by Edna O'Brien
“A gentleman to see you,” the younger waiter said. Mrs. Reinhardi froze: the bounder was back. Like a woman ready for battle, she put down her squashed napkin and stalked out of the room. She had to turn a corner to enter the main hall, and there sitting on one of the high-backed Spanish-type chairs was her husband, Mr. Reinhardt. He stood up at once and they shook hands formally, like an attorney and his client at an auspicious meeting. He has come to sue me, she thought, because of the necklace. She did not say, “Why have you come?” He looked tired. Mrs. Reinhardt flinched when she heard that he had taken a private plane. He had been to the other hotel and had motored over. He refused a drink and would not look at her. He was mulling over his attack. She was convinced that she was about to be shot when he put his hand in his pocket and drew the thing out. She did not mind being shot but thought irrationally of the mess on the beautiful Spanish furniture.
“They found it,” he said, as he produced the necklace and laid it on the table between them. It lay like a snake in a painting, coiled in order to spring. Yet the sight of it filled her with tears, and she blubbered out about the bounder and how she had met him and how he had used her, and suddenly she realized that she was telling him something that he had no inkling of.
“The maid took them,” he said, and she saw the little maid with the brown curly hair dressed for the tournament, and now she could have plucked her tongue out for having precipitated the tale of the bounder.
“Was she sacked?” she asked.
He did not know. He thought not.
“Fine place they have,” he said, referring to the lake and the windmills.
“This also is lovely,” she said, and went on to talk about the view from the dining room and the light which was so telling, so white, so unavoidable. Just like their predicament. In a minute he would get up and go. If only she had not told him about the bounder. If only she had let him say why he had come. She had closed the last door.
“How have you been?” he said.
“Well,” she said, but the nerve in her lower jaw would not keep still, and without intending it and without in any way wanting it to happen, Mrs. Reinhardt burst into tears, much to the astonishment of the young waiter, who was waiting to take an order, as he thought, for a drink.
“He tried to blackmail me,” she said, and then immediately denied it.
Her husband was looking at her very quietly, and she was not sure if there was any sympathy left in him. She thought, If he walks out now, it will be catastrophic, and again she thought of the few lobsters who were left in the tank, and who were motionless with grief.
“There is us and there are people like him,” Mr. Reinhardt said, and though she had not told the whole story, he sensed the gravity of it. He said that if she did not mind he would stay, and that since he was hungry and since it was late, might they not go in to dinner. She looked at him and her eyes were probably drenched.
“Us and people like him!” she said.
Mr. Reinhardt nodded.
“And Rita?” Mrs. Reinhardt said.
He waited. He looked about. He was by no means at ease.
“She is one of us,” he said, and then qualified it. “Or she could be, if she meets the right man.”
His expression warned Mrs. Reinhardt to pry no further. She linked him as they went in to dinner.
The wind rustled through the chimney and some soot fell on a bouquet of flowers. She saw that. She heard that She squeezed his arm. They sat opposite. When the wind roars, when the iron catches rattle, when the very windowpanes seem to shiver, then wind and sea combine, then dogs begin to howl and the oncoming storm has a whiff of the supernatural. What does one do, what then does a Mrs. Reinhardt do? One reaches out to the face that is opposite, that one loves, that one hates, that one fears, that one has been betrayed by, that one half knows, that one longs to touch and be reunited with, at least for the duration of a windy night. And by morning who knows? Who knows anything, anyhow.
Quartet
Uncollected Stories,
1979–1981
Violets
In an hour he is due. In that hour I have tasks to perform and they, of course, revolve around him. I shall lay the fire. I shall lay it as I learned to as a child. I shall put on twists of paper, small pieces of coal, and, last of all, a few dry logs. The kindling is a pale wooden chip basket delivered from the vegetable shop. It was full of Clementines, and their smell lingers in it like a presence. Christmas is but a month gone. Then I did not know him; then I thought of myself as having passed those seesaw states, subject to a man, maybe loving a man, on tenterhooks because of a man.
Christmas I spent with my grown-up children and several old friends in a Tudor house in the North of England. We pulled crackers, put on ridiculous paper hats, and marveled at how happy one can be ripping open packages or finding one’s name crusted with a bit of silly gold glitter. My younger son received a Russian sword and went about the room lashing the uncomplaining air. We clapped and summoned up adversaries for him, and he delighted in the game. Next day it snowed and I thought, as I watched the swirl for an entire afternoon, that I could watch forever, because I had reached a plateau. It was quite mesmerizing to see all those flakes coming vertically through the hemisphere, then tilting sideways, and finally giving a beautiful suede sheen to the graveled earth, or to see them forming like small white stones on the rhododendron bushes, and feathery plumes on the branches of the fir trees.
That was only Christmas, and then came the meeting, and now he is due to arrive. My next task is to plump cushions. A man I know said that of all housewifely chores it is the most boring, the most monotonous, but still we do it, and the pink satin or the plum velvet or the patchwork cushion sits there inflated, ridiculously waiting. Next thing is to get more coal into the scuttle, to give the scuttle a bit of Brasso, to sweep up the grains of coal that will have been spilled, and, if possible, tighten the legs of the tongs so that they do not wobble and disgorge the lumps of coal before they get to the fire.
You would think I have not had visitors for years, but I have—in fact, they flock in all the time. But it is as if I see everything with a ruthless clarity. It is the opposite of that vigil when I watched the snow getting thicker and thicker, and saw the icicles extend from the roof, until after some days they were like walking sticks or beautiful javelins that one wanted to play with. I would paint a panel of this sitting room in this one hour if I had time and a pot of emulsion. The walls are apricot-colored, and in lamplight they are most pleasing because so quietly they emit a glow. Sometimes I think of the yolk of a gull’s egg when I look at those walls, and the thought ushers me on to the month of June, which for some reason I connect with happy and graceful events. In England people give their annual ball, girls wear myrtle in their hair, there are the races at Ascot, and even the most unsumptuous garden has a display of tea roses or briar roses or rambling roses, and if you stay in one of those lovely country houses there is a vase of them on your bedside table, bright and wide open like the eyes of watchful children.
But this is daylight and winter, and even the myriad bits of fluff on the new Edith Piaf record have caught my eye, as they will undoubtedly catch his. So it’s dusting time. I would make it night if I were setting the appointment. Married men are lunchtime callers. I know that. I know so much—albeit so little—about married men. I know how divided they must be, and how cursory, and how mentally they must brush off either her or her kiss as they step off the escalator to reach the Underground, or as they step into their motorcars, or as they glide through their own hallways, whistling or humming a familiar, guarded tune. They deny. They could be called Judas.
I know the mistake I am making. I see the exits in life. It will be six months or the proverbial nine months before it ends, and yet the foreknowledge is as clear as the first meeting. It is just like lifting a latch and seeing into the blazing fire at the far end of the room, with the passage in between, its carpet, its white rug, its chaise longue,
its birdcage, and its many secular delights. One day I will come to the other end and I will perhaps get scorched. I was brought up to believe in Hell and I was brought up to believe that men are masterful and fickle. I could, of course, have said no, but I didn’t. I demurred and then I succumbed. Nevertheless, I am planning something new for myself. I am putting my room in order. The smell of furniture wax, the incenselike smell, will fill the air and complement the beautiful heady innocent smell of the hyacinths that I have cultivated in a big bowl. Their tubers are just visible above the clay, and they are the dreamiest white, the palest blue, and a pink that looks artificial in color, like a cake icing. They are like crests on the round table, and as I pass to do this or that, I want to bury my face in them, but there is no time, and also, specks of pollen would stain the tip of my nose. There are only thirty minutes left.
The soup that is supposed to be simmering on the kitchen stove is, alas, boiling. I cry out, add cream, and beg all those little curds to disappear as I stir it more and more in a circular motion. Then I cannot find the embroidered cloth that I bought in Spain. Damn it. It is a cream cloth with red appliqués stitched over it. It is both chaste and gay. A stranger sitting down to eat might not only be surprised by it but might in jest say, “Get me the castanets.” I am resolved to be gay, to show little of my inner self—no old sores or tragic portraits. The cloth is not in the cupboard, and with no time to spare, I ring up the laundry. The laundry building is eight miles away, and one hundred and thirty people are employed there, yet I am rash enough to think that my Spanish cloth will be located and even delivered before one o’clock.
It is in the middle of my conversation with an insolent girl at the laundry that I realize that the soup is on the boil again. I run to turn the gas off and en route catch my knitted sleeve on the loose nail of the cane chair. Things are getting bungled. These last minutes are the worst. Hurry, hurry.
But when I get out the cut-glass goblets, I remember my dead mother. She gave them to me. Some are thickly cut with raised wedges of glass, some have harps that seem to float inside the walls of the glass itself, and three—the other three in the set got broken—have beautiful indentations to fit exactly the print of a thumb or a finger. I shall use them. I shall lay places for three. That will confuse him. I intend to confuse him. I intend to be someone else. The preparations are going against me—I have cut the bread too thick and the smoked salmon is in slithers. The shop has rooked me. I have met him, this caller, only once, and that was at a Christmas party, and our conversation was pure banter. Then, when he rang, he was crispness itself, and said such things as “Well, are we going to meet? Not that I think we should.” I said that we need not meet, and indeed, I meant it. But my stepping back from him whetted his interest. He invited himself to this lunch. “I shall come and lift lunch off you” was what he said. So English. So arch. I have made a cucumber salad. I pressed it all morning between two platters. Each disk of cucumber is softness itself, and even the green has been drained out of it. I sprinkle the salad with parsley. Soon I shall have to take off the cardigan, because I am wearing a new black dress. It fits me as if I were poured into it, as if I were molded to it.
Busy men often cancel at the last minute. Maybe he won’t come; maybe he will ring and cancel. He is a company director, he is married, he has a chauffeur, and I gather that his wife and he made it from scratch. He probably got a scholarship and went to Oxford or Cambridge. Now he has two houses and a croft in Scotland. I expect he is used to servants; maybe they have a cook … Good God! I left the phone off the hook when I ran from it to save the soup. He may have tried to ring and decided that the phone is out of order, so that he need not ring again to account for his non-appearance. And here all this food, the lovely wine, pellucid, like liquid sun, into which who knows how many precious grapes have gone. The fruits of the earth. I have on black mesh stockings and lace garters that I found in my mother’s drawer after she had died. They were wrapped up in a bolster case along with other things—necklaces, veiling, and some velvet flowers. They shocked me, and yet I said, “They will come in handy one day,” and put them in my suitcase.
Opening the wine, I gauge my strength by pulling the cork out. My strength is monumental. He will see me as some monster, devouring. I leave the ladle near the stove and turn the gas down until it shudders and shows signs of extinguishment. The clock has not chimed, but it is about to. It is in the next room, but I know that it has entered that spate of hesitancy that prevails just before it strikes. It broke once, but I had a man in from the city to repair it. He was actually called Mr. Goldsmith. I am superstitious about it and pray that it will not ever again expire.
My God, there is the doorbell. I know that I must answer it, but I cannot. I am unable to move. I am upstairs. I cannot descend. I read something last night when I was unable to sleep. It has affected me. I read that the only paradise is the paradise lost. Proust. I read it years ago, but I had not absorbed it, and last night, after rereading it, I tossed and turned in my wide bed and thought of my caller and how I would seduce him. I saw our little drama as if on a picture postcard: a naked couple oblivious of the serpent that lies between them. And I thought that I could think of him to my heart’s delight, and that he need never know, that he must never know, that I could paint postcard after postcard and give to skin the tints and the textures that I love, and give to speech and action all that I ever desire. I could ordain it regardless of him, and of course I thought how futile that would be in the end.
His finger is on the bell. He certainly is not timid—not as timid as I would be entering a paramour’s house and not quite knowing what to expect. For God’s sake, I must do something. I can’t just stand here. After all, I have an intercom. I can pick it up and say, “Go away,” or “She’s not here,” or “Just a minute.” But I do not pick it up. I lean against the wall. I am wobbling. I go down the stairs to let him in. He is just leaving. He seems surly. We do not kiss in the hall. I take his tweed coat and very formally lay it sideways on the prayer chair. As he comes into the sitting room, I see his evident pleasure as he takes stock of things.
“Nice room you’ve got,” he says.
“We like it,” I say.
“We?”
“Yes, we are a we.”
*
I have set the course. I shall lie. I shall invent a lover, a mysterious one who comes at night rather than at noon, a privileged one who is allowed to share the secrets of my soul, as this one must never be. Perhaps in this way I shall have my little Paradise Lost; yet I wonder if one has to enter it in order to find it, in order to lose it.
“Do you always dress like this?” he asks. The question bristles with attraction and reproof.
“If I feel like it.”
I am pouring the wine. He says that he does not drink but that he will drink with me. I say there is apple juice, and point to it, on the beautiful gallery tray. He accepts the wine. He puts his tongue out in an involuntary gesture to taste whatever there is to taste.
“You don’t know how lucky you are,” he tells me.
“Why?” I ask.
“Because I like black stockings and black satin, for some odd reason.”
“In that case, you are the lucky one.”
His eyes are like violets, but his skin is bleached. There is something frozen about him. Life, too, has left its cold claws on his shoulder. But I will never know. No more than he will ever know about me. He is about to kiss me. I wonder if one has to enter the gates of paradise, even the tiniest adulterous little paradise, in order to find it, in order to lose it, in order to refind it, in perpetuity. And, wondering, I float into the first bewildered kiss.
The Call
She would be, or so she thought, over it—over the need and over the hope and over the certainty of that invisible bond that linked than—when suddenly it would come back. It was like a storm. She would start to shake. One morning, this frenzy made her almost blind, so that she could hardly see the design on
the teacup she was washing, and even the simple suds in the aluminum sink seemed to enclose a vast pool of woe. When she saw two pigeons in the plane tree outside, it smote her heart, because they were cooing and because they were close. Then her telephone rang in the other room. Going to answer it, with the tea cloth in her hand, she prayed, “Oh, God, let it be him,” and in a sense her prayers were answered, though she could not be sure, because by the time she got to it, whoever it was had rung off. She waited, trembling. It—he—would ring again.
There was sun on the trees in the garden outside, and the varying greenness of each tree was singled out and emphasized in the brightness. There was a dark green, which emitted a gloom that seemed to come from its very interior; there was a pale green, which spoke of happiness and limes; and there was the holly leaf so shiny it might have just been polished. There was the lilac, shedding and rusted because of the recent heavy rain, and the hanging mauve blooms gave the effect of having dropsy. And all of these greens seemed to tell her of her condition—of how it varied, of how sometimes she was not rallying and then again sometimes she would pass to another state, a relatively bright and buoyant state, and sometimes, indeed, she had dropsy. Yet he was not ringing back. But why? Ah, yes. She knew why. He did not care to lose face, and by ringing immediately it would be evident that it had been him. So she busied herself with little chores. She drained the dishes and then dried them thoroughly. Her face on their shining surfaces looked distorted. Just as well he was not coming! She took the loose fallen petals of sweet pea from a vase on the window ledge and squeezed them as if to squeeze the last bit of color and juice out of them. After twenty minutes of devoting herself to pointless trivia, to errands into which she read talismanic import, she decided that he was not going to ring, and so to put herself out of her misery, she must ring him. He had lately given her the number. He had repeated it twice and when last leaving he had said it again. For six months he had kept it a secret. It was his work number. He would not, of course, give his home number, since it was also his wife’s. So why not ring? Why not? Because she found herself shaking before even attempting to dial. She foresaw how she would speak rapidly and hurriedly and ask him to lunch, and suppose he said no. She would wait for half an hour and then she would ring.