by Edna O'Brien
He tried to shave but only shaved half his stubble, and the same with his dinner. He would only eat from one side of the plate, so I’d have to turn it around before he could eat the other. What fucking got me was the way he strove to be self-sufficient, asked for a basket so that he could keep his personal belongings near him, his comb, his wallet, his razor, his notebooks, and a compass, as if we were going safari-ing. He’d see men cuddling me and he’d start to scowl, but he didn’t get the old blunderbuss and belt me, like before. He told these various Lancelots to get the hell out of his parlor, off his site, to get back to work, because common laborers they were and nothing more. It must have been the men at work in their dungarees that he envisaged. A few of them come on pay night and bring presents, records about Innisfail and Malachi’s collar of gold. They call him Guv. He likes that. He damn near blushes. His kineshite Christian brother, Declan, doesn’t come much. Too guilty. He and a foreman by the name of Danno held this big caucus to ratify things. Danno was one of your hill-and-dale robbers, brown ganzy like a dishcloth, always saying, “Take care” and “God bless,” and jollop like that, chewing Rennies for his indigestion. They bought Durack out. It wasn’t difficult, because he was up to his tonsils in debt, gone in for property development, thought building was too lumpen, like cattle jobbing, not suave enough. Bought a morgue in Hampshire that he was going to do up and flog to an American bank. Predicted he’d be one of the richest men in the British Isles. For a year we were within saluting distance of a few million, we were going to have homes all over the goddamn place. My wardrobe worried me to death, what I’d wear in the different countries and how I’d interview cooks and gardeners. I learned Spanish, for God’s sake. They made him a partner. Sleeping fucking partner. Hardly any money coming in now, but of course they bamboozled us with sheets and figures that Galileo wouldn’t understand.
He’s dead worried that we’ll have to sell out and that I won’t be cared for, so he gets blokes over from Christie’s and Sotheby’s to value things—scornful bastards with pimples and pocket calculators. They have no time for our pictures or our commodes, and I’m not surprised, because everything we have is onyx and leatherette, stuff you’d find on any High Street from here to St. John of Groats. Tracy, my beloved daughter, got him a jigsaw puzzle—Emily Bronte on a black chair with the nape of her neck pink-colored. Emily Bronte was not someone he had a penchant for. We scattered the pieces all over the floor and put them together again. We play another slob game where you pick a theme, and he picked sport, and takes about three-quarters of an hour to say Danny Blanchflower.
I’m dreading the winter, because it’s dark at five; at least now we sit outside on the old hammock playing these blasted games and knocking back the cocktails. Cooney stays on to humor him. She has a new hip, and no topic since Copernicus has engendered as much conversation. It’s called Marmaduke. It doesn’t like rain or cold or east winds, and I’ll tell you, another thing it doesn’t like is hard work. I get down on my knees and wash floors while Cooney does the flowers and tells me inanities about the hospital, the food, the other patients, mostly scum, and the way nurses waken you too early to do ablutions. She expected to be in a fucking three-star hotel. Our other regular caller is the Monsignor, who has got very ecumenical with the times, which really adds up to the fact that he approves of Pope John Paul II traveling. Now, when Pope John Paul II travels he says what Popes have been saying since secula seculorum—”Thou shalt not sin.” He’s still for keeping women in bondage, sexual bondage above all, as if they weren’t fucked up enough with their own organs, and whoever said that all women in the world enjoy all the fucking they have to do—no one, certainly not me. The Pope is all for bevies of children within wedlock, more children to fill the slums and the buses and smash telephone kiosks, because of course it’s usually the ones in the slums that breed so profusely, part of their routine, like a fry-up. The smarter ones know all the ropes, know how to keep in with the Pope and still swing from the old chandeliers. I don’t discuss this with the Monsignor because it would be a beetroot face and a sermon, and to tell you the truth, I like him to come and sit with Durack and reminisce. I’m as crooked as everyone else, except that I don’t want to be. The old Monsignor will reminisce about anything, the number of species of potatoes—there’s more than Kerr’s Pink and King Edward, comrade. He has dire things to say about Communism, the tortures of Pol Pot, and is fearful that priests in the Third World are forgetting the divine call. If anyone weighed up the conceited garbage that anyone else speaks in an hour, it would fill a turf bag. Often thought of asking him in jest if he thinks there is copulation in heaven, apostolic emissions from Peter, or Paul, or Simon the Tanner. I can just imagine it, me asking, his eyes and his neck swelling up like a bull’s, and me having to dial 999 for an ambulance, because it would be a second brain tumor, instantato. He’s in Lourdes now with Durack and I can tell you it’s a jaunt I wanted to miss—all those freaks in their winding sheets getting in and out of wells, muttering prayers and ejaculations.
If I went anywhere it would be back to the island, to seesaw with old Snowie. I don’t see myself going far except to the off-license and a gymnasium once a week to keep my limbs from atrophying. You should see where old Snowie lived, a shack made of wood stuck up on a few concrete blocks. Toy Town. Next to it another shack, identical. His sitting room crammed with the most ghastly things—photographs, statues, artificial flowers, and a gigantic television set. His sister was there in her curlers, looking at television in the middle of the day, with the temperature over a hundred. I called on my way to the airport to say goodbye. Pure slop. I don’t know why I do things like that.
“Lady lady …” The flunkies are calling me. There seems to be some development. The damn train is in. They’re up and off toward the barrier, dragging this big trolley. They’re midgets really, Tom Thumbs. Other people are pouring out of the train, with normal things like kids and carrier bags and bunches of flowers. I dawdle. Anything to postpone it. Two native bruisers have to help them with it, they not being broad-shouldered enough, probably not having enough to eat in their far-off climes. I hand over another fiver to the natives and hope to God no one comes up and sympathizes with me.
“Where now, where now, lady?” the two steadies ask me. I point automatically to the gates, which are ceremoniously slung open, and I follow them. They’re crawling. Out of respect, I suppose. A guard has given me her suitcase and a letter. The suitcase is fawn and has a label from a visit she made last Christmas to the old sod. Her son and I will have to take her ashes there and scatter them between the bogs and the bog lakes and the murmuring waters and every other fucking bit of depressingness that oozes from every hectometer and every furlong of the place and that imbued her with the old Dido desperado predilections. I hope she rises up nightly like the banshee and does battle with her progenitors.
It could only happen to hicks like us. The fucking hearse isn’t here. I’m in the middle of Waterloo Station, outside a shop that’s selling warm croissants, with a coffin, two Pakistanis, and not even the name of the undertakers, since they weren’t booked by me.
“We’ll have to hang on,” I say. The lingo is too subtle for them.
“Non arrivo—late, like trains,” I say.
“Okay, lady; okay, lady.” They’re dead stupid and dead affable.
The cow in the health farm was rabid about keeping it hush-hush. It was death by accident, they had a coroner in at dawn. Death is death, whether it’s by accident or design. She was taking swimming lessons, had an instructor, trailed back and forth holding on to a bit of plastic, doing well, as the officious bitch said—too well, as she emphasized—because she got carried away and went in there after dark and took the plunge. Alone and covert as always, not knowing whether it was deliberate or whether she just wanted to put an end to the fucking torment she was in. Probably realized that she had missed the boat, bid adieu to the aureole of womanhood and all that. No more cotillions. Her letter to me says
nothing, inanities about fasting and jogging and being on the mend. A blind really, so that no one would know, so that her son wouldn’t know, self-emulation to the fucking end.
I’m guilty as hell, of course. We lost touch—different lifestyles and so forth. There was a falling out. It was really between Durack and her, her with Keats’s odes, and him with the old chip on the shoulder because of not having a university education. I know people with a university education and they read comics. Instance: Tracy’s beloved boyfriend, Dominic, who can only phrase two sentences—”Have you got a light?” and “Have you got the time?” It was Durack’s fifty-fifth birthday, and we had half London coming, people we hardly knew, boxers, their managers, people we’d met at the races, trainers, bookies, crooks, a couple of toffs like old Lady Margaret, who by now was missing a breast but coping and having radiation, darling. Kate came early. She was to spend the night with us because she lived out of London, ran a bookshop in a theater, and had a little cottage-type house with a gate and roses and bantams and all that. I went there once, as remote as hell, down a cul-de-sac, not even a number over the door. Anyhow, she came early, with her rush bag and took out her suede shoes, her black frock, and a satin flower with a middle in it that looked like caviar. She always had something that no one else had, bought from gypsies or at the Amsterdam airport or some damn place. There were fires all over the house, big consignments of flowers in urns, with bathtubs clogged with champagne. The three of us were imbibing to get warmed up, and all of a sudden it happened, a goddamn eruption. She and Durack began to argue. It was about fuck-all. Just like people who have it in for one another, they’ll argue about anything: how to pronounce a word or the population of China or why fishermen can’t swim. His old stroke must have been brewing then, ‘cause he’d get into tempers and you’d think his veins were going to burst, they were like tires. Working twenty hours a day, wheeler-dealing the Americans, waiting for the big coup, talking bull, about hard sell, soft sell, and push-into-shove garbage, all that trans-mangling of the English language that they do to make them feel they invented it. Invented it. Scrolls of the King James Bible should be put in their microchips to get them to utter a reasonable sentence. Anyhow, he and Kate were tearing into one another, daggers drawn. It was all about roots, values, not losing one’s identity, and so forth. Had it been anyone else, he would have agreed. He was mad for roots. Even got books on genealogy, trying to prove that he went back to Brian Boru, on his mother’s side. Most nights when he got splificated he’d put his arms around me and say we’d go home one day, home to Innisfree. It was a prospect I dreaded. Said we’d build a house in the Burren, nightmare place, all limestone with a few gentians in the spring that people rave over. He felt inferior with her because when he was young of course he, too, dreamed, he did amateur dramatics and could spout Tom Moore and all the meeting-of-the-waters’ slush.
“So you think I’m a phony?” he said.
“I haven’t said that,” she said.
“But you think it,” he said.
“Frank,” she said, trying to mollify him, but the harm was done. The thing is, he always mistrusted her because she and me were pals before he entered the arena, and somewhere I think he blamed her for my big adulterous epoch, little knowing that I’d commit adultery twice a day if I could. Anyhow, they patched it up, and kissed and all that, but it was false mollification; they even danced, for God’s sake, and I prayed for gangs to arrive, which they soon did.
Hours later it re-erupted. She’d gone out of the room, she’d probably gone to the bathroom to mope, and he stood up and announced to the assembled guests, who were mostly illiterate, that he’d written a poem for his birthday, in honor of his native land. It was called “Corca Baiscinn.” Off he started.
Oh little Corca Bascinn,
The wild, the bleak, the fair!
Oh little stony pastures,
Whose flowers are sweet, if rare! …
Kate came into the room and took up the refrain.
Oh rough and rude Atlantic,
The thunderous, the wide …
Thunderous! He picked up a bronze sphinx and threw it at her. Told her to keep her gob shut.
“What’s wrong?” she said.
“Oh, fuck off,” he said, and followed it with a discharge of curses that were wizard. It was clear he hadn’t written the goddamn poem, and several of his pals began to boo and snigger. She ran out of the room in tears, and I would have followed, but he gave me a glare which told me in no uncertain terms to stay put. Luckily some warbler started up—”Come back, Paddy Reilly, come home, Paddy Reilly, to me … to Bally James Duff,” and I wished to Christ that I was in Bally James Duff. Anywhere instead of my own lounge, scorching with drink and flounder. I knew that we wouldn’t see her again, that there would be presents at Christmas and birthdays, that kind of stupid clinging on, for old times’ sake, that cowards do. When she heard about his stroke she wrote a nice letter, and to tell you the truth, I thought that now that he was a semi-simpleton they’d hit it off great. They could discuss lost Atlantis and the Brehon Law to their hearts’ content. Poor Durack. I don’t think he ever had a voluptuous fuck in his life, certainly not with me, and the ones before me were no oil paintings—drips, legions of Mary-ites; one was an ex-nun, for God’s sake, and the other lived with her mother. Of course, he pretended he was a rake, innuendos as heavy as concrete slabs; he’d nudge one of the lads when they saw a waitress with bosoms and give the old salacious wink that said, “I could be there, mate,” or “Space rocket,” or some cretinous thing.
I used the old menopause as a ploy for celibacy, gave him the oft-trotted plea about headaches and flushes. Fell for it. Men are fools in some ways and traitors in another. It’s the way they can’t resist a compliment even if it’s from some barmaid. I suppose it gets the old elasticity going, makes them think they’re taut again. Nature is a bitch. To tell you the truth, the menopause didn’t make a damn difference except that I hadn’t a pad affixed to me every month and didn’t have to wash a sheet before old Cooney got in and accused me of a Roman orgy. I don’t think old Cooney herself ever bled, couldn’t part with it. Old Cooney begrudges me every bit of malarkey I’ve ever had, like a Reverend Mother, always eyeing you and telling you about widows and divorced women and women with cancer, wanting you to join in lugubrious confraternity.
I’d still do anything, if I found the right bloke, frontways, sideways, arseways—funny when you come to think of it, must be chemical, when there’s other dopes that make you puke if you have to stand next to them in the Underground, recoiling in case they rub garments with you. They try it on, especially in summer, when they’re friskier. Worse in Venice. I nearly got a statutory rape in a vaporetto with Durack only two yards away. He would have brained the gink. It was our second honeymoon, for God’s sake, one of those patching-up fiascos, where you go to the same haunts and order the same dish and say how lucky you are.
I hadn’t seen Kate since the imbroglio, until about a week ago she came, all thin and trembly, like a lath; she brought this little pot of violets, trembly, too. I suppose she couldn’t afford anything more. We sat at the kitchen table and talked about strokes, and Frank and Lourdes, and all sorts of garbage. She kept jumping up to add water to her tea. I could see it coming. I knew there was some bloody man and that he was probably married and that she saw him once a fortnight or less, but of course saw him in street lamps, rain puddles, fire flames, and all that kind of Lord Byron lunacy. This was the real thing, it was different from all the rest, he and she were meant, Tristan and Iseult, soulmates, et cetera. Well, if they were meant, why weren’t they together, is what I thought, and why was she looking like something from Ethiopia, all dugs and bone. They would be together if it weren’t for his kids, his job, his principles. This was no lorry driver but a big cheese, and by the sound of things, someone with the old ambition in the ascendancy. A photo of him was produced. He had appeal, I’ll say that, but he was a conceited-looking bastard, and y
ou could tell that in his cradle days nannies had yodeled and told him he was the cat’s meow.
She’d gone to witches, fortune-tellers, sages, faith healers, and God knows what. The prognostications were that he’d chuck in his dearly won status and come to her, but even as she said it she knew she was talking gibberish. Her eyes were like anthracite, only shiny. I was livid with her on two counts: first of all, why should she be having this goddamn, occasional illicit ecstasy when I had to settle for a boring life and put jelly in my privates to fake a bit of long-forgotten desire, and secondly, why couldn’t she see reason, why couldn’t she see that people are brigands, what made her think that there was such a thing as twin-star perpetuity, when all around her people were scraping for bits of happiness and not getting anywhere. She opened a notebook, things she had written. You’d need a brain transfusion to understand them—”The flushes of youth are nothing to the flushes of age, the one is rose leaf, the other the hemorrhage of death.” Reams about him. Walking streets where he worked, with data about rain and flowering cherries and the quack-quacks in St. James’s Park. Useless. He was the Holy Ghost because of his fugitive ways.