by Edna O'Brien
In the Underground station she counted her money and rubbed the tops of her bare arms. The Tube rushed like wind into the empty station, and she stepped into a No Smoking compartment along with two other girls. Had they come from illicit beds, too? They were well organized: they wore eye shadow and had cardigans and carried small travel bags. If the day got warm they would remove their cardigans and put them on again in the evening. She closed her eyes; they had already closed theirs. She closed her eyes on the thought that sleeping with a man was unimportant. A nothing, if nothing in the way of love preceded it. Or resulted from it. Did these girls know this? If the Tube was about to crash and they had seconds warning, what was the last thing she would cry out? This newfound knowledge, or Cash’s name, or an Act of Perfect Contrition? Impossible to tell. Anyhow, they were getting there safely, only three stops to go.
At work she rang him. At least he was a man. He might introduce her to someone else and that someone … Even in sober unslept daylight she hankered after the De Luxe Love Affair.
“You are not a one-night girl, you are for all time,” he said, rambling on about how easy it would be for him to fall in love with her.
“I just want to apologize,” she said, and dragged in the plea about having had too much to drink.
“I would have liked to make you happy.” He was solemn now.
“But you did make me happy,” she said hurriedly, rushing in with fake assurances.
“When I get back from Budapest we must meet,” he said. The writing was clear on the wall.
“Have a good time there,” she said. Just as well. He probably knew that any man she took up with now would only pay in pain for what had happened between her and Eugene; the brutal logic of wronged lovers taking their revenge on innocents and outsiders.
She put the telephone down and for the couple of minutes that remained until opening time she stood facing, but not looking at, the “ticker tape” sign of multicolored lettering which at that moment was still but would soon be flashing on and off, guaranteeing bargains, perfection, and total satisfaction.
The fierce arid clarity that comes from sleeplessness possessed her. She foresaw the day: four hours there, the awful smell of cleaning fluids, the stupidity of dirty, crumpled clothing, the panic on the faces of people who had lost their tickets, then relief at identifying their own garments; she would have a two-and-ninepenny lunch, her daily walk by the Thames, possibly the tide going out, abandoning old shoes—why always single shoes?—and pieces of soggy wood and men’s contraceptives, pigeons gray and black and white pecking for nourishment from the relegated semen on the muddy tideless shore; and at four collecting Cash from school and taking him to a playground to swing on the swings and home to tea. Another night. But not for long. The time was coming, and she could feel it almost like music in her bones, when things would be different. It would be better once Baba’s daughter could talk and walk. She would be a sister for Cash. Tracy, Baba had named her, or rather, it had been Frank’s choice. In the end Frank received her like his own and made even greater consequence of being a parent than if he had actually been one. And Baba, never one to be held down by punishment, was cornered in the end by niceness, weakness, dependence. Still, she and Baba would take a holiday; for a week or two they would live as they pleased, tell fluent lies, have love affairs, dance at night, learn to ski, and slide down mountain slopes, temporarily happy with their children. She had no place in mind, but they would find a place. Baba would attend to that because Frank no longer restricted her in little things. Quite often he was too drunk to register. He merely waved an arm and said, “Powerful, powerful,” to whatever was going on. There would be some very good days, weeks perhaps. And smiling at the thought, she saw the ticker tape move and heard the grunt that machines give before they start up and knew that downstairs the manager had turned on the switch that set the day in motion.
But it did not turn out like that at all. When she got to the school gate Cash was not waiting. No surprise. He was invariably last, or arrived in his school plimsols and passed her by, forgetting that it was the day to go to her house and not his father’s. When he did not come she went to the cloakroom in search of him. All the metal hangers but one were free of coats, and the place looked alarmingly forlorn without either coats or children. The blue anorak hanging there belonged to a much older child. She called. She then stood outside the lavatory and called again. She remembered some drama about his being locked in the lavatory by an older boy and she called now very loudly so that he could not fail to hear her. In the end she went to the headmaster’s door and knocked nervously. He received her in a small neat office, where he sat before a cold cup of tea.
“I can’t find Cash,” she said.
“I’m sorry, the school is sorry …” he said with a shake of the head, and added “Mrs… .” simply to acknowledge her married status. He obviously did not know how to tell her, so he asked her to sit down.
“I wasn’t sure if you knew,” he said then, lifting the cold cup of tea and handing it across to her. He told her how Cash’s father had come and announced his decision to take the boy away. She was seized with giddiness and once again was obliged to ask herself if she was not perhaps dreaming or sleepwalking.
“When?” she asked. For a minute she believed there was some connection between her wayward night and the fathers decision.
“Last Friday,” the teacher said.
Five days before. So there was no connection. This seemed to give her strength. She seemed to recover her senses and drew herself up in order to rise to her feet, and then some invincible and implacable force possessed her whole body as she rushed out of the office and down the corridor and along the five streets to his fathers house.
When she hit the knocker there was no answer, and she knew there would be none, and yet she repeated the move again and again and pressed the disconnected bell and peered through the windows that were coated completely with white chalk. Once, she had seen them through snow, and now through another snow she was looking and seeing nothing. It was a big moment, the one when reality caught up with nightmare, the crest and the end.
The next day there was a short letter from his solicitor enclosing a longer one from him. And both these letters told her everything she had screamed to know when she clawed the door, rapped her knuckles on the windows, and pleaded through a fastened letter box to be heard, to be answered. They had fled. Cash, Eugene, and Maura. “A flight into Fiji.” She could see now how it had been carefully and beautifully worked out, as careful as a major robbery. He saw to it that she got no inkling until they had gone, and it was this that drove her to the last pitch of desperation, this mindlessness of hers. How little had she observed him. She still thought that perhaps she could catch them out, that perhaps they had broken the law.
She rang the passport office, and after frantic explanation to a telephonist and then a secretary, she was put through to the official who had in fact issued a passport for Cash. She asked why she hadn’t been consulted, and the clerk said that a mother’s signature was not necessary for such a thing.
“You call that just?” she said.
“What?” the man at the other end asked.
“Oh, balls,” she said savagely, and hung up. The conspiracy was too enormous, the whole machinery too thorough; it was like seeing a newspaper heading that read HOLIDAY COACH CRASHES and experiencing a senseless, futile, blinding rage.
Eugene’s letter was long and self-righteous. He said he had lost a daughter through a woman’s heinousness and he was not going to lose a son. He outlined her faults, did it so thoroughly, so intelligently, that half the time she found herself nodding, agreeing with him, the words scratched out with care, with cruelty, indisputable, final words—”Vain, immoral, mean-minded, hardhearted, weak, self-destructive, unmaternal.” She skipped and read farther down: “There is no other course open to me than to carry out my duty as his father to the bitter end. I will not allow you to destroy his future life,
to turn him into one of those mother-smothered, emotionally sick people, your favorite kind. What infection—it can hardly be called thinking—makes you take for granted your well-being as of paramount importance over that of the boy’s healthy future, over my work and life. It is too late. You should have planned your full-time mother career a little earlier when he was being reared by Maura and myself.”
Too late! She cried out, “You are mad, mad. It is all mad, senseless.” One idea after another suggested itself, and these were not very far removed from madness either. She would go there, set fire to the house, and rescue Cash; she would have the boy stolen from school; no, she would beg, appeal to his tenderness, send a telegram saying I CARRIED HIM, I BORE HIM, blackmail them, get a letter from her old friend the politician, have a delegation of politicians go out there with banners. Justice justice justice! In her thoughts she twisted and turned like a crazed woman, in the middle of a street with traffic approaching on all sides. Friends did what they could, consoled, raged, sympathized: but no one, no one in the world could remedy what had been done.
She went to see a solicitor, and as she sat there giving dates, facts, scraps of her married life, she had this certainty that what was happening was unreal and that presently someone would nudge her and laugh and say, “It is all a game, we were just testing you.” But no. The interview went on. He was an old man, genial in a quiet way, and a specialist in divorce. He looked down at his notebook when the time came to ask about infidelity. He had to know.
“Well, yes,” she said.
“How many times?”
“Once?”
“Would you like to tell me how it happened.”
“No, I wouldn’t …” she said as she began. She had stopped going to confession, but this was a return in memory to that ordeal and she blessed herself mentally. Telling the story aroused no contrition, just a bad taste. A night of tattiness. Absurd to have to mention it at all.
“And you say your husband did not know about this.”
“No, there is no connection between the two events.” Ah, no, the retribution was far more hideous, far more comprehensive than that. Retribution for what! She talked calmly, sometimes looking at his face bent over the big notebook, sometimes at his good jacket draped on a spare chair. He wore a tattered jacket with leather patching on the elbows, and had she known him better she would have made some nice comment about his prudence.
“Now, your husband, this letter is a bit extreme …” he said, scanning it again.
“He’s like that,” she said. She had no wish to say much else, no wish to list his failings or plead her case; these are things done in hope, in fury, and hope and fury had expired days before. Even sitting there seemed pointless, absurd.
“Now tell me, since you left him, did he molest you?” The very question roused them both a little.
“No,” she said, shaking her head back and forth.
After he had taken all the information, he closed the notebook and looked at her.
“What did you marry a man like that for?”
“It seemed to be what I wanted.”
“Marry a …”
“I knew less then …”
Although her face was to the window and light was pouring in on her, there was no trace of tears or breaking down.
“Silly girl,” he muttered, but in a way that was affectionate and not reprimanding. Then abruptly he asked if he might get her a brandy, and she said no. He looked at her hand on the desk, the fist clenched, veins showing through a density of freckles, and slowly he put his own hand over hers and held it there.
“We’ll do everything we can,” he said in a low voice.
She made no reply.
It boiled down to a question of money. They could go there, if she could afford it; they would fight it through the proper legal channels, but it would take time, a lot of time, a lot of money. He was an honest man, he was not going to tell her otherwise.
After a little while she rose and left, and down in the street a lull occurred, as if all the traffic had been suspended, and rather boldly she crossed the road.
It took days to write, though the difficulty was not what to say but how to say it. Her mind was made up, she had withdrawn. The odds were too great, the battle already won. She did not have his wickedness. She did not have his weapons.
She wrote:
Dear Eugene,
I have decided to let Cash stay with you for the time being. I trust that you will do everything for his well-being, as I am sure you will. My solicitor will be in touch with you shortly.
Dear Cash,
My geography is not good. What is the latitude and longitude of where you are? What food do you eat? And what about your school? I expect it is all quite strange but no doubt very exciting. If you like, I will send your comics.
Nothing else, nothing too close or too tender, or too hurtful. She had not the desire to say anything else. It was as if the decision itself had washed her clean, had emptied her of purpose.
Cash sent her a map of the island. It was drawn in ink on a paper napkin, and then the napkin had been cut around the edge to the exact squat-bottle shape. Towns were marked and streams and a bread shop and a swimming pool and the sea at the bottom. There were hibiscus trees all over, and these did not look like trees at all but like triangles of black in between the other features. At the top he had written in capital letters THE HEAVENS ARE BLUE. When she looked at it, she supposed that they had been eating in a restaurant, all three of them, and one of them had said her name and Cash had decided or had been prompted to do the drawing. She studied it very carefully so that she could make comments in her next letter. Also, she had it pressed between two sheets of glass and used it as a sort of paperweight. In the next letter she told him this and enclosed the comics. It would go on like that, letters back and forth over the years, photographs at intervals, and these she dreaded, and she knew that she would have to steel herself against them.
After Christmas Kate had herself sterilized. The operation was done by a private doctor and it entailed a short confinement in an expensive clinic—money that might otherwise have been frittered on clothes or a summer holiday. On the second day Baba came to see her and found her sitting up in bed reading a newspaper article about women who for the purpose of scientific experiment had volunteered to spend a fortnight in an underground cave. Kate read: “Doctors in touch by telephone from an adjacent cave continue to be astonished at the physical resilience and lively spirits of the women, who were unknown to each other before the vigil began.”
“Frank says you might as well move in with us …” Baba said, interrupting.
“Really?” Kate said, pleased, surprised.
“He suggested it, not me,” Baba said gruffly.
“He usen’t to like me,” Kate said.
“He must be getting over it,” Baba said, but she was glad at being able to make the offer all the same. They would have each other, chats, moments of recklessness; they could moon over plans that they’d both stopped believing in, long ago.
“Well,” Baba said after some time, meaning, “What does it feel like?”
“Well,” Kate said, “at least I’ve eliminated the risk of making the same mistake again,” and for some reason the words sent a chill through Baba’s heart.
“You’ve eliminated something,” Baba said. Kate did not stir, not flinch; she was motionless as the white bedpost. What was she thinking? What words were going on in her head? For what had she prepared herself? Evidently she did not know, for at that moment she was quite content, without a qualm in the world. It was odd for Baba to see Kate like that, all the expected responses were missing, the guilt and doubt and sadnesses, she was looking at someone of whom too much had been cut away, some important region that they both knew nothing about.
Epilogue
It goes on, by Jesus, it goes on. I am at Waterloo again, the railway station where Kate gashed her wrists, thinking daftly that someone might come to her re
scue, a male Florence Nightingale might kneel and bandage and swoop her off to a life of certainty and bliss. Nearly twenty years ago. Much weeping and gnashing in between. They’ve cleaned this place up; it’s morbidly bright and neat, and even the advertisements look as if they’re washed down with suds every morning. They’re high up, far too high for anyone to scrawl PISS or ARSENAL or ARAB or LINDA. One features hills in Wales, rolling hills no less, with undulations. The green is unnatural; it’s lurid and it’s supposed to entice people to have offices in fucking Wales. I’m nervous as hell.
It’s June; there’s sun, masses of it coming through a bloody, girded, glass roof. I wouldn’t mind a bit of rain or a thunderstorm to fit in with the circumstances. There’s a letter for me, it seems. I bet it’ll be elegiac … too fucking elegiac.
On the other side of the tomato-ketchup-colored plastic counter are a loving couple. They’re both gawks, wearing glasses, and they’re too goddamn pent up even to speak. He’s about to depart, he’s about to go ten yards to the service counter to get a doughnut or a sandwich, and what does he do but kiss her and what does she do but droop and blush like a wallflower. Bilge. A lunatic woman in a felt hat is stalking around cursing people. She has an umbrella, and with the point of the umbrella she is searching rubbish bins for some important missive. She’s just the kind of cow who could guess what’s happening to me and make a damn spectacle of me. Lunatics unite. Loveswain is back with a three-decker prawn and mayonnaise sandwich and is offering Miss Wallflower a loving bite. You won’t believe it: it drips all over her chin and he kisses it away. I don’t want to listen to what they have to say. Tautology. It’s that surface fucking niceness that grates on me. Mind you, it’s not happening to me a great deal of late, the tiptoe-through-the-tulip frolic, the old-high-speed sex. I should be thinking about her except that I don’t want to. I am chewing a piece of bread that is so like white blotting paper it would soak up a quart of ink. The pigeons are at my feet assaulting a crust. One is lame, and I can tell you it’s not getting very far in the mastication zones. They’re a hell of a lot more spry than the lumps of flesh and emotion and anxiety and banality and twitch that have assembled around this horseshoe-shaped bar. Sunday papers have already been thrown away. The Queen, the baby princes, the cruise missiles, and the Sportsman of the Year are all inside someone’s noddle now, bobbing around with last week’s data and the week before, all accruing to no fucking avail. People have minds like sieves. Except when it comes to gain.