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

by Edna O'Brien

  “I am,” I said tersely.

  “What the hell is wrong with you?” he said suddenly, in a grievous tone. It surprised me, because I had expected him to coax me for longer.

  “You just make little of me and ignore me,” I said.

  “Make little of you because I have a pleasurable time. Am I to stop talking to people because you haven’t learned to speak yet? If you can’t accommodate yourself to seeing me being amused by other human beings, we’d better just both go home right now,” he said rapidly.

  “You should never have made me come here,” I said.

  “You came. I didn’t make you, any more than I invited the posse of relations who came after you.”

  He was too articulate, too sure of his own rightness.

  “I give you everything—food, clothes—” He pointed to my clothes hanging in the wardrobe. Sometimes the wardrobe door opened quite suddenly as if there were a ghost in it. It had opened just then. “I try to educate you, teach you how to speak, how to deal with people, build up your confidence, but that is not enough. You now want to own me.”

  “I like it when there is just us,” I said, lowering my voice so that he might lower his.

  “The world is not just us,” he said, “the world is this girl coming, and Simon, and all the people you’ve met, and all the ones you will meet. Honestly”—and he sat on the bed and sighed—”I don’t think I can do it, I don’t think I can start from scratch again on a wholly simple level. It’s too difficult, there’s not enough time left in the world anymore, and hundreds of girls, ready-made.” He nodded toward the door as if Mary were in the passage.

  He pointed to me.

  “Your inadequacies, your fears, your traumas, your father …” And I began to cry, knowing my inadequacies like the back of my hand.

  “Young girls are like a stone,” he said, “nothing really touches them. You can’t have a relationship with a stone, at least I can’t.”

  “But you like teaching me,” I protested. “You said you did. Some girls wouldn’t take it, but I don’t mind you telling me about the Ice Age and evolution and auto-suggestion and the profit motive. Maybe she wouldn’t like you telling her things like that …” I wanted to tell him that her legs were hairy, too, but I thought that would betray my nature completely.

  “Maybe she wouldn’t,” he said, “but that doesn’t prevent me from talking to her, from liking her …”

  “But you like me,” I said, “you like me in bed and everything.”

  “Please!” he said in a strained voice. He put out his hands to catch a moth which had come through the open window, then stood up.

  “I suppose if Laura came back it would be the same thing,” I said.

  “It might,” he said. “One relationship does not cancel out another, you’re all”—he thought for the word—”different.”

  “Well, if that’s the case then, I don’t know what I’m doing here.”

  “I certainly don’t know what you’re doing here, acting like a barmaid,” he said urbanely as he walked slowly over to the fire grate. There were papers and matches and hairs from my comb in the grate.

  “I was thinking just now that I’d be better off if I’d never met you,” I said.

  He leaned his elbow on the mantelpiece, pushed a bowl of primroses in from the edge, and said, “You are incapable of thinking. Why don’t you get up and wash your face and put some powder on? Do something. Sink your inadequacy into washing walls or mending my socks or conquering your briary nature …”

  I watched him, strong-featured and hard, standing there, speaking to me as a stranger might.

  “Are you seeing that girl again?” I asked.

  “Probably. Why not?”

  “She’s with Simon, she’s Simon’s girl,” I said.

  “Oh, for God’s sake, stop coming priestly ethics on me; nothing’s irrevocable,” he said. And I thought, Not even us, and I knew as I thought it that if I loved him enough I would put up with anything from him.

  “If you see her again, I’ll go away and I won’t come back,” I said. It was not just her charm and looks that I was jealous of—though there was that, too—it was the fact that she reminded him of Laura. I wanted him exclusively for myself.

  “In that case you ought to start packing now, because I’m having lunch with them tomorrow.”

  “And me?” I said, outraged that he should not have included me.

  “And you,” he said wearily, “if you can be relied upon to behave with dignity and not indulge in one of your states.” He moved toward the door. “Look at yourself in the glass—you’re like a red, swollen washerwoman.”

  “Eugene, Eugene—” I got off the bed and he turned around to say “Yes?” but the bitterness on his face made me swallow whatever I had intended to say. I could not reach him.

  He went downstairs and put some music on, and I sat there planning what I would do to teach him a lesson. I decided to go away and put him to the trouble of finding me. I remembered a story that Baba had told me of how Sally Mead (Tod Mead’s wife) had left Tod once, and he searched the pubs and streets and hotels for three days, and finally a policeman found her, eating an ice cream, alone, in the back row of a cinema. She’d spent the days in a cinema and slept in some hostel at night; but I need not do that, because I could go to Joanna’s. I could help Baba to pack, and all the time he would search for me and swear never to let me out of his sight again.

  19

  It was a long night. I got a suitcase from the top of the wardrobe and packed my clothes; I put my jewelry (some trinkets of Mama’s and a gold chain that he had bought for me) in a box. At about two I went downstairs to heat myself some milk, and on the way I listened at the study door. He seemed to be moving around inside and a flute was being played, mournfully, on the radio. For one second, I had the temptation to knock and go inside, and beg his forgiveness, and listen to the music with him; but I went on down to the kitchen, heated the milk, and brought it up to bed. Anyhow, I could always apologize when he came up later on. But that night he slept in the guest room, and I minded that more than anything.

  In the morning we did not speak, and while he shaved I put the case in the trunk of the car, and the marriage ring he had bought for me in an ashtray on his desk. I had finally decided to go away for a week, to give him plenty of time to miss me. I had a short letter in my handbag, ready to hand to him when we got to Dublin. In the letter, of course, I pretended that I was going away forever.

  The new telephone was there in the hall, clean and shiny, waiting to be used. Anna looked at it, and said that she hoped it wouldn’t ring while we were out. In boredom, she had bleached her black hair blond, but it was badly done and you could see the black roots clearly. I didn’t tell her that I was going away, because I knew that she would implore me either to stay or to bring her with me.

  Eugene and I did not speak half a dozen words as we drove down the mountain, past the brown fields, and down the long rocky hill which led to richer grass and cows grazing, and potato fields blue from a recent spray of copper sulphate.

  “Where are we having lunch?” I asked.

  “The Shelbourne,” he said, and I looked out the window at the two crooked chalked signs on a limestone wall—UP THE IRA and SHUN CYCLING SLAVES, and memorized them, telling myself that I might never drive this way again; telling myself, yet not believing it.

  As we passed a grove of Scots pine trees I said, “Now I know the names of trees,” but he did not answer me. Their limbs were flushed in the sun.

  When we got out at Stephens Green, I walked a little ahead of him, toward the hotel. As we came through the revolving doors I said, “I’m just going into the cloakroom for a minute, won’t be long,” and he went into the lounge without answering.

  In the cloakroom I took the letter out of the paper bag (I had put it in a paper bag to keep it clean), came out, gave it to a page boy along with two shillings, and asked him to hand it to Mr. Gaillard, who was in the lounge.
Then I ran out of the hotel and felt more exalted than I had felt for ages. I got my case from the unlocked trunk of his car (it never locked) and took a taxi to Joanna’s. In the taxi I mused over how shocked he would be when he read the note, and of how he would hurry to Joanna’s looking for me. The note was short. It said simply:

  I love you, but I do not want to be a burden to you, so I am leaving. Goodbye.

  In the taxi also, I powdered my face so that when I got to Joanna’s I should not look too desolate.

  “Jesus, look what the cat brought in,” Baba said, opening the door to me and then going back into the hall to call Joanna.

  “Mein Gott, have you fill up with baby and that man send you back to us?” Joanna asked as she saw me standing there with the stuffed suitcase, one latch of which had come open. She wore a summer dress which I had left behind, and it was funny to see her in it. She must have had it let out. Baba wore blue jeans and a sleeveless blouse. It was very hot.

  “No, I just came back for a few days to help Baba pack and see her off,” I said cheerfully, and they brought me in.

  Joanna was making lemonade from some yellow powder stuff. The kitchen window was open and the flowered curtain ballooned gently under the raised sash. I saw my bicycle outside, and thought with sadness of all that had happened to me since I last rode it. Baba began to question me, and very quickly I broke down.

  “My mother is bloody right,” Baba said. “All men are pigs.”

  “True, is true,” Joanna said, because Gustav was out, “smoking and trinking and start to shout if I go cross. I myself am nerves and I cannot say anythink.”

  “Let Cait talk,” Baba said, shutting Joanna up. Baba looked pale from her recent misadventure, and she smoked more than ever.

  “Come to England,” she said to me. “We’ll have a whale of a time. Striptease girls in Soho, that’s what we’ll be.”

  She was going to England the following Friday, and her parents had allowed her to take her insurance money out of the bank, having reconciled themselves to the fact that she would never pass an examination now. She had told them that she was going to take up nursing.

  “Nursing!” she said to me. “Shaving people and changing sheets. I’m going to Soho, that’s where I’ll see life. You should come with me.”

  “Ah no, he’ll want me back,” I said, telling them about the note which I had given to the page boy. Joanna put us to tidying the front room, so that the place would look respectable when he came. It was funny dusting a rubber plant on a summer’s day, when nice flowers bloomed in the garden outside. There were wallflowers out, and peony roses just opening. I did not expect him until half past three or four, as I knew that he would lunch first with Simon and Mary, behaving as if nothing had happened.

  “Give her a drink,” Baba said to Joanna at a quarter to four. I sat near the front window, holding the net curtain up. Sometimes I let it drop in the belief that he would come the minute I stopped looking. My hands were shaking and my stomach felt sick.

  At half past four, when nothing had happened, Baba dolled herself up and went out to look for him. I made excuses and clung to stupid hopes, as one does in times of desperation. I said, “He didn’t get the note,” “He doesn’t know where I’ve gone,” “He always forgets Joanna’s number,” and with these paltry hopes and egg cupfuls of Joanna’s homemade advocaat, I passed the time from the window to the door, to the hall, upstairs and then down again, until finally Joanna had one of her brainwaves and gave me a pullover to rip. I foresaw our reunion, and debated whether I should sulk for a bit when he arrived with Baba or run to him with open arms.

  Meanwhile, Gustav came in for his tea and shook hands with me, and Gianni, the lodger, arrived looking as conceited as ever.

  “How do you like the country?” he asked. “Have you seen much wild life?”

  “Wild life!” I said, and took my cup of tea into the back room, where Joanna kept buckets of preserved eggs and apples on the window ledges.

  “Baba should be back now,” I said to the plaster nymph in the fireplace whose cheeks Joanna rouged from time to time because everything got mildewed in that room. The roof leaked.

  Eventually I heard the door being opened and I rushed out. Only Baba was there.

  “Baba, Baba,” I said. Her cheeks were flushed and I knew that she’d had one or two drinks.

  “Come upstairs,” she said, making a face toward the dining-room door to indicate that she did not wish them to hear.

  “Is he outside?” I asked as she linked me upstairs to the bedroom which I used to share with her. We closed the door.

  “Where is he?” I asked.

  She looked at me squarely for a second and then said, “He’s gone home.”

  “Without me?” I was shocked. “Isn’t he coming for me?”

  “No,” she said, sighing, “he’s not coming for you.”

  “Is that Mary gone with him?”

  “That moron! Says everything is ‘cute and moving.’ You telling me she was good-looking. Jesus, she’s only in the halfpenny place next to us; all she has is her underwear and a necklace down to her stomach. I cut her dead,” Baba said, smiling victoriously.

  “Where is she? Is she gone home with him?”

  “She’s a right-lookin’ eejit, she got the collywobbles, and that spy with the beard had to take her home. ‘Wow,’ he says to me. ‘Bow-wow,’ says I back to him. You’re too soft with sharks like him!”

  “But what about Eugene?” I asked.

  “Sit down,” she said, giving me a cigarette.

  She began, “I told him that you were here, and he said, ‘Naturally!’ Then he ordered me a brandy, and when th’other pair went off, I told him that you were having a fit and he said that he’d made up his mind about you …”

  I trembled all over, and clutched the bedclothes to prepare myself for the worst.

  “He says you’re to stay here,” Baba said flatly. “He says old men and young girls are all right in books but not anywhere else. You’re to stay here,” she said, pointing to the two iron beds, “until maybe you’ve growed up a bit and he comes back from making his irrigation thing in America. Are you up the pole or anything?”

  I shook my head and sobbed and gripped the satin bedspread until she thought I’d tear it. Then I lay on the bed face downward and began to moan and cry.

  “Jesus, don’t have a nervous breakdown,” she begged as she clutched my shoulders to steady me, “or convulsions or anything. Don’t go off your head.”

  “I’m entitled to have a nervous breakdown or go off my head,” I shouted as Joanna came in and said something sympathetic and then told Baba to take the spread off the bed before I ruined it. I had my shoes on, lying there. Baba pushed me toward the edge of the bed, and I lowered myself on the floor and pounded the brown linoleum while they folded the bedspread and put it away in a drawer.

  “A little bit hysteric, eh?” Joanna said, and Baba recalled how our friend Tom Higgins got put in Grangegorman for a lot less. He kissed a strange nun on O’Connell Bridge because she reminded him of his dead sister. His sister had died of tuberculosis in the bed next to Baba’s in the sanatorium, and before that his brother got killed in Spain.

  “I’m going to Eugene, I’m going to him,” I said, getting to my knees.

  “No, you’re not,” Baba said firmly. “He doesn’t want you.”

  “He does want me, he does want me,” I shouted, and then Gustav came in, and opened his mouth with shame and wonder when he saw me kneeling and crying on the floor, my hair wild about me.

  “Miss Caithleen who is so gentle,” he said, and I thought, Yes, I was so gentle and now I am a wild, debased person because of some damn man, and I lay flat on the floor and howled.

  They lifted me onto the bed, gave me pills and whiskey, and more pills, so that I would calm down. I slept with Baba in the single bed, and once in near-sleep I thought that her arm around my stomach was his arm, and I woke up, relieved, only to face the truth aga
in, and the emptiness. That was the time I missed him worst. Baba’s arm was around me, but it was his body I smelled, the sweet and languid smell of his body in sleep, the dark mesh of hairs on his chest, the honey color of his skin, and the warmth which had enveloped us, night after night. I stayed awake then, my mind muddled from pills and crying.

  Baba had stopped going to lectures, so at about eleven next morning we went to a phone booth and Baba put a call through to his house. The person in the exchange told her that the telephone had not been connected yet, but to try later.

  At home I sat by the window and looked out at the peony roses, which were opening, and at the leaves of the birch tree blown upward by the wind. Baba brought me tea, and went out three or four times to telephone him, but could not get through.

  I thought, While this peony rose is opening into a large red bloom, he is on his way to me; but I was mistaken, because when Baba finally got through, late that evening, Anna told her that Mr. Gaillard had gone away and taken a travel bag with him.

  “He may be in London or somewhere for a couple of weeks,” Baba said.

  “Weeks?” I said. “I’ll be out of my mind if I have to wait weeks.”

  “I’m going to England this Friday,” Baba said, wagging her finger at me, “and for God’s sake, don’t stop me, don’t ask me to stay here and nurse you. I’ve wanted to go for months, and I don’t want anyone or anything to stop me.”

  “I won’t stop you, Baba,” I said, certain that he would come in a matter of days. “He’ll come.”

  “Supposing he doesn’t?”

  “But he will.”

  “But supposing he doesn’t,” and she went on like that, and I thought she was disheartening me because she was jealous. She said again that if I wanted to I could go to England with her.

  “You’ll see him there,” she said. “He might even be over there now.” It was quite possible, because the various companies he made films for were in London. I thought, however, that most probably he had just gone away for one night to some hotel to do a bit of fishing. When he was worried about something he always went fishing; and I knew well that he was missing me.