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

by Edna O'Brien

  Girls

  in Their

  Married

  Bliss

  1

  Not long ago Kate Brady and I were having a few gloomy gin fizzes up London, bemoaning the fact that nothing would ever improve, that we’d die the way we were—enough to eat, married, dissatisfied.

  We’ve always been friends—as kids in Ireland we slept together and I used to push her out of bed on purpose, hoping she’d crack her skull or something. I liked her and all that—I was as jealous as hell of course—but she was too sedate and good; you know, that useless kind of goodness, asking people how they are, and how their parents are. At National School she did my compositions for me, and in the Convent of Mercy we clung together because the other eighty girls were even drippier than she, which is saying a lot. When we vamoosed from the convent we went to a linoleum slum in Dublin, and then on to another slum here in London, where, over a period of eighteen months, we got asked out to about three good dinners apiece, which meant six meals for both of us because we had a pact that whoever got asked out would bring back food for the Cinderella. I’ve ruined the inside of more handbags that way …

  We weren’t here a year when she remet a crank called Eugene Gaillard, whom she’d known in Ireland. They took up their old refrain, fell in love, or thought they did, and lost no time making puke out of it. The marriage was in the sacristy of a Catholic church. Question of having to. They wouldn’t do it out front because he was divorced and she was heavily pregnant. I was bridesmaid. Pink chiffon and a hat with a veil, for which they paid. I looked like the bride. She was in a big, floppy, striped maternity dress and a child’s face on her. She’s sly, the sort that would look like a child even if she kept her mother in a wardrobe. The priest didn’t look toward her stomach once.

  When we came out, Eugene drove away very quick, and that shook me, because he’s the sort of fusser that issues instructions before he lets you into his motorcar. “Don’t step on the running board, don’t push the seat too far back, don’t push the other seat too far forward.” To make himself important. He tore out of the place and down the road like a sportsman. He was laughing, too, a thing he doesn’t do often.

  “What’s up?” says I.

  “Our Beloved Father is finding a little surprise,” he said, and Kate said, “What?” just like a wife.

  It seems the envelope which he handed to the priest, and which was supposed to contain twenty pounds for marrying them, contained one, orange-colored, Irish, ten-shilling note, wrapped in several pieces of paper to make the envelope bulky. Well, she flew into a huff and got violet in the face. He told her she was nothing but a farmer’s daughter reverting to type, and she told him he was so mean he wouldn’t let her buy things for the baby. A dig because he was married before and had kept pram and nappies in storage. He said she had no breeding, and if she wanted to be crude she’d better step out of the car. He said he’d give the twenty pounds to some less pernicious organization, and she said, “Well, go on, give it, stop some poor woman and give it to her,” but he sat tight at the wheel and drove with a set purpose to a middling restaurant in Soho where we had a cheerless breakfast and a bottle of light, sparkling wine, which he liked so much that he took the dampened label off and put it in his wallet so that he’d remember it. For the next marriage! She sulked all through and I couldn’t very well laugh.

  They went to live in the country after the child came, and she wrote me a note that I kept. I don’t know why I kept it. It said:

  Dear Baba,

  We are in a valley with a hill of golden, trampled bracken to look out on, and birds are nesting in the hardly budded trees. We have a gray stone house with stone slates on the roof and wooden beams inside, and whitewashed, bumpety walls and pots for flowers everywhere; the boards creak and he loves me, and there is something about having a child and being in a valley, and being loved, that is more marvelous than anything you or I ever knew about in our flittery days.

  Always,

  Kate

  Always, Kate! I was miserable at the time. Never, Kate! That night I put on my best things and went to an Irish club. Fate of fates, I met my builder.

  His name was Frank and he was blowing money around the place and telling jokes. I’ll repeat one joke so as you’ll have an idea how hard up I was: Two men with fishing tackle have an arm around an enormous woman and one says to the other, “A good catch.” When people are drunk they’ll laugh at anything, provided they’re not arguing, or hitting each other.

  Anyhow, he drove me home and offered me money—he has a compulsion to offer money to people who are going to say no—and asked if I thought he looked educated. Educated! He was a big, rough fellow with oily hair, and his eyebrows met. So I said to him, “Beware of the one whose eyebrows meet, because in his heart there lies deceit.” And sweet Jesus, next time we met he’d had them plucked over his broken nose. He’s so thick he didn’t understand that the fact they met was the significant thing. Thick. But nice, too. Anybody that vulnerable is nice, at least that’s how I feel. Another dinner. Two dinners in one week and a bunch of flowers sent to me. The first thought I had when I saw the flowers was, could I sell them at cut rates. So I offered them to the girls in the bed-sits above and below, and they all said no except one eejit who said yes. She began to fumble for her purse, and I felt so bloody avaricious that I said, “Here’s half of them,” so we had half each, and when he came to call for me that evening, he counted the number of flowers that I’d stuck into a paint tin, for want of a vase. And you won’t believe it, but didn’t he go and ring the flower shop to say they’d swindled him. There he was out on the landing phone, yelling into it about how he’d ordered three dozen Armagh roses and what crooks they were, and how they’d lost him as a customer, and there was I in the room with a fist over my mouth to smother the laughing. “You may not be educated,” said I, “but you’re a merchant at heart. You’ll go far.” It ended up with the flower shop saying they’d send more, and they did. I was driven to go out to Wool worth’s and buy a two-shilling plastic vase because I knew the paint tin would topple if one more flower was put in.

  He didn’t propose bed for at least six dinners, and that shook me. I didn’t know whether to be pleased or offended. He was blind drunk the night he said we ought to, and my garret was freezing and far from being a love nest. The roses had withered but weren’t thrown out, and I had this short bed so that his feet hung out at the bottom. I lay down beside him—not in the bed, just on it—with my clothes on. He fumbled around with my zip and of course broke it, and I thought, I hope he leaves cash for the damage, and even if he does I’ll have to go to a technical school to learn how to stitch on a zip, it’s that complicated. I knew the bed was going to collapse. You always know a faulty bed when you put it to that sort of use. So he got the zip undone and got past my vest—it was freezing—and got a finger or two on my skin, just around my midriff, which was beginning to thicken because of all the big dinners and sauces and things. I reckoned I ought to do the same thing, and I explored a bit and got to his skin, and the surprising thing was, his skin was soft and not thick like his face. He began to delve deeper, very rapacious at first, and then he dozed off. That went on for a while—him fumbling, then dozing—until finally he said, “How do we do it?” and I knew that was why he hadn’t made passes sooner. An Irishman: good at battles, sieges, and massacres. Bad in bed. But I expected that. It made him a hell of a sight nicer than most of the sharks I’d been out with, who expected you to pay for the pictures, raped you in the back seat, came home, ate your baked beans, and then wanted some new, experimental kind of sex and no worries from you about might you have a baby, because they liked it natural, without gear. I made him a cup of instant coffee, and when he went to sleep I put a quilt over him and put the light out. I sat on the chair, thinking of the eighteen months in London, and all the men I’d met, and the exhaustion of keeping my heels mended and my skin fresh for the Mr. Right that was supposed to come along.

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nbsp; I knew that I’d end up with him, he being rich and a slob and the sort of man who would buy you seasick tablets before you traveled. You won’t believe it but I felt sort of sorry for him, the way he worried about not being educated, or being fooled by florists, or being taken for an Irish hick by waiters. Never mind that they’re Italian hicks. I could tell them all to go to hell because I had a brazen, good-looking face and was afraid of none of them, not even afraid whether people liked me or not, which is what most people are afraid of, anyhow. I know that people liking you or not liking you is an accident and is to do with them and not you. That goes for love, too, only more so. Well, to cut a long story short, I married him, and we had a big wedding with names being yelled out and red carpet to walk on. Strictly speaking, it wasn’t carpet but cording stuff. Not that I drew his attention to it, because he’d have had a fight right there and then with photographers at hand to verify it. We were married by an abbot from one of the monasteries that Frank’s outfit built. The wedding was a big do with speeches about hurling, and happiness, and all sorts of generalized garbage. There were ninety-four telegrams. I learned afterward that he had instructed his secretary to send a host of them and put workmen’s names to them. He’d die if he didn’t get a bigger number of telegrams than anyone else, or make the wittiest speech. It was easy to be witty with the guests we had. He planned his own speech for weeks before. Imagine it. He had a voice trainer come in for four evenings. You’d pay not to talk like her. She was screeching all over the place, and he and her were in the room saying “A” and “O” for several hours. She was one of those fat Englishwomen that are stuffed with bread and lah-di-dah and nothing else.

  Of course, everyone got drunk at the wedding and when we got to the airplane, me in a powder-blue Paris going-away suit, we couldn’t be let on because of him being incapable. He got very obstreperous and said did they know who he was, and did they know his wife was wearing a Balenciaga. Anyhow, we had to turn back, and the one thing I was relieved about was that he wouldn’t want to sleep with me that first night, because that was the one thing I dreaded. You see that was the one aspect of him I didn’t like at all. I liked his money and his slob ways: I didn’t mind holding hands at the pictures, but I had no urge to get into bed with him. Quite the opposite.

  I even confided in my mother. I hardly ever talked to my mother about anything, because when I was four I had scarlet fever and she sent me away to a Gaeltacth to learn Irish. She really sent me away so that she wouldn’t have to mind me—the maid was on two weeks’ holiday—but she thought up this Gaeltacth stunt so that it sounded wholesome. I was only there a day when I had to be put in the infirmary. They made me dictate letters: Darling Mummy [I’m not your mother,I’m Mummy you used to say], I am getting better. I drank orange juice through a straw this morning. Love to you and Daddy, darling Mummy.

  I don’t want to sound all martyrish about it, it’s just that I didn’t tell her things, but I did mention this physical ordeal and she said it would be all right, to just grit my teeth and suffer it. She said it was because of physical attraction that most marriages went wallop, that physical attraction was another form of dope. Dope was my mother’s word for anything that people got by on. I don’t hold it against her. I don’t expect parents to fit you out with anything other than a birth certificate and an occasional pair of new shoes. She said what she did because she was feathering her nest, too. That’s how he really hooked us—financing us all. Because of his money my mother was over here in London having the life of Riley: her corns attended to, new clothes, gin slings every evening in hotels, and then we’d all (he never stirred with less than ten or twelve people) repair to some joint where a coarse man or woman played the piano and titivated their wares. As if that was exciting. My mother had a right old time. “He’s a good man, your Frank,” she’d say to me across a table in one of those lurid places, and then she’d look around for him and raise her glass and say, “Frank, take care,” and they’d drink to me: the bloody sacrificial lamb. Twenty years before she wouldn’t have let him use the outside lavatory in our house at home. You’ll think I’m bitter about my mother, but I’m not. She died soon after that. She got cancer of the stomach and died in a matter of months. I believe that for the twenty-four hours before she died she screamed and fought against it, and I missed her more than I ever thought I would. I suppose up to the time people die you think their lives will improve, or you’ll get on better with them, but once they’re dead you know neither thing is possible.

  Well, that’s how it happened. We moved into a posh house. I love the smell of rich houses, rich shops, flowers, and carpets. I’d have the whole world fitted with flowers and carpets if I could. We looked out on the river Thames—great view, storm windows, burglar alarms, double doors, the works. Some of it was a lark, hanging pictures and getting rooms done like the Vatican. Our bathroom was in a fashion magazine, with me sitting on my cane throne. We bought dozens of copies and sent them back to Ireland, to the relations. Twin beds for a while until he read that they were out. He got a king-size monstrosity with a Scandinavian headboard. That finished my tranquillity. Apart from anything else he moves in his sleep like a truffle hound, banging and sniffing and rooting all over the place.

  Brady came back to London, too—nature and silence-in-the-evening didn’t work out, after all. We met regularly to discuss our plight. Her life like a chapter of the inquisition. He wanted her to stay indoors all the time and nurse his hemorrhoids. One day she had a funny glint in her eye.

  “What’s up?” said I. I might have known. She’d met someone else, she was in love, the old, old story. She began to rave until I thought I’d puke. He turned out to be a prize. They came here in the afternoons for cups of tea, and to talk; I even went out to give them a chance, but they never got past the front room. Songs about the oppressed took over. I used to wonder when it would end, but apart from that I didn’t put much consequence on it. Which goes to show how wrong I can be.

  2

  “Long legs, crooked thighs, small head and no eyes …” Her son Cash asked the riddle for the fifth time as they walked by a gloomy pond, their gloved hands joined.

  “A crooked man,” Kate said.

  “No. Will I tell you?” the child asked, impatient to air his knowledge.

  “Give me one more chance,” she said, and guessed again, wrongly, “A crooked woman.”

  The child began to laugh aloud in a shrill and forced way. A thing he did often to try to induce a little gaiety into their lives.

  “A tongs,” he said, triumphant, and she bent down and pressed her damp nose against his. They ought to feed the ducks so that they could hurry in out of the cold. The pond was partly frozen, and partly not. Chunks of ice bobbed about, and the ducks swam around the borders of the ice. One duck perched on a balcony of ice but got off quickly, finding it so precarious. When they saw the bread they swarmed toward the bank and the three swans came right out of the water onto the frozen cinder path. She hated swans. Their greed. Their ugly bodies. Their webbed, slime-like feet.

  “Mind your glove,” she said. A swan had bitten off the child’s red glove one day, a year before, and carried it to the opposite bank, where the park keeper had to rescue it with a hook on the end of a fishing rod.

  “Me mind me glove,” the child said.

  “Stop talking like a child,” she said as she stood there wondering how she was going to get away that evening and should she wear her good clothes or not.

  It was now between three and four on a winters afternoon and the light was beginning to fade. It had snowed on and off for several weeks, but because there hadn’t been a recent fall, what lay on the grass was a soiled and despairing yellow.

  “Are you going out tonight?” the child asked. Something momentous about the way he looked up into her face and caught the two tears she had been holding on to, like contact lenses.

  “Yes.”

  “With Dada?”

  “Without Dada.”

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nbsp; “Don’t go,” he said, parodying a sad face. He affected sadness as easily as he laughed, but that did not mean he wasn’t troubled. No more than that her tears were shallow.

  “Look,” she said, to distract him, and she held the bag upside down and sprinkled the remainder of the bread on the water. The ducks and swans converged on it.

  When they got to the wastepaper basket that was nailed to the bylaw board, she threw the rolled paper bag in, and read for the child’s benefit the names of the fish which according to the notice proliferated in that unlikely half acre of miserable, stagnant water.

  “— —, carp, bleak, bream.”

  They did not sound like the names of fish at all, but like a litany of moods that any woman might feel any Monday morning after she’d hung out her washing and caught a glimpse of a ravishing man going somewhere alone in a motorcar.

  No one was out but themselves. It was teatime and fire-lighting time. The first foul whiffs of smoke rose from several chimneys. She could well believe that there were gas pokers alight in all of these houses. Identical houses with identical things going on behind the brick fronts.

  “Do me smell me custard powder?” Cash asked, knowing well that it wasn’t. In the summertime, depending on how the wind blew, they could smell custard powder from some factory. A niceish smell in the light, airy summer days with the electric chime from the ice-cream van, and stoic men sitting on canvas stools fishing for whales in the “— —, carp, bleak, bream” pond. They crossed the road and walked toward their own house.

  “That was a short walk,” Eugene said, opening the hall door for them. He had the ashen look that he’d worn through autumn when the light was bronze from the trees outside, and through winter now, his chosen, destined season. Weakness, timidity, guilt overcame her. She thought, He knows, he knows. If only he’ll give me this last chance, I’ll change, reform, make myself so ugly that I will be out of the reach of temptation.