The Portable Virgin

by Anne Enright

  My husband came in to breakfast one morning, and his hands were shaking. He said ‘Look what I have done.’ He was holding a letter that he had picked up in the hall. ‘I tore it up,’ he said. ‘It was for you, I’m sorry.’ He was very bewildered.

  If it was wartime, we could have clung to each other and burnt the furniture, we could have deceived the enemy with underground tunnels and built bombs out of sugar. As it was, I rode the buses and he worked and we loved each other well enough.

  The idea of the house grew into our marriage. I don’t know who suggested it in the end, but I rang Paul and said ‘Aidan wants you to think about some plans. We want to build. Yes at last. Isn’t it exciting?’ and my voice echoed down the phone.

  I needed this house to contain, to live in his love. It would be difficult of course. There would be a lot of meetings with the door ajar, talking about damp-courses. The arguments over where the walls should be would mean too much. I would listen to the architect’s big mind and his big heart and look at his shoes. His voice would ache and retract. The green flame of his eye would lick me quite a bit. All the same, I would not fling my life into his life and say that he owed me something (which he did; which he knew), responsibility being impolite these days, even with parents who gave birth and bled and all the rest. Besides, all he owed me was a fuck and whatever that implied. I had not slept with the architect seventeen times, incidentally.

  I chose the site, a green field as near to a cliff as I could find – something for the house to jump off. We would take risks. From the front it would look like a cottage, but the back would fall downhill, with returns and surprises inside.

  Of course he was good at his job. The place rose like an exhalation. The foundations were dug, the bones set, and a skin of brick grew around the rest. It was wired and plastered and plumbed. Much like myself, the first time I slept with the architect.

  It was in the finished house. We were walking the empty shell, making plans to fill it in. I was joking most of the time. There would be no banisters on the stairs. The downstairs toilet, I said, should be in Weimar Brown and Gun Metal Grey, with a huge lever set in the floor for the flush. The bathroom proper would have an inside membrane of glass filled with water and fish. The master bedroom would be a deep electric blue, with ‘LOVE’ like a neon sign hung over the door. Trompe-l’œil for the dining room, even though it was no longer the rage, forests and animals, built out of food. I would coat the study walls with dark brown leather and put a cow grazing on the ceiling.

  ‘It’s just a house, Sylvia,’ he said. ‘Quite a nice house, but a house all the same,’ as he led me through the flexible, proportioned spaces that he made for me. It was all as familiar to me as my dreams: the kitchen, where we did not make love, with wires and tubes waiting in the walls; the dining room, where he did not eat me; the reception room where he did not receive me, the bedrooms where he did not bed me.

  I should tell you who made the first move and what was said. I should say how I sat down on the stairs and how his big, hesitant heart cracked under the strain.

  So we did it on the first landing and it was frank, comprehensive, remarkably exciting and sad. I thought the house might fall down around our ears, but it stayed where it was.

  The payment of debts is never happy. All he owed me was a fuck and whatever that implied, which in this case is a child. I loved the architect and the architect loved me. You think that makes a difference.

  In my childhood book of saints there were pictures of people standing with ploughshares at their feet, cathedrals in their hands. This is the church that St Catherine built. If I painted myself now there would be a round hazy space where my stomach is, and a cathedral inside. This baby is a gothic masterpiece. I can feel the arches rising up under my ribs, the glorious and complicated space.

  I can feel it reaching into the chambers of my heart, and my blood runs to it like children into school. We have the same thoughts.

  Historical women killed their children more than we are used to; it was one of the reasons for the welfare state. Killing your child is an ‘unnatural act’. As if money were nature and could set it all to rights. Money is not nature. I have plenty of money.

  I don’t want anything so bland as an abortion. Killing something inside you is not the same, we do that all the time. Don’t be shocked. Perhaps I will love it instead. Perhaps I will never find out what is inside and what is outside and what is mine.

  We had Paul over for the celebration dinner in our new house, with its avocado bathroom, the bedroom of bluebell white, the buttercup kitchen, the apple-green dining room, and the blue, blue, blue-for-a-boy nursery, with clouds on the wall. I was a beautiful hostess, dewy with pregnancy, surrounded and filled by the men I love. Aidan is a new man. The house, the child, would have saved our marriage, if it needed saving. ‘Let it come down,’ I say, but the house is inside my head, as well as around it, and so are the cracks in the wall.

  Luck be a Lady

  THE BINGO COACH (VZE 26) stopped at the top of the road and Mrs Maguire (no. 18), Mrs Power (no. 9) and Mrs Hanratty (no. 27) climbed on board and took their places with the 33 other women and 0 men who made up the Tuesday run.

  ‘If nothing happens tonight …’ said Mrs Maguire and the way she looked at Mrs Hanratty made it seem like a question.

  ‘I am crucified,’ said Mrs Hanratty, ‘by these shoes. I’ll never buy plastic again.’

  ‘You didn’t,’ said Mrs Power, wiping the window with unconcern.

  ‘I know,’ said Mrs Hanratty. ‘There’s something astray in my head. I wouldn’t let the kids do it.’

  Nothing in her tone of voice betrayed the fact that Mrs Hanratty knew she was the most unpopular woman in the coach. She twisted 1 foot precisely and ground her cigarette into the plastic mica floor.

  When Mrs Hanratty was 7 and called Maeve, she had thrown her Clarks solid leather, solid heeled, T-bar straps under a moving car and they had survived intact. The completion of this act of rebellion took place at the age of 55, with fake patent and a heel that made her varicose veins run blue. They pulsed at the back of her knee, disappeared into the fat of her thigh, ebbed past her caesarian scars and trickled into her hardening heart, that sat forgotten behind two large breasts, each the size of her head. She still had beautiful feet.

  She kept herself well. Her silver hair was thin and stiff with invisible curlers and there was diamanté in her ears. She was the kind of woman who squeezed into fitting rooms with her daughters, to persuade them to buy the cream skirt, even though it would stain. She made her husband laugh once a day, on principle, and her sons were either virgins or had the excuse of a good job.

  Maeve Hanratty was generous, modest and witty. Her children succeeded and failed in unassuming proportions and she took the occasional drink. She was an enjoyable woman who regretted the fact that the neighbours (except perhaps, Mrs Power) disliked her so much. ‘It will pass,’ she said to her husband. ‘With a bit of luck, my luck will run out.’

  At the age of 54 she had achieved fame in a 5-minute interview on the radio when she tried to dismiss the rumour that she was the luckiest woman in Dublin. ‘You’ll get me banned from the hall,’ she said.

  ‘And is it just the bingo?’

  ‘Just the bingo.’

  ‘No horses?’

  ‘My father did the horses,’ she said, ‘I wouldn’t touch them.’

  ‘And tell me, do you always know?’

  ‘Sure, how could I know?’ she lied – and diverted 126,578 people’s attention with the 3 liquidisers, 14 coal-scuttles, 7 weekends away, 6,725 paper pounds, and 111 teddy bears that she had won in the last 4 years.

  ‘If you ever want a teddy bear!’

  ‘Maeve …’ she said, as she put down the phone. ‘Oh Maeve.’ Mrs Power had run across over the road in her dressing gown and was knocking on the kitchen door and waving through the glass. There was nothing in her face to say that Mrs (Maeve) Hanratty had made a fool of herself, that she had expo
sed her illness to the world. Somehow no one seemed surprised that she had numbered and remembered all those lovely things. She was supposed to count her blessings.

  There were other statistics she could have used, not out of anger, but because she was so ashamed. She could have said ‘Do you know something – I have had sexual intercourse 1,332 times my life. Is that a lot? 65% of the occasions took place in the first 8 years of my marriage, and I was pregnant for 48 months out of those 96. Is that a lot? I have been married for 33 years and a bit, that’s 12,140 days, which means an average of once every 9.09 days. I stopped at 1,332 for no reason except that I am scared beyond reason of the number 1,333. Perhaps this is sad.’ It was not, of course, the kind of thing she told anyone, not even her priest, although she felt a slight sin in all that counting. Mrs Hanratty knew how many seconds she had been alive. That was why she was lucky with numbers.

  It was not that they had a colour or a smell, but numbers had a feel like people had when you sense them in a room. Mrs Hanratty thought that if she had been in Auschwitz she would have known who would survive and who would die just by looking at their forearms. It was a gift that hurt and she tried to stop winning teddy bears, but things kept on adding up too well and she was driven out of the house in a sweat to the monotonous comfort of the bingo call and another bloody coal-scuttle.

  She was 11th out of the coach, which was nice. The car parked in front had 779 on its number plate. It was going to be a big night.

  She played Patience when she was agitated and on Monday afternoons, even if she was not. She wouldn’t touch the Tarot. The cards held the memory of wet days by the sea, with sand trapped in the cracks of the table that made them hiss and slide as she laid them down. Their holiday house was an old double-decker bus washed up on the edge of the beach with a concrete block where the wheels should have been and a gas stove waiting to blow up by the driver’s seat. They were numberless days with clouds drifting one into the other and a million waves dying on the beach. The children hid in the sea all day or played in the ferns and Jim came up from Dublin for the weekend.

  ‘This is being happy,’ she thought, scattering the contents of the night bucket over the scutch grass or trekking to the shop. She started counting the waves in order to get to sleep.

  She knew before she realised it. She knew without visitation, without a slant of light cutting into the sea. There was no awakening, no manifestation, no pause in the angle of the stairs. There may have been a smile as she took the clothes pegs out of her mouth and the wind blew the washing towards her, but it was forgotten before it happened. She just played Patience all day on the fold-down table in a derelict bus and watched the cards making sense.

  By the age of 55 she had left the cards behind. She found them obvious and untrustworthy – they tried to tell you too much and in the wrong way. The Jack of Spades sat on the Queen of Hearts, the clubs hammered away in a row. Work, love, money, pain; clubs, hearts, diamonds, spades, all making promises too big to keep. The way numbers spoke to her was much more bewildering and ordinary. Even the bingo didn’t excite or let her down, it soothed her. It let her know in advance.

  5 roses: the same as

  5 handshakes at a railway station: the same as

  5 women turning to look when a bottle of milk smashes in the shop: the same as

  5 children: the same as

  5 odd socks in the basket

  5 tomatoes on the window-sill

  5 times she goes to the toilet before she can get to sleep.

  and all different from

  4 roses, 4 shakes of the hand, 4 women turning, 4 children, 4 odd socks, 4 tomatoes in the sun, 4 times she goes to the toilet and lies awake thinking about the 5th.

  The numbers rushed by her in strings and verification came before the end of any given day. They had a party all around her, talking, splitting, reproducing, sitting by themselves in a corner of the room. She smoked them, she hung them out on the line to dry, they chattered to her out from the TV. They drummed on the table-top and laughed in their intimate, syncopated way. They were music.

  She told no one and did the cards for people if they asked. It was very accurate if she was loose enough on the day, but her husband didn’t like it. He didn’t like the bingo either and who could blame him.

  ‘When’s it going to stop?’ he would say, or ‘the money’s fine, I don’t mind the money.’

  ‘With a bit of luck,’ she said, ‘my luck will run out.’

  On Wednesday nights she went with Mrs Power to the local pub, because there was no bingo. They sat in the upstairs lounge where the regulars went, away from the people who were too young to be there at all. Mr Finn took the corner stool, Mr Byrne was centre-forward. In the right-hand corner Mr Slevin sat and gave his commentary on the football match that was being played out in his head. The other women sat in their places around the walls. No one let on to be drunk. Pat the barman knew their orders and which team were going to get to the final. At the end of the bar, Pauline made a quiet disgrace of herself, out on her own and chatty.

  ‘His days are numbered …’ said a voice at the bar, and Mrs Hanratty’s listened to her blood quicken. ‘That fella’s days are numbered.’ There was a middle-aged man standing to order like a returned Yank in a shabby suit with a fat wallet. He was drunk and proud of it.

  ‘I’ve seen his kind before,’ he counted out the change in his pocket carefully in 10s and 2s and 5s, and the barman scooped all the coins into one mess and scattered them into the till. Mrs Hanratty took more than her usual sip of vodka and orange.

  ‘None of us, of course,’ he commented, though the barman had moved to the other end of the counter, ‘are exempt.’

  It was 2 weeks before he made his way over to their table, parked his drink and would not sit until he was asked. ‘I’ve been all over,’ he told them. ‘You name it, I’ve done it. All over,’ and he started to sing something about Alaska. It had to be a lie.

  ‘Canada,’ he started. ‘There’s a town in the Rockies called Hope. Just like that. And a more miserable stretch of hamburger joints and shacks you’ve never seen. Lift your eyes 30 degrees and you have the dawn coming over the mountains and air so thin it makes you feel the world is full of … well what? I was going to say “lovely ladies” but look at the two I have at my side.’ She could feel Mrs Power’s desire to leave as big and physical as a horse standing beside her on the carpet.

  He rubbed his thigh with his hand, and, as if reminded slapped the tables with 3 extended fingers. There was no 4th. ‘Look at that,’ he said, and Mrs Power gave a small whinny. ‘There should be a story there about how I lost it, but do you know something? It was the simplest thing in the County Meath where I was as a boy. The simplest thing. A dirty cut and it swelled so bad I was lucky I kept the hand. Isn’t that a good one? I worked a combine harvester on the great plains in Iowa and you wouldn’t believe the fights I got into as a young fella as far away as … Singapore – believe that or not. But a dirty cut in the County Meath.’ And he wrapped the 3 fingers around his glass and toasted them silently. That night, for the first time in her life, Maeve Hanratty lost count of the vodkas she drank.

  She wanted him. It was as simple as that. A woman of 55, a woman with 5 children and 1 husband, who had had sexual intercourse 1,332 times in her life and was in possession of 14 coal-scuttles, wanted the 3-fingered man, because he had 3 fingers and not 4.

  It was a commonplace sickness and one she did not indulge. Her daughter came in crying from the dance-hall, her husband (and not her father) spent the bingo money on the horses. The house was full of torn betting slips and the stubs of old lipstick. Mrs Hanratty went to bingo and won and won and won.

  Although she had done nothing, she said to him silently, ‘Well it’s your move now, I’m through with all that,’ and for 3 weeks in a row he sat at the end of the bar and talked to Pauline, who laughed too much. ‘If that’s what he wants, he can have it,’ said Mrs Hanratty, who believed in dignity, as well as nu
mbers.

  The numbers were letting her down. Her daily walk to the shops became a confusion of damaged registration plates, the digits swung sideways or strokes were lopped off. 6 became o, 7 turned into 1. She added up what was left, 555, 666, 616, 707, 906, 888, the numbers for parting, for grief, for the beginning of grief, forgetting, for accidents and for the hate that comes from money.

  On the next Wednesday night he was wide open and roaring. He talked about his luck, that had abandoned him one day in Ottawa when he promised everything to a widow in the timber trade. The whole bar listened and Mrs Hanratty felt their knowledge of her as keen as a son on drugs or the front of the house in a state. He went to the box of plastic plants and ransacked it for violets which were presented to her with a mock bow. How many were there? 3 perhaps, or 4 – but the bunch loosened out before her and all Mrs Hanratty could see were the purple plastic shapes and his smile.

  She took to her bed with shame, while a zillion a trillion a billion a million numbers opened up before her and wouldn’t be pinned down at 6 or 7 or 8. She felt how fragile the world was with so much in it and confined herself to Primes, that were out on their own except for 1.

  ‘The great thing about bingo is that no one loses,’ Mrs Power had told him about their Tuesday and Thursday nights. Mrs Hanratty felt flayed in the corner, listening to him and his pride. Her luck was leaking into the seat as he invited himself along, to keep himself away from the drink, he said. He had nothing else to do.

  The number of the coach was NIE 133. Mrs Maguire, Mrs Power and Mrs Hanratty climbed on board and took their places with the 33 women and 1 man who made up this Thursday run. He sat at the back and shouted for them to come and join him, and there was hooting from the gang at the front. He came up the aisle instead and fell into the seat beside Mrs Hanratty with a bend in the road. She was squeezed over double, paddling her hand on the floor in search of 1 ear-ring which she may have lost before she got on at all.