Country Girl: A Memoir

by Edna O'Brien

  The day the tubes were taken out and I could feel my swallow and then taste the first drops of water that were like nectar, I felt a great gratitude to be alive.

  Yet it was when I got home I began to weigh things up, as I sat and read the get-well cards and looked out the window at the daffodils on one side and the sea on the other. I had to concede that as a nondriver I had picked a lonely outpost indeed. No seafarer I. Yet it was a year before I put the house on the market.

  And so the day came when I was wrapping the glasses and the several ornaments, hanging torn sheets over the mirrors, emptying drawers, finding leaflets about caring for one’s carpet and novel ideas for cocktail recipes. Great stacks of cardboard boxes were already packed, and the sitting room had a sacked appearance to it. I jumped at hearing a light tap on the door. It was a young woman, one of the “six sisters,” who had built a small house on a hill above mine. She wore a long calico skirt and a white drawstring blouse with blown poppies on it. Her shyness was evident from the way she hesitated. I had often seen her in the years that I lived there, deft as a mountain goat, moving from rock to rock, and one Christmas Day, when she thought there was nobody about, she peeled off all her clothes and literally ran into the ice-cold water. She emerged a few minutes later, a verdant Eve, slathered with seaweed, which clung to her, the weed they called sea lettuce. What impulse had made her do that? I would see her often in the evenings, with her tin can, searching the undersides of the rocks for mussels for her dinner, but we had never spoken, neither of us had dared to break the ice.

  She came in, wondering if I needed any help, and before I could answer she had already begun to pack things. There was something I had always wanted to ask her. Had she resented my being there, those ten years? “Yes. Twice.” The first was when she saw a second chimney put in the gable wall that was the stone wall of the house she had grown up in. The second was the night we moved in, lights in every room, so that to her, a few hundred yards up the hill, it was a fairy castle from which she had been banished. There was one other small thing I had to ask. What had made her plunge into the cold sea that Christmas Day? “Ah now” was the evasive answer.

  Piling the books, she asked if I had read them all, and mentioned the only one she had read in years, The Bridges of Madison County. Then her eye fell on an open page of one of the books and she read aloud: “The sea, and Homer… it’s Love that moves all things.” She liked it, copied it on the back of one of the cocktail recipes, and put it in the pocket of her long skirt. He was a tall man, a stranger from the Land of the White Nights and the Cloudberries, and the previous Christmas he had docked his boat over in Gweedore harbor and she’d left a daft note in an empty beer bottle that was on the deck of his boat, which was named after a Norse goddess. No, she did not dream of sailing the high seas with him, she would never leave that coastline, she was married to it, the way one cannot be married to a man.

  Pointing to the low window, she said, “That’s where they laid my mother out, the night she died.” She was a child at the time. Her mother had given birth to eleven children in that tiny house, and she belonged to it, in a way I never could.

  Under the stairs I found a last bottle of champagne, and we sat on the edge of the long table that the movers would soon dismantle, looking out to sea, not saying a word.

  It was still dark when I left the following morning and put the back-door key through the letterbox of the big ceremonial oak door with its iron rivets. I had also left a letter for the auctioneer marked “Urgent.” He was coming later to look at a damp patch which had been discovered and was causing concern for the purchasers, so that the sale was in danger of falling through. A copy of it is in my book of memorabilia:

  Dear Brendan, I have talked to my builder and he says the damp patch is nothing to worry about and is not spreading into the hall. It is caused by the fact that a corner of the house was built on rock (not unlike St Peter’s!). What they intend to do is put electrodes under it then a waterproof plaster which will be painted over, so that no damp will flow further along. The outside is being repainted as requested.

  The minicab driver was not the young man I had expected, he was older and seemed peeved in some way, maybe the early hour.

  In that pale light we came upon a strange and ghostlike spectacle. A field full of hares, dozens of them, peculiarly still, their ears cocked. There was something eerie about it, a suggestion of madness and menace. I asked the driver to slow down, and as he did, some, obviously the females, scattered to one side, to allow for what would be the tournaments. Standing on their hind legs, grouped in pairs, the males began to box one another. They did it expertly and with a formality, as if it had been rehearsed, which it couldn’t have been—this hooking and jabbing they knew by some innate instinct, the battle that had to be waged to win the hand of a lady love.

  Fearing I would miss the plane, the driver started the engine up and, apropos of nothing, said, “I had a good marriage,” his cue to tell me how suddenly his wife died, had been given the all-clear when she went for a checkup, and he was called in from the waiting room to find her, the doctor and two nurses, one male, all in floods of tears, as she had only a week to live. He could not remember what he had done in the two years after her death, could not remember which daughter he had gone to for the Christmas dinner. He drifted through life in a haze and was given counseling that couldn’t help. Eventually, he decided to take up the taxi work, to meet people, and then, late one evening, he was called to drive a lady home. When she got out of the car, she suggested they might have a walk sometime. Already they had taken a run in the car over to Letterkenny to look at the shops and another on a windy headland above Gortahork, where they were nearly blown away. He wasn’t saying anything, but maybe if I came back on a visit, I might see a change in him, he might be a family man again.

  The plane always took off in one of two directions, depending on the wind, and as I had hoped, it cruised above the Pink House, so happy down below, an odalisque, her soft contours opening to the elements.

  The Night of Time

  The cry of a fox at night is a baneful thing. I mistook it at first for that of an infant. It had bitten into a dream, a dream I did not wish bitten into, though I forget what it was. The fox was a vixen, a putative mother, making preliminary reconnaissance for a place to burrow, and the garden, smothered with bushes, fig trees, and shrubs that have seeded themselves, was ideal cover.

  It was snowing. Thick pilings of it, on the flowerbeds and hedging, snow falling, snow flurrying, snow settling, and snow waiting, in the sulky fleeces of the sky.

  She started to come in daylight, would arrive suddenly, stand her ground, a burnished apparition juxtaposed against the white of the snow, the chin so pert and pointed and a strange kind of desolation in the expression that was curiously human. Having sized me up, she would sally over to the fig trees and the high back wall, such a taunt in the swish of the brown tail, and sometimes, when she turned to look back, there would be a rush of blood that boded terror in two recesses behind my earlobes.

  January 2011, and according to the weather reports, the worst winter since 1963, when Wimbledon Common was completely blanketed with snow and in their virgin whiteness you could not count the steps up to the grand houses across the way.

  That was the winter after I left my husband and had rented a room on the Common, when Sasha wrote “Help” in the condensation of the windowpane, being too embarrassed to admit that he wanted to go back to his father’s house, because it was the place he knew, even though he was wretched in it. He and his brother were to be separated for that one night, and since I was allowed to have only one or the other, they tossed a coin for it and Sasha won the toss.

  We were in the new flat, bare, except for a mattress on the floor, a kitchen chair, some mugs, and a gas ring. I had put the kettle on to make cocoa, when on the condensation, from the steam of the kettle, the word HELP, in large capitals, showed on the window.

  We had had a bit of a
humiliation earlier on in the steak house on the Ridgeway. I had sufficient money for one dinner, one order of steak and chips, and asked if we could share it. The befuddled waiter called the manager, who, with a smug superiority, said all tables were already fully booked, and we had to make a shaming retreat.

  I suggested to Sasha that perhaps he wanted to go home, and he nodded “Yes,” and we put on our Wellingtons and our coats and went out to the pay phone. After I had dialed the number and his father answered, Sasha spoke haltingly to him, and it was agreed that his father would collect him in half an hour. We waited downstairs in the porch of the house, and for those interminable thirty minutes we didn’t say much. The path of snow under the streetlight had a pink flush to it and was slippery.

  Next morning I left that flat, and a young assistant in a shop in Wimbledon, after some pleading, agreed to take the mattress back, since I explained that I had not taken off the plastic covering and had not slept on it. I moved to a room in Putney that was on the river and not far from the woman who had allowed me in on the night of the drifting fog. This rented room was my futile and lamentable attempt to make a nest. I would think, irrationally, that if we could go down, down, into a deep snowdrift and hide there, our troubles would be solved, I would get custody of them, their father would be reconciled to it, and life would have a normal hum to it again. In the new digs, I was often alone, as the owner went to a house in Cornwall, and I brought the children for visits. They were intrigued by a collection of maps and compasses in her father’s study, a nautical museum that he was not likely to see again, as he was an invalid in his house in Cornwall, which overlooked the sea.

  I received a commission, Francis Wyndham, who was an editor at Queen magazine, asking me to write a descriptive piece about horses.

  The check for one hundred pounds called for an outing, and the following Saturday I took them to the Strand, to a stamp shop. Sasha, having developed a precocious interest in stamps, saw himself as a putative stamp collector. Afterward we went to the Savoy for lunch. There were loaned ties, the waiter holding an array of them on his arm for them to choose from, and then he conducted us into the opulence of the dining room, where we sat at a round center table. Such suavity, such attentiveness, waiters flying to meet every command, and soon after, as a trolley was wheeled to our table and half a silver salver lifted back, he inquired as to the preference of the “young gentlemen.”

  “It’s pukka… it’s pukka,” Carlo said, appropriating the English phrases that they had overheard, forgetting the ones they knew from Ireland, and even their accents were slightly changed.

  Afterward, a little tipsy from dessert wine, in an anteroom with a beautiful blond writing desk, they helped themselves to engraved notepaper to pen a letter to my mother, of whom they were inordinately fond. From Sasha she received a treatise on stamps, followed by a long account of the Siege of Khartoum in 1884, where General Charles Gordon held out for ten months against a Sudanese army but eventually was beaten, having been outflanked by an enemy who took advantage of the low level of the Nile, rushed the walls, and broke down the gates. He hoped one day in some box in a junk shop that he would find a stamp from that era, with its Egyptian franking and, most marvelous of all, tucked inside the envelope, a soldier’s account of the hungers and afflictions that they endured. Carlo, determined to write an equally long letter, recalled a prayer, the “Desiderata,” which railed against life’s “vexatious” trials. I too availed myself of the engraved notepaper, stuffing sheets of it into my handbag, believing it would be lucky for the novel I had started to write. I wrote in every free moment, on buses, in railway stations, at the school gates, and the novel Girls in Their Married Bliss, written in that frenzied time, was deemed a departure from my earlier, lambent, lyrical tone.

  That was the winter I met the film director Jack Garfield, who sent me a hamper from Fortnum & Mason, delicacies such as I had never tasted, hams in aspic, foie gras, quince jelly, cheeses, and truffles filled with cherry brandy and kirsch. That was the winter I was invited by T. P. McKenna to a party given by Sam Peckinpah, but never actually met my host, which was not unusual for parties in the sixties, since guests brought friends who then encouraged other friends, and gate-crashers made nothing of walking into a house where a front door might be ajar and “I’ll send all my lovin’ to you” full blast.

  That was the winter I bought a Cossack astrakhan hat in the palest gray and one or two men kissed me, but I was not ready to kiss anyone, I was still frozen.

  That was the winter Sylvia Plath took her own life, having written poetry of such searing and murderous truth. Her husband, Ted Hughes, in a book dedicated to her, had written a poem in which Husband is the shadow to the Lady, but shadows swap places in life, just as they can in courtly verse. I had met Sylvia Plath once, after a poetry reading in the Queen Elizabeth Hall, when Robert Graves introduced us, and I felt something inimical and harsh in her. Yet in time, and with my mounting adversities, her poems, filled as they are with the presence of death and the presence of children, were bulletins to my soul. I felt I could bear things just by reading them, the words so perfectly placed, so perfectly honed, the beautiful imagery, the gravity: “Lilies. Lilies.”

  “The moon… staring from her hood of bone.”

  In the rented room, with the river beyond, the shutters did not meet, and cold moonlight ambled along the floor, picking up the acorns on a silver-backed mirror and the rosettes on a pink cloth slipper. I was afraid to sleep in case something drastic happened, in case my husband stole a march and took them to New Zealand, as he had threatened to do, since he had a sister there. In dreams I was constantly trying to reach them, racing up a flight of steps at Wimbledon station, only to arrive at the platform just as the train moved away and they were waving wanly. In another dream I was ironing, and suddenly the smell of scorched cloth changed to that of burning flesh, as their skins came off, sizzling on the bottom of the iron, and I wakened to a catastrophe of my own making. An Irish girl who once worked for us, and who was training to be a children’s nurse, came occasionally to help their father, and on the Saturday morning when she could not come, they had been instructed to vacuum and, on the stroke of one, deliver their father’s breakfast—Earl Grey tea and brown gluten toast, faintly burned and sprinkled with olive oil. I knew the Irish girl, with her proneness to blush in his presence, would take their father’s side, and I feared that she would undermine me, which she did, when the black day came that I appeared in court. When she handed them over at the railway station, she never addressed a word to me, just whispered fondnesses in their ears, and then delivered the ultimatums from my husband about prompt bedtime, their brushing their teeth properly, and the necessity of regular bowel movements. So as to establish my waning powers over them, I asked that she bring a change of clothes and underclothes, which in some way brought me nearer to them, simply by seeing their vests, their socks, and their Fair Isle jumpers thrown on chairs.

  In late February that year, it started to thaw.

  Snow fell from the roofs in small avalanches, water pipes burst, the streets and the towpaths were all slush, and yet a few snowdrops had pushed their way through the dank, leaden earth.

  The vixen came more frequently, her crying at night so eerie, like the banshee, a summons to the living and the dead. Two burrows had been made, but I did not know that there was an adjoining tunnel between them. I began to get nervous and consulted various organizations as to what I might do. From one I learned that foxes were nocturnal mammals, spent the hours of darkness hunting and scavenging, and that their life expectancy could be twelve to fifteen years. Attacks by foxes, it said, were rare, and it would only be a last-ditch measure for a fox to attack. But this was a last-ditch measure. The next organization that I rang was equally unhelpful. Did I know that foxes first colonized London in 1930? I didn’t. The “urban” fox, which mine was termed to be, had reached a stage of equilibrium in the city, and shooting was not acceptable, nor was snaring. Foxes f
elt happier in a corner of the garden with a wall on both sides, where they would feel well guarded. I was to resist the urge to make them tame, though many householders derived pleasure by feeding them from their hand. Putting foul-smelling chemicals into burrows was illegal under the Food and Environment Protection Act of 1985, and it was a misconception to assume that one could move a wild animal to a new area, where it would not settle down and would not know the best feeding sites. By doing this, I would be committing another offense that might lead to imprisonment. A pest-control bureau that I located recommended a repellent that mimicked a rival fox’s smell, the only drawback being that it was not to be found in any hardware shop, garden center, or DIY store, as the demand had been excessive.

  One night the sensor light kept going on and off, ceaselessly, and when I got out of bed and looked out the window, I saw what I did not believe possible. Down below were eight or nine foxes, the young cubs, with the mad antics of squirrels, racing about, romping in and out of the flowerbeds, stirring the evergreen bushes, off which snow fell becomingly onto their furry coats, which were a darker brown than that of the parents. Down there, evincing, I have to say, a happiness unbounded, the mother stood, utterly still and slightly crouched, as they suckled from time to time, then darted about in a mad maelstrom.

  I vacated the bedroom.

  The room next to it used to be for entertaining, but there is less of that with the years. It is the hour, as I knew from one of Mr. W. G. Sebald’s novels (that uncanny literary ghost), which Sir Thomas Browne called “the night of time that surpasseth day.” It is the hour when Scott Fitzgerald contemplated his “crack-up” and lived it. The hour of the wolf and the urban foxes. Books everywhere. On the shelves and on the small space above the rows of books and all along the floor and under chairs, books that I have read, books that I have not read; for instance, I have never read The Rise and Fall of Athens by Plutarch, of which I possess three copies. Leaflets everywhere. Vedic sutras. A newspaper clipping with the heading “A Line to the Lord,” by which Catholics were being given a chance to dial a confession for fifty pence a minute. A letter sent to my address by mistake is confirming my appointment with a coordinator for breast enhancement. Oh, sweet Jesus. There are the exercise manuals that I consulted in my halcyon times, the Tummy Toner, the B I Press-Mono, the Hip-Hop, along with idealized pictures of the hourglass waist. A pamphlet from the local council is offering advice for the over-sixty-fives. “Are you prepared?” the headline asks, to which I answer a spirited no.