by Edna O'Brien
Kate crossed her legs and locked them at the ankles, like a lady sitting down to tea in a convent parlor where she’d once sat with abstemious nuns sitting around her, watching. He screwed up his face, frowned with his red-rimmed eyes, and rolled his half-nourished, humble little body over and over again on the dirty snow. His jeans would need longer in the vat next Friday. She felt shame because she knew she had yielded to him for an instant the week before. That was when she unfolded his trousers and asked if he wanted it “express” with something more than behind-the-counter pleasantness. A madness had passed through her limbs and shone in her eye. But now the bird between her legs died. Quicker in fact than it had taken for the blob of snow that was on her upturned collar to melt. It was trickling down her neck now, worrying her. She thought, I could easily put my hand out and let him draw me down and give him something that would briefly atone for the condemned room where he was born and the stupid parents he came out of and the accent he is doomed to. She glanced with mild pity to say this without actually saying it.
“Fabulous out of doors,” he said.
“It’s cold,” she said stiffly, being careful to misunderstand him.
“Git your knees apart, mine aren’t half warm.”
“How dare you,” she said, the voice of a lady brigadier, a gym mistress, a hospital matron, the voice of authority pealing down through the centuries. Where had she got it from? Her legs and knees trembled, and she stood up and raced across the field with her heart falling out of her mouth.
“How about puttin’ the matter to your solicitor,” he called after her, and then his friend shot back from nowhere and she heard the pale boy say, “Them dirty married bags,” and the epithet cut and carried across the desolate field. She hurried to the ladies’ lavatory that was behind some soot-black arbor trees shrill at that moment with starlings. Inside, the Dettol smell, the unwiped lavatory seat, the roller without a towel, and the attendant without a smell sense depressed her, not for their own sake, but because of her transgression. A week before she had led him on. As she unfolded his dirty, silver-gray jeans, she had some notion of having a vague and magic encounter, of being taken by him, and then left satiated as he tore away. Not knowing his first name or what occupation his dirt-engrained hands were put to. Not knowing anything. A voice from outside called “Paul” roughly, and with anger. “Paul, Paul.”
“Somebody’s calling Paul,” the attendant said.
The following Friday Kate stayed away sick.
After that she went for walks only in the evening when the fog was coming down. She did not have to look people in the eye, and the river was at its best under gauze, with green lights denoting the passing of some boat. To reach the park that skirted the river, she had to pass a street of houses. Fine houses set back from the road, with ivy, with studio windows, and one with an inked sign saying BEWARE, VERY SLIPPERY PATH. Solid fortifications with beware people inside leading solid lives. Powerful smells of roast and gravy came out to trouble her. She had had mutton or beef stew, depending on the day. One-gas-ring, one-saucepan dinner! Funny that she should remember meals they had eaten more clearly than she remembered anything else. Especially ceremonial ones, like the hen pheasant that had got caught by mistake in a rabbit trap. They roasted it, and he’d stuck one of the russet feathers through her auburn hair and joked about not having to buy her a present. It was near her birthday. How could they renounce all of that? She hurried home, sat on her bed, resting the writing pad on her knee, and wrote:
My dear Eugene,
I don’t know if it will make reparation but I want to say that the affair I had was foolish and trite. When I recall his letters now—the ones you have—I feel nothing but shame. Of course I did you wrong, but I did myself wrong, too. I have a screw loose, that screw which should let me know when I am on solid ground and stop me wading into a swamp. I do not know why I do bad things.
She signed it “Little Kate.” A harking back to the early days.
She said nothing about the years of emotional pummeling from him, or her own compulsion to love on an octave note from one daybreak to the next. She posted it but did not expect an answer, and when she got one two mornings later she trembled as she opened the brown business envelope and unfolded the sheet of foolscap. He had written:
Dear Kate,
What I have to do now is forget about little Kate (what a misnomer) and get on with those parts of my life which I have so foolishly neglected because of her.
His investment in her had been too much. She would never be free of the responsibility for the waste of his life. She read it twice and let it go into the Thames, where she was standing once again. Another evening. The tidemarks lost in the gloom. Too late. She knew the letter by heart, like a prayer. If only she had the decency to kill herself. Water was the gentlest way to suicide. It merely meant stepping off the path onto another path that was equally blurred by mist. As her mind dwelt on it, her body ran from that place and walked through the High Street, peering into the jocularity of pubs, looking at clothes she had no desire to own, at plastic chickens motionless on skewers and printed signs to testify that lambs’ tongues were cheaper by four-pence. Ugly streets, ugly signs. She walked for a long time with the bouquet of frying oil in her nostrils, crossing over and back, comparing the prices in one window with those in another, longing to crash through one of those windows, as she had once seen a boy do on a drunken Saturday night. But the police would come and take her away in a big black van and things would be no better.
That night—or perhaps it was another night because all those nights were interchangeable—she had a dream: Cash was asleep, no bigger than a baby, in a cot, with a nappie bagging down around his knees. She went to Maura and asked her to kill the child by burning him with an iron. Maura did. Cash died quietly, without a whimper. It had obviously been painless. She saw a little blood on the nappie, but that image had been borrowed from real life when he was circumcised as an infant and carried back to her from the operating theater. There had been a little rosette of blood on the nappie, and she wept because he had known pain in his unknowing, unsuspecting milk-happy euphoria. She did not waken then, screaming, as she would have expected to. The dream went on. She lived through months, years, running out of restaurants, furniture shops, hairdressers, sick with pain because she had killed the only person she was capable of loving. She eventually would have to go to Eugene and say, “I killed our child. It wasn’t an accident, I killed him.” She woke then, and having no thought for time or sleep, she went out to the telephone on the landing and dialed Eugene’s number.
“How is Cash?” she asked.
“Are you drunk?” he asked, his voice wide awake. Was he in bed? On which side? Did he ever waken and think she was still lying next to him, pink and warm in her fleece-lined nightgown?
“Is he all right?” she asked again.
“He’s asleep. He had some hot milk about two hours ago.”
“I had a terrible dream about him,” she said.
“Must be indigestion, take two aspirins.” She did not put the phone back on the receiver, she just pushed it away from her and laid it on the ledge, where it went on emitting sounds until he realized he was talking to nothing and hung up.
Next day she said “Shit” to a bus conductor who refused her change of a pound. She knew everything that was happening but could not help herself.
Then Cash lost a front tooth. He seemed so empty, so stripped without it that when she met him she asked where his prettiness had gone. He said the tooth fell out and they had put it in an egg cup and he got sixpence. She could see the sixpence shining silver in the water and Cash putting in his finger to prize it out.
“I want Cash’s tooth,” she said to his father a few hours later when he was picking up the child at the railway station. So much of her life centered on that platform that she knew all the advertisements by heart and the telephone numbers of places to ring if one needed God or tranquillity or lessons in ballroom dan
cing. She was familiar with the various obscene messages and pencil changes done to the posters. A girl displaying a man’s outsize shirt had been given a mustache, and a lipstick queen had had one eye cut away.
“The tooth is perfectly safe,” Eugene said. “I’ve put it away for him when he grows up.”
“I want it,” she said.
“Now don’t get all emotional, it’s safe.”
“I must have it,” she said. It was not the tooth at all.
She got it eventually and put it in her purse, but lost it. She must have handed it between the folds of a pound note in some transaction or other. She asked in two shops but without luck. She never forgave herself.
“I lost your little hollow tooth, I’m sorry,” she said to Cash when they met again. Cash didn’t care. She was gloomy and squeezed him too tight and asked who he loved the most. Not like Maura. Maura played fox-and-goose and smelled like a mother and had hair between her legs, just like a mother, too. He saw her through the keyhole. She nearly split her sides laughing. Maura laughed a lot and his mother cried a lot. He’d have another loose tooth soon and get another sixpence. He tried to shift one with his finger but it would not wobble. He loved that wobble feel until it got looser and looser and was held on by one thread of gum.
“What are you doing, Cash?” his mother asked. He always had a finger in his mouth.
“Nothing,” he said.
Did Maura or his father ever talk about her?
“I forget,” he said.
“Try and remember.”
“Dada said you’re jealous of other people’s belly buttons.”
“What?”
He repeated it. She tried to get him to remember when, and where, and how. But he could not or would not trace it for her. He made a face and said, “Big fat sausage,” so that she would chase him and tickle him the way she used to. He ran around the playground, but she remained on the wooden seat, staring at, but not seeing, the motionless swings, the squat, un-horse-like wooden horse, and the sandpit covered over with snow.
“Mama,” he called. She did not rise. Other mothers had arrived, so she could not question him. And she did not hop about on the chalked squares to warm her feet either, because of formality. The mothers were supposed to sit and watch the children play. Once, when she’d got on the swings, the attendant came over and asked her was she over sixteen, and if so, to please get off.
“I got locked in this park one night,” a mother was saying.
“No!” from another.
“I did, I climbed over that gate.”
They were enclosed by high wire netting and by a wired gate. How had that ungainly woman mounted the gate? What breathing and puffing must have gone on. Did she disturb the leaves? Some falling leaves had never reached the ground but had got caught in the wire and were fixed there now, like decoration. Not in clusters but separate. They reminded one of something. Spring and childbirth? Autumn and rotting? So he discussed her faults. It was not enough to kill her, he had to show the sad spectacle of her corpse to others.
“I got across to the main gate,” the woman was saying, “and I called a couple going by. ‘I’m locked in,’ says I, and they wouldn’t believe me. They thought I was Candid Camera. ‘Don’t you heed her,’ his girl said to him. ‘You’ll find there’s a camera behind the bushes and you’ll see yourself on television next week, being ridiculous.’ “
“Wicked,” her listless listener said.
“Mama.” It was Cash again. He was walking through the maze, nodding to the wooden posts as if they were people. She went over to him.
“Did you know that some people believe the earth is flat?”
“I suppose they do.” She felt bad-tempered, because she couldn’t probe about what his father said.
“Yes, they belong to the earth-is-flat club. Can I have a club?” “Do.”
“A what club?”
“Ask them.” She was staring at two children, one white and one colored, who were enacting the birth of a baby on the slide. The colored girl stood at the bottom and pushed a life-size doll up the slide, and the little mother at the top slid down with the doll between her parted legs, and the midwife took it from her. They had done it five times.
Cash went over, stood near, and the pause typical of children took place, while they vetted each other, and then spoke. The colored child left with Cash when the closing-time bell pealed out. Her name was Tessa.
“I have a radio of my own,” Tessa was telling him. “My good mum gave it to me.”
“Your what?” Kate called. Cash and Tessa were a bit ahead, linking.
“My good mum,” she said. “My real mum was a rotter.”
“Where is she?” Kate said, catching up with them.
“Oh, somewhere. She’s a ballerina.”
“And your father?”
“He comes from dark parts, as you can imagine.” Tessa had a shining dark face, and curly hair, and sharp, no-fool eyes.
“A rotter, too,” Tessa said. “He asked me to go to America and I said to give me time to think about it.”
“Are you going to America, Tessa?” Cash said, worried.
“No, I wrote him a letter. I said, ‘Dear Father, I cannot go to America with you as I have a very bad cold.’ “
Without thinking, Kate reached out and embraced the strange child, not so much to comfort as to congratulate her.
“Can we have tea?” Cash said, taking advantage of his mother’s gust of affection.
They crossed the road to a cafe.
“Just tea and one cake each, no chips,” Kate said, in case they blackmailed her once they got inside. At the street corner there was a brazier alight, the red cones of anthracite beautifully glowing, and a whiff of heat shedding from it. A man sat by it, half in and half out of a hut. Cash and Tessa stood up, waited for the man to object, and when he didn’t, they then threw the wrapping from the chocolate she’d given them into the fire. The silver ash from the paper lay on top of the glowing red nuts, and they looked on enthralled, their two faces rosy from the light, their gloved hands splayed out before it.
“I have another mum, too,” Cash said, imitating Tessa’s voice exactly. “She lives in my house with my father.”
Kate drew back from the fire, stabbed by what she had heard.
9
Two days later Kate came to meet Eugene at the railway station. It was convenient for him and anywhere suited her. She arrived early and sat in the midst of the chaos, with pigeons tottering around her feet, and people on all sides apparently going or coming to something important. The trains whistled without cease. She went over what she must say to him: that he sack Maura, take Kate herself back, and move them into the country to a small white house with a vegetable garden and grazing for two cows. She would grow good, and protective, and cling to him, like the ivy he’d once planted on the gable wall of one of the many houses he’d owned. This figmented house she saw as being in a valley with one huge tree shielding it, so that the leaves got into the gutters, the way they always did. It would be their last home, their stronghold, their coffin. Her mind was made up. It was what she must do.
To ward off the cold and pass the time, she got a carton of soup from a machine. After the first sip she looked around for someone to complain to. It couldn’t be her imagination, the green soup was washing-up water. Pea plates had been washed in it. She had another sip when it got cool and this verified her suspicions. The dumb blue machine witnessed her protest as she held the carton upside down so that the soup made an uneventful stream across the tarmac. It eventually settled behind the basket containing orange peel. A man had gone by with a skewer and taken up every piece of orange peel in the place. Toffee papers and cigarette cartons were not impounded, just orange peel. Must be some reason for that. Marmalade? An old, gray, stooped man with his head held down came and cursed her for having thrown the soup away. He had his eyes screwed to the ground for fags and threepenny bits. She apologized, wanted to hand him sixpence, but
feared that he might curse her more.
“Oh, there you are,” she said, turning. Eugene had stolen up on her. She told him about the washing-up water, intending him to laugh, which he didn’t. He had leather gloves on and two wool scarves—one around his neck and the other covering the lower part of his face. He kept flapping his hands back and forth under his armpits.
“Are you perished?” she said. She herself was purposely clad in a dark-brown, hairy coat which she’d purchased at a sale. Its dull institutional look might appeal to his conscience.
“It’s eight degrees below freezing,” he said. Facts. Facts. Any minute now he’d tell her the strontium content of sherbet. England was screaming with facts and statistics, and not one person to supervise soup machines. She moved nearer. He shifted away.
“Well, you wanted to see me?” he said.
“I did.” How to put it, and imply that she was doing it for him as well as for herself? She tried balancing the sentence and out of the corner of her eye saw more orange skin being cast away and at once being lunged at by the skewer.
“It’s about Maura,” she said at last.
“Yes,” he said. He had that calculatedly serene voice which was observing itself say yes calmly, and with understanding.
“I think she’s a bad influence on Cash.”
“Oh, and how do you reach that conclusion?”
“His loyalties are at stake. He doesn’t know who to love.”
“His loyalties are only at stake if someone questions them.”
“I never question him,” she said in a self-committing burst. “I never ask if you chat to her, or take her into your study at night. He just tells me.”
“God help us,” he said overpiously to the roof of sooted glass panels that were backed by steel netting. Her eyes filled with tears. He avoided looking at her. No longer the fixed stare of reproach. He had renounced her in his mind, and through his body. She had always thought that people who had once loved one another kept the faintest trace of it in their being, but not him. He was free of her. Marked of course, but free in a way that she was not. She was still joined by fear, by sexual necessity, by what she knew as love. She tried again.