by Edna O'Brien
‘My God,’ she said reverently, folding back the last piece of paper and revealing a black sheepskin hearthrug. We opened it out. It was a half-moon shape and covered the kitchen table. She could not speak. It was real sheepskin, thick and soft and luxurious. She examined the lining, studied the maker’s label in the back, searched through the folds of brown paper for a possible letter, but there was nothing at all to indicate where it had come from.
‘Get me my glasses,’ she said. We read the address again, and the postmark. The parcel had been sent from Dublin two days before. ‘Call your father,’ she said. He was in bed with rheumatic pains. Rug or no rug, he demanded a fourth cup of tea before he could get up.
We carried the big black rug into the sitting-room and laid it down upon the new linoleum, before the fireplace.
‘Isn’t it perfect, a perfect colour scheme?’ she said. The room had suddenly become cosy. She stood back and looked at it with surprise, and a touch of suspicion. Though she was always hoping, she never really expected things to turn out well. At nine years old, I knew enough about my mother’s life to say a prayer of thanks that at last she had got something she wanted, and without having to work for it. She had a round, sallow face and a peculiarly uncertain, timid smile. The suspicion soon left her, and the smile came out. That was one of her happiest days; I remember it as I remember her unhappiest day to my knowledge – the day the bailiff came, a year later. I hoped she would sit in the newly – appointed room on Sundays for tea, without her apron, with her brown hair combed out, looking calm and beautiful. Outside, the rhododendrons, though wild and broken, would bloom red and purple and, inside, the new rug would lie upon the richly smelling linoleum. She hugged me suddenly, as if I were the one to thank for it all; the hen mash had dried on her hands and they had the mealy smell I knew so well.
For spells during the next few days, my mother racked her brain, and she racked our brains, for a clue. It had to be someone who knew something of her needs and wants – how else could he have decided upon just the thing she needed? She wrote letters here and there, to distant relations, to friends, to people she had not seen for years.
‘Must be one of your friends,’ she would say to my father.
‘Oh, probably, probably. I’ve known a lot of decent people in my time.’
She was referring – ironically, of course – to the many strangers to whom he had offered tea. He liked nothing better than to stand down at the gates on a fair day or a race day, engaging passers-by in conversation and finally bringing someone up to the house for tea and boiled eggs. He had a genius for making friends.
‘I’d say that’s it,’ my father said, delighted to take credit for the rug.
In the warm evenings we sat around the fireplace – we’d never had a fire in that room throughout the whole of my childhood – and around the rug, listening to the radio. And now and then, Mama or Dada would remember someone else from whom the rug might have come. Before a week had passed, she had written to a dozen people – an acquaintance who had moved up to Dublin with a greyhound pup Dada had given him, which greyhound had turned out a winner; an unfrocked priest who had stayed in our house for a week, gathering strength from Mama to travel on home and meet his family; a magician who had stolen Dada’s gold watch and never been seen since; a farmer who once sold us a tubercular cow and would not take it back.
Weeks passed. The rug was taken out on Saturdays and shaken well, the new lino polished. Once, coming home early from school, I looked in the window and saw Mama kneeling on the rug saying a prayer. I’d never seen her pray like that, in the middle of the day, before. My father was going into the next county the following day to look at a horse he thought he might get cheap; she was, of course, praying that he would keep his promise and not touch a drink. If he did, he might be off on a wild progress and would not be seen for a week.
He went the next day; he was to stay overnight with relations. While he was away, I slept with Mama, for company, in the big brass bed. I wakened to see a candle flame, and Mama hurriedly putting on her cardigan. Dada had come home? No, she said, but she had been lying awake thinking, and there was something she had to tell Hickey or she would not get a wink of sleep. It was not yet twelve; he might be awake. I didn’t want to be left in the dark, I said, but she was already hurrying along the landing. I nipped out of bed, and followed. The luminous clock said a quarter to twelve. From the first landing, I looked over and saw her turning the knob of Hickey’s door.
Why should he open his door to her then? I thought; he never let anyone in at any time, keeping the door locked when he was out on the farm. Once we climbed in through the window and found things in such a muddle – his good suit laid out flat on the floor, a shirt soaking in a bucket of dirty green water, a milk can in which there was curdled buttermilk, a bicycle chain, a broken Sacred Heart and several pair’s of worn, distorted, cast-off boots that she resolved never to set foot in it again.
‘What the hell is it?’ Hickey said. Then there was a thud. He must have knocked something over while he searched for his flashlamp.
‘If it’s fine tomorrow, we’ll cut the turf,’ Mama said.
Hickey asked if she’d wakened him at that hour to tell him something he already knew – they discussed it at tea-time.
‘Open the door,’ she said. ‘I have a bit of news for you, about the rug.’
He opened the door just a fraction. ‘Who sent it?’ he asked.
‘That party from Ballinsloe,’ she said.
‘That party’ was her phrase for her two visitors who had come to our house years before – a young girl, and an older man who wore brown gauntlet gloves. Almost as soon as they’d arrived, my father went out with them in their motor-car. When they returned to our house an hour later, I gathered from the conversation that they had been to see our local doctor, a friend of Dad’s. The girl was the sister of a nun, who was headmistress at the convent where my sisters were. She had been crying. I guessed then, or maybe later, that her tears had to do with her having a baby and that Dada had taken her to the doctor so that she could find out for certain if she were pregnant and make preparations to get married. It would have been impossible for her to go to a doctor in her own neighbourhood, and I had no doubt but that Dada was glad to do a favour for the nun, as he could not always pay the fees for my sisters’ education. Mama gave them tea on a tray – not a spread with hand-embroidered cloth and bone-china cups – and shook hands with them coolly when they were leaving. She could not abide sinful people.
‘Nice of them to remember,’ Hickey said, sucking air between his teeth and making bird noises. ‘How did you find out?’
‘I just guessed,’ Mama told him.
‘Oh, Christ!’ Hickey said, closing his door with a fearful bang and getting back into bed with such vehemence that I could hear the springs revolt.
Mama carried me up the stairs, because my feet were cold, and said that Hickey had not one ounce of manners.
Next day, when Dad came home sober, she told him the story, and that night she wrote to the nun. In due course, a letter came to us – with holy medals and scapulars enclosed for me – saying that neither the nun nor her married sister had sent a gift. I expect the girl had married the man with the gauntlet gloves.
‘’Twill be one of life’s mysteries,’ Mama said, as she beat the rug against the pier, closed her eyes to escape the dust and reconciled herself to never knowing.
But a knock came on our back door four weeks later, when we were upstairs changing the sheets on the beds. ‘Run down and see who it is,’ she said.
It was a namesake of Dada’s from the village, a man who always came to borrow something – a donkey, or a mowing machine, or even a spade.
‘Is your mother in?’ he asked, and I went halfway up the stairs and called her down.
‘I’ve come for the rug,’ he said.
‘What rug?’ Mama asked. It was the nearest she ever got to lying. Her breathe caught short and she blushed a li
ttle.
‘I hear you have a new rug here. Well, ’tis our rug, because my wife’s sister sent it to us months ago and we never got it.’
‘What are you talking about?’ she said in a very sarcastic voice. He was a cowardly man, and it was said that he was so ineffectual he would call his wife in from the garden to pour him a cup of tea. I suppose my mother hoped that she would frighten him off.
‘The rug the postman brought here one morning, and handed it to your youngster there.’ He nodded at me.
‘Oh, that,’ Mama said, a little stunned by the news that the postman had given information about it. Then a ray of hope, or a ray of lunacy, must have struck her, because she asked what colour of rug he was inquiring about.
‘A black sheepskin,’ he said.
There could be no more doubt about it. Her whole being drooped-shoulders, stomach, voice, everything.
‘It’s here,’ she said absently, and she went through the hall into the sitting-room.
‘Being namesakes and that, the postman got us mixed up,’ he said stupidly to me.
She had winked at me to stay there and see he did not follow her, because she did not want him to know that we had been using it.
It was rolled and had a piece of cord around the middle when she handed it to him. As she watched him go down the avenue she wept, not so much for the loss – though the loss was enormous – as for her own foolishness in thinking that someone had wanted to do her a kindness at last.
‘We live and learn,’ she said, as she undid her apron strings, out of habit, and then retied them slowly and methodically, making a tighter knot.
The Mouth of the Cave
THERE WERE TWO ROUTES to the village. I chose the rougher one to be beside the mountain rather than the sea. It is a dusty ill-defined stretch of road littered with rocks. The rocks that have fallen from the cliff are a menacing shade of red once they have split open. On the surface the cliff appears to be grey. Here and there on its grey-and-red face there are small clumps of trees. Parched in summer, tormented by winds in winter they nevertheless survive, getting no larger or no smaller.
In one such clump of green, just underneath the cliff, I saw a girl stand up. She began to tie her suspenders slowly. She had bad balance because when drawing her knickers on she lost her footing more than once. She put her skirt on by bringing it over her head and lastly her cardigan which appeared to have several buttons. As I came closer she walked away. A young girl in a maroon cardigan and a black skirt. She was twenty or thereabouts. Suddenly and without anticipating it I turned towards home so as to give the impression that I’d simply been having a stroll. The ridiculousness of this hit me soon after and I turned round again and walked towards the scene of her secret. I was trembling, but these journeys have got to be accomplished.
What a shock to find that nothing lurked there, no man, no animal. The bushes had not risen from the weight of her body. I reckoned that she must have been lying for quite a time. Then I saw that she, too, was returning. Had she forgotten something? Did she want to ask me a favour? Why was she hurrying? I could not see her face, her head was down. I turned and this time I ran towards the private road that led to my rented house. I thought, Why am I running, why am I trembling, why am I afraid? Because she is a woman and so am I. Because, because? I did not know.
When I got to the courtyard I asked the servant who had been fanning herself to unchain the dog. Then I sat out of doors and waited. The flowering tree looked particularly dramatic, its petals richly pink, its scent oppressively sweet. The only tree in flower. My servant had warned me about those particular flowers; she had even taken the trouble to get the dictionary to impress the word upon me – Venodno, poison, poison petals. Nevertheless I had the table moved in order to be nearer that tree and we steadied it by putting folded cigarette cartons under two of its legs. I told the servant to lay a place for two. I also decided what we would eat, though normally I don’t, in order to give the days some element of surprise. I asked that both wines be put on table, and also those long, sugar-coated biscuits that can be dipped in white wine and sucked until the sweetness is drained from them and re-dipped and re-sucked, indefinitely.
She would like the house. It had simplicity despite its grandeur. A white house with green shutters and a fanlight of stone over each of the three downstairs entrances. A sundial, a well, a little chapel. The walls and the ceilings were a milky-blue and this, combined with the sea and sky, had a strange hallucinatory effect as if sea and sky moved indoors. There were maps instead of pictures. Around the light bulbs pink shells that over the years had got a bit chipped, but this only added to the informality of the place.
We would take a long time over supper. Petals would drop from the tree, some might lodge on the stone table, festooning it. The figs, exquisitely chilled, would be served on a wide platter. We would test them with our fingers. We would know which ones when bitten into would prove to be satisfactory. She, being native, might be more expert at it than I. One or other of us might bite too avidly and find that the seeds, wet and messy and runny and beautiful, spurted over our chins. I would wipe my chin with my hand. I would do everything to put her at ease. Get drunk if necessary. At first I would talk but later show hesitation in order to give her a chance.
I changed into an orange robe and put on a long necklace made of a variety of shells. The dog was still loose in order to warn me. At the first bark I would have him brought in and tied up at the back of the house where even his whimpering would be unheard.
I sat on the terrace. The sun was going down. I moved to another chair in order to get the benefit of it. The crickets had commenced their incessant near-mechanical din and the lizards began to appear from behind the maps. Something about their deft, stealth-like movements reminded me of her, but everything reminded me of her just then. There was such silence that the seconds appeared to record their own passing. There were only the crickets and, in the distance, the sound of sheep-bells, more dreamlike than a bleat. In the distance, too, the lighthouse, faithfully signalling. A pair of shorts hanging on a hook began to flutter in the first breeze and how I welcomed it, knowing that it heralded night. She was waiting for dark, the embracing dark, the sinner’s dear accomplice.
My servant waited out of view. I could not see her but I was conscious of her the way one sometimes is of a prompter in the wings. It irritated me. I could hear her picking up or laying down a plate and I knew it was being done simply to engage my attention. I had also to battle with the smell of lentil soup. The smell though gratifying seemed nothing more than a bribe to hurry the proceedings and that was impossible. Because, according to my conjecture, once I began to eat the possibility of her coming was ruled out. I had to wait.
The hour that followed had an edgy, predictable and awful pattern – I walked, sat on various seats, lit cigarettes that I quickly discarded, kept adding to my drink. At moments I disremembered the cause of my agitation, but then recalling her in dark clothes and downcast eyes I thrilled again at the pleasure of receiving her. Across the bay the various settlements of lights came on, outlining towns or villages that are invisible in daylight. The perfection of the stars was loathsome.
Finally the dog’s food was brought forth and he ate as he always does, at my feet. When the empty plate skated over the smooth cobbles – due to my clumsiness – and the full moon so near, so red, so oddly hospitable, appeared above the pines, I decided to begin, taking the napkin out of its ring and spreading it slowly and ceremoniously on my lap. I confess that in those few seconds my faith was overwhelming and my hope stronger than it had ever been.
The food was destroyed. I drank a lot.
Next day I set out for the village but took the sea road. I have not gone the cliff way ever since. I have often wanted to, especially after work when I know what my itinerary is going to be: I will collect the letters, have one Pernod in the bar where retired colonels play cards, sit and talk to them about nothing. We have long ago accepted our uselessn
ess for each other. New people hardly ever come.
There was an Australian painter whom I invited to supper having decided that he was moderately attractive. He became offensive after a few drinks and kept telling me how misrepresented his countrymen were. It was sad rather than unpleasant and the servant and I had to link him home.
On Sundays and feast days girls of about twenty go by, arms round each other, bodies lost inside dark commodious garments. Not one of them looks at me although by now I am known. She must know me. Yet she never gives me a sign as to which she is. I expect she is too frightened. In my more optimistic moments I like to think that she waits there expecting me to come and search her out. Yet, I always find myself taking the sea road even though I most desperately desire to go the other way.
How to Grow a Wisteria
WHEN THEY WERE FIRST married they saw no one. That was his wish. They spent their days in their wooden house, high up, on a mountain. There was snow for four or five months of each year, and in the early morning when the sun shone they sat on the veranda admiring the expanse of white fields, and the pines that were weighed down’ with snow. Beyond the fields reigned mountains, great mountains. She did not feel lonely in the morning. But at night she sometimes sighed. Stabbed she would be by some small memory – a voice, a song, once it was by the taste of warm beetroot. These stray memories she had no control over, no idea when they might occur. They came like spirits to disconcert her. Even when making love they were capable of intruding. She sometimes asked herself why she had chosen a man who insisted on exile. The answer was easy: his disposition and his face fitted in with some brainless dream of hers. He was someone she would never really know.
The only outsider that came was the village idiot, who cycled up to do the garden. He grinned his way through hoeing and digging, never knowing how to answer her questions. Little questions about his mother, his father, his rusted lady’s bicycle, and how he came to possess it. Once he rooted up a creeper, and she laughed and talked to her husband about it incessantly as if it were something of major importance. They planted another.