A Pagan Place

by Edna O'Brien

  Your mother was flabbergasted. Then she let fly. She said there was a set of sins called backbiting, calumny and detraction but that that insinuation topped the lot. She was shaking.

  The landlady said never was there smoke without a fire. Your mother said what nerve and then the landlady got ferocious and spouted the contents of your mother’s letters to Emma over the months, in which there were degrading things about the landlady herself and constant barging about money. The landlady said it was no wonder Emma was a hussy seeing the homestead she sprang from, seeing the lack of breeding.

  Your mother praised her own acres, boasted about the thoroughbred horses. The landlady told her to keep her voice down. Your mother said to you that you must leave immediately and not consort with such folks. Folks sounded very out of place. The landlady said there was no point in going to Father Scanlon either because he had washed his hands of her. Hardly had you stepped off the mat than she dosed the door on you and grazed the backs of your heels with the big draught-excluder.

  In the hospital there was a funny smell. She said that smell brought back memories. It was ether. A clouded smell.

  At first you could not find anyone to direct you. You could hear babies crying. The almoner told you the date when Emma had checked out. Emma had not sent the telegram until she was ready to be discharged. Emma had done a disappearing act. The almoner consulted a chart and read out her full name and the baby’s name. It was a boy and weighed five pounds, twelve ounces. Emma had called it St John Aubrey. There were no relatives of that name. It was in an oxygen tent. She said that in view of the situation there was no question of your being allowed to see it. She said it would be in the tent for weeks but that it was out of danger. Your mother asked about deformities. The almoner was furious, said there were no deformities but a blood defect. Emma’s blood and the man’s blood were incompatible.

  A trolley was wheeled by but you didn’t look. Your mother said afterwards it was lunches with aluminium lids over them. You were both starving. You went to a restaurant and had tea and buns and after the tea had revived her she went to use the telephone. The waitress who was elderly showed her how to put the pennies in.

  She rang up Emma’s place of work and was told that Emma had left five months previously and when she put the phone down she shook her head and sobbed and said she had lost a daughter. The waitress suggested another cup of tea but she was anxious to begin the search.

  You went to the three lots of lodgings where Emma had been. In one of the places she was not even remembered. Then began your quest. You realized the unpreparedness, the flurry of it all. She considered going to the police but shied from the thought. She went to the newspaper office and put an advertisement in the Personal column of an evening paper that she had a hunch Emma might read. She made the request to be reunited at six o’clock any evening, at the foot of the statue of the English general. They could not insert it for a day.

  There was walking and waiting. She thought infantile things like that she might run Emma down in a shop, in the porch of a chapel or sitting on a bench in a park. You passed a place the Germans had bombed by mistake. There were weeds growing out of one wall and children playing on hillocks of rubbish. In every church you prayed for the same thing, to find her. You had no sense of direction and kept going astray. She searched for Emma’s bike among a consignment of bikes that were inside the gates of a cigarette factory. Some had padlocks on them. They were all jumbled together and balanced in such a way that when she put her hands on one an assortment of them collapsed and the two of you ran in mortal terror. It was about the only moment of levity you had. Sometimes in one of the main streets she stopped and looked at the clothes in the windows. She stopped without meaning to and selected the garments that she most liked.

  You got there well before six. People were pouring out of the shops and offices. She remarked on them, how callous they were. There were girls with hair and hair styles like Emma’s. That grieved her, misled her for a moment, made her think she had sighted Emma, coming towards her. You could see her too, you ascribed a certain coat to her, the turquoise coat with the half belt. It was worse than if you couldn’t picture her at all. The same commotion was always going on at six, the throngs, the bicycles, bells clanging and clashing, huge queues for buses, and hardy weather. It was a relief not to be going anywhere, to be simply stationed.

  You could have climbed to the top for a copper each but she was against it both because of the extravagance and the possibility of vertigo. The women who had been selling from barrows folded them up and hauled them off. They took hold of the shafts and were horses to their own carts and you could tell by their gait that they were ready to drop. The ground was strewn with butts, and toffee papers and lollipop sticks, all from the day’s diversion. A one-legged man played a mouth-organ, and his friend, who had a facial affliction, coerced people for money. The one-legged man had his trousers pinned up so that there was no overlooking his condition. She fobbed him off with a miraculous medal, said it would improve his voice, give it timbre. She felt certain that it was on the third day Emma would come. She clung to that.

  A window was decorated for Christmas, well in advance. All nightgowns had Pleasant dreams placards on them. They were long and gossamer, like dance-frocks. She thought Emma might be window-gazing.

  The stars were not nearly so bright in the city, not nearly so singular. Between you and them there was a pall, a pall generated by soot and by smoke. Before the lights went out the sky had a coat of pink. She recalled her time in New York, the time of the green georgette and the dance shoes and multi-flavoured ice-creams. She said the Italians were great for concocting ice-cream.

  The smell of coffee from an ice-cream parlour was agonizing. It plagued you. So did the sight of little oranges wrapped in silver paper. They were packed in blonde wooden boxes. The lid of one box was half open to display the contents. Dark tacks stuck out of the wood. You gazed and gazed and thought of William Wordsworth who had gazed at daffodils. Your mouth watered. She said only people with pull would be able to buy them and why have them in the window at all, tantalizing people. She was reminded of Manny Parker’s sister and then remembered the amount of money she owed her which was catastrophic.

  You missed home, you missed ordinary dull things like crushed stones in a field, and the wind, and the way it touched you on the face and its noises and the cattle too, an accompaniment to everything. The cattle in the city bawled, being cooped together in marts or waiting their turn at the abattoir. She inquired into the bedlam that started up at dawn.

  Everything required money, the ice-cream, the bus, the Zubes that she needed for her sore throat. In the public lavatory you slipped in together and once the attendant, who was a fiend, said it was not allowed. The same attendant recalled a woman to rinse the scummed washbasin after her. You were glad that it wasn’t you. Passing cakeshops she recommended that you look away and sometimes you did and sometimes out of pure perversity you didn’t, you couldn’t.

  She kept having a presentiment that she was going to encounter the man who was responsible for Emma’s ruin. She vowed that she would cut him dead. You were keen for it. But each time passing the block of offices where he worked she nearly ran, although at all other times she hobbled.

  In the evenings she had to pare her corns with a razor blade and allow her poor bunions to soak in warm water. The two evenings there was the same thing, stew. It was brown one evening and white the other. There was bread pudding afterwards but it was dry and unappetizing and without benefit of either raisins or spices. The hunger that assailed you out on the street left you once you sat down to eat.

  You stayed in lodgings near a public park. Just inside the entrance there was a depot for training policemen and you watched them doing exercises each morning before breakfast. You imitated them. Your muscles creaked. Their navy-blue jackets hanging on the spears of the railing looked a bit like policemen too, only nimbler.

  She asked for the tea in the b
edroom so as to shun the other lodgers. It was insipid tea. The landlady used the old tealeaves again and again, put them to dry. They were drying indoors in a strainer. One lodger was an insurance clerk and the other a man who could not control his blinking. The insurance clerk tried to sell her a policy, kept emphasizing the benefits, the kudos he called them. She pretended to have a policy already. To get round her he told her some data about himself. He told her that on Sunday mornings he set his alarm clock so as to have the satisfaction of wakening up and being able to go back to sleep again. It did not work.

  The other lodger was an amateur actor who kept repeating his lines out loud all through the supper. It was a very heated play about an extortionist boss and sweating workers and your mother said she wouldn’t be surprised if he was a Red. The landlady, who was a widow, said she specialized in male guests because they were less demanding.

  You would have liked to sit in her snug kitchen and confide in her but your mother said not to dare. Your mother pretended to be attending auctions on the quays, looking for rare pieces of silver. The landlady, for no reason, said she herself could have managed a chain of hotels if she wished.

  Your mother said afterwards she was a boastful woman. She liked people to be self-effacing. You said the rosary together in bed. Often you said the three mysteries – the joyful, sorrowful and glorious. Once, after she had fallen asleep, you heard panting from the next room, the amateur actor’s room. It was like something you had heard before, distantly, a footprint on your mind, you didn’t know from where. He panted even though he was alone and it sent a kind of shiver through you and you prayed to God that you would never be alone in a city with no one to turn to at night.

  After the third day when Emma had not appeared, she decided to go and see Father Scanlon anyhow. He received you in the hall of his house and he didn’t suggest a cup of tea or any eats. You had never seen a priest dressed so informally before. He was without a jacket and it seemed to you he was like many another man or woman pottering around a house. His voice was censurous.

  He said Emma had gone the wrong way, was well on the path of perdition. A libertine he called her. He said the terrible thing was that she had vocabulary and expression to ornament her various ideas and in that way she might exert power over others. He looked at you.

  Your mother apologized for not being able to give him an offering for a Mass. He said Emma might consider herself the winner but that it was a Pyrrhic victory. He said she used the red herring of all heathens, the one about free will. Your mother said if only they could find her. She went into a recital about the walks, the bicycles, the evening waits, and her nightmare in which Emma was in the gutter crying out for help, and not only prostrate but covered in sores, bedsores she reckoned.

  Either he was moved to pity or he did not want loathsome detail urged upon him because immediately he touched the kid gloves, which she was clutching and said he would do all in his power to find Emma. He was to be the hound of Heaven. She thanked him extensively. He saw you both to the gate.

  When you had gone a distance from the house your mother asked you what a Pyrrhic victory was and you had to confess that you did not know. She laughed. She suggested a pleasant surprise, that you have lunch out. You found a place but when you were installed she said she didn’t feel at ease, had her suspicions about the kitchen. The two waiters were dark-skinned and small. The moment you got their backs turned you left.

  By evening Emma had been located. She was only a few streets away. Your mother kept saying it was a strange coincidence that you hadn’t met going up and down to the centre of the city, on a bus. Emma was out when you called but your mother had envisaged that and had already written a letter which she pushed through the letterbox. Then you both peered in at it. It looked very important, the one white envelope on the dark carpet. The place was spick and span and had an ecclesiastical smell. It enabled your mother to tell herself that Emma had turned over a new leaf.

  Emma’s reply was in a brown business envelope and marked personal. It was succinct. It said she was not bursting to see her mother, pointed out that she had just gone through hell with a neo-Victorian confinement and the loss of her child. Your mother said did anyone ever hear such impertinence, neo-Victorian and the loss of her child. While she was filling her pen she kept wording her letter saying she would tell Emma to come to heel, to come down off her high horse, to uncross the Rubicon. It was one of those pens that leaked if it was filled so she had to shake it to get rid of the excess ink and then almost immediately fill it again.

  You were sent with it. Alone for the first time in the street, you were conscious of your appearance. Your coat was ridiculous compared with other people’s coats. You took the scarf off your head and draped it over the back of the coat to obscure the big shoulder pads. It was a white scarf with the Eiffel tower painted in green on one corner and it was guaranteed washable. There was a drizzle. The tyres of bicycles squelched on the wet road. You were terrified of knocking. The knocker was green. That was verdigris. Filigree was something else. You could hear footsteps inside. Eventually a girl who was wearing tattered slippers came out and said Emma had gone down town. She told you the cafe where Emma had gone. There was nothing underhand about her. At the end of the hall a gleam of light showed through and there was a wireless on. You asked if you might wait. She said no. You assumed she had a sweetheart in there. She told you again how to get to the cafe.

  When Emma saw you she waved like she was expecting you. You smiled, you over-smiled. She was with two other girls. She introduced you as Little Sis and told you to take off the scarf, for Jerusalem’s sake.

  The thing that struck you most was her new poise. She had a navy suit on. It was very youthful. She patted her midriff and said she had got her figure back. That meant that the other girls knew about the baby so you congratulated her. She said Poor little mite and that was all. You said it was a good thing it was a boy because most people preferred sons. They all laughed. One of the girls said you were topping fun. It reminded her that when she was young she had a little dog and she tried to make him into a performer and took him in ripe cornfields to teach him leaps.

  The place was lit with candles. Emma wore no blouse. The top of her slip was edged with lace in a contrasting shade of pink. It looked like something that had come from America. You had never known such atmosphere. The various candle lights were reflected in the window and so was their guttering which was fitful. The candles were in bottles that were crusted with grease.

  The man next to you was eating squat red sausages. Emma said they were tomato sausages, introduced since the shortage of pork. The word pork prompted her into an impersonation of her boss. When in Paris at conferences he slapped his thighs to say lamb, for pork he snorted, and for tongue he stuck out his own tongue. He must have been in the meat business.

  Emma ordered you coffee and a cream cake. You said grace so as to show her that you were loyal to your faith. There was an orchestra comprising a man and two women. They played a waltz. It was slow and alluring and you longed to say to Emma Will you dance, and you ached to be in her arms and she in yours and in that alliance to convey all the understanding and all the forgiveness that could not get said. You were daring yourself to ask her. She said to eat the cake with a fork. It was a bit messy. She was on a diet. You wondered if she was bleeding. Were her stitches out. Had she hollered in labour. What was labour. You wondered.

  The violinist kept looking in her direction and it was obvious that he was performing for her. She told you to stop staring at him. Now and then she gave her head a little toss and the line of her hair moved in one straight line as if it were a cloth. It was very white, tow white like the sail of a ship. She said she was going to change her hairstyle, which was Veronica Lake, because everyone had it now even factory girls. You said your mother was overwrought. She said that was nothing new. The other girls were studying form, commenting on the boys and casting aspersions on the girls. The violinist lost his bearing
s, allowed his bow to go off course and made a ridiculous squiggle. The lady musicians took huff and one person in the audience booed.

  When you laughed Emma tweaked your earlobe lightly and asked if you were clicking yet. You said you were not sure. The other girls conferred with each other how you were not the least bit like Emma. You took it to mean that you were not so pretty. Emma said you had nice eyes, said it was the shape of an eye that counted, not the colour, said people blathered on about brown eyes or blue eyes whereas in fact the colour was a secondary consideration. She said yours were almond shaped. You had never seen almonds, except ground, and then they were a yellow heavyish powder.

  You gave her the letter and without any qualm she held it to the flame of the candle. It made a small but noticeable blaze. The violinist smiled. He may have told himself that it was a love letter she threw away on his behalf. He looked foreign. He had a nose like the Pope’s nose on a chicken, it was flat, and the nostrils flared at the end.

  Emma wrote with an eyebrow pencil on one of the white paper napkins and before folding it she held it up for you to see. It was a song that was all the go then.

  Now is the hour

  For me to say good-bye

  Soon I’ll be sailing . . .

  Far . . . across . . . the . . .

  She said you could sing it or intone it as you saw fit. You could not plead with her. You could not inveigle her. You asked instead if she had a nice flat and she said it was only a stopgap. She said she intended to move to the south side but, that, gone were the days when she had to put blotting paper inside her shoes or iron her clothes by putting them under the mattress. Her eyes, her cheekbones, the set of her mouth, everything about her was more defined. They might have been done with a chisel. She had a smile. She had a secret. It was sewn into her. When she laughed it was brittle.