by Edna O'Brien
He helped her into the bus with as much solicitude as if she were an old woman, and it occurred to me that if I had a baby he would probably marry me.
“Poor Baba,” he said, “the poor old bitch,” as we waved to the moving bus and shut our eyes because of the dust it scattered. I did not feel for her in the way that he did—women care mostly for themselves or for their children, who are extensions of themselves, or for their husbands, who fill their days and their thoughts and their bodies: as he filled mine. Though he was not my husband.
I hoped that we would be married soon, and I was saving up for a trousseau.
“Something old, something new, something borrowed, and something blue,” I used to say as I put ten shillings away each week, in a box.
We went home, and in a day or two I forgot about Baba, except to worry vaguely about her coming to live with us. It was rainy, lilac, April weather—sun and squally showers, and then a wind rose to dry the rain off the hedges and blow the white apple blossoms all about, so that it appeared to be snowing flowers. There were two or three weeks of happiness—I helped him mow the lawn, and the cut grass clung to the soles of my canvas shoes and we could smell it in bed when we had the window open.
One day, as Anna sharpened knives on the stone steps and sang “How much is that doggie in the window?” we carried two basins out of doors and he washed my hair and rinsed it with rainwater. Afterward he took photos of me with my wet hair (to finish out the film), and one of Anna sharpening the knives. A heavy shower began to fall; then we went upstairs; he tied my damp hair in a knot so that he would not get entangled in it, and he made love to me, while the rain refreshed the garden. We could smell the rain, cut grass, and primroses, and I said, “What will Anna think of us?”
“She’ll think we’re going the pace,” he said. And rivers of love flowed into me, through him, carrying long-drawn-out ripples of pleasure which made me cry back to him and, in crying, worry that Anna might burst into the room with a batch of ironing, as the door did not lock.
“All those little seeds we let go to waste,” he said tenderly to me, and I made some vague reply about having a baby next year. It must have been while we lay there talking that the postman came on his pop-pop bicycle and delivered two telegrams. One was for me and one for him.
Mine was from Baba and it said:
CHEERS THE CURSE CAME. GOING TO ENGLAND SOON.
and I wished that she had worded it more discreetly, as I could not show it to him.
“It’s only from Baba,” I said as I looked and saw his face whiten and his thin lips pressed together in anger. Leaning over, I read his telegram:
IF YOU MARRY HER YOU WILL NEVER SEE ELAINE OR ME AGAIN. I PROMISE YOU. LAURA
(Another installment for the village to read.)
“It doesn’t matter,” I said as I looked at him and feared, and also knew, that something dreadful was coming to wrench us apart.
“It doesn’t matter; don’t worry,” I kept saying, and I wanted him to come and sit in the room while I made some tea, but he said that he would go out for a while. I watched him go down to the front field with his head lowered, the dog following close behind, brushing his trouser leg with her fluffy white tail. And I thought, He’s making a choice between me and them, and I wished that I could have a baby in some easy, miraculous way.
He came back later, with a bunch of red and white hawthorn in his arms, and I smelled its sickly-sweet smell and said, “Don’t bring it in the house, it’s unlucky.”
But he scorned my remark and put it in a big vase on the hall table.
We were kind to one another for that day and the next, and I did not barge in on his thoughts or ask what he intended to do in relation to Laura.
His face looked haggard and the lines around his eyes seemed to grow deeper. Neither of us slept well. Nothing is as aggravating as lack of sleep, and by the fourth day we were edgy with each other and he complained about inessential things, like the towels in the bathroom or the worn dish mop. He worked at his desk, preparing for this picture on irrigation. He had maps and encyclopedias spread out on his desk, and I carried his meals in on a tray. Seeing him there working and looking at me guardedly, I imagined that he was planning to go to Brazil without me; and each time I had to run from the study to stop myself from saying something foolish.
In the evening he listened to music and sat very still. Obviously he was thinking that this was a problem only because I made it so. He gave me the impression that he was sad, not only because Laura had blackmailed him, but because I had allowed it to affect our relationship. Gloom spread over the house as the mountain mist spread over the fields in the wet evenings, and I felt that I had never known him. He was a stranger, a mad martyr nailed to his chair, thinking and sighing and smoking.
On Thursday I had a letter from Baba saying that she would come out on Sunday to say goodbye. She was no longer pregnant. Her prayers had been heard! But she had made up her mind to go to England anyhow.
“I’m leaving this curse of a country, so you can have a few fivers ready for me on Sunday,” the note said, and I thought of the night the Body was flashing twenty-pound notes in the Gresham Hotel, and he bought the biggest bottle of brandy that I had ever seen and tied it around his neck, so that he’d be like a St. Bernard dog.
Just as I finished reading her letter, a lorry drove up which seemed to be full of telegraph poles and men in blue overalls. One of the men knocked on the door to tell me that he had come to install a telephone. Ever since the electricity had been put in, in February, we had been trying to get a telephone. I called Eugene and we decided where we would have it—in the hall.
“Won’t it be marvelous,” I said, carrying away the vase of hawthorn, which had shed most of its petals onto the carpet. Two men worked in the hall, and two others were outside putting a post in the front field.
“It will spoil the view,” he said as we looked through the window at the men working, and at the daffodils, some of which had lodged in a yellow sea from the night’s windy rain. I made tea for the men, and watched them work, and longed for the moment when the telephone would be connected and I could ring the grocer or someone.
In the afternoon, just as I sat down to read, Simon the poet drove up in an old-fashioned Austin car. There was a girl with him, a tall American girl called Mary. I brought them in to the sitting room and called Eugene.
“What a beautiful place,” she said. She spoke in a quiet accent, not at all like the American cousins of Mama’s who came one summer and shouted and boasted for a full four hours.
“Simon’s been telling me about you,” she said to Eugene. “I think it’s wonderful that you should come out here and bury yourself in this haven. So many smart men go to pieces nowadays that it’s nice to see someone getting away from it all.”
“The Irish nearly had me in pieces,” he joked, and I hated him for bringing up the subject so unnecessarily.
“The Irish nearly crucified him,” Simon the poet said, sneering. “Was it hatchets or penknives?”
“Hobnailed boots,” Eugene said.
“Boy, you were darned lucky they didn’t cut the balls out of you,” Simon said.
The tall girl shook her head at me, disclaiming all responsibility for what they said. She had long brown hair that looked as if she brushed it night and morning, and she wore black trousers with silver threads running through the black. Her body was neat and well-shaped.
“Wait until the Pope is in Galway,” Simon said to her. “You know that one about the cardinal fainting?”—and she shook her brown hair and asked eagerly that he tell her.
“The last time the Virgin Mary appeared at Knock she revealed that the next Pope would be tortured. Upon hearing this Cardinal Spellman fainted. Ha. Ha.” He had this funny mechanical laugh, and she joined him in it, and said, “What fun.”
“Do you have a comb? I feel as if I’m wild or something,” she said to me, touching the curled ends of her thick hair. I took her upstairs
. I couldn’t tell her age but guessed that she was about twenty-two—like me. She knew a lot more than me, though. In the bedroom she admired a Renoir print of a girl tying her shoe, and the view of pine trees through the back window, which reminded her of her own New England. She began to describe the place where she grew up, and I could have sworn that it was a description she had learned out of a book; it was all too pat, those bits about “pines thrusting into the sky.”
“I’m afraid my comb isn’t too clean,” I said. It was a white comb, which showed up the slightest trace of dirt between the teeth.
“It’s fine.” She smiled at it and drew the comb through her hair and smiled at her image in the mirror. I asked some stupid questions.
“Do you like Ireland? Do you like America? Do you like clothes?”
“Sure. I like Ireland and America and clothes.” She grinned as she tucked the pink seersucker shirt she wore down inside her slacks. “I like sweaters best.” I imagined her wardrobe full of clean shirts on hangers, and rows of different belts that matched different sweaters. She drew up one leg of her trousers to scratch a midge bite that was swelling on her calf. Her legs were hairy, but since she had trousers on, one would not see that. She wore flat shoes and I felt that everything about her was calculated to appeal to Eugene.
I was going to say to her then, “I’m a bit nervous and unsure, don’t hurt me,” but I saw her redo her lips carefully with a little camel’s-hair brush and revive the pink of her mouth. It came to me that she was hard and clever.
“I’ve never used a lip brush,” I said. “Is it very difficult?”
“It’s simple. I’ll leave you this one,” she said, “you can practice.” And she left the gilt case containing the brush on top of a powder bowl. Then we went down and she was smiling and pleased with everything she saw, even the “nice cobwebs” in the corners of the dark wallpaper along the landing.
“I simply adore this place—the view!” she said to Eugene in the sitting room, looking upon him with straight gray eyes.
“Come here,” he said, and he crooked his finger and she followed across to the french window to look at the valley of birches in the distance, which was now a blur of lime-green instead of purple. He opened the window a little and she put out her hand in a flutterlike movement, as if she were a white bird about to fly.
She astonished him by saying that she had seen a “darling film” of his at the National Film Theatre in London. She talked animatedly for a few minutes, and then, looking around the shabby high-ceilinged room, she said, “It’s got great charm, this house.” I glanced about the room which he had made, and realized that I had contributed nothing to it—not even a cushion. I went off to make some tea.
When I came back he was playing records for them—that classical stuff that reminds me of birds—and she stood by the window marveling at everything and moving her body to keep time with the music. He came across the room to take the tray from me, and smiled as I had not seen him smile for several days.
“So you’re getting a telephone, Caithleen,” Simon the poet said to me. “You can telephone all your friends.”
“Yes, I can,” I said. I had only two friends: Baba and the Body, and neither of them had a telephone.
Eugene poured the tea and passed Mary the first cup. Then he came around with the sugar bowl, and standing over me he said, “Do you take sugar?”
“Sugar?” I repeated sharply as if he had just said, “Do you take arsenic?” and shook my head and glared at him, and said, “No, I don’t take sugar.”
At any other time I would not have minded, but that day I was more touchy than usual.
“Oh, you don’t take sugar, of course, I was thinking of somebody else,” he said, and grinned as he moved on to hold the sugar bowl for Simon.
“Watch it,” Simon said, and winked at Mary. She asked me some polite questions, such as did I think sugar was fattening?
“How’s New York?” Eugene asked tenderly, as if it were some girl he inquired after.
“New York, that awful place,” she joked, “I’m never going back there. I like Europe. There’s a much greater intellectual ferment here. All you painters and writers and artists are more embodied into your society. I mean, I met a bus conductor the other day who’d read James Joyce. Do you like New York?”
“In a way”—he wrinkled his face—”I suppose I do. I hate it, but I like it also; some of my soul is there. Let’s say I spent a lot of money in Brooks Brothers.”
They laughed, but I didn’t understand the joke.
“Me too—I never carry more than twenty thousand dollars in cash,” said Simon the poet.
I felt very lonely and did not want to be with them. Eugene and I were all right alone, but when anyone else came I lost him to them, even to the poultry instructress with her knitted stockings. I had nothing to talk about really, except things about my childhood, and he had heard all of that.
“Have you been to America?” Mary asked me.
“Not yet,” I said, “but I hope to, next year.”
“Over my dead body,” Eugene said. “I like that old song about stay as sweet as you are.”
Mary told him that he must let a girl travel and that he mustn’t be unkind to women because there was a rumpus about it now. They had a moment of teasing each other and he ended it by saying, “Would you like to step outside, please?” as she hit him playfully with the knitted tea cozy.
She looked tall and pretty as she stood there near the window, with her back to the brown shutter. Eugene looked at her and said to Simon, “She’s so like ‘your woman’ that I can’t get over it,” and Simon laughed and said that they must both have had the same vitamins.
“They got a system now to grow them like that,” Simon said, and grinned, and I knew that they meant that Mary was like Laura. I felt a lump rise in my throat to choke me, and the pain which precedes tears. I got to the door, muttering something about fresh tea, and was gone before anyone really noticed.
I went to my secret seat in the lady’s garden where I sometimes had a cry. So she was like Laura! Laura was like that—bright, talkative, throwing tea cozies with charm and not knocking anything over, the way I would. Every second of it came to mind, the way he smiled at her and brought her to the window to see the view, the wonder in her voice, the man’s wristwatch outside her sleeve. (Hadn’t Anna told me that Laura wore a man’s wristwatch, too?)
I cried and felt wretched and swore at everything for being so cruel. It was such a shock to me to know that he could love me at night and yet seem to become a stranger in daytime and say to me, “Do you take sugar?”
Up to then I thought that being one with him in bed meant being one with him in life, but I knew now that I was mistaken, and that lovers are strangers in between times.
So she was like Laura—tall and long-legged. If Laura came back, it would be like that; or if he went to Brazil and dropped off on the way to see her. It would be like that, only much worse, because there was also his child, the little girl whom he had framed a picture of, the day before, and hung in the bathroom, saying, “I hope this doesn’t affect you anymore.”
I cried insanely and walked around, chewing a stalk of grass to calm my temper. And he brought up the whole thing about my relations again. He always did, causing me to suffer over their red faces and their blundering stubborn ways. When he ridiculed them I felt sick and doomed, knowing that one day he would leave me because of them. I foresaw it all in one of those violent flashes of self-illumination which come to us after whole years of complacency, and still crying and chewing that same stalk of tough grass, I came back and peeped in through the side of the sitting-room window. What I saw filled me with panic. They were talking, laughing. Mary had her feet curled up under her on the sofa, her shoes some distance away on the rug. To me there is something marvelously dangerous and frank about a woman who takes off her shoes in company—it’s almost like taking off her clothes. I can’t do it.
They were drinki
ng whiskey and he seemed to be telling them some story, because they laughed a lot, and Mary put her hand to her side, seemingly begging him to stop telling her such funny things, because she had a stitch there. Simon sat on the rocking chair, rocking and laughing. No one missed me.
I went away and cried more and crushed a harmless flower between my fingers, and thought of Laura’s letters to him and wondered how he replied to them. I could see the telegram, too, the exact wording of it—”If you marry her you will never see Elaine or me again. I promise you”—and farther down a sticker which said, “Send your reply by Western Union.” I had no idea if he had replied, or not. He always did things without telling me.
It would be better for me to go in and talk to them as if nothing had happened, or else to pack my clothes and leave him, but I did neither. When I came and peeped through the window a second time, I saw that he had lit the fire and the tall shadows of flames leaped on the pink wall. The room looked enchanting, as rooms do in that twilight time, when people are eating and talking and drinking whiskey. With all my heart I wished that I could go in and say something casual or funny, something that would no longer mark me as an outsider.
Instead, I went in by a side door and up to my room to powder my face. They did not leave for another hour and a half.
“I’ll just see if she’s here,” I heard Eugene say downstairs. He called my name. “Kate, Kate, Katie.” And then he whistled. I did not answer. Finally I heard their car door bang and the engine start up. At last they were gone.
He came into the house calling me and went to the kitchen to ask Anna, “I wonder where Caithleen is?”
She must have nodded to the bedroom, because he came up at once. My heart leaped with anger and relief as I heard him climb the stairs, whistling, “I wonder who’s kissing her now …” It was almost dark and I lay on top of the bed with a rug over me.
“Having a little rest?” he said as he came into the room. I did not answer, so he came around to my side, and bending down he said, “Are you in one of your emotional states?”