The Light of Evening

by Edna O'Brien

  Ere long, he began to send the Portia “fair speechless messages.” Then the maitre d’, to my surprise, came over and with a courtesy that had not hitherto been evident, asked, “Would madam wish for a glass of red wine?” Madam drank white wine. The gentleman bowed by way of consent. Rhone, Rhine, or Loire? Either. Something with a nose in it perhaps? Yes, something with a nose in it. A bottle arrived in a pewter ice bucket, beaded with dew, and he made much of offering me the cork to smell. A glass of red wine and a glass of white wine raised in mutual salutation. Salute. Sante. Skol. Cheers. Slainte. The west’s awake, the west’s asleep, and down the hatch.

  Presently and with an alacrity, monsieur’s plate, cutlery, and glassware are plonked down at my table, he himself bowing obsequiously, charmed at the ease and glide of it all. He was a coffee maestro, went into raptures about coffee beans, their nuttiness, their taste, their aroma, their aftertaste, their after-aromas, the different soils they throve in. He was from Turin. Was the Turin shroud, which was said to be placed over the face of the crucified Christ and bore his image, authentic or a hoax. Who knows, Bellissima! It was not a topic to his liking. The wines, coffees, and cuisines of the regions in which he traveled were his forte. Studied human nature and female beauty from the vantage of many a dining room.

  He ate heartily, jambon with artichoke, duck à l’orange, and then announced exuberantly his craving for zuppe Inglese. The waiter was uncomprehending, then scornful, holding up the carte where there was soufflé, crepe au poivre, or tarte citron. No no. The coffee maestro must have his zuppe Inglese. A contretemps. “A little joke, monsieur, a traveler’s joke.”

  Afterward a digestiva and a night stroll. A very select street, high shuttered windows, the shutters swinging open, the dwellers walking their small dogs, the last word in respectability. Back in the lobby a courteous goodnight as he betook himself to a bar in the cellar, no doubt to order a liqueur, having done the gallant with Bellissima.

  The unfinished bottle of wine had been sent up to my bedroom. It lay there, wobbling in the ice bucket, and my sky-blue nightgown was draped decorously across the largest, fattest white bolster I have ever seen. There were two doors to the bedroom, an outer door padded with red leather and studded with red buttons, then a second door that led to the inner sanctum and guaranteed silence.

  Tap-tap-tap. There was even a little miniature knocker on the outer door. He had changed into a blazer, stood with a certain braggart air, his eyes keen but slightly contemptuous as though to say, “I always know when a woman wants to get laid.” Without any demur he leaned in and switched out the bedroom light, confining us to a dark and speechless confessional, the unfamiliar mouth, the unfamiliar cock, the unfamiliar cunt, the lunging thrusts, swift and loveless and sinuous, in which nothing was allowed in, not even you, Mother.

  * * *

  The woman doctor I consulted was less of a wall than the two ponderous gentlemen. Bertha was her name. Her eyes were soft and dark as sloes and the fact that she was Eastern held out even greater promise. I thought that she, or maybe another, could reach in and pull out all the tribulation and the mountainous bile. These thoughts often became fanciful and I pictured different methods, many surgical, then recalled my mother putting wire down the throttles of young chickens to cure them of their pip. She would cure me of my pip, I thought.

  I would arrive early and walk up and down her wide, windswept street. I say windswept because there was always building work and hence rubbish and grit flying about, along with loose bolts from the scaffolding that were a hazard. They were white stucco houses, several stories high, with basements, one of which was her consulting room, number forty-eight.

  I would keep my eyes on her door—it was a black door with a knocker that jammed—and wait for the patient preceding me to be helped out. She was a younger woman in a wheelchair and a chauffeur came to collect her just minutes before she was due out, then carry her up the steps. There was something so poignant about this young woman being carried up those steps, making sure always to smile, and then as he went back to get the wheelchair she looked out the car window, gazing and forlorn.

  After me there was a man, tall, owl-like, with owlish eyes and metallic gray hair, shoulder-length, which I reckoned was a wig.

  One day the Owl man was there ahead of me and, to my consternation, as soon as the chauffeur arrived and descended the rickety stairs, he followed and stationed himself in the doorway. He spoke to Bertha after the chauffeur and the young woman had gone and in those moments I became frantic at the prospect of losing my precious appointment. She was nodding, listening, as he was obviously giving her a cock-and-bull story about having to catch a train or an airplane and she was falling for it. She saw me, saw my importuning, and presently he was coming back up the steps, muttering and with a galled expression.

  Months later I did something extreme. I rang Bertha up one evening, invited her over, implying that it was important.

  She came, muffled up. What a thrill it was, what a clandestine thrill it was to see her remove her garments and throw them off one by one, her scarf, her hat, her coat, and her black kid gloves with their zillions of little wrinkles. She crossed from the land of wide streets to the narrow street where I live, rows of Victorian cottages that adjoin or face each other but remain secretive, in one a window box with a few geraniums that survive the frosts, another with a dusty paisley curtain up against the window and wisteria on the double-fronted house, twice blooming, the trunk in winter pared back to the bone, bony and with a sallow thinness.

  She was glowing. The fur collar around her throat brought to my mind a painting Rubens did of his second wife, who though clad in white ermine seemed stark naked. Bertha had taken trouble with her makeup, kohl under the eyes and the amethyst choker deepened the dark pools of her eyes.

  We ate and drank and lolled, sat on big cushions by the fire, she so plump and languorous and confiding, telling tales of a childhood in Alexandria, a rocking horse with jade stones for eyes, orchards of pomegranates that when ripe she and her sister would trample on, visiting uncles, all of whom had a thing for her and she knew even then just how much rein to give them, then the dancing in the evening in the drawing room, parents and children and guests and cousins, dancing to an orchestra that had been summoned from the city. The fact that I had not danced was of no consequence to her. She said I would find such a freedom in it and even, perhaps, such pleasure. There we were dancing, my doctor Bertha and me. Her womanly arms soft but firm as junket, the musk smell of her perfume new, dancing as though in the fields of youth, the steps as wild and as fluid as she decreed them, in and out of the various downstairs rooms, rooms that had been crying out for a bit of life and thence into the garden, regardless of the season, where, in the aftermath of a shower of rain, the air was damp and refreshing.

  Soon as she got her breath back she broached it, but very tentatively. I had said on the phone that her coming to see me was important. How could I tell her that it was, but now that it was not. How could I tell her that for the twenty-eight years since I first read it as a young wife, I had clung to the fable of the Steppenwolf, believing that his redemption would also become mine. I had thought and thought of Harry Haller as he chanced on the black sheen of wet asphalt in an unfamiliar quarter of the old town, chanced upon fallen lettering that when pieced together read “Magic Theater for Madmen Only.” Going inside he encountered Hermine, the mysterious hermaphrodite who taught him the tango and many of life’s sweet poisons. But sitting there with her, I knew that Harry Haller’s magic theater was not our magic theater, no more than Proust’s hawthorns in all their pink and tender effulgence could be our hawthorns, my mother’s and mine, our hawthorns and our selves belonging off there in that sacral and saturate place and just as dearly as I had longed for her to come, I now longed for her to be gone, so that I could allow in the wolf of loneliness, at last.

  * * *

  Human begetting raw raw raw. A scorching day, the smell of the elderflower si
ckly, sickening. I was inside of you. Being banished. Wave after wave of it, hour after hour. Your blood, your bloodshed, and my last stab at living. Between us, that blood feud, blood knot, blood memory. How can I know? I don’t know. I do know. It’s what we know before the words that is known. At the end of your tether, alone, alone as only the dying are. Except that it did not turn out as you had planned. So little does. I picture you walking back, the heaving desolation, blood running down your thighs, down your legs, jellied blobs of it, and the drops here and there spangling the dry grass. Your Gethsemane. Oh Father, oh Mother, forgive us, for we know not what we do.

  Part VII

  Dilly

  DILLY IS SITTING UP, her bed made, partly dressed for a journey, her face pale and drawn, dark shadows under her eyes, and a hunted look.

  All she needs is her coat, hat, and shoes to be brought from the cloakroom. It is only a matter of a day; she will have returned before nightfall. These are her words that she repeats again and again, fearing she will be thwarted. The young nurse puzzles, thinks it ought to be okayed with someone higher up, whereupon Dilly asks to see Sister Consolata, only to learn that Sister had to fill in on a two-day retreat for a nun that got mumps.

  “I’m my own boss anyhow,” she says then quite commandingly and asks for her garments and the walking stick that Sister Consolata had put aside for her husband.

  “Is it a funeral?” the little nurse asks kindly.

  “Listen here … do you know anyone who could drive me?”

  “I know one man … Bronco … he’ll get you there and back but he’s a terror on the road … umpteen crashes…”

  “Like a good girl would you ring him for me … just do it on your own bat,” Dilly says, then foolishly and contrary to her resolution she tells how she is going home to see her solicitor, to change her will, because as things stand, it could only lead to trouble. She delves in her purse for the coins for the pay phone, the little nurse refusing them, saying she can use the office phone as there’s no one on duty yet.

  “Are you sure you’re strong enough to go, missus?”

  “It’s a flying visit.”

  She drinks the tea without tasting it, eats the toast without tasting, without chewing, her mind like that hold-all in the pantry where things were flung, sharp knives, scissors, razorblades, implements.

  “Making our escape, are we?” Nurse Flaherty says, materializing, in a raincoat and plastic bonnet, obviously having been informed of this defection.

  “I’ll be up and down in a matter of hours,” Dilly says, determined not to be ruffled.

  “I won’t allow it.”

  “You can’t stop it.”

  “My good woman, if anything happened to you on that journey we’d be responsible, it’s us who’d take the rap … so get back into that bed and I want no argument.”

  For an instant they face each other, sworn enemies, but Dilly is determined to be unflinching.

  Seeing the little nurse return with her clothes and the walking stick, she asks as calmly as she can, “Did you get Bronco?”

  “I got his wife … he’s out on a run … we’re to ring back.”

  “Who gave you leave to ring Bronco?” Nurse Flaherty asks her.

  “No one,” the little nurse replies, cowering, waiting to be thumped.

  “Take off that hat and coat, Mrs. Macready, and you’ll be brought your breakfast,” the nurse says and hearing that she has already had a breakfast, she is told that she can’t bolt it anyhow until the consultant comes on and that won’t be for at least an hour.

  As she goes, vehemently shaking the rain from the plastic bonnet, Dilly reads menace in the cut of her back.

  * * *

  Dilly sits in the outside porch by the front door, gathered into herself, not looking at those who come and go, her hands fingering her rosary beads, just willing Buss to hurry, imagining that by now he must be more than halfway, it being well over an hour since she rang and implored his sister to ask him to come posthaste. The porter, with a croak in his voice, keeps coming in and out of his booth to tell her she is in a draft, urging her into the inner hall because the March wind is bitter.

  “I’m fine here … I’m fine here,” she says and pulls her collar that bit higher so as to be inconspicuous.

  Her husband will think she had been discharged, will welcome it, back to their routines, the blended soup, tomato or mulligatawny, the fire laid each morning but not lighted until six, their routines, their hard-won harmony. He may even bridle at the thought of being brought off to a solicitor, but she will remind him of being dragged for that crooked outing, afternoon tea in a deluxe hotel, a big reception hall with a black papier- mâché dog, its orange-rimmed eyes, and a card that read “Collection for the Blind,” the drawing room so opulent, loveseats, armchairs, china shepherdesses along the mantelpiece, painted water lilies on the glass firescreen, a roaring fire, a picture window that looked onto a millstream, the big mill wheel stationary, tea for four, the white and the brown sugar cubes mixed into the one bowl, scones with jams and clotted cream and then the bombshell, Terence asking them did they love him as a son and if so would they show it, prove it by willing Rusheen and all its lands to Cindy and him. What with the strangeness, the grandeur, and the bluntness, they put up no fight at all, just acquiesced in it, he presently announcing that he had made an appointment with J. M. Brady & Co., the well-known solicitors.

  * * *

  When she sees her son come up the steps, flushed and agitated, she knows there has been foul play. She knows by the rage in him, the way he swoops through the swing door, not allowing an elderly woman to pass, his overcoat unbuttoned, and she smarts at the sarcasm in his voice, “Well, ma’am, I hear that you were thinking of creeping out on us.”

  “I want to see the homestead … to walk round it … it’s a small thing to ask at my time of life.”

  “Nothing crookeder,” he says, refixing his rimless glasses to see her all the clearer.

  “Nothing crookeder,” she answers.

  “So why does it have to be so sly, so underhand?” he asks.

  “I’m sick, Terence … make no scene here…” and as she says it she sees the expression on his face, savage and infantile, her own son, her once-upon-a-time white-haired boy, ready to strike her dead.

  “Don’t strike me, Terence … not here,” she says and as if by prompt, Nurse Flaherty appears waving a thermometer and a plaid car rug, a soul of solicitude, saying how the little daft nurse had forgotten to take her temperature, something that is a must before any patient is allowed out.

  Silenced, cowed, she is made to sit on a chair, the glass pipette in her mouth, unable to speak, hearing them expound on the unwiseness, nay the madness of her decision as her eyes cast around for the sight of Buss. Her temperature is slightly up as Sister Flaherty says, but her pulse is racing, in fact, like a dynamo and they each take her arm and she is conducted into the inner hall with the heave of the defeated. She does not struggle, she has lost her battle, listening in disgust to their false concerns about bad roads, rotten roads, trees down everywhere, a freezing vehicle, and the likelihood of her catching a cold that would undoubtedly go down to her chest.

  They have reached the bottom of the staircase when she turns and sees Buss come through the door, doffing his cap as if he is entering chapel, and springing backward, she runs toward him with a surge, saying his name, her hat falling off and with it the two tortoiseshell side combs, her hair wild, disheveled, when she staggers, then stumbles, Buss’s big slow hands and arms opening but failing to save her from crashing onto the hard, vast archipelago of colored tiles.

  Bells, nurses running, two men in white coats, like two butchers to her stunned eyes, being lifted onto a wheelchair, and Nolan, as from nowhere, shouting, “What’s happening to the missus?”

  * * *

  It is Nolan’s hand Dilly reaches for, not theirs. It is Nolan to whom she whispers to keep them away, and it is Nolan who hears her last baleful utt
erances, again and again: “It’s beyond the beyond the beyond now.”

  Moss

  THERE WERE TWO MEN, an old man and a young man. A few stars still in the sky but pale and milky as stars are in the early hours before they slip away.

  Ned, the young man, garrulous as if he were drunk, which he wasn’t.

  Climbing the mountain road, a godforsaken stretch, the odd carcass of a dead animal, ruts and runnels, and in the fields of richly bronzed bracken a few scutty Christmas trees that never flourished.

  They park the van by the television mast, a steel god looking down on the valley below, the cable around it juddering in the wind, the threads and messages within, passing unheard, and then a tramp over toughened heather terrain until they arrive at the boundary wall and climb it. Already feeling like felons.

  Flossie knows the owner and has gone there on the quiet umpteen times to shoot woodcock and even once shot a wild turkey, which Jimmy said had come all the way from the Appalachians. Flossie was an apprentice then and Jimmy was boss. Going together, because the loveliest and most luxuriant mosses throve in that wood, so many varieties, the oak moss, the brook moss, the stair-step moss, and the green-gold moss that has no equal for color, not in any curtain, not in any carpet, not in any mountain range.

  The owner, a bachelor, the last of his tribe, living alone, confining himself to kitchen, scullery, and pantry quarters, holy pictures on every wall, walls covered with Sacred Hearts and a medley of saints, a mammy’s boy who never married and who keeps a shotgun in case of trespassers, but loves his trees, loves his woodland, and honors a covenant set down by his great-uncle, which was that no tree should ever be wantonly cut down.