The Country Girls Trilogy and Epilogue: The Country Girls / Girl with Green Eyes / Girls in Their Married Bliss

by Edna O'Brien

  “Tell them if there’s a knock, not to answer it,” I suggested.

  “Nonsense,” he said, “they never come down once they’ve gone up at night. They go to bed after the nine o’clock news.” He was very proud and did not wish to share his troubles with anyone.

  “Now the hall door,” I said. We opened it for a minute and looked out at the windy night and listened to the trees groaning.

  “Go away from the window, bogey man,” he said as we came in and sat on the couch in front of the study fire. The oak box was stocked with logs, and he said that we were perfectly safe and that no one could harm us.

  There was a shotgun in the corner of the hall, and I thought that maybe he should get it to be on the safe side.

  “Nonsense,” he said. “You just want some melodrama …”

  I could hear the wind and I imagined that I heard a car driving up to the house; I heard it all the time, but it was only in my imagination. I rubbed his hair and massaged the muscles at the back of his neck, and he said that it was very nice and very comforting.

  “We get on well together, you and I,” he said.

  “Yes,” I said, and thought how easy it would be, if he said then, I love you, or I could love, or I’m falling in love with you, but he didn’t; he just said that we got on well together.

  “We only know each other a couple of months,” he said to the fire, as if he had sensed my disappointment. I knew that he believed in the slow, invisible processes of growth, the thing which had to take root first in the lonely, dark part of one, away from the light. He liked to plant trees and watch them grow; he liked our friendship to take its course; he was not ready for me.

  “Do you believe in God?” I said abruptly. I don’t know why I said it.

  “Not when I’m sitting at my own fire. I may do when I’m driving eighty miles an hour. It varies.” I thought it a very peculiar answer, altogether.

  “What things are you afraid of?” I wished that somehow he would make some deep confession to me and engross me in his fears so that I could forget my own, or that we could play I-spy-with-my-little-eye, or something.

  “Just bombs,” he said, and I thought that a peculiar answer, too.

  “But not hell?” I said, naming my second greatest fear.

  “They’ll give me a job making fires in hell, I’m good at fires.” I wondered how his voice could be so calm, his face so still. Sometimes I rubbed his neck, and then again I rested my arm and sat very close to him, wondering how I could live without him in London for the while—until things blew over, he said.

  “The best thing you can do about hell …” he began, but I never heard the end of the sentence, because just then the dog barked in the yard outside. She barked steadily for a few seconds and then let out a low, warning howl that was almost human-sounding. I jumped up.

  “Sssh, ssh,” he said, as I stumbled over a tray of tea things that was on the floor. He ran across and lowered the Tilley lamp; then we waited. Nothing happened, no footsteps, no car, nothing but the wind and the beating rain. Yet I knew they were coming and that in a moment they would knock on the door.

  “Must have been a badger or a fox.” He poured me a drink from the whiskey bottle on the gun bureau.

  “You look as white as a sheet,” he said, sipping the whiskey. Then the dog barked again, loudly and continuously, and I knew by her hysterical sounds that she was trying to leap the double doors in the back yard. We had not locked them. My whole body began to shake and tremble.

  “It’s them,” I said, going cold all over. We heard boots on the gravel and men talking, and suddenly great banging and tapping on the hall door. The dog continued to bark hysterically, and above the noise of banging fists and wind blowing I heard the beating of my own heart. Knuckles rapped on the window, the shutters rattled, and at the same time the stiff knocker boomed. I clutched Eugene’s sleeve and prayed.

  “Oh, God,” I said to him.

  “Open up,” a man’s voice shouted.

  “They’ll break down the door,” I said. Five or six of them seemed to be pounding on it all at once. I thought that my heart would burst.

  “How dare they abuse my door like that,” he said as he moved toward the hall.

  “Don’t, don’t!” I stood in his way and told him not to be mad. “We won’t answer,” I said, but I had spoken too late. One of my people had gone around to the back of the house, and we heard the metallic click of the back-door latch being raised impatiently. Then the bolt was drawn and I heard Anna say, “What’n the name of God do you want at this hour of night?”

  I suppose that she must have been half asleep and had tumbled down thinking that we had been locked out or that the police had come for me.

  I heard the Ferret’s voice speak my name. “We’ve come to take that girl out of here.”

  “I don’t know anything about it. Wait outside,” Anna said insolently, and then he must have walked straight past her, because she shouted, “How dare you!” and the sheep dog ran up the passage from the kitchen, yelping. The others were still knocking at the front of the house.

  “This is beyond endurance,” Eugene said, and as he went to open the hall door, I ran back into the study and looked around for somewhere to hide. I crawled under the spare bed, hoping that he would bring them to the sitting room, because he did not like people in the study, where he worked. I heard him say, “I can’t answer you that, I’m afraid.”

  “Deliver her out,” a voice demanded.

  I had to think, to recall who it was.

  “Come on now.” It was Andy, my father’s cousin, a cattle dealer. I recalled strange cattle—making the noises which they made in unfamiliar places—being driven into our front field on the evenings preceding a fair day. Then cousin Andy would come up to the house for tea, and sitting in the kitchen in his double-breasted brown suit he’d discuss the price of heifers with my father. Once he gave me a threepenny bit which was so old and worn that the King had been rubbed off.

  “Where is my only child?” my father cried.

  She’s under the bed, she’s suffocating, I said to myself, praying that I would be there only for a second, while Eugene picked up the lamp and brought them across to the sitting room. Could I then hide in the barn—and take the flashlight to ward off rats!

  “My only child,” my father cried again.

  For two pins I’d come out and tell him a thing or two about his only child!

  “Who are you looking for?” Eugene said. “We’ll confer in the other room.”

  But my father had noticed the fire, and with a sinking feeling I heard them all troop into the study. Someone sat on the bed; the spring touched my back, and smelling cowdung from his boots, I guessed it was cousin Andy. I recognized two other voices—Jack Holland’s and the Ferret’s.

  “Don’t you think it is a little late in the day for social calls?” Eugene said.

  “We want that poor, innocent girl,” cousin Andy said—he, the famed bachelor, who had spoken only to cows and bullocks all his life, bullying them along the road to country fairs. “Hand the girl over, and by God if there’s a hair astray on her, you’ll pay dear for it,” he shouted, and I imagined how he looked with his miser’s face and his mean little mouth framed by a red mustache. He always had to carry stomach mixture with him everywhere, and had once raised his hand to my mother because she hinted about all the free grazing he took from Dada. On that occasion my father, in his one known act of chivalry, said, “If you lay a finger on my missus, I’ll lay you out.”

  “This is outrageous,” Eugene said.

  Various matches were struck—they were settling in.

  “Allow me,” Jack Holland said, proceeding to make introductions, but he was shouted down by my father.

  “A divorced man. Old enough to be her father. Carrying off my little daughter.”

  “To set the record straight, I did not bring her here, she came,” Eugene said.

  I thought, He’s going to let me down, he�
��s going to send me away with them; my mother was right: “Weep and you weep alone.”

  “You got her with dope. Everyone knows that,” my father said.

  Eugene laughed. I thought how odd, and immoral, he must look to them, in his corduroy trousers and his old checked shirt. I hoped that all his buttons were done up. My nose began to itch with the dust.

  “You’re her father?” Eugene said.

  “Allow me,” Jack Holland said again, and this time he performed the introductions. I wondered if it was he who had betrayed me.

  “Yes, I’m her father,” Dada said, in a doleful voice.

  “Go now and get the girl,” Andy shouted.

  I began to tremble anew. I couldn’t breathe. I would suffocate under those rusty springs. I would die while they sat there deciding my life. I would die—with Andy’s dungy boots under my nose. It was ironic. My mother used to scrub the rungs of the chair after his visits to our house. I said short prayers and multiplication tables and the irregular plurals of Latin nouns—anything that I knew by heart—to distract myself. I thought of a line from Macbeth which I had once recited, wearing a red nightgown, at a school concert—”I see thee still and on thy blade and dudgeon gouts of blood …”

  “Are you a Catholic?” the Ferret asked, in a policeman’s voice.

  “I’m not a Catholic,” Eugene answered.

  “D’you go to Mass?” my father asked.

  “But, my dear man—” Eugene began.

  “There’s no ‘my dear man.’ Cut it out. Do you go to Mass or don’t you? D’you eat meat on Fridays?”

  “God help Ireland,” Eugene said, and I imagined him throwing his hands up in his customary gesture of impatience.

  “None of that blasphemy,” cousin Andy shouted, making a noise as he struck his fist into his palm.

  “What about a drink to calm us down?” Eugene suggested, and then, sniffing, he added, “Perhaps better not—you seem to have brought enough alcohol with you.”

  I could smell their drink from under the bed now, and I guessed that they had stopped at every pub along the way to brace themselves for the occasion. Probably my father had paid for most of it.

  “Well … a sip of port wine all round might be conducive to negotiation,” Jack Holland suggested in his soft, mannerly way.

  “Could I have a drink of water—to take an aspirin?” my father said.

  “Good idea. I’ll join you in an aspirin,” Eugene said, and I thought for a second that things were going to be all right. Water was poured. I closed my eyes to pray, dropped my forehead onto the back of my hand, and gasped. My face was damp with cold sweat.

  “I would like you to realize that your daughter is escaping from you. I’m not abducting her. I’m not forcing her—she is running away from you and your way of living …” Eugene began.

  “What the hell is he talking about?” Andy said.

  “The tragic history of our fair land,” Jack Holland exclaimed. “Alien power sapped our will to resist.”

  “They get girls with dope,” the Ferret said. “Many an Irish girl ends up in the white-slave traffic in Piccadilly. Foreigners run it. All foreigners.”

  “Where’s your wife, mister? Would you answer that?” Andy said.

  “And what are you doing with my daughter?” my father asked fiercely, as if recollecting what they had come for.

  “I’m not doing anything with her,” Eugene said, and I thought, He has shed all responsibility for me, he does not love me.

  “You’re a foreigner,” Andy said contemptuously.

  “Not at all,” Eugene said pleasantly. “Not at all as foreign as your tiny, blue, Germanic eyes, my friend.”

  “What are your intentions?” my father asked abruptly. And then he must have drawn the anonymous letter from his pocket, because he said, “There’s a few things here would make your hair stand on end.”

  “He hasn’t much hair, he’s near bald,” the Ferret said.

  “I haven’t any intentions; I suppose in time I would like to marry her and have children … Who knows?”

  “Ah, the patter of little feet,” said Jack Holland idiotically, and Dada told him to shut up and stop making a fool of himself.

  He doesn’t really want me, I thought as I took short, quick breaths and said an Act of Contrition, thinking that I was near my end. I don’t know why I stayed under there, it was stifling.

  “Would you turn?” my father said, and of course Eugene did not know what he meant by that.

  “Turn?” he asked in a puzzled voice.

  “Be a Catholic,” the Ferret said. And then Eugene sighed and said, “Why don’t we all have a cup of tea?” and Dada said, “Yes, yes.”

  It will go on all night and I’ll be found dead under this bed, I thought as I wished more and more that I could scratch a place between my shoulder blades which itched terribly.

  When he opened the door to fetch some tea he must have found Anna listening at the keyhole, because I heard him say to her, “Oh, Anna, you’re here, can you bring us a tray of tea, please?” And then he seemed to go out of the room, because suddenly they were all talking at once.

  “She could have got out the back way,” my father said.

  “Get tough, boy, get tough,” Andy said. “Follow him out, you fool, before he makes a run for it.”

  “Poor Brady,” the Ferret said when Dada had apparently gone out, “that’s the thanks he gets for sending that little snotty-nose to a convent and giving her a fine education.”

  “She was never right, that one,” cousin Andy said, “reading books and talking to trees. Her mother spoiled her …”

  “Ah, her dear mother,” said Jack Holland, and while he raved on about Mama being a lady, the other two passed remarks about the portrait of Eugene over the fire.

  “Look at the nose of him—you know what he is? They’ll be running this bloody country soon,” Andy said.

  “God, ‘tis a bloody shame, ruining a girl like that,” Andy said, and I thought how baffled they’d be if they had known that I was not seduced yet, even though I had slept in his bed for two whole nights.

  I heard the rattle of cups as Eugene and my father came back.

  “How much money do you earn in a year?” my father asked, and I knew how they would sneer if they heard that he made poky little films about rats and sewerage.

  “I earn lots of money,” Eugene lied.

  “You’re old enough to be her father,” Dada said. “You’re nearly as old as myself.”

  “Look,” Eugene said after a minute, “where is all this ill temper going to get us? Why don’t you go down to the village and stay in the hotel for the night, then come up in the morning and discuss it with Caithleen. She won’t be so frightened in the morning, and I will try to get her to agree to seeing you.”

  “Not on your bloody life,” cousin Andy said.

  “We’ll not go without her,” my father added threateningly, and I lost heart then and knew that there was no escape. They would find me and pull me forth. We would go out in the wind and sit in the Ferret’s car and drive all night, while they abused me. If only Baba were there, she’d find a way …

  “She’s over twenty-one, you can’t force her,” Eugene said, “not even in Ireland.”

  “Can’t we? We won our fight for freedom. It’s our country now,” Andy said.

  “We can have her put away. She’s not all there,” my father said.

  “Mental,” the Ferret added.

  “What about that, mister?” cousin Andy shouted. “A very serious offense having to do with a mentally affected girl. You could get twenty years for that.”

  I gritted my teeth, my head boiled—why was I such a coward as to stay under there? They’d make a goat ashamed. Tears of rage and shame ran over the back of my hand and I wanted to scream, I disown them, they’re nothing to do with me, don’t connect me with them, but I said nothing—just waited.

  “Go and get her,” my father said. “Now!” And I imagined the
spit that shot out of his mouth in anger.

  “You heard what Mr. Brady said,” cousin Andy shouted, and he must have risen from the bed, because the springs lifted. I knew how ratty he must look with his small blue eyes, his red mustache, his stomach ulcer.

  “Very well, then,” Eugene said, “she’s in my legal care. A guest in my house. When she leaves she will do so of her own free will. Leave my house or I’ll telephone for the police.” I wondered if they’d notice that there was no phone.

  “You heard me,” Eugene said, and I thought, Oh, God, he’ll get hit. Didn’t he know how things ended—”Man in hospital with fifty-seven penknife wounds.” I started to struggle out, to give myself up.

  I heard the first smack of their fists, and then they must have knocked him over, because the Tilley lamp crashed and the globe broke into smithereens.

  I screamed as I got out and staggered up. Flames from the wood fire gave enough light for me to see by. Eugene was on the floor, trying to struggle up, and Andy and the Ferret were hitting and kicking him. Jack Holland was trying to hold them back, and my father, hardly knowing what he was doing, held the back of Jack Holland’s coat, saying, “Keep out of this, you fool. Now, Jack, now, Jack, God save us, now, Jack—oh Jack—”

  My father saw me suddenly and must have thought that I had risen from the grave—my hair was all tossed and there was fluff and dust on me. He opened his mouth so wide that his loose dental plate dropped onto his tongue. They were cheap teeth that he had made by a dental mechanic.

  “Oh, Lil, oh, Lily,” he whispered, and backed away from me clutching his teeth. Long after, I realized that he thought I was Mama risen from her grave in the Shannon lake. I must have looked like a ghost—my face daubed with tears and gray dust, my hair hanging in my eyes.

  I shouted at the Ferret to stop, when the door burst open and the room lit up with a great red and yellow flash, as Anna fired the shotgun at the ceiling. The thunderclap made me stagger back against the bed with my head numb and singing. I tried to stay still, waiting to die. I thought I’d been shot, but it was only the shock of the explosion in my ears. The black smoke of gunpowder entered our throats and made me cough. Jack Holland was on his knees, praying and coughing, while Andy and the Ferret were turned to the door with their hands to their ears. My father leaned over a chair gasping, and Eugene moaned on the floor and put his hand to his bleeding nose. Shattered plaster fell down all over the carpet and the white dust mixed with gun smoke. The smell was awful.