A Pagan Place

by Edna O'Brien

  There was a smell of night-scented stock in the air. It was from the creamery manager’s garden, they were the only people apart from Lizzie that bothered to sow flowers. The lamp was lit again and the plastic half-curtain drawn. He drew it. You saw his small fat hand, the hand that you had seen administer to people in different circumstances. He had attended to you, had syringed your ears and afterwards pulled your earlobe by way of joke. He was good with ladies, had a bedside manner.

  The rain had stopped but everything was wet. The lichen on the wall was revived by rain. Some was raised like a cushion and some passed into the body of the stone and had become part of it. There was white and green and rust-coloured lichen and there were queer shapes, all wavery at the edges, like the borders of countries on the school map. You scratched the stones with the edge of a pebble.

  Austria was Hungary

  She ate Turkey

  Dipped it in Greece,

  Fried it in Japan,

  Dropped it in the middle of the Indian Ocean,

  While long-legged Italy

  Kicked poor Sicily

  Into the middle of the Mediterranean Sea.

  You were tired of sitting and you were tired of standing. After it got dark you coughed when people went by so that they would know you were you and not mistake you for a ghost.

  People mistook Manny Parker for a ghost because of the way he mooched around at all hours, in the dawn, in the dewtime, gathering different specimens. Your father had a set on Manny Parker and on the Hairy Fellows, pretended he was afraid of them, pretended, so that he could denounce them.

  You tried to whistle. Only men should whistle. The Blessed Virgin blushed when women whistled and likewise when women crossed their legs. It intrigued you thinking of the Blessed Virgin having to blush so frequently. The bird that had the most lifelike whistle was the curlew. The curlew was a grallatorial bird, indigenous to sedge and damp places, more partial to wading than flying. The curlew’s whistle was a cry.

  The light in the dispensary window got quenched but neither of them emerged. You said five Our Fathers and five Hail Marys. Then you said five Glory be to the Fathers. Glory be to the Father was routine, was like the full stop at the end of the words. You said a litany. Behind you there was a field of corn and it was green and vast. You could imagine things looming, animals, a chariot, Miss Davitt. Your prayers got very singsong, and weren’t delivered for Emma but were said to keep ghosts and chariots away.

  When Emma came out she was vivacious, said what an angel you were, what a little dote, what a little lapdog. She said it had taken longer than she had imagined because it involved various tests and what a nuisance it all was, one’s insides, the inner paraphernalia of one. Women’s insides were a sea with shapes sliding and colliding, their fertility juices leaking away. She hopped. She frolicked. She did not mind when her legs got spattered. She was exalted. She said she was off, in the morning, to take the spa waters for her complaint. It was to a town several hundred feet above sea-level. Elderly people went there when the harvest was in. It had five or six hotels and many guest houses. She had no idea where she would stay.

  They stiffened when they heard it. Your father said she was just home and it wasn’t a very civil thing to be gallivanting straight away. Your mother said it was a waste of money. Emma wasn’t very flush, had brought no presents, Emma had hinted about being a bit short of spondulics. Emma said she must go, that it was a must. She asked what time the bus went in the morning and grudgingly she was told. All the jubilation had passed. It dawned on them then. Things are known before they happen.

  She tried humouring them, asked about his crops, his pasture, his cattle and his horses; asked how the hens were laying. For fun she plaited your mother’s hair and when she milked each plait like a cow’s teat, no one laughed and no one smiled. He dragged his chair, scraped it along the floor and stood up and announced that he was going to bed. A pall had set in. When he had gone your mother asked if it was really necessary, this jaunt, and Emma said that it was. Your mother’s face contorted then and the dagger look came in her eyes that always presaged danger.

  What was left of Emma’s belongings she plundered through. There were old shoes, odd stockings, an angora jersey and some underwear. One stocking had a huge rosette of dried nail varnish on the thigh and the strap of a black brassière was knotted and reknotted industriously. Nice milieus, nice milieus, your mother said and instanced the story about the swimming pool and the hot bouillon. Laid into the cups of the brassière were two foam pads and when she held it up they tumbled out. She did not retrieve them, she would not allow you to, she was savage with Emma’s belongings. Under the pillow was the sanitary towel, stained, but not bloodstained. Under the mattress Emma’s diary. She flicked through it, pausing at nothing, expecting to light upon the clue, the confirmation.

  She sent you for her glasses but as soon as she started to read she realized that the disclosures were sacrilege. She sat on the bed. She gasped, she said between those pages there was a cesspool, a veritable Hades, a chronicle of vice and filth. She asked her Maker why this cruel cross, she shook, she went into a paroxysm, she enumerated her life’s woes, the skein of woes, she put two and two together, and asked whom she could turn to, in her hour of need.

  He called from downstairs, asked in Moses’ name where his dinner was. It was in the lower oven, drying up. She put the diary under the mattress and ran down, apologizing. He said why wasn’t the table laid, why wasn’t the pepper and salt and relish put down, he let out a tirade about the lateness of the hour.

  You stayed behind. The thought of looking at the diary made you sick, made you squirm. You were both hot and cold. Your temples were hot and so were your eyeballs because of the way the blood rushed behind them but at your extremities you were cold.

  You put two fingers in. You touched it. What were you doing? What were you doing? It was a sin. It was a sin against two Commandments. You took it out and opened it and your eyes raced from page to page, pouring over it, words, names, a rhyme:

  Tony, thee I love

  Long for thee I’ve tarried

  Let’s have jinks tonight

  But no kids until we’re married.

  There were no appointments in it, nothing practical like that. It was all about men, what they did to her, what she did to them, how hot they were. Emma was fanatic with how hot they were. She called their yoke their apparatus. A school inspector had put Emma across his knee and thrashed her, hard. You had heard of him, he was famous, he was a famous native speaker. There were hurley players, a bus conductor, a policeman, a school inspector, a member of parliament, and an Italian who was a hat manufacturer. Emma had put the profession and the amount of money spent on her beside each one along with the details of what they did in private. The bus conductor spent nothing on her, had brought her to a park near the terminus late one night. Emma had a rendezvous with two men in the same evening, one at six, and the other, a medical student, at eleven in the night. After that she put Living at Last.

  You were boggled. You began to read them all over again. Your mother told you to come down at once. You went down sucking the corner of your handkerchief. Sutach and suck-suck and spoilsport and pissabed and clown.

  She had gone outside to pound potatoes. She worked the pounder round and round, used both hands and was prodigal with her strength. Steam completely blotted her face. The big potatoes she bruised by pressing them against the side of the saucepan. Hens perched on her bent back and were occupied trying to depose each other.

  Ambie came and stood beside her and watched her pound potatoes that were already ground to a mash. The aluminium ring on his little finger flashed like mad as he raised it to scrape the tartar from his front teeth. He was biding his time. He said a little bird told him that a porker was on the way. She looked up, affronted. Her face was the colour of porridge. He said Emma sent a wire to the doctor: Went over cliffs but still the same. Worried. He said the whole village was buzzing with it and no
t only that but farmers who might never have heard of it were discussing the substance, the wording, with each other. There was a pig fair on.

  Your mother said Jesus Mary and Joseph like she had never said it before. Ambie told her the doctor had chosen to go on the batter and that a queue of people waited outside the dispensary either for him to return or to send that fop, the locum from the next village. He said the doctor had been called to Della at dawn and when he got there proceeded to examine her mother and later fell over the bed while looking into Della’s tonsils.

  Her eyes were dark and shiny as sloes. She asked how far gone he thought Emma was. She was frank with him. His own disgrace with the doctor’s maid was forgiven, forgotten, in this new catastrophe. He said he thought five or six months. She thought less. They bickered over it. They discussed symptoms. She said Emma showed no lack of appetite, and referred to her own biliousness that was perpetual thoughout her pregnancies. She hoped against hope. You were not told to go away. She said a diary upstairs contained the most lurid information conceivable. She said a chequered life went on in the metropolis away from home.

  Ambie said Ah, stop. You could see that he was agog to look at the diary, to pore over it. He said a second communication had come, from a hospital, regarding a thing called a zondiac. He recited it, Zondiac negative. He said the bus conductor had brought in a bottle to the hospital and said it was either wine or urine.

  She erupted. She said any fool would know it had to be urine, as what would a hospital want with wine, enjoined him to use his common sense on the matter. Emma had had to pass water into a bottle the night in the dispensary and maybe that was why he put the light out. Emma would have had to crouch over the bottle and funnel it in either with guesswork or the aid of a hand.

  Ambie said it was on everyone’s agenda and that he himself had incurred some of the obloquy. She said to stop being hypocritical and flounced off with a following of hens behind her.

  *

  Emma arrived by bus and hurried up the avenue. Your mother said she was to be given no refreshments but watched until such time as she could go to the doctor, until it fell dark. Emma made the mistake of humming as she entered the kitchen and she did a little wave of the hand by way of saying hello. He was out counting cattle.

  She was radiant. The sulphur water had cleared her skin and there was not a pimple on it and not a blackhead. Her eyebrows were heavily pencilled, in an unbecoming shade of brown. One line was crooked.

  Your mother produced the diary, brandished it before Emma’s eyes and said what was the meaning, what was the significance. Emma showed extreme presence of mind. She laughed and said Oh that. She said she was trying her hand at being a playwright, she said all for Hecuba, and that the play was the thing. She cited dramas that had thrilled her in her teens. East Lynne, Dracula, Murder in the Red Barn, and she also trotted out the names of the players who had been in them.

  Your mother said a likely yarn and called her Madame. One of her real barbs. She pointed out that the diary was a tale neither of murder nor of love, but like an extract from the annals of a white-slave trafficker.

  Emma tried to snatch it from her, saying it was personal property but it got consigned to your mother’s apron pocket and you watched its shape through the cloth, which was thin. You could not look Emma in the eye, you were too aghast.

  Emma said there was no need to explode and was off on another tack about it being written at the behest of someone else, someone who was blackmailing her. Your mother shook her head and said Alas, alas, said a liar needed a great memory. Your mother was scrutinizing her from head to toe. Emma talked quickly and wildly, said it was true she had had an internal complaint that resulted in flatulence and that had mystified two specialists but that it had been properly diagnosed by her own doctor and had some cumbersome Latin name. She said there was no need for hysterics.

  Your mother asked if she was bleeding. Emma prevaricated. Your mother took her by the shoulders and insisted upon being told. You dreaded what she might do. You were on Emma’s side. Emma said she was spotting. They were both red in the face, Emma was a port wine colour and your mother was beetroot like the Nigger. Emma flared up and said for pity’s sake to postpone the dramatics until evening, until after she had seen her doctor and had the whole thing clarified. Such sudden authority shook your mother, made her hesitate, made her baulk. Then Emma lost her footing, she put her hand out and each finger begged to be united with your mother’s, to be interlocked. That resumed the hostilities, made her say that the writing was upon the wall. It was a bit like the song Mrs Durack, as a bride, sang in the screechy voice, only it was not a bridle hanging on the wall, it was a catastrophe. Emma said there was nothing to be fatalistic about but the opposite was true. It was adjourned.

  Emma begged to be let make pies to pass the time. Your mother went and picked rhubarb. The stalks were young and the skin came off in threads. When she chopped it a pink juice oozed from it which Emma tasted by dipping her finger in it from time to time. They worked together but without speaking. Emma put an inverted eggcup in the centre of the heaped fruit and covered the whole thing with a very thin tent of pastry.

  She said she went three evenings a week to a vocational school. She said there was nothing like bettering oneself. She addressed you but it was for your mother to register. Each time when you were on the point of saying something to Emma the words got caught in your throat and you could neither say them nor forget them and you could not utter them. You were like someone with a muzzle. Emma must have thought it was enmity, because she stuck her tongue out at you.

  It was arranged that Ambie would go early to the doctor and pinion him down. It had to be after dark. Emma had to be ready to hide from your father. The news would have to be broken to him by imposing people, the doctor and Co. You were put looking out for him, you were the lookout person. There was no knowing from which direction he might come.

  You ran from one side of the house to the other and sometimes you thought you saw his lank figure with the long nap overcoat wide open and flapping at either side. But it was only a figment you saw. You were banking on the dogs to come first, to be his precursors the way St John the Baptist was the precursor of Christ. You thought that if only you could go and forestall him and break it to him, that it would be a coup for you and a blessing for Emma but that would be the red rag to the Gaelic bull. You knew the altitude of his anger. Your limbs felt the onslaught of events.

  She did not let Emma out of sight. When Emma went to the pantry she followed and likewise when Emma went to the front room to sit. She exclaimed when she spotted Lizzie coming up the avenue with a cane, said did anyone ever see such gall. She locked the door but did not put the big key in its customary place on the narrow window ledge, she brought it with her into the hall and up the stairs where you followed. You tiptoed although Lizzie was quite a bit away from the house. She tried the latch, then banged on the door, then raised the window, then walked around the house asking the hedge and devil’s pokers where everyone had vanished to, emphasizing that she hadn’t seen a sinner go in or out by the front gate. She tried the hall door as if she were a visitor. She rapped first on the wood and then on the panes of stained glass between the wood. She used a medal or money because it was a metallic sound.

  You were all crouched under the window and could hear your hearts beating but you did not look at each other. Theirs, too, seemed in danger of bursting. You could also hear the wind rushing between the strands of paling wire. The main dilemma then was that Lizzie and your father might clash and that it would be broken to him thus precipitately, disastrously.

  Lizzie yelled up, and said Attention please. She had used her hand as a loudspeaker because her voice was both loud and more muffled. She said If she were mine I’d walk her through the town and hold my head high, and then there was a deathly silence while she must have been stepping over the grass and getting across the paling wire because there was no further announcement and you were on tente
rhooks until she was far enough down the avenue to be sighted.

  She moved like a harrier. Your mother remarked on it, on the caper of her. Your mother said Another candidate for the lunatic asylum and without too long an interval either. Emma agreed.

  Your mother kept wondering aloud how your father ought to be told and then she went through the chain of events that was likely to ensue. It was amazing the things she could think of, the pinnacles of disaster to which her imagination rose. The weapons with which she supplied him, from the simplest thing like a slash-hook to the most fearful like the bulldog revolver even though it was up in the river where she’d slung it, herself.

  He blundered into it. The doctor, who was supposed to receive Emma in the dispensary, arrived instead at the hall door and was met by him returning with a lantern because he had gone to see to a sow who was with bonhams. The doctor shook his hand and said it was parlous, parlous, and how he would not have wished it on anyone, not even those mean demons who never paid his fees except in the form of poultry at Christmas time.

  Your mother and you eavesdropped. The doctor was drunk. He lit a cigarette so clumsily that it burst into sparks. She made a request for a cup of hemlock there and then and the same for you.

  Your father thought it was about Giddy the mare that had to be shot and he said what shook him altogether was that her flesh was sold in France as a delicacy and what savages the French must be. The doctor said he was speaking of Emma and asked pertinently if he thought the culprit, alias the prospective husband, was in danger of being a married man. He said the best they could hope for was a bachelor of means.

  Your father got very sarcastic then and said Doc, I think you’ve had one over the limit. And the doctor biled at such a remark from a man he had so often treated for delirium tremens, got vituperative altogether and said Christ’s sake man, open your eyes, she’s five months gone. He added that it had been proven both by internal examination and with a urine test.