The Light of Evening

by Edna O'Brien

  * * *

  The news of her pregnancy elated him. Upon hearing it he wrote in celebration on the several windowpanes. He would have a son. He cradled her and went around the room, marveling at the fact that he would be a father again; the theft and the treachery wreaked upon him would be undone. They drank Madeira wine and he said that one day he would take her to Madeira, all three would go to sunny Madeira, a triptych.

  Once in her convent she had been given a holy picture of the Virgin, in a dimly lit interior, with a line of cypresses outside, beautifully symmetric and the Virgin herself emanating a harmony, realizing she was pregnant. She did not feel like that at all, she felt terror, but she could not tell him so. They sat, quiet, united, the wine sweet and viscous, an intimacy in what would become the most cherished moments of their history.

  * * *

  She wrote to her mother knowing she would not send it:

  Dear Mother,

  When my child is born, you may perhaps forgive me and we will be close again. Or is that wishful thinking. Between you and I, I am scared. Your labor pains have got mixed up with mine. God grant I don’t scream when the time comes. Hermann is most kind to me. In the evenings by the fire I see the nicer side of him, the side of him that you also would like. The way he listens and has a tender expression and perhaps everyone is tender at bottom but it gets buried. Flaubert claimed that we each have a royal room in our hearts into which only very few are admitted. Yet his mother said his love of words had hardened his heart, had shut her out. There are mornings when I waken and see the sun coming through the curtains and I am not in my bedroom here by the lake with him, but in your bedroom, which was also mine. How it poured in and picked out the emblems and the tweeny birds perched on roses and rosebuds, so adroit and so mischievous on their background of cream cretonne. By the way, I don’t seem to be able to get the stains out of the linen tablecloths and napkins the way you could. Was it those Reckett’s cubes that you used that made everything snow white again with a tinge of blue.

  * * *

  And so it was that their thoughts conjoined. The blotched and rained-upon postmark of home. The letter in a pink envelope. Treasa, her mother’s friend, has gone to expense with the notepaper or maybe her mother has supplied it. A missive outlining the many months since she eloped, a mother’s tears and gnashing, a father’s tears, an entire parish reeling from the shock, and moreover the blow to her poor mother’s heart, who had collapsed up in the yard but luckily was found by a passerby. After much prayer and deliberation her mother is proposing that they meet. A hotel in Limerick is suggested and two possible dates, one immediately and one in four weeks’ time. She thought it better to get it over, to look at last into her mother’s eyes and not flinch.

  On the long train journey she put her fret to one side, immersed herself in the book she had brought. Not once did she look up from it to see the passing landscape, which she knew anyhow, suburbs, small allotments, wild ponies, cattle trampling in the ruins of fallen castles, wet fields, and bog land unyieldingly black. She was reading Virginia Woolf’s The Common Reader, was with Dean Swift in those splendid rooms in London, silver plate, a galaxy of guests, vivaciousness, the Dean leaving to go home and by the light of a wax candle to fill page after page, recounting it to Stella, who guessed his greatness, the handwriting illegible, since a bad scrawl ensured secrecy. The formidable Swift telling Stella the events of the day, the talk at dinner, conversing in nonsense language to her in the house in Moor Park, she on one side of the Irish Sea and he on the other, yet in no hurry to exchange the rarefied circles of London for the trout streams of County Meath, Stella thirty years his junior, living frugally with a chaperone, Mrs. Rebecca Dingley, to whom he sometimes sent a gift of tobacco. Stella was privy to all his movements, the pamphlets he wrote, the Tories he harangued on behalf of the Irish, the twenty guineas he gave to a sick poet in a garret, the duchesses he scolded or befriended, and on and on, until one day Stella began to see traces of something less open, less confiding, in short the specter of a rival. Swift bridled. What was so wrong with visiting Mrs. Vanhomrigh, recently widowed, and her daughter Esther, why shouldn’t he have supper with them if he boarded nearby, what harm was there in leaving his gown or his periwig in their keeping, and who could accuse him for joining in a game of whist? Yet in time Esther, who had not Stella’s reserve, nor Stella’s forbearance, threw down the gauntlet, writing in vehement tones, demanding to know the exact nature of her relationship with the Dean. Upon learning of it he went to Esther, flung her letter down, then rode off, leaving her, as she put it, with his killing killing looks, which were prophetic because soon she was dead and Stella left in the shallows.

  From that it was to Dorothy Wordsworth and Brother William, Dorothy’s eye so acute, jotting down all that she saw to be of use to William, the raised ridge on the backs of sheep, a cow giving over eating, to stare at them, the sloe tree in blossom, the varnished beams of her bedroom that in the light of the fire looked like melted gems, Dorothy controlling and repressing her own impulses for the sake of William.

  A moment of vindication when she read of Christina Rossetti, Christina Rossetti dressed in black at a tea party of Mrs. Virtue Tebbs, having to listen to banality, social nothings, suddenly standing up in the middle of that room, holding a green volume of her poems and saying to the frivolous group, “I am Christina Rossetti. ‘Bring me poppies brimmed with sleepy death.’” Yes, she would be Christina Rossetti when she confronted her mother.

  The train had stopped. There was no knowing how long. She got up and walked, or rather ran, down the short length of street to the hotel where her mother stood outside under an awning crestfallen, with a look of bewilderment, fearing she was not coming.

  * * *

  Her mother is kind, soft-spoken, a small drip like a tear on the end of her nose. She is also nervous, as Eleanora can tell by the strain in her voice, a timidity on account of all the reproaches, their pursuit of her, the assault on her husband, the insulting solicitors’ letters from one party to another, and the unfinished state of affairs. They order soup to start with, pea soup, followed by lamb cutlets and roast potatoes. While they wait, her mother places her hand on the table and then gradually inches closer to Eleanora’s by way of saying, “I forgive you.” The soup is too salty, pickled with bacon, the cutlets somewhat greasy, in short she is unable to eat and her mother with an uncanny clairvoyance says in shock, “A baby.” The word seemed to hover in that constraining dining room with its smell of fried onions and gravy.

  “You’re having a baby.”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “I’m sure.” Her mother seeing into her and to the child in her and she said yes, she was having a baby. She must now marry the man with the Rasputin features, the man Treasa had christened the anti-Christ.

  A few days following her husband received a letter saying that considering recent and significant developments, the family was giving their consent to the marriage.

  He resented being told what to do, but marry they did, the ceremony proving to be somewhat joyless, in the sacristy of a Catholic church, two workmen acting as witnesses. She wore a fawn crêpe de Chine dress with a hidden pleat down the front and hidden zip fasteners that could be released as the child inside her kicked, making its presence known.

  In the dark, a few nights before it was due to be born, a pearled, full moon shining in and along the bedroom floor, she confessed to her husband that she was afraid the child would be deformed because of her many macabre thoughts and the fact of its being conceived out of wedlock. He saw how inexperienced, how frightened she was and wiping her eyes said, “Now there are two children that I will have to take care of.”

  Yet the birth was not so awful. It was as if something came free in her and though howling as the pain gripped and encircled her belly, she felt her body to be obeying some instinct older than her, older than her mother, older than time; she felt a freedom. The nurse coming at intervals, telling her to push, then
going off to tend to another woman in labor, alone with it and yet not alone, this tournament as it were between her and it and in the last ferocious half-hour her whole self seeming to be carried by it, then the great burst of water as the infant came hurtling into the world. A son, her son, their son, red and raw but sinuous as a wrestler and roaring its lungs out, a protest at being ejected into a cold, boundaryless world. His father chose its name and arranged for it to be circumcised. After the operation, two mornings later, it lay in its basket like a little snowman, a sheaf, pale, mute, chastened inside a white lace shawl and on a greeting card she wrote, “In the bag of your napkin a berry, fresh from the morning’s blood and your tippet raw from the morning’s knife.”

  She dressed him in new dresses and the pale blue matinee coats that her mother’s friends had sent her. Blue for a boy and pink for a girl. If she had another child it would be a girl, one of each, a little clan. At times he laughed and gurgled with a glee, then burped back the milk he had swallowed that was already solid and at other times there was a gravity to him, the little seer that knew, that comprehended, as though from the well of bygone memory. Then he was crawling, reaching for the gravel in the front drive, to put up his nose or pelt at the sight of strangers, whom he resented. Then he was talking. In his own world, in his own crib, gabbling away. The words myriad and full of fascination, sound and color, sense and non-sense, his smell so particular and so affectionate and the silk skin silkier than the sheerest flower. Her son and in some way her shield. His father too showered love on him, tossed him up in the air to catch him on the way down, his little arms the two branches going to her, going to his father, a candelabra bringing them together.

  Her next child came into the world differently, stole in, no big breach of the waters, just finding his way through. Enormous navy-blue eyes, drinking in his surroundings. She thought he would be a girl but he wasn’t, he was a boy, and his brother poured the bath of water that was on the bedside over him, saying nice babbie, nice babbie, while dispatching him to his end. In time they sparred. They sparred over the rocking horse and over the mashed blackberries and sugar that they loved, their hands and their mouths all purpled, two painted faces and two painted warriors. They enjoyed their battles but were also comrades. The day her elder son tripped over a hosepipe and split his forehead, her younger son attempting to mop the blood and called out geth the dhoctor, geth the dhoctor. He had a lisp.

  The peace that she and her husband had made was tenuous. He knew that she wrote and tucked it away in folders and between blotting paper so as not to be discovered. But he found it, made notes on it, sometimes quite caustic notes—“There is no such thing as a blue road,” he wrote with a red pen on one of the pages. He worked at night. A light in his window and a light in hers is what a traveler would chance on, two disparate lights signaling a divided house.

  * * *

  It was in his study, which had become his habitat; it was where he took his meals, listened to music, did his exercises with dumbbells that he had sent away for, and wrote as he said but always put those writings in a strongbox, lest she read them. The fire was lit and a stack of logs lay in a wheelbarrow that he had just wheeled in.

  The book he held was covered in the same ocher wallpaper as that in their bedroom. He read aloud and with conviction. The story concerned a man with fever, in the hold of a ship, visited by a woman and presently declaring his passion for her, saying that if she were but a savage maid and he a strong hunter, they could fly to the wilderness where there were great trees and bunchy grapes. Throwing protocol aside, the man confessed of a warm love to come, a life of blood and heart such as she had not had with her husband.

  He asked her what she thought of it. It was not for her.

  “Why was it not for her?”

  “It has no life,” she said awkwardly.

  “In what way?”

  “It’s too generalized … great trees and bunchy grapes … that’s not how…”

  “You mean that’s not Hans Castorp,” he snapped back.

  “I mean it’s not Hans Castorp,” she said, and with infinite meticulousness he removed the wallpaper and there on the dust jacket was his name in handsome lettering and a photograph of him as a much younger man, so earnest and studious, a young man filled with great and poetic endeavor and she looked from the photograph to him and back again, saying the same inept thing, “God help us … oh, God help us,” and he stood, not stirring, not moving a muscle as she tried to undo her mistake, the very attempt so cringing, so cretinous, his eyes seething with murderous grief.

  * * *

  Shadow and half-shadow as they walked between the line of trees, moonlight spilling down and slashes of it on the path, silvering the tree trunk and path where they walked and halted, each surprised to find the other abroad at so late an hour. She had gone out by the back kitchen door and he, as she reckoned, must have left by the door that led to the potting shed. Then passing on, as strangers might. If ever there was a moment for reconciliation it was there, it was then, the softness of the night, the trees in their spring vesture and the sighing of the leaves, not like winter’s brawl.

  She carried on up to the fence, climbed it, and looked beneath to where the sheep lay in their shifting slumbers, a stream from somewhere trilling happily along and seeming to say the same thing—Irrawaddy, Irrawaddy … Irrawaddy.

  Scene Five

  A LOVE AFFAIR.

  It happened that she had come across a small advertisement in the back pages of a magazine, in which readers were invited to apply for the job of reading manuscripts. To her surprise she was accepted and so began her working life, a connection to the outside world, the world of letters, through which she now sought deliverance.

  How she flung herself into her new endeavor, the excitement of opening the envelope, counting the pages, expecting the selfsame transports and mesmerization as she had found in the great Russian novels, intrigues, masked balls, thunderous skies, irresolute love, duels, but mostly they were tales of forlorn, lackluster lives not dissimilar to her own and as a consequence her reports were a little crisp, sometimes even condescending.

  Then one morning, enclosed with her check there was a short note from the managing director of the publishing house, saying that going through the warrens of his office and his endless dreary correspondence he had chanced on a few of her reports and what a breath of fresh air they were—a new sharp intelligence, nervous, feminine, strangely personal, and yet not afraid to get out the chisel. For two guineas a time she was giving the company more than their money’s worth and he simply had to thank her. She did not reply, sensing in it some attraction.

  He wrote again, said his curiosity was aroused as to who this person could be and before many months an intimacy had started up.

  It’s evening and I’ve come back to the office, all the corridors dark and deserted, tons of manuscripts, tons of torn-up paper and the stale smell of the scent of the secretaries. I drove down through a shower and then came out of Albany Street across a clean line drawn straight across the road where it had not rained at all. I stopped and got out to see what direction the wind was blowing in. It was coming from your country and I thought of the mist on the mountain, the clouds so big, so roaming, reluctant to cross the Irish Sea and come and hang over this great wide blotch of a city of London and hang over me. I thought of you, whom I have never met.

  So he had left home in order to go to his office to think of her, just as she went up into the woods with his letters to be alone with them. She kept telling herself it was all harmless, they could be Swift and Stella, corresponding on different sides of the Irish Sea. By writing to her he said he was finding relief from the ifs and buts and strains of editorial life, he was also asking for little glancing descriptions of her own life, not that he intended to pry.

  In one letter he wondered if she had ever written anything apart from her insightful reports and if so might he be allowed to read them. She sent some pieces, apologizing for the
rambling in them, yet his letter back was the transfusion she had been waiting for. Despite certain awkwardnesses he saw a new voice, a new slant, a girl revealing to him that the angels were on her side. Stories poured out of her, small things, bigger things, her father’s eczema that always came on after he had taken the pledge and the way it itched and crazed him, her mother squeezing oranges that they could not afford to humor him and giv- ing her the pulp with a sugar loaf in it to suck from; then that winter night when a man in a leather coat and leather gloves, possibly a doctor, came to their house to examine a neighbor, screams from the dining room, and next day the girl sent away and not heard of again. There was Drue, the workman, always asking her for a kiss, a birdie, but warning her not to tell. All this under her husband’s roof and without his knowing it, her friend meanwhile delighting in them. He would interlace his praises with talk of meetings and committees, describe the people who worked for him, a highly strung secretary, a voluble Scotsman reciting the poems of Iain Lom, who had fought with Montrose and thanked God that after the battle of Inverlochy that the plains and the hillside would be green and fertile in times to come because of the great enrichment they had from the bodies of the Campbells, left piled in the field.