Country Girl: A Memoir

by Edna O'Brien

  I came away from that appointment more shaken than ever.

  When his bill came, I suddenly saw things in more livid light. It was a large bill, covering the hours he had spent with me, and though somewhat nettled, I wrote the check and posted it at once. Then a strange thing happened. A call came after some weeks from his assistant to say that the bill was overdue. I said I had sent it, and fearing that she disbelieved me, I made an appointment for when he would return from his holiday. It must have been August.

  It was a warm day when I sat in his flat, his wife and child out in the garden. With windows open all around I could hear sounds, and distinctly heard someone shouting his name and challenging him. He made no reference to it. I mentioned the check that he thought was not paid, whereupon, and with that strange half-smile, he produced an envelope from a drawer in his desk. The odd thing was that though I had the correct address and it was written legibly, the envelope went to all the other places he had lived in, in London, and was neatly readdressed. It was as though he was being followed by occult forces.

  On the way out I asked him why it was that Freud had given Virginia Woolf a narcissus the day she visited him, also in rooms in Hampstead. He laughed his inscrutable, frozen laugh, and I never saw him again.

  A long time afterward I was being driven from Edinburgh over to Glasgow when Laing’s death was announced on the taxi radio. He had died of a heart attack, on a tennis court in the South of France. I owed him a debt; he had sent me packing with an opened scream, and that scream would become the pith of the novel I would write. It was called Night, the story of Mary Hooligan, in nocturnal lather, her mind raveled and excoriating, with all semblance of niceness gone. It was the dividing line in my life, between one kind of writing and another.

  Chelsea

  It was time to leave the house in Putney. In my fraught state, I began to imagine coffins in various rooms, the small white coffins of children, and soon it came to be that each room was filled with them and therefore uninhabitable.

  Somehow, in all the turmoil, I managed to do some work and had written a screenplay called Zee & Co., a sort of sexual flamenco featuring a spitfire wife, her husband, and the other woman. It was bought for a film in which Elizabeth Taylor, Michael Caine, and Susannah York would eventually star, but the result was a tame offering, with all the meatiness squeezed out of it. I received thirty-nine thousand pounds and so, with my housekeeper Elizabeth Lobey, I went house hunting. She could drive, whereas I could not. In the evenings we would drive away from Putney and on into Chelsea, to look for FOR SALE signs on hoardings nailed to gateways and piers. We would get out and walk around to see if this was the right street or the right house, and I would stand with the intensity of a water diviner to try to guess if there were any white coffins in there.

  On Lower King’s Road we passed the chandelier shop owned by two Russians, Dawna and Petrov. On my walks I used to be drawn to their window, which was bathed in light, as the chandeliers were left on all day. Scores of them, crammed together on low gilt chains, the pendants cheek to cheek, giving a shimmer to a bit of street that ran under a railway bridge, with a few small factories, a smelting works, and a garage that did repairs. Looking in, I could not help thinking of Anna Karenina at a ball in St. Petersburg, with fresh pansies in her hair, dancing the mazurka, turning round and round, about to leave the low earth of duty and routine for the higher and more terrifying peaks of love.

  Then we came on my future mansion, No. 10 Carlyle Square. In the double drawing room, a young boy was playing the piano, and already I pictured my sons there. The fact that the asking price exactly tallied with the amount that I would get for the film was further proof that this house was meant for me. After some slight haggling with the estate agent, the price was reduced by fifteen hundred pounds, and in due course Petrov came and hung matching chandeliers in the downstairs drawing room.

  My first night in that house was one of my happiest ever. I stood on the doorstep and saw a chain of fairy lights on a restaurant across the way, and next to it an art gallery and then a wine shop, where a young enthusiastic man called Ali would become my chevalier.

  Before long, I met different people in the nearby cafés: a man in a black beret who claimed to be Marc Chagall’s nephew, and another man, always tipsy, who came from Brittany and sold onions in the neighborhood. He would stagger into the café for a coffee and then bicycle off with garlands of pink-skinned onions around his neck and on the handlebars of his bicycle. There were two markets nearby that specialized in clothes and jewelry from the twenties, and in one of them, on a throne of cushions, was the Highlander seer Isabella Campbell, who became my friend and indeed foresaw love affairs that were looming. People were friendly. I would linger there and tell myself that I need never be lonely again. Adjoining one of the markets was a café where a very young shy girl made crepes, which she filled with either stewed apple or cream cheese and sugar. It was the bohemian life that I had longed for.

  At the window of Carlyle Square, 1974.

  Ali wore a kilt and was something of a jester, teasing his customers, calling everybody John. “Yes, John. No, John. Your wish is my command, John.” There was a basement in Carlyle Square, and I asked him if perhaps he would like to live in it. He was jubilant. “Yes, John.” He moved in within twenty-four hours, and soon after his mother sent two rosebushes as a gift to me and for good luck. He stayed with me all those years with, it has to be said, some rowdy visitors at weekends. Frequently, on a Monday morning, a naval van, its blue light flashing, would be parked outside my house as an irate registrar came in search of laggard sailors who had not shown up for duty. Ali’s paramours. I cautioned him about this, at which he would hang his head in remorse and say it wouldn’t happen again, John. Then he would say he loved me, the way he loved his mother and Ella Fitzgerald, and that’s the truth, John.

  The actor Patrick Magee came to lunch and brought a bunch of red roses. A powerful man, his voice was a heavenly blend of ecclesiastical Armagh and the heightened rhapsodies of Anew McMaster in his great Shakespearean roles. Magee had toured Ireland with McMaster, and one of the troupe was a young Harold Pinter, who used to joke that Magee and he had shared minor parts, digs, and jockstraps. The evening I first met Pinter in the bar of the Aldwych Theatre, at a preview of The Birthday Party in the early sixties, contrasted so lamentably with the last day, a week before he died, in December 2008, when we had lunch. There were seven years of illness, which he heroically fought, almost disdained, except that it was there, and never so tellingly as in the lines of the poem “But I remember how to die, though all my witnesses were dead.” He was a frail shadow of that other man, that earlier man, with the jutting jawline, eyes licorice-black that literally smote one, as he was having, as it happened, an altercation with the barman about the ice in his whiskey. At that very first introduction he spoke of his years of touring in Ireland, as he would on the very last day, Ireland, poor and bedraggled, and yet to him it was a golden time, which he enshrined in a little book called Mac that is a tribute to McMaster. In it he captured Mac the Thespian, Mac the Canny Manager, and Mac the Irate, who would brook no interruptions either from ignoramuses in the front row or actresses swooning during his soaring soliloquies.

  But it was not he who introduced me to Magee, it was Samuel Beckett, in the bar next to the Royal Court Theatre. Magee was warm and expansive, yet one felt that he was in the grip of such turbulence that if any whelp were to try to muscle in, Magee would explode. He loved Beckett, it was plain to see, but so did all those who met him. It was not the fame, it was the sheer bareness, not a grain of untruth either in the person or in the work; it had all been whittled away.

  Magee invited himself to lunch in Carlyle Square, and on the appointed day he arrived punctually, dressed like a toff. The roses he brought had sprays of white gypsophila, and when I said that hospitals at home never liked mixing the red and the white flowers, he bowed to tradition and the gypsophila was put in a separate vase. He was
polite, almost genteel, and moved as big strong men sometimes do, with a daintiness. He drank vodka, and at first he drank slowly, but that was not to last. He talked of Ireland, mud and muck, trees dripping, fierce fathers and women’s soft hearts, he bound from the youngest age for the boat, an émigré, with his svelte elocutions. Hating England at first, the provinces, dingy digs, playing to small houses with, however, some lonely and amenable landladies. He drank more and brightened, and grew melancholy again and raged, and was more theatrical by the hour.

  It was now five o’clock, then six o’clock, and Magee was in no mood to leave. He was reciting Hamm’s speeches from Endgame, putting a cold but furious madness into them. Nervously I said I had to be somewhere.

  “Capital, capital.” He would come with me. To augment the lie, I invented the name of a family in a large house on Wimbledon Hill, one that I had noticed in the fallow times when I took the number 14 bus to Wimbledon to collect the children. I went to the bedroom, changed, and put makeup on, realizing the absurdity of all this. We left the house together, my trying to appease him, telling him they were quite uninteresting people and the dinner party would be formal. He tut-tutted that. He would lend some color. At the corner of King’s Road I could see a taxi coming from the far end, and I ran, hailing it wildly, leaving Magee like a dethroned king uttering his harangues as to how disgracefully he had been treated, he who had dined with the nobles in the great houses of Ireland, England, and beyond.

  It was three in the morning when the phone next to my bed rang: it was Magee, both lucid and furious, declaring love and hate in equal measure, upbraiding me, saying, “Woman, I bring you roses and the only gratitude I get is that you throw me out.”

  My nearest neighbors in Carlyle Square were somewhat fastidious, and I realized that I would not be borrowing the proverbial “bowl of sugar” from over the clapboard fence. They objected to Ali’s rambunctious guests, and once, when Carlo, who was by now at Beaconsfield Film School, was loaned the school bus for the night, they complained by letter at having to sit in their drawing room and look out at something so vulgar. Others would take exception to the honeysuckle that I had brought from Drewsboro and that grew prodigiously on the front railings. Over the years many famous faces graced the place, including Robert and Beryl Graves, Robert bringing Jerome Robbins, who was led to believe that he was about to meet Edna Ferber, though he knew that she was long dead.

  My play A Pagan Place opened at the Royal Court for six weeks. I exulted in seeing my name in lights above the door. That was how I met Joan and Laurence Olivier, Laurence describing it as “graspingly human.” They were frequent visitors, and for one Christmas party Laurence could be seen through the window conducting the hymn singing.

  One evening when Sasha got back unexpectedly from Cambridge, he saw that the front door was open and there was a policeman standing there who asked him his name. Inside, he found his mother dancing with Prime Minister Harold Wilson, while his wife, Mary, and Marcia Falkender looked on. I was not a natural dancer, but Harold Wilson was gallant, unlike Lawrence Durrell, whom I had met in Paris and to whom I had accidentally said that I was unable to dance. A postcard that followed that infelicitous meeting said that if he had read anything of mine before our meeting, he would have looked for my single breast—in other words, he saw me as an Amazon. Feminists and academics, on the other hand, were tearing into me for my supine, woebegone inclinations.

  On the opening night of my play Virginia, in which Maggie Smith was both radiant and prismatic, Carlyle Square housed a great galaxy of people, including Ingrid Bergman, who came in looking like an Ibsen heroine in a coat with a high fur collar.

  “Dark cold mantles the land.” Those were the unforgettable lines in a letter that Jay, the first of the two loves whom the Highland seer had sighted in the globe of her amber crystal ball, wrote to me. There had been a few breezy postcards that somehow conveyed the danger of the looming attraction. I met him by chance in Odin’s restaurant in Devonshire Street, run by Peter Langan, another incorrigible Irishman who, because he was also from County Clare, felt he had the license to berate me, saying, “You aul whore you, you can’t write,” reminding me of how Anthony Burgess had slated me, had said that after Joyce and Yeats and Co., after the giants, came “the little people,” such as me. Then later he would come over to the table with a bottle of champagne, unwilling to budge, and Sean Kenny would challenge him for his boorishness, but Sean Kenny was now among the shades. An Icarus, golden-haired, who had flown too close to the light, he was dead at forty-four. In a way, he foresaw it. The previous New Year’s Eve, in Kevin McClory’s house in County Kildare, he wrote in the visitors’ book: “I have a habit of walking and talking. I have a habit of walking towards death.” So that night, when I met Jay, a shy man, an embryo poet with a soft spill of dark hair, it was as if the ghost of Sean Kenny had brought us together. He had seen me at Sean’s funeral in County Tipperary, had wanted, as he said, to cross the road and go into the pub where the wake was taking place, but instead he stayed with the men by the stone wall, holding their caps, paying their silent respects. One of Sean’s four beautiful sisters showed me the model of the magic theater that Sean had made at the age of nine or ten. It was of matchboxes painted green, with cutouts of sandpaper for the glitz. He named it Kincora, the seat of a famous king. I told her how much I had loved him, to which she replied, “He broke hearts, that’s what he did.”

  Jay was an Englishman who had gone to live in Ireland, and in his letters he would describe the walks that he took by the big river, cold and blue, and how he would then go off the beaten track and find a hidden spot where the older trees had got entangled and made a sort of house, so as to be alone with his thoughts of me. He gave me back the landscape that I had left. Then one day I received a copy of The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats, with, on the flyleaf: “Suddenly I meet your face.” An invitation to a love affair.

  He would come to England once or twice a month, but I had this yen to meet with him somewhere in Ireland, to recapture the time in my life before I met him, thereby bridging the years between us.

  Castle Martin. Castle Keep. Castle Martyr. Castle Mary. Castle Hen. These were just some of the names of castles in Ireland which would appear in the tourist brochures. I found an advertisement for one that was on the Shannon Estuary and could rightly be called Castle Bullock. As castles go, it was not expensive, but then again I had not viewed it.

  It was in the middle of a field, the gable wall gaunt, crumbling, and tilting from the winds. I went with my sons to view it. True, it was on the Shannon Estuary and it did have lookout windows to ward off marauders, but cattle had made it their abode, wandering in and out of the open doorway, dung everywhere, dry dung and fresh dung, and the smell of the beasts off the straw that had been thrown down in various corners. The boys found timber posts to make a haphazard scaffold up to the top floor, and having climbed up, I indulged my brief dream of entertaining Jay in this salubrious gallery.

  Not long after I met him in Tipperary, and as it was a warm day, unusually warm for March, we sat on the grass that was pickled with daisies and made unrealistic plans.

  That night, as we lay in a four-poster bed entwined in sleep, a figure, half-clown, half-satyr, came in, dressed in a white nightshirt and knitted nightcap. He was both comic and malevolent as he walked around the bed. Jay sat up astonished, then shouted, “Get out, get out,” and the figure disappeared, smiling. But he was no spirit, rather he was someone sent to spy on us, and thenceforth we were shadowed. Yet we swore that nothing could come between us.

  A few of his friends in England suspected that we were intimate. One woman, as I noticed from the one time I met her, by a needling in her pupils, resented it, and later on, lifting a rib of reddish-brown hair from the collar of his coat, she said my name, guessing his infidelity. Another of his friends invited me to lunch, saying mischievously that Jay would be there, three men to myself. Jay avoided looking at me and somehow gave the impression
that we were strangers. I left early and went to nearby Portobello Road, where perversely, since I do not like fur coats, I bought a cheap fur coat. It had seen better days. It was a pelt really, with grisly patches of fur. When I got back to my house, he was already in the sitting room, pensive and contrite, warming his hands at the fire. He had wanted to tell his friends, he had wanted to proclaim our being in love, but somehow he couldn’t. Seeing the coat, he said something unfortunate, how his wife might use it as a lining for a better coat, and I ran out of the room, appalled. How we must have chased and missed each other in so many of the back streets of Chelsea, because when we ended up meeting at World’s End, in front of a shop called Granny Takes a Trip, we were both shattered, but reconciled.

  His letters from Ireland were what kept me buoyant, and I would read them over and over again. Letters replete with promise.

  Then one morning, unannounced, he appeared carrying a small bag with a few possessions, and without any explanation, it was clear that he had moved in. We were living together. We cooked dinners together. He sang Billie Holiday’s “Here It Is Tomorrow Again” as he peeled potatoes. We read aloud to each other from Thomas Mann’s Tristan, and sometimes we played Scrabble. Most evenings he would go out to the public phone to ring his family, but when he got back in, it was not referred to. It would have been a few months later when one night he was struck speechless with pain. He could only mime it. His teeth chattered. The pain ran from his heart up into his mouth, and in the early hours I called a doctor. In the Heart Hospital, where he spent two weeks, I would visit out of hours, and I came to realize that I was not the cornerstone of his existence. I did not bring calf’s-foot jelly or arrowroot biscuits, I was not the wife who would discuss with him his plans for going home and convalescing in the morning room and possibly reading Thomas Mann.