by Edna O'Brien
When I wakened this morning, the cocks had not yet begun to crow. The driver came to collect my luggage, and we went on tiptoe through the town, past all those tiny fortresses, with owners bound in sleep and countless dreams. Driving along, we witnessed the dawn, and at first sky and sea were merged, a pearled vista so pale and so fragile that one knew that it could—indeed, that it would—be vanquished. Its beauty brought to mind every intrepid, virginal thing. Even as one looked it was vanishing, or at least altering, becoming a vision or a passing dream. The little churches perched on the hilltops were like tiny beehives, and the earth gave off a breath of moisture and repose. But it was to the sky one looked, and as I looked at it the realization of my love came back to me in one unheralded burst of sadness. Beauty and sadness must be what love is founded on, I thought. Then the sky became rosier, the light seeming to flaunt itself, no longer tentative, as a river of red shot across the heavens, making a gash. The dawn itself was bleached and milky, with scarcely any light at all, and the sun rose, shy and timid, bringing that discharge of emotion inseparable from any birth. At the airport, the driver and I had coffee, and then he conveyed me to a small twin-engined airplane whereby I was whisked to that other island, which by comparison was tropical. There were white goats tethered in the fields next to the landing strip, and the sight of these and the little trees and shrubs reminded me of my native land. I had a four-hour wait, and so I sat outside on a step, and presently some young soldiers came to talk to me and tried to inveigle me to dance by putting on their transistor radio and performing some idiotic capers. They plied me with offers of coffee and cigarettes. They were dark, their dark eyes small and busy, and from the sun’s constant glare they had wrinkled like raisins. Even then I did not believe that I was going home. I felt I would be detained there, and I did not in the least object.
It is evening when our plane lands. It is not dark, but it seems so in comparison with that far-off scorching island. It is as if all the sun has been snatched from here, and involuntarily I think of autumn and the hexagonal streetlights in my square, which will go on a fraction earlier each evening. My fellow passengers and I wait for our luggage, stare at the monitor to see which bay our bags will arrive at, and sometimes looking at each other involuntarily look away, as if we have done wrong. We are slipping back into our old lives. He is not here, nor did I expect him to be, but it has started up, not quite as pain or fret, but as a sense of resumption. Already I feel the imminence of his next visit, and I think how it will appear as if he had vacated the place only minutes before. The future looms, mirroring the selfsame patterns of the past—his occasional visits, the painful vigils in between, the restraints we have imposed upon ourselves—and I wonder how much longer I shall be able to endure it.
ALSO BY EDNA O’BRIEN
The Country Girls (1960)
The Lonely Girl (1962)
Girls in Their Married Bliss (1963)
August Is a Wicked Month (1964)
Casualties of Peace (1966)
The Love Object and Other Stories (1968)
A Pagan Place (1971)
Zee & Co. (1971)
Night (1972)
A Scandalous Woman and Other Stories (1974)
Mother Ireland (1976)
I Hardly Knew You (1977)
Mrs. Reinhardt and Other Stories (1978)
A Rose in the Heart (1978)
Some Irish Loving (1980)
Returning (1982)
The High Road (1988)
On the Bone (1989)
Lantern Slides (1990)
Time and Tide (1992)
House of Splendid Isolation (1994)
Down by the River (1996)
James Joyce (1999)
Wild Decembers (1999)
In the Forest (2002)
The Light of Evening (2006)
About the Author
Edna O’Brien is the author of more than twenty-five books, including The Light of Evening. Born in County Clare, Ireland, she now lives in London. You can sign up for author updates here.
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
FOREWORD BY PHILIP ROTH
Epigraph
Returning (1981)
The Connor Girls
My Mother’s Mother
Tough Men
The Doll
The Bachelor
Savages
Courtship
Ghosts
Sister Imelda
From The Love Object (1968)
The Love Object
The Mouth of the Cave
Irish Revel
The Rug
Paradise
From A Scandalous Woman (1974)
A Scandalous Woman
Over
The Creature
The House of My Dreams
From A Rose in the Heart (1978)
Number 10
Baby Blue
The Small-Town Lovers
Christmas Roses
Ways
A Rose in the Heart of New York
Mrs. Reinhardt
Quartet (Uncollected Stories, 1979–1981)
Violets
The Call
The Plan
The Return
Also by Edna O’Brien
About the Author
Copyright
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
18 West 18th Street, New York 10011
Copyright © 1984 by Edna O’Brien
Foreword copyright © 1984 by Philip Roth
All rights reserved
Published in 1984 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
“Christmas Roses” first appeared in The Atlantic, and “The Doll” in Redbook. Except for “My Mother’s Mother,” “Tough Men,” “Courtship,” “The Mouth of the Cave,” “Paradise,” “A Scandalous Woman,” and “Mrs. Reinhardt,” all of the other stories in this volume originally appeared in The New Yorker.
Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint five lines from “Remorse for Intemperate Speech” from The Poems by W. B. Yeats, edited by Richard J. Finneran, copyright 1933 by Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc., renewed © 1961 by Bertha Georgie Yeats. Reprinted with permission of Macmillan Publishing Company.
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2007935713
eISBN 978-0-374-60217-8
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