by Edna O'Brien
In that half hour, her whole body seemed to lose its poise and its strength. She felt sick and ashamed, as if she had done some terrible wrong—some childish wrong like wetting or soiling her bed—and she sought to find the root of this pointless notion of wrong-doing that was connected with an excruciating wait. She thought of previous times when she had been spurned by others and tried to marshal in herself the pride, the fury, the common sense that would cause her not to lay herself at his feet. She thought of the day when she would learn to get by—maybe learn to swim—and for an instant she saw herself thrashing through a pool and kicking and conquering. She said, “If I ring, does it not make me the stronger one?” Her words were hollow to herself. The sun shone, yet her house had a coldness—the coldness of a vault, the coldness when you press yourself on the tiled floor of an empty dark country chapel and beg your Maker to help you in these straits—and for no reason there crowded in on her mind images of a wedding, a slow procession down the aisle, a baptismal font with a rim of rust on its marble base, religious booklets about keeping company, and in the chapel porch an umbrella with one spoke protruding. In imagination she went out the graveled path under the yew trees and smelled their solemn, permeating perfume. She thought, Yesterday I could do without him, today I can’t. And then she remonstrated, You can.
She was going on a train that afternoon, to the country, and once on the train, no matter how great her unhappiness, she could not succumb to a frenzy. She thought, too, that if she rang him once she might ring him at all hours, she might make a habit of it. If only he would sit opposite her, take her hand, and tell her that he had no interest in her, then she believed that she would be free to let him go … Or was he going? Was she herself becoming narked? She saw him once a fortnight, but that was not enough. These clandestine visits were the crumbs of the marriage table. The making do with nearly nothing. Where was the bounty of it? Where the abandon?
“You are what you are,” she said. But did others have to suffer so? Did others lie down and almost expire under such longing? No. Others swam; others went far out to sea, others dived, others put oxygen flagons on their backs and went down into the depths of the ocean and saw the life there—the teeming, impersonal life—and detached themselves from the life up above. She feared that her love of nature—her love of woodland, her love of sun on hillside and meadow, her love of wildflowers and dog roses and cow parsley, her love of the tangled hedgerows—was only an excuse, a solace. Mortal love was what she craved.
She imagined how he would come and pass by her in the hall, being too shy to shake hands, and walk around the room inhaling her while also trying to observe by the jug of fresh flowers or the letters on her desk who had been here recently, and if perhaps she had found a lover. He had commanded her to, and had also commanded her not to. Always, when he lay above her, about to possess her, he seemed to be surveying his pasture, to sniff like a bloodhound, making sure that no other would pass through to his burrow, making sure that she would be secret and sweet, and solely for him.
Ah, would that they were out on a hillside, or in the orchards of her youth, away from telephone calls or no telephone calls, away from suspicions, where he believed she wore perfume deliberately so his wife would guess his guilty secret. She was watching the face of her telephone, following with her eye the circle of congealed dust about the digits, where fingernail never reached nor duster ever strove; watching and praying. She heard a letter being pushed through her box and she ran to get it. Any errand was a mercy, a distraction, a slender way of postponing what she would do but must not do.
The letter was from a stranger. It bore a scape of a blue sea, a high craggy cliff, and a flying bird. The message said, “I thought this to be the bluebird of happiness but fear it might only be a common pigeon.” It wished her happiness and to be well. It was signed, “A WELL-WISHER, MALE.” She thought, Oh, Christ, the whole world knows of my stew, and she wondered calmly if this union she craved was something that others, wiser ones, had forgone—had left behind at their mothers’ breast, never to be retasted—and she thought of her dead mother with her hair tautly pinned up and of the wall of unvoiced but palpable hostility that had grown between them. She hoped then that she would be the same toward her man one day, withdrawn, cut off from him. Her mother’s visage brought tears to her eyes. They were different tears from the ones she had been shedding earlier. They were a hot burst of uncontrolled grief that within minutes had sluiced her face and streamed over into her temples and wet her hair.
The half hour had passed in which she promised herself that she would ring him, and now she was talking to herself as to an addict, saying could she not wait a bit longer, could her longing not be diverted by work or a walk, could she not assuage the lump inside her throat by swallowing warmed honey on it, so that the syrup would slide down and soothe her. The needless pain there seemed to be intensified, as if a sharp current were passing through her. Could she not put it off until the morrow?
There is no stopping a galloping horse.
She went toward the telephone, and as she did, it began to ring. It rang loudly. It rang like some tutelary ogre, telling her to pick it up quickly, telling her that it was the master of her fate, of her every moment, of the privacy of her room, of the tangle of her thoughts, of the weight of her desire, and of the enormity of her hope. She did not answer it. She did not know why she did not answer it. She simply knew that she could not answer it, and that she waited for its ringing to die down the way one waits for the ambulance siren to move out of one’s hearing, to pass to the next street.
“Is this love?” she asked herself, admitting that she had wanted so much to answer it. The longing to see him, communicate with him, clasp her fingers in his, feed him, humor him, and watch him while he ran a comb through his hair was as strong and as candescent as it had ever been.
“You had better go out now,” she said aloud, and quickly, but with a certain ceremony, she put an embroidered shawl over the phone, to muffle its sound.
It would be three days before she came back, and she saw a strip of water that would get wider and wider. Green and turbulent it was, and in time, she knew, it would swell into a vast sea, impassable and with no shore in sight. Time would sever them, but as yet it was love, and hard to banish.
The Plan
It is morning. What is more, it is a beautiful morning. There is a sparkle on everything and even the dullest things are shot with radiance. From my back window, the bedroom window, I see that the cats—those wise barometers—are already stretched out on the tiled roofs, taking the sun through their thick fur. From the front window, if I were to walk to the next room, I would no doubt see girls and women going off to work in their sleeveless dresses, the women carrying their cardigans just in case. And I would probably note that the pensioners are out that bit early in search of a shady seat in Dove-house Green. It is amazing what a steady sunshine does for these blanched English souls.
Just now I put powder on, and the translucency that the shop assistant guaranteed showed up for the first time. It is like seeing specks of mica on a road. I am reminded suddenly of those traveling actresses who came to our little village in Ireland long ago and made such an impression on me. They were quite bedraggled and unhappy when in the daytime they pushed prams down the seedy street that was called Main Street, but at night they were creatures endowed with glitter—glitter on their faces, glitter on their bodices, glitter in their eyes, possibly owing to nerves or maybe fever. They were transformed beings. I loved watching them. I luxuriated in their pain as they strode about the stage, or halted, or flung themselves onto some velvet-covered sofa. Their characters were invariably ones that had to endure pain. There was the young flighty mother who abandoned her little son in order to elope with a rake, and of course, when she repented her wild impulse and tried to come back to her own home, her upright husband had married her rival, who was naturally a woman of steel. The mother was forced to return disguised as a maid, and nurse her l
ittle son but behave with distance, as if they were not of the same blood—as if she had not once intrepidly carried him within her. There was another, in direct contrast, who chose the vows of chastity, and was kneeling on a little dais, haloed in white, taking those final and irreversible vows, when her errant scoundrel came to claim her and found that he was too late!
Yes, those ladies come to mind when I pat the powder on and look in my long wardrobe mirror and see that the effect is indeed cheering. Why am I putting the powder on so early, when in fact I have household chores to do and when I know that it is best to leave my skin untampered with through the day, to let it breathe, while no one is seeing me? Ah, to be seen is the big nourishment, the sop of content. If only we could go to each other’s house and show ourselves to other women’s husbands, or valets, or sons, or employers, then we could display ourselves, come home, and feel justified. We could feel that the effort we put into sereneness, into smiling, into pursing, into deportment, was not completely in vain. I think of all the women in all the houses in London at this moment for whom a visit would change everything, even fleetingly, and I think that if I had organizing abilities I would do something about it. For some reason, I see a young woman, an Eastern woman of sallow complexion, with her baby, and they are placed in an English garden. There are poppies sprouting red in the high yellow unmown grass, and I realize that her baby tugging at her breast defers the emptiness that she might otherwise feel, and yet she is being emptied, and one day her breasts will be like discarded shells. But there is no need for pessimism. This is a special day. It is marked in my diary with a little asterisk and it says “pour diner.” I have already laid my outfit on the bed. It is a lace blouse that would not go amiss as an altar cloth. The disks of thick cream lace are stitched loosely together, so that the skin can be seen through the webbing. The skirt is also cream, with spatters of red and violet, just as if one took a marking pen and childishly indented these colored points.
It is probable that we will eat outdoors. There will be several tables covered in white cloth, and the crystal goblets will be like sentinels at each place setting. There will be roses in special glass bowls. The bowls are high, like cake stands, and the roses will be cut close to their petals and laid in there like confectionery; if they are pink, as indeed they may be, they will be like those iced sweets that I loved in childhood, and it will not be hard to recapture that beautiful synthetic almond taste. The lights will be concealed in the foliage, and the smell will be a blend of roses, honeysuckle, and various expensive perfumes. There will perhaps be a summerhouse or a little gazebo where a couple will wander, apparently to study some facet of its design, but really to make an assignation. That will not be him and me. If he gives me five minutes of his time without taking a tweezers to my nervous system, I shall consider myself lucky. To be fair to myself, I did not plan this meeting. The opposite. Two days ago, when I heard of it from my hostess, I flinched. She had come here to discuss her dilemma with her lover and her impatience with her paunchy husband. Just as she was leaving, I asked who were the other guests. As soon as she told me, I tried to get out of going. She said my name sharply. She said, “Anna,” and I could feel the inevitable rebuke. She said, “Finding a woman at the last minute is almost as difficult as finding a man.” Her nails, her eyes, and the Heels of her lizard shoes were all very pointed, and I was afraid to cross her. But my heart did start to gallop.
I am envisioning each group, with the new arrivals like extras waiting for their moment to be received, to be introduced, to find excitement or shock in some unexpected face. The men will all be wearing black tie, and I pray that at least two of them will be personable. I will need all the discipline that I have got. My lover is going to be there. My lover’s wife is going to be there. I have never met her. That is not quite true; I once saw her, and so I will recognize her. My eyes will land on her, and rest on her, so that she will know that I am not flinching, and not turning away. She is dark. She is dark, like the raven. At least that is how I remember her. It may have been the lighting, in which green was impregnated with blackness. It was in a marquee at a wedding and there was a great storm outside, so that the event was marked by a kind of menace that I took to be talismanic. Among the guests I saw a dark woman in a cape, but I did not know then to whom she was attached. He and I had just met and we were eating canapés on which there was a single sprig of limp tinned asparagus. I refused a second one, to which he said, “You don’t look as if you need to diet,” and then announced that he was not as thin as he looked, that the hollows in his face made him seem thinner than he actually was. His face reminds me of those stone effigies that decorate the ceilings or columns of a monastery or a chapel. It is a graven face. In contrast, our conversation was merry and stirring.
“And you don’t know how lovely you are,” he said, half joking. The marquee was freezing, as there was only one gas heater at the far end, around which the older people had converged. It being spring, the bride and groom naturally had anticipated a warmer day. After all, the daffodils were out; but the wind was blowing their wrinkled flutes. Seeing in the distance the blue coronet of the gas fire, I thought of baby chicks curled up next to each other under a lamp, and I had a sudden unaccountable longing to nestle nearer to him, when I saw that already he had come a few steps closer. Between us was only a fraction of space, in which I could feel a shudder. It was getting to be the moment when the bride’s father was to make his speech, and I realized who the dark woman was. She came toward us and said to the man, “Having a good time?” And at once I moved away.
Of course, it could have been that she trusted him so utterly, that they lived in such an understanding, that they even liked to share people such as me, so as to talk about us afterward. At any rate, on that first occasion I could not find words, or the words I could find would have sounded caustic or maybe even brazen. My future lover saw me move, and came and touched my elbow so lightly and so gracefully that I felt as if a ghost had taken charge of his body and brushed against mine, and I thought, Oh, Christ, I am falling in love with a ghost, just as always, and I saw in him shades of others—saw his disappearing tricks, his appearing tricks, his inability to give love, along with his restless pursuit of it. When he touched me, it was as if we had met before, as if we knew each other in some hidden way and the time had now come for us to cross that barrier and to savor each other, to cease to be strangers. Though of course we would always be strangers. Is that not the essence, the requisite, of love?
So I can say—because now I am better acquainted with him—that my instinct was flawless and that I could have predicted almost everything that would happen, that has happened, and that is yet to happen. Even as he is asking to see me, he is asking not to see me; when I am distant, he loves me like a clinging schoolboy, and when I reveal my feelings, he looks at his watch and says he has a meeting at four. Only my near-absence guarantees his near-presence, and it is an exhausting game to play. Yet I feel that if I could reach him things would be different. I believe that he does not know himself, and that if I could lead him to himself he would dispense with all artifice, he would welcome this rapture, he would not shirk it. When he is trying to shrug me off, he eats hurriedly. He throws the cherries into his mouth and gulps them down. He did that the last time he was here to lunch, and in his haste one fell onto his white shirt, which was still open. “Damn,” he said, as he looked for it. It had slipped into his belly button, and fitted there like the stone of a ring, a ruby. It had burst He picked it out. It left a red stain on his shirt. He began to suck the white fabric. He sucked it with such determination. I hated him then. I thought, He is sucking it clean, so that when he goes home he will not be asked, “How did that get there?” I saw his ruthlessness and I saw his fear. In myself I saw stirrings of pain, a dip into that fount of sorrow, a reintroduction to a loss that I thought I had finished with. Perhaps it was then I hatched my revenge.
Sensing a coolness, he reached out for me and drew me onto his knee,
and he said, “Do you fantasize about me?” and I said, “Yes,” but I was too shy to say how. I asked if he fantasized about me, and he said yes, in the car, when on his way to see me, and then he said that I fantasized too much and that it was unhealthy. I was about to say that so did he, when I realized with staggering clarity that he was right and that I was misled. He only fantasizes when he is on his way to see me, when he is assured of the sight of me and all that I can give, whereas I spin fantasies as the hours go by, as the sprinkler in the garden makes a damp circle around the base of every rosebush, as the shadow on the sundial moves lower, and as the floor that I have polished gleams and has the magic of a ballroom waiting for its waltzers—him and me.
Tonight, I fear that he will snub me. In fact, I know that he is in danger of snubbing me unless I am cunning, unless I preempt him by giving him a glacial look. That will unnerve him, make him doubt the certainty of next week’s luncheon date. I will look past him at the moment of being introduced to him, and then I will hurry to some other man, and I know that unwisely but impulsively he will follow me and mutter, “You’re very aloof tonight and very beautiful.” His flattery is always undisguised, and for that reason it never fails to thrill me. Perhaps I see the transparency of it, and flagrant reason for it, the truth and the untruth of it. Tonight I shall guard myself, so that I can carry out my little scheme. I shall join the group that his wife is in. I know that she will want to talk to me. I know that she will detach herself from the others and veer toward me, that she will talk about everything under the sun—her twins, summer holidays, their garden, her busyness—deferring what she most wants to know, and presently I will unnerve her. She will not be sure whether her little jabs of inner dread are validated or not. What I have decided to do is to listen to her, to admire her dress or her blouse or her jewelry, to admire anything that can be admired without my being obsequious. I am going to be as soft and as patient as a wet nurse. When she needs a drink, I will be the one to signal the waiter, and I will down mine more quickly so that our glasses can be filled, then clinked together. Even if she thinks that I am overfriendly, she will not think it by the time I am finished, because of my trump card. Naturally, others will come over and interrupt this tête-à-tête; others will delay my strategy. Her husband, fearing the worst, may come over and say, “What ate you two nattering about?” or our hostess may not allow two lovely women to slink into a corner and while away that half hour when they should be mixing with and delighting the men.