by Edna O'Brien
For spells during the next few days, my mother racked her brain, and she racked our brains, for a clue. It had to be someone who knew something of her needs and wants—how else could he have decided upon just the thing she needed? She wrote letters here and there, to distant relations, to friends, to people she had not seen for years.
“Must be one of your friends,” she would say to my father.
“Oh, probably, probably. I’ve known a lot of decent people in my time.”
She was referring—ironically, of course—to the many strangers to whom he had offered tea. He liked nothing better than to stand down at the gates on a fair day or a race day, engaging passersby in conversation and finally bringing someone up to the house for tea and boiled eggs. He had a genius for making friends.
“I’d say that’s it,” my father said, delighted to take credit for the rug.
In the warm evenings we sat around the fireplace—we’d never had a fire in that room throughout the whole of my childhood—and around the rug, listening to the radio. And now and then, Mama or Dada would remember someone else from whom the rug might have come. Before a week had passed, she had written to a dozen people—an acquaintance who had moved up to Dublin with a greyhound pup Dada had given him, which greyhound had turned out a winner; an unfrocked priest who had stayed in our house for a week, gathering strength from Mama to travel on home and meet his family; a magician who had stolen Dada’s gold watch and never been seen since; a farmer who once sold us a tubercular cow and would not take it back.
Weeks passed. The rug was taken out on Saturdays and shaken well, the new lino polished. Once, coming home early from school, I looked in the window and saw Mama kneeling on the rug saying a prayer. I’d never seen her pray like that, in the middle of the day, before. My father was going into the next county the following day to look at a horse he thought he might get cheap; she was, of course, praying that he would keep his promise and not touch a drink. If he did, he might be off on a wild progress and would not be seen for a week.
He went the next day; he was to stay overnight with relations. While he was away, I slept with Mama, for company, in the big brass bed. I wakened to see a candle flame and Mama hurriedly putting on her cardigan. Dada had come home? No, she said, but she had been lying awake thinking, and there was something she had to tell Hickey or she would not get a wink of sleep. It was not yet twelve; he might be awake. I didn’t want to be left in the dark, I said, but she was already hurrying along the landing. I nipped out of bed and followed. The luminous clock said a quarter to twelve. From the first landing, I looked over and saw her turning the knob of Hickey’s door.
Why should he open his door to her then, I thought; he never let anyone in at any time, keeping the door locked when he was out on the farm. Once, we climbed in through the window and found things in such a muddle—his good suit laid out flat on the floor, a shirt soaking in a bucket of dirty green water, a milk can in which there was curdled buttermilk, a bicycle chain, a broken Sacred Heart, and several pairs of worn, distorted, cast-off boots—that she resolved never to set foot in it again.
“What the hell is it?” Hickey said. Then there was a thud. He must have knocked something over while he searched for his flashlamp.
“If it’s fine tomorrow, we’ll cut the turf,” Mama said.
Hickey asked if she’d wakened him at that hour to tell him something he already knew—they discussed it at teatime.
“Open the door,” she said. “I have a bit of news for you, about the rug.”
He opened the door just a fraction. “Who sent it?” he asked.
“That party from Ballinsloe,” she said.
“That party” was her phrase for her two visitors who had come to our house years before—a young girl and an older man who wore brown gauntlet gloves. Almost as soon as they’d arrived, my father went out with them in their motorcar. When they returned to our house an hour later, I gathered from the conversation that they had been to see our local doctor, a friend of Dada’s. The girl was the sister of a nun who was headmistress at the convent where my sisters were. She had been crying. I guessed then, or maybe later, that her tears had to do with her having a baby and that Dada had taken her to the doctor so that she could find out for certain if she was pregnant and make preparations to get married. It would have been impossible for her to go to a doctor in her own neighborhood, and I had no doubt but that Dada was glad to do a favor for the nun, as he could not always pay the fees for my sisters’ education. Mama gave them tea on a tray—not a spread with hand-embroidered cloth and bone-china cups—and shook hands with them coolly when they were leaving. She could not abide sinful people.
“Nice of them to remember,” Hickey said, sucking air between his teeth and making bird noises. “How did you find out?”
“I just guessed,” Mama told him.
“Oh, Christ!” Hickey said, dosing his door with a fearful bang and getting back into bed with such vehemence that I could hear the springs revolt.
Mama carried me up the stairs, because my feet were cold, and said that Hickey had not one ounce of manners.
Next day, when Dada came home sober, she told him the story, and that night she wrote to the nun. In due course, a letter came to us—with holy medals and scapulars enclosed for me—saying that neither the nun nor her married sister had sent a gift. I expect the girl had married the man with the gauntlet gloves.
“ ’Twill be one of life’s mysteries,” Mama said, as she beat the rug against the pier, closed her eyes to escape the dust, and reconciled herself to never knowing.
But a knock came on our back door four weeks later, when we were upstairs changing the sheets on the beds. “Run down and see who it is,” she said.
It was a namesake of Dada’s from the village, a man who always came to borrow something—a donkey, or a mowing machine, or even a spade.
“Is your mother in?” he asked, and I went halfway up the stairs and called her down.
“I’ve come for the rug,” he said.
“What rug?” Mama said. It was the nearest she ever got to lying. Her breath caught short and she blushed a little.
“I hear you have a new rug here. Well, ’tis our rug, because my wife’s sister sent it to us months ago and we never got it.”
“What are you talking about?” she said in a very sarcastic voice. He was a cowardly man, and it was said that he was so ineffectual he would call his wife in from the garden to pour him a cup of tea. I suppose my mother hoped that she would frighten him off.
“The rug the postman brought here one morning and handed it to your youngster there.” He nodded at me.
“Oh, that,” Mama said, a little stunned by the news that the postman had given information about it. Then a ray of hope, or a ray of lunacy, must have struck her, because she asked what color rug he was inquiring about.
“A black sheepskin,” he said.
There could be no more doubt about it. Her whole being drooped—shoulders, stomach, voice, everything.
“It’s here,” she said absently, and she went through the hall into the sitting room.
“Being namesakes and that, the postman got us mixed up,” he said stupidly to me.
She had winked at me to stay there and see he did not follow her, because she did not want him to know that we had been using it.
It was rolled and had a piece of cord around the middle when she handed it to him. As she watched him go down the avenue she wept, not so much for the loss—though the loss was enormous—as for her own foolishness in thinking that someone had wanted to do her a kindness at last.
“We live and learn,” she said, as she undid her apron strings, out of habit, and then retied them slowly and methodically, making a tighter knot.
Paradise
In the harbor were the four boats. Boats named after a country, a railroad, an emotion, and a girl. She first saw them at sundown. Very beautiful they were, and tranquil, white boats at a distance from each other, cosseting
the harbor. On the far side a mountain. Lilac at that moment. It seemed to be made of collapsible substance so insubstantial was it. Between the boats and the mountain a lighthouse, on an island.
Somebody said the light was not nearly so pretty as in the old days when the coast guard lived there and worked it by gas. It was automatic now and much brighter. Between them and the sea were four fields cultivated with fig trees. Dry yellow fields that seemed to be exhaling dust. No grass. She looked again at the four boats, the fields, the fig trees, the suave ocean; she looked at the house behind her and she thought, It can be mine, mine, and her heart gave a little somersault. He recognized her agitation and smiled. The house acted like a spell on all who came. He took her by the hand and led her up the main stairs. Stone stairs with a wobbly banister. The undersides of each step bright blue. “Stop,” he said, where it got dark near the top, and before he switched on the light.
A servant had unpacked for her. There were flowers in the room. They smelled of confectionery. In the bathroom a great glass urn filled with talcum powder. She leaned over the rim and inhaled. It caused her to sneeze three times. Ovaries of dark-purple soap had been taken out of their wrapping paper, and for several minutes she held one in either hand. Yes. She had done the right thing in coming. She need not have feared; he needed her, his expression and their clasped hands already confirmed that.
They sat on the terrace drinking a cocktail he had made. It was of rum and lemon and proved to be extremely potent. One of the guests said the angle of light on the mountain was at its most magnificent. He put his fingers to his lips and blew a kiss to the mountain. She counted the peaks, thirteen in all, with a plateau between the first four and the last nine.
The peaks were close to the sky. Farther down on the face of the mountain various juts stuck out, and these made shadows on their neighboring juts. She was told its name. At the same moment she overheard a question being put to a young woman, “Are you interested in Mary Queen of Scots?” The woman, whose skin had a beguiling radiance, answered yes overreadily. It was possible that such radiance was the result of constant supplies of male sperm. The man had a high pale forehead and a look of death.
They drank. They smoked. All twelve smokers tossing the butts onto the tiled roof that sloped toward the farm buildings. Summer lightning started up. It was random and quiet and faintly theatrical. It seemed to be something devised for their amusement. It lit one part of the sky, then another. There were bats flying about also, and their dark shapes and the random fugitive shots of summer lightning were a distraction and gave them something to point to. “If I had a horse I’d call it Summer Lightning,” one of the women said, and the man next to her said, How charming. She knew she ought to speak. She wanted to. Both for his sake and for her own. Her mind would give a little leap and be still and would leap again; words were struggling to be set free, to say something, a little amusing something to establish her among them. But her tongue was tied. They would know her predecessors. They would compare her minutely, her appearance, her accent, the way he behaved with her. They would know better than she how important she was to him, if it were serious or just a passing notion. They had all read in the gossip columns how she came to meet him; how he had gone to have an X-ray and met her there, the radiographer in white, committed to a dark room and films showing lungs and pulmonary tracts.
“Am I right in thinking you are to take swimming lessons?” a man asked, choosing the moment when she had leaned back and was staring up at a big pine tree.
“Yes,” she said, wishing that he had not been told.
“There’s nothing to it, you just get in and swim,” he said.
How surprised they all were, surprised and amused. Asked where she had lived and if it was really true.
“Can’t imagine anyone not swimming as a child.”
“Can’t imagine anyone not swimming, period.”
“Nothing to it, you just fight, fight.”
The sun filtered by the green needles fell and made play on the dense clusters of brown nuts. They never ridicule nature, she thought, they never dare. He came and stood behind her, his hand patting her bare pale shoulder. A man who was not holding a camera pretended to take a photograph of them. How long would she last? It would be uppermost in all their minds.
“We’ll take you on the boat tomorrow,” he said. They cooed. They all went to such pains, such excesses, to describe the cruiser. They competed with each other to tell her. They were really telling him. She thought, I should be honest, say I do not like the sea, say I am an inland person, that I like rain and roses in a field, thin rain, and through it the roses and the vegetation, and that for me the sea is dark as the shells of mussels, and signifies catastrophe. But she couldn’t.
“It must be wonderful” was what she said.
“It’s quite, quite something,” he said shyly.
At dinner she sat at one end of the egg-shaped table and he at the other. Six white candles in glass sconces separated them. The secretary had arranged the places. A fat woman on his right wore a lot of silver bracelets and was veiled in crepe. They had cold soup to start with. The garnishings were so finely chopped that it was impossible to identify each one except by its flavor. She slipped out of her shoes. A man describing his trip to India dwelt for an unnaturally long time on the disgustingness of the food. He had gone to see the temples. Another man, who was repeatedly trying to buoy them up, threw the question to the table at large: “Which of the Mediterranean ports is best to dock at?” Everyone had a favorite. Some picked ports where exciting things had happened, some chose ports where the approach was most beguiling, harbor fees were compared as a matter of interest; the man who had asked the question amused them all with an account of a cruise he had made once with his young daughter and of how he was unable to land when they got to Venice because of inebriation. She had to admit that she did not know any ports. They were touched by that confession.
“We’re going to try them all,” he said from the opposite end of the table, “and keep a logbook.” People looked from him to her and smiled knowingly.
That night behind closed shutters they enacted their rite. They were both impatient to get there. Long before the coffee had been brought they had moved away from the table and contrived to be alone, choosing the stone seat that girdled the big pine tree. The seat was smeared all over with the tree’s transparent gum. The nuts bobbing together made a dull clatter like castanets. They sat for as long as courtesy required, then they retired. In bed she felt safe again, united to him not only by passion and by pleasure but by some more radical entanglement. She had no name for it, that puzzling emotion that was more than love, or perhaps less, that was not simply sexual, although sex was vital to it and held it together like wires supporting a broken bowl. They both had had many breakages and therefore loved with a wary superstition.
“What you do to me,” he said. “How you know me, all my vibrations.”
“I think we are connected underneath,” she said quietly. She often thought he hated her for implicating him in something too tender. But he was not hating her then.
At length it was necessary to go back to her bedroom, because he had promised to get up early to go spearfishing with the men.
As she kissed him goodbye she caught sight of herself in the chrome surface of the coffee flask which was on his bedside table—eyes emitting satisfaction and chagrin and panic were what stared back at her. Each time as she left him she expected not to see him again; each parting promised to be final.
The men left soon after six; she heard car doors because she had been unable to sleep.
In the morning she had her first swimming lesson. It was arranged that she would take it when the others sat down to breakfast. Her instructor had been brought from England. She asked if he’d slept well. She did not ask where. The servants disappeared from the house late at night and departed toward the settlement of low-roofed buildings. The dog went with them. The instructor told her to go backwar
d down the metal stepladder. There were wasps hovering about and she thought that if she were to get stung she could bypass the lesson. No wasp obliged.
Some children, who had been swimming earlier, had left their plastic toys—a yellow ring that craned into the neck and head of a duck. It was a duck with a thoroughly disgusted expression. There was as well a blue dolphin with a name painted on it, and all kinds of battleships. They were the children of guests. The older ones, who were boys, took no notice of any of the adults and moved about, raucous and meddlesome, taking full advantage of every aspect of the place—at night they watched the lizards patiently and for hours, in the heat of the day they remained in the water, in the early morning they gathered almonds, for which they received from him a harvesting fee. One black flipper lurked on the bottom of the pool. She looked down at it and touched it with her toe. Those were her last unclaimed moments, those moments before the lesson began.
The instructor told her to sit, to sit in it, as if it were a bath. He crouched and slowly she crouched, too. “Now hold your nose and put your head under water,” he said. She pulled the bathing cap well over her ears and forehead to protect her hairstyle, and with her nose gripped too tightly she went underneath. “Feel it?” he said excitedly. “Feel the water holding you up?” She felt no such thing. She felt the water engulfing her. He told her to press the water from her eyes. He was gentleness itself. Then he dived in, swam a few strokes, and stood up, shaking the water from his gray hair. He took her hands and walked backward until they were at arm’s length. He asked her to lie on her stomach and give herself to it. He promised not to let go of her hands. Each time, on the verge of doing so, she stopped: first her body, then her mind refused. She felt that if she was to take her feet off the ground the unmentionable would happen. “What do I fear?” she asked herself. “Death,” she said, and yet, it was not that. It was as if some horrible experience would happen before her actual death. She thought perhaps it might be the fight she would put up.