by Edna O'Brien
5
I set out early on Sunday morning, as the church bells of Dublin clanged and clashed through the clear, bright air. Other people were on their way to Mass, but I was going to visit him in his own home. I did not feel sinful about missing Mass, because it was early morning and I had washed my hair. The city was white with frost and the road looked slippery in places.
I went up to the corner of the avenue to wait for him because Joanna had threatened to send Gustav with me.
“A chaperon you need,” she said. She said that it was not right for me to be alone with a strange man in his home. She said that he might be a spy or a maniac. She called it a meaniac.
“I’m going alone and that’s that,” I said. I wanted to hear about his marriage.
“Gustav will not be in the way,” she said. She was really worried about me. She polished Gustav’s brown leather boots and put them beside the fire along with his clean gray socks. He always put on his shoes and socks at the fire, having warmed his feet first.
“Oh, all right, then,” I said, and I got out of the house on the excuse that I was going to early Mass.
Eugene was ten minutes late. He was lined and gray as if from lack of sleep. He just looked at me and breathed on my face in welcome.
“Wow!” he said to the wide straw hat that I wore. It was a summer hat really, with a bunch of wax rosebuds on it.
“You look like a child bride—it must be that hat,” he said, and grinned at it. I suppose he thought it was foolish. My long, clean, bright hair fell down over both shoulders and I had put on very white makeup. I told him about Gustav wanting to come with us. He just smiled. I thought the smile peculiar and wondered if I should have brought someone after all. I said a prayer to my Guardian Angel to protect me:
Oh, angel of God, my guardian dear,
To whom God’s love commits me here;
Ever this day he at my side
To light and guard, to rule and guide.
He asked me if I had had breakfast. I said no. I had been too excited to eat. Then he reached to the back seat and got a fawn wool scarf, which he put around me. He tied a soft knot under my chin and kissed me before we set out.
We drove through the city and past suburbs and then along a wide road with ditches and trees on either side. Sometimes we came into a village—houses, a few shops, a pump, a chapel.
“I usually go to Mass,” I said as we slowed down to let people come out the chapel gates and cross the road.
“I have a few prepaid indulgence forms and excommunication applications at home somewhere, which may fix you up,” he said, and I laughed it off and said how nice the country looked. Branches and little dark, delicate twigs formed a fretwork of black lace against a cold silver sky. I hadn’t been in the country for months, not since I was home the previous summer, and I thought of my aunt and my father settling to the Sunday papers and a long sleep after their Sunday lunch. My aunt looked after my father now, and they lived in our old house, occupying one or two of the large, damp rooms.
“Feel your ears clicking,” he said as we climbed a long, rocky hill toward bleak mountain land. There were no trees on that stretch—just gorse bushes and granite rocks. Sheep moved between the marbled rocks, and I felt my ears buzzing, just as he said. We got to his house around eleven. The frost had melted by then and the laurel hedge was a dark, glossy green; the house itself was white, with french windows downstairs and trees all around it.
A big sheep dog ran to us and Anna opened the door. I had heard of her—she looked after him in a haphazard sort of way, and lived downstairs at the back of the house. She was married and had a baby.
“Well, at long last,” she said, almost insolently.
“Hello, Anna.” He handed her the parcels from the car and introduced me. There were chops, a sheep’s head for the dog, a bottle of gin, and a new coffeepot.
“Booze,” she said. She was a weedy woman with a greasy face and long, straight hair. She looked sleepy or drugged or something.
Even though it was winter, flowers were blooming on the rockery—a mist of small blue flowers trailed over the marbled rocks. I felt that he was excited about showing me his house; he hummed as we climbed the stone steps to the door.
The front hall was clean and bright, with cream paintwork, black antique furniture, and walking sticks in a big china holder.
“ ‘Tis a divil to keep clean,” Anna said as she led the way down to the kitchen, and just as we went in by one door, we heard her husband go out by another. She said that he was shy.
“Now, aren’t you glad you came?” Eugene said to me when Anna went into the dairy for a jug of cream. He made coffee.
“Yes, it’s lovely,” I said, looking around the large, stone-flagged kitchen, and at the set of green house bells high on the wall, which looked as if they hadn’t been in use for years. Small logs were stacked to dry at one end of the black-lead range, and a boiling kettle let out its familiar sigh. It was a nice kitchen.
He changed into an old oatmeal jacket and went out to saw some wood, as Anna said that Denis had gone off for the day to count sheep and mend a fence. I longed to follow Eugene, but she drew a chair over near the fire for me, so I sat and talked to her, while she chopped cabbage on the big kitchen table. She looked sluttish in a black cotton skirt and a shapeless gray jumper. She wore a man’s hat and had stuck a duck’s feather into the brown, stained band.
“Are you an actress?” she asked, as soon as we were alone.
“No.”
“He knows a lot of actresses.”
She poured herself some gin from the bottle he had brought and told me that she wasn’t a servant really and that I mustn’t think so. A caretaker, she called herself, nodding to the back stairs, where her apartments were and where her baby slept. She had a baby, nine months old. She talked about her womb, and about her husband.
“The only woman he ever warmed to was Mrs. Gaillard—Laura,” she said, looking into my eyes. Her own eyes were a bright, malignant yellow.
“He has a little blue stone upstairs that he’s keeping for her. He found it out on the mountain.”
She talked of the great times and big parties they’d had in Laura’s time, and I imagined the front rooms filled with people, candles on the mahogany tables, and lanterns in the beech trees down the avenue. I had not fully believed that Laura existed up till then, but I believed it now, because Anna said so—”Laura was great sport; she had a big fur coat and her own car and everything. The place is like a churchyard now”—she poured herself more gin and squeezed some lemon into it.
There were a lot of slugs in the cabbage and she just tipped them into the fire with the blade of the knife.
Eugene wheeled a barrow of logs in and she went off on the excuse that she had to do something upstairs.
“Is she drinking?” he asked. The bottle of gin was on the table with the cut lemon beside it. He took away the bottle and told me about a new power saw which he would like me to see. He had just cut the wood and you could see the bright knots of amber resin in it and smell its fresh resin odor.
“That would be lovely,” I said, though machinery bores me. He tiptoed over and kissed me and asked if something worried me, because my face looked tense.
“Has she been telling you a whole long saga?” he asked.
I nodded.
“Don’t believe a word of it, she’s invented a big fairy tale. Did she say we had a Rolls-Royce and a butler?”
I nodded again, and smiled at the tuft of his hair which stuck out foolishly over one ear. He wore his cap sideways, and he looked pale in the oatmeal jacket.
“I’ll tell you about it later,” he said, and though I dreaded him having to tell me, I also wanted desperately to know everything, so that Anna could not surprise me with anything new.
We ate lunch off a little circular table in his study, and it was late, as Anna had got slightly merry from the gin and did not put on the vegetables until after two o’clock.
&
nbsp; “To plow the rocks of Bawn,” she hummed as she came in, carrying plates. She still kept on the man’s hat, which made me wonder if she had shingles or something. The bacon was sliced on our plates, and she also carried a big napkin of steaming, floury potatoes.
“That’s a nice bacon.” She winked at him, and he smiled into her yellow face. She had put on some violet eye shadow, which didn’t enhance her appearance, because there were black circles under her eyes anyhow. He said that she had appropriated all the cosmetics which “your woman” left behind. He rarely called Laura by name.
“Will you be my amanuensis in this shooting lodge?” he joked as I looked around the room to admire it. The walls were a faded blue, the paintwork cream. There were no curtains on the french windows (just shutters, which had been drawn back), and the light came in, in abundance, so that you could see where Anna had dragged a cloth over the pieces of brown mahogany furniture and only half dusted them. The view through the long window was magical. Beyond the paling wire was the front field, below it a forest of trees, and in the distance a valley of dreaming purple. He said that it was a valley of birch trees and that in wintertime the twigs of birch always had this odd, flushed purple color. He suggested that we drive down there after lunch, but I did not want to go and spoil the beautiful illusion.
“Tell me, what sort of food do you like?” he asked as he put butter on my cabbage and passed me a tube of mustard. At home we always mixed mustard in egg cups.
“I like everything.”
“Everything?” He looked appalled.
I was sorry then that I didn’t pretend to have some taste. He talked about his work; he had just finished a script for a picture on the world’s starving people. He had traveled all over the world, to India, China, Sicily, Africa—gathering information for it. On his desk were photographs of tumbledown cities and slums with hungry children in doorways. It made me hungry just to look at them.
“Bengal, Honolulu, Tanganyika,” I repeated after him in a dreamy voice, recounting where he had been. I had no idea where those places were.
“You make a lot of pictures?” I asked.
“No. I make odd little pictures; I made one I think you’d like, about a Maori child.”
“Is your name on the screen?” I longed to be able to tell my aunt.
“It’s such small print,” he said, measuring its depth by holding his thumb and forefinger slightly apart, “no one ever reads it. I made one picture in Hollywood—a romance—and I bought this house with the earnings from it.”
That would be in Laura’s time, I thought, as he went on talking about one he was making on sewerage systems.
“Sewerage?”
“Yes, you know, water sewerage; it’s a very exciting business.”
I looked at him and saw that he was quite serious, and I knew that I could never tell my aunt about him now.
“They’re charming films. I used to think of my life as a failure, purposeless … until I got older and became aware of things. I now know that the problem of life is not solved by success but by failure: struggle and achievement and failure … on and on.” He said the last words almost to himself.
What he said reminded me of a film I had seen, of a turtle laying her eggs on the sands and then laboring her way back to the sea, crying with exhaustion as she went.
“I’d like to see some of your films,” I said.
“You will.” But he did not make any plans then. There was a bed in the room with a rug thrown over it. He said that it had been brought down from upstairs once when somebody was ill. He didn’t say who.
We went for a walk so that I could see the woods before it got dark. He loaned me a raincoat that was lined with honey-colored fur and a pair of woman’s Wellingtons from under the stairs. I turned them upside down before putting them on, because once I found a dead mouse in a Wellington. Some corn seeds dropped out of them.
“All right?” he asked.
“Lovely, thank you.” They pinched a bit. She must have had smaller feet than me. Baba always says I probably have bigger feet than any girl in Ireland.
We went up by the wood at the back of the house to shelter from the misting rain. There were all kinds of trees and the ground was soggy with leaf mold. He said that huge red and purple mushrooms grew in the wood in summer. It was very quiet except for the rain and our feet breaking twigs. Even though it was winter, the wood was green and sheltered, because there were many big Christmas trees.
“So you heard that I’m married,” he said as I stood to admire the startling red berries on a holly tree.
“Yes, the boss’s wife told me.”
He smiled and seemed almost flattered that anyone should know about his private life.
“And you think this is a very bad thing?”
“Oh no,” I said, staring straight ahead at a split oak that looked like the legs of a giant.
He went on: “Yes, I married an American girl when I was over there. She was a nice girl, very personable, but after a few years she didn’t care for me. I wasn’t ‘fun.’ A privileged girl, brought up to believe that she is special, changes an unsatisfactory husband as she might change her bath salts. She believes that happiness is her right.”
“That’s a pity,” I said. It was a stupid thing for me to say, but I was afraid that I might cry, so I had to say something.
“She was a failed painter. We lived in Hollywood in a plaster mansion-cottage—they’re going cheap there in the last few years,” he said aside, as if he were addressing the holly tree. “The unending blue sky nearly drove me mad, so did the people—’Hi Joe, Hi Al, Hi Art.’ We came to Ireland and bought this house. I had money from the picture I made and she had an income. She had gone to school in a gold-plated Rolls. She hated everyone.”
It occurred to me that he was secretly proud of this, though he may not have known it.
“She had big plans,” he said, “hunting and shooting. She thought we might invite film directors here and writers. We did, but they never came. It rained, I got my rheumatism back.” He moved his neck stiffly, as if there were rheumatism always waiting to be summoned. “I put on my long underpants and my long face, and she said that I had a feudal attitude to women because I let her carry in a log for the fire. She left one day when I was out mowing hay with Denis … There was a note on the table and …” He stopped and withdrew whatever it was he had intended to say.
“I’m sorry,” I said. I was actually sorry.
“Oh … thank you.” He smiled, and put his hand to catch the drops of rain that fell from the trees. It was the first time he had looked shy or ill at ease.
The dark, polished green of holly leaves was reflected on his pale skin so that he looked a little green and unhealthy, and I longed to take him in my arms and console him. We walked on.
At the top of the wood he climbed onto a grass bank, and pulled me up by the hand to show me the view.
“Ah,” he said, breathing in the wonderful remoteness of the place. “You mustn’t worry about my being married.”
“I’m not worrying,” I lied.
“I would have told you about it eventually,” he said. “I don’t talk about some things easily. Guilt and failure are painful topics, and as you get older you try and put them out of your mind.”
I shivered slightly, I don’t know why, and he put an arm around me, thinking that I was dizzy from standing on the height.
Underneath, sheep grazed on the rough, yellowish grass which stretched toward a low mountain. Some gorse had been burned, and in the fading light the charred, bent branches looked like skeletons of ghosts. The view depressed me.
“That was why I did not want to get involved with you in the very beginning,” he said quietly.
“I know now,” I said, and he turned sharply to see if I was crying or something.
Then he smiled at me. “You’re wild, you must have grown up out in the open.”
I thought of our front field at home with pools of muddy water lodged
around the base of trees and I felt desolate.
“You have a look of mystique on your face,” I said.
His pale expression fell to pieces, and he hollered with laughter and asked where I had picked up such a word. I realized that it must have been a wrong word, but I had read it in some book and liked its sound.
“Dear girl, you’ll have to give up reading books.” He took my hand and we ran down the slope of the bank and back into the wood. We had a quick look at a plantation of young pine trees which he had put down. A netting wire fence ran all around them to keep out rabbits and deer. He reached in and touched the tip of the trees and said that he must sow one for my coming. I wondered if he had sown trees for his wife and if he still loved her.
Anna and her husband went out after tea to play cards, and took their baby, though Eugene said it would get pneumonia.
I felt uneasy being alone with him in that large house. He lit two Tilley lamps, drew the shutters in the study, and said, “Let’s have a little music.”
There were records in small piles on the floor, and books everywhere, and antlers sprung at me from one wall. He said that the previous owner, who had been keen on slaughter, had left traces of himself behind—horns and heads, and dried skins on the floor. A strange music filled the room and he moved around, beating time to it and pausing to see how I liked it. It had no words.
“Well, what do you think of that? What does it remind you of?” he asked when the record had played itself out. It reminded me of birds making a brown V in the sky.
“Birds,” I said.
“Birds!” He did not know what I meant, so he put on another, and this one sounded much the same.
“More birds?” he said, laughing, and I nodded. I think he was disappointed, because he did not play any more records that night.
“Let’s look at the fire upstairs,” he said, but I did not want to go up there. I feared that it might be a plan to lure me up to his bedroom. He had lit a fire there earlier on—because of a damp patch over the mantelpiece, he said.
“I’ll sit here,” I said as he went off, carrying a brass candlestick and a new, unlighted candle. I looked at his desk, to try to find out things about him. It was littered with papers, letters, air-mail envelopes, packets of flower seeds, stiffeners from a man’s collar, copper nails in a jam jar, and ashtrays with funny drawings on them.