by Edna O'Brien
“Am I likely to be kissing anybody?” he asked the mirror as he stroked the stubble on his chin.
I laughed.
“Well, am I?” he asked again. I loved kissing him. I thought, If only people just kissed, if all love stopped at that.
He picked up my hairbrush and began to brush my hair very slowly. I liked the slow, firm strokes of the brush on my scalp, and after a while I felt exhilarated from it. He smiled a lot at me in the mirror.
“I have too much chin and you have a shade too little. We should make perfectly chinned children,” he said. He expected me to laugh, but I didn’t. There were some things which I was very touchy about: babies, for instance. Babies terrified me. Then I remembered the box of toys; I had never forgotten it really, just postponed thinking about it.
“There is a box of toys in my room, under the bed,” I said.
“Yes, I know, they’re mine. I had a child.”
“Oh.”
“I had a daughter, she’s three now.” I thought his voice changed, but I could not be certain. I imagined him giving a little girl a pickaback, and the thought stabbed me with jealous pain.
“Do you miss her?” I asked.
“I miss her very much, almost every minute of the day I think of her, or think that I’m hearing her. Once you’ve had a child you want to live with it and watch it grow.”
He went on brushing my hair, but it was not the same after that.
I slept in his bed that night, and he loaned me a white flannel nightgown with rosebuds on it, which was exactly like one my mother kept in a trunk at home, in case she ever had to go to hospital. He set the alarm clock for seven and put it on the bedside table, and put the lamp out. I thought of Laura, because he said that he had bought the clock in New York one night when he was walking around, very late. He said you could buy things in the middle of the night there, or go to the pictures. I longed to go with him to London, where he was going in a day or two. During dinner a telegram had been delivered, asking him to go to London as soon as possible. I read it in the study after dinner, when we were eating mandarin oranges. It said: YOU OLD SOD CAN YOU COME AND DO SOMETHING TO THIS LOUSY SCRIPT ON SEWERAGE, IT STINKS. It was from somebody called Sam, and Eugene said that he would have to go there for a few days. He took a canvas travel bag from the gun bureau to remind him to pack.
“ ‘Tis well for you,” I said, and I thought that he might bring me, but instead he asked me what I did with orange pits.
“I swallow them,” I said. There were so many that it would have been a day’s work to remove them.
“You swallow them,” he repeated, raising his eyes to the cracked ceiling. “How am I ever going to take you into society?”
“I’ll be very polite,” I said, sure that he would invite me to London, but he didn’t.
We went to bed early and he got me the nightgown from the hot press and set the clock for seven.
“Not so cold tonight,” he said when we got into bed. There had been an oil heater on in the room for several hours and the air was fuggy.
“Not so strange, either, is it?” he asked as he rubbed my cold knees briskly and asked if I usually slept with half a dozen hot-water bottles. Baba and I had one stone bottle between us and we were always threatening to buy a second one, but it seemed such a waste of good money. We fought over it a lot and sometimes I went to bed very early to have the first of it.
“Not so strange,” I lied as his hand roamed over my body and his fingers searched for the places I liked most to be caressed. I was thinking that by the next day he would be off in London, far away from me, and already I had begun to tighten with fear and nervousness. I drew my nightgown down over my knees and said that we would just talk about things.
“But I want to love you,” he said. “I’ve been thinking all day of how I shall make love to you and make you happy.” He went on caressing me, and in a halfhearted way I caressed him and wished that I could stop myself from being so afraid. But that night was a failure, too.
We were up and ready to leave for Dublin long before the alarm went off. I heard it ring when I was putting on my coat, but I was too downcast to go up and press in the button.
In the motorcar he hardly spoke. His profile looked gray and forbidding, and I thought, He has a hard, unforgiving face.
“I hope you enjoy London,” I said.
“I hope so,” he said, and asked if I had the two books he loaned me. He had loaned them to me the previous night, before we went up to bed. One was a novel, and the other was called The Body and Mature Behavior.
“I have them here,” I said, kicking my bag to indicate where they were. I thought for one minute that he was going to ask me to give them back, but he didn’t.
“Will you write to me from London?” I asked.
“Of course,” he said, but coolly. I’ll send you a card.” And I thought with desolation of how different it would have been between us if I had not been afraid in bed.
I longed to do something dramatic, to scream or throw his new coat back at him, or jump out of the car while it was moving. A minute later, I longed to be in his arms, unafraid, pleasing him. More than anything I longed to please him. It seemed like weeks since he had put my hair behind my ear and whispered, “I am never going to let you go.” In fact, it had only been nine or ten hours before that we had got into bed and he had kissed my frightened nipples and they had sprouted like seed potatoes—before I got the fit of shivering.
He drove me right up outside the shop. I asked him not to, in case Mrs. Burns should be looking out the bedroom window, but he ignored it, or else he did not hear me.
I got out quickly, said goodbye, and thanked him.
“Goodbye,” he said. He was as offhand as if I were some stranger to whom he had given a lift. I ran to the shop door and unlocked it with the key, which I had ready in my hand. I went inside, without turning back to wave.
A moment later when I drew up the blind of the shop window, there was no sign of his car. I knew that he was gone. It was all over, Christmas, kissing, everything …
7
He had been gone five days now and there was no news of him. Baba said that he had probably arranged to meet his wife in London and that we would never see him again.
“You got a coat out of him,” she said. “I got sweet damn all.”
“It wasn’t his wife,” I said angrily. “I read the telegram myself, it was about his work.”
“It’s bound to be that bitch he married,” Baba said. Baba maintained that all wives were bitches.
Anyhow, she said that we would soon know, because we were on our way to a fortune-teller in Donnybrook. At Donnybrook Church we got out of the bus, and as we had never been in that church before, we nipped in for three wishes. Two women who were filling lemonade bottles with Holy Water from a tub inside the door directed us to the fortune-teller’s house.
It was a large brick house. In the cold tiled hallway, seven or eight girls waited. Three of them told us that they came regularly every week and each of the others had been to the fortune-teller at least once before.
“She’s marvelous,” they said. They also said that she was moody. The place reminded me of the convent—the walls tiled halfway, the group of girls with their various smells of sweat, and perfume, and soap; the absence of cigarette smoke. A homemade, inked sign said NO SMOKING. It didn’t even say “please.” I had only to close my eyes to smell again the convent cabbage and hear a nun admonishing Baba about the hole in her sock.
“Come into the place,” Baba said to me, and together we went into the downstairs lavatory to have a smoke. A block of pearl-colored disinfectant was placed in a saucer on the ledge—it gave the place a hygienic smell.
“Jesus, this place gives me the creeps,” Baba said, and we debated whether or not we should leave. But I wanted to know very badly about Eugene, so we stayed. When we came out and took our places on the stool, four more girls had arrived. To many of the girls it was a recreation; th
ey came once a week, instead of going to the pictures or to a dance.
“Now, don’t give her any clues, about any damn thing,” Baba warned me, and just then a middle-aged woman came out of the fortune-teller’s room, crying. We all stared at her. I supposed that she had heard something awful, such as that her husband was leaving her for another woman.
“We’ll go in together,” Baba whispered, and I said yes.
We had to wait an hour.
“Sit down,” the fortune-teller said in a disinterested voice as we went into her room. We guessed that she must be in one of her bad moods, because the others had told us that if she didn’t talk, it meant bad humor. She sat beside an electric fire, drinking tea and warming one hand around the cup. She was dressed completely in black and her pale face suggested that she never had any fresh air. The room was large and drafty, with a faded screen dividing it into two. Baba nudged me as much as to say, It’s awful.
“Well,” the fortune-teller said at last, picking up Baba’s hand as if it were some loose object which was not joined to Baba’s arm.
“Why are you wearing an engagement ring, you’re not engaged.”
It was her mother’s engagement ring which Baba wore. She took it off and gave it to me to hold.
“There’s trouble in store for you,” the fortune-teller said, staring into the palm of Baba’s neat hand. Poor Baba looked very frightened and sat with her shoulders tensed up.
“You’ll marry a rich man,” she went on, “that is, when you give up this married man.”
Baba blushed. I knew that it must be Tod Mead.
“You have one brother, and your birthday is in June,” she said as she dropped Baba’s hand abruptly and asked us to change places. The routine was that she read hands first, then read the cards, and finally the crystal. A beautiful crystal of green glass rested on a side table.
“You’ll make a journey,” she said to me. She had a black scarf tied around her head so that you couldn’t see her hair. Her voice was low, extraordinarily flat, and monotonous. She had no interest in the things she told me.
“It’s an unpleasant journey,” she noted, “and before the new year is out, you’ll marry an eccentric man; you’ll have to marry him, because you will be the mother of twins.”
“Twins,” Baba said, and fell into a fit of laughing and could not stop. So did I. It wasn’t just my face that laughed, my whole body shook with it. She waited for us to stop, but it became worse, and finally she dropped my hand and asked us to leave the room.
Baba stood up, delighted, as she felt that she had heard enough about herself. I tried to apologize, but the fortune-teller would not listen.
“A refund,” Baba said gaily as she retrieved the two ten-shilling notes which we had put on a plate when we came in.
“Put that money down, young lady,” the fortune-teller shouted, so Baba dropped the money and we ran out of the room, laughing.
Just as we approached the hall, a man stuck his head out of a side door and said, “Excuse me, missy, how do you spell umbrelly?”
He talked through his nose, and of course this made us hysterical with laughter.
“I don’t know,” Baba said, talking through her nose. “Why don’t you go up the river on a bicycle?”
He laughed too, he even laughed through his nose.
“Talk about the loony bin,” Baba said as we ran down the avenue. Baba said that she might set mad dogs on us, so we ran the whole way to the road.
We took a bus to Grafton Street and then got out to look at the shop windows, because the sales were on.
Then we went to Davy Byrnes’s cocktail bar and ordered a Pernod between us. We hadn’t enough money to buy two drinks.
“Look fast,” Baba said. We sat near the door and Baba said that some moron was bound to buy us a drink. She beamed at a man in a leather jacket who had an absurdly curling mustache.
“That drink has to last two hours, till closing time,” she said as I took a swig of Pernod. It was like licorice cough-bottle mixture and it looked cloudy when she added water to it. She kept adding water all the time, to make it go far. The barboy asked if we were all right.
“We’re broke,” Baba said, and he went off and got us two glasses of beer.
“That’s the best I can do,” he said, placing the glasses on little blotting-paper mats that bore an advertisement for something.
“I won’t forget you,” Baba said. He was a young boy, just up from Tipperary, and we had spoken to him one night before.
“Right,” he said in a falsely brave voice.
“I’ll send you my garter in the post,” Baba said, and he went off, blushing and grinning.
“Decent of him,” I said to Baba. The beer tasted insipid after the Pernod.
“Decent! It’s my charm that gets us these sorts of favors,” Baba said, and then she turned to look at the man with the mustache. He stood by the counter, drinking alone. I suppose with that mustache no one could sit or stand opposite him without laughing.
“Excuse me, have you got the right time on you?” Baba leaned over and asked him.
Right time! There was a wall clock staring her in the face. It was twenty minutes past nine o’clock.
He moved away, agitated. A tremor began in his right cheek. I suppose he thought we might damage his good name, just by talking to him. I knew him well by sight, as he sold scooters in a shop in D’Olier Street. Suddenly I felt cheap and humiliated, and I wished that Eugene would come and take me to the cathedral of tall green trees behind his house.
“We’ll ring the Body,” Baba said. It was what she always said—ring someone, anyone—when we had nothing special to do. He drank in his local pub in Blanchardstown most nights from nine o’clock on. She got three pennies and went off to telephone.
A country-looking boy came over to me and said, “I was looking for Bovril.”
“Were you?” I said, cutting him dead with my cheeky look. My hair was loose around my face and I tossed it out of one eye at regular intervals. He just stood there, looking at me, with his coat open and his jacket open, and a glaring yellow pullover inside it. Baba came back and he repeated to her that he had come in to get some Bovril.
“Have a whiskey,” she said.
“I never broke my confirmation pledge,” he said in a rough, humorless voice. He sat at our table.
“Where’s the Body?” I asked Baba.
“He’s gone to Mount Melleray to confession.” Every January the Body went to the Cistercian Monastery at Mount Melleray to fast and pray. He always returned full of good resolutions, but after a week or two he was on the drink again.
The country boy told us that he was from Oranmore and that he had come to Dublin for treatment, because he had had an accident the summer before and was still lame from it.
“I’m going into the Rotunda tomorrow,” he said, and Baba laughed, because the Rotunda is a maternity hospital. He rooted in his pocket for an envelope and we saw that it was addressed to the Richmond hospital. The envelope was black with fingermarks and you could see that it had been opened and restuck.
“Poor you,” Baba said falsely. He bought us a whiskey each, and a pork pie, and coffee for himself.
“ ‘Twas an aul tractor,” he said, “it rolled over me. I was nearly in pulp, only for me father—”
Baba flapped her hands behind his back and signaled to me to shut him up. He was talking loud and everyone could hear him.
At closing time we left and walked with him to his hotel. We promised to visit him in hospital, but we didn’t think we would.
“We’ll write t’him care of the Rotunda,” Baba said as we ran up Amiens Street to catch the last bus.
At home, we heated soup.
“You’re getting dull,” Baba said.
“I know,” I said. The night had been stupid, boring, paltry. Nothing interested me now, unless it had to do with Eugene; I thought of him and of his sudden outbursts of nervous energy, which made him dance around and conduct
an imaginary orchestra or chop wood for an hour. It even gave me pleasure to think of his sheep dog, and of the old house with its dark wood always creaking and shutters rattling at night.
“It’s Eugene?” Baba said.
“Yes,” I said despairingly.
Then the soup began to boil and a nice smell pervaded the small kitchen. We had to open the window to let the smell out, otherwise Joanna might have come down, as the soup was part of next day’s lunch.
“Did he try it on?” Baba said. The two drinks had made her outspoken.
“Sort of,” I said. Shame stifled me as I remembered the soft bed, with the nice smell of clean linen and an owl crying in one of the pine trees.
“How far did he go?” Baba asked.
“Oh, don’t ask me such a thing!”
I drank the soup and remembered back to the evening at dinner when the telegram asking him to go to London had been delivered. Anna, who is cursed with the curiosity of the lonely, had said, “No one dead?”
“No one dead,” he had said, and gone on with his dinner. Anna had sulked. She had looked funny that night, because she’d taken her curling pins out for dinner (he would have remarked on them), and her long dark hair was neither straight nor curly but quiffed in places. I thought of every detail of my visit—even the kind of soap he used, and the color of his facecloth.
“You’ll never hear from him again,” Baba predicted, but she was mistaken.
Next morning I had a letter, and Baba had a card.
“How dare you read my correspondence,” she said, snatching the card from me, “sly bitch.”
I read my own letter upstairs.
Dear Sweetling,
How are you? We parted bad friends and don’t think I didn’t notice the resentment in your fat bottom as you hurried into your huckster shop.
Anyhow, I’ve been thinking of you and I forgive you everything. I’m working very hard on those glorious sewerages which I told you about; and I’m staying in a hotel, which is full of young American girls! Makes me nostalgic for the old days, but have no fears, none are as awkward or as pretty as you. You are a nice, kind, dear, sweet, round-faced pollop and now that I’m all mixed up in you and your mad hair, don’t set fire to yourself until I come back to you.