by Edna O'Brien
It was on St. Valentine’s Day that he told Miss Hawkins he had to quit the flat he was lodging in.
“I’m not surprised,” she said, evincing great relief, and then she went a step further and muttered something about those sort of people. He was staying with some young people in Notting Hill Gate, and from what Miss Hawkins could gather, they hadn’t got a clue! They slept all hours, they ate at all hours, they drew national assistance and spent their time—the country’s time—strumming music on their various hideous tom-toms and broken guitars. Miss Hawkins had been against his staying there from the start and indeed had fretted about their influence over him. He defended them as best he could, said they were idealists and that one did the crossword puzzles and the other worked in a health-juice bar, but Miss Hawkins just tipped something off the end of the shovel the very same as if she were tipping them off her consciousness. She deliberated, then said he must move in with her. He was aghast with relief. He asked did she mean it. He stressed what a quiet lodger he would be, and how it would only be a matter of weeks until he found another place.
“Stay as long as you like,” Miss Hawkins said, and all through this encounter she was brusque in order not to let things slide into a bath of sentiment. But inside, Miss Hawkins was rippling.
That evening she went to a supermarket so as to stock up with things. She now took her rightful place alongside other housewives, alongside women who shopped and cared for their men. She would pick up a tin, muse over it, look at the price, and then drop it with a certain disdain. He would have yin and yang, he would have brown rice, and he would have curry dishes. She did, however, choose a mild curry. The color was so pretty, being ocher, that she thought it would be very becoming on the eyelids, that is if it did not sting. Miss Hawkins was becoming more beauty conscious and plucked her eyebrows again. At the cash register she asked for free recipes and made a somewhat idiotic to-do when they said they were out of them. In fact, she flounced off murmuring about people’s bad manners, bad tempers, and abominable breeding.
That night Miss Hawkins got tipsy. She danced as she might dance for him one night. It was all being exquisitely planned. He was arriving on the morrow at five. It would not be quite dark, but it would be dusk, and therefore dim, so that he need not be daunted by her little room. His new nest. Before he arrived she would have switched on the lamps, put a scarf over one; she would have a nice display of forsythia in the tall china jug, she would have the table laid for supper, and she would announce that since it was his first night they would have a bit of a celebration. She ferreted through her six cookery books (those from her married days) before deciding on the recipe she wanted. Naturally she could not afford anything too extravagant, and yet she would not want it to be miserly. It must, it simply must, have “bouquet.” She had definitely decided on baked eggs with a sprinkling of cheese, and kidneys cooked in red wine, and button mushrooms. In fact, the wine had been bought for the recipe and Miss Hawkins was busily chiding herself for having drunk too much of it. It was a Spanish wine and rather heady. Then after dinner, as she envisaged it, she would toss a salad. There and then Miss Hawkins picked up her wooden spoon and fork and began to wave them in the air and thought how nice it was to feel jolly and thought ahead to the attention that awaited him. He would be in a comfortable room, he would be the recipient of intelligent theatrical conversation, he could loll in an armchair and think, rather than be subjected to the strumming of some stupid guitar. He had suggested that he would bring some wine, and she had already got out the cut glasses, washed them, and shone them so that their little wedges were a sea of instant and changeable rainbows. He had not been told the sleeping arrangements, but the plan was that he would sleep on a divan and that the Victorian folding screen would be placed the length of the room when either of them wished to retire. Unfortunately, Miss Hawkins would have to pass through his half of the room to get to the bathroom, but as she said, a woman who has danced naked in Baghdad has no hesitation passing through a gentleman’s room in her robe. She realized that there would be little debacles, perhaps misunderstandings, but the difficulties could be worked out. She had no doubt that they would achieve a harmony. She sat at the little round supper table and passed things politely. She was practicing. Miss Hawkins had not passed an entrée dish for years. She decided to use the linen napkins and got out two of her mother’s bone napkin holders. They smelled of vanilla. “Nice man coming,” she would tell her little dog, as she tripped about tidying her drawers, dusting her dressing table, and debating the most subtle position for a photograph of her, from her cabaret days.
At length and without fully undressing, Miss Hawkins flopped onto her bed with her little dog beside her. Miss Hawkins had such dratted nightmares, stupid rigmaroles in which she was incarcerated, or ones in which she had to carry furniture or cater on nothing for a host of people. Indeed, an unsavory one, in which a cowpat became confused with a fried egg. Oh, was she vexed! She blamed the wine and she thanked the gods that she had not touched the little plum pudding which she had bought as a surprise for the Sunday meal. Her hands trembled and she was definitely on edge.
In the garden Miss Hawkins kept looking toward her own door lest he arrive early, lest she miss him. Her heart was in a dither. She thought, Supposing he changes his mind, or supposing he brings his horrid friends, or supposing he stays out all night; each new crop of supposing made Miss Hawkins more bad-tempered. Supposing he did not arrive. Unfortunately, it brought to mind those earlier occasions in Miss Hawkins’s life when she had been disappointed, nay jilted. The day when she had packed to go abroad with her diamond-smuggling lover, who never came, and when somehow, out of shock, she had remained fully dressed, even with her lace gloves on, in her rocking chair for two days until her cleaning woman came. She also remembered that a man proposed to her, gave her an engagement ring, and was in fact already married. A bigamist. But, as he had the gall to tell her, he did not feel emotionally married, and then, to make matters worse, took photos of his children, twins, out of his wallet. Other losses came back to her, and she remembered bitterly her last tour in the provinces, when people laughed and guffawed at her and even threw eggs.
By lunchtime Miss Hawkins was quite distraught, and she wished that she had a best friend. She even wished that there was some telephone service by which she could ring up an intelligent person, preferably a woman, and tell her the whole saga and have her fears dismissed.
By three o’clock Miss Hawkins was pacing her floor. The real trouble had been admitted. She was afraid. Afraid of the obvious. She might become attached, she might fall a fraction in love, she might cross the room, or shyly, he might cross the room and a wonderful surprise embrace might ensue, and Then. It was that Then that horrified her. She shuddered, she let out an involuntary “No.” She could not bear to see him leave, even leave amicably. She dreaded suitcases, packing, goodbyes, stoicism, chin-up, her empty hand, the whole, unbearable lodestone of it. She could not have him there. Quickly she penned the note; then she got her coat, her handbag, and her little dog in its basket and flounced out.
The note was on the top step under a milk bottle. It was addressed to him. The message said:
YOU MUST NEVER EVER UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES COME HERE AGAIN.
Miss Hawkins took a taxi to Victoria and thence a train to Brighton. She had an invalid friend there to whom she owed a visit. In the train, as she looked out at the sooty suburbs, Miss Hawkins was willing to concede that she had done a very stupid thing indeed, but that it had to be admitted that it was not the most stupid thing she could have done. The most stupid thing would have been to welcome him in.
Ways
A narrow road and the fist tentative fall of snow. A light fall that is merely preparatory and does not as yet make life cumbersome for the people of the herds. Around each clapboard house a belt of trees, and around the younger trees wooden Vs to protect the boughs from the heavier snow. The air is crisp, and it is as if the countryside is suddenly, miracu
lously revealed—each hill, each hedgerow, each tiny declivity more pronounced in the mande of snow. Autumn dreaminess is over and winter is being ushered in.
The road could be anywhere. The little birches, the sound of a river, the humped steel bridge, the herds of cattle, the silo sheds, and the little ill-defined tracks suggest the backwardness of Ireland or Scotland or Wales. But in fact it is Vermont. Together they are braving the elements—two women in their thirties who have met for a day. Jane has lent Nell, her visitor, a cape, snow boots, and fuzzy socks. They pass a house where three chained guard dogs rear up in the air and bark so fiercely it seems as if they might break their fetters and come and devour the passersby. Jane is a little ashamed; it is, after all, her neighborhood, her Vermont, and she wants things to be perfect for Nell. She is glad of the snow and points proudly to the little pouches of it, like doves’ feathers, on a tree. She apologizes for the dogs by saying that the poor man has a wife who has been mentally ill for twenty years and has no help in the house.
“In there?” Nell says.
“Yes, she’s in there somewhere,” Jane says, and together they look at a little turret window with its second frame of fresh snow and a plate glass with a tint of blue in it. Together they say, “Jane Byre,” and think how eerie to be telepathic, having only just met.
“You were wonderful last night,” Jane says.
“I was nervous,” Nell says.
“Ironing your dress, I guess I was, too. It was so delicate, I was so afraid.”
“Afraid?”
“That it might just disappear.”
Nell remembers the evening before—arriving from New York, going up to a cold bedroom, and taking out a sheaf of poems she was going to read to the English Department of the university where Jane and her husband teach. Scrambling through her notes in the guest bedroom, searching anxiously for a spare refill for her pen, she was once again envisaging a terrible scene in which her head would be hacked off and would go rolling down the aisle between rows of patient people, while her obedient mouth would go on uttering the lines she had prepared. Always, before she appeared in public, these nervous fits assailed her, and more than anything she longed for a kind hand on her brow, a voice saying “There, there.”
Jane had ironed the dress Nell had chosen to wear and brought it up, moving on tiptoe. She asked if Nell wanted to wash and had given her a towel that was halfway between a hand towel and a bath towel. Nell said that she might like a drink to steady her nerves—only one—and shortly afterward, on a tiny little gallery tray, there was a glass of sweet sherry and some oatmeal biscuits. As she changed into the dress, taking her time to fasten the little buttons along the cuffs, the bells from three different churches pealed out, and she said an impromptu prayer and felt dismally alone. As if guessing, her hostess reentered, carrying an electric heater and a patchwork bedcover. They stood listening to the last peal of the last bell, and Nell thought how Jane was kindness itself in opening her house to a stranger. Not only that, but Jane had gone to the trouble of typing out a list of people at the university whom Nell would meet, adding little dossiers as to their function and what they were like.
“And what do you do apart from teaching?” Nell asked.
“I like to give my time to my family,” Jane said.
“Social life?”
“No, we keep to ourselves,” Jane said, following this with a little smile, a smile with which she punctuated most of her remarks.
Jane took her on a tour of the house then, and Nell saw it all—the three bedrooms, the guest room with the patchwork quilt, the pink shells on the little girl’s bureau, the teddy bear with most of its fur sucked bare, four easy chairs in the living room, and the seven new kittens around the kitchen stove, curled up and as motionless as muffs in a shop window. Jane explained how two kittens were already booked, three would be taken on loan, and the remaining two would stay with the mother and be part of their family. Pinned to the wall in the kitchen was a list of possible Christmas gifts, and when Nell read them she felt some sort of twinge:
Make skirt for Sarah
Grape jelly for Anne
Secondhand book for Josh
Little bottles of bath essence
The house and its order made such an impression on her that she thought she would like to live in it and be part of its solidity. Then two things happened. A kitten detached itself from the fur mass, stood on its hind legs, and nibbled one of Jane’s slippers, which was lying there. Then it shadow-boxed, expecting the slipper also to move. Next thing, the hall door opened, someone came in, went through to the parlor, another door was heard to bang, and almost at once Mozart was being played on a fiddle. It was Jane’s husband. Jane went to see him, to inquire if he wanted anything, and to tell him that the new guest had come and was very content and had brought a wonderful present—a cut-glass decanter, no less. He seemed not to reply. The fiddle playing went on, and to Nell there was something desperate in it.
Soon after, the two women left for the reading and Jane kept a beautiful silence in the car, allowing Nell to do her deep breathing and memorize her poems. Afterward, they went to a party, and during the party Nell went into the bathroom, watched herself in someone’s cracked mirror, and asked herself why it was that everyone was married, or coupled—that everyone had a husband to go home to, a husband to get a drink for, a husband to humor, a husband to deceive—but not she. She wondered if there was some basic attribute missing in her that made her unwifely or unlovable, and concluded that it must be so. She then had an unbearable longing to be at home in her own house in Ireland, having a solitary drink by the open fire as she looked out at the river Blackwater.
“What does your husband look like?” she asks of Jane now as they trudge along the road. It is colder than when they set out, and the snow is pelting against their faces. They have to step aside to let a snowplow pass them on the road, and Jane is smiling as she envisages her answer. It is as if she enjoys the prospect of describing her husband, of doing him justice.
“You two girls in trouble?” asks the driver of the snowplow, and they both say they are simply taking a walk. He shakes his head and seems to think that they are a little mad, then he smiles. His smile reaches them in a haze of snow. They wave him on.
The branches of the birches teeter like swaying children. The icicles are just formed and wet; they look enticing and as if they might melt. With her thumbnail Jane flicks open a round locket that hangs from a fine chain about her neck, and there in cameo is a man—gaunt and pensive, very much the type that Nell is drawn toward. At once she feels in herself some premonition of a betrayal.
“He’s lovely,” she says, but offhandedly.
“ ‘I don’t want you lovely’ was what he told me,” Jane says.
“Not one of King Arthur’s knights,” Nell says, gobbling a few flakes of snow.
“It wasn’t a romantic thing,” Jane says.
“What was it?” Nell says, nettled.
“It was me being very adoring,” Jane says. “I have a theory it’s better that way.”
“I don’t believe you,” Nell says, and stands still, causing Jane to stand also, so that she can look into Jane’s eyes. They are gray and not particularly fetching, but they are without guile.
“You’re prying,” Jane says.
“You’re hiding,” Nell says, and they laugh. They are bickering now. They look again at his likeness. The snow has smeared the features, and with her gloved thumb Jane wipes them. Then she snaps the locket dosed and drops it down inside her turtleneck sweater—to warm him, she says.
“How did you catch him?” Nell says, putting her arm around Jane and tickling her lightly below her ribs.
“Unfortunately, I was one of those exceptional women who get pregnant even when they take precautions,” Jane says, shaking her head.
“Was he livid?” Nell says, putting herself in the man’s shoes.
“No; he said, ‘I guess I’ll have to marry you, Sarah Jane,’ and we
did.”
It is the “we” that Nell envies. It has assurance, despite the other woman’s nonassertiveness.
“I was married in gray,” Jane says. “I simply had a prayer book and spring flowers. Dan’s mother was so upset about it all that she left during the breakfast. Then we went back to the college, and he read a paper to the students on Mary Shelley.”
“Poor Mary Shelley,” Nell says, feeling a chill all of a sudden, a knife-edged chill that she cannot account for.
“You’d like him,” Jane says, worried by the sudden silence.
“Why would I like him?” Nell says, picturing the face of the man that stared out of the locket. All of a sudden Nell has a longing not to leave as planned, at six o’clock, for New York, but to stay and meet him.
“Why don’t I stay till tomorrow?” she says as casually as she can.
“But that would be wonderful,” Jane says, and without hesitation turns sharply around so that they can hurry home to get the Jerusalem artichokes out of the pit before it has snowed over. She discusses a menu, says Dan will play his favorite pieces for them on the phonograph—adding that he never lets anybody else touch the machine, only himself.
Nell’s thought is “a prison”—a prison such as she had once been in, where the precious objects belonged to the man, and the dusters and brooms belonged to her, the woman.