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

by Edna O'Brien

  “I wouldn’t get married,” I said rashly, “unless I got married in a Catholic church.”

  “I’m glad you told me,” he said, “I’ll make a note of that,” the merest hint of sarcasm in his rich voice. A rainbow was arched in the bottom of the sky and looped across the sunny hills. I counted its seven colors; behind it the sky was changing from blue to water-green and I could feel my attitude to him changing, like the colors of the changing sky.

  We gave a lift for part of the way to two young men who were making the journey to a youth hostel seventeen miles away. They sat in the back seat, whispering; and when I turned to speak to them, I was conscious only of their knees. They wore shorts and their thick knees were on a level with my face, because the back of the car was so small. They were about my age, and it occurred to me that I ought to be with them, walking from one village to the next, worrying about nothing more than the price of a cup of tea. But then I consoled myself with the thought that young men, with their big knees and their awkward voices, bored me.

  17

  When we got home Eugene’s mother was there. She came to lunch most Sundays.

  She had a little present for me—a hand-embroidered tray cloth. It was a wedding gift. We pretended that we were married, and anyhow, I wore a ring. We drank sherry, and then she sat in the sun until lunchtime.

  During lunch a row broke out because I had put chopped onions in a sauce. She took the tray cloth back, saying that I must have put the onions in on purpose, knowing that they would make her bilious.

  “I knew I could never trust a red-haired woman,” she said to the water jug as we ate in silence. She had pushed her dinner plate away, and was calling the dog, “Shep, Shep.”

  Eugene winked at me, and I went on eating.

  “Well, things have come down a lot here. Laura was an adventuress, but she knew how to entertain.”

  “Have some orange mousse,” Eugene said, but she said that she couldn’t trust that either.

  “I’ll have a piece of bread and butter if it’s not too much trouble,” she said; and ignoring the sarcasm, he got her some bread and then disappeared. He always fled from a row. I finished my dinner and got up as soon as I decently could.

  He helped me to wash up. He peeped through the dining-room door and saw her eating the dinner, including the mousse, which she had so vehemently refused. No talk of poison now.

  “Come here,” he whispered, and I looked through the keyhole and saw her spooning the mousse from the bowl.

  “I’ll tell you a secret,” he said when we were back in the pantry. “She’ll see us all to our graves yet.” And then he kissed me, and while I was in his arms the warm hum of love began again.

  A car drove up as we were kissing and he slipped away to welcome two guests whom he had invited out from Dublin.

  “I’ll comb my hair first,” I said, and I went up and put on a lot of makeup to compensate for my social inadequacies, because his friends terrified me. The man was a lecturer in history and wrote poems on Sundays, and he had a pudding of a wife who thought she knew everything. By coincidence a third guest came, another poet, Simon, an American, who had cycled over from Glencree, nearby. Eugene’s mother wore an Indian shawl and sat in state on the velvet chair beside the fire, telling everyone that onions repeated on her.

  Simon the poet said “Wow” when I was introduced to him, and stroked his reddish beard. I knew from Eugene that he had been a friend of Laura’s, and I was frightened of him. He called all women cows—”a fat cow,” “a thin cow,” “a frigid cow,” “a nice cow.”

  “Things went wrong with the food today,” Eugene’s mother said to the pudding wife, who sat opposite her, wearing green tweed trousers.

  I went off to the kitchen to make some tea, and Simon came to help me. Standing in the middle of the flagged floor, his green close-together eyes looking on me, he said, “Well, here you are, shining quietly behind a bushel of Wicklow bran.”

  “You pinched that,” I said to him, because I remember everything that I have read, “from James Joyce.”

  “Who the hell is James Joyce?” he said, and then asked how I got on with old Eugene and what we talked about and if he was good in bed.

  Such impertinence, I thought, and remembered a proverb of Mama’s—”By their friends you shall know them.” I resented Eugene for knowing a man like this.

  “Did you measure it?” the poet asked. He winked and looked at me in such a way that my stomach suddenly felt sick.

  “What?”

  “What! You ask me what! Wow, you need lessons. His you-know-what. All my women measure mine; it’s great fun; you should try it.”

  I kept my head down so that he would not notice how I blushed, and I hated him, the way I hate people who tell me smutty stories which are not funny. He had sandy red in his beard, and a little Irish somewhere behind his American accent—though he claimed his people were blue-blooded English.

  “Shall I butter these for you, Caithleen?” He pointed to the sliced currant cake.

  “Do.” He said my name too often and was affable and ugly alternately—as wicked people often are.

  “How’s old Eugene’s work going? Any epics coming up? God, how he’d love to make Moby Dick, or something great.”

  “I don’t think so,” I said. Once, I asked Eugene if he had secret ambitions to make a famous picture, and he shook his head gravely and said, “No, not a famous one; I’d like to compile a long chronicle about the injustice and outrage done by one man to another throughout the ages, and of our perilous struggle for survival and self-protection—but who’d want to look at it?”

  “You know what his big ambition is,” Simon the poet scoffed. “To have a drink with someone in MGM.”

  “You’re behind the times,” I said, trembling with emotion, as I always tremble when I want to say something that is important. “He says that what matters is to have a conviction about your work; to do your duty according to your lights.”

  “Duty, har, har,” Simon laughed, as if some laughing machine had been wound up inside him. “Laura would love that. Jesus, that’s priceless; he’s good on propaganda. Duty! God, Laura will love that when she comes.”

  “Comes?”

  “Yeh. Hasn’t she told you? She must be saving it up as a big surprise, because she’s sailing for Cobh next week. Now what about some lemon for my tea, Miss Caithleen Brady?”

  “It’s over there.” I pointed to a bowl of fruit on the dresser. The lemon looked brown and wrinkled but I didn’t mind; my legs were trembling because of what he’d told me.

  “There’ll be a hot time in the old bed when she arrives. Have you ever seen her? Wow!” And then he began to sing, “Do not forsake me, oh, my darling, on this our wedding day …”

  I had seen a photo of her. She had short hair and a strong face. I’d looked at Eugene’s pictures one day when he was out. He kept them in a locked box, but I found the key under one corner of the carpet where it was not tacked down. There were a lot of pictures of his daughter, and on the back of each one he had written details of where the picture was taken and what the child had been doing—”Elaine eating bread and jam in high chair,” “Brown Dog sleeping in Elaine’s pram.” They distressed me, and putting them away guiltily, I wondered when the child’s birthday was and if he sent her presents.

  “Old Heathcliff is a bit gone on her still, you know, old hatreds die hard,” Simon the poet said, crashing in on my worried thoughts.

  “The tea is made now,” I said, desperate to escape from him. Earlier on he had confided to me that he sucked birds’ eggs, which gave him a special virility. “Alone with nature and the little birds,” he said mockingly.

  “The tea is made,” I said again, and piled the last few things onto the tray.

  “Now, there’s an efficient girl, that’s what I like; an efficient girl and cool. Wow cool! You’ve got a clever tear in your eye, Caithleen; clever because it’s not real. I am a poet and I know these things. After you.�
� And he carried the tray as I walked ahead of him, up the narrow dark passage toward the dining room.

  “You’ve got a nice little ass,” he said, and as usual my high heel caught in the rat hole along the wooden passage. (Once in a snowstorm a rat had gnawed his way into the house, and Anna said that Laura had stood on a chair and screamed, just as any woman would.)

  “You brought the wrong cups,” Eugene said when he saw me unload the tray. They were kitchen cups.

  “They’ll do,” I said, getting red.

  “No, no, no. It’s Sunday afternoon, we’re entitled to nice cups,” he said good-humoredly as he repiled the unmatching cups back on the tray and carried it out.

  “Well, what can you expect?” his mother said to the big log in the fireplace. “Country girls. Fresh from the bogs.”

  Simon stroked his beard and looked from one to another of us. The other couple sipped their port wine, and the woman smiled, either sorry because of what had happened or to show her pleasure over it.

  “Sit down, dear,” she said. I hate people who call me dear.

  “Excuse me,” I said, leaving the room. I got my coat and went off to hide in the lady’s garden.

  For that hour I hated Eugene. I hated his strength, his pride, his self-assurance. I wished that he had some deep flaw in his nature which would weaken him for me; but he had no flaw (except his pride); he was a rock of strength. Then I remembered—as one does in a temper—the ugly side of his nature: of how cross he could be, of the day he shouted, “You’re a mechanical idiot who can’t even turn off a tap.” He had been doing something with the water cistern up on the roof and he had explained that I was to turn the tap on and off when he said the words “On” and “Off.” I turned it on all right, but when it came to turning it off, I got flustered and turned it on more, and then he shouted that he was being flooded, and I got quite helpless and could do nothing. His jibes and pinpricks leaped to memory—”Baba, when I have a harem you’ll be in it,” “I’m teaching Kate how to speak English before I take her into society,” and “Run upstairs on your peasant legs.” For that hour I hated him.

  “I hate him,” I said to the early birds who had come to make their nests. They did not so much sing as warble, and make noises to clear their throats, in preparation for their long song of beautiful courtship.

  “Courtship,” I said bitterly, and wondered who Baba was with, and if she still saw Tod Mead. I thought, or tried to think, of the various men I knew, all simple boys compared with Eugene. I remembered then a story he had told me of how he shared one room with another man somewhere in London and each washed his own half of the floor on Saturdays; and it seemed to me to be a cold, inhuman thing to do. I could not see myself washing half a floor without letting the cloth slide over to include the other half; but they were methodical, they had a line drawn across the center of the linoleumed floor. I thought of this and of Simon the poet saying to me, “How do you feel about breasts?” as he buttered slices of cake and took the foundations from under my life by telling me that Laura was coming back. His high-pitched laugh re-echoed in my mind, and I worried because Eugene knew such a person.

  I stayed there moping and wishing that he would come for me. There were catkins on the sally tree, white as snow and hanging like tassels, and along the granite sundial there trailed a shoot of winter jasmine, its spare yellow flowers giving hope and brightness to the sad day. Eugene had said that wild thyme would grow there later on and that the garden would be filled with the bouquet of wild thyme. I wondered if I would be married by then.

  “He’ll never marry you,” Baba had said, and I thought, It’s true, because he’s a dark horse. The good and the bad of him alternated in my thoughts, as I remembered first his scowling expression and his unyielding nature and then his tenderness—he brought me toast to bed once and put lanolin on a welt of mine, and got three pillows so that I could be propped up to read. For a while I welcomed the fact that one day I would be old and dried, and no man would torment my heart.

  It got chilly once the sun went down. He came to look for me when the visitors had gone.

  “Trying to make little of me in front of people,” I said as he stood over me in the dusk, patting my hair and apologizing. The dark violet hush of evening had descended.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, “I didn’t mean to offend you. I just thought that the cups looked awful and that Mother would complain and that we might as well get the better ones.”

  “Cups don’t matter.” I almost shouted it. “Cups are not important; you’re always the one that’s talking about inessentials—well, cups are inessentials.”

  “All right, all right,” he said, patting me to keep me still.

  “You shouldn’t have done that to me in front of all those people.” It maddened me to think that it happened in front of that wicked poet and the two women who would remember it, no doubt forever.

  “You know no nice people, no sincere people,” I said.

  “My dear child,” he replied, almost smugly, “there are no wholly nice people, there are no sincere people; I mean, a worm is probably sincere, if that’s what you want.”

  I remembered how “sincere” had been Mama’s criterion for everyone. “Lizzie is sincere,” she said of some mean woman who asked us to tea and gave us sandwiches with tomato ketchup in them, and rhubarb. “They’re sincere,” Mama would say of mean cousins in Dublin who expected her to send them homemade butter for nothing, all during the war. It was how she judged people.

  “And that Simon fellow, talking to me about intimate things …” I complained.

  “Oh, I should have warned you—his male appendage, I gather, is rather small and some woman once laughed at him.”

  He looked up at the violet sky; the birds in the darkening trees singing their night songs, and the calmness in the air, seemed to give him such pleasure that he hardly heard what I was saying. He’s happy, I thought, when his friends walk on me and say filthy things to me!

  “He’s a funny friend to have,” I said.

  “He’s not a friend,” Eugene corrected. “In this country there are so few people to talk to that one is thankful for any friendly enemy who can speak one’s own language.” He sighed at the dark sky as if he would like to ascend into its calm loneliness.

  I broke in on this moment. “Simon says that Laura is sailing for Cobh.”

  “Indeed!” he said, without any apparent surprise. “I’ll be delighted to see her.”

  I got off the wooden seat and stared up into his calm, impassive face.

  “You what?” I said.

  “I’ll be delighted to see her, we can discuss things; maybe I can get a divorce and marry you. We’ll share the child.” (He never said the little girl’s name.) “Laura can come here and we’ll all be good friends. You can wash her hair; she can wash yours …”

  “You mean …?” I began but did not go on. There was nothing I could say, because I was thinking, He’s a prig, an indifferent, unfeeling prig. I let out some sound of despair.

  “All right; I’ll write to her about a divorce. I can see that not being married is injuring your immortal soul.”

  The words stung me. Something—everything—had struck the whole, laughing pleasure of my life.

  That night while I sat by the fire reading the opening chapters of Anna Karenina, he typed out a letter to Laura. I longed to know if he had begun it with “Dear Laura,” or “Dearest Laura,” or “My darling,” but I could not look over his shoulder.

  We walked to the village to post the letter. The night felt warm and springlike; the fields on either side were damp with dew, and he did not link me.

  Halfway along the dusty mountain road we found that they had begun to tar it, and the tar being fresh, our feet left marks on its blue-black surface.

  “Cheers,” he said, “we’re going to have a tarred road.” It was the first word he had spoken since we set out.

  In a sad, doomed voice I said, “It’s not fair, is it? We just c
an’t be left alone.”

  My father had written three times, the local priest wrote, the head nun from the convent sent me prayers and medals, and now Laura would be coming.

  “Nothing’s fair, it’s not a fair world,” he said in a tired, dull voice.

  In the village I heard piano music from the lounge of the one hotel, and it made me lonely for all the gay nights with Baba, hearing her say, “Down the hatch,” to some man or other. When he had posted the letter I said, “I’d love to go into the hotel.”

  “You don’t want to go in there.” He frowned toward the yellow-sashed building with porter barrels outside, under the window.

  “Just for one drink,” I said, and though he sighed, he took off his cap and escorted me into the lounge bar. The place was crowded, the room thick with smoke and commotion. Someone was singing. They were mostly local people and they all stared at us. It was because we weren’t married. He ordered two whiskies. The noise, which had subsided when we came in—while people nudged and whispered—began again and a fat woman continued to play the piano. They had painted the piano white, so that it looked like a washstand.

  “Do you know any of these people?” I asked in a low voice. They had not saluted him. Anna had told me that they didn’t like him, because he never got drunk or bought free drinks for them on fair days. Some of them drove cattle and sheep into his land at night, and in the morning Denis drove them out again. A herd of goats kept coming in, and he wrote several times to their owner, but she ignored the letters. He would not have minded if she had asked for permission, but like most people in the neighborhood, she was dour and unfriendly. Someone had cut the tops off hundreds of small trees in the new plantation shortly after I came there. It was regarded as a big disgrace for me to be there, and they used to question Anna, every Sunday, when she went to Mass.

  “I know one or two of them,” he said.

  “So his nib’s got rid of the American woman and now he has this young one,” I heard one man tell another. I blushed and looked down at the glass-topped table.