dame Street,” Baba said.
“It’s morbid.”
“It’s twice as morbid to sit in this dump with four bloody tickets going to waste on the mantelpiece.”
“We’ve no money to rent dresses,” I said, pleased at such an easy solution to the whole thing. I had no interest in going now.
“We’ll sell our bodies to the College of Surgeons!” she said. “They come and collect when you’re dead, and the students put you on a table, with no clothes, and take you to pieces.”
I said that she couldn’t be serious. She said she’d do anything for a few bob.
I thought of him out there in his large house, unaware of the misery he had caused us. I imagined a brown leather-topped desk, with numerous pens and pencils, and two colors of ink in special glass bottles.
“You can steal in that joint where you work, they’re underpaying you,” Baba said.
“It’s a sin.”
“It’s not a sin. Aquinas says you can steal from an employer if he underpays you.”
“Who’s Aquinas?”
“I don’t know, he’s a big nob in the Church.”
Finally we managed it. We borrowed five- and ten-shilling amounts from various people and hired long dresses and silver dance shoes. Baba’s dress was white net and mine a lurid purple. It was the only one they had which fitted me.
We got quite excited on the evening of the dance. We bought half a pound of scented bath crystals and bathed in the same
water. I put pancake on Baba’s back to hide her spots, and she put pancake on mine and hooked my dress up. I could scarcely breathe in it, it was so tight.
“Bee-beep, bee-beep,” the Body’s horn hooted at nine o’clock, and we went down holding our dresses up so that the tails would not get dirty. He had come in the blue van, which he used to take greyhounds to the veterinary surgeon and such places. It smelled of that kind of life.
Then we collected Eamonn White, a chemist’s apprentice, who was to be my partner for the night. He was a nice boy except that he kept saying “great gas,” “great style,” “great fun,” “great van,” “great gas,” all the time.
On the way down we stopped at a pub in North Frederick Street to have a few drinks. The customers stared at Baba and me, in our long tatty dresses with tweed coats over our shoulders. Baba was miserable because she hadn’t been able to borrow a fur.
“Name your poison,” the Body said, clapping Eamonn on the back.
Eamonn was a Pioneer and wore a total abstinence badge, which he must have transferred from the lapel of his ordinary suit to his hired black suit. He said he’d have tomato juice and the Body was very offended by this, but Baba said wed have large ones to make up for it.
I danced with Eamonn for most of the night, because he was my partner. “Great gas, great gas,” he kept saying. It was his first dress dance. He marveled at the slipperiness of the floor, the pink lighting, the two bands, the paper roses hanging from the ceiling, and the tables beautifully laid for supper. My frock was strapless, and his warm, pink hands seemed to be on my bare back all night. He had blond hair and blond eyelashes, and the pinkness of his skin reminded me of young pigs at home.
The Body was different.
“You’re a noble woman,” he said to me later as I danced with him in my hired silver shoes and wondered if I would ever waltz with Eugene Gaillard. I was glad that he hadn’t come, because he would have seen me in my foolish dusty dress, saying foolish tittery things to amuse the others.
We drank wine with our supper, and then as usual the Body took too much and got obstreperous and started to shout. He rolled the menu up and bellowed through it: “Up the Republic, Up Noel Browne, Up Castro, Up me.”
Eamonn was frightened and left the table. He never returned. Being a Pioneer, he did not understand the happy madness which drink could induce in others.
At two o’clock, just when everybody was getting very merry and the band players had begun to toss paper hats around, Baba and I brought the Body home. He was too drunk to drive, so we left his blue van there and hired a taxi. We had no idea where he lived. It’s funny that we should have known him for a year but did not know where he lived. Dublin is like that. We knew his local pub but not his house. We brought him home and put him on the horsehair sofa in Joanna’s drawing room.
“Baba, Caithleen, I wan’t’tell you something, you’re two noble women, two noble women, and Parnell was a proud man, as proud as trod the ground, and a proud man’s a lovely man, so pass the bottle round. What about a little drink, waiter, waiter …” He waved a pound note in the air, still thinking he was at the dance.
“Have a sleep,” Baba said, and she put out the light. His voice faded with it, and within a minute he was breathing heavily.
We knew that we would have to be up at half past six to get the Body out of the house before Joannas alarm went off at seven.
“We’ve just three hours’ sleep,” Baba said as she unhooked my dress and helped me out of it. A new boned brassiere had made red welts on my skin.
“We’ll sue,” she said when she saw the welts. We went to bed without washing our faces, and when I woke the pancake makeup felt like mud on my face.
“Oh, God,” I said to Baba as I heard the Body shouting downstairs: “Girls, les girls, there’s no Gents, there’s no bloody service here—where do I go?”
We both ran out to the landing to shut him up, but Joanna had got there before us.
“Jesus meets his afflicted mother,” the Body said as Joanna came down the stairs toward him in her big red nightgown, with her gray hair in a plait down her back.
“Thief, thief,” she shouted, and before we even knew it, she had pressed the button of the small fire extinguisher that was fixed to the wall at the end of the stairs and trained the liquid on him.
“I want police,” she yelled. He was struggling to explain things to her, but he couldn’t make himself heard.
“Stop that bloody thing, he’s our friend,” Baba said, running downstairs.
The Body was covered with white, sticky liquid which looked like hair shampoo, and his dress shirt was drenched. His wet hair fell over his face in oily curls.
“He’s our friend,” Baba said sadly. “God protect us from our friends.”
“You call him a friend, hah?” Joanna said. He put his hand on the banister and proceeded to go upstairs. Joanna blocked the way.
“I want to see a man about a dog,” he said, wiping the wet off his face with a handkerchief.
“What dog? I have no dog, I say,” she shouted, but he pushed past her.
“Gustav, Gustav,” she called, but I knew that cowardly Gustav would not come out.
“Jesus falls the first time,” the Body chanted as he tripped on a tear in the brown linoleum.
Baba ran to him and got him up. A little later we helped him into the bathroom to wipe the stuff off his hair and face.
“Who’s the cow out there, who the hell is she?” he asked as he looked into the bathroom mirror and saw his wild, bloodshot eyes and oily ringlets. He beamed when he saw himself.
“Look at that jawline, look at it, Baba, Caithleen; I should have been a film star or a boxer,” he said. “Me and Jack Doyle and Movita. ‘Oh, Movita, oh, Movita, you’re the lady with the mystic smile …’ Who’s that cow out there? …”
Joanna rapped on the bathroom door. “You leave my house. I come from good Austrian family, my brathers doctors and Civil Service.”
“Balls,” he said.
“What ball you say?”
Baba stuffed the white towel over his mouth to shut him up, and through it he murmured, “Veronica wipes the face of Jesus …”
“Come on, we’ll dance down the road,” Baba said, and somehow she got him out of the house and up to the bus stop. By then it was half past seven.
Joanna found twelve eggs in a pot on the gas stove. The Body had apparently been boiling eggs and the water had boiled off. She flew into a fresh rage when she saw that the saucepan had got burned.
“You leave my house this day,” she said to us. “My good, best saucepan. One dozen country eggs for nog for Gustav, and my fire extinguisher. I am not spending all this money on frivolous. I tell you this, if I go poor I am better dead.” She almost cried as she held the pot of brown eggs for us to see.
“All right,” Baba said. “We’ll leave.” She proceeded to go upstairs, but Joanna caught the cord of her dressing gown.
“You cannot leave me, eh? I am gut to you like a mother. I stitch your clothes and your ironing.”
“We’re leaving,” Baba said.
“Oh, please.” There were tears in Joanna’s eyes by now.
“We’ll think it over,” Baba said, and then Joanna caught her winking at me, so that she knew we would not leave. She got abusive again.
All I wanted was to go back to bed, but it was morning and I had to dress myself and face the day.
3
Luckily for me, that day was Wednesday and (as usual) the shop closed in the afternoon.
I took the dance dresses and shoes back to the rental shop, and then collected photos of myself which had been taken by a street photographer the previous Wednesday. I felt tired and nervous from the short sleep and the mixture of drinks which we had had. I wished that I were rich and could drink coffee all afternoon, or buy new clothes to cheer myself up.
As usual I went to the bookshop at the bottom of Dawson Street where I had a free read every week. I read twenty-eight
pages of The Charwoman’s Daughter without being disturbed, and then came out, as I had an appointment to meet Baba in O’Connell Street.
Coming down the stone steps from the bookshop, I met him, point-blank. I saw him in that instant before he saw me, and I was so astonished that I almost ran away.
“Oh, you!” he said as he looked up in surprise. He must have forgotten my name.
“Mr. Gaillard, hello,” I said, trying to conceal my excitement. In daylight his face looked different—longer and more melancholy. A shower of rain had brought us together. He came up to shelter in the porch and I stood in with him. My body became like jelly just from standing close to him, smelling his nice smell. I kept staring down at the long, absurd toe of my white shoe, which had got blackened from rain and wear.
“What have you been doing since, besides going to dances?” he said.
“Yes, we went last night, it was marvelous, a marvelous band and supper and everything.” Oh, God, I thought, I am as dull as old dishwater. Why can’t I say something exciting, why can’t I tell him what I feel about him?
“The rain sparkles on the brown pavement,” I said in a false fit of eloquence.
“Sparkles?” he said, and smiled curiously.
“Yes, it’s a nice word.”
“Indeed.” He nodded. I felt that he was bored and I prayed that there would be a deluge and that we would have to stay there forever. I imagined the water rising inch by inch, covering the road, the pavement, the steps, our ankles, our legs, our bodies, drawing us together as in a dream, all other life cut off from us.
“It’s getting worse,” I said, pointing to a black cloud that hung over the darkening city of Dublin.
“It’s only a shower,” he said, shattering all my mad hopes. “What about a cup of tea, would you like some tea?” he asked.
“I’d love it.” And in the rain we crossed the road to a tea shop.
I forget what we talked about. I remember being speechless with happiness and feeling that God, or someone, had brought us together. I ate three cakes; he pressed me to have a fourth but I didn’t, in case it was vulgar. It was then he asked my name. So he had forgotten it.