by Edna O'Brien
‘No braces,’ he said as he held the wide black trousers around his middle. His other trousers must have been supported by a belt.
‘I’ll go to Woolworths for some,’ I said. But that was impractical because he was already in danger of being late. I got a safety pin and fastened the trousers from the back. It was a difficult operation because the pin was not really sturdy enough.
‘You’ll bring it back?’ I said. I am superstitious about giving people pins. He took some time to reply because he was muttering ‘damn’ under his breath. Not to me. But to the stiff, inhuman, starched collar which would not yield to the little gold studs he had wanted to pierce through. I tried. He tried. Each time when one of us failed the other became impatient. He said if we went on the collar would be grubby from our hands. And that seemed a worse alternative. I thought he must be dining with very critical people, but of course I did not give my thoughts on the matter. In the end we each managed to get a stud through and he had a small sip of whisky as a celebration. The bow tie was another ordeal. He couldn’t do it. I daren’t try.
‘Haven’t you done it before?’ I said. I expect his wives – in succession – had done it for him. I felt such a fool. Then a lump of hatred. I thought how ugly and pink his legs were, how repellent the shape of his body which did not have anything in the way of a waist, how deceitful his eyes that congratulated himself in the mirror when he succeeded in making a clumsy bow. As he put on the coat the sound of the medals tinkling enabled me to remark on their music. There was so little I could say. Lastly he donned a white, silk scarf that came below his middle. He looked like someone I did not know. He left hurriedly. I ran with him down the road to help get a taxi, and trying to keep up with him and chatter was not easy. All I can remember is the ghostly sight of the very white scarf swinging back and forth as we rushed. His shoes, which were patent, creaked unsuitably.
‘Is it all-male?’ I asked.
‘No. Mixed,’ He replied.
So that was why we hurried. To meet his wife at some appointed place. The hatred began to grow.
He did bring back the safety pin, but my superstition remained because four straight pins with black rounded tops that had come off his new shirt were on my window ledge. He refused to take them. He was not superstitious.
Bad moments, like good ones, tend to be grouped together, and when I think of the dress occasion I also think of the other time when we were not in utter harmony. It was on a street; we were searching for a restaurant. We had to leave my house because a friend had come to stay and we would have been obliged to tolerate her company. Going along the street – it was October and very windy – I felt that he was angry with me for having drawn us out into the cold where we could not embrace. My heels were very high and I was ashamed of the hollow sound they made. In a way I felt we were enemies. He looked in the windows of restaurants to see if any acquaintances of his were there. Two restaurants he decided against, for reasons best known to himself. One looked to be very attractive. It had orange bulbs inset in the walls and the light came through small squares of iron grating. We crossed the road to look at places on the opposite side. I saw a group of rowdies coming towards us and for something to say – what with my aggressive heels, the wind, traffic going by, the ugly unromantic street, we had run out of agreeable conversation – I asked if he ever felt apprehensive about encountering noisy groups like that, late at night. He said that in fact a few nights before he had been walking home very late and saw such a group coming towards him, and before he even registered fear he found that he had splayed his bunch of keys between his fingers and had his hand, armed with the sharp points of the keys, ready to pull out of his pocket should they have threatened him. I suppose he did it again while we were walking along. Curiously enough I did not feel he was my protector. I only felt that he and I were two people, that there was in the world trouble, violence, sickness, catastrophe, that he faced it in one way, and that I faced it – or to be exact that I shrank from it – in another. We would always be outside one another. In the course of that melancholy thought the group went by and my conjecture about violence was all for nothing. We found a nice restaurant and drank a lot of wine.
Later our love-making, as usual, was perfect. He stayed all night. I used to feel specially privileged on the nights he stayed, and the only little thing that lessened my joy was spasms of anxiety in case he should have told his wife he was at such and such an hotel and her telephoning there and not finding him. More than once I raced into an imaginary narrative where she came and discovered us and I acted silent and ladylike and he told her very crisply to wait outside until he was ready. I felt no pity for her. Sometimes I wondered if we would ever meet or if in fact we had already met on an escalator at some point. Though that was unlikely because we lived at opposite ends of London.
Then to my great surprise the opportunity came. I was invited to a Thanksgiving party given by an American magazine. He saw the card on my mantelshelf and said, ‘You’re going to that, too?’ and I smiled and said maybe. Was he? ‘Yes,’ he said. He tried to make me reach a decision there and then but I was too canny. Of course I would go. I was curious to see his wife. I would meet him in public. It shocked me to think that we had never met in the company of any other person. It was like being shut off … a little animal locked away. I thought very distinctly of a ferret that a forester used to keep in a wooden box with a sliding top when I was a child, and once of another ferret being brought to mate with it. The thought made me shiver. I mean I got it confused; I thought of white ferrets with their little pink nostrils in the same breath as I thought of him sliding a door back and slipping into my box from time to time. His skin had a lot of pink in it.
‘I haven’t decided,’ I said, but when the day came I went. I took a lot of trouble with my appearance, had my hair set, and wore a virginal attire. Black and white. The party was held in a large room with panelled walls of brown wood; blown-up magazine covers were along the panels. The bar was at one end, under a balcony. The effect was of shrunken barmen in white lost underneath the cliff of the balcony which seemed in danger of collapsing on them. A more unlikely room for a party I have never seen. There were women going around with trays, but I had to go to the bar because there was champagne on the trays and I have a preference for whisky. A man I knew conducted me there and en route another man placed a kiss on my back. I hoped that he witnessed this, but it was such a large room with hundreds of people around that I had no idea where he was. I noticed a dress I quite admired, a mauve dress with very wide, crocheted sleeves. Looking up the length of the sleeves I saw its owner’s eyes directed on me. Perhaps she was admiring my outfit. People with the same tastes often do. I have no idea what her face looked like, but later when I asked a girl friend which was his wife she pointed to this woman with the crocheted sleeves. The second time I saw her in profile. I still don’t know what she looked like, nor do those eyes into which I looked speak to my memory with anything special, except, perhaps, slight covetousness.
Finally I searched him out. I had a mutual friend walk across with me and apparently introduce us. He was unwelcoming. He looked strange, the flush on his cheekbones vivid and unnatural. He spoke to the mutual friend and virtually ignored me. Possibly to make amends he asked, at length, if I was enjoying myself.
‘It’s a chilly room,’ I said. I was referring of course to his manner. Had I wanted to describe the room I would have used ‘grim’, or some such adjective.
‘I don’t know about you being chilly but I’m certainly not,’ he said with aggression. Then a very drunk woman in a sack dress came and took his hand and began to slobber over him. I excused myself and went off. He said most pointedly that he hoped he would see me again, some time.
I caught his eye just as I left the party and I felt both sorry for him and angry with him. He looked stunned as if important news had just been delivered to him. He saw me leave with a group of people and I stared at him without the whimper of a smile. Yes
, I was sorry for him. I was also piqued. The very next day when we met and I brought it up he did not even remember that a mutual friend had introduced us.
‘Clement Hastings!’ he said, repeating the man’s name. Which goes to show how nervous he must have been.
It is impossible to insist that bad news delivered in a certain manner and at a certain time will have a less awful effect. But I feel that I got my walking papers from him at the wrong moment. For one thing it was morning. The clock went off and I sat up wondering when he had set it. Being on the outside of the bed he was already attending to the push button.
‘I’m sorry, darling,’ he said.
‘Did you set it?’ I said, indignant. There was an element of betrayal here as if he’d wanted to sneak away without saying good-bye.’
‘I must have,’ he said. He put his arm around me and we lay back again. It was dark outside and there was a feeling – though this may be memory feeling – of frost.
‘Congratulations, you’re getting your prize today,’ he whispered. I was being given an award for my announcing. I am a television announcer.
‘Thank you,’ I said. I was ashamed of it. It reminded me of being back at school and always coming first in everything and being guilty about this, but not disciplined enough to deliberately hold back.
‘It’s beautiful that you stayed all night,’ I said. I was stroking him all over. My hands were never still in bed. Awake or asleep I constantly caressed him. Not to excite him, simply to reassure and comfort him and perhaps to consolidate my ownership. There is something about holding on to things that I find therapeutic. For hours I hold smooth stones in the palm of my hand or I grip the sides of an armchair and feel the better for it. He kissed me. He said he had never known anyone so sweet or so attentive. Encouraged I began to do something very intimate. I heard his sighs of pleasure, the ‘oy, oy’ of delight when he was both indulging it and telling himself that he mustn’t. At first I was unaware of his speaking voice.
‘Hey,’ he said, jocularly, just like that. ‘This can’t go on, you know.’ I thought he was referring to our activity at that moment because of course it was late and he would have to get up shortly. Then I raised my head from its sunken position between his legs and I looked at him through my hair which had fallen over my face. I saw that he was serious.
‘It just occurred to me that possibly you love me,’ he said. I nodded and pushed my hair back so that he would read it, my testimony, clear and clean upon my face. He put me lying down so that our heads were side by side and he began:
‘I adore you, but I’m not in love with you, with my commitments I don’t think I could be in love with anyone, it all started gay and light-hearted …’ Those last few words offended me. It was not how I saw it or how I remembered it: the numerous telegrams he sent me saying, ‘I long to see you’, or, ‘May the sun shine on you’, the first few moments each time when we met and were overcome with passion, shyness and the shock of being so disturbed by each other’s presence. We had even searched in our dictionaries for words to convey the specialness of our regard for each other. He came up with ‘cense’ which meant to adore or cover with the perfume of love. It was a most appropriate word and we used it over and over again. Now he was negating all this. He was talking about weaving me into his life, his family life … becoming a friend. He said it, though, without conviction. I could not think of a single thing to say. I knew that if I spoke I would be pathetic, so I remained silent. When he’d finished I stared straight ahead at the split between the curtains, and looking at the beam of raw light coming through I said, ‘I think there’s frost outside,’ and he said that possibly there was, because winter was upon us. We got up and as usual he took the bulb out of the bedside lamp and plugged in his razor. I went off to get breakfast. That was the only morning I forgot about squeezing orange juice for him and I often wonder if he took it as an insult. He left just before nine.
The sitting-room held the traces of his visit. Or, to be precise, the remains of his cigars. In one of the blue, saucer-shaped ashtrays there were thick turds of dark-grey cigar ash. There were also stubs but it was the ash I kept looking at, thinking that its thickness resembled the thickness of his unlovely legs. And once again I experienced hatred for him. I was about to tip the contents of the ashtray into the fire-grate when something stopped me, and what did I do but get an empty lozenge box and with the aid of a sheet of paper lift the clumps of ash in there and carry the tin upstairs. With the movement the turds lost their shapes, and whereas they had reminded me of his legs they were now an even mass of dark-grey ash, probably like the ashes of the dead. I put the tin in a drawer underneath some clothes.
Later in the day I was given my award – a very big silver medallion with my name on it. At the party afterwards I got drunk. My friends tell me that I did not actually disgrace myself but I have a humiliating recollection of beginning a story and not being able to go ahead with it, not because the contents eluded me but because the words became too difficult to pronounce. A man brought me home and after I’d made him a cup of tea I said good night over-properly, then when he was gone I staggered to my bed. When I drink heavily I sleep badly. Wakening, it was still dark outside and straight away I remembered the previous morning, and the suggestion of frost outside, and his cold warning words. I had to agree. Although our meetings were perfect I had a sense of doom impending, of a chasm opening up between us, of someone telling his wife, of souring love, of destruction. And still we hadn’t gone as far as we should have gone. There were peaks of joy and of its opposite that we should have climbed to, but the time was not left to us. He had of course said, ‘You still have a great physical hold over me,’ and that in its way I found degrading. To have gone on making love when he had discarded me would have been repellent. It had come to an end. The thing I kept thinking of was a violet in a wood and how a time comes for it to drop off and die. The frost may have had something to do with my thinking, or rather with my musing. I got up and put on a dressing-gown. My head hurt from the hangover but I knew that I must write to him while I had some resolution. I know my own failings and I knew that before the day was out I would want to re-see him, sit with him, coax him back with sweetness and my overwhelming helplessness.
I wrote the note and left out the bit about the violet. It is not a thing you can put down on paper without seeming fanciful. I said if he didn’t think it prudent to see me, then not to see me. I said it had been a nice interlude and that we must entertain good memories of it. It was a remarkably controlled letter. He wrote back promptly. My decision came as a shock he said. Still he admitted that I was right. In the middle of the letter he said he must penetrate my composure and to do so he must admit that above and beyond everything he loved me and would always do so. That of course was the word I had been snooping around for, for months. It set me off. I wrote a long letter back to him. I lost my head. I over-said everything. I testified to loving him, to sitting on the edge of madness in the intervening days, to my hoping for a miracle.
It is just as well that I did not write out the miracle in detail because possibly it is, or was, rather inhuman. It concerned his family.
He was returning from the funeral of his wife and children, wearing black tails. He also wore the white silk scarf I had seen him with, and there was a black, mourning tulip in his buttonhole. When he came towards me I snatched the black tulip, and replaced it with a white narcissus, and he in turn put the scarf around my neck and drew me towards him by holding its fringed ends. I kept moving my neck back and forth within the embrace of the scarf. Then we danced divinely on a wooden floor that was white and slippery. At times I thought we would fall but he said, ‘You don’t have to worry. I’m with you.’ The dance floor was also a road and we were going somewhere beautiful.
For weeks I waited for a reply to my letter but there was none. More than once I had my hand on the telephone, but something cautionary – a new sensation for me – in the back of my mind bade me to wait.
To give him time. To let regret take charge of his heart. To let him come of his own accord. And then I panicked. I thought that perhaps the letter had gone astray or had fallen into other hands. I’d posted it of course to the office in Lincoln’s Inn where he worked. I wrote another. This time it was a formal note, and with it I enclosed a postcard with the words YES and NO. I asked if he had received my previous letter to kindly let me know by simply crossing out the word which did not apply on my card, and send it back to me. It came back with the NO crossed out. Nothing else. So he had received my letter. I think I looked at the card for hours. I could not stop shaking and to calm myself I took several drinks. There was something so brutal about the card, but then you could say that I had asked for it by approaching the situation in that way. I took out the box with his ash in it and wept over it, and both wanted to toss it out of the window and preserve it for evermore.
In general I behaved very strangely. I rang someone who knew him and asked for no reason at all what she thought his hobbies might be. She said he played the harmonium which I found unbearable news altogether. Then I entered a black patch and on the third day I lost control.
Well, from not sleeping and taking pep pills and whisky I got very odd. I was shaking all over and breathing very quickly the way one might after witnessing an accident. I stood at my bedroom window which is on the second floor and looked at the concrete underneath. The only flowers left in bloom were the hydrangeas, and they had faded to a soft russet which was much more fetching than the harsh pink they were all summer. In the garden next door there were frost hats over the fuchsias. Looking first at the hydrangeas, then at the fuchsias, I tried to estimate the consequences of my jumping. I wondered if the drop were great enough. Being physically awkward I could only conceive of injuring myself fatally, which would be worse because I would then be confined to my bed and imprisoned with the very thoughts that were driving me to desperation. I opened the window and leaned out, but quickly drew back. I had a better idea. There was a plumber downstairs installing central heating – an enterprise I had embarked upon when my lover began to come regularly and we liked walking around naked eating sandwiches and playing records. I decided to gas myself and to seek the help of the plumber in order to do it efficiently. I am aware – someone must have told me – that there comes a point in the middle of the operation when the doer regrets it and tries to withdraw, but cannot. That seemed like an extra note of tragedy that I had no wish to experience. So, I decided to go downstairs to this man and explain to him that I wanted to die, and that I was not telling him simply for him to prevent me, or console me, that I was not looking for pity – there comes a time when pity is of no help – and that I simply wanted his assistance. He could show me what to do, settle me down, and – this is absurd – be around to take care of the telephone and the doorbell for the next few hours. Also to dispose of me with dignity. Above all I wanted that. I even decided what I would wear: a long dress, which in fact was the same colour as the hydrangeas in their russet phase and which I’ve never worn except for a photograph or on television. Before going downstairs, I wrote a note which simply said: ‘I am committing suicide through lack of intelligence, and through not knowing, not learning to know, how to live.’