by Edna O'Brien
The seasons brought variety – first a false spring, a premature thaw, then a real one, then the flowers, small and soft like the pupils of eyes, sheep lambing, and the things that they had sowed appearing above the ground. When the rains came the wood swelled, and then when the rains went the wood had a terrible time shrinking and settling down. The creak in the house was unnerving. She was not with child. They no longer got up in the middle of lunch or breakfast or supper and walked to their vast bed in a quiver of passion. They chopped wood, they lit the stove, they kept busy; there is always something to do in a house.
When summer came he took a sleeping bag out of doors, saying nothing. He chose the forest. At first she cried, then she became reconciled to it, but she was always hungry and always cold.
At length, feeling the bleakness himself, he agreed to move into a city but on the understanding that they would live perfectly privately. He went first to find an apartment because it had to be suitable, it had to look out on a stretch of green and in a city that is a difficult to find.
She missed him. It was the first time in years that they had been parted, and when he came back and walked along the dark lane carrying a torch she ran and embraced him. In their embrace there was tenderness and a reconciliation.
The apartment had a high ceiling, double doors and a radiator concealed behind wooden bars. They missed the stove. He fitted up his machines – his tape recorder, his record player, his infra-red lamp. Since they had only one room she made a point of being out a lot to leave him to his solitude. In her walks she came to know the streets, intimately. She knew where ill-fitting slabs of stone caused a ridge in the pavement, the rust stains on the red paper kiosks, nannies, prams; she never looked at those inside the prams. She knew the dogs that were at war with their owners and those that followed meekly on their leashes. One or two people smiled at her. There was one square of houses she found particularly enchanting. They were four-storey houses set well back from the road with a flight of steps leading to the tiled porchways. In this square she studied curtains, gateways and the paintwork, thinking she could tell the life of the house by these external signs. She loved that hour of evening when things perked up as people hurried home with provisions for their dinner. Their urgency excited her. She often hurried with them and then found she was going in the wrong direction. In the daytime she made bus journeys, going from terminus to terminus simply to overhear. When she came home she told her husband all that she had seen and all that she heard and he sometimes laughed because she heard some amusing things.
At Christmas she plucked up courage to invite people to dinner. They owned a gallery where she had passed many pleasant hours. It entailed manoeuvring beforehand and a war afterwards. They did not meet with his approval. The woman confessed to a weakness for leather suitcases and that he found distasteful. They had three sets of guests throughout a winter and only one of these evenings went well.
Christmas again, the anniversary of their betrothal and she left him. She walked out of the house and down the street. There were stars, a moon and a succession of street lights to show the way. The frost which was severe seemed to fix and make permanent her action as the frost had fastened the hoof marks of animals on their mountain walks long before. Her friends drove to his apartment and handed him her note saying that she had gone. ‘Peace, peace at last,’ was what he had said.
He went back to the mountain and wrote her a chain of letters. They were all abusive, and she could not read them through without succumbing to tears.
She moved to a larger city and got a job in a gallery. The intention was to meet people. She lived modestly well. Her old life and her new life, they could not be more opposing. Things went from one extreme to another. It was all parties and friendship and telephone calls now. Not a week, not a day, not an hour went by but she saw someone or was telephoned by someone and made plans. She had plans it seemed for the rest of her life. Life stories were dropped in her ear and though she felt flattered she was also unable to sleep at night, for all the incidents that crowded in on her.
There were lovers, too, drunken lovers in drunken beds after parties, and the more expedient ones were those who called just before dinner and seduced her in the kitchen or the hallway or wherever they happened to be. There were some well-conducted affairs and presents and bunches of flowers and eating in restaurants. There were all these exciting things but the proper feelings of enjoyment refused to come. In fact something else happened. She was filling up with secret revulsion. ‘I need a rest, a rest from people,’ she would say, but it was impossible to escape.
At one of her parties a tap flew off a cider-barrel and though the cider gushed ponderously over the floor no one made any attempt to control it. Someone had made bows out of mauve lavatory paper and was passing them round and everyone was laughing about this. She wished that they would all leave, together, at once, and like a swarm of flies.
Then she made a resolution. She tried being with people and not seeing and not hearing. But they got through. They always found some chink. It was not difficult – an insult, a well – placed line of flattery, some new gossip and she was theirs. Theirs to make promises to, theirs to be obligated to, theirs to hide her distaste from. She thought there are not left in the world two people who really like one another. Two parts of her were in deadly enmity, the her that welcomed them in and the her that shrank away from them. It was all terrible and tiring and meaningless.
One evening in a friend’s house she overturned a glass of red wine. It pooled into a wide stain and went through the holes of the crocheted cloth. Under the cloth there was red crepe paper so that the stain – a savage red – was out of all proportion to the amount of wine spilt. She apologized of course and her hostess was more than forgiving. In fact they all moved to another room to rid themselves of its unsightliness.
Next time she disgraced herself in an hotel. A tumbler – there had been whisky in it – simply shot out of her hand and missed the very polished boot of a gentleman passing by. Her friend (a new man) found it very funny.
In a drawing-room just before lunch she kicked some bottles which were put to warm by a hearth. She tried mopping it up with a handkerchief before anyone could see. She even used the corner of her flimsy dress. Just like a child.
After that it became inevitable. No matter where she went, no matter who she was, it simply had to happen. It began to control her life, her outings. Her friends laughed indulgently. They made jokes as she entered rooms and yet it was always mortifying and always shocking when it occurred. Lying down at night it assailed her. She saw herself spilling her way across rooms, dance floors, countries, continents. In her sleep she spilt and when she wakened she dreaded the encounters of the day, knowing what must happen.
The decision took months to arrive at, but one day it was easy to execute. As easy as the night she left her husband, knowing it was for ever. She had to give up seeing people. She was quite methodical about it. She had blinds put on the windows, asked for the telephone to be removed. That was a wrench. To make matters worse the workmen left her the extension saying she might like it for her kiddies. Though unconnected she feared it was in danger of ringing because it had developed the habit. People wrote. Some assumed that she was having a wicked affair with somebody so notorious that he had to be hidden. They were maddeningly coy about it. When they came she hid, telling herself that the ringing would die down once they had run out of patience. An order was delivered once a week and left on the doorstep. On the doorstep, too, she left the empties, letters for posting and the list of necessities for the following week. To her friends she wrote, ‘Thank you for asking me, I wish I could, but at the moment I dare not come out of doors. Perhaps another time, perhaps next year?’ Each letter always the same. She could have had them printed but she didn’t. Each one she wrote carefully in heavy black ink. She did not wish to offend. They had been friends once and she might meet them again before she died. She knew that it needed only a toothache, a
burst pipe or an excess of high spirits to lure her back into the world. ‘Not yet, not yet,’ she would say resolutely to herself.
The day passed agreeably. There were things to be done. Dust assembles of its own accord. She kept everything spotless. She had a small massage machine which she used on herself twice a day. Its effect was both bracing and relaxing and she used it all over. She dressed for dinner, and each evening had two martinis. During dinner she put on some records and allowed herself to be animated. Otherwise it was quiet, quiet. The quiet, ordered days lay ahead like a foreseeable stretch of path. She had no wish to go out. She had nothing to say, nothing to hear. She had only one quibble: the timing of her affliction. Had it happened sooner the marriage need not have ended and they might have stayed together, two withdrawn people, in a house, on a mountain.
Irish Revel
MARY HOPED THAT THE rotted, front tyre would not burst. As it was, the tube had a slow puncture, and twice she had to stop and use the pump, maddening, because the(pump had no connexion and had to be jammed on over the corner of a handkerchief. For as long as she could remember she had been pumping bicycles, carting turf, cleaning out-houses, doing a man’s work. Her father and her two brothers worked for the forestry, so that she and her mother had to do all the odd jobs – there were three children to care for, and fowl and pigs and churning. Theirs was a mountainy farm in Ireland, and life was hard.
But this cold evening in early November she was free. She rode along the mountain road, between the bare thorn hedges, thinking pleasantly about the party. Although she was seventeen this was her first party. The invitation had come only that morning from Mrs Rodgers of the Commercial Hotel. The postman brought word that Mrs Rodgers wanted her down that evening, without fail. At first, her mother did not wish Mary to go, there was too much to be done, gruel to be made, and one of the twins had earache, and was likely to cry in the night. Mary slept with the year-old twins, and sometimes she was afraid that she might lie on them or smother them, the bed was so small. She begged to be let go.
‘What use would it be?’ her mother said. To her mother all outings were unsettling – they gave you a taste of something you couldn’t have. But finally she weakened, mainly because Mrs Rodgers, as owner of the Commercial Hotel, was an important woman, and not to be insulted.
‘You can go, so long as you’re back in time for the milking in the morning; and mind you don’t lose your head,’ her mother warned. Mary was to stay overnight in the village with Mrs Rodgers. She plaited her hair, and later when she combed it it fell in dark crinkled waves over her shoulders. She was allowed to wear the black lace dress that had come from America years ago and belonged to no one in particular. Her mother had sprinkled her with Holy Water, conveyed her to the top of the lane and warned her never to touch alcohol.
Mary felt happy as she rode along slowly, avoiding the pot-holes that were thinly iced over. The frost had never lifted that day. The ground was hard. If it went on like that, the cattle would have to be brought into the shed and given hay.
The road turned and looped and rose; she turned and looped with it, climbing little hills and descending again towards the next hill. At the descent of the Big Hill she got off the bicycle – the brakes were unreliable – and looked back, out of habit, at her own house. It was the only house back there on the mountain, small, whitewashed, with a few trees around it, and a patch at the back which they called a kitchen-garden. There was a rhubarb bed, and shrubs over which they emptied tea-leaves and a stretch of grass where in the summer they had a chicken run, moving it from one patch to the next, every other day. She looked away. She was now free to think of John Roland. He came to their district two years before, riding a motor-cycle at a ferocious speed; raising dust on the milk-cloths spread on the hedge to dry. He stopped to ask the way. He was staying with Mrs Rodgers in the Commercial Hotel and had come up to see the lake, which was noted for its colours. It changed colour rapidly – it was blue and green and black, all within an hour. At sunset it was often a strange burgundy, not like a lake at all, but like wine.
‘Down there,’ she said to the stranger, pointing to the lake below, with the small island in the middle of it. He had taken a wrong turning.
Hills and tiny cornfields descended steeply towards the water. The misery of the hills was clear, from all the boulders. The cornfields were turning, it was midsummer; the ditches throbbing with the blood-red of fuchsia; the milk sour five hours after it had been put in the tanker. He said how exotic it was. She had no interest in views herself. She just looked up at the high sky and saw that a hawk had halted in the air above them. It was like a pause in her life, the hawk above them, perfectly still; and just then her mother came out to see who the stranger was. He took off his helmet and said ‘Hello’, very courteously. He introduced himself as John Roland, an English painter, who lived in Italy.
She did not remember exactly how it happened, but after a while he walked into their kitchen with them and sat down to tea.
Two long years since; but she had never given up hoping – perhaps this evening. The mail-car man said that someone special in the Commercial Hotel expected her. She felt such happiness. She spoke to her bicycle, and it seemed to her that her happiness somehow glowed in the pearliness of the cold sky, in the frosted fields going blue in the dusk, in the cottage windows she passed. Her father and mother were rich and cheerful; the twin had no earache, the kitchen fire did not smoke. Now and then, she smiled at the thought of how she would appear to him – taller and with breasts now, and a dress that could be worn anywhere. She forgot about the rotted tyre, got up and cycled.
The five street lights were on when she pedalled into the village. There had been a cattle fair that day, and the main street was covered with dung. The townspeople had their windows protected with wooden half-shutters and makeshift arrangements of planks and barrels. Some were out scrubbing their own piece of footpath with bucket and brush. There were cattle wandering around, mooing, the way cattle do when they are in a strange street, and drunken farmers with sticks were trying to identify their own cattle in dark corners.
Beyond the shop window of the Commercial Hotel, Mary heard loud conversation, and men singing. It was opaque glass so that she could not identify any of them, she could just see their heads moving about, inside. It was a shabby hotel, the yellow-washed walls needed a coat of paint as they hadn’t been done since the time De Valera came to that village during the election campaign five years before. De Valera went upstairs that time, and sat in the parlour and wrote his name with a penny pen in an autograph book, and sympathized with Mrs Rodgers on the recent death of her husband.
Mary thought of resting her bicycle against the porter barrels under the shop window, and then of climbing the three stone steps that led to the hall door, but suddenly the latch of the shop door clicked and she ran in terror up the alley by the side of the shop, afraid it might be someone who knew her father and would say he saw her going in through the public bar. She wheeled her bicycle into a shed and approached the back door. It was open, but she did not enter without knocking.
Two townsgirls rushed to answer it. One was Doris O’Beirne, the daughter of the harness-maker. She was the only Doris in the whole village, and she was famous for that, as well as for the fact that one of her eyes was blue and the other a dark brown. She learnt shorthand and typing at the local technical school, and later she meant to be a secretary to some famous man or other in the Government, in Dublin.
‘God, I thought it was someone important,’ she said when she saw Mary standing there, blushing, pretty and with a bottle of cream in her hand. Another girl! Girls were two a penny in that neighbourhood. People said that it had something to do with the lime water that so many girls were born. Girls with pink skins, and matching eyes, and girls like Mary with long, wavy hair and good figures.
‘Come in, or stay out,’ said Eithne Duggan, the second girl, to Mary. It was supposed to be a joke but neither of them liked her. They hated shy
mountainy people.
Mary came in carrying cream which her mother had sent to Mrs Rodgers, as a present. She put it on the dresser and took off her coat. The girls nudged each other when they saw her dress. In the kitchen was a smell of cow dung and fried onions.
‘Where’s Mrs Rodgers?’ Mary asked.
‘Serving,’ Doris said in a saucy voice, as if any fool ought to know. Two old men sat at the table eating.
‘I can’t chew, I have no teeth,’ said one of the men, to Doris. ‘’Tis like leather,’ he said, holding the plate of burnt steak towards her. He had watery eyes and he blinked childishly. Was it so, Mary wondered, that eyes got paler with age, like bluebells in a jar?
‘You’re not going to charge me for that,’ the old man was saying to Doris. Tea and steak cost five shillings at the Commercial.
‘’Tis good for you, chewing is,’ Eithne Duggan said, teasing him.
‘I can’t chew with my gums,’ he said again, and the two girls began to giggle. The old man looked pleased that he had made them laugh, and he closed his mouth and munched once or twice on a piece of fresh, shop bread. Eithne Duggan laughed so much that she had to put a dish-cloth between her teeth. Mary hung up her coat and went through to the shop.
Mrs Rodgers came from the counter for a moment to speak to her.
‘Mary, I’m glad you came, that pair in there are no use at all, always giggling. Now first thing we have to do is to get the parlour upstairs straightened out. Everything has to come out of it except the piano. We’re going to have dancing and everything.’
Quickly, Mary realized that she was being given work to do, and she blushed with shock and disappointment.
‘Pitch everything into the back bedroom, the whole shootin’ lot,’ Mrs Rodgers was saying as Mary thought of her good lace dress, and of how her mother wouldn’t even let her wear it to Mass on Sundays.