Night

by Edna O'Brien

  “I’ll walk you out,” she said, and she linked me, but she did not press upon my arm and we did not say any little recouping thing. She said she would put salt and hew a footpath in case the postman came. That farewell for whatever reason carried with it the nugget of all the others and the waves we exchanged were artifice itself.

  As it faws to one, it faws.

  *

  Another letter from the lad. Even seeing or saying his name gives me such a thrill, it goes through me like a wash or a ripple. I got a longing then to be on the strands with the big breakers riding over me, ducking down and coming up again for more. I know that the water will be my métier again. In blasted Coose, in yon churchyard.

  He says:

  Have seen a dance dear Mam-ma! Very different. A file of robed men in the proscenium. Bare stage, no props. Drums and stringed instruments. Black togas and high grey hats, to represent tombstones. A ceremonial kiss and then off with the togas to reveal white robes, not pure white, but off-white, of flannel. They dance, in circles, arms out, eyes never raised, swirl after swirl. You could hear a pin drop. Only the music and the creak of shoes. Swivel after swivel, yet they never touched, they never collided into one another, every one of them independent of every other and yet together, dancing as one, as a whole. Very soothing and at the same time exciting. I will be home soon.

  The dawn like doves to come and still the heart doth burst with need.

  Oh mine own land, a lifetime away and still near to me now and for eternity. Is there an eternity – there must be, we have such bodings about it. Is it not it that haunts us at night, it and the bogy man and the freshly dead. Oh land of yew trees and forts and the quicken rods, keep old, wear your old age well, and your stately stoop; the rags that hang about you are like mantles, the mantles of knowledge and wise. Young men will try to procure you, you will be wooed by mediators and mercenaries, do not at the eleventh hour barter yourself, do not sell your old soul.

  I went back to Coose for Christmas. I harkened to. It was pitch by the time I got off the bus, but soon I got the feel of the place, the hasp, then the stones, as if the stones hadn’t budged or changed place, or the track itself except to get further saturated by waters. There were no cowpats, no cows, he had finished with farming, was living on his pension. Thin times. It was then I remembered the various herds, and their big soft shits, and the flies on them and their promiscuous feelings and their old dun horns rubbing together, their butting, their bawls, the cowpats crusting and drying, the flies swarming elsewhere, the unbroken spell of summer evenings. The trees and the mounds became familiar one by one. I had a speech prepared. I was to say, “I am sorry, I haven’t written, I neglected you, I neglect you.” I was going to say it the minute he opened the door as I stepped into the vestibule, and while I was still wiping my shoes on the mat, or failing one, on the dark red tiles. That is why I went, to show some nature, to make my peace. I practised saying it before I got there at all, in the bus, as I lifted the hasp of the gate, as I walked over the gravel drive, and then, most specifically of all, as I entered the region of grass nearer to the house itself. The air was sweet and everything hushed, still. My heart pounded, the very same as if I was taking an exam. I could hear the dogs starting up. They were not really barking, they were rehearsing barking, the way a singer does at a party while somebody else is taking the tasselled runner off the piano. They came towards me snarling, but as soon as they recognised it was me, their enmity turned into fawns and licks and wagging of tails. I could see them well, my eyes having got accustomed to the dark. I spoke to them, I said their names and how well they looked for old dogs. One had a growth on her underbelly, which was big and bulbous, like a ballcock, and funny in its hurtful way. I told the dogs how I had come home for Christmas, and I said that yes, I would cook the meat so soft that he could eat it with a spoon, spoon it up, and that I would put holly on the overmantel and rags into the jambs of doors to keep the draughts out and that I would have a secret toddy in the pantry from time to time, to bolster the spirits. I already saw Boss as in a tableau by the fire, deciphering things in the flames, pictures, ogres, animals frontwise and profile, maybe even the dead; Boss scratching his head, digging in, the dandruff falling out, dandruff dispersed about his shoulders (would he be wearing a rug or a shawl, would he have deteriorated that much?) and I saw the too-deep sofa, and the representation of the tabby cats as they tried to turn on the hands of a clock to make it nearer their supper time, and I saw two items of bamboo, and the wise old owl; a whatnot, crammed.

  The first thing he said when he opened the door was what an hour of night to come home and what a fright he’d got and how long was I staying. I grudged him the cheek that he so cumbrously kissed. He felt it. He said what was wrong. I said nothing, nothing was wrong. I said life was A1 and ran to the fire like someone who wanted to. A young acacia plant had grafted itself on to the log of wood so that there was a very unfamiliar smell, like a temple, as the essences bubbled. He had cut the trees nearest the house, the ash trees and some ornamental ones. He blamed it on the man with the electric saw, said he wouldn’t venture to the woods, said you couldn’t get workmen for love or money any longer. I asked how he was. He said a horse had to be shot having slipped on the cobbles and broken a leg. The bridling had started up. I knew that I would be gone by St Stephen’s Day, the day of the bachelor wren-bird. I should not have come. I was sullen. He was sullen. I gave him his present, of money; but there was no celebration attached to it, he did not even make a pretence of refusing it as he might have in the past. He said it could go towards a storage heater for the hall. I said halls were a devil altogether to heat. He made the tea. We talked about the crops, other people’s crops. The artificial tea roses were still there, thick with dust, it was as if they had been plunged in molten dust and were coated in it rather than in some silver or golden dip. I asked which of the four bedrooms I might sleep in. He said “Please yourself.” He had got into the habit of talking at the top of his voice. He threw water on the fire to damp it down and said, “I knew you wouldn’t renegue me,” giving me a little biff. In him resided the stance, the stare, the wild umbrage prevalent in all the men that I had loved, unloved, betrayed.

  “I came,” I said, but it changed nothing. Same moon, same baulk, same null regret.

  In the morning I tore up sacking and put the strips on the rhubarb bed, tucked them around the small shoots to protect them from the frost. Useless. I knew that he would not have stewed rhubarb or a rhubarb pie, ever again. He lived now on shop bread and like me was converted to tinned and instant foods. He proposed a spot of visiting. We cheered ourselves up with that. We decided to visit a cousin who had had a bereavement, and scrounge the tea out of him. His sister Ita had died. It was in that brief truce, what with joking and plotting our outing that he handed me the teacloth, unwrapped, and spreading it out on the hedge I read my alternate characteristics. We even laughed.

  The driver of the hackney car was most erratic, drove at a snail’s pace on the straight road, then accelerated when he came to corners. I had bought a bottle of wine, port, and little knew that before a month had passed I would be visiting a town house here, the Duke’s where it was always decanted. The hips and haws were still on the bushes and it was exceedingly mild. His cousin, Marty, didn’t know what to say when we sympathised, didn’t know how to reply. We stood in the backyard surveying ourselves in the puddles. “Ye might as well come in, I suppose,” he said, and we followed him into the kitchen where there was a fishing rod and a tangled line in the middle of the floor. All the foodstuffs were on the table beside the lit primus, also the heart of the pike, a little heart, moist, fibulating away. The pike proper was in the frying pan, with white lard dolloped over it. I offered to help. The salt would not come clear of the cellar, so damp was the place. He pointed to a safety pin that was for that purpose. The needling part was bent right back and was coated with salt. I looked at the pike, its narrow eyes, its dainty tongue, teeth pointed as thorn
s and then covered it with a lid of a saucepan. Anything that fixes my gaze has a habit of coming back, taking me off my guard. I even see upper lips with moustaches affixed to them and ladies with Eton crops. Of course I intervene, I say to them, “Off, be off, Trash.” Then mercifully I see something lovely, rhubarb or vegetation, some incommensurate blue, that might be sea, or then again might be mountain, blends, all together, all separate, flotillas to the sky. His trenchcoat and his galoshes gave out a smell of rain and rainwater. There was a motto, left by forebears, “Spe vivemus”. His sister’s grey fur tippet lay on the floor with some pups in it. A litter of six. He said he should have drowned them only that we came and took up the time. I had to search in the wardrobe for the glasses. There was his flannel trousers hanging. It was funny, because it was not folded, the two legs were hanging down, jaunty, must have been his from some sojourn of his at a bijou spot. He was gruffness itself. He said “I suppose you’re coining it, Mary,” and he kept his left hand half fisted. There had been a rash on it, that went havoc after we’d arrived. It ran all over his hand like a map, or a dye. I poured the wine into the glasses, said how smart they were, tinted glasses with their long stems. He said they were hers, Ita’s. She must have got them when she was engaged to a farmer by whom she was later jilted. I thought uneventful her life, uneventful her death. He dished out the pike. I said did he go to dances at all. He said, “No no. No diversions.” God bequeath to him wet dreams. We sat with the door open, facing an outside stream, a babbling brook as it’s called. The only bit of cheerful sound that there was. The outdoors was like a second kitchen, what with the washtub, his laundry, and a slop bucket hanging from the bough of a tree. There had just been a shower and the air was lustrous. The stream. The sky. The incomplete arc of rainbow. They talked about the prices they got for beef. Boasted but never bothered to listen to one another. He put a sod on the fire but it didn’t catch. Nothing, not even a flicker. The sky an avenue of colour. The pups were moaning. I said remember the sugar plums he used to give us in the harvests. Lil used to bribe him with a couple of broiling fowl. He’d skin a flea for a farthing. Still, he likes a bit of a court, had a competition once for lady cyclists and rigged it so that his favourite, a Tilly, won, a great uproar altogether, ladies shrieking, spokes whirring, mudguards getting entangled and he himself unabashedly shouting “Come on Tilly, come on Tilly.” I expect he has other young girls now who come with baskets in the autumn and with whom he has a bit of guff, a bit of sport, in the orchard.

  “Oh there’ll be more,” he said, and rose, giving us the beck to leave. He threw the skin of the pike to the pups and though they did not move, various pink tongues, thin tongues, reached up to lick. It glittered as it dangled from the fork and twirled in the air. It was like a strip of flypaper to which they adhered. We shook hands but he did not see us out. The driver was beep-beeping and in a rage because he’d been offered no refreshments. Boss and I sat in the back, wrapped up in ourselves, moving farther and farther away until we had slid right up to either window and pressed our faces to it. It said “Soft margins for two miles”. Fields of brown, hedges brown, buried, the dark steaming up out of the grasses, the odd bit of tallyho as a whelping dog chased the car and was struck with one of the driver’s unintelligible, galumptious oaths.

  *

  There is no magic, no homecoming, no handshake, no loving cup. Ah my little scalliwags, you have separateness thrust upon you.

  And still the journey is not without its come hithers, not without challenge, not without incentive. When I come to a crossroad and see the ways ahead, the bushes, the little brown birds, the fortress in the distance, and I ask does it have to be made, and then a terrible fever takes hold of me and I go on unwittingly as if to the sound of bugles, though very often it is to the sound of curs. The very flowers of the field get inside my head and the blossom that hangs from the hedges and I talk to them, to the herds, to the humans, and heady on to the thought of the warm inn and the wheaten bread and maybe an ascension.

  *

  I am up now, limbering. I don’t think I shall miss my beauty sleep. I am in command of an unusual feeling, a liking for everything, especially the day with a nip in it, jack frost, the winter treetops cogitating, the sky vivid because polluted. I have that nice feeling that one has after a convalescence, the joints are weak and the head inclines to reel but the worst is over, the lurid fever has been passed. Oh Lamb of God. Oh my dark Rosaleen, do not sigh, do not weep. O Connemara, oh sweet mauve forgotten hills.

  I went down in all harmlessness to bring in the paper and pick up the various circulars that come, and there it was, an overnight, overseas telegram, addressed to me. It was the very same as if this Armenian quilt reunited with its owner, the goat, had the runs, and the pellets brown and shining came squittering out, numerically before my very eyes. A fait accompli. “We will be home Friday a.m.” The humidity didn’t agree with her. Bugger her. She said I might like to telephone Saturday as they will need Friday to sleep in and get reorientated. In other words I am to vamoose. It stands to reason. They don’t want to come back into their own house and find me here curled by the fire, or on a sofa, or playing scales on the piano. Finding me here would make it my house. Of course I could squat or throw myself at their feet, I could say I have nowhere to go, I could implore, but the thought of that prostration galls me. Making this my umbilicus, begging for crumbs from their shrivelled store. They won’t be seeing me on Saturday, they won’t be having any little confabulation with me concerning the inventory, hence the breakages, the dining-room table, the sugar bowl, the ignoble graffiti, and the brandy snifters that so joyously got severed from their stems. Moriarty here I come.

  *

  The good is oft interred with the bones . . . Example, Flaggler, who is no longer on my social register, and sundry people with whom I meant to make walking expeditions, to whom I promised devotion. Oh shadows of love, inebriations of love, foretastes of love, trickles of love, but never yet the one true love.

  *

  “Begone, begone,” everything seems to be saying it, shrieking it, the mirrors, the ingots, the silver cockatoos, and the beautiful brass Portuguese chandelier that I meant to swing out of, but didn’t. Even old Instant Humility is in a grump. Begone, begone. Or maybe it’s me that’s saying it. Already I have such a dislike for the place, such a loathing, an aversion, vengeance for the roof under which all the auspices were tawdry. Oh life’s crucible, oh strange latitudes, oh golden birds, heady drinks, poisons, elixirs, let me partake of you yet again. Au revoir Tig, au revoir Jonathan, au revoir Boss and Lil and all soulmates, go fuck yourselves. I have been saddled long enough. It is time for memory to expire.

  Gladly, too gladly I go. I refuse to touch my favourite surfaces, or to say anything in the way of a bardic farewell. The harp that once through Tara’s halls is silenced, mute. No doubt the time will come when I will think of here with liking, the big pantry, the excitement over visitors, the evenings summoned up by lamps, the spare rooms that I so faithfully aired, the one little room where I sat and heard the impending silence, the tiniest stirs, and lived, though marginally, most sweet, most wholesome hours.

  About the Author

  Since her debut novel The Country Girls, Edna O’Brien has written over twenty works of fiction, along with a biography of James Joyce and Lord Byron. She is the recipient of many awards including the Irish Pen Lifetime Achievement Award, the American National Art’s Gold Medal and the Ulysses Medal. Born and raised in the west of Ireland she has lived in London for many years.

  also by Edna O’Brien

  FICTION

  The Country Girls

  The Lonely Girl

  Girls in Their Married Bliss

  August Is a Wicked Month

  Casualties of Peace

  The Love Object and Other Stories

  A Pagan Place

  Zee and Co.

  Night

  A Scandalous Woman and Other Stories

  A Rose in the
Heart

  Returning

  A Fanatic Heart

  The High Road

  Lantern Slides

  House of Splendid Isolation

  Down by the River

  Wild Decembers

  In the Forest

  The Light of the Evening

  Saints and Sinners

  The Love Object

  NON-FICTION

  Mother Ireland

  James Joyce (biography)

  Byron in Love

  Country Girl

  DRAMA

  A Pagan Place

  Virginia (The Life of Virginia Woolf)

  Family Butchers

  Triptych

  Haunted

  The Country Girls

  Copyright

  First published in 1972

  This ebook edition first published in 2014

  by Faber & Faber Ltd

  Bloomsbury House

  74–77 Great Russell Street

  London WC1B 3DA

  All rights reserved

  © Edna O’Brien, 1972

  The right of Edna O’Brien to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly