by Edna O'Brien
Anyhow, they discussed the practicalities of the wedding while they ate their fruit cocktail. It was served in the little carnival dishes, and I thought of the numerous operations that Nuala had done, and how if it was left to Eily and me, things would not be nearly so crucial. I did not want her to have to marry him, and I almost blurted that out. But the plans were going ahead; he was being told that it would cost him ten pounds, that it would be in the sacristy of the Catholic church, since he was a Protestant, and there were to be no guests except those present and Eily’s former teacher, a Miss Melody. Even her sister, Nuala, was not going to be told until after the event. They kept asking him was that clear, and he kept saying, “Oh yeah,” as if it were a simple matter of whether he would have more fruit cocktail or not. The number of cherries were few and far between, and for some reason had a faint mauve hue to them. I got one and my mother passed me hers. Eily ate well but listlessly, as if she weren’t there at all. Toward the end my father sang “Master McGrath,” a song about a greyhound, and Mr. Hogan told the ghost story about seeing the headless liveried man at a crossroads when he was a boy.
Going down the field, Eily was told to walk on ahead with her intended, probably so that she could discuss her trousseau or any last-minute things. The stars were bewitching, and the moonlight cast as white a glow as if it were morning and the world was veiled with frost. Eily and he walked in utter silence. At last, she looked up at him and said something, and all he did was to draw away from her; there was such a distance between them that a cart or a car could pass through. She edged a little to the right to get nearer, and as she did, he moved farther away, so that eventually she was on the edge of a path and he was right by the hedge, hitting the bushes with a bit of a stick he had picked up. We followed behind, the grownups discussing whether or not it would rain the next day while I wondered what Eily had tried to say to him.
*
They met twice more before the wedding, once in the sitting room of the hotel, when the traveling solicitor drew up the papers guaranteeing her a dowry of two hundred pounds, and once in the city, when he was sent with her to the jeweler’s to buy a wedding ring. It was the same city as where he had been seeing the bacon curer’s daughter, and Eily said that in the jeweler’s he expressed the wish that she would drop dead. At the wedding breakfast itself there were only sighs and tears, and the teacher, as was her wont, stood in front of the fire and, mindless of the mixed company, hitched up her dress behind, the better to warm the cheeks of her bottom. In his giving-away speech, my father said they had only to make the best of it. Eily sniveled, her mother wept and wept and said, “Oh, Alannah, Alannah,” while the groom muttered, “Once bitten, twice shy.” The reception was in their new lodgings, and my mother said that she thought it was bad form the way the landlady included herself in the proceedings. My mother also said that their household utensils were pathetic, two forks, two knives, two spoons, an old kettle, an egg saucepan, a primus, and, as she said, not even a nice enamel bin for the bread but a rusted biscuit tin. When they came to leave, Eily tried to dart into the back of the car, tried it more than once, just like an animal trying to get back to its lair.
On returning home my mother let me put on her lipstick and praised me untowardly for being such a good, such a pure little girl, and never did I feel so guilty, because of the leading part I had played in Eily’s romance. The only thing that my mother had eaten at the wedding was a jelly made with milk. We tried it the following Sunday, a raspberry-flavored jelly made with equal quantities of milk and water—and then whisked. It was like a beautiful pink tongue, dotted with spittle, and it tasted slippery. I had not been found out, had received no punishment, and life was getting back to normal again. I gargled with salt and water, on Sundays longed for visitors that never came, and on Monday mornings had all my books newly covered so that the teacher would praise me. Ever since the scandal she was enjoining us to go home in pairs, to speak Irish, and not to walk with any sense of provocation.
Yet she herself stood by the fire grate and, after having hitched up her dress, petted herself. When she lost her temper, she threw chalk or implements at us, and used very bad language.
It was a wonderful year for lilac, and the windowsills used to be full of it, first the big moist bunches, with the lovely cool green leaves, and then a wilting display, and following that, the seeds in pools all over the sill and the purple itself much sadder and more dolorous than when first plucked off the trees.
When I daydreamed, which was often, it hinged on Eily. Did she have a friend, did her husband love her, was she homesick, and, above all, was her body swelling up? She wrote to her mother every second week. Her mother used to come with her apron on, and the letter in one of those pockets, and sit on the back step and hesitate before reading it. She never came in, being too shy, but she would sit there while my father fetched her a cup of raspberry cordial. We all had sweet tooths. The letters told next to nothing, only such things as that their chimney had caught fire, or a boy herding goats found an old coin in a field, or could her mother root out some old clothes from a trunk and send them to her as she hadn’t got a stitch. “ ’Tis style enough she has,” her mother would say bitterly, and then advise that it was better to cut my hair and not have me go around in ringlets, because, as she said, “Fine feathers make fine birds.” Now and then she would cry and then feed the birds the crumbs of the biscuit or shortbread that my mother had given her.
She liked the birds and in secret in her own yard made little perches for them, and if you please hung bits of colored rags and the shaving mirror for them to amuse themselves by. My mother had made a quilt for Eily, and I believe that was the only wedding present she received. They parceled it together. It was a red flannel quilt, lined with white, and had a herringbone stitch around the edge. It was not like the big soft quilt that once occupied the entire window of the draper’s, a pink satin on which one’s body could bask, then levitate. One day her mother looked right at me and said, “Has she passed any more worms?” I had passed a big tapeworm, and that was a talking point for a week or so after the furor of the wedding had died down. Then she gave me half a crown. It was some way of thanking me for being a friend of Eily’s. When her son was born, the family received a wire. He was given the name of Jack, the same as his father, and I thought how the witch had been right when she had seen the initial twice, but how we had misconstrued it and took it to be glad tidings.
Eily began to grow odd, began talking to herself, and then her lovely hair began to fall out in clumps. I would hear her mother tell my mother these things. The news came in snatches, first from a family who had gone up there to rent grazing, and then from a private nurse who had to give Eily pills and potions. Eily’s own letters were disconnected and she asked about dead people or people she’d hardly known. Her mother meant to go by bus one day and stay overnight, but she postponed it until her arthritis got too bad and she was not able to go out at all.
Four years later, at Christmastime, Eily, her husband, and their three children paid a visit home, and she kept eyeing everything and asking people to please stop staring at her, and then she went around the house and looked under the beds, for some male spy whom she believed to be there. She was dressed in brown and had brown fur-backed gloves. Her husband was very suave, had let his hair grow long, and during the tea kept pressing his knee against mine and asking me which did I like best, sweet or savory. The only moment of levity was when the three children, clothes and all, got into a pig trough and began to splash in it. Eily laughed her head off as they were being hosed down by her mother. Then they had to be put into the settle bed, alongside the sacks of flour and the brooms and the bric-à-brac, while their clothes were first washed and then put on a little wooden horse to dry before the fire. They were laughing, but their teeth chattered. Eily didn’t remember me very clearly and kept asking me if I was the oldest or the middle girl in the family. We heard later that her husband got promoted and was running a little shop
and had young girls working as his assistants.
I was pregnant, and walking up a street in a city with my own mother, under not very happy circumstances, when we saw this wild creature coming toward us, talking and debating to herself. Her hair was gray and frizzed, her costume was streelish, and she looked at us, and then peered, as if she was going to pounce on us; then she started to laugh at us, or rather, to sneer, and she stalked away and pounced on some other persons. My mother said, “I think that was Eily,” and warned me not to look back. We both walked on, in terror, and then ducked into the porchway of a shop, so that we could follow her with our eyes without ourselves being seen. She was being avoided by all sorts of people, and by now she was shouting something and brandishing her fist and struggling to get heard. I shook, as indeed the child within me was induced to shake, and for one moment I wanted to go down that street to her, but my mother held me back and said that she was dangerous, and that in my condition I must not go. I did not need much in the way of persuading. She moved on; by now several people were laughing and looking after her, and I was unable to move, and all the gladness of our summer day, and a little bottle of Mischief pressed itself into the palm of my hand again, and I saw her lithe and beautiful as she once was, and in the street a great flood of light pillared itself around a little cock of hay while the two of us danced with joy.
I did go in search of her years later. My husband waited up at the cross and I went down the narrow steep road with my son, who was thrilled to be approaching a shop. Eily was behind the counter, her head bent over a pile of bills that she was attaching to a skewer. She looked up and smiled. The same face but much coarser. Her hair was permed and a newly pared pencil protruded from it. She was pleased to see me, and at once reached out and handed my son a fistful of rainbow toffees.
It was the very same as if we’d parted only a little while ago. She didn’t shake hands or make any special fuss, she simply said, “Talk of an angel,” because she had been thinking of me that very morning. Her children were helping; one was weighing sugar, the little girl was funneling castor oil into four-ounce bottles, and her oldest son was up on a ladder fixing a flex to a ceiling light. He said my name, said it with a sauciness as soon as she introduced me, but she told him to whist. For her own children she had no time, because they were already grown, but for my son she was full of welcome and kept saying he was a cute little fellow. She weighed him on the big meal scales and then let him scoop the grain with a little trowel, and let it slide down the length of his arm and made him gurgle.
People kept coming in and out, and she went on talking to me while serving them. She was complete mistress of her surroundings and said what a pity that her husband was away, off on the lorry, doing the door-to-door orders. He had given up banking, found the business more profitable. She winked each time she hit the cash register, letting me see what an expert she was. Whenever there was a lull, I thought of saying something, but my son’s pranks commandeered the occasion. She was very keen to offer me something and ripped the glass paper off a two-pound box of chocolates and laid them before me, slantwise, propped against a can or something. They were eminently inviting, and when I refused, she made some reference to the figure.
“You were always too generous,” I said, sounding like my mother or some stiff relation.
“Go on,” she said, and biffed me.
It seemed the right moment to broach it, but how?
“How are you?” I said. She said that, as I could see, she was topping, getting on a bit, and the children were great sorts, and the next time I came I’d have to give her notice so that we could have a singsong. I didn’t say that my husband was up at the road and by now would be looking at his watch and saying “Damn” and maybe would have got out to polish or do some cosseting to the vintage motorcar that he loved so. I said, and again it was lamentable, “Remember the old days, Eily.”
“Not much,” she said.
“The good old days,” I said.
“They’re all much of a muchness,” she said.
“Bad,” I said.
“No, busy,” she said. My first thought was that they must have drugged the feelings out of her, they must have given her strange brews, and along with quelling her madness, they had taken her spark away. To revive a dead friendship is almost always a risk, and we both knew it but tried to be polite.
She kissed me and put a little holy water on my forehead, delving it in deeply, as if I were dough. They waved to us, and my son could not return those waves, encumbered as he was with the various presents that both the children and Eily had showered on him. It was beginning to spot with rain, and what with that and the holy water and the red rowan tree bright and instinct with life, I thought that ours indeed was a land of shame, a land of murder, and a land of strange, throttled, sacrificial women.
Over
Oh my dear I would like to be something else, anything else, an albatross. In short, I wish I never knew you. Or could forget. Or be a bone—you could suck it. Or a stone in the bottom of your pocket, slipped down, if you like, through one of the holes in the lining and wedged into the hem more or less forever, until you threw the coat away or gave it to one of your relations. I never saw you in a coat, only in a sort of jacket, what they call an anorak. A funny word.
The first time you came to see me, you were on the point of leaving as I opened the door. Leaving already. Yes, you were that intrepid. So was I. You asked me where you might put your coat, or rather that anorak thing, and I couldn’t think, there being no hall stand. Do you remember the room was too big for us? I remember. Seeing you sitting an ocean away, on a print-covered chair, ill at ease, young, younger than your thirty years, and I thought how I would walk across somehow or even stride across and cradle you. It was too grand: the room, the upright piano, the cut-glass chandelier. I have had notions of grandeur in the past but they are vanishing. Oh, my God, everything is vanishing, except you.
A younger man. I go over our years ahead; jump ahead if you will. I will be gray before you. What a humbling thing. I will dye my tresses, all my tresses. Perhaps I should experiment now with a bottle of brown dye and a little soft brush, experiment even with my hidden hairs. I must forestall you always, always. Leave no loopholes, nothing that will disappoint or disenchant you. What nonsense, when you have already gone. I don’t expect to see you again unless we bump into one another. I think I am getting disappointed in you and that is good. Excellent. You told me yourself how you lied to me. You are back from your lecturing and probably thinking of getting in touch with me, probably at this very moment. Your hand on the telephone, debating, all of you debating. Now you’ve taken your hand away. You’ve put it off. You know you can, you can put it aside like a treat, a childhood treat.
I did that as a child with a watch. Not a real watch, but still a watch. It was the color of jam, raspberry color, and I left it somewhere, in fact in a vestibule, in order that I could go look at it, in order to see it there, mine, mine.
I did it. I crossed the room, and what you did was to feel my hair over and over again and in different ways, touch it with the palm of your hand, your drink was in your other hand (at first you refused a drink), felt it, strands of hair with your fingers, touched it as if it were cloth, the way a child touches its favorite surfaces such as a doll or a toy.
I keep saying child. It was like that, and you staring, staring, right through me, into me.
No knowing what I surrendered that night, what I gave up. I gave up most people, and gave up the taste for clothes and dinners and anything that could be called frivolous. I even gave up my desire to talk, to intrude, or to make my presence felt. I went right back; that is true, right back to the fields, so to speak, where I grew up. All the features of that place, the simplest things, the sensations repossessed me. Crystal clear. A gate, a hasp, a water trough, the meadows, and the way one can flop down into the corner of a field, a hay field. Dew again. And the image I had was of the wetness that babies and calves and fo
als have when they are just born and are about to be licked, and yet I was the mother.
Undoubtedly I was the mother when I gave you that soup and peeled a potato for you and cut it in half and mashed it as if you couldn’t do it yourself and you said, “I have a poor appetite.” You thought I should have been more imposing. Even my kitchen you liked, the untidiness and the laurel leaves in a jug. They last a long time and I am told that they are lucky.
I should have enjoyed that night, that first unplanned meeting. As a matter of fact I did, but it has been overlaid with so much else that it is like something crushed, something smothered, something at the bottom of a cupboard that has been forgotten, its very shape destroyed, its denomination ignored, and yet it is something that will always be there, except that no one will know or care about it, and no one will want to retrieve it, and in the years to come if the cupboard should be cleaned out, if, for instance, the occupants are leaving, it will indeed be found, but it will be so crumpled as to be useless.