by Edna O'Brien
“There is no joy in life,” Crystal sobbed, as the gramophone made crackling noises and Mary ran in from the landing, away from O’Toole.
“I mean business,” O’Toole said, and winked.
O’Toole was the first to get quarrelsome.
“Now, ladies, now, gentlemen, a little laughing sketch, are we ready?” he asked.
“Fire ahead,” Hickey told him.
“Well, there was these three lads, Paddy th’Irishman, Paddy th’Englishman, and Paddy the Scotsman, and they were badly in need of a …”
“Now, no smut,” Mrs. Rodgers snapped, before he had uttered a wrong word at all.
“What smut?” asked O’Toole, getting offended. “Smut!” And he asked her to explain an accusation like that.
“Think of the girls,” Mrs. Rodgers said.
“Girls,” O’Toole sneered, as he picked up the bottle of cream—which they’d forgotten to use with the jelly—and poured it into the carcass of the ravaged goose.
“Christ’s sake, man,” Hickey said, taking the bottle of cream out of O’Toole’s hand.
Mrs. Rodgers said that it was high time everyone went to bed, as the party seemed to be over.
The guests would spend the night in the Commercial. It was too late for them to go home anyhow, and also, Mrs. Rodgers did not want them to be observed staggering out of the house at that hour. The police watched her like hawks, and she didn’t want any trouble, until Christmas was over at least. The sleeping arrangements had been decided earlier on—there were three bedrooms vacant. One was Brogan’s, the room he always slept in. The other three men were to pitch in together in the second big bedroom, and the girls were to share the back room with Mrs. Rodgers herself.
“Come on, everyone, blanket street,” Mrs. Rodgers said, as she put a guard in front of the dying fire and took the money from behind the owl.
“Sugar you,” O’Toole said, pouring stout now into the carcass of the goose, and Long John Salmon wished that he had never come. He thought of daylight and of his swim in the mountain river at the back of his gray, stone house.
“Ablution,” he said aloud, taking pleasure in the word and in the thought of the cold water touching him. He could do without people, people were waste. He remembered catkins on a tree outside his window, catkins in February as white as snow; who needed people?
“Crystal, stir yourself,” Hickey said, as he put on her shoes and patted the calves of her legs.
Brogan kissed the four girls and saw them across the landing to the bedroom. Mary was glad to escape without O’Toole noticing; he was very obstreperous and Hickey was trying to control him.
In the bedroom she sighed; she had forgotten all about the furniture being pitched in there. Wearily they began to unload the things. The room was so crammed that they could hardly move in it. Mary suddenly felt alert and frightened, because O’Toole could be heard yelling and singing out on the landing. There had been gin in her orangeade, she knew now, because she breathed closely onto the palm of her hand and smelled her own breath. She had broken her Confirmation pledge, broken her promise; it would bring her had luck.
Mrs. Rodgers came in and said that five of them would he too crushed in the bed, so that she herself would sleep on the sofa for one night.
“Two of you at the top and two at the bottom,” she said, as she warned them not to break any of the ornaments, and not to stay talking all night.
“Night and God bless,” she said, as she shut the door behind her.
“Nice thing,” said Doris O’Beirne, “bunging us all in here; I wonder where she’s off to.”
“Will you loan me curlers?” Crystal asked. To Crystal, hair was the most important thing on earth. She would never get married because you couldn’t wear curlers in bed then. Eithne Duggan said she wouldn’t put curlers in now if she got five million for doing it, she was that jaded. She threw herself down on the quilt and spread her arms out. She was a noisy, sweaty girl, but Mary liked her better than the other two.
“Ah, me old segotums,” O’Toole said, pushing their door in. The girls exclaimed and asked him to go out at once, as they were preparing for bed.
“Come into the drawing room, Doris,” he said to Mary, and curled his forefinger at her. He was drunk and couldn’t focus on her properly, but he knew that she was standing there somewhere.
“Go to bed, you’re drunk,” Doris O’Beirne said, and he stood very upright for an instant and asked her to speak for herself.
“Go to bed, Michael, you’re tired,” Mary said to him. She tried to sound calm because he looked so wild.
“Come into the drawing room, I tell you,” he said as he caught her wrist and dragged her toward the door. She let out a cry, and Eithne Duggan said she’d brain him if he didn’t leave the girl alone.
“Give me that flowerpot, Doris,” Eithne Duggan called, and then Mary began to cry in case there might be a scene. She hated scenes. Once, she heard her father and a neighbor having a row about boundary rights and she’d never forgotten it; they had both been a bit drunk, after a fair.
“Are you cracked or are you mad?” O’Toole said, when he perceived that she was crying.
“I’ll give you two seconds,” Eithne warned, as she held the flowerpot high, ready to throw it at O’Toole’s stupefied face.
“You’re a nice bunch of hard-faced aul crows, crows,” he said. “Wouldn’t give a man a squeeze,” and he went out, cursing each one of them. They shut the door very quickly and dragged the sideboard in front of the door, so that he could not break in when they were asleep.
They got into bed in their underwear; Mary and Eithne at one end, with Crystal’s feet between their faces.
“You have lovely hair,” Eithne whispered to Mary. It was the nicest thing she could think of to say. They each said their prayers and shook hands under the covers and settled down to sleep.
“Hey,” Doris O’Beirne said a few seconds later, “I never went to the lav.”
“You can’t go now,” Eithne said, “the sideboard’s in front of the door.”
“I’ll die if I don’t go,” Doris O’Beirne said.
“And me, too, after all that orange we drank,” Crystal said. Mary was shocked that they could talk like that. At home you never spoke of such a thing, you just went out behind the hedge and that was that. Once a workman saw her squatting down, and from that day she never talked to him, or acknowledged that she knew him.
“Maybe we could use that old pot,” Doris O’Beirne said, and Eithne Duggan sat up and said that if anyone used a pot in that room she wasn’t going to sleep there.
“We have to use something,” Doris said. By now she had got up and had switched on the light. She held the pot up to the naked bulb and saw what looked to be a crack in it.
“Try it,” Crystal said, giggling.
They heard feet on the landing, and then the sound of choking and coughing, and later O’Toole cursing and swearing and hitting the wall with his fist. Mary curled down under the bedclothes, thankful for the company of the girls. They stopped talking.
“I was at a party. Now I know what parties are like,” Mary said to herself, as she tried to force herself asleep. She heard a sound as of water running, but it did not seem to be raining outside. Later she dozed, but at daybreak she heard the hall door bang and she sat up in bed abruptly. She had to be home early to milk, so she got up, took her shoes and her lace dress, let herself out by dragging the sideboard forward, and opening the door slightly.
There were newspapers spread on the landing floor and in the lavatory, and a heavy smell pervaded. Downstairs, porter had flowed out of the bar into the hall. It was probably O’Toole who had turned on the taps of the five porter barrels; the stone-floored bar and sunken passage outside were swimming with black porter. Mrs. Rodgers would kill somebody. Mary put on her high-heeled shoes and picked her steps carefully across the room to the door. She left without even making a cup of tea.
She wheeled her bicycle down the a
lley and into the street. The front tire was dead flat. She pumped for half an hour, but it remained flat.
The frost lay like a spell upon the street, upon the sleeping windows and the slate roofs of the narrow houses. It had magically made the dunged street white and clean. She did not feel tired but relieved to be out, and stunned by lack of sleep, she inhaled the beauty of the morning. She walked briskly, sometimes looking back to see the track which her bicycle and her feet made on the white road.
Mrs. Rodgers wakened at eight and stumbled out in her big nightgown from Brogan’s warm bed. She smelled disaster instantly and hurried downstairs to find the porter in the bar and the hall; then she ran to call the others.
“Porter all over the place; every drop of drink in the house is on the floor—Mary Mother of God, help me in my tribulation! Get up, get up.” She rapped on their door and called the girls by name.
The girls rubbed their sleepy eyes, yawned, and sat up.
“She’s gone,” Eithne said, looking at the place on the pillow where Mary’s head had been.
“Oh, a sneaky country one,” Doris said, as she got into her taffeta dress and went down to see the flood. “If I have to clean that in my good clothes, I’ll die,” she said. But Mrs. Rodgers had already brought brushes and pails and got to work. They opened the bar door and began to bail the porter into the street. Dogs came to lap it up, and Hickey, who had by then come down, stood and said what a crying shame it was, to waste all that drink. Outside, it washed away an area of frost and revealed the dung of yesterday’s fair day. O’Toole, the culprit, had fled since the night; Long John Salmon was gone for his swim, and upstairs in bed Brogan snuggled down for a last-minute warm and deliberated on the joys that he would miss when he left the Commercial for good.
“And where’s my lady with the lace dress?” Hickey asked, recalling very little of Mary’s face, but distinctly remembering the sleeves of her black dress, which dipped into the plates.
“Sneaked off, before we were up,” Doris said. They all agreed that Mary was no bloody use and should never have been asked.
“And ’twas she set O’Toole mad, egging him on and then disappointing him,” Doris said, and Mrs. Rodgers swore that O’Toole, or Mary’s father, or someone, would pay dear for the wasted drink.
“I suppose she’s home by now,” Hickey said, as he rooted in his pocket for a butt. He had a new packet, but if he produced that, they’d all be puffing away at his expense.
Mary was half a mile from home, sitting on a bank.
If only I had a sweetheart, something to hold on to, she thought, as she cracked some ice with her high heel and watched the crazy splintered pattern it made. The poor birds could get no food, as the ground was frozen hard. Frost was everywhere; it coated the bare branches and made them like etchings, it starched the grass and blurred the shape of a plow that stood in a field, above all it gave the world an appearance of sanctity.
Walking again, she wondered if and what she would tell her mother and her brothers about it, and if all parties were as bad. She was at the top of the hill now, and could see her own house, like a little white box at the end of the world, waiting to receive her.
The Rug
I went down on my knees upon the brand-new linoleum and smelled the strange smell. It was rich and oily. It first entered and attached itself to something in my memory when I was nine years old. I’ve since learned that it is the smell of linseed oil, but coming on it unexpectedly can make me both a little disturbed and sad.
I grew up in the west of Ireland, in a gray cut-stone farmhouse which my father inherited from his father. My father came from lowland, better-off farming people, my mother from the windswept hungry hills above a great lake. As children, we played in a small forest of rhododendrons—thickened and tangled and broken under scratching cows—around the house and down the drive. The avenue up from the front gates had such great potholes that cars had to lurch off into the field and out again.
But though all outside was neglect, overgrown with ragwort and thistle, strangers were surprised when they entered the house; my father might fritter his life away watching the slates slip from the outhouse roof—but within, that same, square, lowland house of stone was my mother’s pride and joy. It was always spotless. It was stuffed with things—furniture, china dogs, Toby mugs, tall jugs, trays, tapestries, and whatnots. Each of the four bedrooms had holy pictures on the walls and a gold mantelpiece surmounting each fireplace. In the fireplaces there were paper fans or lids of chocolate boxes. Mantelpieces carried their own close-packed array of wax flowers, holy statues, broken alarm clocks, shells, photographs, soft rounded cushions for sticking pins in.
My father was generous, foolish, and so idle that it could only have been some sort of illness. That year in which I was nine and first experienced the wonderful smell, he sold another of the meadows to pay off some debt, and for the first time in many years my mother got a lump of money.
She went out early one morning and caught the bus to the city, and through a summer morning and afternoon she trudged around looking at linoleum. When she came home in the evening, her feet hurting from high heels, she said she had bought some beautiful light-brown linoleum, with orange squares on it.
The day came when the four rolls were delivered to the front gates, and Hickey, our farm help, got the horse and cart ready to bring it up. We all went; we were that excited. The calves followed the cart, thinking that maybe they were to be fed down by the roadside. At times they galloped away but came back again, each calf nudging the other out of the way. It was a warm, still day, the sounds of cars and neighbors’ dogs carried very distinctly; and the cow lats on the drive were brown and dry like flake tobacco.
My mother did most of the heaving and shoving to get the rolls onto the cart. She had early accepted that she had been born to do the work.
She may have bribed Hickey with the promise of hens to sell for himself, because that evening he stayed in to help with the floor—he usually went over to the village and drank a pint or two of stout. Mama, of course, always saved newspapers, and she said that the more we laid down under the lino the longer it would wear. On her hands and knees, she looked up once—flushed, delighted, tired—and said, “Mark my words, we’ll see a carpet in here yet.”
There was calculation and argument before cutting the difficult bits around the door frames, the bay window, and the fireplace. Hickey said that without him my mother would have botched the whole thing. In the quick flow of argument and talk, they did not notice that it was past my bedtime. My father sat outside in the kitchen by the stove all evening while we worked. Later, he came in and said what a grand job we were doing. A grand job, he said. He’d had a headache.
The next day must have been Saturday, for I sat in the sitting room all morning admiring the linoleum, smelling its smell, counting the orange squares. I was supposed to be dusting. Now and then I rearranged the blinds, as the sun moved. We had to keep the sun from fading the bright colors.
The dogs barked and the postman cycled up. I ran out and met him carrying a huge parcel. Mama was away up in the yard with the hens. When the postman had gone, I went up to tell her.
“A parcel?” she said. She was cleaning the hens’ trough before putting their food in it. The hens were moiling around, falling in and out of the buckets, pecking at her hands. “It’s just binding twine for the baling machine,” she said. “Who’d be sending parcels?” She was never one to lose her head.
I said that the parcel had a Dublin postmark—the postman told me that—and that there was some black woolly thing in it. The paper was tom at the corner, and I’d pushed a finger in, fearfully.
Coming down to the house, she wiped her hands with a wad of long grass. “Perhaps somebody in America has remembered us at last.” One of her few dreams was to be remembered by relatives who had gone to America. The farm buildings were some way from the house; we ran the last bit. But even in her excitement, her careful nature forced her to unknot eve
ry length of string from the parcel and roll it up, for future use. She was the world’s most generous woman, but was thrifty about saving twine and paper, and candle stumps, and turkey wings, and empty pill boxes.
“My God,” she said reverently, folding back the last piece of paper and revealing a black sheepskin hearthrug. We opened it out. It was a half-moon shape and covered the kitchen table. She could not speak. It was real sheepskin, thick and soft and luxurious. She examined the lining, studied the maker’s label in the back, searched through the folds of brown paper for a possible letter, but there was nothing at all to indicate where it had come from.
“Get me my glasses,” she said. We read the address again, and the postmark. The parcel had been sent from Dublin two days before. “Call your father,” she said. He was in bed with rheumatic pains. Rug or no rug, he demanded a fourth cup of tea before he could get up.
We carried the big black rug into the sitting room and laid it down upon the new linoleum, before the fireplace.
“Isn’t it perfect, a perfect color scheme?” she said. The room had suddenly become cozy. She stood back and looked at it with surprise, and a touch of suspicion. Though she was always hoping, she never really expected things to turn out well. At nine years old, I knew enough about my mother’s life to say a prayer of thanks that at last she had got something she wanted, and without having to work for it. She had a round, sallow face and a peculiarly uncertain, timid smile. The suspicion soon left her, and the smile came out. That was one of her happiest days; I remember it as I remember her unhappiest day to my knowledge—the day the bailiff came, a year later. I hoped she would sit in the newly appointed room on Sundays for tea, without her apron, with her brown hair combed out, looking calm and beautiful. Outside, the rhododendrons, though wild and broken, would bloom red and purple, and inside, the new rug would lie upon the richly smelling linoleum. She hugged me suddenly, as if I were the one to thank for it all; the hen mash had dried on her hands and they had the mealy smell I knew so well.