Authors: Edna O'Brien
They got into bed in their underwear; Mary and Eithne at one end with Crystal’s feet between their faces.
‘You have lovely hair,’ Eithne whispered to Mary. It was the nicest thing she could think of to say. They each said their prayers, and shook hands under the covers and settled down to sleep.
‘Hey,’ Doris O’Beirne said a few seconds later, ‘I never went to the lav.’
‘You can’t go now,’ Eithne said, ‘the sideboard’s in front of the door.’
‘I’ll die if I don’t go,’ Doris O’Beirne said.
‘And me, too, after all that orange we drank,’ Crystal said. Mary was shocked that they could talk like that. At home you never spoke of such a thing, you just went out behind the hedge and that was that. Once a workman saw her squatting down and from that day she never talked to him, or acknowledged that she knew him.
‘Maybe we could use that old pot,’ Doris O’Beirne said, and Eithne Duggan sat up and said that if anyone used a pot in that room she wasn’t going to sleep there.
‘We have to use something,’ Doris said. By now she had got up and had switched on the light. She held the pot up to the naked bulb and saw what looked to be a hole in it.
‘Try it,’ Crystal said, giggling.
They heard feet on the landing and then the sound of choking and coughing, and later O’Toole cursing and swearing and hitting the wall with his fist. Mary curled down under the clothes, thankful for the company of the girls. They stopped talking.
‘I was at a party. Now I know what parties are like,’ Mary said to herself, as she tried to force herself asleep. She heard a sound as of water running, but it did not seem to be raining outside. Later, she dozed, but at daybreak she heard the hall door bang, and she sat up in bed abruptly. She had to be home early to milk, so she got up, took her shoes and her lace dress, and let herself out by dragging the sideboard forward, and opening the door slightly.
There were newspapers spread on the landing floor and in the lavatory, and a heavy smell pervaded. Downstairs, porter had flowed out of the bar into the hall. It was probably O’Toole who had turned on the taps of the five porter barrels, and the stone-floored bar and sunken passage outside was swimming with black porter. Mrs Rodgers would kill somebody. Mary put on her high-heeled shoes and picked her steps carefully across the room to the door. She left without even making a cup of tea.
She wheeled her bicycle down the alley and into the street. The front tyre was dead flat. She pumped for a half-an-hour but it remained flat.
The frost lay like a spell upon the street, upon the sleeping windows, and the slate roofs of the narrow houses. It had magically made the dunged street white and clean. She did not feel tired, but relieved to be out, and stunned by lack of sleep she inhaled the beauty of the morning. She walked briskly, sometimes looking back to see the track which her bicycle and her feet made on the white road.
Mrs Rodgers wakened at eight and stumbled out in her big nightgown from Brogan’s warm bed. She smelt disaster instantly and hurried downstairs to find the porter in the bar and the hall; then she ran to call the others.
‘Porter all over the place; every drop of drink in the house is on the floor – Mary Mother of God help me in my tribulation! Get up, get up.’ She rapped on their door and called the girls by name.
The girls rubbed their sleepy eyes, yawned, and sat up.
‘She’s gone,’ Eithne said, looking at the place on the pillow where Mary’s head had been.
‘Oh, a sneaky country one,’ Doris said, as she got into her taffeta dress and went down to see the flood. ‘If I have to clean that, in my good clothes, I’ll die,’ she said. But Mrs Rodgers had already brought brushes and pails and got to work. They opened the bar door and began to bail the porter into the street. Dogs came to lap it up, and Hickey, who had by then come down, stood and said what a crying shame it was, to waste all that drink. Outside it washed away an area of frost and revealed the dung of yesterday’s fair day. O’Toole the culprit had fled since the night; Long John Salmon was gone for his swim, and upstairs in bed Brogan snuggled down for a last-minute warm and deliberated on the joys that he would miss when he left the Commercial for good.
‘And where’s my lady with the lace dress?’ Hickey asked, recalling very little of Mary’s face, but distinctly remembering the sleeves of her black dress which dipped into the plates.
‘Sneaked off, before we were up,’ Doris said. They all agreed that Mary was no bloody use and should never have been asked.
‘And ’twas she set O’Toole mad, egging him on and then disappointing him,’ Doris said, and Mrs Rodgers swore that O’Toole, or Mary’s father, or someone, would pay dear for the wasted drink.
‘I suppose she’s home by now,’ Hickey said, as he rooted in his pocket for a butt. He had a new packet, but if he produced that they’d all be puffing away at his expense.
Mary was half-a-mile from home, sitting on a bank.
If only I had a sweetheart, something to hold on to; she thought, as she cracked some ice with her high heel and watched the crazy splintered pattern it made. The poor birds could get no food as the ground was frozen hard. Frost was general all over Ireland; frost like a weird blossom on the branches, on the river-bank from which Long John Salmon leaped in his great, hairy nakedness, on the ploughs left out all winter; frost on the stony fields, and on all the slime and ugliness of the world.
Walking again she wondered if and what she would tell her mother and her brothers about it, and if all parties were as bad. She was at the top of the hill now, and could see her own house, like a little white box at the end of the world, waiting to receive her.
E
VERYTHING WAS READY, THE
suitcase closed, her black velvet coat-collar carefully brushed, and a list pinned to the wall reminding her husband when to feed the hens and turkeys, and what foodstuffs to give them. She was setting out on a visit to her daughter Claire in London, just like any mother, except that
her
daughter was different: she’d lost her faith, and she mixed with queer people and wrote poems. If it was stories one could detect the sin in them, but these poems made no sense at all and therefore seemed more wicked. Her daughter had sent the money for the air-ticket. She was going now, kissing her husband goodbye, tender towards him in a way that she never was, throughout each day, as he spent his time looking through the window at the wet currant bushes, grumbling about the rain, but was in fact pleased at the excuse to hatch indoors, and asked for tea all the time, which he lapped from a saucer, because it was more pleasurable.
‘The turkeys are the most important,’ she said, kissing him good-bye, and thinking faraway to the following Christmas, to the turkeys she would sell, and the plumper ones she would give as gifts.
‘I hope you have a safe flight,’ he said. She’d never flown before.
‘All Irish planes are blessed, they never crash,’ she said, believing totally in the God that created her, sent her this venial husband, a largish farmhouse, hens, hardship, and one daughter who’d changed, become moody, and grown away from them completely.
The journey was pleasant once she’d got over the shock of being strapped down for the take-off. As they went higher and higher she looked out at the very white, wispish cloud and thought of the wash tub and hoped her husband would remember to change his shirt while she was away. The trip would have been perfect but that there was a screaming woman who had to be calmed down by the air hostess. She looked like a woman who was being sent to a mental institution, but did not know it.
Claire met her mother at the airport and they kissed warmly, not having seen each other for over a year.
‘Have you stones in it?’ Claire said, taking the fibre suitcase. It was doubly secured with a new piece of binding twine. Her mother wore a black straw hat with clusters of cherries on both sides of the brim.
‘You were great to meet me,’ the mother said.
‘Of course I’d meet you,’ Claire said, easing her mother right back on the taxi seat. It was a long ride, and they might as well be comfortable.
‘I could have navigated,’ the mother said, and Claire said nonsense a little too brusquely. Then to make amends she asked gently how the journey was.
‘Oh I must tell you, there was this very peculiar woman and she was screaming.’
Claire listened and stiffened, remembering her mother’s voice that became low and dramatic in a crisis, the same voice that said, ‘Sweet Lord your father will kill us’, or, ‘What’s to become of us, the bailiff is here’, or, ‘Look, look, the chimney is on fire.’
‘But otherwise?’ Claire said. This was a holiday, not an expedition into the past.
‘We had tea and sandwiches. I couldn’t eat mine, the bread was buttered.’
‘Still faddy?’ Claire said. Her mother got bilious if she touched butter, fish, olive oil, or eggs; although her daily diet was mutton stew, or home-cured bacon.
‘Anyhow, I have nice things for you,’ Claire said. She had bought in stocks of biscuits, jellies and preserves because these were the things her mother favoured, these foods that she herself found distasteful.
The first evening passed well enough. The mother unpacked the presents – a chicken, bread, eggs, a tapestry of a church spire which she’d done all winter, stitching at it until she was almost blind, a holy water font, ashtrays made from shells, lamps converted from bottles, and a picture of a matador assembled by sticking small varnished pebbles on to hardboard.
Claire laid them along the mantelshelf in the kitchen, and stood back, not so much to admire them as to see how incongruous they looked, piled together.
‘Thank you,’ she said to her mother, as tenderly as she might have when she was a child. These gifts touched her, especially the tapestry, although it was ugly. She thought of the winter nights and the Aladdin lamp smoking (they expected the electricity to be installed soon), and her mother hunched over her work, not even using a thimble to ease the needle through, because she believed in sacrifice, and her father turning to say, ‘Could I borrow your glasses, Mam, I want to have a look at the paper?’ He was too lazy to have his own eyes tested and believed that his wife’s glasses were just as good. She could picture them at the fire night after night, the turf flames green and fitful, the hens locked up, foxes prowling around in the wind, outside.
‘I’m glad you like it, I did it specially for you,’ the mother said gravely, and they both stood with tears in their eyes, savouring those seconds of tenderness, knowing that it would be short-lived.
‘You’ll stay seventeen days,’ Claire said, because that was the length an economy ticket allowed. She really meant, ‘Are you staying seventeen days?’
‘If it’s all right,’ her mother said over-humbly. ‘I don’t see you that often, and I miss you.’
Claire withdrew into the scullery to put on the kettle for her mother’s hot water bottle; she did not want any disclosures now, any declaration about how hard life had been and how near they’d been to death during many of the father’s drinking deliriums.
‘Your father sent you his love,’ her mother said, nettled because Claire had not asked how he was.
‘How is he?’
‘He’s great now, never touches a drop.’
Claire knew that if he had, he would have descended on her, the way he used to descend on her as a child when she was in the convent, or else she would have had a telegram, of clipped urgency, ‘Come home. Mother.’
‘It was God did it, curing him like that,’ the mother said.
Claire thought bitterly that God had taken too long to help the thin frustrated man who was emaciated, crazed and bankrupted by drink. But she said nothing, she merely filled the rubber bottle, pressed the air from it with her arm, and then conducted her mother upstairs to bed.
Next morning they went up to the centre of London and Claire presented her mother with fifty pounds. The woman got flushed and began to shake her head, the quick uncontrolled movements resembling those of a beast with the staggers.
‘You always had a good heart, too good,’ she said to her daughter, as her eyes beheld racks of coats, raincoats, skirts on spinning hangers, and all kinds and colours of hats.
‘Try some on,’ Claire said. ‘I have to make a phone call.’
There were guests due to visit her that night – it had been arranged weeks before – but as they were bohemian people, she could not see her mother suffering them, or them suffering her mother. There was the added complication that they were a ‘trio’ – one man and two women; his wife and his mistress. At that point in their lives the wife was noticeably pregnant.
On the telephone the mistress said they were looking forward, awfully, to the night, and Claire heard herself substantiate the invitation by saying she had simply rung up to remind them. She thought of asking another man to give a complexion of decency to the evening, but the only three unattached men she could think of had been lovers of hers and she could not call on them; it seemed pathetic.
‘Damn,’ she said, irritated by many things, but mainly by the fact that she was going through one of those bleak, loveless patches that come in everyone’s life, but, she imagined, came more frequently the older one got. She was twenty-eight. Soon she would be thirty. Withering.
‘How do?’ her mother said in a ridiculous voice when Claire returned. She was holding a hand mirror up to get a back view of a ridiculous hat, which she had tried on. It resembled the shiny straw she wore for her trip, except that it was more ornamental and cost ten guineas. That was the second point about it that Claire noted. The white price tag was hanging over the mother’s nose. Claire hated shopping the way other people might hate going to the dentist. For herself she never shopped. She merely saw things in windows, ascertained the size, and bought them.
‘Am I too old for it?’ the mother said. A loaded question in itself.
‘You’re not,’ Claire said. ‘You look well in it.’
‘Of course I’ve always loved hats,’ her mother said, as if admitting to some secret vice. Claire remembered drawers with felt hats laid into them, and bobbins on the brims of hats, and little aprons of veiling, with spots which, as a child, she thought might crawl over the wearer’s face.