August Is a Wicked Month

by Edna O'Brien

  Chapter Eleven

  THE GARDEN WAS COMPLETELY deserted. She turned on him sharply to see if he had arranged it.

  ‘Where are they?’ she asked.

  ‘I should know,’ he said, sensing her anger. The table was in ruin and the record of the last castrated man groaned away. The homosexuals had put it on and it had obviously been played again by them or by someone else. He crossed over to the player and touched a switch. In the silent room her eye rested on the huge fish-bone that someone had dexterously extracted without breaking. It looked angry on the silver platter, the long fishbone with its sturdy white teeth.

  ‘I bet Bobby did that’ she said, wanting to utter his name so that in a second she could decently ask where he was likely to be.

  ‘We have it done in the kitchen before they carry the fish through,’ he said quietly but with a sting.

  ‘Where is he, where are they all?’ she said, looking round at the traces of them: georgette scarves, hardly-worn high-heeled shoes with a costly designer’s name engraved in gold on their insides, Denise’s charm bracelet with all its little attachments spread out flat on the tablecloth as if put there to tell a story. Someone had drawn pussy cats on the cloth with a red Biro pen and the ashtray near by was stuffed with barely smoked cigarettes.

  ‘Desecration,’ she said, and remembered how the garden had first seemed the moment she entered it.

  ‘He’s retired, I expect,’ Sidney said, and then with a bitterish grin, ‘and probably busy now.’ He moved around, clicking the various lights off so that the place was beginning to get ghostly with an emptiness that reminded her of a deserted ballroom where she’d once waited because the band leader had promised to come back for her, once he’d put his instruments in the car. She thought he’d hidden in the Gents and she waited behind one of the curtains that concealed a fire-escape, but later when she knew he was not coming back she moved tentatively over the slippery dance floor and tried to reconcile herself to disappointment. Then, as now, a wafer of moon lit the place but whereas then it had endowed her with loneliness, this night’s moon was for this yellow, parched man who had killed his wife and hoped to sleep with her.

  A figure came in from the hallway and she thought before she looked that it would be Bobby. It was Gwyn, come to say good night.

  ‘Got to get some sleep so I can look pretty tomorrow,’ she said, her voice slurred from alcohol.

  ‘Sorry we had that little whatyacallit,’ she said to Ellen and came across and kissed her pathetically.

  ‘It’s all right,’ Ellen said, ‘we were all a bit shaken.’ She did not know what to say. She thought of the dead man again. Would the moon pick up the course of blood?

  ‘Your stole?’ she said then, suddenly remembering it.

  ‘Forget it,’ Gwyn said, and then for no reason and in a broken voice she said, ‘Do you know, when we were first married we even had the same type of fountain pen, we were that much in love with each other.’ She cried openly and like a baby and Ellen kept patting her and saying it was all right.

  ‘Listen sweetie pie,’ Sidney said, ‘you’ve got to get some sleep so you can look pretty tomorrow for Jason.’

  ‘Got to look pretty tomorrow,’ she said, sinking into his arms as he led her away to one of the bedrooms.

  ‘So,’ he said returning and touching Ellen’s elbow, ‘Daddy puts them all to bye-byes.’

  ‘Where do they sleep?’ she said, meaning what trick of fate or manipulation has left me alone with you?

  ‘Oh we got beds, we can sleep…’ he paused, although he knew the number well, ‘eighty.’

  ‘Together or separate?’ she asked, but he ignored the question and bent down and picked up an ear-ring from the marble floor. Looking into the jewelled leaf of its face he said, ‘That must be little Suzie’s, she had those for Christmas,’ and he put it on a safe place under the mantelshelf clock.

  ‘Where’s Gwyn’s husband?’ she asked.

  ‘Oh he’s around, he’ll show up,’ Sidney said. She wondered which of the slender sober girls he’d teamed with and how they actually got out of the room without questioning. Denise would be with Bobby for sure. The bracelet spread out on the table seemed to be a code saying, ‘Gone with Bobby, gone with Bobby.’

  ‘I must go home,’ she said, looking around for her handbag.

  ‘ Don’t say it, don’t say it.’ It was the first time he raised his voice and the first time a flush came in his cheeks.

  ‘But I must,’ she said quietly, her eyes damp from the tears shed on them by the other woman, her body worn out from the fierce exhaustion of hoping.

  ‘ Don’t leave me,’ he said. He was also saying, ‘I am an old man and a sad one and nothing much quickens me any more and for some illogical reason you do, so stay.’

  ‘Where would I sleep?’ she said.

  ‘You would just lie beside me,’ he said. She shivered. There was something in his proposal that made her think of lying next to the dead.

  ‘Do I have to?’

  ‘You don’t have to,’ he said humbly. So humbly that she knew she must, and waving good night pointlessly to the empty room she went with him up two flights of marble – stairs and entered a room with a door whose back and sides were covered in green baize so that it opened softly and closed again with the same hushed and sinister softness. She thought of a morgue. He pointed straight away to the bathroom leading through another doorway and she vanished there and took a long time over undressing. It was a big bathroom. In a large whisky vat there were soft stones of talcum powder, coloured a light mauve and smelling of stock in summer rain. She crumpled some and let them fall in the valley between her breasts and crushed some on her legs that were white where the sun lotion unevenly stopped, above her knee. She did this to, not to excite him but so that the light, mauve, summer smell might see her through. Far from being on the threshold of sin she saw herself as about to make a sacrifice.

  He had already climbed into the enormous bed and was lying there in a blue nightshirt with a label that said ‘All Action Garment.’ She saw it as she stroked his neck.

  ‘You found everything you wanted?’ he said, ghastly polite. She’d found a bathrobe. Tell me what you like,’ she said, ‘your fetishes…’ She was trying to be funny and trying to be loving but doing it badly.

  ‘Hold it,’ he said. As she did an enormous memory thirst took hold of her and she drank a tumbler of Perrier from the bedside cabinet.

  ‘You want a drink?’ she asked.

  ‘No, little one,’ he said, and thanked her for the hands that stroked and wakened him.

  ‘ Not for years…’ he said.

  ‘Don’t think of it,’ she said. If they got on to their respective lonelinesses it would be unbearable altogether.

  ‘You are a good person,’ he said, ‘kind.’

  That sickly word.

  ‘I’m a nurse at heart,’ she said. ‘Didn’t you know that?’

  ‘Nurse,’ he said, mawkishly funny, ‘can I have my medicine?’

  ‘Provided you don’t spill,’ she said, mawkish too.

  ‘Nurse,’ he said, ‘I’ll be a good boy.’ She imagined herself back as a student nurse, appalled by the occupation she had unwittingly chosen for herself. Doing the routine moves and saying the routine words, she remembered how she’d met her husband at a bus stop the very day she ran out of the operating theatre in terror and he asked why she cried. He offered to help her. Kindness. The most unkindest thing of all.

  ‘You’re a soft, soft woman,’ Sidney said. Little did he know that it was his costly creams and his mauve talc that put the false softness and the false dew upon her.

  ‘I’m glad,’ she said, ‘that it meets your requirements, sir…’

  ‘You’re so original,’ he said, and then she lost the sense of the many senseless things he said and willed herself into a state of forgetfulness.

  Afterwards she felt that she had failed him. She had wanted it to be a gift but it turned out hurried and
nervous. Neither of them removed their clothes and she lay in the towel robe and he in the long, blue, ‘All Action‘ nightshirt.

  ‘I’ll have to wash,’ she said, soon.

  ‘Have I made a mess on you?’ he said, not even looking at her stomach, smeared as it was. He’d been a gentleman, he’d been careful.

  ‘Just a little,’ she said. She was thinking of egg white in its various stages of being whipped. He was telling the four-poster roof how happy and younger and glad he felt.

  ‘Is there anything you want?’ he said.

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘A little trip, to some new place?’ He was going to Marrakesh the following day for a few weeks.

  ‘We’re all going,’ he said, ‘a house party.’

  ‘ Bobby?’ she asked, but not frantic now.

  ‘I think we’re all booked to go.’

  ‘I can’t come,’ she said. He’d give her his card all the same and the day telephone number and the answering service at night in case she changed her mind suddenly.

  ‘Can I sleep downstairs now?’ she said abruptly.

  ‘Something upset you?’ he said.

  ‘No, I just can’t sleep with anyone near me.’ She could not give him anything more, not even the solace of conversation.

  ‘Of course,’ he said, ‘I’ll move into the dressing room and you…’

  But she was already out of bed and telling him truthfully that she wanted a bath and a little air and then to go to sleep on the garden hammock and be rocked by its gentle swaying. He must have guessed at her disgust because from the bedside desk he took a card and said,

  ‘Put that in your purse.’ It was the address of his house in Marrakesh and the various telephone numbers for the various hours of day and night. Reluctantly he let go of her hand and in the bathroom doorway she turned and closed her eyes and cradled her head in her hands to remind him that he must sleep.

  She took a long time over her bath and almost enjoyed it. A second door led her out on the corridor and she found the stairs straight away. She went down slowly and noiselessly, on tip toe, her hand carefully clinging to the iron banister. Anyone would think she was being watched.

  Just when she considered it light enough to leave, a violet darkness descended on the living room where she had been resting. Then suddenly there was a ponderous clap of thunder followed by lightning so stark and green that she thought it was something electrically contrived. The huge window was open. More and more thunder followed, each clap running into the previous one like an enormous belch and the forks of lightning followed upon the thunder instantly. It was near. It seemed now that it had been threatening all night ever since they saw the dead man on the roadside, his blood flowing into the soft black tar. Then the rain came. Like stones pelting on a near-by glass roof and then coming in the open window, pushing the curtain ahead of it. She thought to close the window, but the intervals between the claps of thunder and the forks of lightning were not enough for her to get across the innumerable yards between where she stood and where the window was. The curtains were oyster silk with extra panels of silk like waves drawn across the width of each curtain. Within seconds the material was drenched grey and the waves were falling down laden with wet. The floor beneath was pooled with rain. It was not his black-and-white tiles she worried for, but getting the window closed for some more important reason as if a murderer were likely to come in.

  ‘I’ll do it after this flash,’ she would say, moving a pace nearer and then ducking because of the next peal. The lightning in the room lit up a brown picture and made it sulphur green as if it were being painted anew. She’d never seen a storm like it. Half-way across the pavilion of the floor she sat down and knew that the curtains were now soaking, the floor under the window flooded and the furniture on that side of the room well drenched, so that there was nothing left to save. Remembering about metals she pushed an ashtray away from her and then pulled it back again because she was going to die anyhow. She remembered how as a child her mother had sent her sister in a storm all round the cottage shutting windows because her mother had wanted her sister to die. Her sister hadn’t died then but had died another way, becoming a liar and marrying for money. They never corresponded now. Her death would be a shock all the same. She was going to die in this place and be buried God knows where. The colossal accident of her surroundings irked. She would have liked somewhere humble in keeping with her birthplace, the small council cottage with cliché, pink roses climbing up on either side. People used to say that she and her sister would go far because of their beauty. Black eyes, pale faces. She’d married above her mental means because of that startling face. Blackberries in an off-the-track Kerry road, he said, where there were no cars and no dust to blight the sheen on her. Marrying him she cut herself off, lost the knack of prayer, of superstitions, of going to dances and asking young men, ‘Do you come here often?’, of fierce friendships with other girls and linking and going for walks. She had to discard all those when she teamed with him because he was taking her into the fresh pasture of ideas and collective thought and flute music. It all sounded grand. Except that it wasn’t enough and he didn’t buoy her up when she hankered after the proverbs and accordion music and a statue of the Virgin hewn from blackthorn wood. When she admitted to these needs he put his hand to his mouth and swallowed painfully as if she had just farted sulphur. How superficial she was. The lightning missed her part of the floor by inches and she waited now, patient and truthful, as she rarely was in life. What irony. She always thought he would die first, since he was older, and then the child would be hers exclusively. She knew many people in the world and would miss none of them except that child with its pre-aged face and the nice parts of her and the nice parts of him. Her flitteriness, his pensive ways. The only bit of her life she would re-live were the first few months of her marriage when her husband would make love to her on and off through the night and would afterwards talk to her with such words of sweetness that she was mesmerized as to how any man could love any woman so. And yet, it never being enough. She hungered for more: love, reassurance, as if what had gone in had been mysteriously drained away by some sort of spiritual diabetic flow. And if he punished her now with black looks it was because he knew she had not matched an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth in the deep, exacting algebra of love. The best part was over. It was a relief to die except for the fact of leaving a son. She looked down at the pad on the couch which said, ‘Dear Sidney, Thank you for the pleasant evening,’ and she tore it in tiny pieces rejecting its smarmy falseness now that she had only a few minutes left. Mindless of the rain, the swift green lightning and the powerful thunder she wrote, ‘My dear and only son, I came here to work [a lie] and got killed by mistake.’ But on re-reading it too disgusted her. The third letter was very conspicuously chirpy; it said:

  How are you and how is George? Behaving yourself I hope, eating nourishing cereal and doing plops in fields (mind the’ horseflies), and remembering to sleep with your eyes shut and no comics under the pillow. I want to tell you a story, don’t go away. When I was your age I got a shilling from a man going by on a tandem (Exp. a tandem is a bicycle made for two) because he asked me the way to the canal. I used to stand at the gate saying ‘hello’ to people. Anyhow when I got the shilling I went off to the shop where we owed a lot of money because my father was out of work (hammer toes he had at the time) and I asked the grocer to take the shilling off our bill and he told me, do you know what he told me, ‘To go up the river on a bicycle.’ So I kept the shilling. But I think the grocer had a lot of spunk in him to tell me that. And I want you to have lots of spunk in you and if you’re going to do a good, do a big good and don’t go offering shillings around because they won’t get anyone far. Put this in your pocket along with the two hundred and forty-seven sweet papers that are likely to be there. Goodbye, your Mother.

  She addressed it to his father’s house and hoped when he grew up he would understand it. But almost as she licked the scen
ted gum she heard the rain soften and knew that the storm was moving away, and she felt cheated of her death.

  Chapter Twelve

  SHE WAS LYING LIKE that, dropping off to sleep when Gwyn came in, in her stocking feet, walking unsteadily with her hands in front, groping as if it were dark. It was quite bright.

  ‘Aren’t there any cigarettes?’ she said, and Ellen sat up and saw the face that had gone to bed early to look nice for Jason. In the penetrating afterstorm light her hair was thin and worn, like a cheap doll’s wig with the scalp showing through. Repeated bleachings had weakened it. Her face, because of the effort gone into preserving it, looked far older than a middle-aged face should.

  ‘There was a storm,’ Ellen said, to account for ornaments knocked over and broken.

  ‘Don’t be funny, it was a hurricane,’ Gwyn said, and looked around impatiently for cigarettes.

  ‘Behind you,’ Ellen pointed, and the woman turned and bent towards a low table where there were tipped cigarettes and kitchen matches. Holding the long match as a taper she trained it on the floor to see how far the water came across the room.

  ‘Go call the housekeeper, it’s like Venice in here,’ she said, but Ellen made no move.

  ‘And the whole goddam place smells of flowers,’ she said, sniffing. In the freshness the smell of flowers came from the garden and there were flowers also in vases all around.

  ‘Looks like a funeral parlour to me.’ She wandered from one vase to another, looking at the flowers’ faces, trying to identify them. ‘They lupins?’ she asked. A small bowl of misty blue flowers had been put there, it seemed, to match the blue of a stained-glass religious figure on the wall. She looked up at it. ‘Old Moses,’ she said defeated. Then she saw the nylon birds and screamed.

  ‘Holy Jesus.’ Instinctively she put her hands up to protect her eyes and her frail cotton-wool hair.

  ‘They don’t fly,’ Ellen said. They were small gay-coloured birds, made of cloth that resembled down. There were dozens of them throughout the room, perched on the rims of vases and window-ledges and on the curtains. Those on the curtains were hung so as to appear dead.