by Edna O'Brien
‘Is the house for sale?’ she asked the neighbour.
‘Not that we know of,’ the neighbour said, frantic to ask questions, eyeing Ellen’s body as if there was something to be learnt from it.
‘Will you let me know if it is?’ Ellen said, and gave her office telephone number. There was a set of old teaspoons in there she wanted. Her key to the house was no use because he had the locks changed after she left him. The teaspoons were all she coveted now, although when she left him she had tried to get back in and read his mind by the memos he wrote for himself on calendars, by the number of dirty cups on the table, by the squashed state of cushions in chairs. That was all behind her. The teaspoons were a different matter. They were silver, but that was not the point, because they were dented. Her mother had sent them as a wedding present, although she’d fallen out with her daughter for marrying a heathen. She sent the gift and put no name to it. Her mother had stolen them from the big house where she worked, because the initials were there for all to see, and Ellen thought it a very noble thing for her mother to have done. An actual gift. This was all she wanted from her early life, and she would have liked one pleasant photograph of her husband and of course the child’s belongings. Fragments were enough: in time those people who had meant everything to her and consumed her thoughts and inflamed her passions, those same people would become fragmented too and days would go by and she would not think about any of them. Her son would be the last to be relinquished but he would go, just as he would have gone of his own volition, if he had lived. Life had rendered her down: she no longer cherished any illusions about everlasting love, or about steadfastness.
‘Just a couple of odds and ends I wanted to pick up,’ she said.
‘Of course, it’s only natural, every woman has her souvenirs,’ the neighbour said. But the look in her eye was saying, ‘Your son is dead and you’re still alive, what a heartless woman you must be.’
‘And of course I have to arrange for a tombstone,’ Ellen said, taking offence at the woman’s unspoken thoughts. She had already decided on a rock, a strong, jagged rock the colour of blue slate. In a week or two she would take a train down there, and if she found his father had arranged for anything different she would have to usurp those arrangements. A rock was the most fitting thing for a young grave. A rock would outlast them all. And no inscription. Nothing soppy.
‘Of course, the poor little chap,’ the neighbour was saying. ‘His ball came over the hedge one day, and he asked ever so…’
Ellen had to go. With a sudden bolting move she excused herself. The neighbour must have thought her very callous. Yes, she was callous, she was hurrying away to find a doctor to cure herself. Already Bobby meant nothing, he had merely been the bearer of infection. The three-wise-men fable in reverse. Not that she blamed him. Blame, like nostalgia, was a sensation she had dispensed with. Trivial, all of these tags, when set against the huge accident of being alive or not. The days on the beach were some spent dream, only her disease was real, and the air around her and the stones of the road, and cars going by.
The neighbour closed the door hurriedly. Probably ran to tell her husband the news.
Why Ellen rang Hugh Whistler she was never sure. It certainly was not to start up anything romantic. On the telephone she thanked him for both telegrams, and hearing his voice she thought how English and formal and uninspired he was. She felt the same sort of relief as she had experienced outside her husband’s over-grown home. She no longer cared about whom he loved or whom he saw, she had no need of him, no innuendo slipped into the conversation, she simply answered drab questions and asked others. It was a new sensation, indifference; it was like observing a party as one passed by a sleek and softly lit front room and having no feeling of regret about being uninvited because to walk the streets alone provided a greater and surer pleasure.
‘Perhaps through the week,’ she said. He was asking when they could meet. She dallied. He insisted on visiting her later that night when his newspaper was put to bed.
She could see that her rude glow of health shocked him. When he looked at her face, he gasped. And the whites of her eyes! That clear pale-blue of baby’s eyes.
‘It’s all out of bottles, sun lotion, rouge, belladonna, everything…’ The apology wrung from him a smile.
‘It was terrible,’ he said as he kissed her cheek.
‘It is terrible,’ she said. Between the time she came back from her husband’s house and waited for him the hours had been savage. She went around and beat upholstered chairs with her fists and knocked her forehead against various walls hoping to knock herself unconscious.
‘How are you?’ she said. He looked pale, aged. It did not take long to learn why. His girl friend had left. Another man. His double really.
‘When will men and women get used to being alone?’ she said.
‘She resented my children,’ he said and was off on some long story about how his children came for breakfast once a month and two of them fancied hot milk on their cereal but she insisted they have cold milk.
‘Wouldn’t take the trouble to heat it,’ he said.
‘Perhaps she thought it might kill the vitamins,’ Ellen said, not so much to defend the woman but because she’d taken to finding numerous rational reasons for the most absurd behaviour. He looked at her startled. Since when had she become so matter of fact? Then, remembering his duties as a mourner, he said,
‘Do you want to tell me about it? ‘
He was on the edge of the chaise, totally ill at ease, not even drinking the whisky she had given him. It was strange to see his beautiful face again and know that what once thrilled and stirred her now only created a void. As if she had become another person. He patted the blue velveteen beside him and asked her to sit.
‘I’ll sit here,’ she said. She could not trust herself to be close to him because of the other matter.
‘You would be more at ease in my arms.’
To that she closed her eyes nervously and started sniffing to make sure there was no odour. At least the whisky smell was all pervasive.
‘I wouldn’t,’ she said. Her monstrous affliction had put her out of the reach of other people. It was funny to think that insanity was the downfall that used to dog her, of how she might go raving mad like the two women who thrust themselves into the solitary lake. But this was something less pitiful; contagious, and unforgivable in fact. Nothing moved or spoke to her from the real world now unless she saw in it an echo of her own cast-away plight. There could be no chance that anyone would want to help her, any more than she had helped her own son. Fate. Or, created by herself, and her own willful follies. Either way these things had all happened and were floating under her memory’s eye and would be sealed eventually by her death. Dumb and insensible to the call of friendship, sex, whisky, comfort, she could only contain herself by repeating to herself that there were in the world strangers, doctors, science, drugs – things that could cure her body at least. She thought of the Confessional and that black grille through which she used to murmur ‘I cursed, I told lies, I had bad thoughts,’ and she remembered that she never came away feeling absolved no matter how great the priest’s strictures had been or how painful the penance. Perhaps it was the same with bodily ailments. Her stomach still bore the pitter-patter marks of muscles strained in childbearing, and a neck operation had left a permanent scar. Nothing healed.
‘You would,’ he said, ‘because I want you more than the last time I saw you.’
The words couldn’t have surprised her more. She opened her eyes and smiled on him.
‘You don’t believe it,’ he said. She thought back to their long day together, their vigil over the wall, the hours in bed, their wet, contented, joined-together bodies and how she’d yearned about his going away, wanting it almost as much as she dreaded it. How nice it would be to snuggle down with him and feel newly warm and welcome it for its own brief passing sake rather than as a life investment. Impossible! Her eyes brimmed with tears. T
he first in weeks.
‘What is it?’ he said. He put his hand out, sweetly and gently, to steer her from the high-backed chair to the place next to him on the velveteen chaise. A nest. But she dare not risk it. She had washed before he came, but it was still chancy. Also she found that in tense situations it became worse, as if she were crying down there. Across the room, while she sobbed a bit, he talked about many things: the weather, the editorial he had written that night, the kind of car he planned to buy in the autumn. But he kept coming back to it, to them, to his need for her to sit close to him.
‘I thought about you,’ he said. ‘Not just because your son got killed, but about…everything.’ She looked at his pale, earnest face. His tongue moistened his top lip, it was a habit of his. She had not thought of him once. Not once. That was her crime. Under the soft skin and behind the big, melting eyes, her heart was like a nutmeg. Some of it had been grated by life but the very centre never really surrendered to anyone, not to the mother who stole for her, nor to the drunken father, nor to her far-seeing but poisoned husband, and not to the child in the way it should have. No wonder she clung to the parable about white peaches.
‘You know what I want,’ she said. He came and knelt near her and gave her the cigarette he had just lit. She drew her dress farther down over her legs and curled those legs under the chair, shrivelling away from him.
‘I’m not going to rape you,’ he said. ‘I would only make love to you.’
‘You know what I want,’ she said again. ‘To cease to be me.’
He said nonsense, that she was one of the sweetest girls he ever met. The mean joys of vanity possessed her for a moment and then she stopped listening to him and said, to herself, ‘I want to love someone or something, so utterly, and to ask for nothing in return and to die for loving that thing if necessary.’ He crushed her hands, asked her to come back to him, say something.
‘I want to love someone other than myself,’ she said.
‘We all do that a little,’ he said. He was such a flat person to talk to.
‘Pure love.’ It sounded pompous, and she drank from the whisky glass to give some ordinariness to the occasion.
‘It’s your Roman Catholicity,’ he said.
‘It’s how I feel,’ she said flatly. Then smiled. He put his face to her hands and kissed them and looked at them as if he was looking at a clump of flowers.
‘Don’t,’ she said. She kept backing into the chair.
‘Is it because of his death?’ he said.
‘No, I slept with everyone in France, tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor…’ she said, as much to flagellate herself as to disillusion him.
‘You poor girl,’ he said, because of course he did not believe her. ‘I must decide for us both.’
‘You can’t decide for me, no one can,’ she said. He got himself another drink, he walked around, he stood behind her chair and embraced her. She thought, ‘If he finds out by coming near me he will shun me for ever.’ Every time he touched her she felt he was coming nearer to finding out her shame.
‘Hugh,’ she said, not having to look at him because he was behind her, ‘you’ll have to go.’
‘You want me to go?’ he said.
‘Yes.’
She felt him move and heard him put the glass down. He picked up his lighter and his tie which he’d taken off because the night was so warm.
‘Maybe in a month or two, or at Christmas, we’ll make candles,’ she said, trying to be cheerful. He took the packet of French cigarettes and pushed back the ones that had fallen out and put them in his pocket.
‘Can you leave me a cigarette for the morning?’ she said. He left the whole packet.
‘Only one,’ she said.
‘I’ll get some when I go out,’ and he gave a little smile of forgiveness. He was handsome. And not impatient. And there were as many lovable girls in the world as there are stars in the December sky. The futility of what was happening seemed to take her by the throat. And the irony. She felt she might be sick and she had only one idea: to get him out, to wash herself again and again and see it through.
Within a few days she rang a friend who put her on to a nice lady doctor in a very exclusive part of outer London. There was a little fur mouse as a mascot on the doctor’s table and Ellen sat eyeing the mouse and telling her story as calmly as she could. She felt inhibited.
‘This is not your husband.’
‘No, it was not my husband.’
The lady doctor made notes and took records: her age, her pregnancy, her present symptoms, and then sat her on the couch. Always at the prospect of being medically examined she cried. This time was no exception, and her limbs tightened.
‘Well if you must be careless you’ve got to pay,’ the lady doctor said grimly as she probed first with a rubber-gloved finger and then with a cold metal instrument. It hurt. In all she did seven tests and by the end of the examination Ellen was quite reconciled to having seven different diseases. Except that she would not know for a few days. Meanwhile at work she wore heavy skirts and two pairs of knickers to insulate herself.
On her second visit she sat once again beholding the mouse and the grim little fat-chested woman.
‘I’ve had a letter,’ the woman said, holding it. ‘And it appears there is a secondary infection, but no gonorrhoea infection…’
‘After all my worrying,’ Ellen said. She felt a bit cheated but relieved all the same. In fact for a minute there was a danger that she might have done something disgraceful like clapping. She got a prescription for pills and a violet lotion, and going out she thought gladly how the lotion would stain all her pants and the stains in themselves would be a testimony of mourning. Ugly irregular purple shapes.
She walked part of the way home across a common, holding the medicine parcel tight. The birches were turning, their leaves like sovereigns. Tufts of rough grass sprouted ochre, the ground beneath was a worn, faded yellow, the light in the air mellow. She had been walking fast. She stopped herself and stood: no need to hurry now, nothing to hurry to, she breathed, not happy, not unhappy – if the days were never to be quite so lustrous-bright again, equally so the nights would not be as black. Or so she liked to think. Leaves fell, she watched them drop off, curl down and lodge in a bed of grass, still heavy with moisture, they were falling all around her, simple and unceremonious; for a month or two at least, a cool and lovely autumn.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
copyright © 1965 by Edna O’Brien
cover design by Angela Goddard
978-1-4532-4732-7
This edition published in 2012 by Open Road Integrated Media
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