The Love Object

by Edna O'Brien

  For the first time she thought about cramp.

  In the morning she took three headache pills and swallowed them with hot coffee. They disintegrated in her mouth. Afterwards she washed them down with soda water. There was no lesson because the actual swimming performance was to be soon after breakfast. She tried on one bathing suit, then another, then realizing how senseless this was she put the first one back on and stayed in her room until it was almost the time.

  When she came down to the pool they were all there, ahead of her. They formed quite an audience: the twenty house guests and the six complaining children who had been obliged to quit the pool. Even the housekeeper stood on the stone seat under the tree, to get a view. Some smiled, some were a trifle embarrassed. The pregnant woman gave her a medal for good luck. It was attached to a pin. So they were friends. Her instructor stood near the front, the rope coiled round his wrist just in case. The children gave to the occasion its only levity. She went down the ladder backwards and looked at no face in particular. She crouched until the water covered her shoulders, then she gave a short leap and delivered herself to it. Almost at once she knew that she was going to do it. Her hands no longer loath to delve deep scooped the water away, and she kicked with a ferocity she had not known to be possible. She was aware of cheering but it did not matter about that. She swam, as she had promised, across the width of the pool in the shallow end. It was pathetically short, but it was what she had vouched to do. Afterwards one of the children said that her face was torture. The rubber flowers had long since come off her bathing cap, and she pulled it off as she stood up and held on to the ladder. They clapped. They said it called for a celebration. He said nothing but she could see that he was pleased. Her instructor was the happiest person there. When planning the party they went to the study where they could sit and make lists. He said they would order gipsies and flowers and guests and caviare and swans of ice to put the caviare in. None of it would be her duty. They would get people to do it. In all, they wrote out twenty telegrams. He asked how she felt. She admitted that being able to swim bore little relation to not being able. They were two unreconcilable feelings. The true thrill she said was the moment when she knew she would master it but had not yet achieved it with her body. He said he looked forward to the day when she went in and out of the water like a knife. He did the movement deftly with his hand. He said next thing she would learn was riding. He would teach her himself or he would have her taught. She remembered the chestnut mare with head raised, nostrils searching the air, and she herself unable to stroke it, unable to stand next to it without exuding fear.

  ‘Are you afraid of nothing?’ she asked, too afraid to tell him specifically about the encounter with the mare which took place in his stable.

  ‘Sure, sure.’

  ‘You never reveal it.’

  ‘At the time I’m too scared.’

  ‘But afterwards, afterwards …’ she said.

  ‘You try to live it down,’ he said and looked at her and hurriedly took her in his arms. She thought, Probably he is as near to me as he has been to any living person and that is not very near, not very near at all. She knew that if he chose her that they would not go in the deep end, the deep end that she dreaded and dreamed of. When it came to matters inside of himself he took no risks.

  She was tired. Tired of the life she had elected to go into, and disappointed with the man she had put pillars round. The tiredness came from inside and like a deep breath going out slowly it tore at her gut. She was sick of her own predilection for rotten eggs. It seemed to her that she always held people to her ear, the way her mother held eggs, shaking them to guess at their rottenness, but unlike her mother she chose the very ones that she would have been wise to throw away. He seemed to sense her sadness but he said nothing, he held her and squeezed her from time to time in reassurance.

  Her dress – his gift – was laid out on the bed, its wide white sleeves hanging down at either side. It was of open-work and it looked uncannily like a corpse. There was a shawl to go with it, and shoes and a bag. The servant was waiting. Beside the bath her book, an ashtray, cigarettes, and a box of little soft matches that were hard to strike. She lit a cigarette and drew on it heartily. She regretted not having brought up a drink. She felt like a drink at that moment and in her mind she sampled the drink she might have had. The servant knelt down to put in the stopper. She asked that the bath should not be run just yet. Then she took the biggest towel and put it over her bathing suit, and went along the corridor, and down by the back stairs. She did not have to turn on the lights, she would have known her way, blindfolded, to that pool. All the toys were on the water, like farm animals just put to bed. She picked them out one by one and laid them at the side near the pile of empty chlorine bottles. She went down the ladder backwards.

  She swam in the shallow end and confronted the thought that had urged to be thought for days. She thought, I shall do it, or I shall not do it, and the fact that she was in two minds about it seemed to confirm her view of the unimportance of the whole thing. Anyone, even the youngest child, could have persuaded her not, because her mind was without conviction. It just seemed easier, that was all, easier than the strain and the incomplete loving and the excursions that lay ahead.

  ‘This is what I want, this is where I want to go,’ she said, restraining that part of herself that might scream. Once she went deep, and she submitted to it, the water gathered all around in a great beautiful bountiful baptism. As she went down to the cold and thrilling region she thought, They will never know, they will never, ever know, for sure.

  At some point she began to fight and thresh about, and she cried though she could not know the extent of those cries.

  She came to her senses on the ground at the side of the pool, all muffled up and retching. There was an agonizing pain in her chest as if the black frosts of winter had got in there. The servants were with her and two of the guests and him. The floodlights were on around the pool. She put her hands to her breast to make sure; yes she was naked under the blanket. They would have ripped her bathing suit off. He had obviously been the one to give respiration because he was breathing quickly and his sleeves were rolled up. She looked at him. He did not smile. There was the sound of music, loud, ridiculous and hearty. She remembered first the party, then, everything. The nice vagueness quit her and she looked at him with shame. She looked at all of them. What things had she shouted as they brought her back to life? What thoughts had they spoken in those crucial moments? How long did it take? Her immediate concern was they must not carry her to the house, she must not allow that last episode of indignity. But they did. As she was borne along by him and the gardener she could see the flowers and the oysters and jellied dishes and the small roast piglets all along the tables, a feast as in a dream, except that she was dreadfully clear-headed. Once alone in her room she vomited.

  For two days she did not appear downstairs. He sent up a pile of books and when he visited her he always brought someone. He professed a great interest in the novels she had read and asked how the plots were. When she did come down the guests were polite and off hand and still specious, but along with that they were cautious now and deeply disapproving. Their manner told her that it had been a stupid and ghastly thing to do and had she succeeded she would have involved all of them in her stupid and ghastly mess. She wished she could go home, without any farewells. The children looked at her and from time to time laughed out loud. One boy told her that his brother had once tried to drown him in the bath. Apart from that and the inevitable letter to the gardener it was never mentioned. The gardener had been the one to hear her cry and raise the alarm. In their eyes he would be a hero.

  People swam less. They made plans to leave. They had ready-made excuses – work, the change in the weather, aeroplane bookings. He told her that they would stay until all the guests had gone, and that then they would leave immediately. His secretary was travelling with them. He asked each day how she felt, but when they were alone h
e either read or played patience. He appeared to be calm except that his eyes blazed as with fever. They were young eyes. The blue seemed to sharpen in colour once the anger in him was resurrected. He was snappy with the servants. She knew that when they got back to London there would be separate cars waiting for them at the airport. It was only natural. The house, the warm flagstones, the shimmer of the water would accompany her and be a joy long after their love had become an echo.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  “An Outing,” “The Rug,” “Irish Revel,” “Cords,” and “The Love Object” first appeared in the New Yorker, and the author and publishers are grateful for permission to include them here.

  copyright © 1968 by Edna O’Brien

  cover design by Angela Goddard

  978-1-4532-4731-0

  This edition published in 2012 by Open Road Integrated Media

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  EBOOKS BY EDNA O’BRIEN

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