by Edna O'Brien
It was a strange sensation, as if touching gauze, or some substance that was about to vanish into thin air. Like the clocks of dandelions that were and then were not, fugitive dandelions vanishing, running away, everything running away, everything escaping its former state.
The woman asked her to go on, to please go on. She thought of other loves, other touches, and it was as if all these things were getting added together in her, like numbers being totted up in a vast cash register, poor numbers that would never be able to be separated.
She did go on, and then her own eyes swam in her head, and for no reason she recalled the transparent paper that her mother used to apply to the lower halves of windowpanes, paper with patterns of butterflies and the consistency of water when dampened. They were both wet. Her fingers inside the woman would leave a telltale for all time.
They didn’t know what to say. The woman spoke about her chap, what a regular maniac he was. Then the woman told her some facts about her sordid childhood in Cairo, about being a little girl, constantly raped by uncles and cousins, and great-uncles, and great-great-uncles, and with each similar revelation she would say, “Horrible eh, horrible eh.”
The woman had lived through wars, had half starved, had eaten cactus root, had been bruised and beaten by soldiers, and hideous though these events were, they had not made her deep or brave, they had not penetrated to her. She was like any other woman at the tail end of a party, a little drunk, a little fatigued, soured about her fate.
The little dog bared his eyeteeth at them. He knew he was being put down before it happened, hence bit doors, wainscotting, and the legs of chairs, bit avidly in anticipation of his fate. She hadn’t told the children until it was over. They cried. Then they forgot.
But did they forget? They, too, had brimming hearts. Children’s hearts broke, but they did not know that for a long time. One day they discovered it, and then it was as if some part of them had been removed unthinkingly, on a ritual operating table.
Soon after that she caught the illness, or rather, it descended on her, an escalating fever. It centered in the throat, the nose, and behind the eyes, and everything about her felt raw. The neighbor used to come to see her, bring Bovril in a thermos, and the doctor came twice a day. But when they were gone it used to possess her again, that hound of terror. Would her heart be plucked out of her body, would the roof fall in, would a rat come out of its hiding? She often saw one, on the head of the bed, on the bedknob, poised, bristling.
A girl she’d known had had a rat in her bedroom that got killed by a cat, after hours and hours of play, and had witnessed the last screeching tussle, the leaps, then described the remains—a little heart of dry triangular flesh and a string which was the tail. The girl had found a nice bloke and moved with him into his barge. The very day the girl saw him she wrote him a note saying no person, animal, insect, or thing had sniffed about her sex for almost a year and asked were there any offers. They clicked.
At the height of the fever, small flying creatures assembled and performed a medieval drama. They flew from the ceiling, perched on the various big brass curtain rings, hid in the dusty hollow space above the wardrobe, and hissed at one another: hiss-hiss. They chattered in a rich and barbarous language. She could comprehend it, though she could not speak it. They stripped her bare. They worked in pairs, sometimes like angels, sometimes like little imps. They, too, had tails. They worked quickly, everything was quick and preordained.
She lay prostrate. Her nipples were like two aching mouths, unable to beseech. The Leader, half man, half woman, lay upon her, and in that unfamiliar, mocking, rocking copulation, all strength seemed to be sucked out of her. Her nipples had nothing left to give. After milk came blood, and after blood, lymph. Her seducer, though light as a proverbial feather, had one long black curved whisker jutting from his left nostril, and there was no part of her body that did not come under the impact of its maddening trail. The others kept up some kind of screeching chorus. She was wrung dry.
She came to on the floor. She saw the pictures, and her oval, silver-backed mirror, as if she had been away on a long long journey, and she resaluted them. In the silence there was a heaviness, as of something snoring, and various hairs had got into the glass of orange juice beside the bed.
The next day, when her temperature had abated somewhat, she decided to get a grip on herself, to find the use of her legs again, and to walk around. There was even a walking stick that someone had left behind. She opened a door that led into a room, a little vacant room, as it happened, but it was no longer empty; she saw numbers of coffins throughout the room, lifting and flying about, and she heard a saw cutting through wood, slowly and obstinately.
Good God, I am dying, she thought, as the coffins careened about, and then she closed the door and then opened it again, and the room was as it should be, with a single bed, covered in an orange counterpane, a lamp with a white globe, a buckled dressing table, and a painting that represented a purring heart.
That was the first time. Not long after, the washbasin in the maid’s room did a little dance, and the enamel was like a meal inside her mouth, crushing her teeth. They said it was bad to be alone. It was.
She lost interest in cooking and housekeeping, wagged her finger at her own self, and pronounced a ridiculous verdict, “You are slipping, slipping.” Very often she caught sight of a bright sixpence concealed inside a wad of dough, and she thought that if she could get it and keep it in her purse, it would be a good augury for the future. Yes, she was slipping. Her hardworking mother would not approve. Her mother had been a good cook, superb at puddings, blood puddings, suet puddings, and, of course, the doyen of all, the inimitable queen of puddings.
The neighbors suggested she take driving lessons, and she did. On the second lesson, she headed straight for a pond, escaped only because the instructor grabbed the steering wheel. All she could hear was “The pond, the pond.” She saw it, with its fine fuzz of green scum, looking exceedingly calm and undangerous. The instructor drove home.
She went to a boy called Pierre to have streaks and highlighting. Consequently, her hair at night suggested the lights of an Aladdin’s cave. She should have streetwalked. She got a new outfit. She got new boots. They were the color of hessian and thickly crusted with threaded flowers. In the shop, the male assistant told her that their consultant psychiatrist could tell any woman’s character from the footwear she chose. For that she smirked.
There was only one tune in her head, and it was that London Bridge was falling down, falling down. She would sit far back in a chair and try to keep still. But very often it would come, this mutiny, and there was no knowing what blood battles, what carnivals, what mad eyes and bulbous eyeballs would swim before her. Get thee to a nunnery, she said to them in vain. The bills poured in. Nevertheless, she bought unnecessary things, an ivory inlaid occasional table, a prayer chair.
The chair had to stay in the shop window for three days, until a dexterous man came to haul it out. She used to go up to the shop and look at it, observe the word SOLD in bold red letters and her name just beneath it. She envisaged sitting on it, kneeling on it. She never did, because it had to go back to the shop, still with its corrugated wrapping on, since the check had bounced.
She had stopped work supposedly for a month, but by then it was several months. She had been replaced by a younger girl, and the column that used to carry her name and her oval-faced likeness each Tuesday morning now had a cute little photograph of a blond lady who used the pseudonym of Sappho. Her former editor wrote and said if he could ever do anything for her, he would be only too glad to help. It was both touching and useless.
As time went on, she was selling instead of buying. Her dresses, both chiffon affairs, in beautiful airy designs, were in a shop window not far away, and her fox cape had been snatched up two minutes after she had deposited it in the secondhand market. She saw the new owner go out in it, strutting, and she wanted to sub her. The new owner wore red platform shoes, and sh
e herself made a note to procure a pair when her ship came home.
The children guessed but never said. They got little presents for her—usually nice notebooks and Biros to try and coax her back to work. From school they wrote insouciant notes—how they were out of socks, they were almost out of underwear, they wondered if she’d had the leak fixed. A man whom she’d met in the park, another nutter, drew her a graph of her waning sexuality and presented her with a sealed letter. He wrote:
It appears you do not appreciate a mature person, such as myself, you know many cultured children, some you worship and some you ridicule, but, dear friend, you say you are very occupied, so are the Pope, the United Nations, the Brotherhood of Workers, the Black Militants, the White Pacifists; all playing similar games.
Fellow puppet of nature, from outside, stationed in my space, time, and tranquillity, I observe the stardust drifting and pulsating through the Milky Way. Goodbye. It is not the end of me.
Then he told her to beware. All because she stood him up one day on a park bench, where he was going anyhow, after his afternoon ration of fresh air.
She let the bills come and then dropped them into the boiler. She was glad she had not converted to oil, otherwise there would have been no boiler, and no ashes, and no ash pan, with its lovely big surreal clinkers. The house was silent, and yet in those silences she could hear a little gong summoning her to something, to prayer perhaps, and then the voices, real and imagined, were like packing needles, being dispatched in one ear and out the other, through the brawn of her head. Yet no one had died, not even her parents, so that there was no excuse for those ridiculous coffins.
Still, morning was morning. She would creep down into the garden, quietly, so that she did not even disturb the pigeons out of their roost, and at once she would be possessed of such a nice feeling, a safeness—talking amicably to the sweetness of nature about her. There were still such things, the milky air, the camellias in their trembling backdrop of shining foliage, which she would smell and touch and inhale, and thank for being there. Symbols of another world, a former world, a beautiful world. What world? Where, when, and why had she gone wrong?
It was inside that things were worst. If she sat, or lingered too long in any room, it seemed as if the books, the encyclopedias might commence to talk, the pages might fly open and reveal something dire. At intervals the walls purred. She was several sizes, tiny and shrinking, holding a doll’s stomach, pressing, making it say “Ma-ma, ba-ba,” she was beating nettles with a stick, she was squatting under the trees, she was a freak being hoisted up on stilts, she was flying, not flying, fixed frozen. She began to lock the door on one room after another, and she would listen outside these doors and peer through their keyholes, but not go in. She locked every room in that house, had a camp bed down in the hall, and was ready to fly at the slightest hint of irregularity. In the end she rented a room in a small hotel and came home only for a change of clothing or to collect the mail.
“Knock-knock.” He was there. She went out smiling and he helped her with the few things that she was carrying. He hesitated before pulling on the choke. In the back seat were two cardboard boxes, full of empty milk bottles, and the moment they started up, two or three of the bottles rolled off.
“Any regrets?” Yes, plenty of regrets. She was going to a place named after a lake, and she and others would be under supervision. He said she would be all right, that there were plenty of others in the same boat. Her hackles did not rise.
Ah, never did the house look so lovely as just then, the sheltering eaves from which the birds were darting in and out, the multicolored brick with its hues of violet and crimson, the paintwork, which with a bit of effort could be renewed. She had thrown it all away, she had let it go. Her lungs burst for a moment with regret, and she thought of the alternative, of how blissful it would be, to be going in there and starting all over again, with wooden spoons and a kitchen table, and a primus or a stove; a few belongings. Then she checked herself. It was no use wishing. She saw the living death and the demons behind her, she saw the sad world that she had invented for herself, but of the future she saw nothing, not even one little godsend.
FROM
A Rose in the Heart
1978
Number 10
Everything began to be better for Mrs. Reinhardt from the moment she started to sleepwalk. Every night her journey yielded a fresh surprise. First it was that she saw sheep—not sheep as one sees them in life, a bit sooty and bleating away, but sheep as one sees them in a dream. She saw myriads of white fleece on a hilltop, surrounded by little lambs frisking and suckling to their heart’s content.
Then she saw pictures such as she had not seen in life. Her husband owned an art gallery and Mrs. Reinhardt had the opportunity to see many pictures, yet the ones she saw at night were much more satisfying. For one thing, she was inside them. She was not an outsider looking in, making idiotic remarks, she was part of the picture: an arm or a lily or the gray mane of a horse. She did not have to compete, did not have to say anything. All her movements were preordained. She was simply aware of her own breath, a soft, steady, sustaining breath.
In the mornings her husband would say she looked a bit frayed or a bit intense, and she would say, “Nonsense,” because in twenty years of marriage she had never felt better. Her sleeping life suited her, and of course, she never knew what to expect. Her daily life had a pattern to it. Weekday mornings she spent at home, helping or supervising Fatima, the Spanish maid. She gave two afternoons a week to teaching autistic children, two afternoons were devoted to an exercise class, and on Fridays she shopped in Harrods and got all the groceries for the weekend. Mr. Reinhardt had bought a farm two years before, and weekends they spent in the country, in their newly renovated cottage. In the country she did not sleepwalk, and Mrs. Reinhardt wondered if it might be that she was inhibited by the barbed-wire fence that skirted their garden. But there are gates, she thought, and I should open them. She was a little vexed with herself for not being more venturesome.
Then one May night, back in her house in London, she had an incredible dream. She walked over a field with her son—in real life he was at university—and all of a sudden, and in unison, the two of them knelt down and began scraping the earth up with their bare hands. It was a rich red earth and easy to crumble. They were so eager because they knew that treasure was about to be theirs. Sure enough, they found bits of gold, tiny specks of it which they put in a handkerchief, and then, to crown her happiness, Mrs. Reinhardt found the loveliest little gold key and held it up to the light while her son laughed and in a baby voice said, “Mama.”
Soon after this dream Mrs. Reinhardt embarked on a bit of spring cleaning. Curtains and carpets for the dry cleaner’s, drawers depleted of all the old useless odds and ends that had been piling up. Her husband’s clothing, too, she must put in order. A little rift had sprung up between them and was widening day by day. He was moody. He got home later than usual, and though he did not say so, she knew that he had stopped at the corner and had a few drinks. Once that spring he had pulled her down beside him on the living-room sofa and stroked her thighs and started to undress her within hearing distance of Fatima, who was in the kitchen chopping and singing. Always chopping and singing or humming. For the most part, though, Mr. Reinhardt went straight to the liquor cabinet and gave them both a gin, pouring himself a bigger one because, as he said, all her bloody fasting made Mrs. Reinhardt lightheaded.
She was sorting Mr. Reinhardt’s shirts—T-shirts, summer sweaters, thick crew-neck sweaters—and putting them each in a neat pile, when out of his seersucker jacket there tumbled a little gold key that caused her to let out a cry. The first thing she felt was a jet of fear. Then she bent down and picked it up. It was exactly like the one in her sleepwalk. She held it in her hand, promising herself never to let it go. What fools we are to pursue in daylight what we should leave for nighttime.
Her next sleepwalking brought Mrs. Reinhardt out of her house into a w
aiting taxi and, some distance away, to a mews house. Outside the mews house was a black-and-white tub filled with pretty flowers. She simply put her hand under a bit of foliage and there was the latchkey. Inside was a little nest. The wallpaper in the hall was the very one she had always wanted for their house, a pale gold with the tiniest white flowers—mere suggestions of flowers, like those of the wild strawberry. The kitchen was immaculate. On the landing upstairs was a little fretwork bench. The cushions in the sitting room were stiff and stately, and so was the upholstery, but the bedroom—ah, the bedroom.
It was everything she had ever wanted their own to be. In fact, the bedroom was the very room she had envisaged over and over again and had described to her husband down to the last detail. Here it was—a brass bed with a little lace canopy above it, the entire opposite wall a dark metallic mirror in which dark shadows seemed to swim around, a light-blue velvet chaise longue, a hanging plant with shining leaves, and a floor lamp with an amber shade that gave off the softest of light.
She sat on the edge of the bed, marveling, and saw the other things that she had always wanted. She saw, for instance, the photo of a little girl in First Communion attire; she saw the paperweight that when shaken yielded a miniature snowstorm; she saw the mother-of-pearl tray with the two champagne glasses—and all of a sudden she began to cry, because her happiness was so immense. Perhaps, she thought, he will come to me here, he will visit, and it will be like the old days and he won’t be irritable and he won’t be tapping with his fingers or fiddling with the lever of his fountain pen. He will smother me with hugs and kisses and we will tumble about on the big bed.