by Edna O'Brien
‘Boy, do I need a drink.’ Gwyn poured a very big vodka, added tomato juice and then ground pepper furiously into the drink.
‘A little fruit juice?’ she said to Ellen. But meant a drink.
‘Too early,’ Ellen said.
‘You’ll rue it, my girl,’ Gwyn said solemnly as she raised her glass to nothing and drank as if she’d been parched. She drank it right down in one draught and made herself another.
‘I don’t want to get drunk,’ Ellen said, peevish. Gwyn faced her, paused, ran her tongue over her front teeth and said, ‘You want to know something?’ For a minute it looked as if she was going to deliver a punch.
‘Yes,’ Ellen said, raising herself to kneeling position and balancing on the arm of the sofa.
‘The secret of not getting drunk is to drink all the time.’ She delivered the words slowly and surely as if it were the one thing in the world she was certain of.
‘I mean it,’ she said. ‘The only time I fell flat on my face was when I went out to dinner and had two highballs, without having had a drink all day. I’d been out taking the goddam dog to the vet or something.’
‘You fell down?’ Ellen said, for something to say.
‘What?’ the woman said, her voice high and rasping now as if she were going to argue. Looking around again, she repeated, why had the whole place to look like a funeral parlour, and Ellen got to her feet, intending to leave.
‘You didn’t do Sidney?’ the woman said, as if she wanted a quarrel.
‘ I beg your pardon,’ Ellen said, but not calm enough.
‘Well don’t, ’cos he can’t. He’s not supposed to. He’s got some, oh, he’s got a puncture, right through the heart.’
‘I’ve been down here, writing letters,’ Ellen said, showing the envelope and then putting it in her handbag. The sooner she got out the better. Maybe he was dead. They would know, have tests carried out, trace her. She saw her name in all the papers. A wicked tourist. Her son would have to change his school.
‘His lady-love shot him for ineffectuality,’ Gwyn said.
‘He shot her,’ Ellen said. He had to be in the wrong. He just had to be.
‘Poor lamb, he can’t shoot peanuts,’ Gwyn said, and let out a splutter of scorn. The wealth and beauty of that house turned to dust then and the cloth birds and the dirty pictures and the mystery people all shrank into tattiness and became the tatty props of a tired, dirty man, upstairs. All except Bobby, who had his own core of inviolate gutter-strength.
‘Where’s Bobby?’ she said, the last question she would ask.
‘Pretty nice, eh?’ Gwyn said. She had moments of perception for all her foolishness.
‘I liked him,’ Ellen said.
‘And he you. He searched around a bit for you and then I guess he thought “Well, it’s Sidney’s house .”’
‘Sidney’s house,’ Ellen said bitterly. ‘I must depart from you.’
She took a bunch of cigarettes for the journey and the rosiest apple from the fruit dish.
‘What do you do, anyway?’ the woman asked. A trick to hold her back.
‘I work,’ Ellen said righteously.
‘You do?’ said Gwyn, putting on a surprised look and forcing her eyes to open wide.
‘And I was married,’ Ellen said. She really disliked this woman.
‘Was he darling?’ the woman asked.
‘Depends on your standards,’ Ellen said, affronted. She didn’t want to enlarge on it. She had claimed wifedom to give herself status, not to be cross-questioned.
‘Jason’s cute, I’ll say that. Don’t you think Jason’s cute?’ Not waiting for a reply, she told the sweet breath of morning air and the empty damaged room:
‘Jason’s sweet but I could kill Jason’s mother.’
Then she sat down and sighed, and opened her purse with a snap; To a small, sharp-edged mirror she addressed herself.
‘C’mon, how do I look, how does the lady look?’
‘Jesus Christ,’ she replied to herself, ‘she looks like her eyes have been taken out and deep-fried or something.’
Ellen put her hands to her ears in a habitual gesture of withdrawal. Running again.
‘Open your ears for Chrissake,’ Gwyn said, and dropped the mirror on to her lap where she could refer to it between sips.
‘So you’re married and all that,’ she said, looking at the tall girl in the blue dress shrinking away.
‘Was,’ Ellen said, sharp again.
‘He fuck you, or not?’ Gwyn asked. The question was so sober and abrupt coming from such a rambling and blurred person that Ellen started a little.
‘Two kinds of men, they fuck everyone or they fuck no one. All very sad,’ she said, busy now with her nails. She was cleaning one set of finger-nails with their opposite counterparts. Her hands were long and white and soft. Hands into which cream and money had been poured and unlike the face they were able to be beautiful without showing the umbrage of the unloved. She had her eyes lowered, concentrating on her nails. Ellen took the last two vital steps to the doorway.
‘Don’t go,’ the woman said, raising her eyes, pitiful, speechless. Like a runny-eyed spaniel. She spoke quietly: she had two voices, the tough rasping voice and the quiet salutary one.
‘The first time it was with my best friend. He went up to New York and couldn’t get a hotel, there was a ball game or something. I rang up in the middle of the night and I said “You get out of there.”’
‘And did he?’ Ellen asked, trembling as if it had been her own husband and her own life that was at stake.
‘Like hell he did. I didn’t see her for months, then I went up to New York myself to get some shades and I called her from my hotel, I said, “Suzie I’m here,” thinking she’d say, “Come on over,” and d’you know she fixed a tea date for Thursday. Thursday! This was Monday! I couldn’t believe it. She fixed it for some store because the tea was good and the cups. They were pure white china cups. I’ll never forget them and they had this little scroll, this little gold thing, I guess you’d call it a flower on the inside and do you know I did the craziest thing after she left, I went down to the china department and bought a set of those cups.’ She paused, and reverting to her tough, husky voice she said in answer to the question Ellen had not asked but had been thinking.
‘Never mentioned it, neither of them.’
‘You should have,’ Ellen said.
‘The hell I should,’ the woman said, and went over and mixed two new drinks in two new glasses and gave one to Ellen. They were buddies now.
‘And they kept seeing each other?’ Ellen was gripped for a minute by the fiction of the woman’s life.
‘God for years,’ the woman said, throwing her hand away as if she couldn’t be bothered reckoning up the length of time.
‘You should have…’ Ellen said, about to deliver advice but the woman remembered something else and burst in with it. ‘Someone advised me that if I wrote about it I’d get it kinda cleared out of me the way Jane Austen and people did, and I tried, and do you want to know what happened?’ Ellen already knew or guessed but shook her head.
‘ It holds thr door back between the kitchen and the terrace when I carry the dishes through on the maid’s day off.’
‘It can’t be that bad,’ Ellen said, trying to say something sympathetic.
‘Oh let’s not talk about it. I never bore people with my problems,’ she said. They heard the footsteps.
‘Well I’ll be damned,’ Jason said, as he stood in the threshold, wearing light-blue canvas trousers and a shirt that had the colour and texture of sand. Ellen stood back, to let him enter.
‘There’s my boy,’ Gwyn said and put her hand out, and she rose and they made an arch with hands and their arms and he sang, in a false hearty voice:
‘I will give thee a gold… en b… all,
If you will marry,
Marry, marry, marry,
If you will marry me.’
Their morning offering.
And she sang:
‘And I will take your golden ball
If you will marry, many, marry,’
and seeing that she teetered he lowered her arms and helped her to sit down again.
‘Where’ve you been? he asked.
‘Oh having a little breakfast and a little talk. She’s darling,’ she said, pointing to Ellen, reverting to her little-girl voice now. ‘I was jus’ saying if she ever comes to New York she’s got herself a friend. Hell she’s got herself a friend anyhow. And you know that blue wrap I have with the fox collar –’ she was gazing into his shifty eyes now, searching his face to know which of the little whores in slit skirts he’d slept with and how it had been – ‘well it’s hers when she gets to New York. Wouldn’t it look cute on her…?’
‘It looks cute on you, Mary Pickford,’ he said.
‘Mary Pickford,’ she said, affecting the deep husky voice now and laughing and pretending to be happy. Then pointing to the floor she said, ‘Looks like we weren’t behaving ourselves.’ And he sniffed and she sniffed and said the flowers smelt kinda nice.
‘You know what we’re going to do today,’ he said, and she looked at him with an obscene smile, licking her lips. He spoke very seriously:
‘We’re going to go out and get ourselves two fountain pens and you know what colour they’re going to be?’
‘Blue,’ she said.
‘Nope,’ he said. Then his answer was delivered to the nape of her neck, marked from stretching itself too hard.
‘ Gold,’ he said, ‘eighteen-carat gold.’ And they were so busy celebrating the fountain pens that they did not notice Ellen clutch her handbag tighter, wave a little embarrassed goodbye and slip away.
She took one look at Sidney, glad now that his door opened stealthily. He was as she left him, his eyes closed, his yellow face on the muslin pillow, the sheet folded back under his chin, laid out like a corpse. But he was breathing. Her own breath held, she listened joyously for his and smiled and thanked God for the narrow escape. She thought she might run into Bobby on the stairs but it was too early and not even the servants were yet stirring.
Outside under the rinsed blue sky the lawn and flowerbeds were moist. But the road had dried off and except for the freshness in the air it would have been impossible to say there was a storm. She took the road that they had climbed the previous night, walking quickly at first. She kept hurrying to bends, only to see other bends a little ahead of her. Where the walls were high she lost the sea. Palm trees went straight up, higher than the walls, but the branches never interlocked so that there was no shade. Only the fig trees looked remotely like trees. The poppies growing out of the walls were crepe-paper flowers. Sometimes she plucked one and smelt it, then tore its paper face between her fingers. It was getting hot. On the prow of a hill she stood and unhooked her brassière. Down below, it was impossible to say how far below, she could see a village where she hoped to catch a bus that would take her back to her hotel. Already she felt better because she’d decided to go home that day. The feeling of disappointment over losing the actor had left her and the nausea of Sidney and the sadness of the sad woman; they’d all gone out of her life, she was safe, she was going home to her son. Sometimes she ran and then again she had to stand and catch her breath, but all the time she was making headway.
Chapter Thirteen
BUT IT DID NOT work out like that at all. After she got back to her hotel she fell asleep. The journey had taken hours between walking to a village, catching a bus to Cannes and then waiting for another bus to her own town. When she got back at noon the heat was brutal. Even the road-menders who were black from sun looked up at it, apprehensive, as if it were going to burst over their heads. They skulked under trees to eat lunch. The light was zinc, shutters were being folded over to keep it out, shops closing. The only cool things were the cool silk dresses in the shop windows, under the awnings. Coming out of the Travel Office, Ellen looked at them with longing, she might buy one if she had enough money left. There was no seat on the plane that day but if a cancellation came through they would ring. Then she would pay her bill, buy a toy for her son and if possible one of those lovely cool dresses. There were little insects in the air. Outside a restaurant a young boy went by with a spray gun, pumping a liquid out. She could taste the chemical in her mouth and that made her feel hotter still. He was a tall boy with a curiously dazed expression and he did not smile as she went by. She liked the boys who did not smile at her. In a way she wished that he had.
Back at the hotel she undressed, lay on her bed and fell fast asleep.
Wakened by a knock she came to, thinking it was her son, and then realizing her surroundings she thought it was the room-boy and put her hands across her breasts to guard them.
‘It’s me, honey.’
It took her seconds to recognize the voice as being Denise’s.
‘It’s you, honey,’ she said acidly. Her head pained and she had a terrible thirst.
‘Oh come on, don’t be mad at me, I didn’t know where I was…’ Denise said. Rather than have their night’s history delivered in the corridor Ellen opened the door and let the girl in. She was wearing a grey dress and looked sober.
‘Prodigal,’ Ellen said.
‘Honest…’ Denise said and paused. Her voice was low as if she was talking in a church. Whatever occurred it had improved her face, given it back its childhood curves. Ellen felt a moment’s gladness on account of this and a small smile escaped from her thin, boned face. How elementary the aids to happiness. Little liver pills. Winning money. But much more so, an embrace, or a proposition, or a night’s panting. The great brainwash began in childhood. Slipped in between the catechism advocating chastity for women was the secret message that a man and a man’s body was the true and absolute propitiation.
‘So you’re not mad,’ Denise said, relieved by the smile. Ellen re-hardened. They must not get friendly or she might be obliged to hear the one thing that could stab her.
‘It was just another of those stupid, crowd-scene nights…’ Ellen said, looking abstractedly round the room as if there were something she had to locate. Oh for humility. Why could she not say that the gathering first enthralled her and later sickened her because her little-girl dream had not come to pass. Denise was rattling on:
‘I looked for you and suddenly you weren’t there, and then someone’s bringing me up steps and more steps, it’s like the Eiffel Tower only worse and I’m in bed stroking his hair and I’m saying, Frankie…’
‘Who’s Frankie?’ Ellen said, caustic again. She was in charge of this girl as she never suspected she could be.
‘Frankie’s my…was my beau.’
‘So you slept with our hero?’ Ellen said. ‘You could sell it to the magazines, call them long distance, reverse the charges…’
‘Listen,’ Denise said, less placatory now, ‘stop it. I got the understudy, some slob…’
Whether it was true or not, Ellen felt enormous relief. She moved about now, taking dresses off their hangers, waving them saying, ‘I’m off, I’m off…’
‘ I thought you were nice when I first saw you…’
‘Nice?’ Ellen said as if it were a dirty word. There was a long ash on her cigarette and she speculated how many minutes she could go without tipping it. She made a production out of just packing.
‘Don’t you want to ask me,’ Denise said following her.
‘You were raped,’ Ellen said, ‘and it was your father, sorry, your stepfather, and ever since when you meet men…’ and as she talked she looked and saw the thick face weaken as if it were being pulped and she thought, ‘How hard I have become, how hard,’ and she stopped. The girl opposite her in the grey dress was on the verge of awful, humiliating tears. Ellen felt tears come in her own eyes, and they looked at each other and laughed a little behind their tears. Denise sat down. Ellen hid her face by delving into the suitcase. They would not cry. She spoke for them both. On the contrary they would have a drink sen
t up and they would drink to women alone, to women’s solely noble hour without the company of men to vie for. She ordered two champagne cocktails and asked the operator to get the Travel Office again. She was really impatient to get home.
‘You can’t go…’Denise said. ‘It’s too soon, it’s still August. August is the month.’ She proclaimed it as if she was also in need of reassuring herself.
‘The wicked month,’ Ellen said, thinking of her own pathetic struggles towards wickedness. She could see Sidney’s face close to death, on the starched pillow; and the violinist behind the camera stocking up with titillation for the winter months.
‘I have to go, I have a son,’ she said, for no apparent reason. And again, for no better reason, she added, ‘His name is Mark but we call him Rock.’
‘You’re crazy about kids?’ Denise asked, threatened.
‘Not really,’ Ellen said and recalled a story she had been told of a woman who locked her son into a bathroom and of the child subsequently boring a hole through the wall and Ellen herself asking very coldly if it had been a tiled wall because in that case the child’s persistence was greater.
‘I’m crazy about him, but nothing else much,’ Ellen said, picking up clothes she had never worn and stuffing them purposefully into the fibre suitcase. Better to have bought a decent case. Her peasant origins coming out again. Caught napping.
‘If you tell yourself you don’t care, then you become like that,’ she said, flatly.
‘It’s all slightly above my head,’ Denise said. ‘But what’s your other name anyhow ?’
‘Ellen. Ellen Sage. Sage means wise or something like that.’
‘I have a sneaking suspicion you’re a nice girl,’ Denise said as the boy knocked and came in with the drinks. They drank to that, to being nice girls, no matter what. They drank quickly and then as Ellen munched the cherry off the skewer Denise looked at hers and ran it over her face and said very abruptly, ‘You got a guy then, or what?’