by Edna O'Brien
Her finances suffered a dreadful setback when her entire stock contracted foot-and-mouth disease, and to add to her grief, she had to see the animals that she so loved die and be buried around the farm, wherever they happened to stagger down. Her lands were disinfected and empty for over a year, and yet she scraped enough to send her son to boarding school and felt lucky in that she got a reduction of the fees because of her reduced circumstances. The parish priest had intervened on her behalf. He admired her and used to joke her on account of the novelettes she so cravenly read. Her children left, her mother died, and she went through a phase of not wanting to see anyone—not even a neighbor—and she reckoned that was her Garden of Gethsemane. She contracted shingles, and one night, dipping into the well for a bucket of water, she looked first at the stars, then down at the water, and thought how much simpler it would be if she were to drown. Then she remembered being put into the well for sport one time by her brother, and another time having a bucket of water douched over her by a jealous sister, and the memory of the shock of these two experiences and a plea to God made her draw back from the well and hurry up through the nettle garden to the kitchen, where the dog and the fire, at least, awaited her. She went down on her knees and prayed for the strength to press on.
Imagine her joy when, after years of wandering, her son returned from the city, and announced that he would become a farmer and that he was getting engaged to a local girl who worked in the city as a chiropodist. Her gift to them was a patchwork quilt and a special border of cornflowers she planted outside the window, because the bride-to-be was more than proud of her violet-blue eyes and referred to them in one way or another whenever she got the chance. The Creature thought how nice it would be to have a border of complementary flowers outside the window, and how fitting, even though she preferred wallflowers, both for their smell and their softness. When the young couple came home from the honeymoon, she was down on her knees weeding the bed of flowers, and looking up at the young bride in her veiled hat, she thought an oil painting was no lovelier or no more sumptuous. In secret, she hoped that her daughter-in-law might pare her corns after they had become intimate friends.
Soon, she took to going out to the cowshed to let the young couple be alone, because even by going upstairs she could overhear. It was a small house, and the bedrooms were directly above the kitchen. They quarreled constantly. The first time she heard angry words she prayed that it be just a lovers’ quarrel, but such spiteful things were said that she shuddered and remembered her own dead partner and how they had never exchanged a cross word between them. That night she dreamed she was looking for him, and though others knew of his whereabouts, they would not guide her. It was not long before she realized that her daughter-in-law was cursed with a sour and grudging nature. A woman who automatically bickered over everything—the price of eggs, the best potato plants to put down, even the fields that should be pasture and those that should be reserved for tillage. The women got on well enough during the day, but rows were inevitable at night when the son came in and, as always, the Creature went out to the cowshed or down the road while things transpired. Up in her bedroom, she put little swabs of cotton wool in her ears to hide whatever sounds might be forthcoming. The birth of their first child did everything to exacerbate the young woman’s nerves, and after three days the milk went dry in her breasts. The son called his mother out to the shed, lit a cigarette for himself, and told her that unless she signed the farm and the house over to him he would have no peace from his young barging wife.
This the Creature did soon after, and within three months she was packing her few belongings and walking away from the house where she had lived for fifty-eight of her sixty years. All she took was her clothing, her Aladdin lamp, and a tapestry denoting ships on a hemp-colored sea. It was an heirloom. She found lodgings in the town and was the subject of much curiosity, then ridicule, because of having given her farm over to her son and daughter-in-law. Her son defected on the weekly payments he was supposed to make, but though she took the matter to her solicitor, on the appointed day she did not appear in court and as it happened spent the entire night in the chapel, hiding in the confessional.
Hearing the tale over the months, and how the Creature had settled down and made a soup most days, was saving for an electric blanket, and much preferred winter to summer, I decided to make the acquaintance of her son, unbeknownst to his wife. One evening I followed him to the field, where he was driving a tractor. I found a sullen, middle-aged man, who did not condescend to look at me but proceeded to roll his own cigarette. I recognized him chiefly by the three missing fingers and wondered pointlessly what they had done with them on that dreadful day. He was in the long field where she used to go twice daily with buckets of separated milk, to feed the suckling calves. The house was to be seen behind some trees, and because of either secrecy or nervousness he got off the tractor, crossed over, and stood beneath a tree, his back balanced against the knobbled trunk. It was a little hawthorn, and somewhat superstitious, I hesitated to stand under it. Its flowers gave a certain dreaminess to the otherwise forlorn place. There is something gruesome about plowed earth, maybe because it suggests the grave.
He seemed to know me, and he looked, I thought, distastefully at my patent boots and my tweed cape. He said there was nothing he could do, that the past was the past, and that his mother had made her own life in the town. You would think she had prospered or remarried, his tone was so caustic when he spoke of “her own life.” Perhaps he had relied on her to die. I said how dearly she still held him in her thoughts, and he said that she always had a soft heart and, if there was one thing in life he hated, it was the sodden handkerchief.
With much hedging, he agreed to visit her, and we arranged an afternoon at the end of that week. He called after me to keep it to myself, and I realized that he did not want his wife to know. All I knew about his wife was that she had grown withdrawn, that she had had improvements made on the place—larger windows and a bathroom installed—and that they were never seen together, not even on Christmas morning at chapel.
By the time I called on the Creature that eventful day, it was long after school, and as usual, she had left the key in the front door for me. I found her dozing in the armchair, very near the stove, her book still in one hand and the fingers of the other hand fidgeting as if she were engaged in some work. Her beautiful embroidered shawl was in a heap on the floor, and the first thing she did when she wakened was to retrieve it and dust it down. I could see that she had come out in some sort of heat rash, and her face resembled nothing so much as a frog’s, with her little raisin eyes submerged between pink swollen lids.
At first she was speechless; she just kept shaking her head. But eventually she said that life was a crucible, life was a crucible. I tried consoling her, not knowing what exactly I had to console her about. She pointed to the back door and said things were kiboshed from the very moment he stepped over that threshold. It seems he came up the back garden and found her putting the finishing touches to her hair. Taken by surprise, she reverted to her long-lost state of excitement and could say nothing that made sense. “I thought it was a thief,” she said to me, still staring at the back door, with her cane hanging from a nail there.
When she realized who he was, without giving him time to catch breath, she plied both food and drink on him, and I could see that he had eaten nothing, because the ox tongue in its mold of jelly was still on the table, untouched. A little whiskey bottle lay on its side, empty. She told me how he’d aged and that when she put her hand up to his gray hairs he backed away from her as if she’d given him an electric shock. He who hated the soft heart and the sodden handkerchief must have hated that touch. She asked for photos of his family, hut he had brought none. All he told her was that his daughter was learning to be a mannequin, and she put her foot in it further by saying there was no need to gild the lily. He had newspapers in the soles of his shoes to keep out the damp, and she took off those damp shoes and trie
d polishing them. I could see how it all had been, with her jumping up and down trying to please him but in fact just making him edgy. “They were drying on the range,” she said, “when he picked them up and put them on.” He was gone before she could put a shine on them, and the worst thing was that he had made no promise concerning the future. When she asked, “Will I see you?” he had said, “Perhaps,” and she told me that if there was one word in the English vocabulary that scalded her, it was the word “perhaps.”
“I did the wrong thing,” I said, and though she didn’t nod, I knew that she also was thinking it—that secretly she would consider me from then on a meddler. All at once I remembered the little hawthorn tree, the bare plowed field, his heart as black and unawakened as the man I had come away to forget, and there was released in me, too, a gigantic and useless sorrow. Whereas for twenty years she had lived on that last high tightrope of hope, it had been taken away from her, leaving her without anyone, without anything, and I wished that I had never punished myself by applying to be a sub in that stagnant, godforsaken little place.
The House of My Dreams
She hurried home from the neighbor’s house to have a few spare moments to herself. The rooms were stripped, the windows bare, the dust and the disrepair of the ledges totally revealed, everything gone except for the few things she insisted on taking herself—a geranium, a ewer, and a few little china coffee cups that miraculously had escaped being broken. There was a broom against the wall—a soft green twig that scarcely grazed the floor or penetrated to the rubble adhering there. Neighbors were good the day one moved house. No, that was not fair. She had had good neighbors, and a variety of them. She had spent nights with them, got drunk with some of them, slept with one of them and later regretted it, quarreled with one of them, and with another had made a definite plan to have a walk in the country once a week, but excuses always intervened, hers and the woman’s.
She went to the children’s room and hollered, “Hey, around the corner, po-po, waiting for Henry Lee.” This was the room where, nightly, her children used to squabble over who would have the top bunk, and where she brought cups of hot milk, thick with honey, for the colds and congestions they did not have, and where her older son used to enjoy looking up at the skylight, listening to the rain go pitter-patter, hoping for the snow to fall, listening (though one cannot hear it) to the sun coming up and lighting the pane of glass, watching the gradual change from dark sheet to transparent sheet, and then to a resemblance of something dipped in a quick wash of bright morning gold. Her son had dreamed that there were pink flamingos in a glass, a glass that he was drinking from, and that they were there because of a special bacteria in the water. That pink, or rather those multiples of feathered pink, layer upon layer, could compare with no color that he had ever seen. He feasted on it.
The room was empty except for the marks of casters, the initial J daubed on the wall, and the various stains. When she repeated, “Hey, around the corner, po-po,” there was not the slightest hint of an echo. Ah yes! The children had ritually buried a coin under one of the loose floorboards, and no doubt it was down there somewhere; in its hole, covered in dust and maybe smeared with cobwebs.
The night she had served their father with a custody writ, she had gone all around the house and lifted off the telephone receivers and watched them where they lay, somehow like numbed animals, black things or white things, or a red thing, that had gone temporarily dead. In the middle of the night her husband came and slipped the threatening letter in under the hall door (she had nailed down the letter box), and she was there cowering and waiting for it, the letter saying, “They are mine, they are not yours, you are going to be a nervous corpse if you take this to court, you gain nothing except your gross humiliation, you are bound to lose, I cannot show you any mercy, I am really determined to do everything within the law to get custody of those children, no holds barred.” She had read it and reread it and wrung her hands and wondered how she could have married such a man.
Another time she had waited in the hall, being too shy to stand at the window, and at intervals had pushed the letter box open to peep out into space. She was waiting for a man who did not appear. They happened to have the same birthday, and that factor, along with his smile, made her think somehow he would come, and listening for the car or the taxi, she had found herself in a particular stance, a stance repeated from long ago, waiting behind a window in a flannel nightgown for a man, her father, who anyhow might thrash her to death. It was as if all those past states only begged to be repeated, to be relived, to go on forever and ever, amen. Those things were like shackles that bound her.
*
The house had been her fortress. And yet there were snags. The time when a total stranger knocked, a tall thin man, asking if he could have a word with her, stepping inside onto the rubber mat and telling her that he had no intention of leaving her alone. It happened to be late spring, and he was framed by the hawthorn tree, and looking at it, and the soft nearly emergent petals, she thought, If I pretend not to be in the least bit afraid, he will go away. That was what she did—stared at the tree, giving the impression that someone else was in the house, that she was not petrified, that she was not stranded, not alone. He repeated his intention, then she dismissed him, saying, “We will see about that,” and she closed the door very quietly. But back in the house she began to tremble and was too incapacitated even to lift the telephone to call anyone; then when she heard his footsteps go away, she lay down on the floor and wondered why it was that she could not have talked to him, but she knew why it was, because she was petrified of such people. They were usually fanatical, they had a funny stare, and they laughed at things that were no laughingstock. The first such person she had ever come across had been a woman, a tall streelish creature whose mania gave her a wild energy, made her stalk fields, roads, byroads, lanes, made her rap on people’s doors at all hours of the day and night, insult them about their jobs, their self-importance, their furniture, and everything that they had taken to be enhancing. She could not have appeared casual for fear he might strangle her, or misbehave, treat the floor as a lavatory, or, worse, split her head. She had the glass changed, so that she was enabled to see out but no caller could see in. He came a few times but was told to scarper by a builder who was in her employment.
It had been a nice lunch, delicate—poached eggs and leaf spinach. When she sat down the neighbor handed her a linen napkin and said, “There you are, pet.” They drank wine, they clinked glasses, they recalled Christmases, numerous parties, the Scottish boy whom they both fancied and deceived each other over. At the time it had rankled. She herself had met him on the road one morning, by the merest chance, and he had the temerity to tell her he had been looking for a hardware shop, although it was a street solely of private houses. But that was well behind her. The garden would go on blooming. The Virginia creeper would attach itself to everything and finally encumber everything. She had put down three trees, numerous creepers, herbs, and wonderful bright shrubs that defied the nourishless London soil. She would recall the garden in times to come, the evenings sitting out on the low wall, looking at the river, or again at the blocks of flats on the opposite side, feeling the vibrations of the distant tube train go right through her stomach and her bowels, admiring the flowers, and sometimes getting down to stake up a rose that had straggled and bowed along the ground. It had been a home. “No place like home,” her parents used to say whenever they went away from their ramshackle farm, to be ill, or to shop for a day, or, in the case of her father, to go on binges.
She went up to her bedroom. Nothing left of its character but the wallpaper. Beige wallpaper with bosses of red roses, each rose like an embryo bud, and all intricately joined by stems that were as thin as thread and on the point of raveling. Not many people had seen her bedroom, but those who had were still in it, like ghosts, specters, frozen in the positions that they had once unthinkingly occupied. There was a boy, blond, freckled, who had never made lov
e to her but had harbored some true feelings for her. He always used to arrive with a group, but almost always got too drunk to go home, and once, though not drunk, felt disinclined to go home and took off his boots by the fire, and held the soles of his feet toward it, asking if by any chance seers read feet, if feet had lines of destiny just like hands. She thought that maybe shyness had deterred him, or maybe distaste. He used to talk in the early morning, the very early morning, touching the stems of the roses with his forefinger, watching the careens of the birds through the window and the course of the river beyond. People used to envy her that view of the river. Yes, it was a shame to leave. At night because of the aspect of the water and its lap, it often seemed as if it were another city altogether, and now just as the trees were beginning to grow she was leaving it all behind. She ought to desecrate it, do some misdeed, such as at school when they got holidays and used to throw compasses and chalk about, used to chant, “Kick up tables, kick up chairs, kick Sister So-and-so down the stairs, no more Latin, no more French, no more sitting on a hard old bench.” But those were the carefree days, or seemed to be.
I am loath to leave, she thought, and dragged the broom over the bare wood floor. Dust rose out of nowhere, so she filled a coffee cup with water and spattered it over the floor to keep the motes down. Once, during a very special party, she thought that the freckled boy must not be coming, and then just as her hopes were dashed, he arrived with a new girl, a girl not unlike herself, but younger, tougher, and more self-assured. The girl had asked for cigars immediately, and strode around the room smoking a cigar, telling all the men that she knew they lusted after her. She was both clever and revolting. At the end of the night there were only the three of them left and they sat in a little huddle. He was right in the throes of a sentence, when all of a sudden he fell fast asleep, the way children do, leaving the two of them to watch over him, which they did like vultures. Together they removed his high boots, his suede jacket, and his outer sweater. When at last the girl fell asleep, she herself went around her own house, stacking glasses, thinking it had been a good party, primarily because he was there. And occasionally, even in those very early days, things would suddenly become otherwise, and her heart would predict a disaster. She would forget a name, even her own name, or a cigarette butt in a glass would be enlarged a hundredfold, and once, the violets came out of a brooch and it seemed to her they were exuding either sweat or tears. The cheeky girl rang her mother the moment she wakened and asked how Kafka, her dog, was. Then she borrowed money and, walking away from him with a strut, said, “Isn’t he chubby,” his function in her life now completed.