Authors: Edna O'Brien
The instructor let go of the rope. She panicked and stopped using her arms and legs. The water was rising up over her. The water was in complete control of her. She knew that she was screaming convulsively. He had to jump in clothes and all. Afterwards they sat in the linen room with a blanket each and drank brandy. They vouched to tell no one. The brandy went straight to his head. He said in England it would be raining and people would be queueing for buses and his eyes twinkled because of his own good fate.
More than one guest was called Teddy. One of the Teddies told her that in the mornings before his wife wakened he read Proust in the dressing-room. It enabled him to masturbate. It was no more than if he had told her he missed bacon for breakfast. For breakfast there was fruit and scrambled egg. Bacon was a rarity on the island. She said to the older children that the plastic duck was psychic and had squeaked. They laughed. Their laughing was real but they kept it up long after the joke had expired. A girl said, ‘Shall I tell you a rude story?’ The boys appeared to want to restrain her. The girl said, ‘Once upon a time there was a lady and a blind man came to her door every evening for sixpence and one day she was in the bath and the doorbell rang and she put on a gown and came down and it was the milkman, and she got back in the bath and the doorbell rang and it was the breadman and at six o’clock the doorbell rang and she thought I don’t have to put on my gown it is the blind man and when she opened the door the blind man said. “Madam, I’ve come to tell you I got my sight back.” ’ And the laughter that had never really died down started up again and the whole mountain was boisterous with it. No insect, no singing bird was heard on that walk. She had to watch the time. The children’s evening meal was earlier. They ate on the back veranda and she often went there and stole a sardine or a piece of bread so as to avoid getting too drunk before dinner. There was no telling how late dinner would be. It depended on him, on whether he was bored or not. Extra guests from neighbouring houses came each evening for drinks. They added variety. The talk was about sailing and speeding, or about gardens, or about pools. They all seemed to be intrigued by these topics, even the women. One man who followed the snow knew where the best snow surfaces were for every week of every year. That subject did not bore her as much. At least the snow was nice to think about, crisp and blue like he said, and rasping under the skis. The children could often be heard shrieking but after cocktail hour they never appeared. She believed that it would be better once they were married and had children. She would be instated by courtesy of them. It was a swindle really, the fact that small creatures, ridiculously easy to beget, should solidify a relationship, but they would. Everyone hinted how he wanted a son. He was nearing sixty. She had stopped using contraceptives and he had stopped asking. Perhaps that was his way of deciding, of finally accepting her.
Gull’s eggs, already shelled, were brought to table. The yolks a very delicate yellow. ‘Where are the shells?’ the fat lady, veiled in crepe, asked. The shells had to be brought. They were crumbled almost to a powder but were brought anyhow. ‘Where are the nests?’ she asked. It missed. It was something they might have laughed at, had they heard, but a wind had risen and they were all getting up and carrying things indoors. The wind was working up to something. It whipped the geranium flowers from their leaves and crazed the candle flames so that they blew this way and that and cracked the glass sconces. That night their love-making had all the sweetness and all the release that earth must feel with the long-awaited rain. He was another man now, with another voice – loving and private and incantatory. His coldness, his dismissal of her hard to believe in. Perhaps if they quarrelled, their quarrels, like their love-making, would bring them closer. But they never did. He said he’d never had a quarrel with any of his women. She gathered that he left his wives once it got to that point. He did not say so, but she felt that must have been so, because he had once said that all his marriages were happy. He said there had been fights with men but that these were decent. He had more rapport with men; with women he was charming but it was a charm devised to keep them at bay. He had no brothers, and no son. He had had a father who bullied him and held his inheritance back for longer than he should. This she got from one of the men who had known him for forty years. His father had caused him to suffer, badly. She did not know in what way and she was unable to ask him because it was information she should never have been given a hint of.
After their trip to the Roman caves the children came home ravenous. One child objected because the meal was cold. The servant, sensing a certain levity, told her master and the story sent shrieks of laughter around the lunch table. It was repeated many times. He called to ask if she had heard. He sometimes singled her out in that way. It was one of the few times the guests could glimpse the bond between them. Yes, she had heard. ‘Sweet, sweet,’ she said. The word occurred in her repertoire all the time now. She was learning their language. And fawning. Far from home, from where the cattle grazed. The cattle had fields to roam, and a water tank near the house. The earth around the water tank always churned up, always mucky from their trampling there. They were farming people, had their main meal in the middle of the day, had rows. Her father vanished one night after supper, said he was going to count the cattle, brought a flashlamp, never came back. Others sympathized, but she and her mother were secretly relieved. Maybe he drowned himself in one of the many bog lakes, or changed his name and went to a city. At any rate he did not hang himself from a tree or do anything ridiculous like that.
She lay on her back as the instructor brought her across the pool, his hand under her spine. The sky above an innocent blightless blue with streamers where the jets had passed over. She let her head go right back. She thought, If I were to give myself to it totally, it would be a pleasure and an achievement, but she couldn’t.
Argoroba hung from the trees like blackened banana skins. The men picked them in the early morning and packed them in sacks for winter fodder. In the barn where these sacks were stored there was a smell of decay. And an old olive press. In the linen room next door a pleasant smell of linen. The servants used too much bleach. Clothes lost their sharpness of colour after one wash. She used to sit in one or other of these rooms and read. She went to the library for a book. He was in one of the Regency chairs that was covered with ticking. As on a throne. One chair was real and one a copy but she could never tell them apart. ‘I saw you yesterday, and you nearly went under,’ he said. ‘I still have several lessons to go,’ she said, and went as she intended, but without the book that she had come to fetch.
His daughter by his third marriage had an eighteen-inch waist. On her first evening she wore a white trouser suit. She held the legs out and the small pleats when opened were like a concertina. At table she sat next to her father and gazed at him with appropriate awe. He told a story of a dangerous leopard hunt. They had lobster as a special treat. The lobster tails, curving from one place setting to the next, reached far more cordially than the conversation. She tried to remember something she had read that day. She found that by memorizing things she could amuse them at table.
‘The gorilla resorts to eating, drinking or scratching to by-pass anxiety,’ she said later. They all laughed.
‘You don’t say,’ he said, with a sneer. It occurred to her that if she were to become too confident he would not want that either. Or else he had said it to reassure his daughter.
There were moments when she felt confident. She knew in her mind the movements she was required to make in order to pass through the water. She could not do them but she knew what she was supposed to do. She worked her hands under the table, trying to make deeper and deeper forays into the atmosphere. No one caught her at it. The word plankton would not leave go of her. She saw dense masses of it, green and serpentine, enfeebling her fingers. She could almost taste it.
His last wife had stitched a backgammon board in green and red. Very beautiful it was. The fat woman played with him after dinner. They carried on the game from one evening to the next. They played very contentedly. The woman wore a different arrangement of rings at each sitting and he never failed to admire, and compliment her on them. To those not endowed with beauty he was particularly charming.
Her curling tongs fused the entire electricity system. People rushed out of their bedrooms to know what had happened. He did not show his anger but she felt it. Next morning they had to send a telegram to summon an electrician. In the telegram office two men sat, one folding the blue pieces of paper, one applying gum with a narrow brush and laying thin borders of white over the blue and pressing down with his hands. On the white strips the name and address had already been printed. The motor-cycle was indoors, to protect the tyres from the sun, or in case it might be stolen. The men took turns when a telegram had to be delivered. She saved one or other of them a journey because a telegram from a departed guest arrived while she was waiting. It simply said ‘Thanks, Harry.’ Guests invariably forgot something and in their thank-you letters mentioned what they had forgotten. She presumed that some of the hats stacked into one another and laid on the stone ledge were hats forgotten or thrown away. She had grown quite attached to a green one that had lost its ribbons.
The instructor asked to be brought to the souvenir shop. He bought a glass ornament and a collar for his dog. On the way back a man at the petrol station gave one of the children a bird. They put it in the chapel. Made a nest for it. The servant threw it nest and all into the wastepaper basket. That night at supper the talk was of nothing else. He remembered his fish story and he told it to the new people who had come, how one morning he had to abandon his harpoon because the lines got tangled, and next day, when he went back, he found that the shark had retreated into the cave and had two great lumps of rock in his mouth, where obviously he had bitten to free himself. That incident had a profound effect on him.
‘Is the boat named after your mother?’ she asked of his daughter. Her mother’s name was Beth and the boat was called
Miss Beth.
‘He never said,’ the daughter replied. She always disappeared after lunch. It must have been to accommodate them. Despite the heat they made a point of going to his room. And made a point of inventiveness. She tried a strong green stalk, to excite him, marvelling at it, comparing him and it. He watched. He could not endure such competition. With her head upside down and close to the tiled floor she saw all the oils and ointments on his bathroom ledge and tried reading their labels backwards. Do I like all this love-making? she asked herself. She had to admit that possibly she did not, that it went on too long, that it was involvement she sought, involvement and threat.
They swapped dreams. It was her idea. He was first. Everyone was careful to humour him. He said in a dream a dog was lost and his grief was great. He seemed to want to say more but didn’t, or couldn’t. Repeated the same thing in fact. When it came to her turn she told a different dream from the one she had meant to tell. A short, uninvolved little dream.
In the night she heard a guest sob. In the morning the same guest wore a flame dressing-gown and praised the marmalade which she ate sparingly.
She asked for the number of lessons to be increased. She had three a day and she did not go on the boat with the others. Between lessons she would walk along the shore. The pine trunks were white as if a lathe had been put to them. The winds of winter the lathe. In winter they would move; to catch up with friends, business meetings, art exhibitions, to buy presents, to shop. He hated suitcases, he liked clothes to be waiting wherever he went, and they were. She saw a wardrobe with his winter clothes neatly stacked, she saw his frieze cloak with the black astrakhan collar and she experienced such a longing for that impossible season, that impossible city, and his bulk inside the cloak as they set out in the cold to go to a theatre. Walking along the shore she did the swimming movements in her head. It had got into all her thinking. Invaded her dreams. Atrocious dreams about her mother, father, and one where lion cubs surrounded her as she lay on a hammock. The cubs were waiting to pounce the second she moved. The hammock of course was unsteady. Each time she wakened from one of those dreams she felt certain that her cries were the repeated cries of infancy, and it was then she helped herself to the figs she had brought up. He put a handkerchief, folded like a letter, before her plate at table. On opening she found some sprays of fresh mint, wide-leafed and cold. He had obviously put it in the refrigerator first. She smelt it and passed it round. Then on impulse she got up to kiss him and on her journey back nearly bumped into the servant with a tureen of soup, so excited was she.
Her instructor was her friend. ‘We’re winning, we’re winning,’ he said. He walked from dawn onwards, walked the hills and saw the earth with dew on it. He wore a handkerchief on his head that he knotted over the ears, but as he approached the’ house he removed this head-dress. She met him on one of these morning walks. As it got nearer the time she could neither sleep nor make love. ‘We’re winning, we’re winning.’ He always said it no matter where they met.
They set out to buy finger bowls. In the glass factory there were thin boys with very white skin who secured pieces of glass with pokers and thrust them into the stoves. The whole place smelt of wood. There was chopped wood in piles, in corners. Circular holes were cut along the top of the wall between the square grated windows. The roof was high and yet the place was a furnace. Five kittens with tails like rats lay bunched immobile in a heap. A boy, having washed himself in one of the available buckets of water, took the kittens one by one and dipped them in. She took it to be an act of kindness. Later he bore a hot blue bubble at the end of a poker and laid it before her. As the flame subsided it became mauve, and as it cooled more it was almost colourless. It had the shape of a sea serpent and an unnaturally long tail. Its colour and its finished appearance was an accident, but the gift was clearly intentioned. There was nothing she could do but smile. As they were leaving she saw him wait, near the motor-car, and as she got in, she waved, wanly. That night they had asparagus which is why they went to the trouble to get finger bowls. These were blue with small bubbles throughout, and though the bubbles may have been a defect, they gave to the thick glass an illusion of frost.