August Is a Wicked Month

by Edna O'Brien

  ‘I want my handbag.’ They made no answer.

  ‘Can you please hand me out my handbag?’ she said, galled by their ill manners. She waited, knowing she could not retreat, and after a decent interval she pushed the door and entered the room.

  In the half-light she saw the bed, the covers in a mound, then her eyes travelled farther up and she saw the empty dented shapes of big, square, white pillows and clicking on the light she saw how trespassed the bed had been and how empty it was. It was the emptiest bed she’d ever seen. They’d gone. The window was open wide and she remembered having heard the footsteps and the thud and she stood staring at the empty bed as if she could not think what to tell herself to do next. Then she flung herself on it, face down, hitting, pounding, cursing and crying with her fists and with her eyes, and when the temper had passed she lay on her back and pulled the sheet up over herself, and stretching and tensing her legs she felt the smooth, silk feel of the sheet over her.

  When she was calm she got up and opened his bureau drawers. She picked out several silk handkerchiefs but just tossed them and threw them back, and his shirts were too big for her and the silver brush set was in such awful taste she would not be bothered to steal it. But she wanted to violate the place in some way. She thought, ‘What can I do to this house short of burning it?’ She passed water and left the lavatory unflushed and then drank liquor straight from the bottle and poured what she could not drink down a sink. She was ready to go. She dialled the operator to ask about a taxi and then she said, into the telephone, ‘Do you speak English by any chance?’ and so surprised was she when the girl said ‘yes’ that without having intended to she asked for her husband’s London number. She would ask him to meet her at the airport. She would see her son sooner in that way and hand him the big present and hug him and they would all go out to tea. They might even get on well. He and her. They would compare holidays; she would hold back the sordid bit. Who knows, they might even look in each other’s faces and see something they cherished. Rock would have the present on the table. He would eat several cakes. If possible she would pay the bill. They would be happy. Even briefly happy. As she thought this she was fitting on a blue suede jacket of Bobby’s and wondering if she could have the sleeves shortened when the call came through and she heard two voices, one French, the other English, talking in French and then the English voice talking to her directly in English, and then to her amazement her husband at the other end saying,

  ‘Where are you?’

  ‘I’m in France,’ she said, ‘I was lonely so I came away for a little holiday.’

  He was saying how he had put SOS bulletins all over England for her and she thought for an insane second that he had missed her so desperately he was calling her back, and then she knew that his voice was furious and she said, ‘What?’

  ‘Mark,’ he said, ‘got killed.’ He never used the pet-name of Rock.

  ‘What?’ she said again. He must be out of his mind. She shouted at him to speak up, to explain himself.

  ‘Where is he?’ she said, not waiting for his reply.

  ‘He got killed,’ he said, ‘on the road. A car ran over him.’

  ‘God almighty,’ she said. ‘Why didn’t you find me? ‘

  ‘There has been an SOS out for you for three days,’ he said. ‘How were we to know you were vacationing?’

  ‘Three days, where is he?’ she said again. ‘In hospital?’

  ‘I told you, he’s dead.’

  ‘And buried?’ she said, as if only by being buried was his death absolute. He said yes, buried.

  ‘How could you bury him without me?’ she said.

  ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘it’s not the time for feeling injured. I saw him, I was with him…’

  ‘And why didn’t you get killed?’ she thought bitterly. She asked where he was buried.

  ‘In Wales,’ he said, ‘where we were.’

  ‘But how…how?’

  ‘He went for the milk, he went every morning…’

  ‘You fool, too lazy to go yourself,’ she said, and thought hatefully of the various tins of plaster and the small useless bottles of medicine that he’d transferred from the larger bottles. A spume of hatred and blame fell out of her mouth and if there was one pleasure in the world that she could have relished at that moment it would have been the pleasure of being able at last to blame him for the most terrible crime possible. Their roles at last reversed!

  ‘Listen,’ he said. ‘Listen, listen.’

  ‘ You killed him,’ she said. ‘You did it, it was your fault.’

  ‘Thank you,’ he said, ‘for your charity,’ and she knew it was awful for him too and she felt a little sorry. ‘How bad was it?’ she said, in a different tone of voice.

  ‘I never saw him,’ he said. ‘They had to cover him up.’

  ‘Who covered him up?’ she said. That should be something only she could do.

  ‘A road-mender on his way to work.’

  ‘Was his head…?’ she asked, not daring to bring herself to use the word split.

  ‘Everything,’ he said, ‘was mutilated,’ and she knew without asking that he’d possibly been put into the coffin like that with the blanket over him holding the mutilated parts together.

  ‘Who was at the funeral?’ she said. The questions came automatically. They were not the questions she wanted to ask.

  ‘I was,’ he said, and she saw him before an open grave in a black coat, standing there for ever. The operator butted in to know if they were finished and she shouted no and asked him for God’s sake to tell her, to tell her everything, to stop making it worse by having to be asked every single question.

  ‘Do you think I’m able?’ he said. His voice was pitiful.

  ‘I’ll come back,’ she said. ‘I’ll get a plane tonight.’

  ‘I don’t want to see you,’ he said. ‘You’re the last person.’

  ‘But we have to help one another, we have to,’ she said.

  ‘Don’t come,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t see you,’ and then he told her he was going to ring off and he did. She realized that he had not asked where she was or anything about her. He was serious when he said he did not want to see her. She put the telephone back and stood absolutely still.

  It is always thought that in times of crisis people go wild, but she was not wild. She was calm and able to say to herself that she had killed her son. The logic was simple: if she’d never left her husband they would have holidayed together and she and the child would have gone for the milk and they would have stood, hands held, waiting for the car to go by and it would be something that flashed by leaving a cloud behind and they would have then crossed the road.

  Her hand had moved with the thought. It was opened out to grasp his, and looking at it empty she felt the first bit of physical torture that was to be the beginning of knowing he was dead. She held his face, his little neck, kissed his hair that was cut like a monk’s and pieced what she saw before her eyes with what her husband had said and she was not so calm then. She had to do something. She rushed through the room and corridors and past other rooms to where the servants were and told Antonio in one unhalting burst. He did not understand fully, but his dark, dour face darkened more and he stood up and gave her a drink of water and called his wife who was looking at television in the other room and his wife got the sense of it at once. Then there were a lot of footsteps hurrying along corridors and servants she’d never seen came to attend to her and she was given drink and put in a chair and out of nowhere Gwyn and Jason appeared with two other people, all of whom embraced her. Being with all these people helped because they were so strange and far away and they gave her mixtures of drink and pills that blurred what they said and what she told them. There was some talk of chartering a plane that night.

  ‘You’d better ring him,’ she said to Jason and gave him her husband’s telephone number. Jason was away for quite a while and when he came back he said it would be better not to charter the plane. Obviously he’d
made the telephone call and found her husband as hostile as she had found him. Jason kept saying it was an accident, a lousy accident. Someone asked stupidly if the name and number of the motorist who had killed the child was known. This practicality sent a shiver through them because they remembered the dead man on the road and how dead he’d been and how pointless it was to have his murderers standing by.

  ‘I don’t want to know who killed him,’ she said. They agreed, they said it didn’t pay to seek revenge. They gave her ‘Sweet-Dreams’ pills from a big bottle thus labelled and they moved in groups from room to room, searching out new chairs and new positions so that they could all be comfortable.

  ‘He was always on to me to get goldfish,’ Ellen said. Her son, she meant. One minute she was talking about that, one minute about her husband. Someone asked was he nice.

  ‘He looks sadder than he is,’ she said, but did not know what she meant. She began talking about her child again and told how he’d taken fright at a new frilly bedspread and cried out and said, ‘It might turn into a lady in the middle of the night,’ and then there was some rambling generalization from her about inherited groundless fear. Everyone nodded. Heads shook. They knew in their half-drunken senses that this time her fears were not groundless but had happened.

  ‘Death was never absolutely real before,’ she said. Her mother had died, of cancer, her father had died soon after, of neglect. She’d buried them, had a novena of masses offered, paid for the coffins, the hearses, and the barrels of porter drunk at their wake, cried, worn a black diamond on her sleeve and remembered their possible Purgatories in gloomy November, the month of the Holy Souls; but those deaths were merely something sad and uncomfortable, going on outside her. Her son’s was in her like a lancet, like a pain, she couldn’t stand it: she screamed. They converged on her again, pills, whisky, arms on her shoulders, a basin in case she was going to be sick, towels, cold-water compresses, perfume, a rosary from Gwyn, a cold crucifix brought to her lips. Somehow they got through the night. Spells of calmness and then an outburst and people running back and forth. Nobody had any sleep.

  ‘How old was he?’ It was morning and they were all seated at a breakfast table. She saw egg yolk spewing down the side of a silver egg cup.

  ‘Seven . . .’

  And that was all anyone could say.

  A while later they asked what they could do and she made a gesture that signified she did not know. When the cloth was removed she did not rise, nor did they, and she looked at the satin-wood table and thought how long it would be before they would grow tired of condolences and offer to take her back to the hotel and then on to the airport.

  What can we get you?’ they said. ‘Flowers?’ and although she shook her head and meant no, they sent flowers later that day after they had carted her back to her hotel. She wanted to go back, she said, to stay in the hotel for one night to live it out, alone.

  ‘She wants to be alone,’ they said and she knew they were weary of keeping vigil with her. Anyhow what could they do? The flowers came. Two enormous bouquets: white flowers and blue flowers. She imagined they’d put some thought into it and they did not want these flowers to look gay. She placed them on the bed and saw them as wreaths, although they were not circular-shaped.

  ‘Dead,’ she said to Maurice the room-boy, who stood looking at the flowers on the bed but could not understand her tears.

  ‘Enfant,’ she said, and cradled a child in her arms so that he would understand. He stood looking at her but he did not know what to say. He’d come with whisky. Two glasses of it. She took one glass and began to drink. He stood watching, his hands folded. Then he picked up her suitcase, asking if she wished to leave soon.

  ‘No,’ she said, shaking her head, ‘I’m not going.’ It was too much trouble to explain that they’d buried the child, that there was nothing to go home to. After a while he left, backing out of the room nervously, as if he were frightened of being imprisoned there. She opened the window fully, then pulled at the cords until the shutters fell down and darkness flooded the room. She undressed and got into bed and drank from the second glass of whisky. She did not have to drink it all. The pills and the crying and the previous drink made her head swim and soon she was in a fevered sleep. It was not until the paper thudded through next morning that she stirred. Thick with hangover, and muddle she opened and read:

  NUNS IN TAKEOVER BID

  DEADLOCK IN THE BANANA WAR

  First memory returned and then grief: as if in sleep she had thrown off the agony the way she’d stepped out of her uncomfortable shoes. The thought of England and of having to go home sent a cold shiver of terror through her. She bundled the paper in her hand, crumpling it so that it would be impossible to read at any hour of the day, and she reached for the drink left from the previous night and rang down for tea.

  She did not pack or go home that day either. In the afternoon she forced herself to get up and go out and then impulsively she asked in a shop where it said ‘Ici on parle. anglais‘ if there was a Catholic church near. For she clung with her expiring virtue to habits like that. It was a small church with palm trees around it and the side door was open. She knelt for a while on the tiled floor near the water font, blessing herself over and over again with the Holy Water, saying ‘Lord have mercy on him’, each time. It was cool in the chapel and difficult to understand that outside the summer world still went on, the bodies still offered themselves up to the sun, car seats roasted, shutters were being closed, towels put out on balconies and the snow on the mountains beyond blindingly white. Her praying was automatic: it meant nothing. It was to make faith come. But no relief descended from the blistering heavens and she arose with grazed knees – sand had been walked into the tiles – and a vague feeling of having committed sacrilege for having prayed at all. She ought to besdr herself and go home to England, but her limbs were like lymph and she could barely drag herself around.

  Chapter Fifteen

  AND THEN A STRANGE thing happened. She entered the false lull that sometimes follows upon shock. She did not go home. She did not want to go home. By staying there she did not have to face calamity. She neither thought her son was dead nor was alive. She thought nothing. ‘I’ll stay one more day,’ she would say, and mean it, but next day she was uttering the same thing. It was like being another person. She did not struggle. In the numbness of her flesh she could feel no reaction except a new and fanatic urgency to get sunburnt. She was the first out each morning, hurrying through the twilight of trees to sink on to the mattress which she had permanently booked. A few feet from the water. She had only to stretch her toe for the water to curl over it. An Arab with treacherous black-eyed cunning went by selling goat-skins, but never troubled her; another man came with dampened red roses in tight bunches of probably a dozen, and a third carried English papers and called out their names, but she bought nothing. She said nothing. When the English group smiled at her she looked abstracted. The woman with the lorgnette had grown tired of propositioning. They were merely living ghosts to Ellen. She’d bought new sunglasses with deep-blue tinted lenses and the effect was like being enclosed and swimming in an underground grotto with the soft noise of eddying water to lull the senses. No trouble from people. Once the glasses slipped down on her nose and she caught sight of a Scottish girl with a black crescent on her pink and freckled arm where teeth had sunk in. She’d seen the girl hover around the violinist in the lobby at night and heard her address him in garbled French. When Ellen saw that bite she felt distaste and, recalling the crudeness of day-to-day encounters, she quickly restored her glasses, retreating back to the safety of her grotto. The sun, the numbing sun was all she craved. Stretching her legs full length she would close her eyes and let it soak into her and pray for it to get stronger and stronger so that all the other people would flee and it would focus on her alone. She believed other people’s presence was taking some of the fire from her. It was not enough that her outer skin should be burnt, she wanted it to penetrate r
ight through her, to flow into her limbs as pure fire and become part of her energy. She talked to no one now, she looked at no one; sometimes through her lenses she would see people going by, shadows that came between her and the sun, and she never even speculated whether they were men or women. Gradually she altered. Her skin changed to red-gold, the colour deepening each day and at night she would go to sleep thinking only of the morning and the next day’s baptism of fire. She ought to be feeling sad. She ought to be going home. She ought to be weeping. But she refused to think outside the environment of white, wan, listless-making heat.

  Sometimes of course thoughts forced through, like damp seeping through stone walls or weeds bursting out of a slate roof. Then it hit her. She saw him, felt him, heard his voice:

  ‘The most bloodthirsty animal is one and a half inches long. It is the common shrew.’

  This and many scraps of knowledge like confetti fluttering around in his busy scatter-brain. They all spoke to her. A succession of his voices as they changed through the years: when he couldn’t pronounce R, the lisp when he lost a tooth, the big, portmanteau words he loved, whispers of little feats to George in bed at night. The time he’d said, ‘George is having a high and mighty piss contest,’ and checked her face to find traces of anger, and seeing none went on repeating the word ‘piss’ with the jubilance possible only to the very innocent. She had horror images of his body in pieces all over the road and his arms wrenched off and thrown there. Then in her mind she would try screwing the arms back on as if they were dolls’ arms. Piecing him together.