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

by Edna O'Brien

  “And then?” the Monsignor was saying with interest. I could see he was planning to get to know this man and give religious instruction in lieu of shirts.

  “Well, Monsignor,” Frank said—he calls him by his name every couple of seconds—”this is where the shrewdness comes in: then he sells them to other men who are not so rich. I mean wealthy men in their own right, but not rich beyond the dreams of avarice.”

  “Well, it’s a good thing, a wholesome thing,” the Monsignor said. “After the loaves and fishes, Our Lord asked them to gather up the leavings. Waste is not a Christian ethic either.” Then he made a big joke: he moved very close to Frank and looked at his thick neck and said, “Would I be right in thinking, Frank, that you’re wearing one yourself?” Everyone looked then.

  “Monsignor, you’re a caution,” Frank said. “Having me on like that.”

  Frank was wearing a four-pound, fifteen-shilling, striped job got in the King’s Road. I could still see that impotent bastard in his brown attire, strutting around the room.

  “That’s how to keep one’s money,” Lady Margaret said. She managed to keep her own fairly intact. She had a big place in Ireland with butlers and all that, but God, had she rotten legs. Even in the evening skirt which she was wearing you’d know she had bad legs.

  “Baba, what sort of hostess are you? Their glasses are empty, empty!” Frank said. He was gathering wind for his second story.

  “Don’t we know where it is and that we’re welcome to it,” the Monsignor said, helping himself. I was well oiled before the brother and his wife came. She was in a white crocheted creation. It really shook me, because I was in one of my ordinary things. I hadn’t the incentive to dress, if you want to know. I knew Frank would be livid, because the competition between him and brother is desperate. The way it is between good friends.

  “I know someone who wants to catch her death,” I said, because her back was exposed right down to her middle.

  “I simply had to show it to you,” she said. “It was flown over today.” I didn’t even ask from where, but anyhow, she was a big hit with all and sundry. I hustled them to the dining room before nine because I had some mad idea about nipping out to find him after they’d all gone.

  Cooney conducted herself very well throughout the dinner. For one thing, she didn’t wear that hat or get chatting. There was one tricky second when they began to compliment me on the food. She had her revenge, though; she thrust a boiling-hot sauce boat into my hand and sailed away.

  “Cranberry sauce,” Frank kept saying. “More turkey, Maggsie. More ham, anybody?”

  “You can’t beat the Irish ham,” the Monsignor said. “The succulence of it.”

  Succulence! It was straight from Denmark.

  Then they got on to food and how poor they’d all been at one time or another. You know, vying with each other to know who had starved the oftenest. The merchant, who hadn’t opened his mouth up to then, told a big rigmarole about walking around London with one and threepence in his pocket and standing outside cafés trying to decide to have a one-and-threepenny meal and no evening paper, or a shilling meal and a paper for the racing results.

  “Indeed I did,” he said, looking around for their reactions.

  “I believe it,” Frank said.

  “Until the bank opened,” I said, real bitchy. He got all flustered then, and Lady Margaret made some sort of disapproving sounds, as if she were spitting out pips.

  “Baba has a good heart,” I heard the Monsignor say. “Her only failing is that she inclines to be outspoken.”

  Frank butted in to tell them how good I was to the poor and how I’d given a beggar man tea from one of the good cups. That of course set me thinking about my drummer again. I could just see him dropping the cigarette into the big, vulgar china pot. And the way he had of throwing a match away. He held it between his thumb and middle finger and dismissed it like an arrow. I was miles away most of the time. I thought, One week of him and I’d be bored, but boy, would I do anything for that one week. I’d buy boots the following day and a coat like he said and one of those rain hats.

  “She’s not to give in to fatalism, is she, Baba?” the Monsignor was saying. Eliciting sympathy from me for the Maggsie cow.

  “I don’t know,” said she, the arch phony that she is, “whether to drown myself in my beautiful lake or marry my butler.” She had a lake in Ireland and a butler from Italy, and I’d heard that piece of timed despair before. I was about to say, “Go up the river on a bicycle,” when the telephone rang. Brady, I thought. So I skipped across to one of the occasional tables and picked it up, prepared to say, “Don’t get on a moaning bout.” Sweet Jesus, it was him.

  “Would you like to come down to the Serpentine and have a swim?” he said.

  “Who’s that?” I’d know his low voice in hell.

  “Would you?”

  “Strictly for the ducks,” I said. God Almighty, the whole crew of them had their necks and ears craned. You know the way people pretend to be talking but aren’t really, well, that’s what they were doing. I couldn’t go to one of the four extensions either, because I knew his Lordship would pick it up. I turned my back on them, not that it helped.

  “So you don’t want to come?” he said. Christ, was he touchy!

  “Are you coming over tomorrow?” I said. It was dead difficult to say things that he’d understand and they wouldn’t catch on to. Anyhow, I’m no use at it.

  “It’s doubtful,” he said.

  “Well, when?” I said. I was taking terrible risks.

  “Come to the Serpentine, baby,” he said. I was afraid of my life they’d hear what he was saying.

  “Tomorrow,” I said, and stopped as if I had nothing else to say.

  “Well, don’t forget I asked you,” he said, and we hung up more or less together. I was shaking all over.

  “Who’s that?” Frank said.

  “Just a friend,” I said as cool as a breeze.

  “Who is it?” he said—stubborn again. The brother, that shark with the blood pressure, was giving me the eye, too, as much as to say, “We’re powerful and you can’t lie to us.” The vote, I thought, means nothing to women, we should be armed.

  “My dentist,” said I. “I missed out on an appointment.” I hadn’t even got one in England. I got the brace and things in Ireland.

  Cooney came in with the coffee and looked at me, real interested. She knew it all and recognized his voice, of course.

  “Mrs. Cooney, you’ve been simply marvelous,” I said, to give her a bit of puff. She beamed.

  “A pleas-ure,” she said. We were well matched.

  The thing went on for hours. They got to the Pope and Khrushchev.

  “He’s afraid of his life of the Pope,” the brother said.

  “So well he ought,” said his wife. “His Holiness could wipe him out.”

  “Now, now, now, don’t give our friend the wrong impression,” the Monsignor said. Our friend the merchant was a Protestant and doing very nicely with the brandy and the sister-in-law’s back to explore. He didn’t give two pins about the Pope, but he felt he had to say something.

  “A point I’ve often wanted to raise with you chaps,” he said, “do priests wear trousers under their cassocks?”

  Even in the state I was in, I burst out laughing. Everyone else got very red in the face and nervous, but the Monsignor replied as if he wasn’t shocked at all. You know, nothing-shocks-me sort of thing.

  They covered crime, too, and unmarried mothers and the morals of England. As if the morals of Ireland were any better. About twenty hours went by before their various chauffeurs and taxis came, and they were hardly out of the door before I was up the stairs to bed.

  “I’m worn out,” I said to Frank. I could not have endured intimacy that night. He looked very satisfied. He said he’d made two jokes, and did I notice how everyone laughed? He said the merchant looked as if he would come through. Everything looked rosy, except that I had to get to see m
y drummer, or die.

  Next morning I ripped up there and brought Brady as an alibi.

  “I hope it’s a nice place,” she kept saying. “Congenial.” Everything had to be congenial.

  “I hope we get in,” I said. I knew he’d be a bit huffed about my not going to the Serpentine for an orgy, but I had a few things to cheer him up: some smoked salmon for brek and the biggest pair of boots you ever saw. I looked like a general in them.

  We got through the front door because it was wide open, and we climbed as many flights as I remembered having climbed. There were no names on any of the doors. ‘Twas one of these sleazy dives where people didn’t want their names on doors in case they’d be found out. Hashish, pep-pills pimping, all kinds of contemporary offenses. Brady’s face was a study. I got a look at it on the landing, with the foul light that came through the skylight.

  We got to his door. I recognized the brass mermaid knocker.

  “Smoked salmon?” I said as the door opened back. A woman faced me. An ordinary-looking crow in black.

  “Is Harvey in?” I said.

  “Who?” she said.

  “Harvey,” I said. She was a born evader.

  “Oh, Harvey,” she said, as if I’d been talking in double Dutch.

  “Yes, him,” I said, glaring at her.

  “We’ve come about the flat,” Eejit Brady said, telling our business. She always tells her business to everyone.

  “I own the flat. He was living here,” she said, the smug cow.

  “Oh no,” said Kate, as if that’s what we’d really cared about.

  “Can you give me Harvey’s address? I want to return his piano,” I said.

  “I can’t,” she said. “He didn’t leave a forwarding address.”

  The nomad jag had stuck in my mind. He was gone. We stood there a few more minutes and then shuffled off.

  All that day we tried restaurants and clubs, because I knew he played in some dive. Sharks asked us would we like to audition for striptease, and one told me I had the makings of a lady wrestler. There wasn’t a trace of him. I even rang the boring actor whose mother was on solvents, but he knew nothing. He didn’t even know my name, for God’s sake.

  “Did you know him well?” Brady kept asking. She couldn’t understand why I was so hot and bothered. He’d got my arse in an uproar and left me high and dry. I more or less knew he’d skipped. Like a fool I went to the Serpentine to see if he was there. Useless. The ducks got the smoked salmon, bag and all.

  8

  Kate’s room turned out to be small but adequate. A single bed, a wall cupboard, and a washbasin that lurked behind a green cretonne curtain. The curtain had a smell of dust, as curtains have when they are not laundered for years. From the hot tap cold water came, and from the cold tap hottish water came, and she knew that when she left the place, as she eventually must, it was this detail she would remember—the folly of the reversed taps. In the mornings she cooked her breakfast in the kitchen—the lower shelf of the cupboard being allotted to her foodstuffs—and carried it back to her bedroom to eat it there, saluting the dog or the landlady if she met either, appeasing them both with a smile before vanishing into her cell once again. At nine she went to work. She had taken a part-time job in a cleaners, which meant she earned some money and did not have to take charity from Eugene. To be maintained by a man who did not love her was depraved. Not that he’d offered! She had afternoons free. Sometimes she walked, or saw Baba, and on three afternoons she met Cash. They would go to some park or other and she would ask him questions about what went on at home.

  “Oh, boredness,” he said, a word he’d made up.

  “Like what?” she said, breaking all the rules of decency. He never told, he merely gathered fistfuls of snow to fling at her or, when she ducked and protested, at some uncomplaining tree stump. After a few flings he would grumble about his cold hand, and removing the wet glove, she would warm the hand finger by finger, licking each one back to life again. He liked that. He even seemed happy. But at times, looking into his overwhite face and his overliquid, dark eyes with the mauve shadows (from constipation), she would think that he knew everything that was happening, and everything that would happen in the future. They always went to a café for tea—the same one each time because she knew the prices—and he ate chips, and éclairs filled with mock cream. Sometimes he shed a few tears when they were leaving.

  On one such afternoon after she had delivered him to Maura at a bus stop she found his glove in her pocket, and knowing he had only one pair, she decided to deliver it to the house later that night. When she got there it was about eight, but the curtains were not drawn—one of Eugene’s many liberation schemes. The family—Maura, Cash, and Eugene—were at the dinner table. The double doors separating front and back rooms were also open, so that she could see right through to the place where she once sat, and where the girl now replaced her. There was music from the record player, Russian dance music, which he often played because he said it suggested happy, jingly, Russian people dancing about in the snow. She could see Maura’s face and Cash’s, and two mouths moving, and the back of his still head, and she put her nose to the window to try to catch some word of what they said. Suddenly she noticed a figure to one side of her, in front of the garage door. At first she thought it was real and was about to run, shamefaced. It was a snowman, about the height of Cash, and going to it she saw his size and his features exactly reproduced: the round face with the cheeks that hollowed ever so slightly, the big bullet head, and a little snub of a branch for his nose, as small and neat as his own nose. Eyes had been traced there, too, big eyes: a perfect likeness. Maura must have done it while he was out, as a surprise for when he got back. Kate kept looking at it for a long time, and she could see it perfectly, because the moon was full and the whiteness of gardens and hedges and gate piers gave to this figure an uncanny presence. It might not melt for days. She wanted to pick it up and carry it off, but daren’t.

  The glove was still her reason for coming. She thought of leaving it on the pier, where children’s lost gloves are always left, but since the snow would ruin it, she stuck it through the letter box, but did not let it drop through, in case one of them might hear. Maura had remarkable hearing.

  Then she ran until she was out of breath and had to stand. She had not been back to the neighborhood in weeks. Already it looked strange. The full moon and the dazzle of stars put a spell on the little houses, the powdered street, and the glassy pond where she’d long ago fed the ducks and swans. It was a dance floor now, with branches touching its surface, those laden down by their weight of snow. She stepped on the ice, first one foot, then another. She wanted to walk there, and dance there, forever, with her son or with his image, which had been reproduced by someone else. If only she could do that and lose herself, the way one reads of young girls dancing alone, with roses held between the teeth. But her thoughts kept going back to the three of them, in the warm room, beyond the iced-over window, the snow-child outside, keeping guard.

  In a way it was the worst night of all.

  One thing Eugene had instilled in her was the need to have a walk each day, and walk she did, no matter what the weather. It thawed and refroze all the time. Dikes of gray snow were piled in the gutters and the tires of buses sloshed this swept snow around her booted ankles. She could hear icicles cracking like girders, and women going by grumbling about the shortage of plumbers. She went to a park. Flowers were out—a few, tatty, forlorn crocuses, but they were flowers all the same and they meant something. She sat at her appointed seat and saw him come and knew then why she had come back. He was a young boy who came in the cleaners every Friday with his skin-tight, dirt-tight jeans to avail himself of the two-hour service. He sat next door—in last season’s jeans—in the café, and after the two hours rivved home to change into his renewed, Romeo, silver-gray ones.

  She’d met him the day before in the park and he called out “Gorgeous” after her. Gorgeous—with a body shapeless from
extra clothing, and a face stricken by all that had happened. But she acknowledged it all the same.

  He was with a friend now. They rode their bicycles over the snowy grass, making crazy patterns, looping around, then swerving and repatterning their tracks. And all the time shaking the handlebars at each other as matadors would wave a cape at a bull. Gradually coming closer and closer until they surrounded the bench on which she sat. She was on a bench in the middle of the park, her legs a little apart, her eyes looking beyond them at the square concrete factory with its honeycomb of square windows and a sign beginning with H commanding the horizon. The same H that she saw at night, instead of a moon. Their eyes ran up and down the length of her legs, which were covered with blue wool stockings. She did not look at them observing her, but she knew that they were. A secret flutter took possession of her, as if a bird had come between her legs and flown high up under her coat and thick tweed skirt. He made a sucking noise, the one who’d called her gorgeous. He was pale, with very drained blue eyes and spots that just missed being pimples. He wore a silver chain so tight around his neck that it could choke him. The second boy had Italian blood, and they both had long hair curling on the napes of their necks. She had not looked at them as they circled the bench, but she knew their faces from the cleaners.

  “New type of kissin’ come in,” the pale boy said as he cast his bicycle from him and lay belly downward on the snowy grass, facing her. He had his head raised, his elbows dug into the snow, and he scratched with his thumb at the medal on the chain. His eyes ran up the length of her legs. Could he see the knickers, too? The warm, chaste, winter knickers with long legs, elastic reinforced.

  If she said, “Go away,” he could have said, “Belt up, I pay rates, too,” so she said nothing, only stared straight ahead at the H, which would soon be a moon-bright neon. He called to his friend, “Git, there’s a gorgeous bird that works in a bread shop, a real doughnut.” His friend roared off, saying, “Don’t tempt the girl. Can’t ye see she’s contemplatin’.”