by Edna O'Brien
Well, of course, when I went downstairs the plumber took one look at me and said, “You could do with a cup of tea.” He actually had tea made. So I took it and stood there warming my child-sized hands around the barrel of the brown mug. Suddenly, swiftly, I remembered my lover measuring our hands when we were lying in bed and saying that mine were no bigger than his daughter’s. And then I had another and less edifying memory about hands. It was the time we met when he was visibly distressed because he’d caught those same daughter’s hands in a motorcar door. The fingers had not been broken but were badly bruised, and he felt awful about it and hoped his daughter would forgive him. Upon being told the story, I bolted off into an anecdote about almost losing my fingers in the door of someone’s Jaguar. It was pointless, although a listener might infer from it that I was a boastful and heartless girl. I would have been sorry for any child whose fingers were caught in a motorcar door, but at that moment I was trying to recall him to the hidden world of him and me. Perhaps it was one of the things that made him like me less. Perhaps it was then he resolved to end the affair. I was about to say this to the plumber, to warn him about so-called love often hardening the heart, but like the violets, it is something that can miss awfully, and when it does two people are mortally embarrassed. He’d put sugar in my tea and I found it sickly.
“I want you to help me,” I said.
“Anything,” he said. I ought to know that. We were friends. He would do the pipes tastefully. The pipes would be little works of art and the radiators painted to match the walls.
“You may think I will paint these white, but in fact they will be light ivory,” he said. The whitewash on the kitchen walls had yellowed a bit.
“I want to do myself in,” I said hurriedly.
“Good God,” he said, and then burst out laughing. He always knew I was dramatic. Then he looked at me, and obviously my face was a revelation. For one thing I could not control my breathing. He put his arm around me and led me into the sitting room and we had a drink. I knew he liked drink and thought, It’s an ill wind that doesn’t blow some good. The maddening thing was that I kept thinking a live person’s thoughts. He said I had so much to live for. “A young girl like you—people wanting your autograph, a lovely new car,” he said.
“It’s all …” I groped for the word. I had meant to say “meaningless,” but “cruel” was the word that came out.
“And your boys,” he said. “What about your boys?” He had seen photographs of them, and once I’d read him a letter from one of them. The word “cruel” seemed to be blazing in my head. It screamed at me from every corner of the room. To avoid his glance, I looked down at the sleeve of my angora jersey and methodically began picking off pieces of fluff and rolling them into a little ball.
There was a moment’s pause.
“This is an unlucky road. You’re the third,” he said.
“The third what?” I said, industriously piling the black fluff into my palm.
“A woman farther up; her husband was a bandleader, used to be out late. One night she went to the dance hall and saw him with another girl; she came home and did it straightaway.”
“Gas?” I asked, genuinely curious.
“No, sedation,” he said, and was off on another story about a girl who’d gassed herself and was found by him because he was in the house treating dry rot at the time. “Naked, except for a jersey,” he said, and speculated on why she should be attired like that. His manner changed considerably as he recalled how he went into the house, smelled gas, and searched it out.
I looked at him. His face was grave. He had scaled eyelids. I had never looked at him so closely before. “Poor Michael,” I said. A feeble apology. I was thinking that if he had abetted my suicide he would then have been committed to the memory of it.
“A lovely young girl,” he said, wistful.
“Poor girl,” I said, mustering up pity.
There seemed to be nothing else to say. He had shamed me out of it. I stood up and made an effort at normality—I took some glasses off a side table and moved in the direction of the kitchen. If dirty glasses are any proof of drinking, then quite a lot of it had been done by me over the past few days.
“Well,” he said, and rose and sighed. He admitted to feeling pleased with himself.
As it happened, there would have been a secondary crisis that day. Although my children were due to return to their father, he rang to say that the older boy had a temperature, and since—though he did not say this—he could not take care of a sick child, he would be obliged to bring them to my house. They arrived in the afternoon. I was waiting inside the door, with my face heavily made up to disguise my distress. The sick boy had a blanket draped over his tweed coat and one of his father’s scarves around his face. When I embraced him, he began to cry. The younger boy went around the house to make sure that everything was as he had last seen it. Normally I had presents for them on their return home, but I had neglected it on this occasion, and consequently they were a little downcast.
“Tomorrow,” I said.
“Why are there tears in your eyes?” the sick boy asked as I undressed him.
“Because you are sick,” I said, telling a half-truth.
“Oh, Mamsies,” he said, calling me by a name he had used for years. He put his arms around me and we both began to cry. I felt he was crying for the numerous unguessed afflictions that the circumstances of a broken home would impose upon him. It was strange and unsatisfying to hold him in my arms, when over the months I had got used to my lover’s size—the width of his shoulders, the exact height of his body, which obliged me to stand on tiptoe so that our limbs could correspond perfectly. Holding my son, I was conscious only of how small he was and how tenaciously he clung.
The younger boy and I sat in the bedroom and played a game which entailed reading out questions such as “A river?” “A famous footballer?” and then spinning a disk until it steadied down at one letter and using that letter as the first initial of the river or the famous footballer or whatever the question called for. I was quite slow at it, and so was the sick boy. His brother won easily, although I had asked him to let the invalid win. Children are callous.
We all jumped when the heating came on, because the boiler, from the basement just underneath, gave an almighty churning noise and made the kind of sudden erupting move I had wanted to make that morning when I stood at the bedroom window and tried to pitch myself out. As a special surprise and to cheer me up, the plumber had called in two of his mates, and among them they got the job finished. To make us warm and happy, as he put it when he came to the bedroom to tell me. It was an awkward moment I’d avoided him since our morning’s drama. At teatime I’d even left his tea on a tray out on the landing. Would he tell other people how I had asked him to be my murderer? Would he have recognized it as that? I gave him and his friends a drink, and they stood uncomfortably in the children’s bedroom and looked at the little boy’s flushed face and said he would soon be better. What else could they say!
For the remainder of the evening, the boys and I played the quiz game over and over again, and just before they went to sleep I read them an adventure story. In the morning they both had temperatures. I was busy nursing them for the next couple of weeks. I made beef tea a lot and broke bread into it and coaxed them to swallow those sops of savory bread. They were constantly asking to be entertained. The only thing I could think of in the way of facts were particles of nature lore I had gleaned from one of my colleagues in the television canteen. Even with embellishing, it took not more than two minutes to tell my children: of a storm of butterflies in Venezuela, of animals called sloths that are so lazy they hang from trees and become covered with moss, and of how the sparrows in England sing different from the sparrows in Paris.
“More,” they would say. “More, more.” Then we would have to play that silly game again or embark upon another adventure story.
At these times I did not allow my mind to wander, but in the eve
nings, when their father came, I used to withdraw to the sitting room and have a drink. Well, that was disastrous. The leisure enabled me to brood; also, I have very weak bulbs in the lamps and the dimness gives the room a quality that induces reminiscence. I would be transported back. I enacted various kinds of reunion with my lover, but my favorite one was an unexpected meeting in one of those tiled, inhuman, pedestrian subways and running toward each other and finding ourselves at a stairway which said (one in London actually does say), TO CENTRAL ISLAND ONLY, and laughing as we leaped up those stairs propelled by miraculous wings. In less indulgent phases, I regretted that we hadn’t seen more sunsets, or cigarette advertisements, or something, because in memory our numerous meetings became one long uninterrupted state of lovemaking without the ordinariness of things in between to fasten those peaks. The days, the nights with him, seemed to have been sandwiched into a long, beautiful, but single night, instead of being stretched to the seventeen occasions it actually was. Ah, vanished peaks. Once I was so sure that he had come into the room that I tore off a segment of an orange I had just peeled, and handed it to him.
But from the other room I heard the low, assured voice of the children’s father delivering information with the self-importance of a man delivering dogmas, and I shuddered at the degree of poison that lay between us when we’d once professed to love. Plagued love. Then, some of the feeling I had for my husband transferred itself to my lover, and I reasoned with myself that the letter in which he had professed to love me was sham, that he had merely written it when he thought he was free of me, but finding himself saddled once again, he withdrew and let me have the postcard. I was a stranger to myself. Hate was welling up. I wished multitudes of humiliation on him. I even plotted a dinner party that I would attend, having made sure that he was invited, and snubbing him throughout. My thoughts teetered between hate and the hope of something final between us, so that I would be certain of his feelings toward me. Even as I sat in a bus, an advertisement which caught my eye was immediately related to him. It said, DON’T PANIC, WE MEND, WE ADAPT, WE REMODEL. It was an advertisement for pearl stringing. I would mend and with vengeance.
I cannot say when it first began to happen, because that would be too drastic, and anyhow, I do not know. But the children were back at school, and we’d got over Christmas, and he and I had not exchanged cards. But I began to think less harshly of him. They were silly thoughts, really. I hoped he was having little pleasures like eating in restaurants, and clean socks, and red wine the temperature he liked it, and even—yes, even ecstasies in bed with his wife. These thoughts made me smile to myself inwardly, the new kind of smile I had discovered. I shuddered at the risk he’d ran by seeing me at all. Of course, the earlier injured thoughts battled with these new ones. It was like carrying a taper along a corridor where the drafts are fierce and the chances of it staying alight pretty meager. I thought of him and my children in the same instant, their little foibles became his: my children telling me elaborate lies about their sporting feats, his slight puffing when we climbed steps and his trying to conceal it. The age difference between us must have saddened him. It was then I think that I really fell in love with him. His courtship of me, his telegrams, his eventual departure, even our lovemaking were nothing compared with this new sensation. It rose like sap within me, it often made me cry, the fact that he could not benefit from it! The temptation to ring him had passed away.
His phone call came quite out of the blue. It was one of those times when I debated about answering it or not, because mostly I let it ring. He asked if we could meet, if, and he said this so gently, my nerves were steady enough. I said my nerves were never better. That was a liberty I had to take. We met in a café for tea. Toast again. Just like the beginning. He asked how I was. Remarked on my good complexion. Neither of us mentioned the incident of the postcard. Nor did he say what impulse had moved him to telephone. It may not have been impulse at all. He talked about his work and how busy he’d been, and then relayed a little story about taking an elderly aunt for a drive and driving so slowly that she asked him to please hurry up because she would have walked there quicker.
“You’ve recovered,” he said then, suddenly. I looked at his face. I could see it was on his mind.
“I’m over it,” I said, and dipped my finger into the sugar bowl and let him lick the white crystals off the tip of my finger. Poor man. I could not have told him anything else, he would not have understood. In a way it was like being with someone else. He was not the one who had folded back the bedspread and sucked me dry and left his cigar ash for preserving. He was the representative of that one.
“We’ll meet from time to time,” he said.
“Of course.” I must have looked dubious.
“Perhaps you don’t want to?”
“Whenever you feel you would like to.” I neither welcomed nor dreaded the thought. It would not make any difference to how I felt. That was the first time it occurred to me that all my life I had feared imprisonment, the nun’s cell, the hospital bed, the places where one faced the self without distraction, without the crutches of other people—but sitting there feeding him white sugar, I thought, I now have entered a cell, and this man cannot know what it is for me to love him the way I do, and I cannot weigh him down with it, because he is in another cell confronted with other difficulties.
The cell reminded me of a convent, and for something to say, I mentioned my sister the nun.
“I went to see my sister.”
“How is she?” he asked. He had often inquired about her. He used to take an interest in her and ask what she looked like. I even got the impression that he had a fantasy about seducing her.
“She’s fine,” I said. “We were walking down a corridor and she asked me to look around and make sure that there weren’t any other sisters looking, and then she hoisted her skirts up and slid down the banister.”
“Dear girl,” he said. He liked that story. The smallest things gave him such pleasure.
I enjoyed our tea. It was one of the least fruitless afternoons I’d had in months, and coming out he gripped my arm and said how perfect it would be if we could get away for a few days. Perhaps he meant it.
In fact, we kept our promise. We do meet from time to time. You could say things are back to normal again. By normal I mean a state whereby I notice the moon, trees, fresh spit upon the pavement; I look at strangers and see in their expressions something of my own predicament; I am part of everyday life, I suppose. There is a lamp in my bedroom that gives out a dry crackle each time an electric train goes by, and at night I count those crackles because it is the time he comes back. I mean the real he, not the man who confronts me from time to time across a café table, but the man that dwells somewhere within me. He rises before my eyes—his praying hands, his tongue that liked to suck, his sly eyes, his smile, the veins on his cheeks, the calm voice speaking sense to me. I suppose you wonder why I torment myself like this with details of his presence, but I need it, I cannot let go of him now, because if I did, all our happiness and my subsequent pain—I cannot vouch for his—will all have been nothing, and nothing is a dreadful thing to hold on to.
The Mouth of the Cave
There were two routes to the village. I chose the rougher one, to be beside the mountain rather than the sea. It is a dusty ill-defined stretch of road littered with rocks. The rocks that have fallen from the cliff are a menacing shade of red once they have split open. On the surface the cliff appears to be gray. Here and there on its gray and red face there are small clumps of trees. Parched in summer, tormented by winds in winter, they nevertheless survive, getting no larger or no smaller.
In one such clump of green, just underneath the cliff, I saw a girl stand up. She began to tie her suspenders slowly. She had bad balance because when drawing her knickers on she lost her footing more than once. She put her skirt on by bringing it over her head, and lastly her cardigan, which appeared to have several buttons. As I came closer she walked away. A youn
g girl in a maroon cardigan and a black skirt. She was twenty or thereabouts. Suddenly, and without anticipating it, I turned toward home so as to give the impression that I’d simply been having a stroll. The ridiculousness of this hit me soon after and I turned around again and walked toward the scene of her secret. I was trembling, but these journeys have got to be accomplished.
What a shock to find that nothing lurked there, no man, no animal. The bushes had not risen from the weight of her body. I reckoned that she must have been lying for quite a time. Then I saw that she, too, was returning. Had she forgotten something? Did she want to ask me a favor? Why was she hurrying? I could not see her face, her head was down. I turned and this time I ran toward the private road that led to my rented house. I thought, Why am I running, why am I trembling, why am I afraid? Because she is a woman and so am I. Because, because? I did not know.
When I got to the courtyard I asked the servant, who had been fanning herself, to unchain the dog. Then I sat outdoors and waited. The flowering tree looked particularly dramatic, its petals richly pink, its scent oppressively sweet. The only tree in flower. My servant had warned me about those particular flowers; she had even taken the trouble to get the dictionary to impress the word upon me—Venodno, poison, poison petals. Nevertheless I had the table moved in order to be nearer that tree, and we steadied it by putting folded cigarette cartons under two of its legs. I told the servant to lay a place for two. I also decided what we would eat, though normally I don’t, in order to give the days some element of surprise. I asked that both wines be put on the table, and also those long sugar-coated biscuits that can be dipped in white wine and sucked until the sweetness is drained from them and redipped and resucked, indefinitely.