by Edna O'Brien
“The sink smells again. I told you not to strain cabbage or cauliflower down,” he said.
“Maura must have done it. Where is she?” Kate said, relieved that his wrath was for the sink only.
“I don’t know where she is,” he said as Kate advanced toward the well of the stairs and called to the young giggly servant with as much authority as she could muster.
They had steamed fish and cauliflower. The fish had gone cold, and Maura ruined the vegetables by overcooking them.
“All right?” Kate said out of habit. They sat at their accustomed places, he at one end of the mahogany table, she at the other, Cash and Maura in between, facing each other, making daft sounds, golluping their food one minute, chewing it to distraction the next minute.
“I wouldn’t say it was the best meal I’ve ever had,” he said, lifting his face from the plate of white, insipid food to stare over her head at the greenhouse, where the branches of an old vine wormed and gnarled their way.
“Cauliflower needs only a little water,” she said, giving Maura a hint. She wanted to sound practical so that after tea she could decently stand up and say, “I’m going over to see Baba for a couple of hours.”
Baba, her friend since childhood and now the wedded wife of a builder. Baba owned one ranch-mink stole and intended owning several more. She’d even promised one to Kate. Baba had hazel eyes that drooped at the corners and were inclined to flashes of wickedness. An occasional blow from her husband gave to one or the other of those green eyes a permanent knowingness, as if at twenty-five she realized what life was all about. She had plans for them both to leave their husbands one day when they’d accumulated furs and diamonds, just as once she had planned that they would meet and marry rich men and live in houses with bottles of grog opened, and unopened, on silver trays.
As soon as he put the knife and fork down and pushed the plate to the side of the table, Kate would tell him that she was going out. Then she would fly upstairs, make her face up, but not overdo it, wear her second-best coat, carry her earrings and her fur hat in a paper bag, saying it contained homemade scones for Baba, and set out in a flutter. She could put them on, as always, in the ladies’ room of the Underground station.
“I think it’s the coldest day we’ve had,” she said, hoping for a response.
“The wireless says there’ll be more snow,” Maura said.
“Oh no,” Kate said, and caught a look from him that said, “We are all inconvenienced by it, not just little you.”
“Goody, piles and piles of snow, we’ll make a snowman.” Cash was always threatening to make a snowman but never did. He hatched indoors like the rest of them. Waiting for the spring.
“You weren’t out at all today?” she said to her husband. He wasn’t working. He’d saved enough money from the previous project to see them through a few months. He directed documentary pictures but was always buying leisure, as if in the course of leisure he most found what he had been ordained to do.
“No,” he said. They were surrounded by silence. Simply to fill in the silence she said that the oil heater in the room tended to give her a headache.
“Oh well, everything has its drawbacks,” he said. Every word pierced. Tonight she would tell her friend that they must not see each other for a while. Anyhow, the joy of seeing him was diminishing, and she was more conscious of the risks than of the pleasure. She thought how it is impossible to tell in the beginning of an attraction whether it is the real thing or not.
They’d met at a party, and they were attracted to each other the way hundreds of people are, out of hunger. It would have ended there but that they met by accident a few days later, as she was coming out of a white sale.
“Are you plunging in?” she said. There was something sissyish about seeing a man shop for sheets. She had a parcel of them in her hand and a new fur hat on her head. Saved having it wrapped.
“Would you like some tea?” he said, apparently too ashamed to shop now. He steered her down the street to a cramped restaurant with atrocious masks on the wall, and high stools that made no allowance for the small of the back. It was March. Windy. Pieces of paper and dust blowing about, and people with a look of fortitude because they had to fight the wind. He said something about apple blossoms, how it was probably blowing about in orchards all over Kent and how he wished he was there. But then he would not have met her! Some such compliment.
He asked her to have tea the following week, and she agreed, telling herself that she was not in love with him and therefore not party to anything wicked. The love came later. Or something bordering on it. They began to meet oftener; they made furtive telephone calls, wrote ardent letters, swore they would have to do something, but did nothing. Her husband began to sense it at once, although there was no evidence that he knew. He took to wearing pajamas in bed, to going for walks alone, to commenting on her slackening midriff. At Christmas, a few weeks before, she gave him a calendar on a marble stand and he said, “You’re sure this is for me?” He produced two packages, one for Cash and one for Maura.
“You forgot me,” she said to him sullenly.
“I give presents when I want to,” he said, “not out of duty.”
“You’re quite right,” she said, but in the wrong tone.
“I see you’re getting your persecution complex back, put a sign out,” he told her, and turned to Cash to explain the principle of the steam train he had just given him. Maura received high boots and matching gloves, and she marched around wearing both, hitting her gloved hands together, saying she was well away. It was strange how a happy face automatically became a pretty one.
“You’d like tea or coffee?” Kate said, because he had pushed the half-eaten fish aside and was awaiting the next course. They had no pudding that particular evening.
“Tea.”
She and Maura automatically had the same, and Cash had milk, which he drank through a straw to make it exciting. Outside, they could hear the spatter of snow falling on the greenhouse. The wind began to howl. For some reason she thought of a dog she’d once known as a child, who had taken fits and had been locked up in an outhouse. She had feared that the dog would break loose and do terrible damage to them, just as now she knew the wind was intending to do harm.
“I hope it’s not too bad, I promised Baba I’d go over,” Kate said as casually as her guilt would allow.
“On a night like this?” he said.
“Well, I promised,” she said, carrying her own cup of tea out of the room, to the refuge of the freezing upstairs, where she adorned her face with vanishing cream and a new gold powder she’d bought.
When she came down she found that he had his coat on, and she smiled and asked if he was having a little constitutional.
“I’ll come with you,” he said. “Haven’t seen Baba for months.”
“Oh,” she said, getting all solicitous, “you’d better not, Baba’s in trouble. She and Frank are not hitting it off and she wants advice from me.”
“In that case,” he said, “I’ll go somewhere else.”
She almost froze to death. They each kissed the child, warned Maura about the oil heater, and went out into the bitter night.
“Which way are you going?” she said, pausing at the gateway. He did not reply but walked beside her toward a bus stop that was at the end of their road. The steady, pitiless blobs of snow beating against her face, the emptiness and darkness of the street—only two of the seven streetlights functioned—irritated her. Why could he not use his car like other men? Why did they have to live in that place? she thought, forgetting that she had coaxed him to come there. It was a long, dull street. Trees. Some shed red berries that children later stamped into the tarred road so that they were like the tracks of someone who had gone by bleeding. Deathly quiet in the daytime. Rag-and-bone men rumbling along, yelling an inexplicable cry that she would never have understood except for seeing the junk. And always funerals. Coffins garnished with flowers, one or two courtesy cars following
behind. Flowers instead of friends. Death, as bleak as living. She hardly ever talked to her neighbors. No wonder. They were mostly housewives who waved their husbands goodbye in the mornings, shopped around eleven, collected plastic tulips with the packets of dust-blue detergent, and wrote to the County Council about having the trees chopped down. They believed trees caused asthma and were always petitioning her to write and say the same thing. How did they survive? Endurance! That was a thing to aim at, and maybe asthma. A disease that she could talk about, and use as a weapon to live.
“Missed it!” she said to Eugene as the bus trundled by. They had to wait ten minutes for the next one. She timed it on his watch, touching his wrist each time, to feel his regard for her. Nothing.
The bus had that flat, after-Christmas feeling. People with new gloves, handbags, headscarves were making the dutiful trip to thank whoever had sent them these dull gifts in lovely, frosted-paper wrappings.
“But take me,” a girl behind was explaining. “People see me and they say, ‘Hello, Judith, how’s Janice?’ “
“She must be a twin,” Kate said, turning to Eugene. He was not listening; his eyes were centered on a beautiful Indian woman who sat quite still, and with such presence that every other woman seemed foolish or strident.
“I should have some Indian children,” he said.
“Cash is all right,” Kate said, pricked.
“Of course he’s all right.”
It was useless. He occupied most of the seat, too, and was crushing her new skirt.
“If you sat on the other seat I’d have more room,” she said to Eugene. The words cut like a lancet through the fog-filled chatter. She stopped short. They looked at each other for some time. It was the last look of pity that passed between them. Each turning to the other had felt the ghost go out. A little phrase had severed them. He moved to the seat behind.
“I was only joking,” she said. He did nothing but smile, a bitter, cunning, tell-you-nothing smile. Kate got out first because Baba’s house was nearby. She said she’d see him later. The cunning smile ushered her away.
“ ‘Bye,” he said.
She crossed the road and took the same number bus back to the station, fretting because she was over an hour late for the appointment with her friend.
3
Kate came into the warm, mahogany-brown pub; looked, and through one of the glass panels she saw him rise to greet her.
“I love you,” he said, even before he said hello. He helped her off with her snowy gloves, so then they could plait fingers in passing.
“Do you hear me?” he asked, his jaw twitching, his top lip yellow from the froth of beer. They moved to the open fire. She caught sight of herself in the old-fashioned mantelpiece, and saw her nose, not quite purple, but a cold, unlovely blue. The gold powder was useless.
“Look,” he said, as if it were their last chance of saying anything, “I thought how ghastly if you didn’t come.”
“Well, I did.” She winked to seem funny for him. Mad. Mad.
They sat themselves on a long bench behind a stained, unsteady table, spreading out their coats and their drinks to discourage others from sitting next to them. He had a large whiskey waiting for her, and beer and whiskey for himself, which he drank from alternate glasses.
“I would never do it like that,” she said, and looked away, knowing she was going to do it another way. She knew his face by heart anyhow: a pleasant, full face that was not overfull; blue, affectionate eyes; one jaw that twitched; waved graying hair; and a ring on his marriage finger. That irked.
“Tell me everything, what you’ve been doing and thinking,” and then he said quickly, “I have so much to tell you.”
Would he leave his wife, forfeit his chance in politics? Sometimes he was reckless, but only in drink. He was drunk now. They could go on exactly as they were. But no, they’d already worn it out, with talk.
“I couldn’t be without you—it would be like dying,” she said. A sentence that he’d nursed when she first spoke it months ago. She thought that phrases were like melodies, they went on appealing long after one had stopped listening. Then one day they fell out of favor.
“I am alive, and in some ways happy,” he said. His bloodshot eyes closed on her face many times, either because they were tired or because he wanted to feast on the image of her.
“I am not,” she said, without humor.
“I would bless you for that,” he said.
“Why?”
“Because you are candid, honest, outright.”
He ought to be Prime Minister; he had a fierce gift for words.
“Really?” she said, believing and not believing him.
“That is the truth of it,” he said.
It was quiet except for the soft hiss of soda being splashed from a siphon down the side of a glass. She looked around to search the faces near her to see if there was anyone listening.
“I hate to say it,” she began, “but everything at home is getting worse, bleak.” It was not so much that she hated to say it as that she was inadequate. How could she give any notion of what it was like to ascend her own stairs, meet her own husband on the first landing, see him turn away, and hear him cough politely as if she were a deformed person? Anyhow, it was not for this kind of chat that her friend picked her that windy far-off day.
“Dear God,” he said, beating his forehead, “I am now filled with blackness.”
“Forgive me,” she said.
“Of course,” he said. “I knew it, anyhow. We are as one, I knew it by your face.”
“I look awful,” she said, seeking flattery.
“On the contrary. How very beautiful you are, your face has a new dimension.”
He was overdoing it again. He ordered large drinks; they clenched hands, sat like two people in an air-raid shelter wondering why they had come down there and not met death up above.
“We are guilty,” he said, “and no doubt. But who is to judge us? It happened.”
“It happened,” she repeated after him, as if they were on trial.
“What will we do?” she said. He beat his lined forehead again, curled and uncurled his square-tipped fingers, searched for her hand, swore at the gods, and called her “Milis,” which is the Gaelic for sweet.
“The world is hard,” he said at last. She did not doubt it; he had a leaden wife and school bills for five children, and a town house and a country house and a job to keep. At least she could mope around all day and dwell on her unhappiness, but he had to work: keep his minister informed of things, appease the voters, ward off complainers, dress well, and make conversation at ludicrous dinner parties engineered for reasons quite separate from friendship. He had to pretend great enthusiasm.
“So what ought we to do?” she said.
“No harm must be done, to anyone,” he said.
“It has been done,” she said, not knowing the full truth and consequence of her remark.
Then he said what she expected of him, and almost what she wished: that they must not meet for a while, that they must suffer it, that they must consider the feelings of other people, that they must cling to the seeds of their love and spit out the unpleasant but necessary pips. More apple images. She nodded, and shivered, and half wept, and drank, and reshivered. She thought of a girl she knew who wrote a letter to a man, and finding that it was not soulful enough, she sprinkled it with tapwater to convince him more.
“You know what I know,” he said, holding both her hands in both of his, “and how I care.” She returned from the trance of his strong, preaching, Welsh accent stating their respective duties, returned to the noise and fog-laden smokiness within the pub. And felt a little fortified. It was almost closing time. Meanwhile, the place had filled up and Irish barmen were going around collecting glasses and yelling at the latecomers who circled the brown, solid counter, jostling for service.
“Let’s go,” he said. Out in the street, because it was late and in a minute many more people would clamor
for taxis, they took the one that came instantly. He kissed her a troubled good night. He was already three hours late for his dolorous wife.
“Sit on it, lock it up, be brave,” he said as she vanished inside and deposited herself on the cold leather seat and heard him ask what the fare would be. He had nice ways.
She thought of asking the driver to let her out so that she could telephone Baba and make sure her lie had gone unquestioned. But it was late and she had no coins, and anyhow, since the affair had terminated, her guilt and unease seemed to lessen. They merely deluded themselves about postponing it; it was over.
It was a mean thought and she knew that, but she still wished that she had asked him to return the skeleton of the leaf. Probably he had lost it or left it between the pages of a long-winded report. She suddenly attached superstition to it, its return would preface the return of everything good. It had been a gift from her husband, this skeleton leaf, mouse-brown in color with a fine lace texture and a tail long and thin like a mouse’s, too A delicate thing created by chance in the autumn when it fell and the flesh of the leaf shriveled away. They got it in Wales. She had given it to her friend the third time they met, and now she wanted it back.
She was like that, she gave too quickly. She did not have her husband’s instinct to preserve. She thought of him throughout the drive. Not as he was at dinner, but as she remembered him before. Calling her out of a crowded room once, simply to kiss her, and go back in again. And she had prayed into his mauve tongue that such a miracle would last forever. Prayed one thing and done another. Tonight she was returning to him. She would communicate it in some way, linger over him, pour myrrh on his scalded soul, ask him to forget, forget and forgive, the way the song said.
“Here, just here,” she said. The taxi had gone several doors past her house. Just as well. She got out and walked back, planning how she would break the ice with him. The snow was thick and vaporous in the pathway, and the tracks of his twelve-inch, crepe-soled shoes were fresh on it.