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

by Edna O'Brien

  “Hullo, little old lady with the castor oil,” I said to her, sitting there. “T.D.L.,” I said, because I was damned if I was going to get all morbid again. No man was worth it.

  “Total dead loss,” she repeated after me. She was more grave than me.

  “We’ll get our minks on and hitchhike to the Olympic Games,” I said. “I’ll enter for the egg-and-spoon race.”

  She didn’t laugh. It was about four o’clock on a lousy afternoon in March, but at least the house was warm because of the way we got the boiler whizzing.

  “The gardener came,” she said. I could hear him shoveling the snow away. All he could do that winter was shovel snow away so that we could get our Jags in and out, and get up the front steps, drunk, without falling. Not that I’d have minded a fall at that time. It was gray and awful-looking, and I got her to put on the light and draw our sun-drenched blinds.

  “Well, it’s now for some crook,” I said, and pitied those typists again. I was sorry for everyone and no one, the way you are when you’re in a mess.

  “You can’t,” she said.

  “I go to crooks to have my hair washed,” I said. “Where’s the difference?”

  “The difference is that one is just frivolous, and the other is violence.”

  Well, Christ, I roared out laughing. I mean, think of being in the state I was, and someone going on like that. Then she launched into a sermon. A whole lot of high-falutin’ speech about how I was trying to destroy myself, murder part of myself. A parable, just the way it was in the Gospels. They’d all eat fish and then sit around and hear a story.

  Hers was about some woman who was having a baby by a man who loved her, and she didn’t want the baby. So she got rid of it. The man stopped loving her, and she fell madly in love with him and went around with a terrible loss in her, because she’d killed two good things.

  “But it’s not Frank’s,” I said. As if she didn’t know.

  “But the point is,” she said, “that you don’t know beforehand what damage you do to yourself by your actions. You only know afterward.”

  Well, I couldn’t dispute that. I proved it every ten minutes of every day.

  “You know her, too,” she said.

  “What is she like?” said I. There was something about that story that gripped me. I knew I’d be looking out for that woman at the hairdressers.

  “We’re going to tell Frank,” she said, “when he comes in this evening.”

  “No.” I didn’t want to tell her the bit about him getting berserk when he got angry. If we told him, there wouldn’t be a stick of stuff left in the house, and nothing of me, only bones.

  “He’ll wreck the joint,” I said.

  “We’ll go to his office,” she said. “He can’t wreck anything there.”

  “No,” I said.

  “Look,” she said. She was off again. Another sermon.

  The upshot is, I’m dressing myself. She’s telling me to put on white makeup and no lipstick and to look wretched. It is not difficult. She’d got me into such a state of righteousness that I was ready to be a suffragette for ten minutes. She said we wouldn’t take a car, no, we’d go in all humbleness by bus or Tube. It was miles away in North London. I can tell you, I was pretty wobbly from what was behind me, and from what lay ahead. We damped the boiler, put on our coats, and set out.

  Down in the Underground there was a gas advertisement. It said DO NOTHING UNTIL YOU’VE READ VOGUE. Well, in our plight, and with people starving, and having pyorrhea and all sorts of things, I thought it was very vital advice.

  “We must come down in the Tube oftener,” I said.

  “I come every day,” she said, making me feel like a rat.

  Then a great big enormous pregnant woman appeared from some archway, and that was enough to make me run for the exit stairs.

  “Come back, come back,” Kate said, catching me by the belt of my camel coat. That minute a Tube tore into the station and she linked me into a No Smoking compartment. We changed into the next compartment at the next station and had a fag each.

  “We’ll have a few gins along the way,” I said. Even she was beginning to lose her fervor.

  We got there around four. That was the first time I’d ever been near any of the building sites. They were putting up new blocks of offices on a bomb site, and the ground was snow and yellowish muck. There was an arrow underneath a home-done sign that said INQUIRIES AT OFFICE, and we went in that direction; men booed and whistled at us. Such commotion, such noise: hammers clattering and hammering, a great bloody bulldozer churning up more yellow earth, a drill whining and men on the scaffolds yelling in Cockney at Irishmen underneath who couldn’t understand a word they were saying. A din. I prayed that the brother wouldn’t be with Frank.

  “Don’t apologize,” said Kate, knowing that it was her own worst trait.

  “I might funk it in the very middle,” I said.

  We found him alone in a small, fuggy, little corrugated-iron office with plans and papers laid out all over the table in front of him. He was on the phone.

  “Christ,” he said when we came in without knocking.

  “No, no, Lady Constantine,” he said into the phone, “it’s just that somebody’s capsized a bottle of ink over my notes …”

  It was about a cesspool that he was going to install in her country cottage. We got bits of the conversation. While she was talking he put his hand over the mouthpiece and said like a savage to Kate, “I hope we haven’t to get you out of another mess.”

  I was kind of glad that I was going to shatter him.

  “Yes, it has its own waste-disposal system,” he was telling Lady Con, and I knew it was about this cedar-shingled place he’d put up for her in the country. She started on about the roof then. The slates must have been cracking and spalling all over the place. He got red in the face and raised his voice.

  “The roof!” he said. “That roof was perfect.”

  Next thing he was apologizing for his language and saying, “I’ll come down there myself.”

  God help the roof, I thought. He could do a good thousand pounds’ worth of damage in five minutes.

  “At no cost to you,” he said. Then he told her not to worry, and that his bark was worse than his bite. Finally, and after a typical jarvey-driver’s farewell, he put the telephone down. Kate stood on my toe just to give me a bit of courage. He didn’t look at us for a minute; he wrote some big important nothing into his desk diary and sat there frowning at what he’d written. I could not believe that he was my husband and that I sometimes slept near him and had seen him sick and drunk and in all sorts of conditions. He was another man in that outfit.

  “We haven’t come about me,” said Kate, quite indignant. “We’ve come to tell you something.”

  “You’d better make it snappy,” he said, “the men knock off at five and we have our conference.” He called the men together every evening, and the big, brutal foreman of a brother told who was slacking during the day. Just like the countries we read about where it’s supposed to be coercive.

  “You tell him.” Kate turned to me.

  “You begin it,” I said.

  “It’s yours, Baba,” she said, very stern. In the end I had to.

  “I’m going to have a baby,” I said. He grinned, a terrible pathetic grin. It was like telling someone his mother was dead, and you beginning the sentence and he getting it all wrong and thinking his mother had won money. For a minute he thought it was his and that he’d proved himself. He stood up to kiss me, but I put my hand out straightaway. He went like a block of wood; he stayed quite motionless in that position, which is halfway between sitting and standing, and he didn’t utter a word. The telephone rang.

  “Will I answer it?” I said. He picked it up and threw it, and I ducked, knowing the throwing craze was on. He got more fluent than he’d ever been in his whole life.

  “You cow,” he said. “There’s a way to deal with you and whores like you. I’ll kick the arse off
you when I get you home.”

  “I’ll take a boat for somewhere,” I said.

  “You’ll do no such thing. You’ll bloody well stay where you are and do what you’re told.”

  “Did you think I was going to live frustrated?” I said, just the posh way Kate would say it. I could see he didn’t understand that word. There’s lots of words like “frustrate” and “masturbate” that he doesn’t understand.

  “It’s not very much for a woman living the way we live,” I said. “All that huntin’ and shootin’ and fishin’ lark is all very well in company,” I said. He began to close his fist and turn his bottom lip outward, the way he does when he’s furious. All this thing about women and new freedom. There isn’t a man alive wouldn’t kill any woman the minute she draws attention to his defects.

  “Watch your language,” he said. Boy, it was hot in that room with a double-bar electric heater going full blast!

  “I can leave you,” I said. “I don’t care about a scandal.”

  He knew of course that it would cause a setback between him and the bishops, and be bad for his work, too, because a lot of the big contracts he got were from Catholic firms.

  “I’ll tell you what to do,” he said.

  I could hear heavy footsteps outside crushing their way along the cinder path and I knew that help was arriving. It was the brother to say the meeting was due in a couple of minutes.

  “Tell your brother,” I said. “He’s a great one in a crisis.”

  The brother killed someone in Ireland once and drove on but was found. They would have jailed him except that he bought his way out.

  “Get out,” he said, knowing damn well what I meant.

  “When I get home there won’t be much of you left,” he said.

  “I won’t be there,” I said, and wrote the telephone number of Kate’s dump on a piece of paper, so that he could ring me if he wanted to.

  “What’s up?” the brother asked. He has a murderously red face and curly hair.

  “The stork,” I said as brazen as hell. My knees may have been wobbling under me, but I kept a good front up.

  We muddled our way through the muck and got onto the road.

  “The eyes of workmen are permanently screwed up; they have to keep them like that in case mortar flies into them,” she said. I thought it a boring piece of data, but it got us out of there to the dark street, to bus queues of people.

  “Oh no,” she said, suddenly defeated. Lucky I had money and could get a taxi to her dump.

  “I’ll be shacking up with you,” I said. “You needn’t be lonely anymore.”

  She looked worried. She’s all unnatural about babies and birth.

  He rang me about ten. He’d cooled off considerably. He said, “I’ve decided to let you stay on as my wife—in theory only, of course.” Nothing new about that.

  “That’s great,” I said. I suppose he expected a great slob scene from me about how generous and charitable he was. Not me. I know the minute you apologize to people they kill you. Then he wanted to know whose it was so that he could go around and kill him.

  “He’s a Greek,” said I, “and he’s gone home.”

  It was the only thing I could think of. Kate had her head out the bedroom door. She was as inquisitive as hell.

  “Will it be white?” said he. The eejit doesn’t know Greeks from blacks.

  “It might,” said I, “if we’re lucky.” He said he wanted no more cheek from now on and I had to do what I was told and nobody was ever to know the truth.

  “Does Brady know?” he said.

  “Of course,” I said.

  “Keep her away from the house. Pay her to keep her bloody mouth shut,” he said. He hated her then.

  “And go to confession,” he said. He then told me he was having a much-deserved holiday to get over the shock, and if anything urgent in the business line arose I was to telephone the secretary.

  “Have a nice time,” I said, and dashed in to Brady to tell her she could live in elegance with me for a week until he got back.

  ‘It’s an ill wind,” I said, and she finished the sentence, “that doesn’t blow good for someone.”

  We laughed. A thing we hadn’t done for ages.

  I was in the bathroom trying to change things around—since our misadventure the very sight of it depressed me—when lo, Durack appeared. It shook me. He hadn’t shaved for the three days since I last saw him, and he smelled of booze.

  “You’re still here, arsing about,” he said.

  “Where ought I be, in the Magdalene laundry?” I said, whistling like a man.

  “That’ll do now,” he said. He stood in the doorway, he was nearly the width of it. He took a bit of a blond lady’s hair out of his pocket; it was in the shape of a ringlet.

  “Recommend her to your gentleman friend,” he said. “Wonder worker.”

  “You recommend her,” I said, “you’re the authority.” I reckoned he was telling me he’d been to some brothel and got a testimonial, and I was mighty glad.

  “I find I like it,” he said, “vicarious living.” Well, that was a new word for certain.

  “Insertion at various angles,” and he looked at me, quite drunk. “You get my drift?” he said.

  “It’s made a new man of you,” I said. I suppose he thought I ought to show jealousy or temper; I showed nothing. I was quaking.

  Then he began to curse and swear in a blackguardly way. Such a volley of language. Unparliamentary. Words we never parsed at school. Then something checked the words on his tongue, as if there were another him inside the blackguardly part, and he started to cry, and I said for God’s sake to hit me, assault me, kill me, do whatever he had to do, but to get it over. I took a step forward. He looked at me, big child’s tears on his face.

  “Isn’t it a fact that I gave you everything you want?”

  “It’s common knowledge,” I said. That worked terrific. Instantaneous. Remorse. He began to cry harder, but it was collapse and not temper that invoked the tears.

  “Baba, why did you do it to me?” he said. Useless to say that I hadn’t thought of him when I was doing it. Useless to say that I always thought your acquaintanceship with one person had nothing to do with another. Or to say all the things that went on in my head, the longings, for songs, cigarettes, dark bars, telegrams, cacti, combs in your hair, the circus, nights out, life. He wouldn’t understand.

  “I was drunk.” How could he but forgive that condition?

  “It was in Hyde Park,” I said. A man’s home is his castle.

  The way I said it, he could see it was no great event, and a bit of spunk came back into his voice.

  “Like dogs,” he said. I thought, Not even like dogs, but I sang dumb. I thought how I had this daft notion that men could make you feel it all over, and make you half faint at the same time, and it was a mystery to me where I picked it up from.

  We heard Brady let herself in and heard Cash call our two names, and I for one was glad of their arrival. She brought the kid for high tea and I told him this.

  “She’ll blather about it,” he said.

  “She’s demented, she’ll tell no one,” I said. He was glad of that.

  Then he came right in and closed the door and began to talk in whispers. He said he’d give me a second chance, but on conditions. Never, never was I to do it again or he’d slay me alive.

  “I’ll satisfy you,” he said. Ah, the land of promise. It was quite a pathetic thing to hear him say, his eyes down. I reckoned he was feeling pretty terrible. Then he caught hold of my hand and said we were never to bring it up again. We were to keep it a dark secret. Poor devil, he told no one, not even the brother. So the big biblical bond between them was all my-eye. They were allies in nothing, only making money. When it came down to fundamentals, he had no one. All by himself and that brothel he went to. There was just us, him and me. Allies, conspirators, liars together. I took the line of least resistance. In the eyes of the world it would be his and mine. I sa
id okay. What else was there to do? Among other things, I didn’t relish going out into the world to sell buns or be a shorthand typist. It would have his name.

  “Give me your word,” he said. I blessed myself. The visible signs of the cross. Salvage began. We shook hands and went out. Not very lighthearted of course, but then how could it be otherwise?

  Our family doctor arranged for me to go and see a gynecologist, and I went one boring afternoon when lots of other people were sitting down to tea and shop buns. The nurse that let me in had very thick glasses and her eyes were teary behind them. Not that it mattered. I wasn’t feeling very sympathetic. He asked me how long I’d been married and were we delighted to start a family? I had to say yes, of course. They were all Catholics. He asked me how I felt, and I told the bit about cooking Brussels sprouts in the middle of the night, and having bile in the mornings. He asked me a ream of questions about whether I’d had miscarriages, tummy aches, and other morbid ailments. I’m the kind that gets these complaints if someone reminds me of them. He wrote it all down, dead serious. God only knows how many lies I told.

  Then he sent me to another room and told me to pass water. I didn’t know whether I’d be able to pass water or not—it isn’t a thing you can do to order. I went up there anyhow and had a look around. There was a lavatory and a washbasin with a pair of yellow rubber gloves on the side of the basin. They were sprinkled with a talcum powder that smelled of babies. I’d forgotten that smell. There was a picture that was supposed to be a joke. It was a crazy drawing and the caption said that before you have a baby you ought to measure the size of your husband’s head. As I heard him coming up the stairs I mounted the black leather couch, which had stirrups at the side. I knew that they were to put my heels into for the examining bit and I was hoping to God that I wouldn’t make a fool of myself.

  He came in real casual. He asked if I backed horses. He began a long rigmarole about how he’d nearly brought off a tote double. All this time he was easing the rubber glove onto his hand and then smoothing it out so that there was not a crinkle in any of the fingers. He told me to grip my heels in the stirrups and I never felt so helpless or so obscene in my whole life. Just prostrate and facing a window as well.