August Is a Wicked Month

by Edna O'Brien

  ‘You would,’ he said churlishly, meaning he envied whoever it was she was going to see, and she guessed that he must have some interest in her in so far as a man with four children, a deserted wife, and a mistress can have the luxury of giving a thought to another woman. That was over a year before. For a few days or weeks she went around thinking of him and suffering, but the ache trickled away like all her other false-alarm aches, and when he arrived in dark glasses she was shocked to think that for a certain time he had burnt holes in her thoughts.

  ‘You’re sorry I came. I bore you,’ he said.

  ‘Not really. We had a nice dinner. I mightn’t have stirred myself to cook otherwise.’ She had her summer vacation from the office and was in the habit of going out to the café for a snack in the evenings. Without her son, or without a guest, she found that cooking saddened her. Alone, she ate standing up, so as not to make a ceremony of it.

  ‘And what now?’ he said. He’d put the rug over them again and they resumed kissing.

  ‘Like the last time,’ he said.

  ‘I’ve never opened it so wide before,’ she said.

  ‘ In that case I ought to bring you to bed and teach you all my wicked ways.’ The first and in fact the only funny thing he said. They moved up the garden and climbed the terrace of steps to the room that overlooked the river.

  ‘You’re lucky to be loaned this house.’ A rich woman who’d gone off to Africa had loaned her the house for a year.

  ‘I’m always lucky,’ she said, leading the way to her bedroom. He said they did not need the light on and she in turn asked if he would like the curtains drawn.

  ‘Leave them open,’ he said. ‘We’ll see the sun in the morning.’

  ‘Who said there will be sun?’ Relief. She thought, he means to stay until morning, and that pleased her as much as that he was going to sleep with her. She remembered a man who got up and left straight after he came, while she was still in the throes of desire.

  In bed she opened wide. And christened him foxglove because it too grew high and purple in a dark secretive glade. He put the bedside light on. She felt him harden and lengthen inside her like a stalk. Soft and hard together. He loved her as no man had ever done, not even the husband who first sundered her and started off the whole cycle of longing and loving and pain and regret. Because that kind of love is finally emptying.

  ‘You loved me lovely,’ she said. His back was bathed in sweat. He had laboured on her behalf and she was filled with the most inordinate gratitude.

  ‘I’ll cool it,’ she said, dipping her hand in the water jug and spreading it over his back to mix with his sweat in a cool balm. Then he lay on his back and said good night although he was already asleep.

  In the crook of his arm she lay and listened to him snore. She did not mind him snoring. She felt too happy to sleep. She just lay there thinking about nothing at all except that she was happy.

  ‘Say you’re sorry,’ she said in the morning when he wakened and blinked at the light pouring in and looked around the strange room and then at the unfamiliar red hair spread over the pillow, next to him. She was saying it as a joke and to forestall him.

  ‘Say I’m sorry!’ he said. ‘For what?’

  ‘Just in case you are,’ she said.

  ‘Are you?’

  ‘No I’m happy.’

  ‘I’m dumbfounded,’ he said. ‘I can’t believe it. I met you once.’

  ‘Twice,’ she said, ‘including yesterday. But never without pounds of stuff on my face.’

  He liked her face better like that. Without its mask.

  And he loved her again and spoke very little except to say how sweet it was.

  They had breakfast and sat in the garden until it was time for her luncheon appointment. More sunshine. He dozed and talked a little and wondered aloud what he would do.

  ‘I suppose I’ll have to move out,’ he said. ‘It’s so bloody unfair, the man always has to leave.’

  ‘Not always,’ she said, thinking of her own situation and how she’d left and had to fend for herself.

  ‘I suppose I can’t ask her to leave,’ he said.

  There was so much that Ellen wished to say and so much that she wanted to ask but she said nothing for fear of jeopardizing her chances with him. She hid all her meannesses and gave him a drink weighed down with ice cubes. They sat supporting each other with their backs, sometimes one or other of them hummed a song that was very popular at that time, called ‘Anyone who had a heart,’ and the words were especially nice because of the way they were feeling. At noon he offered to drive her to the centre of London.

  ‘Why are you smiling?’ he said as they stopped and started. It was Saturday and the traffic was bad.

  ‘Why?’ she said, lightly. So much had happened. She felt new again. Soft and indulgent towards the bad-tempered traffic. Looking at his ear lobe she remembered and told him how a drop of sweat behind it, in bed, had the effect of a crystal about to drop off. She kept moving from one position to another to give all her limbs a lovely stretch.

  ‘You have so much energy,’ he said.

  ‘I’m just boisterous.’ He looked at her and smiled and then looked in the car mirror and smiled to himself. He was happy too.

  ‘It’s not every day one gets a gift and gives a gift,’ she said. She wanted to do something lovely and loving for him. To give him a garden in full bloom – he liked flowers and was cultivating daisies in window-boxes – or a stone with a thousand colours, something he would never want to discard. Mainly she talked and hugged herself with happinesses, and twice when they were held up at the lights he kissed her. She knew they would meet again and she did not have to press him about when or where.

  ‘I suppose we’ll ring each other up,’ he said when she got out and stood on the kerb holding the door.

  ‘I suppose we will,’ she said. Wise now with the soft lustre of love upon her. Her eyes shining. They would meet soon and she would open again. The river of his being flowing into the pasture of her body. She was thinking of that when she got to the restaurant.

  Chapter Three

  WHICH MADE THE LUNCH boring. A stingy theatre producer asking her what plays he ought to put on. Her. A week before she might have found it flattering. This well-known face with its striped suit and Mexican silver cuff-links at a special table near the window, some actress somewhere trying to catch his eye. He’d brought her to the roof garden of the hotel and they sat looking at the monstrosities of London: buildings jumbled in together and the appearance from up above of there being practically no trees and only one dusty parkland in the maze of un-matching houses and narrow streets.

  ‘So you haven’t found the perfect man yet?’ he said.

  ‘No, but I’ve applied for one.’ He tasted his cold soup. It was not chilled enough. He beckoned. The waiter who came over spoke no English, but lifted the bowl of thick soup out of its ice bed to show that it ought to be chilled enough. Her friend argued that it wasn’t, and that the pure orange juice they’d ordered was not pure but tinned. She had a feeling that they were being looked at. The waiter was having his revenge. She was wasting time.

  ‘And what will you do with your life?’ he said, waiting for the second bowl of soup to be brought.

  ‘I’ll just be,’ she said. A rare thing for her, racked as she was with anxiety, wondering always what would happen next, if an affair would be eternal, or if she loved her son over much, or if the wheels of a car they sat in would fly off and leave them half dead on the roadside.

  ‘So you’re getting sensible,’ he said.

  ‘I’m getting old.’ Not for years had she felt happier, more content, and therefore youthful. The bill was high and he left in a surly humour.

  That evening she waited in and read a little (Keats) and walked around and journeyed to the end of her garden to make certain that the pipes of light were still there. She put a stone to the door in case she missed the ringing of the telephone. The evening was very still and the sound c
arried perfectly, so that in fact she heard the very first ring it gave as she ran up the lawn, past the frog pond and leapt up the steps. For some reason that had nothing to do with her running the necklace she wore dismantled and the beads ran down the steps as she was running up but it did not matter.

  ‘Hello,’ she said, as she picked up the phone and tried not to sound as if she’d hurried.

  ‘Can you come and have a drink?’ It was not him at all, but another man who often rang her on the spur of the moment to ask her out.

  ‘I can’t,’ she said. ‘There’s someone coming here.’

  ‘Infidelity,’ he said. He liked her a little and she often said to him how unfortunate that she could not have love affairs with someone for whom she had affection. Fear and hatred were what motivated her passions.

  ‘I hope he’s a dwarf,’ he said.

  ‘He’s almost,’ she said, and promised to have a drink another time and rang off.

  Then she went to collect up the spilt beads. Some were easy to find, but as it got dark she trained the beam of a flashlamp into the corners of the mossy steps and felt with her fingers for the tiny pearled ones that were strung between the big blue beads and middle-sized glass ones. It was important to find every bead, not just to repair the necklace but because she took it as an omen. When she had retrieved a pile she held them between her palms, tossing them from one hand to another, killing time, and every so often she put her hand down and in the dark found another in a corner or under a weed. It was funny how you could go on finding them. Later she came in the house and sat in front of the telephone, staring at it, waiting for it to come to life, hoping, beseeching, lifting it from time to time to make sure it was not out of order, then, relieved at its regular purr she would drop it suddenly in case he should be dialling at that very moment, which he wasn’t.

  Late next evening she took it upon herself to ring him. He worked at night in a newspaper office, writing editorials.

  ‘I don’t know why I’m ringing,’ she said chirpily. He asked how she was and what she’d done. She lied a bit about having gone out a lot and said her necklace was all over the garden, and then she heard herself say, softly and shamelessly, ‘It was lovely with you.’

  He said yes and how he hadn’t been so happy for years and how he regretted nothing.

  ‘And?’ she said.

  ‘I just don’t know,’ he said. ‘I love Miranda as I keep finding out every time I leave and come back to her. I suppose I want it every way, and I have such . . .’ He meant guilt, problems, responsibilities, but could find no single word to contain his meaning. He said they would meet in a while and she knew that possibly they would but it would be a duty meeting out of courtesy.

  ‘You’re all right?’ he said. ‘I mean, not worried?’

  ‘Not very,’ she said. She would have to resign herself to being alone again, alone like she was the previous morning when he came for comfort, except that now she’d lost that spacious calm that had been here through months of training, of discipline, and abstinence, and doing work and loving her child and watering the garden.

  ‘I think you’re one of the nicest people I ever met,’ he said. And meant it.

  ‘You too,’ she said, and they said a few more nice things and then they had to ring off because his other telephone was buzzing. It was no lie, she could actually hear the buzzing.

  ‘People get what they deserve,’ she said as she came off the phone. A great believer in punishment. She wondered if he’d told Miranda where he’d been.

  The next couple of days were bad. She went around the house in her nightdress, thinking of him, thinking of her son, and the holiday that she’d meant to have. It had been her intention to walk around London and become a sort of tourist doing tourist things like taking a bus into the country and gathering leaves or buying bits of pottery to bring home. The fear that he might not ring was so great that she had to take the telephone off the rest to remove all possibility of his ringing, but part of her kept putting it back on again and hoping. She drank a lot and two nights she went to bed drunk and her head swam and the mattress swooned and she lay with the curtains open.

  On the third day she went out to buy food. It was dull for August. A haze hung over the street and it was uncertain whether the sun would shine or if there would be rain. People were downcast.

  ‘We haven’t had a summer,’ the greengrocer said, forgetting about the five days. She bought strawberries to cheer herself up.

  ‘You’re going away?’ he said. She said no, but was he? He said later he’d go to Spain with the sister and they’d eat maggots and drink vino and come home tanned.

  ‘It’s astonishing,’ he said, ‘the way the sun gets you. Like the devil, that’s it, it’s demonic, like the devil. You’ve been around, you know what I mean. You get that you want it, irresistible…’

  ‘I know what you mean,’ she said as she went on her way up the High Street, past the flower stall and past the man who held up and acclaimed plastic wardrobes but sold none and towards the bookshop where she intended to get a new book to distract herself. She would sit on the bench at the top of the High Street and read a bit and watch the people go by and look at the big public house across the way which said ‘BANQUETS, RECEPTIONS’ and maybe the Cypriot would be there. He came most days. A big sad hulk of a man with a simpleton for a sister. They smiled at each other and once when he was eating an orange he tore off a section and gave it to her.

  She had never noticed a tourist office in that place but now she saw one down a side street, about four doors from the corner. She went to look in the window and saw a coloured photograph of two girls in straw hats under a beach umbrella smiling to receive someone who was not shown in the photograph. The girls wore purple bikinis and their bellies were chocolate coloured with the belly button beautifully concave and she thought of him again and how the second time they had made love towards morning, he had not come inside her at all but touched her with his body, finding new places of pleasure that were virgin, and she longed for him as she stood in the street and thought the wickedest thing he had done was to come like that and give her false hope, and renew her life for an evening when she had resigned herself to being almost dead. Who, going by with prams and shopping and punnets of strawberries leaking blood, would know that she stood at a window with aggravation between her legs? It was demonic like the greengrocer said, and looking up at the overcast sky she cursed it for its darkness and cursed her own dark, convent life. She had been brought up to believe in punishment; sin in a field and then the long awful spell in the Magdalen laundry scrubbing it out, down on her knees getting cleansed. She longed to be free and young and naked with all the men in the world making love to her, all at once. Was that why he ran? He saw jail written all over her face. And punishment. And looking again towards the window she said aloud, ‘I’ll punish him, I’ll go away,’ because of course she still hoped he would have another row with Miranda and come back for her. She went into the shop not knowing what she intended to inquire about. A delicate young man, who badly needed sun, told her there were dozens of places to go and gave her a free booklet to consult. She sat at a table and opened it at a page that said, ‘France will prove an adventure in all that is pleasurable in existence,’ and she saw photographs of beaches beautifully fronded by palm trees and she remembered a novel set on a French beach where all people though decadent were touched with a special, mellifluous charm. And she went back to the young man, with the page open. He’d been there himself once with his fiancée and its marvels had to be seen to be believed.

  ‘Breathtaking,’ was his word for it.

  ‘Do people go there on their own?’ she said. ‘I mean women?’

  ‘Best way to go,’ he said. She thought she heard regret in his voice. Had he wanted to slip away for an evening and have some lunatic encounter on that beach under one of those incredibly tall trees?

  She would go there.

  ‘The sooner the better,’ she said as
he rang up to arrange a flight and book an hotel. Her husband and son would not be back for a week or more and she would lie in a strange new place and let strange new things happen.

  Afterwards she went to buy clothes. She bought trousers and shirts with slits at the sides to be worn over trousers and gold sandals with a strap separating the big toe from the other toes. Freedom clothes.

  ‘Do you know, I’ve never worn trousers,’ she said to the shop assistant. Squeamishness. As children they’d been told all that. And not to cross their knees because it caused Our Lady to blush. Well she was getting fast clothes now and blue trousers and Our Lady could blush to her follicles.

  ‘Slacks suit you,’ the assistant said. She had another pair over her arm, of lighter material, suitable for evenings. Ellen was overspending, but she told herself that she would skimp when she got back and do extras for the magazine throughout the winter, like reviewing out-of-town plays that no regular reviewer would deign to go to. She took the second pair as well. They were of green silk with a coatee to match. A small division between the waistband of the trousers and the end of the coatee. An inch of stomach showing, white as milk.

  At home she fitted the new clothes on again and packed them in a case as she took them off. She painted her toenails carmine and pared the two corns on her little toes and thought them almost decorative like pearls, with their hard white centres. She danced in the new green outfit to wireless music. Dancing alone now, but by the same time next day she would be walking down a path to the sea, languid because of the heat, and she would stand and throw something in the water and know that there was some stranger behind, shadowing her, smiling and when she turned they.… She was happy and breathed deeply, deeply. But for him she might never have gone. ‘Bless you, Hugh Whistler,’ she said, as she copied the exact address of the newspaper so that she could send him back a snappy, happy, I-don’t-give-a-damn-about-you postcard. She ironed her son’s clothes and put them in a pile on his bed for when they all got back and life was normal again. She stored his sandals away. She did exercises to be supple and wrote the milkman a note. She packed odds and ends of food in a cardboard box and left them to a woman down the street. She could not sleep. In the mirror, as she danced with the portable radio, she saw herself in the new clothes with the milk-white waist showing and her toe-nails glistening, a wicked carmine in new gold sandals. She danced through the last night of aloneness. And when she slept it was in the downstairs room on a sofa with three alarm-clocks set to go off at intervals of five minutes each so that there was no possibility of her sleeping out. The flight was booked for noon.