by Edna O'Brien
“Tell me, what do you read?” he asked. He had a habit of smiling whenever I caught his eye, and though his eyes were sad he smiled nicely.
“Chekhov and James Joyce and James Stephens and …” I stopped suddenly in case he should think that I was showing off.
“I must loan you a book some time,” he said.
Some time? When is some time, I thought as I looked at the tea leaves in the bottom of his cup. I poured him a second cup, through the little strainer which the waitress had belatedly brought. The tea dripped very slowly through the fine strainer.
“Oh, that fiddle-faddle,” he said, so we discarded the strainer and left it on a side plate to drip.
I knew that Baba would be waiting and that I should go to her, but I could not stand up and leave him. I loved his long, sad face and his strong hands.
“I often wonder what young girls like you think. What do you think of?” he asked, after he had been looking steadily at me for a few seconds.
I think about you, I thought, and blushed a bit. To him, I said in a dull stupid voice, “I don’t think very much really; I think about getting new clothes or going on my holidays or what we’ll have for lunch.”
It seems to me now that he sighed and that I tittered to hide my embarrassment and told him that some girls thought of marrying rich men, and one I knew of thought only of her hair; she washed it every night and measured how much it grew in a week, and it was halfway down her back like a golden cape. But it gave her no pleasure because she worried about it too much.
“Where do you go on holiday?” he asked, and I sighed, because I longed to stay in a hotel and have breakfast in bed. I had never had breakfast in bed, except once or twice in the convent when I was sick, and then there was a cup of hot senna, which I had to drink down first. Sister Margaret always stood there while you drank the hot senna, telling you that it was good for the soul as well as the body.
“I go home.”
“Where’s home?”
I told him.
My father had gone back from the gate lodge to our own house and he lived there with my aunt. I described it as best I could.
“You like your home?”
“There’s a lot of trees. It’s lonesome.”
“I like trees,” he said. “I sow them all the time—I’ve got thousands of trees.”
“Have you?” I said. I felt that he was bluffing and I don’t like bluffing.
He looked at his watch, and inevitably he had to go.
“I’m sorry, but I was to see somebody at four.”
“I’m sorry for keeping you,” I said as we stood up. He paid the bill and took his corduroy cap off the mahogany hatrack inside the door.
“Thank you. A pleasant encounter,” he said as we stood on the stone step. I thanked him; he raised his cap and went away from me. I watched him go. I saw him as a dark-faced god turning his back on me. I put out my hand to recall him and caught only the rain. I felt that it would rain forever, noiselessly. The buses were full, as it was after five o’clock, and Baba was furious when I got there an hour late.
“Blithering eejit,” she said. I did not tell her that I had met him.
We had coffee, and later, as arranged, the Body came. We had more coffee; he apologized for everything and gave us five pounds to cover the cost of the dance tickets. Then he took us by taxi to the greyhound track at Harold’s Cross.
On the following Wednesday I went to Dawson Street and stood outside the bookshop for two hours, but Eugene Gaillard did not come, nor the next Wednesday nor the one following.
I waited for four Wednesdays and walked around searching for a sight of him, in his long black coat with the astrakhan collar. I imagined him sitting in Robert’s café looking at dark-haired girls. He said that he liked dark hair and dark eyes and very pale skin; he said these things had a quietness which he liked. I sat in Robert’s, too, and thought of him—he didn’t eat potatoes and he drank water with his dinner, so I took to drinking water with my meals. Tap water in Joanna’s was never cold or sparkling the way you imagine water should be, but it was nice to do something that he did.
I waited and walked around, certain that I would meet him, and the wild hope made my spirits soar. I could almost smell him, see the black hairs on his hands, his proud walk. But for a whole month I did not see him. Once, I saw his car parked in Molesworth Street and I waited for ages in the doorway of a wool shop which had closed down. Finally hunger drove me home, and the next day I wrote to him and asked him to have tea with me the following Wednesday.
The week went round and I came to the restaurant feeling mortified. He was there all right, sitting at a table inside the door, reading a paper.
“Caithleen,” he said when I came in. It was the first time he ever said my name.
“Hello,” I said, trembling, and wondered if I ought to apologize for having written. I sat down in my old coat with a new blue chiffon scarf around my neck.
“Take off your coat,” he said, and I slipped it off and let it hang on the back of the chair.
“I always forget how pretty you are, until I see you again,” he said as he looked carefully at my face. “Ah, the bloom of you, I love your North Circular Road Bicycle Riding Cheeks.”
My cheeks were always pink, no matter how much powder I used. He ordered sandwiches, cakes, scones, and biscuits. I worried, fearing that I would have to pay the bill, being as I had invited him, and I had only ten shillings in my purse. He put his elbows on the table, his fist under his chin. In repose his eyelids were lowered partly, and when he made the effort of raising them you were surprised by the tender expression in his great brown eyes. His face was hard and formidable, but his eyes were compassionate.
“Well?” he said, smiling up at me. “So here we are.” There was a spot of dried blood on his jaw where he had cut himself shaving.
“I hope you didn’t mind coming,” I said.
“No, I didn’t mind. I was very happy in fact; I thought of you on and off during the past few weeks.”
“Five,” I said hastily.
“Five what?”
“Five weeks. You know me five weeks.” He laughed, and asked if I kept a diary, and I thought to myself, He’s a sly one.
“Tell me more about your social life?” he asked as I bit into a cream slice and then licked my lips clean.
“I thought I’d see you,” I said openly.
“I know, but …” He halted, and played with the sugar tongs. “You see, it’s difficult, I’ll be quite honest, I don’t want to get involved. It must be my natural, puritan caution, because Baba and you are two lovely girls, and I’m a man more than old enough to know better.”
Keep Baba out of this, I thought as I said to him, “What do you mean ‘involved’?”—my voice choked, my heart pounding.
“You are a nice girl,” he said, and he put his hand across and petted my wrist, and I asked then if we could have tea once in a while.
“We’re having tea now,” he said, nodding toward the silver pot. “We might even have dinner.”
“Dinner!”
“Dinner!” he said, mimicking my breathless, surprised voice.
We had dinner that evening, and afterward we drove out to Clontarf and walked down by the Bull Wall, as it was a mild, misty November night. He held my hand; he did not squeeze my fingers or plait them in his, he just held my hand very naturally, the way you’d hold a child’s hand or your mother’s.
He talked about America, where he had lived for some years. He had lived in New York and in Hollywood.
The sea was calm, the waves breaking calmly over the boulders and a strong, unpleasant smell of ozone in the air. I could not tell whether the tide was coming in or going out. It is always hard to tell at first.
“Its going out,” he said, and I believed him. I believed everything he said.
Walking down over the concrete pier we shared a cigarette. There were fog horns blowing out at sea and a chain of lights across the harbor that cur
ved like a bright necklace, beyond the mist. Lighthouses blinked and signaled on all sides and I loved watching the rhythm of their flashes, blinking to ships in the lonely sea. They made me think of all the people in the world waiting for all the other people to come to them. For once I was not lonely, because I was with someone that I wanted to be with. We walked to the end of the pier, and looked at the rocks and the pools and the straps of seaweed on everything. He talked about another sea—the faraway Pacific.
“I used to drive out there on weekdays, when things became too much in Los Angeles. The sky is always blue in California, a piercing blue, and the pavements hot, and the tanned, predatory faces booming out their hearty nothings. I like rain and isolation …” He spoke very quietly, using his hands in gestures all the time. I could just see the outline of his face, greenish from moonlight and the glow of the filtered cigarette which we shared.
“And you drove out there?” I said, hoping that accidentally, or otherwise, he would tell me something of his personal life.
“I drove out there and walked over this great, white, Pacific beach, edged so delicately with tar oil on the one side and oil derricks on the other. I kicked the empty beer cans and wanted to go home.”
I thought it odd that no other people occurred in his reminiscences. It was only the place he described, the white beach, the beer cans, the ripe and rotting oranges along the roadside.
“You always talk of places as if only you had been in them,” I said.
“Yes, I was born to be a monk.”
“But you’re not a Catholic,” I said immediately.
He laughed loudly. It was strangely disturbing to hear his laugh above the noise of the washing waves and the anxious breathing of two people who lay between the rocks, making love. He said that Catholics were the most opinionated people on earth—their self-mania, he said, frightened him.
At the end of the pier we looked down at the water as it lapped against the concrete wall, and he told me that he had won cups and medals for swimming when he was a boy. He had lived most of his life in Dublin, with his mother, and had gone to work at twelve or thirteen. His father had left them when he was a small boy, and as a child he had combed the beaches looking for scrap.
“I found shillings often,” he said. “I’ve always been lucky, I’ve always found things. I’ve even found you with your large, lemur eyes. D’you know what a lemur is?”
“Yes,” I lied, and then terrified that he might ask, I talked rapidly about something else.
Driving me home, he said, “It’s a long time since I’ve spent an evening with such a nice girl.”
“Go on,” I said, looking at his fine profile and longing to know of all the other women he had been with and their perfume and what they said and how it had ended. He said that up to the age of twenty-five while he was apprenticed to various trades—cinema operator, gardener, electrician—he could only afford to look at girls, the way one looks at flowers or boats in Dun Laoghaire harbor.
“It’s true,” he said, turning to smile at me.
The smile was nice, and I moved nearer and touched with my cheek the cloth of his gray, hairy overcoat.
He did not kiss me that night.
4
We met three evenings a week after that. In between he wrote me postcards, and as time went on he wrote letters. He called me Kate, as he said that Caithleen was too “Kiltartan” for his liking—whatever that meant.
Each Monday, Wednesday, and Saturday he waited outside the shop for me in his car, and each time as I sat near him, I trembled with a fantastic happiness. Then one night he stayed in a hotel in Harcourt Street and planned to meet me at lunchtime the next day in order to buy me a coat. It was coming near Christmastime, and anyhow, my old green coat was shabby. He bought me a gray astrakhan with a red velvet collar and a flared skirt.
“I’m stuck with you now,” he said as I walked around the shop, while he surveyed the coat from behind. I wished that he wouldn’t scrutinize so much, because I have a stiff walk and become ashamed when people look at me.
“It suits you,” he said, but I thought that it made me look fatter.
We bought it. I asked the assistant to wrap up my old one. She was very posh, with moonlight dye in her hair and a pale lavender shop coat which buttoned right up to her throat. Then he bought me six pairs of stockings and we were given one free pair as a bonus. He said that it was immoral to get a free pair just because we could afford six pairs, but I was delighted.
I thought of Mama and of how she would love it, and I knew that if she could she would come back from her cold grave in the Shannon lake to avail herself of such a bargain. She was drowned when I was fourteen. I felt guilty on and off, because I was so happy with him and because I had seldom seen my mother happy or laughing. Being in the posh shop reminded me of her. A few weeks before she was drowned, she and I went to Limerick for a day’s shopping. She had saved up egg money for several weeks, because although we had a lot of land, we never had much ready cash; Dada drank a lot, and money was always owing—and also she sold off old hens to a man who came around buying feathers and junk. In Limerick she bought a lipstick. I remembered her trying the various shades on the back of her hand and debating for a long time before deciding on one. It was an orange-tinted lipstick in a black-and-gold case.
“My mother is dead,” I said to him as we waited for our change. I wanted to say something else, something that would convey the commonplace sacrifice of her life: of her with one shoulder permanently drooping from carrying buckets of hen food, of her keeping bars of chocolate under the bolster so that I could eat them in bed if I got frightened of Dada or of the wind.
“Your poor mother,” he said, “I expect she was a good woman.”
We lunched in the restaurant off the shop, and I worried about being late back to work.
As he followed me through a narrow, cobbled cul-de-sac toward where the car was parked, he said, “You’re like Anna Karenina in that coat.”
I thought she must be some girlfriend of his, or an actress.
Driving back, I said rashly, “Would you like to come and have tea this evening, in the house where I stay?” Baba had been pestering me to invite him home to tea so that she could flirt with him.
He said he would, and promised to be there at seven.
As I hurried toward the shop, he called after me, laughing, to take care of the new coat. I blew him a kiss.
“Your old bottom’s getting fat,” he shouted. I nearly died. There were customers waiting around the door and they heard him.
When Mrs. Burns wasn’t looking I wrote a note to Joanna to ask if we could have something special for tea. It was Friday and always on Friday we had roly-poly pudding. We had the same things on the same successive days of each week. Joanna called it her “new systematic.”
Willie took the note over and returned with Joanna’s reply on his blue, hungry lips. “Mein Gott, I am not spending any luxury for this rich man.”
I bought her a cake in the bakery two doors away. It was an expensive cake topped with shredded coconut. I sent it over, along with a bag of biscuits and a sample jar of cranberry jelly. Willie came back and reported that she had put the cake in a tin, which meant that she had put it away for Christmas. All afternoon my heart was bubbling with excitement; happiness, unhappiness. Twice I gave wrong change, and Mrs. Burns asked me if it was my bad time. In the end I got so worked up that I hoped he wouldn’t come at all. I could see his face all the time, and his grave eyes, and a vein in the side of his temple that stood out. Then I became terrified that once having seen where I lived, he would no longer ask me out.
Joanna’s house was clean but shabby. It was a terraced, brick house, linoleumed from top to bottom. She had a strip of matting (which she got cheap) in the downstairs hall. The furniture was dark and heavy, and the front room was stuffed with china dogs and ornaments and knickknacks. There was a green rubber plant in a pot on the piano.
When I got home Baba was th
ere, all dressed up. Joanna must have told her that he was coming. She wore her tartan slacks and a chunky cardigan back to front. The V neck and the buttons were down her back.
As I went into the room I heard Joanna say, “It is not good to the floor these girls with spiked shoes.”
Our stiletto heels had marked the linoleum.
“I have no other shoes,” Baba said in her brazen, go-to-hell voice.
“Mein Gott, upstairs is full of shoes, under the beds, the dressing table, I see nothing but shoes, shoes, shoes.”
They both noticed my new coat.
“Where d’you feck it?” Baba asked.
“A new coat! Astrakhan,” Joanna said. And she touched the cuff with her hand and said, “Rich, you are a rich girl. I had not a new coat since I left my own country nine years ago.” She held up nine fingers as if I didn’t know numbers.
“You give me your old one, hah?” she said, grinning at me.
“What’s for tea?” I asked. I had cycled home so quickly that my chest hurt. He was due any minute.
“You asked me what’s for tea! You know what is for tea,” Joanna said.
“But look, Joanna, he’s awful special and rich and everything. He knows film stars, he met Joan Crawford; oh, Joanna, please, please.” I exaggerated to impress her.
“Rich!” Joanna said, rolling the r of that word, her favorite word, the only poem she knew.
“I tell you this, I am not rich. I am a poor woman, but I come from good home, good respectable Austrian family, and driven out of my own country.”
“He’s from around there, too,” I said, hoping to soften her.
“Where?” she asked as if I had just insulted her.
“Bavaria or Rumania or some place,” I said.
“Is he a Jew, eh?” Her eyes narrowed. “I do not like Jews, they are a little bit mean.”
“I don’t know what he is, but he’s not mean, honest,” I said, and I almost told her that he had bought the coat for me.