by Edna O'Brien
“Can we have bunk beds?” Cash said. He was hitting the walls and floors with the new wooden spoons, making bangs.
“Bunk beds!” she said. She was making up the secondhand bed in the front room where they would sleep together that night. She put the hot water bottles in, and lit the paraffin heater. It was brand-new, its wick white and unblemished.
“Now, what do you vote we have for tea?” she asked. It was essential to keep busy, and to keep him busy, because of the awful emptiness. Rashers and beans on toast. They ate off their laps, in the front room, close to the heater. Cash liked it better than a table because when the beans skeetered off his plate he could reach down and pick them up.
“You’ll be able to bring some of your toys here and leave them here,” she said, wanting him to settle in.
“Can I have new rockets?” he said. “And when will we have a telly?” She thought how pathetic that she should have to win him back with goods.
The evening stretched on interminably. It was still only six o’clock and they had finished tea, washed up, put the chemical in the sink, and gone around the house, laying a candle in a saucer in each room, with matches beside the saucer, in case they needed to go into any of these rooms urgently in the middle of the night. She’d brought one red candle as a celebration and put it in a scooped-out turnip on the mantelpiece. She was telling him about Christmas when she was a child, and how they’d always had a candle in a turnip on the windowsill in case Christ went by. He’d never seen the place where she was born. He knew nothing of the weeping, cut-stone house where all her troubles began. And he had no interest in the boring story about being afraid if her mother went upstairs to make the beds, and eventually having to follow her mother up. He wanted to draw. There were no pencils or papers. They searched the two wall cupboards and found only damp, and one shriveled football boot.
“Draw on the window,” Kate said. “Be resourceful.” It was thick with grime outside and dust inside. A yellow streetlight had just come on and cast light on the two dirty, encrusted windowpanes. Later in the evening, before they got into bed, she would have to hang a sheet or something, because the street gaped in at them. Later still, she would have to buy material, and measure the windows and make curtains, and hang them up and draw them in the evenings to shut out the gaping street. There would be the noise of curtain rings running back along the rods, and the fire flames leaping on the wall and people sitting down to eat. What people?
She looked across to see if he had done a house, or a pussy cat, and when she saw the enormous HELP daubed across the sooty pane, she put her hand to her mouth and gasped. It was when she ran to console him that he must have become aware of something catastrophic happening to him, because suddenly he began to cry in a way that she had never seen him cry.
“I want Dada,” he said.
“We’ll get him,” she said.
“Now,” he said.
“What’s the matter?” she said. “Why are you crying?”
He wanted paper, pencils, television, toys, warmth, bunk beds, things he knew.
“Look,” she said, sitting him on the bed and pushing back his fringe so that his very creamy forehead showed. She kissed its cool creamy texture and told him how forgetful she was not to have all these things, and promised she would have them the next day. He did not like the candlelight either. “It might turn into something else,” he said. It was fitful and it threatened to go out when the wind blew down the chimney. She pressed him in her arms, to give him shelter, and to revive the solidity that had gone out of their lives.
“I want Dada,” he said, sobbing in her embrace. He smelled of cool basins of cream in a pantry at night. When she had first carried him, his feet pressed against her stomach, and later on he bit her nipple with impatience, but at no time had she felt so close to him as now.
“I’ll take you home,” she said, rising. The tears which seemed to have been overflowing from him vanished as if he’d put them back in his eyes, as into a reservoir.
In the taxi he kept looking out of the window, commenting on the darkness. He could not face her, he felt too contrite.
“I’ll come back if you want me to,” he said, and when she did not answer he said, “Mama,” but very softly, and very tentatively, as if he feared he had failed her.
“You’ll come back,” she said, “when the electricity is in and things are cheerful.” He had reminded her more than she’d ever known of the terror of being young, of that fearful state when one knows that the strange, creepy things in the hallway are waiting to get one.
“I thought he wouldn’t care for it,” his father said, jubilant, as he met them at the door. Maura waited somewhere behind, and Cash went in the house calling her name.
Late that night it rained. The first, harsh, swift drops rushed through the garden tree and down the outside of the window, inside which she’d hung the patched sheet. It was one she had pinched from Eugene’s cupboard one day when collecting Cash. But Maura saw her do it, so she didn’t have a chance to take any more. Maura didn’t like her. She knew from what Cash said. They had been passing a linen shop and Cash saw pillowcases for elevenpence.
“We’ll get some for Mother,” he had said.
“No, we won’t, we’ll get them for Father,” Maura had said. It told everything.
The sudden sound of rain startled her. She’d been sitting for hours listening to sounds, and up to then she’d heard footsteps outside, passing along, and voices passing along with them, the flurry of soot falling, and the letterbox flapping as if someone or something from the outside world was coming through. But it was wind. She wanted to go to the lavatory but couldn’t. Terror had gripped her. It began hours earlier as a knot in her chest, and it went down to the pit of her stomach, and now it paralyzed the tops of her legs, enveloping them in cages of iron. She could not move. Some awful thing waited outside the door for her. By morning she would be crippled. The strange thing was that the monster outside the door would only harm her if she went out. It would not come in. She jumped up and opened the door, asking it to show its face, but saw only the dark of the hall which she didn’t know sufficiently to locate what recess it had stepped into. She closed the door again and came back to her seat, knowing it was fruitless to scream because nobody could come to her rescue. But terror has its own resources, and when she climbed through the front window she had no idea she was so distraught. Her neighbor, who had come out to put a tarpaulin over a scooter, turned and said, “Are you locked out, love?”
“No. Locked in,” Kate said. She realized it was funny a second after saying it. The neighbor—a fat woman in an overall—straddled the low wall and came to help.
“You’re at sixes and sevens,” she said, looking into the front room. Nothing to her own place, which was a little palace. She’d have a whiskey, and love to. They climbed in. She told Kate to see that the mailman kept his hands to himself and not to forget that bins were collected on Tuesdays and always to knock on the wall if she wanted anything. After she’d sympathized a bit about moving in winter, she got down to her own troubles. How her man had upped and left her one day and now she was afraid of her life he’d come back because she was happier by herself. She had a boyfriend, of course, but men were different when you lived with them. She also said that for a young person Kate had a very startled face, and that the house could be improved, and that it was a dreadful night but gardens benefited, and never to underrate the pleasure of gardens, flowers, trees, and plants. She left when Kate had calmed down. At least the terror had passed away, and she smiled when the woman said, “If you’re interested in ballroom we might make up a foursome.”
“I might be,” Kate said, chagrined by her numerous inadequacies. At least it is true she was trying to smile, and she had not mentioned the child, not once. The woman, staggering a little from whiskey, was about to get over the wall, but on second thought decided to use the gateway and walked with ridiculous dignity.
12
Ear
ly summer days. The garden, which had been so savagely empty in winter, began to reveal things: lupins, dog daisies, and some wild kind of rambling roses that fell apart when they were touched by wind, or the clothes from the line. Although it was May there was still frost, and some mornings the clumps of thistles were a sight to see. Erect, knife-edged, covered in silver. Six months now. Spinster days and untrespassed spinster nights, except for lying awake and dreams. She often dreamed that they were back together, and in the dream she welcomed it, but not in real life; when she saw him she acted cold, wary, indifferent. Jealousy had passed away. She spotted them from a bus and Cash said, “Look, look, Dada, Dada.” It was late evening and he was driving across a common in his car, which was itself the color of dusk. It would be Maura, or then again it could be somebody new, but she had no wish to know. Would that they drove to the horizon and right out of the world, leaving her and Cash to their own devices. A war was brewing. They’d stopped meeting because he wrote and said it afforded him no pleasure to gaze upon her destroyed face and her mean little dagger eyes. She thought his stares carried more hatred than her own, but knew she was not a perfect judge. They were each plotting, separately but thoroughly, both assuming total injury, both framing ugliness that would tear to shreds the last, threadbare remnant of their once “good” life. It was for Cash, they said. But what is a child between injured parents? Only a weapon.
He had found someone and so must she. But the effort!
“You could bloody well trick someone into thinking you’re swinging,” Baba would say, over and over again.
“I don’t want to,” Kate said. And didn’t, until one specially lambent summer evening when her new telephone gave out a shrill and totally alarming ring. No one knew her number except Baba and Eugene. But this was a woman’s voice, a total stranger asking for Kate. It turned out to be a photographer who’d once photographed Cash.
“Hiding away like a little old mole,” she was saying. “Had to get your number from directory inquiries.”
“How are you?” Kate said. She hardly knew the woman. They had met in a coffee shop. The woman liked Cash’s face and asked to photograph him for an exhibition she was holding. Like everyone else, she said at the end of the session that they must meet again. She said she lived with a madman who did papier-mâché figures and that Kate would love him.
“I’m ghastly. He cracked my skull and I have double vision. Oh yes, he’s still here, absolutely,” she was now saying.
That was the unnerving thing. Other men and other women survived their mutual slaughterings. She compared everyone’s behavior with Eugene’s.
“When is it?” Kate asked. The woman had rung to ask her to a party. The word “party” still had evocations, like the word “myrrh,” or “Eucharist,” or “rosewater,” or “pearl barley.”
“Now, this very evening,” the voice said. “And you’ve got to come.”
Why not. Not quite ready for a second flowering, but conscious of that all the same. A summer evening. And all her clothes beautifully clean, like clothes waiting for an outing. Since she worked in the cleaners she had everything pristine all the time. It also happened to be the night on which she did not have Cash. She and Eugene had him on alternate nights, and either one took him to school next day. He was a schoolboy now, with a life of his own, and a desk, and picture books and crayons that he had to be responsible for. One day she went to look at his homework, and in one of those copy books she had read a composition which he’d written, and for which he had been given a gold paper star. It was entitled “My Life,” and it said:
I live in a large cave with my mother and father. Each morning my father goes out hunting, if he is lucky he catches a deer. While he is out my mother dusts the cave.
“I’ll come,” Kate said, and took down the address. She dressed herself in blue (Mary, star of the heavens) and put on blue beads that “like a rosary” reached down to her navel.
Outside, the evening had a sort of golden afterglow that held the world in its thrall. Gold-lit houses, aslant in Thames water. Little boats going by silently, silent men pushing their way unambitiously with the help of a single oar. The tide was high, the river water clean and solid, giving the illusion that it could be trod on, as if on a silvered, swaying roadway.
She walked for a while, conscious of how gay people were, of how many bright pairs of red sweaters were abroad, and how many birds. She’d forgotten that birds sang!
The key was in the door and noise streaming down the stairs conducted her accurately to the room filled with people and many, many candles in gilt bottles. She paused for a minute at the threshold, apprehensive: meeting a roomful of people was not the same thing as thinking about them when one is on one’s way and bus windows are a fiery gold. They had drawn the hand-woven curtains and shut out the evening. The music was so loud that she could not identify any face; once her hearing was impaired, she also seemed to stop seeing. Bad coordination. A man, some man, in an open-necked shirt came over and greeted her.
“You’ve just arrived and you look lost in that beautiful dress, and your name is what and what do you do?”
She asked if he were the papier-mâché man, and when he said no, she felt no obligation to be courteous, so she heard herself say that mainly she got through. He let out a rich, congested laugh and begged her to tell him more.
She went away from him toward the drink table, toward her hostess, who was wearing gold lamé to match the bottles that contained the candles.
“Darling, you look different. What happened?” The voice, somewhat husky, projected to her. She laughed it off and accepted a whiskey. After all, the hostess had had a cracked skull. Possibly everyone in the room had had a catastrophe, so why should hers be condolable?
“Darling, just make yourself known to everyone,” the hostess said. Kate looked around. Two West Indians were arguing. Sophistication. She thought of telling them of a sign she’d seen in the Underground which said NIGS GET OFF OUR WOMEN, but they might not laugh. They might just tell her to hoof off. There was a time when she could have approached anyone. He noticed and came across, the same man who first greeted her. His name was Roger. Jokingly he began to strangle her with her own necklace.
“You’re a bit fresh,” she said, thankful all the same. He was very good-looking and that worried her. For months now she’d been spouting to Baba about the accident of physical attraction. She’d even decided that she would never have fallen in love with Eugene if it weren’t for his sepulchral face.
“I am aloof,” he said. “Except when I meet a very beautiful woman.” He was so affected, he may even have been real.
He was alone obviously, because no woman’s eye trailed him, as women’s eyes do, in the most crowded and ill-lit rooms. He was standing much too close to her—hip to hip, you could say.
“Listen,” she said, faking indifference. The woman was telling another to ring Daphne, because Daphne knew where to get antiques for nothing, and Daphne’s lavatory was trad, and Daphne knew scores of handsome, potent, unattached men.
“I wouldn’t think you needed Daphne,” he said.
“I could do with antiques,” she said, picturing her four rooms, two of which were empty except for tea chests and the folds of paper in the fireplace onto which the soot dropped. She was on the verge of telling him about it when he said, “You’re married?” She still wore the plain gold that they’d bought long ago.
“Yes,” she said. Then a girl came up behind him and chained his neck with thin, tanned arms and locked hands. Kate went off. She made herself promise that she would not cling to anyone, or confide in anyone, that she would skim through the party, coming and going like the soft gold moths that came in the window, fluttered about, and went out again. Except that some made straight for the candle flames!
In the kitchen there was food. Clear soup simmered in a vat. It reminded her of the soup she’d once had at Waterloo Station, but she helped herself to a mug all the same. Perhaps some sane person w
ould come and talk to her.
“It’s the greatest,” a small Scotsman was telling another small Scotsman, with witnesses standing by. They all wrote plays or sonnets or toothpaste ads; they all had something self-important to say.
“Are you an Irish nurse, or an Irish barmaid, or an Irish whore?” some kind, goat-bearded man asked her.
She acted as if she were a deaf-mute, and that, too, made them laugh.
More people came in, smelling the soup and the steam, mistaking the laughter for real, calling each other by familiar names: Do and Jill and Issa, the shortened names that were for longer names but whose use made people feel they would never be quite so alone again.
“He has the old falsies, et cetera,” one joker was saying of a man who posed as a woman. The story had cachet because the poseur was a television actor.
“My hair grows an inch every day. I sit up in bed watching it grow,” a starlet type said. The same one that had put her arms around Roger. She was nibbling the ends of her buff-colored hair, waiting for someone to tell her how provocative it was.
“When Clarissa is hungry she just eats her hair,” Roger said dutifully. A yes-man.
“Yes,” said Kate, with weary humor, turning to Clarissa but meaning it for him, “if you were in a chorus you would be almost certain to make the front row.”
How bitchy she had grown! She moved away, apparently warming her hands on the mug of soup that was already going cold.
In the next room they were dancing, and she slunk in there and found a stool. She’d picked up a drink on the way and drank it with the soup. In the small dark room the carpet had been rolled back and the floor was cramped with people who shook, and wobbled, and looped their arms, and lolled their crazed and craving heads. Sometimes and for a brief moment, in the pause as one record followed upon another, the various partners came together, and the woman simpered, and the man took hold of her crotch, putting his claim on her, the way he might spit into his drink before going to the Gents in a public bar. One man asked a redhead if her hair was the same color down there.