SEVEN
Some days later I visit the O’Haras. In another country I would take flowers, but here it might be misconstrued. Propriety rules. Instead I take books as a gift. Goethe’s
Elective Affinities
and Fontane’s
Effi Briest
. Though I do not know Olivia O’Hara well, I feel an affinity and a sympathy towards her. Nothing more. And since she has been wounded, doubly wounded, I wish to warn her of other dangers.
It is Sunday and the previous day I had asked Mr. O’Hara if a visit was acceptable. Reluctantly he’d agreed. Perhaps he believed I would talk about the gate. He was wrong.
Their house is long and low. It is a bungalow, but one built about fifty years ago and has a charm that is altogether lacking in the new concrete prairie buildings now scattered through the fields of Ireland. What Harriet refers to as bungalow hell. I stand outside this unlucky house, as its owner calls it, press the bell and to my surprise Olivia O’Hara opens the door.
“Hello Mr. Middlehoff Don’t look surprised: I’m fine now. I hobble a bit but Dada tells me it looks romantic. Come in. We’re in here.”
I follow her into their sitting room. It is large and dark. Heavy red velvet curtains obscure daylight and the silence I noted when I entered the hall permeates this room also, like a curtain one dare not draw. I stand awkwardly, waiting for a way into what I know is the formless darkness in which they move and from which I now understand I cannot escape for some time. I regret considerably that I did not post my books to Olivia O’Hara. Indeed, as I survey the scene I regret knowing them at all.
“Mama, Mr. Middlehoff is here.”
“Mrs. O’Hara.”
She is sitting quite upright in a large armchair. She is composed. She is dressed in a black skirt and a black high-buttoned cardigan. When she looks at me her face is drained of expression. True nothingness. True grief. Tom O’Hara follows me into their sitting room and with him comes a feeling of a sudden normality.
“Now, Mr. Middlehoff, you will have some sherry?”
And from the handsome mahogany sideboard with its silver teapots and trays and goblets he pours me a drink I loathe. Dry for me and sweet for Mrs. O’Hara. For Olivia he squirts soda water into a tumbler. She has, he tells me, taken the pledge. I look confused … And the promise made by the youth of Ireland to abstain from drink as part of a temperance movement is explained to me. The banal, I believe, is now expected of me conversationally and I obey.
“Dr. Carter tells me that there are no problems with your knee.”
I have failed. At the name Dr. Carter I see Mrs. O’Hara jerk her head slightly, as though I’d inadvertently brushed my hand against her face. She recovers. I am a guest. These are a courteous people. Again the silence settles. Then, suddenly, music from another room. Had it been machine-gun fire all three of them could not have looked more horrified.
“My God! What is that? What is that, Tom? Music? It’s music!”
I feel that I am frozen in a painting of this family and the now-closed eyes of father and daughter tell an enigmatic story. The viewer would never know that the closed eyes are a reaction to an assault of a music that they cannot hear. Then their eyes open and a weary Tom O’Hara smiles sadly at his wife.
“It’s Daragh. He’s got the wireless on. It’s coming from his room.”
Olivia jumps up from her chair. She winces slightly as she rushes towards the door.
“I’m sorry Mr. Middlehoff Will you excuse me?”
I stand up as she leaves the room. I wish that I too could leave but Mrs. O’Hara is now speaking rapidly.
“How can that happen Tom? How I can hear music in this house? Music? Music in this house?”
“It’s his wireless.”
“He has his own wireless?”
“Yes, he has.”
“How?”
“I got it for him. I told him only to play it when you were out. He needs something. He enjoys Radio Luxembourg.”
“Radio Luxembourg? He needs Radio Luxembourg? Now, in the days …?”
“He’s young, Sissy.”
“So is Olivia. She just reads her books quietly.”
“Ah, Sissy, he’s three years younger than Olivia and what ever age he gets to be, reading will not be what comforts him. He’s a boy.”
“But… he … He loved books. He was like Olivia. Like me. Like you.”
“The two boys listened to Radio Luxembourg. You know that, Sissy. He didn’t only read books. He was wild as well. You know that. Climbing up on the roof. Diving too deep, roller skating too fast. Daragh’s wild in his own way—but he’s a different boy, he’s a different child. Now, Sissy darling, don’t get so upset angel. Think of our poor visitor. He came in from Lake House to give Olivia a present.”
“Ask Daragh to stop! I’m sorry Tom, I can’t bear it. I’m sorry, Mr. Middlehoff. I can’t bear it.”
I understand that at least. And I understand that she will have to bear it. I feel I must say something, anything.
“I understand, Mrs. O’Hara.”
“I doubt that, Mr. Middlehoff. Forgive me I’m … I’m …”
What do I have to lose? I say the words quickly: “You are ill, Mrs. O’Hara. You are seriously ill with grief.”
She looks down at her hands and slowly twists the rings on her wedding finger. A Victorian sapphire ring and a wedding ring. Then she looks up at me.
“You’re right Mr. Middlehoff. I am indeed ill with grief. And I know it. But they don’t. They refuse to accept that I am ill.” And she looks defiantly at her husband.
“Ah Sissy, we must not do this to Mr. Middlehoff.”
“Please, Mr. O’Hara. I am full of sympathy.”
And just then the music stops. Mrs. O’Hara closes her eyes.
“Would you like another sherry, Mr. Middlehoff?”
“No. Thank you. I wanted to bring a small gift—these books—to Olivia. I will leave them for her.”
“No, please wait. She’ll be back in a second. Ah, here she is. Thank you darling. He didn’t …?”
“No Dada, he was grand about it.”
She looks at me and bites her lip. I am selfish, and even was I kinder what could I do? What could I say? I wish to leave. I hand the books to her.
“Thank you Mr. Middlehoff. Goethe! I think he’s on the banned list.”
“Olivia is working her way through it!” And Tom O’Hara laughs. “With regard to books I trust her. We’ve had Father Dwyer down here before and she always argues him out of his worries.”
There exists between this father and daughter what rarely exists between parent and child: moral trust. Trust. My father felt the same about me. Once. When he saw me as a teenager reading Gottfried Benn’s
Morgue
. But that was long ago. I rise to leave. They press me to stay. To have another sherry. But I know that they too wish for the end of this visit. Tragedy has savagely dislocated them from their lives, from the normal rhythms in their house and they need to establish a pattern for a new life, in private. I have intruded. And will not again. I say goodbye with a small bow to Mrs. O’Hara, who looks straight into my eyes for a disturbing second and then turns away.
“I’ll show you to the door.”
“Thank you.”
And Olivia walks, still limping slightly, out into the cold and towards my car as I protest.
“Please stay inside. It really is too cold.”
“No, it’s good for me to be outside …”
“When do you return to school?”
“The middle of the week after next. They’ve let me come back late.”
“After this year you will attend university?”
“No.”
She has that quality of certainty, which Harriet also has.
“No?”
“When I’m finished at school I think I should stay at home for some time. I talked to my father.”
“That seems such a pity.”
“Does it? It doesn’t seem such a pity to me. Something is telling me to hold the fort. We’re all wounded. It’s going to take a long time to heal us. I’d feel I was leaving a battle scene. Leaving them to cope alone. I don’t want to be away from here. I have made my mind up: this is where I stay for a while. They both need me. Mama must survive otherwise they’ll both … be lost, I think. My father is blind and deaf and dumb with love. Yeats. Mrs. Garvey thinks the man has ruined us.”
“Miss O’Hara. Olivia. May I call you Olivia?”
“Well I’m too young for you to keep calling me Miss O’Hara. You and Dr. Carter are trying to make me older than I am. But up until last year I wore ankle socks at school.” She laughs. “I’m sure a German girl wouldn’t be wearing ankle socks at sixteen.”
And I think, in this country young women of seventeen are indeed young, much younger than their equivalent in Germany, even before the war drowned all our youth.
“Olivia. I do not seek to interfere but this is a major decision. One with consequences. You would be wrong to let this chance—this time in your life—slip away.”
“Wrong, Mr. Middlehoff? No. I don’t think so. I have a duty and I don’t feel the same about my life. I am less wrapped up in it. Anyway, as the nuns say, people wrapped up in themselves make very small parcels. I’m not ambitious any more. You see, I think with his future gone I should wait a bit longer for my own. I want to be in this place to let it stay with me longer. To let him stay with me longer.”
“You must miss him all the time.”
“No, I don’t.”
“I do not understand you.”
“You see, Mr. Middlehoff, I keep him here with me. He’s with me all the time. Here. In this house. So no, I don’t miss him at all: I’m living in the house with him. That’s my decision. It’s not lonely. And I talk to him, silently. We have things to work out together. About what I did. The choice I made that day, that moment twist-turning on the porch. Maybe we’ll have to agree I did the wrong thing, took the wrong turning. Decided—no, gambled—that I had time to make it up to him after we’d saved my mother. I can’t quite make out what he thinks yet.”
I am inexpressibly moved. And worried for her. What can I say to her?
“I shouldn’t have told you. Ah, here’s Dada. Don’t tell him what I said.”
“I am sorry, Mr. Middlehoff. I should have realised it would be a mistake for you to visit. We are having a hard battle here, aren’t we Olivia?”
“We are, Dada.”
“It would seem as though your wife is ill still with the shock.”
“I hope so. In my bleaker moments I think she’s dying on me. People can simply cease to live. You must know that.”
“She went missing yesterday,” Olivia interjects quickly.
“But you found her, obviously.”
“Oh yes.”
“Where had she gone?”
“She hadn’t gone anywhere! Had she, Dada? Not really. She just wasn’t where we thought she should be.”
“She’d done an unexpected thing.”
“Yes. But we don’t want unexpected things any more.”
“No.”
“I panicked. When Olivia told me, I panicked. Came running down from work and my face must have told a story because when she saw me Olivia started crying, ‘Oh Dada, Dada, we’ll find her. We must find her for you.’ Didn’t you, darling?”
I noted she had not said she would try to find her mother for herself.
“We were frantic with terror that we’d lose her. We rang the hospital and we went everywhere, the cathedral, the graveyard, down the canal walk. No sign of her. And when we got back, there she was in the kitchen! Laughing! It was awful. ‘Where were you?’ we cried. ‘I’m a prisoner, am I?’ Can you imagine? This is Sissy talking. But it’s not our Sissy. That’s not her. But she went on, defiantly, and said, ‘I met a friend. He was passing through the town. Bumped into him. We went for a drink in the Dublin Arms. What’s wrong with that? Can’t I do that? Am I trapped in my house?’ We just sat there listening to this stranger talking to us. Praying we’d see Sissy, even sad, sad Sissy, again. Then suddenly everything was back to normal. Well the new normal, with just the fear. We’re disconnected from everything. There’s just the four of us. Lost.”
I feel suffocated by their pain. It is too close. A witness needs distance. I feel I am being forced into a false intimacy. Standing there beside them I have no hiding place. Yet decency requires some gesture from me. I must say something, if only to leave with some grace. About the gate perhaps. But I am too late.
“Dada’s right, we think she’s dying on us. She doesn’t eat. She just sits there and goes back into that silent world. She’s gone down to nothing. Her black suit is hanging off her and all she’ll wear is that, or one of the black cardigans and skirts she’s wearing today. She’s rolling up the waistbands of her skirts to make them stay on. I offered to move the buttons and she turned on me: how useless I am at sewing and stuff. And then she was sorry. But her ‘sorry’ was so far away. Like she is now. So far away.”
I know this disconnection. And that it rarely passes. I remain silent.
“It’s not getting any better. Sometimes I think it’s worse. She’s not alive in the normal sense.”
And I wonder what is the normal sense of being alive? Am I alive in the normal sense, living with so much of me missing?
“What is awful is when she just sits there watching Daragh going to school each day. She just watches him. He runs from the house to get away from her … from us.”
And I think he’ll be running away for years.
“Olivia does the opposite, don’t you darling? I don’t know which is best. I made Sissy stay here. Living close to what is lost—do you remember, Mr. Middlehoff? Does anything work?”
“I do not know. If I could tell you, Mr. O’Hara, I would. However, I must go now. I have written to my father about the gate, Mr. O’Hara. It originally came from the house of his childhood, you see.”
My lie appals me. He looks at me hard. He knows the subject has been changed and is for a second not certain how to react.
“I will contact you as soon as I have a reply. It is fair to warn you that my father rarely makes sudden decisions.”
“Sudden decisions are usually made for us, Mr. Middlehoff. I’m sorry. I’ve blundered into your family history. Blind, I suppose, not knowing which way to go or what to do for him now that I can do nothing. I honestly didn’t know I’d asked for a family heirloom. I’ll put the idea out of my mind now. It was a mad thought. I was a bit mad at the time.”
I am aware that I may have broken the connection between us. I hadn’t wished to do that quite so harshly. However, equally I do not wish to come any closer to the O’Haras. The agony of others obscures rather than clarifies.