by Edna O'Brien
“Ring him,” I said, but she shook her head; she knew it was curtains. She knew he’d gone home to wife and kiddies, put her in aspic, and wouldn’t think about her till he was eighty or ninety and gaga, sans guilt, sans testicles, sans everything. He’d given her some spiel about honor, duty, how they should have met before he went up the aisle. Fucking mendicant, she was.
The worst bit was when she started accusing herself, said she was ashamed of being miserable when there was war and drought and famine and holocausts. She kept jumping from one thing to another, said she couldn’t pray anymore, mumbled petitions to St. Anthony but felt a hypocrite. Then she quoted Van Gogh, said he wanted to paint infinity. I thought, Her ear will be off next. Asked me what I thought was infinity, if there was something more to life. She said it was the emptiness that was the worst, the void. Then she contradicted herself and said it was the hallucinations. At times she thought she was stitched to the sky with a safety pin or daggers, and other times her teeth were too big for her mouth, were like a sink or a cattle trough inside her mouth, crushing her. Her brain was like a whirling dervish. One minute it was her son, his globe head, his eyelashes, how when he was six she admired them and he went to tear them off to give to her; then his motorcycle, how many cylinders it had, and how she used to stay awake at night until he got safely home; then the big rupture, his leaving for America, the letter on the kitchen table saying, “I am never far from you and always at the other end of a telephone.” Got a scholarship to Harvard. Full of brains. Probably knew it was best to vamoose.
I was the one that had to break it to him. I said it straight out, couldn’t gloss it.
“Has she?” he said, as if he already knew it, not that she had appeared to him or anything like that, but because he knew she was prone to the old Via Dolorosa. God knows what he was feeling or if he was in bed with a girl or something. I kept holding on to the bedside table and smoking like a chimney so’s I’d act normal. All of a sudden I thought of the thing she’d read to me about the flushes of youth versus the flushes of age, and thank Christ, I didn’t blurt that out. I told him how apparently she had swum a few strokes and probably got carried away, and then went in alone and lost her bearings.
“Poor Nooska,” he said. That was his pet name for her. It was the way he said it, so grown-up and so fucking tender that it made me bawl. I’m sure he heard me. He said he’d go to the airport straightaway because there might be crowds.
“I’ll pay your fare,” I said.
“Oh, don’t worry about that,” he said. I expect he’s a stowaway or coming the cheapest way there is.
Even he was slipping from her mind. She said she couldn’t picture him anymore, that it was like a tassel or the banister of the stairs which disappeared as soon as you touched it. Everything was disappearing.
“What’s happened to you, Kate?” I said. I was trying to bring a bit of normality into the situation. She was crying into the tea, slopping everything.
“I don’t know,” she said, “I don’t know what’s happened to me.” She raved about some dream, some apocalyptic dream, Christians and Muslims fighting, weapons none other than pools of blood, wrapped up in pouches of human flesh and thrown up into the air like jam tarts or rosettes. She was in Battalion 3 and about to go into battle, when she saw God, who apparently told her that it was not for earthly considerations we fight, we suffer so. Earthly considerations! She was in the fucking Azores.
All of a sudden she steadied herself, began to make plans—she was going to do social work, she was going to read poems to prisoners, read Rilke.
“Who’s Rilke?” I said. One line was enough—”For only solitaries shall behold the mysteries.”
I could just see prisoners getting chuffed over that.
“If I get through this, I’m all right,” she said.
“Through what?” I said.
“This last big breach,” she said, and I went all cold, because I sensed something calamitous.
She put her hand to her heart and said she’d like to tear it out, stamp on it, squash it to death, her heart being her undoing.
“It’s only a pump,” I said, trying to give her a jolt, trying not to show that I was quaking. She jumped up, said she had to go. I mumbled some platitude about having put tea roses in her room. She was always a great one for roses. I followed her out, but she wouldn’t listen, said she’d telephone me the next day. She was going to his office, she was going to stand outside the iron gates until he emerged complete with briefcase and ask him the one question, the question being, whether it had had meaning for him. Why the fuck are people like her always looking for meaning? The crows were cawing like mad and I should have known it would lead to this. I wanted to call someone but I didn’t know who. For one split second I thought, I’ll call Kate. That’ll show you how mad I was. Another thing, I have this feeling that there’s a second letter, a truthful one, and that it’ll come to light someday. It could be in the post now, it could be saying that what she did was deliberate. I pray not. Ignorance is bliss. On the back of my letter there was a bit about nature: “Saw on my evening walk just now the young ferns, lime-green and wand-like, as if waiting to be picked and carried onstage to accompany lines of Shakespeare—oh, Shakespeare deepest and powerfulest of friends, father of us all.” Father—the crux of her dilemma. I daren’t think of the hours beforehand, the frenzy, trying to dodge it, trying to circumvent. I suppose it was the future she couldn’t face, the thought that it would be the same forever, eons of fucking emptiness. It’ll hurt Durack, it’ll cut him up, remind him of such dire things as his own irreversible plight, and it’ll make her son a fugitive for life. I don’t blame her, I realize she was in the fucking wilderness. Born there. Hadn’t the reins to haul herself out. Should have gone to night school, learned a few things, a few mottos such as “Put thy trust in no man.”
I doubt that she went to his office, that she confronted him, in case he cut her or was incognito all of a sudden. I expect she ran, hither and thither, one place to another, up steps, down steps, along by the river, into a café, into a church, prostrating herself, expecting a fucking miracle, that he’d divine it, that he’d appear, that they’d walk down the aisle to the old
Morning has broken, like the first morning
Blackbird has spoken, like the first bird …
Jesus, is there no end to what people expect? Even now I expect a courier to whiz in on a scooter to say it’s been a mistake; I’m crazy, I’m even thinking of the Resurrection and the stone pushed away, I want to lift her up and see the life and the blood coming back into her cheeks, I want time to be put back, I want it to be yesterday, to undo the unwanted crime that has been done. Useless. Nothing for it but fucking hymns.
We’ll go through all the motions and all the protocol, the wreaths and the roses and Mozart and Van Morrison, and then the coffin off on its little rocky ride, as if to a jamboree, except that it isn’t. I’m walking toward the hearse now and thinking of Durack’s motto—”An old soldier, Baba, an old soldier,” and I’m praying that her son won’t interrogate me, because there are some things in this world you cannot ask, and oh, Agnus Dei, there are some things in this world you cannot answer.
ALSO BY EDNA O’BRIEN
FICTION
August Is a Wicked Month
Casualties of Peace
A Pagan Place
Zee & Co.
Night
A Scandalous Woman
Johnny I Hardly Knew You
A Rose in the Heart
Mrs. Reinhardt
Some Irish Loving
Returning
A Fanatic Heart
The High Road
On the Bone
Lantern Slides
Time and Tide
House of Splendid Isolation
Down by the River
Wild Decembers
In the Forest
The Light of Evening
Saints and Sinners
The Love Object
The Little Red Chairs
NONFICTION
Mother Ireland
James Joyce
Byron in Love
Country Girl
About the Author
Edna O’Brien is the author of more than twenty-five books, including, most recently, The Little Red Chairs. Born in County Clare, Ireland, she now lives in London. You can sign up for author updates here.
Thank you for buying this
Farrar, Straus and Giroux eBooks.
To receive special offers, bonus content,
and info on new releases and other great reads,
sign up for our newsletters.
Or visit us online at
us.macmillan.com/newslettersignup
For email updates on the author, click here.
Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Introduction by Eimear McBride
The Country Girls
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
The Lonely Girl
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Girls in Their Married Bliss
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Epilogue
Also by Edna O’Brien
About the Author
Copyright
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
18 West 18th Street, New York 10011
Copyright © 1960, 1962, 1964, 1986 by Edna O’Brien
Introduction copyright © 2017 by Eimear McBride
All rights reserved
This omnibus edition, with a new Epilogue by the author, was originally published in 1986 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux as The Country Girls Trilogy and Epilogue
Paperback edition, 2017
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint copyrighted material:
Lewis Music Publishing Co., Inc.: Lyrics from “I Didn’t Know the Gun Was Loaded” by Hank Fort and Herb Leighton. Copyright © 1948 by Lewis Music Publishing Co., Inc. All rights reserved. Copyright renewed.
Volta Music Corporation, 43 Welbeck Street, London W1M 7NF, England: Lyrics from “High Noon” by Dimitri Tiomkin and Ned Washington.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:
O’Brien, Edna.
The country girls trilogy and epilogue.
Contents: The country girls— The lonely girl— Girls in their married bliss.
I. Title.
PR6065.B7C68 1986 823.914
85032113
eISBN: 978-0-374-71802-2
Designed by Jacqueline Schuman
Our eBooks may be purchased in bulk for promotional, educational, or business use. Please contact the Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department at 1-800-221-7945, extension. 5442, or by e-mail at [email protected].
www.fsgbooks.com
www.twitter.com/fsgbooks • www.facebook.com/fsgbooks