by Edna O'Brien
“There’s another one in it. I’ll blow your brains out,” Anna said. She stood at the study door, in her nightgown, holding Eugene’s shotgun. Denis stood beside her with a lighted Christmas candle.
“Out you get,” she said to them, holding the gun steadily up.
“By God, I’m getting out of this,” the Ferret said. “These people would kill you!” I went to Eugene, who was still sitting on the floor with blood coming from his nose. I put my handkerchief to it.
“Dangerous savages,” my father said, his face white, holding his teeth in one hand. “She might have killed us.”
“I’ll blow your feet off if you don’t clear out of here,” Anna said in a quivering voice.
“Get out,” Eugene said to them as he stood up. His shirt was torn. “Get out. Go. Leave. Never come inside my gates again.”
“Have you a drop of whiskey?” my father said shakily, putting his hand to his heart.
“No,” Eugene said. “Leave my house immediately.”
“A pretty nights work, a pretty night’s work,” Jack Holland said sadly as they left. Anna stood to one side to let them pass and Denis opened the hall door. The last thing I saw was the Ferret’s hooked iron hand being shaken back at us.
Eugene slammed the door and Denis bolted it. I collapsed onto the bed, trembling.
“That’s the way to handle them,” Anna said as she put the gun on the table.
“You saved my life,” Eugene said, and he sat on the couch and drew up the leg of his trousers. There was blood on his shin, where he had been kicked. His nose also was bleeding.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” I said between sobs.
“Oh, tough men, tough men,” Denis said solemnly as we heard them outside arguing, and the dog barking from the back yard.
“Get some iodine,” Eugene said. I went upstairs but couldn’t find it, so Anna had to go and get it, along with a clean towel and a basin of water. He lay back on the armchair, and I opened his shoelaces and took off his shoes.
“Wh’ist,” Denis said. We heard the car drive away.
Anna washed the cuts on Eugene’s face and legs. He squirmed with pain as she swabbed on iodine.
“I shouldn’t have hidden,” I said, handing him a clean handkerchief from the top drawer of his desk, where he kept them. “Oh, I shouldn’t have come here.”
Through the handkerchief he said, “Go get yourself a drink. It will help you to stop shaking. Get me one, too.”
After a while the nosebleed stopped and he raised his head and looked at me. His upper lip had swollen.
“It was terrible,” I said.
“It was,” he said, “ridiculous. Like this country.”
“Except for me where would we be?” Anna said.
“What about a cup of tea?” he said in a sad voice, and I knew that he would never forget what had happened and that some of their conduct had rubbed off onto me.
We went to bed late. His shin ached and a cut over his eye throbbed a lot. It was an hour before he went to sleep. I lay for most of the night, looking at the moonlit wall, thinking. Near dawn I found him awake and looking at me.
“I love you,” I said suddenly. I had not prepared it or anything, it just fell out of my mouth.
“Love!” he said, as if it were a meaningless word, and he moved his head on the pillow to face me. He smiled and closed his eyes, going back to sleep again. What could I do to make up? I cried a bit, and later got up to make some tea.
Anna was in the kitchen putting on her good shoes and silk stockings, preparing to go to Mass.
“I’m not over it yet,” she said.
“I’ll never be over it,” I said, and to myself, They’ve ruined, and ruined, and ruined me. He’ll never look at me again. I’ll have to go away.
14
She came back from Mass bubbling over with news.
“They think in the village that you must be a film star,” she said as she took a long hatpin out of her blue hat, removed the hat, and stuck the pin through it for the next Sunday. She said that I was the topic of conversation in the three shops. My father and his friends had stopped at the hotel for drinks on the way up.
As she put the frying pan on the range, I noticed the tracks of mice in the cold fat.
“I expect you’ll be leaving today,” she said.
“I expect so.”
It was after ten, so I made Eugene’s tea and carried it upstairs. Standing for a moment in the doorway with the tray, I felt suddenly privileged to be in his room while he slept. The hollows of his cheeks were more pronounced in sleep and his face bore a slight look of pain.
I drew back the curtains.
“You’ll break the curtain rings,” he said, sitting up. His startled eyes looked twice their normal size.
“Oh, hello,” he said, surprised to see me, and then rubbed his lids and probably remembered everything. I put a pullover across his shoulders and knotted the two sleeves under his chin.
“Nice tea,” he said as he lay there, like a Christ, sipping tea, his head resting on the mahogany headboard.
Anna tapped on the door and burst in, before he had time to cry halt.
“I handed in the telegram—it will go first thing in the morning,” she said. It was to his solicitor.
She told me that my black pudding, below on the range, would be dried up if I didn’t go down and eat.
“Black pudding!” he groaned.
“Your nose is a nice sight,” she said to him.
“Probably broken,” he said, without a smile.
“Oh—not broken!” I said.
“Lucky I don’t earn my living with my nose,” he said. “Or make love with it.”
“Hmmmh,” Anna said as she stood in the middle of the room, hands on hips, surveying the tossed bed and my nightgown in a chair.
“All right,” he said to us both, “trot off,” and I went, but she stayed there. I listened outside the door.
“I saved your life, didn’t I?”
“You did. I am very grateful to you, Anna. Remind me to strike you a leather medal.”
“Will you loan me fifty pounds?” she asked. “I want to get a sewing machine and a few things for the baba. If I had a sewing machine we could mend all your shirts.”
“We could?” he said mockingly.
“Will you loan me it?”
“Why don’t you say give me fifty pounds.’ I know that word ‘loan’ has no meaning here.”
“That’s not a nice thing to say.” She sounded offended.
“Anna, I’ll give it to you,” he said. “A reward.”
“Good man. Keep it to yourself, not a word to Denis. If he knew I had fifty pounds, he’d buy a bull or something.”
She came out of the room beaming, and I ran away, ashamed at having been caught listening.
“Telltale-tattle,” she said as I hurried guiltily along the carpeted passage. “Come on, I’ll race you down the stairs,” and we ran the whole way to the kitchen.
She read the Sunday papers.
“She’s the image of Laura,” she said, pointing to an heiress who was reported as being in love with a barber.
“Fitter changes sex,” she read aloud. “Mother of God, I don’t understand people at all. Do they never look at themselves when they’re taking their clothes off!”
She read our horoscopes—Denis’s, the baby’s, Eugene’s, mine, and Laura’s. She included Laura in everything, so that by the time she went out after lunch with Denis and the baby, I had the feeling that Laura was due back any minute. It was with this unsettling feeling that I made my first tour of the house. Eugene had gone down the fields to look at the ram pump.
There were five bedrooms. The mattresses were folded over and the wardrobes empty, except for wooden hangers. The furniture was old, dark, unmatching, and in lockers beside the beds there were chamber pots with pink china roses on the insides of them.
In the top drawer of a linen chest I found a silver evening bag with a diary
of Laura’s inside. The diary had no entries, just names and telephone numbers. There was also a purple evening glove that smelled of stale but wonderful perfume. I fitted on the glove, and for some reason my heart began to pound. There was nothing in any of the other drawers, just chalk marks stating the number of each drawer.
Near dusk, I came downstairs and raised the wick of the hanging lamp which Anna had lit for me before she went out. The rabbit was on the table, as she had left it, skinned and ready to be cooked. Denis had caught it the day before.
“The dinner,” I said aloud, as I got a cookery book and looked up the index under R.
Radishes
Ragout of Kidneys
Raisin Bread
Raisin Pie
Raisin Pudding
Rarebit
Raspberries
Rabbit was not mentioned. The cookery book had belonged to Laura. Her maiden name and her married name were written in strong handwriting on the flyleaf.
“The dinner,” I said, to suppress a tear, and then I remembered how Eugene had asked, earlier in the day, “Can you cook?”
“Sort of,” I had said.
It was a total lie. I had never cooked in my whole life, except the Friday Gustav and Joanna went to a solicitors to make a will. I brought home two fish for lunch, one for Baba, one for me. Baba laid the table while I fried the fish. I knew nothing about cleaning them. I just put the gray, podgy little mackerel on the big frying pan and lit the gas under it. Nothing happened for a few minutes and then the side of one fish burst.
“There’s a hell of a stink out there,” Baba called from the dining room.
“It’s just the fish,” I said. Both fish had burst by then.
“It’s just what?” she said, rushing into the kitchen, holding her nose.
When she saw the mess she simply took hold of the pan and ran down the garden to dump it on Gustav’s compost heap.
“Phew,” she said, coming back into the house. “You should have been alive when they ate raw cows and bones and things. A bloody savage.” And she put the pan into the sink and ran the tap on it.
We went out to lunch at Woolworth’s. It was a big thrill being able to march around with a tray, helping ourselves to whatever we fancied—chips, sausages, trifle topped with custard, coffee, a little jug of cream, and lemon meringue pie.
Sitting in the big flagged kitchen, I thought of Baba and cried. I missed her. I had never been alone before in my whole life, alone and dependent on my own resources. I thought with longing of all the evenings we went out together, reeking with vanilla essence and good humor. Usually we ended up in the cinema, thrilled by the darkness and the big screen, with perhaps a choc ice to keep us going.
“Oh, God,” I said, remembering Baba, my father, everyone; and I buried my face in my hands and cried, not knowing what I cried for.
Three or four times, I went around the corner of the front drive and leaned on the wet white gate to see if there was a sign of anybody coming. Nobody came, except a policeman who cycled down the byroad, stood at the gate lodge for a minute, relieved himself, and cycled off again. He was probably keeping an eye out for poachers.
By the time Eugene came back I had dried my eyes; and I wondered if perhaps he expected me to have left discreetly while he was out.
“I’m still here,” I said.
“I’m glad,” he said as he kissed me. It was dusk and we proceeded to light the Tilley lamps.
As we sat by the study fire he said, “Oh, you poor little lonely bud, it’s not a nice honeymoon for you, is it? Think of nice things … sunshine, mountain rivers, fuchsia …”
I lay in his arms and could think only about what would happen next. He had put a record on the wind-up gramophone, and music filled the room. Outside, rain spattered against the window; water had lodged on the inner ledge of the window frame. It was very quiet except for the music and the rain. His eyes were closed as he listened to the music. Music had a strange effect on him: his face softened, his whole spirit responded to it.
“That’s Mahler,” he said, just when I expected him to say, “You can stay or you can go.”
“I like songs that have words,” I said to clarify my position. But his eyes were closed and I did not think that he heard me at all. The music still reminded me of birds, birds wheeling out of a bush and startling the mellow hush of a summer evening; crows above an old slate quarry at home, multiplied by their own shadows, screaming and cawing incessantly. I wondered about my father then, and felt that they would come again, that night.
“But this music has words,” Eugene said unexpectedly. So he had heard me. “Words of a more perfect order; this music says things about people, people’s lives, progress, wars, hunger, revolution … Music can express with as simple instruments as reeds the gray bodiless pain of living.”
I thought he must be a little mad to talk like that, especially when I was worried about my father coming, and feeling very apart from him, I jumped up, on the excuse that I must look at the dinner. We had put on the rabbit.
It simmered very slowly and the white meat was falling away from the bone, gradually. I thickened the gravy with cornstarch, but it lumped a lot. Little beads of the starch floated on the surface.
‘Twill have to do, I thought, as I went away to put some more powder on my face—the steam of the dinner had reddened my cheeks. When I came back to the room he was reading.
I sat opposite him and stared up at the circle of wrecked plaster—the result of Anna’s shot. I thought, When I leave here tomorrow it is this that I will remember, I will always remember it.
“I’ll go tomorrow,” I said suddenly. The yellow lamplight shone on his forehead and the reflection of a vase showed in the top part of his lenses. He had put on horn-rimmed glasses.
“Go?” he said, raising his eyes from the paper which rested on his knee. “Where will you go?”
“I might go to London.”
“Do you want to?”
“No.”
“Then why are you going?”
“What else can I do?”
“You can stay.”
“That wouldn’t be right,” I said, pleased that it was he who suggested it and not me.
“Why not?”
“Because it would be throwing myself at you,” I said. “I’ll go away, and then when I’m gone you can write to me, and maybe I’ll come back.”
“Supposing I don’t want you to go away, then what?” he asked.
“I wouldn’t believe it,” I said, and he raised his eyes to the ceiling in mild irritation. I kept thinking that he asked me to stay because he pitied me, or maybe he was lonely.
“Why do you want me to stay?” I asked.
“Because I like you. I’ve lived like a hermit for so long, I mean, sometimes I feel lonely.” And he stopped himself suddenly, because he saw my eyes fill with tears.
“Caithleen,” he said softly—he usually said Kate, or Katie—”Caithleen, stay,” and he put out his hand for mine.
“I’ll stay for a week or two,” I said, and he kissed me and said how pleased he was.
We closed the shutters and had dinner. The rabbit meat and potatoes were crushed in the flour-thickened sauce, and the meal tasted very nice. He said that he would buy me a marriage ring, so that Anna and the neighbors would not bother me with questions.
“We can’t actually get married, I’m not divorced and there is the child,” he said as he looked away from me, toward the crooked ink on the graph paper of the barograph. I followed his gaze—the jagged ink line suggested to me the jagged lines of all our lives, and I said, to hide my disappointment, “I don’t ever intend to get married, anyhow.”
“We’ll see,” he said, and laughed, and then to cheer me up he told me all about his family.
He began—”My mother is a hypochondriac”—he seemed to have forgotten that I had met her—”and she married my father in those fortunate days when women’s legs were covered in long skirts. I say fortunate becaus
e her legs are like matchsticks. They met going down Grafton Street. He was a visiting musician—tall, dark, foreign, on his way to buy a French-English dictionary—and very courteously he asked the lady if she could direct him to a bookshop. I”—he tapped his chest—”am the product of that accidental encounter.”
I laughed and thought how odd that his mother should have charmed the stranger so quickly. He went on to tell me that his father had left them when he was about five. He remembered his father dimly as a man who came home from work with a fiddle and oranges; his mother had worked as a waitress to feed them both, and like nine-tenths of the human race, he had had a hard life and an unhappy childhood.
“Your turn,” he said, making an elegant gesture in my direction.
Fragments of my childhood came to mind—eating bread and sugar on the stone step of the back kitchen, and drinking hot jelly which had been put aside to cool. Sometimes one word can recall a whole span of life.
I said, “Mama was in America when she was young, so she had American words for everything—applesauce,’ ‘sweater,’ ‘greenhorn,’ and ‘dessert.’ “
I thought of incidental things—of the tinker woman stealing Mama’s good shoes from the back-kitchen window, and of Mama having to go to court to give evidence and later regretting it because the tinker woman got a month in jail; of the dog having fits; and of a hundred day-old chickens being killed once by a weasel. In talking of it I could see the place again, the fields, green and peaceful, rolling out from the solid cut-stone house; and in summertime, meadowsweet, creamy-white along the headlands, and Hickey humming, “How can you buy Killarney” as he sat like an emperor on the rusted mowing machine, swearing to me that dried cow dung was sold in the shops as tobacco. I watched the grease settle on the dinner plates, and still I sat there talking to Eugene as I had never talked before. He was a good listener. I did not tell him about Dada drinking.