The Light of Evening

by Edna O'Brien

  To think that just two months ago he did not know her and now while fighting off art editors, advertising managers, and production directors, he was searching for her handwriting, searching among the stacks of mail for her reports, her stories that brought him from stoical begrudgery, from the hard carapace of money and budgets to his true self. In one letter he said she reminded him of a certain day in his youth when he too had discovered literature, the way she was discovering it and perhaps, perhaps, in time they would meet and they would talk about it and much else. He could feel and respond to some inward pressure in her and wanted to save her from the harshness of the world because he knew the world had already taken its knife to her.

  He knew her husband’s name and her children’s names and would always conclude his letters with greetings to them. Then came the incriminating letter. He was on a business trip in New York and he described the evening before, going to a theater, going to dinner, then to a club, bushels of whiskey, then the dream of her that with the distance of an ocean gave him license to tell her that she had him by the hair of his head, for now, for then, forever. In the dream he saw her, the sun on the lake, or rather her husband’s lake, the leaves in their wood patterning the light, the blue distance and the blue her, opening her slender arms to life. She was wearing a blue dress, white knitted stockings, and black suede shoes, the wind stirring her hair. She had asked him in the dream which direction was uptown and which was downtown and they got on one of those jaunting cars and told the driver to take them to Central Park. There, a frozen reservoir came into sight, it lay in green and silver shimmeriness, like a dance pavilion under a whey-green moon, and at the instant of asking her to dance he wakened up.

  * * *

  Her dream did not correspond to his.

  When her husband announced that he was selling up and that they would move to London she could barely conceal her excitement. There began the flurry of departure, taking down curtains, rolling carpets, wrapping china and glasses, labeling the crates of books, almost too nervous to believe in it. In her dream life a white swan attached itself to her so that she was ferried to where she imagined to be London, standing on a bridge with its chain of lampposts, when a stranger, a robed man, held up card after card of ancient Hebrew lettering, telling her that she must discover the hidden meaning of the word. In another dream she was still in what she believed to be London, a fog-ridden milieu, a silver-gray motorcar, similar to the one her husband had, careening recklessly into a decrepit and shuttered dwelling.

  * * *

  Not Thackeray and not Dickens either. No high-ceilinged salons in which there lurked the trapped laughter of Lord Steyne and Becky Sharp and no Miss Flite with her twenty cages of birds and her daily pilgrimage to listen to the interminable wrangles at Chancery.

  Their house was in a suburb that looked out onto a common, dismal and misted, a sluggish bottle-green pond and on the wooden hoarding nailed to the bridge in blotched and fading lettering a list of the fish it had been stocked with. It was a semidetached house with mock Tudor windows and gabling, a small front garden with straggling rosebushes, identical to all the houses that ran either up or down the hill. There was a hatch in the small kitchen where dishes could be passed through, the linoleum, left by the previous owner, of black-and-white squares, which the children stamped on, asking plaintively when the family was going home.

  She did not hurry to meet her friend, fearing the outcome, and kept offering lame excuses about settling in and fetching children to and from their new school. Yet she would make tentative journeys in anticipation of it. In the bright evenings after the children had gone to bed she would walk a mile or so down to the main road where the bus to the station ran every twenty minutes. She read the timetable, imagined getting on the bus, getting off the bus and onto a train, getting out at Waterloo Station and onto an underground train and the noisy venue where he would be waiting. What would he make of her? What would she make of him? Sometimes on those aimless walks she saluted a neighbor, an elocution teacher who lived three doors down and had handed her a card in case her sons wished to take lessons. A Miss P. Trevelyan, a timid woman, her white ermine collar and white pigskin gloves testifying to better days, yet rhapsodic at recounting the names of two famous actors that she had helped onto the London stage.

  In the window of a newsagent there were handwritten signs, people looking for work, looking for love, looking for furniture, and one that struck her as being especially pitiful: “Widower wishes to dispose of recently deceased wife’s clothing, as good as new, call evening.”

  * * *

  At the supper table her husband would resort to doggerel or rhyme so that fife and strife rhymed with wife, wife who bribed children with sweets and toy guns to unseat father, to steal their love away from father so that he would be disliked and associated with duties such as taking their cod-liver oil, brushing their teeth, and doing their homework. Children were being sucked daily into the emotional incubator of mother, which rhymed with smother. The children were not deaf to these barbs but dealt with them in their childish ways, either laughing uncontrollably, making funny faces, or staring into the distance as if they had floated off. They asked the same riddles that they knew the answers of—“What bow can’t you tie—a rainbow, tee hee hee”—and when one answered precipitately the other threatened him with extinction: “My gang is bigger than your gang and will get you.” Her younger son read the essay he’d been given a gold-foil star for:

  I was playing in a small enclosed space surrounded with young apple trees that the boys were using as goalposts, they were blossoming into color and it seemed a pity to see them being continuously pummeled by the hard leather ball. For some reason I had a magnifying glass in my hand and a girl ran away with it and I chased after her, but by the time I got it back the lunch bell rang and I had to go in. The girl started to throw apples at me so I threw some back at her.

  His brother named the girl as Eustace and there followed the picturesque names of girls, who graced the playground like so many nascent ballerinas.

  * * *

  Puddle Dock. Blackfriars. Threadneedle. Throgmorton. Cripplegate. Cheapside. Camomile. Names redolent of the toil, the trades, and the hardships that had gone on. Ancient brick walls veined with ivy and smothered in weeds, elsewhere warm brick abutting onto stone and onto newer, blondish brick, a bustle so in contrast to the humdrum tedium of their suburb.

  Her friend recognized her at once, hale, welcoming, so lavish were his gestures that his arm succeeded in overturning plates of luncheon that a waitress was carrying with great caution. In those flustering moments as they met, Eleanora felt a little lurch, gone the mystery they had constructed around each other, she saw a man with a near-scraped mustache, amberish, his bearing so cavalier that he reminded her of those officers in Chekhov’s plays, full of romantic but unfulfillable longings.

  “At last. At last.” How could there have been a time when he did not know her—“Oh ye Gods, oh ye jealous prevaricating Gods.”

  They are in a booth all to themselves, a wooden panel between them and their neighbors, a vista of wooden kegs, wooden hammers, wooden baskets, and photographs of maidens blithe and barefooted who had harvested grapes in Kent. He pointed out to her the regulars, the man in a black beret who claimed to be Marc Chagall’s nephew and who would presently ask to do a portrait of her for a reasonable sum. A second man, who was a cadger with a flowing red beard, instantly tried his luck with her and as she shook her head called her a bog-trotting bitch. He had, as her friend told her, published a slim volume of verse twenty years previous and lived in a permanent state of poverty and bile.

  She didn’t dare talk of home life, instead she told how she had arrived very early and had gone to a small museum. There, from photographs and drawings in red-brown ink, she had learned that in A.D. fifty-one Emperor Claudius needed a victory and invaded England, brought elephants to frighten the Britons but lost thousands of his legionnaires in the marshes. Everything in t
hose times, she told him, was iron, the weapons, the spears, the catapults, even the pens and words, as she said, were carved with the sharp snout of an iron pen onto wooden tablets and what severe words they must have been. He looked at her with compassion and said, “We are not iron … far from it … we are we … and we are here.” Then he ordered a wine that was so expensive it had to be decanted, and while they waited he insisted that they each drink a dram of malt whiskey.

  Two dishes of steak-and-kidney pudding, with inverted eggcups to keep the pastry from sagging, lay in front of them untouched. The wine was fuzzing her. Cigarette smoke wreathed the room and gave to the reddish yeomen’s faces the gloom of the sepulcher.

  Out on the street they let taxi after taxi go by, each knowing there was something that needed to be said, but it was not said. She apologized for the fact that she would not be able to meet him often and it was decided that she would ring him from the sweetshop near her house the Monday of each week. He paid the taxi driver overgenerously, said to bring the lady to her doorstep because she was precious cargo indeed. She walked the last bit home to avoid the suspicion of her husband and she seemed to be levitating, the ground rising and falling under her feet, the common no longer a maze of gloom but a stage with wanderish blue footlights. The elation that she should have felt in his company she was feeling now, reliving every moment.

  His letter arrived a few mornings later, the postman handing it to her on her way back from having left her children at school. She stood by the bridge to read it, to revel in it:

  It was wonderful and it was hideous. You, whom all the great bards would depict, but oh, the awful pantomime of us not being able to talk to one another apart from yes and no and would it be the rib steak or the fish pie. Yet how close we became in that cramped corner with folks envying us our rapture. I did not want to let you go. You did not want to go. Back at my office I discovered I had taken the wrong coat and the wrong briefcase. So back to the restaurant. The owner of the coat was still boozing at the bar and remarked that his cashmere was much superior to mine, old chap. And my briefcase was in the charge of the nice waitress who remarked that she wasn’t surprised at my confusion as there were stars in my eyes. There were. The stars were the eyes of the girl sitting opposite me. So what do we do. Work work work—Thomas Carlyle’s recipe for melancholy. I have never met anyone so, so … but what’s the point … you know how I feel.

  They would come faithfully, though faithless, two, three, four letters a week, the amorous words, the utterances of his heart, as he put it, brimming over. She put them in an old lizard bag that hung on a peg in the hall behind a trench coat and yet when they were discovered she had to ask herself why had she been so careless, why had she not hidden them?

  It was close to Christmas and the stamp that she would never forget carried a picture of Santa Claus floundering in a snowstorm.

  The letter began “My living angel” and already she felt that catastrophe had struck. She read on:

  Your husband has written to me. It was delivered by hand and this hand shook as it read and re-read the contents, right down to the last cadence. Understandably he is very annoyed, says he will knock out the few remaining front teeth that I have left. It would appear that on our very first rendezvous you were followed to the restaurant, because he knew where we sat and the wines I had chosen. What a bitch life is. We get our happiness in inches and our despair in miles. It was blind and intemperate of me not to have foreseen. I am full of anguish for any harm I have done you and my gut is twisted into a knot when I think of the damage to your life at home. This must be set right. I shall write to him and tell him frankly what he knows already—that I am fond of you, good God who isn’t, that we corresponded and that I offered my services to you as an editor. We must learn to lock up our affections, to sit on it, to control it, to keep it from flaring into the open. It all happened too unexpectedly. We seem to have been on the very edge of a volcano, we shall always be in some sense on that edge but we must not fall into the crater. Sad myself, I writhe to think of your sadness and the shadow that has fallen over your family but that will be lifted. Write your novel. Do that for me. It shall be the bridge between us and I shall be a happy man because of it.

  * * *

  That evening she left it on her husband’s side plate as they sat down to dinner, thereby saying Confront me. It was rissoles, which were oversalted, and a cauliflower cheese that had got burned, the good enamel saucepan in the sink, soaking. The children, sensing a storm, felt emboldened enough to ridicule it and leave the table, going as they said to continue the list they were making for Christmas, both wanting a watch with stopwatch and a telescope to study stars and shooting stars from a balcony.

  Her husband did not look at her once, merely read the letter, then crossed to the fire grate and she followed.

  They stood as in a frieze. They watched wordless as the tiny show of petrol-blue flames veered over the steel bars of the grate. Then for an instant it flared and eddied as if he who had penned those words was voicing an objection, yet soon it petered out, a smear of ash, gray and silver-gray, like a bird dropping on the mossed branches of apple wood that the children had lugged in from the garden after the tree had fallen.

  Scene Six

  HER MOTHER had been promising to come. She missed seeing the children and their little letters were a fillip to her, but as she said she missed seeing the faces of the little princes.

  She came laden with gifts, cakes, jams, chutneys, Fair Isle sweaters in sea colors for the children, and cushion covers embroidered with Celtic motifs in the purple and indigo that served as the inks of old. Her husband was given a bottle of dry sherry that he did not unseal. It was put on the mantelpiece and in time different colored rubber bands hung from its neck.

  Her mother found London strange, not as friendly as Brooklyn and she missed the American twang, yet she loved the shops and for three days in a row they trudged up and down a busy and barbarous street, her mother debating on whether the gift that Eleanora insisted she have should be a fawn camelhair coat, which would be serviceable, or a gray astrakhan with a bulky collar, which was swankier.

  One evening they ate, just the two of them, in a restaurant so dimly lit that her mother said it was a pure Aladdin’s cave. She became youthful, expansive, and made no comment at the fact that her daughter drank a cocktail with a flower in it. She marveled at the decorative plates that were set down before the dinner plates, admiring the painted flowers, and claimed she felt reluctant to part with them. Likewise feeling the warm cloche that came with her spiced lamb, she said what a feature, what a feature, and then swapped recipes with the waiter, who could not understand a word she said, but who was courtesy incarnate. The Powder Room, as it was named, smelled of gardenia and she wondered if there was anyone they could ask what it had been sprayed with. In the taxi on the way home she deemed it the highlight of her life and yet she cut her visit short by several days, not long after. Everyone was most polite and plans were made for visits to and fro across the sea and just before leaving she handed Eleanora a bottle of holy water to sprinkle on the unbaptized children.

  Waving to her mother on the platform, Eleanora thought how much was left unsaid, how she had held her mother at a distance for the very simple reason that she feared she would break down completely if she confessed to how unhappy she was.

  Scene Seven

  THE LILAC in their garden and laburnum in the neighboring garden, tapers of pale purple and yellow, quietly, unostentatiously, bobbing away. Mrs. Humphries, her next-door neighbor, called over the fence to ask if they might have a word. Eleanora went, fearing that the children’s ball had been kicked over yet again and had done damage to her borders of pink and orange begonias. But instead it was a friendly encounter. Mrs. Humphries had a surprise. There it was tucked into a circular marbled hatbox, a hairpiece of reddish gold, so lifelike that there might have been a little skull resting beneath it, Mrs. Humphries’ own narrow skull. Her crowning glory th
at her husband had adored so much and when against his will she had it cut off, he insisted that it be made into a copious wig so that he could continue to gaze on it. It was quite a cynosure at the annual Christmas dinner when other wives flaunted their gowns and their jewelry, she with her crowning glory and now seeing it in the lambent evening light Mrs. Humphries ruminated on how it brought it all back for her, memories flooding in, her girlhood in north Yorkshire, making her way to London, finding service as a chambermaid in a hotel in Marble Arch, the good fortune at meeting Hubert, who came twice monthly from a vintners in St. James’s to take the wine orders, and there in a passage he had met her, his Durham lass. He called her lark and she called him lark. Their first train journey to meet her parents, their jitters, their first kiss on the return journey as the train stalled and eeled its way into Liverpool Street, the engagement ring that though small was priceless, the wedding plans, the dither, the expenses alleviated somewhat because Mr. Humphries was allowed to bring his own wine, except that the grasping hotelier charged a fee for the corkage. Their honeymoon in Bognor Regis, her hair crinkling after a shower of rain and she ironing it and Mr. Humphries enchanted by her ironing her long head of hair on a bureau and he wishing to God that he was an artist with easel and brush.

  Eleanora had to be coaxed to touch it and more than once she felt bound to repeat how lovely it looked, how vibrant. In her thoughtful hours Mrs. Humphries had come to a decision: Brenda, as the piece was called, bore a resemblance to Eleanora’s hair, had the same glints and therefore was asking to be appropriated. Eleanora must have her but on no account must she come into the hands of children to malarkey with. Brenda must be kept in her box, her flat strands fluffed up from time to time with a hairpin and when worn Brenda had to be fitted snug, secured to the natural hair or else she would sally off in a gust of wind. Eleanora kept hesitating. Mrs. Humphries was adamant. Brenda would once more take her place amid a galaxy of glittering guests, which Mrs. Humphries assumed to be the pattern of Eleanora’s social life.