by Edna O'Brien
“It’s like a volcano,” she said, “you and me, it settles down and then it flares up again.”
Whether he thought she was talking gibberish or whether he guessed the implications, he showed no wish to listen.
“You know,” he interrupted, “the first time I began to fall out of love with you—oh, years and years ago—was the day it hit me like a bomb that you never cry for anyone but yourself.”
“Does anyone?” she said. “Show me the man or woman who does,” she said, and thought to remind him that he had chosen her for his own needs, too. His little dictatorship demanded a woman like her—weak, apologetic, agreeable. Self-interest was a common crime.
“Of course. Men have died for other men. Women sweat their youth away.”
What had he done? Talked incessantly about wars, money, injustice, but sat at home stewing in his private pain. And yet he managed to sound superior.
She sobbed, and nodded, and sobbed.
“So that’s all you wanted to see me about?”
“More or less,” she said.
He had to be off, he said.
Urgent business. Snow to shovel away from his front path, tea to make, and his child to rear. It had all become his child. He slipped into the crowd and became one of the many people, apparently going or coming to something important.
A numbness took charge of her brain and she sat somewhere to puzzle things out. She’d missed her chance. It was as if he said he was setting out on a long voyage. How much more comforting if he had just said he was about to die. She knew danger as she had never known it; the danger of being out in the world alone, having lost the girlish appeal that might entice some other man to father her. It wasn’t just age; she was branded in a way that other men would spot a mile away, and though still young, she had not the energy to coax, and woo, and feed, and love, and stroke, and cosset another man, beginning from the very beginning again. Everything was hazy before her eyes—around her, the heavy flights of the pigeons and porters pushing trolleys and the drone of canned music from a loudspeaker. The huge weight of terror that she had been dragging around for years had not lifted on his final exit, but had increased oppressively. Almost to test this weight she stood up to walk, and bumped into two nuns on the way. Nuns, with their serene faces, and their very white hands lost in big black sleeves. A smell of linen and starch, the black smoking wick of a candle that a nun had quenched with her fingers, the suffocating sweetness of a certain kind of lily. For an instant she remembered her life in the convent, and thought how safe, how wooden, how unscathed she was then. It had all been so long ago. She set herself the task of walking twenty times around a bookstall before she faced the certainty of the future. The icy air cut into her and her feet were damp—snow had melted between the crepe sole and the upper suede part—but she did not care about the cold. She was panting, and felt that lunatic itch under her armpits as if hordes of crawling lice nested there. A sure sign of terror, for her.
“Walk, walk, walk,” she said. At some point a man went by, with a little girl who had a doll in her arms. The girl was limping.
“Come on, Emily, just a few more steps. Mummy will be pleased,” she heard the father say. He had the child by the hand, but at arm’s length, as if she were a dog.
“I bet you’ll eat a big tea, I bet.” They went toward the ticket window, and out of some compulsion Kate followed them.
“Will we get a ticket for dolly, too?” the father asked the child.
“Fuck,” Kate said. Suddenly and unplanned, it escaped from her lips and directed itself to his limp, chinless, five-thousand-a-year face. He looked away into the enclosed distance as if he hadn’t heard. But he had heard, because he changed his daughter to the other arm so that she would not be corrupted. Kate slung toward a giant weighing machine, and unthinkingly set about weighing herself.
“Eight stone, seven pounds,” a rich Irish country accent told her. She talked back to him. There was no question of this being a metal voice.
“Where are you from?” she asked. He was probably shy, thinking she was making fun of him, as no doubt many people did. A gray cloth map on the school wall, long forgotten, rose before her eyes, a map with names that were once names and now which had the intrigue of legend—Coleraine, Ballinasloe, and Athy. Places that she’d never visited and never wanted to visit but were part of a fable summoned up by this now familiar voice.
“I bet I know,” she said. Still no answer.
“Ever heard of the Silvermines? I’m from there. I didn’t go home this Christmas, did you?”
She thought that maybe he had goose with soft, oozy potato stuffing, to which sweetbreads had been added. She thought of her father, and wondered why it was that he meant nothing to her at all now. It seemed barbarously unfair that someone could have had such a calamitous effect on her and still not pop up in her mind once or twice a day. Eugene sucked every thought and breath of her waking moments.
“Come on,” she said to the man behind the machine, “I haven’t all day to talk to you.” Although, of course, she had.
She stepped off, took another penny from her purse, and weighed herself again. Again he spoke. He was still there.
“I bet you find Sundays in London lonely,” she said. “I bet you miss not going out in the fields with a couple of hounds and a gun.” A thing Irishmen loved to do.
“Please,” she said softly, “talk.” She tapped the glass, waited, to hear his breath first, then the voice saying, “Hello,” or, “Where do you come from?” the way these voices greeted one in dance halls.
Possibly twenty seconds went by. Then something broke loose inside her and she started to scream and bang the glass that covered the numbered face. She hurled insults at it and poured into it all the thoughts that had been in her brain for months. She lashed out with words and with her fists and heard glass break and people run and say urgent things. She was held down by the shoeshine man until the ambulance came, and she came to, back to reality, that is, in the casualty department of a large hospital. At first she only stared at the bandages on her hands as she heard the soft-soled shoes of nurses walking by on the rubber floor. Then she remembered, first one thing, and then another: how he had come, how he had gone; she threaded their conversation together, then recalled what she had said to the man with the child, then the weighing machine, then her heart beating madly before the outburst of violence. Every detail was crammed into a capsule, so small and tight and contained that she would carry it with her forever.
A nurse asked if she was all right and if they could telephone her husband to come for her. They’d seen her marriage ring. She said no, that he was gone on a voyage, but that she had a friend that would come. They let her telephone from the almoner’s office and a nurse stood over her while she did it. She got through to Baba.
“Cut out the opera-star stuff and get over here,” Baba said when Kate explained the predicament.
“You’re waiting in for me, oh, bless you.” She had to say that, in case she would not be released. More outrage from Baba.
“I’ll be there in half an hour,” she said, and hung up, telling the nurse that her friend was expecting her and everything would be all right. To her there was something disastrous about losing one’s grip on oneself, like a dead woman she’d seen once on the road with her clothes above her knees and one shoe a bog of blood. On her way out, she got a card to come back in a day or two for a checkup. She went into the cold street, panting because her strength had been drained away. It was a narrow escape.
10
Well, curiosity killed the cat and information made her fat. That little salubrious interlude with the drummer had its results. In other words, the months went by and I did not have my regular visitor and could not eat a breakfast. I began to wonder what I could do. When did it remotely resemble a child, because what I had to do ought to be done before that. I was musing over this in my tobacco-toned room, listening to the Swedish bitch banging the vacuum cleaner all over the hou
se, when the telephone rang. As you might expect, I had to sack Cooney the minute I got the wind up. She’d be following me into the bathroom to watch me being sick. I said we were going to Rome for a year. I didn’t care what I said.
It was Brady from some hospital. She’d had a little argument with a weighing machine at Waterloo Station and took this to be the end of the world.
“Get over here,” I said, “there’s a real kicking problem.” And I said it so furiously that she did.
First of all, I had to get rid of the Swedish bitch.
“How about takin’ the afternoon off, hah? Nice shoopping and buoy friend,” I said.
“Goood,” she said, and dropped the Hoover without even turning off the switch. She was off in no time, wearing one of those marvelous-looking Norwegian jerseys that would make any man think she was good-looking. Kate arrived soon after with her face of woe. Guess what she talked about? Them. He didn’t love her. She’d met him. His words were brutal, final, and meaningful. She did love him, but sometimes she didn’t. The break came in a bus, when she was all dressed up in about nine petticoats and raging that they had to bus it. She said to him, “If you sat on the other seat I’d have more room,” and he took this to be significant, and so did she, and that was how the break came.
“Shut up,” I said. I couldn’t take any more of that. Garbage.
“There’s a real live problem facing us, get your thinking cap on,” I told her.
“What?” said she.
“The old, old story,” I said, sort of singing it, to make it less awful.
“Love,” she said. If you say potato famine she’ll say love.
“Preg,” I said, remembering that I’d said it to her before when we were in Dublin and she’d said, “How?” and I’d said, “The usual way,” and she’d said something else, and I’d said it was easier than owning two coats. Well, the conversation repeated itself, verbatim. At least this time we had money and we had drink, and she didn’t know it, but I had a gallon tin of castor oil in the shed, if the worse really came to the worst.
“But children are nice,” she said. “You’re fond of Cash.”
“It helps,” I said, because she may have got a scholarship but in some ways she’s a moron, “if they have a trace of their father’s eyes, ears, nose, feet, or something. Would I be that frantic if it was orthodox?”
It dawned on her. She wanted to know who. What was he like? What was it like? Did I see him often? Was I in love? Should we go and see him? See him! He’d bolted to Greece! I was in two minds whether I should tell her or not that it was all her fault. But the thought of a big ream of apology stopped me. It was action we needed.
You won’t believe it but she asked me was I hoping it would be a boy or a girl.
“Twins,” I said. “Two of each.”
She got all soppy then about irony, telling me a card she’d seen in a For Sale window which said UNWORN MATERNITY DRESS, FINE GRAY CHECK, SEEN ANY TIME.
“Poor creature,” I said. “We’ll go around now and buy it.” I gave her a look that would curl her. Then I armed her with three crisp pound notes and sent her out to buy a medical book so we’d get all the dope. (I’m beginning to talk like my mother.) Anyhow, she came back hours later with a big dictionary that cost five pounds—she had to expend two of her own—and it has to be seen to be believed, this dictionary. It said things like: “Catarrh, disease of the nostrils.”
“Get the preg data,” I said, because she’s brighter than me in educational matters. She began to read about Fallopian tubes and raised her head from the printed page to tell me she knew a woman who had two and having two meant you could have two children by two different men at the same time. I was enjoying this, I really was. I took the book out of her hand and looked up under A for Abortion. They didn’t even consider that word.
“We’ll have to get a doctor,” she said. “Some nice understanding doctor.”
I couldn’t go to the shark down the road that I usually went to, because he’s our family doctor and a Catholic. We got the telephone book and rang specialists. I’d have paid seventy-five quid, for God’s sake. Well, they had it all so fixed that you had to have appointments made before you were pregnant—like booking for that Eton lark when the babies are conceived, before they know whether they’ll be cretins or not—and you had to have a letter from your family doctor. We thought of friends. She knew someone who knew someone that had a friend who was a gynecologist. About ten phone calls ensued and the final one was me talking to this hag who was a lady gynecologist in the Knightsbridge region. She had one of those voices you hear in second-class hotels where people are pretending they don’t know it’s a second-class hotel.
“Fur example,” she said, “aur you bleeding alort?”
“I wish I was,” I said. She got very dodgy then and found that her appointment book was full for an indeterminate time.
“I hope your vowels move tomorrow,” I said, and rang off.
“What now?” said Kate, fatalistic. If I hadn’t been in such a mess I’d have said she was sick and ought to be in bed.
“You ought to know someone,” I said, “with all your connections”; with her Madame Bovary slop, I thought she’d be adequate to it. “Or even a crook who’d do a job on a kitchen table in Bayswater,” I said. She gave off a big spiff. How these crooks live a lurid life and make a fortune by telling about it in the Sunday papers. She said they had little typists living in terror.
“They can go to hell, they won’t get my money,” I said in a fit of sympathy for those goddamn typists, whoever they are.
We went back to the dictionary.
“There’s people all over London, happy at this moment, and people getting on buses, and doing normal things,” she said.
“I’ll swap them this house and all this gear for it,” I said. We were really low. She had a gray coat on that you could sieve vegetables through, and her skin was dry like an old cooked potato. Her eyes, which used to be her good point, were gone back in her head from crying.
“I’ll buy you a coat,” I said.
“Did you marry him for money?” she said. I said I didn’t know.
“Do you hate him?” she said. I didn’t know that, either.
“I don’t hate him, I don’t love him, I put up with him and he puts up with me,” and then I thought of this new disaster and how it would kill his pride, and I got frantic again.
“Baba,” she said, “once you have the child, it will be all right. You’ll both find it is the most important thing in the world to you. A woman needs children. I’d have more myself.”
“Right,” said I, “we’ll go on a world cruise for our nerves and come back and say ‘tis yours.”
Boy, did she change her tune. She wasn’t ready for children, she said. Who is?
I knew then that it was up to me and I’d better do something, so I told her about the bath and castor-oil plot and asked would she stay, in case I got drowned or had a heart attack. I know she’d really like to have run, but she stayed. I’ll say that for her. Not that she was much use. She nearly fainted three times, what with the steam, and the greasy look of the castor oil in the cup, and me sweating and moaning and retching. I had her play “Careless Love” on the record player. She had to go out and put the needle back on that part of the record each time it changed to another song. I thought it was kind of apt.
Suddenly I turned around in my sweating condition and she’s kneeling down with her hands joined.
“Get up,” I said. “Get up, you lunatic.”
“I’m praying,” she said. She hadn’t said a prayer for years, and even I thought it a bit steep that she should be asking help of someone she’d ignored for so long.
“Nothing short of sacrilege,” said I, knowing that would put the wind up her. She was on her feet like lightning, and off to change the needle and put more coal in the boiler. I could hear that boiler roaring up the chimney and I prayed it wouldn’t burst or anything until this ordeal was o
ver. He’d kill us. I had cramps and pains, and I began to shake all over. The whole place looked weird. The mirror was all fogged up, and steam all over the place, so that I couldn’t see my own makeup and stuff on the various glass racks. I’d look at the hot tap running, then all around, then directly down at the water, hoping to see its color change, then back to the tap again and all around, and I don’t know how long I did that.
“Kate, Kate,” I said, holding on to the bath as if I was sinking.
“Kate, Kate,” I yelled and roared, and she came and said I’d better get out.
“Are you out of your mind?” I said. Imagine going through all the pain and sweat and sickness that I’d gone through and then give up in the middle. I was shaking like a leaf and she held me.
“Good old Florence Nightingale, little old lady with the castor oil,” I kept saying, so that she wouldn’t think I’d gone too far and call a doctor or do something criminal.
“Jesus,” I said suddenly, because it was as if I was stabbed in the butt of my back. I began to howl.
“I’ll get brandy,” she said.
“Don’t leave me, don’t leave me,” I said. I was dead certain that if she left me I’d fade out. Anyhow, she let go of my arms and I just lolled there, and next thing I know she’s giving me brandy from a spoon and saying, “I’m going to phone Frank.”
Frank! That revived me. I came to for long enough to say, “If you phone Frank, I’ll take twenty-four sleeping pills right now.” She gave me more brandy and turned off the hot tap. I knew as she was turning it off that my chances were over, but I hadn’t the energy to resist. The steam, the heat, the castor oil, and then the drink had made me feel like straw. She swears that when I passed out a few seconds later I was a hefty weight to haul out of the bath.
I came to in my own bed with two dressing gowns on me. The first thing I did was to see if anything had resulted, because I’d had a feverish dream that I was in a train and it came, and I couldn’t get off the seat, and porters were standing over me yelling at me to get up. Only in the dream had it come.