Country Girl: A Memoir

by Edna O'Brien

  The Literary Bessie Bunter

  Because of spouting bits of poetry, I came to be named “The Literary Bessie Bunter.” It was a journalist at the radio station, whose pet name was Bunny, who christened me so. I had met him the day I did my first-ever broadcast. It was on Saint Bridget, patron of country women and of butter, whose feast day fell on February 2. “The Literary Bessie Bunter.” It is how I would have been described to the man I would marry, although marriage did not feature in my ruminations.

  After Peter Abelard I had taken a vow of chastity, but nevertheless I had a few lackluster dates, one with a man who delivered bread and cakes down the country and who would walk me the three miles from the Crystal Ballroom in South Anne Street to the digs in North Circular Road, just by Phoenix Park. There was I, devouring books and yet allowing a man who had never read a book to walk me home for a bit of harmless fumbling on the front steps. Another time, in a hotel in Kilkenny, a gamey, curly-haired rogue who had plied me with champagne took me upstairs and into the one bedroom that was unlocked, where providentially a housekeeper stormed in, arms akimbo, and shouted, “A bishop slept in this room last night and ye want to defile it,” at which he scooted.

  It was December when our landlady called me to the pay phone in the hall. It was Bunny ringing to invite me to have a drink with an author who had had a film made of his book The Plymouth Adventure, starring Spencer Tracy. Would I join them? To smarten my appearance, I took a red muff, which my sister had borrowed from a wealthy woman, knowing it would liven the drabness of my black coat (the tweed one long since discarded). This black coat was going green and had moth holes.

  In Lake Park, County Wicklow, 1952.

  When I came into the crowded pub in Henry Street, Bunny greeted me effusively, as if I were an old flame. There was Ernest Gébler, handsome beyond words, sallow-faced, with dark brown eyes and granite features. I had seen a picture of a German actor, Conrad Veidt, and saw a resemblance in this man, whose voice was so hypnotic that others deferred to him, as did I. He spoke of his trips to Hollywood, of which he was scathing, and a play that he was meant to have had produced in New York, starring Sam Wanamaker, except that producers and producers’ wives had argued interminably over it and the project was scrapped. He was so cosmopolitan and so cultured. He spoke of James Joyce with familiarity and referred to Leopold Bloom as Poldy. I was elated. By chance we discovered we had something in common. I mixed two stomach medicines each week for a German man, in long black overcoat and black Homburg hat, who spoke with a European accent. It happened that it was Adolf, his father.

  Next day was my birthday, which he must have overheard me mentioning to one of the group. To my astonishment, after I had shut the shop for the lunch hour, I found him tapping on the window for me to come outside. In his sports car we drove to a shop in Grafton Street, and there I acquired a coat that surpassed anything my mother or her friends, the beautiful Gavin girls, or the doctor’s wife, had ever worn. It was gray astrakhan, with a red velvet collar, and it fitted like a glove. Already I was saying adieu to The Literary Bessie Bunter.

  On that spring day when I first visited his house in County Wicklow, the gorse was just coming into bloom with the daffodil flowers, buds in tapers of folded green under the trees, up along a winding avenue. He drove slowly, for me to be able to see everything, and he was proud at showing me these things, and even in those early days, though half in jest, he referred to me as his “child bride.” The house, a shooting lodge, was not so very imposing, painted white and set down in a hollow with youngish woodland behind it; he told me there was a lady’s garden and a rose garden. It was called Lake Park, though it did not overlook the lake, which was about a mile down a twisted track. In the fields all around I could hear the bleating of sheep, and standing on the front steps, I saw a second valley where he said a bohemian poet, who had poisoned one of his many wives, also lived. They had not yet met, and I got the feeling that he kept mostly to himself.

  His housekeeper, Nancy, opened the hall door, sleeves rolled up, her arms strong and pink. She scolded him for not having come the two days previous as he said he would and, taking one look at me, believed that I was the reason for it. As a peace offering, he handed her a brown glazed coffeepot that he had bought in Bewley’s in Grafton Street and the choice things from a delicatessen, for our supper, which she looked at and then snorted.

  As I waited alone in the sitting room, I looked at the portrait of him hanging on the wall. It was in green, his skin a sickly greenish hue and his eyes with a livid light in them, as if the painter had not liked him. It was a darkish room, the walls painted oxblood red, and the half-drawn brown shutters obscured most of the daylight.

  How could I have known that in six weeks, I, the future “child bride,” would be living there, wandering through those unfamiliar rooms, yet not mistress of the house, because he was still married to a wife who had returned to America with their son? I would be living there, going from room to room, a little lost and out of my depth, and curious about the life and the love that happened in it before I came.

  It had all been so precipitate, too precipitate, and I thought that it would take months, if not years, for us to come to know one another. I missed the life in Dublin, the customers, the Saturday evenings, tearing to get to a shop to buy something, to buy anything, because ironically, two months before I met him, I had qualified as a pharmacist and was promoted to a salary of three pounds ten shillings per week. I missed hearing the latest from Rory about the literati and the woman, a dazzling American, who had breached their poetic circle and who, because of the color of her hair, was called Marmalade. Although he was a writer, Ernest was an outsider in these circles, his one friend being J. P. Donleavy, who had written a novel of bohemian Dublin, not yet published, but rumored to be a sizzler.

  It so happened that I had run from the chemist’s shop, still in my white coat, run from the family who were coming to bring me back home and, as I had overheard in the conversation between my boss and his wife, if necessary, to put me away. The “putting away” meant nothing other than the lunatic asylum, and I had a momentary image of Mad Mabel. They had learned of my transgressions, my sinful life with this evil stranger, and the two weekends alone with him in his country seat. It was an anonymous letter, left on the saddle of my mother’s bicycle as she came out of morning Mass. Someone who knew me well had betrayed me, and that someone had carved the future path of my life.

  There was consternation in the chemist’s shop the morning the news came, what with the boss ringing around to find a locum to replace me, and his wife in high dudgeon because my mother had telephoned him and not her. I resolved to do the only thing I could do, which was to bolt. The chance came when they repaired upstairs to have their lunch and I, as usual, passed in and out through the kitchen and down the back garden to the shed, where the stocks of medicine were kept in Winchesters, to fill the smaller eight-ounce medicine bottles. Making my escape into a back alley, I ran the length of the parade and then came out onto the main road much farther up, and so as not to be too noticeable, I took off the white coat and carried it on my arm. A bus for County Wicklow left St. Stephen’s Green each evening at seven, and I waited under cover of trees, not knowing what the welcome might be when I arrived at the shooting lodge.

  My future husband embraced me, almost childishly glad to see me, as yet ignorant of the looming furor. He had missed me, and on his mantelpiece were a few loose hairpins that had fallen out of my hair in bed, which he kept as reminders. In a welter, I told him that I would be followed, dragged home, and put away, but he was disbelieving and said poetry had gone to my head, and that such things happened in the dark ages of long ago.

  As the plane landed on the Isle of Man, I saw gorse in bloom, and it seemed to me to be a continuation of the gorse that bloomed in County Wicklow, as if the distance was not too great for my family to find me. Ernest had yielded to my entreaties and decided that we should go away, for a week or so, until tempers
died down. He contacted Donleavy, who, with his wife, Valerie, was staying on the Isle of Man in his mother-in-law’s house, which, as he said, was so secluded that we would never be found.

  Except that we were. The next morning I am marched out of a garden by a strange policeman, and on the other side of the wooden gate a group of people was waiting for me: my father, an abbot from a Cistercian monastery who is a friend of his, my sister’s boss, who hired me to write the Sabiola column (now scotched), a neighbor of ours, and my brother. My brother steps forward and grips my arm, saying, “You’re coming with us.” But I was not coming with them, and I spoke rash words of never wanting to see them again. Yet it was also true that the night before I had been having misgivings, hearing Donleavy and Ernest talking, so blasé, about books, exchanging literary gossip, stories concerning publishers that they seemed to know about. Donleavy talked of Gainor Crist, the man from Ohio, a demobbed GI who had come to Trinity College to study but instead was an habitué of various pubs where he made friends of motley boozing companions. He was the inspiration for Donleavy’s book The Ginger Man, which at that time was being considered by a publisher in Paris. For my part, I would begin to say something and then find myself inadequate to finish the sentence. Donleavy’s wife, Valerie, sensing my awkwardness, would cover up for me, as she saw that I was out of my depth.

  The abbot, in an endeavor to calm things, held up the gold crucifix that was around his neck and made the sign of the cross over me with it. He was the one I feared least. I told him to reason with them, to tell them I was not going home. The two policemen stood farther up the road, somewhat aimlessly, and my brother took my arm to steer me to a second car. It was boiling hot, so hot inside that car that I could feel the perspiration from my armpits oozing out onto the pink seersucker dress. It was a new dress that Ernest had bought for me on our way to the airport, when we stopped at a small town where the owner of a drapery store was called down to admit us. My brother asked me if I was pregnant. Could I be pregnant? I didn’t know. Had I had intercourse? I had. He said there was no other solution but to take me to England. The word “abortion” was not spoken, but it was implied, and before my eyes ran images of Mamie Cadden, the dingy room, the bucket of Jeyes Fluid and fatality. By now I was hysterical, and he was about to slap me, when suddenly we heard shouting, and in the rear window he saw that, farther up, the party had come to blows. On impulse he rushed to defend his own, leaving the car door open, and I got out and ran to a nearby bungalow, where a man in a straw hat was watering plants, a golden retriever beside him. I asked if he would hide me, and surprisingly he led me into a hall where a woman gave me a glass of water. Once I heard the two cars go down that quiet road, I knew that they had gone, and I asked the woman to ring Valerie to come for me.

  Back in the kitchen, the minutiae of the fight are being played out, half in excitement and half in repugnance. The visitors had called Ernest out and immediately set upon him. They had kicked him with force, while the abbot and two policemen looked on, whereupon Donleavy, who had trained under outstanding boxing coaches in New York, arrived, sleeves rolled up, and tore into them. The upshot was that they left, to repair to the hotel in the town, on the understanding that Ernest and I would go there at four o’clock and I would be returned. When I told them what my brother was intending, the idea of that visit was squashed and the police were informed that we would not be coming at four o’clock.

  We heard the private plane go over soon after, and I wondered what it had cost and how my father could have scraped together that huge amount of money in so short a time.

  It was in the guest bungalow that adjoined the main house that my husband-to-be made his feelings known. His ankles had been kicked, they were blue and black, and there were open wounds on both of his shins. Strips of skin, like strips of parchment, were hanging off, and at his instruction I was holding a steaming kettle to the various wounds. I still recall the arc of that steam and his seething expression.

  He had already, on Donleavy’s typewriter, written a letter to my parents which I was to sign. It was an ugly letter, unsparing of them in every way, and it was hard to reconcile it with the man who had bought me the astrakhan coat and kept hairpins as a souvenir on the marble mantelpiece. He seemed surprised by my small attempt at rebelling, and when I said I could not sign it, he asked indignantly if, perhaps, I was eager to be restored to their ignorant and barbaric ways.

  I signed it, and in the doing I knew that, by going from them to him, I had burnt my boats.

  We came home to the shooting lodge and, in the language of benign fiction, settled down. He gave me money to buy new clothes. I bought a pleated skirt and a salmon-pink cardigan, its tiny sleeve buttons covered in the same fetching pink, and flat ballet shoes, since he said high heels, which I loved, were bad for me. He opened a subscription for me in a library in Dublin where I could get all the most recently published books, and so, in truth, began my real apprenticeship as a writer. He took a photograph of me with my long hair, standing by the hall door, somewhat self-consciously, and with pride sent it to his first wife. I learned to cook. I copied out a line from Elizabeth Bishop, “Christmas trees, waiting for Christmas,” although it was only April.

  I was lonelier than I should be, for a woman in love, or half in love. There was this gulf between us, so much about him seemed strange and distant. Sometimes I would notice such a sad expression on his face and wonder if it was for the other wife, or his child, or his early life, which I was learning about gradually. Theirs was a fractured family; his father, who played the clarinet, was a traveling musician, and they had moved with orchestras from Ireland to Wolverhampton and back to Dublin again, by which time he had parted from the wife who had borne him six children. She was a diminutive woman with a sharp tongue, and having paid us a cursory visit once with one of her daughters, she looked me up and down and said, “You will never be Mrs. Gébler in this house.” His ancestors, according to what he had been told, were carpetbaggers from Armenia, who had migrated to Bohemia, where they merged and married with Czechs and Germans, so that he was of mixed blood on his father’s side and Irish on his mother’s, which is perhaps why he was nettled when by chance one day I read aloud a poem by Bertolt Brecht:

  With Ernest Gébler, London, 1959.

  I, Bertolt Brecht, came out of the black forests.

  My mother moved me into the cities as I lay

  Inside her body. And the coldness of the forests

  Will be inside me till my dying day.

  It was not the first time I saw that cold resentment, as if something that was his had been taken from him, or, more grievously, he had thrown it away, and it was the source of his writing.

  There was a room on the opposite side of the landing from where we slept, and one day I ventured in there. In one corner there was a pink cot with an abacus of colored beads and a folded pink angora blanket. In the wardrobe, as if she had only recently left, there were some of his wife’s clothes, slacks, scarves, shirt blouses, and various pairs of walking shoes, with shoe trees in them. In a side drawer there was underwear neatly folded and a variety of belts. From a hanger I took a tartan jacket and put it on, and as there was no mirror in that room, I went to have a look in the bathroom, where Nancy was lurking, always lurking, having increasingly taken on the scrutiny of Mrs. Danvers in Rebecca. The jacket, she said, did not suit me. It suited the other wife better. Then she whispered something terrible in my ear. The other wife was coming back, and only she, Nancy, had been entrusted with the secret. It was to be a surprise. She had set sail for Cove in Cork, bringing everything, her son, her trunks, everything. I knew it was a lie and said to unnerve me, and yet I feared it like an omen. Ernest had been writing to his wife to get the divorce papers from their hurried marriage, and she had been writing back, talking of her new life, but things were more amiable between them. The pictures on the stamps were all of American heroes, and I would hold the flimsy, airmail envelope up to the light, hoping that I could glea
n something from it.

  There were things I feared about him, small things with larger implications. A sheep had got in among our flock. Tom, who was Nancy’s husband, reported it, and there indeed was a sheep with a pink stripe among all the other petrol blues. He guessed it was some farmer who drove it in, in spite, because he was not popular with the locals. Late that night, with a Tilley lamp, we went up to the field that was beyond the wood. At the very sight of us the sheep started to run, and dogs from farms at the far side of the lake began to bark furiously, something that undermined the secrecy of the mission. They ran in crazed circles, with the culprit in among the others, so that twice, because of the angle at which I held the lamp, he caught the wrong sheep and shouted at me to hold the lamp upright. It was a blustery night. Still running, he whipped them apart, or tried to, with a bit of rope he had brought up, and was shouting at me to follow close, a hysteria in his voice. They ran as fast as greyhounds, without any cunning, kept running into one another and scattering, and twice he had the pink sheep by the haunches, only for it to escape, and finally, when he almost tripped on a hole, it too tripped, so he caught it and knelt down, holding it with both hands. He told me to put the lamp down and tie the feet with the rope, which I did, though it resisted in frantic and impotent little thrusts. Then he carried it down in his arms, as it continued to bleat haltingly and pitifully, while the remainder of the fold had scurried off away from us, lying prone under the low stone wall, where they huddled, in fear for their lives. It was still occasionally bleating and struggling when he bundled it into the empty turf sack and put it on the back seat of his car.