Time and tide, p.32
Time and Tide, page 32
He did not follow her to England, but wrote letters, beautiful letters, broken sentences, feeling hopeless with all those kilometres between them. Feeling crazy. Loving and crazy and having to write in another language, but happy, happy about it all. Then a plan for her to follow him to Spain. More crazy. A hotel she went to was not fully finished, wet brown cement in sprawling turds and men with wheelbarrows slowly carting it hither and thither. A foreman in a lather, shouting. The travel agents had got her booking wrong, as the hotel where she intended to be was closed until the spring. He was in an apartment block a few miles away, and she had sent a letter by taxi and was awaiting a reply. It was cold and the little primulas up against a border of fresh concrete looked as if they would not survive. Then came a group of men, very studious-looking and well dressed, some with sheet music, one with a baton. He was the conductor, the one who had inspired them to such extremes of exaltation. Some went so far as to lie down on the new grass seed or the wet cement surround of the pool, to drink in the weak winter sun. The conductor walked alone, talking, gesticulating, while a young man, an acolyte, ran after him with his overcoat, insisting that he put it on. He refused, marched over the newly planted primulas, veered between barrows of cement, talking, exclaiming, a Moses with his tablet of Commandments. Finding himself close by the bench where she sat, he leant over her as if she were a Rhine maiden and spoke in German, spoke heatedly. The acolyte translated. He had discovered that Toscanini had the same brainscan as Puccini, which is why he could conduct Madama Butterfly flawlessly.
“Yahw … yahw,” the conductor said, and then moved closer, eyes demonic, shouting, “Tiefgreifend … Tiefgreifend.”
“What’s that?” she said, startled.
“Deep catch … deep catch,” the acolyte said.
“What’s that?” she said again.
“Lachen … Frau Lachen,” he said to his master, and they both turned away.
On a date tree the young nascent bellies were a pale gold, clustered like berries on a bonnet, except that they spoke of life, fertility, of fruits to come. Looking up she saw him, her lumberman, in a long, modish cardigan, shy, ill at ease, guilty at having left an ailing wife and child, startled by the medley of men speaking German, and going towards him she thought, It is over … our fling is over, and yet in their reunion there was a tenderness, the tenderness of those who have passed each other by but who remember it sweetly, the way one remembers a shooting star.
“Your hair,” he said. “Your hair is different.”
* * *
Walking, racing, her glance on the ground mostly, seeing cigarette butts, swirls of dust, and here and there carbuncles in the pavement where the cement had bulged up. In a restaurant window little meringue cases, not quite sallow and not quite white. A tiny dish of raspberries catches her eye, each one like a rosebud, moist. Only nature can touch her now, a fleeting touch at that. To think that over the months she had thought Penny was a thing of the past. Now this, this. Was he going for the sake of his brother, to uphold his brother’s troth and so forth, or was he going for the sake of himself? Passing a half-finished block of flats, she reads a sign chalked on hardboard: LADS, NO WORK TODAY, GO TO YARD. Cruelty. Lashings of it. A sudden brainwave, a ruse. She will buy a bottle of champagne and bring it as a farewell gift, a bribe, and if he has gone she will bring it to Penny’s to patch things up.
“You see,” she says to herself, “you are even prepared to lie, to break bread with those you do not like, simply to cling to him, to cling; you have become as craven as that.”
“But I am doing my best,” she answers back, and in an oblong of mirror at the side of a shut shoe shop, she sees a face that bears no resemblance to the face of even half a year ago. A wounded face, eyes stark, upbraiding—all traces of beauty gone. The shoe shop has closed, but there are shoes left. They stand like solitary props on glass plinths, with a little tag in front of each one of them. Circulars and letters cram the passage inside.
* * *
“You don’t remember me,” a voice says. She is in the wine shop now, having decided to go the whole hog of hypocrisy. She does not recognise the face or the very blue eyes or the short brown hair, like the hairs of a shaving brush. She should. He repeats it and gives his little laugh, his laugh of insolence. Suddenly she does and gasps at the sheer galling coincidence of it. Why is he here? Why is she here? Why did she cross the road at that point? Only because the lights were green and she wanted to walk as fast as she could, and saw as she sees now a glut of bottles crammed into wooden barrels, plus lore about wine and wine-tasting, that gives her the pips.
“I thought you were an actor,” she says tartly.
“Not at the moment,” he says, and she detects the same little mendicant sneer from which she retreated on the oratory steps. She enquires about wine. He is fluent with description—adjectives rolling off his tongue, false confidence in his thin, hurt eyes as he says in a blasé voice, “South African … Bulgarian … Italian … Californian … Lebanese.” As if she didn’t know. As if she couldn’t read. He points to the barrels and she knows why. A barrel saved him. She remembers that. The iron hoop of the barrel cutting his neck. Part of her, indeed an almost vanished part of her, wishes to throw the gauntlet down and tell him her latest bombshell and weep and talk with him. Ridiculous. Feelings have died. Not so, feelings alive and kicking and bucking in her, vicious feelings, growing like a child, a child that swells but does not come out, an alien dementing the walls of her mind.
“I’ll have the Macon,” she says, to which he asks tersely if she wants the Villages or the Lugny.
“Whichever is cheaper,” she says, and detests the remark, as if she is asking him to take pity on her straits. He pounces on it. He has the advantage. He will give her the better one at the lesser price. She doesn’t want that. She does not want charity, especially not his. When they tossed the coin, did he choose heads or tails? His eyes are more cavernous than when they last met. The blue is all fear, droplets of fear.
She feels that if at that moment either of them or both of them were opened up, liquid would spill out, gurglings of it, and his would be this vitiated blue and hers a viscous black-red. She vows to smash the bottle on the way home and carry the jagged neck, like a weapon, a weapon she is no longer afraid to brandish. He wraps it and hands her warm coins, coins so warm that they are perspiring. They disgust her.
“So you don’t act anymore” is her parting shot.
“No … I don’t act anymore … The thing is, I just don’t sleep,” he says, and he says it softly, and if there was a moment in this world for any one person to forgive another or to initiate a gesture of reconciliation, it is this moment, except that she can’t, she is all balk, blunder, stammer, umbrage, blubber, and hate; so she flees, flees.
45
In the luxury and hush of the chapel, she moves among blues and golds, among pews and escutcheons, in and out between the myriad altars, holding the bottle, skulking, candle flame heaving this way and that, teetering, recovering, swelling, like air being pumped into a bellows; sees the oak-brown of the confessionals, the dropsical expressions of martyrs, always overlooked by sages with sage hands and sage punitive eyes; she sees Virgins, some like queens, some like courtesans, and in recesses naked angels determined to frisk. In the blue dome of the rotunda, a vaporish light, the smell and smokiness of quenched altar candles. There is a barricade of flowers on an iron rest. Waves of incense, a floating presence. Oddments have been forgotten—gloves, rosary beads, a child’s knitted boot. Candles have been lit, to beam and intercede for those who have fled to their lunches, or their copulations, or their tennis courts or their gymnasiums. Fronds of light, gleaming, as in a theatre. She kneels by Saint Anthony, he who once brought respite. The bottom of the Infant Jesus fits snugly, fleshily, into the hollow of Saint Anthony’s outstretched palm. Comical. In his other hand he holds an Easter lily. She always loved lilies. Not anymore. Both are smiling, as if they share a joke. She cannot pray, and yet she waits the way someone waiting to be sick waits. There are two black boxes on metal stands. One for alms and one in His honour. She cannot give. That is the truth of it. That is her plight. Her sin. She cannot give. Too much has been taken away from her, everything: her sons, first one and now the other. Galling to see necklaces and lockets and trinkets in the oblong case next to Saint Anthony, offerings from those who can give, mothers such as herself, wives such as herself, daughters such as herself. Hers not the only tragedy, and yet to her the only tragedy. Remembers reading about women in Africa, captive women walking back to their shacks, hundreds of miles back to the ruined village they were plucked from, most of them with child, the foul, forced seed of their captors. How could one love a child like that, and yet they might, their breasts a warm monstrance, their bitter memories dissolved. In a matching glass case are faded blotches on the velvet where other trinkets had been, until a fat priest or a thin priest unhooked them and skedaddled to the pawnshop. She cannot give. She will not give. She would steal the barricade of flowers from the altar except that they are so vulgar, so secular, so vast, so overblown. To think that she thought she might pray. What does one do with grief? What does one do with hate? What does one do with a bastard child seeded from a lewd and vicious captor? What does one do? She thinks of refuse dumps. Not a pretty sight. They are everywhere, only a mile or two from your stately manor or your green-grow-the-rushes lake. A phantasmagoria of ashes, plastic, paper, food, condoms, flowers, mush, the afterbirth of all hope, toil, and aspiration merged into a grotesqueness which cannot itself be destroyed. She thinks that she is like that and calls out to her dead mother, the pity, the raving pity that they had never known that milky oneness; each in her trajectory of dark.
* * *
How could he have known? At any rate, he is there chaining his bicycle to the black railing. The blue of the chain transparent, the metal inside like a series of snakes, each coil snug in its socket.
“Mass is finished,” she says, harshly, harshly.
“I’ve just come to say my little prayers.”
“Oh, you’re religious.”
“Let me tell you,” he says, and he moves towards her, his hackles out, his moment for retribution. She may think he killed her son.
She may think he cadged a ticket to life. She has another guess coming. He would gladly have died. Yes, lady, to relive the moment before the toss of the coin, the heave-ho, the hole that he squirmed into, is to relive a nightmare every sleeping and waking moment of his life. He knows the worst. He has been there. Death is not the worst. Having to live is, having to live knowing that everyone else has forgotten it, the schamozzle has died down and you’re alone and you’ve lost your three best friends. He laughs, a strange, metallic laugh, and says evidently it was his fate, his karma. His outburst does not frighten her, merely makes her pause for a moment to think.
“Your three best friends?”
He recoils, fears that he has said too much, babbled.
“Say anything … say anything,” she whispers.
“Well … we have dinner,” and he looks to see if this is too fantastic, but it isn’t … “Jim loved soup, so I make soup, tomato or lentil … We have it in mugs … brown pottery mugs … Pasco and I go swimming—he was a great swimmer, the best swimmer of us all—he’s teaching me to dive. Then Hugo, the ringleader, our king—he was going to be a rock star, he had all the makings, the smile, the looks, the talent … He left a song … Well, a bit of a song—’Love Is Gonna Cut You Down.’ We put different lines to it … different beginnings … different ends. ‘Love Is Gonna Cut You Down.’ I make him an omelette and he throws it back in my face and he says, ‘Jeeves, it’s runny … It’s not the way I like it,’ so I add this and that to it, a bit of grated cheese, herbs, then I whisk it, put it back in the pan, and I brown it and toss it and say, ‘Is that the way you like it, Hugo?’ He loves it. He tells me he loves it. I put a few flowers in a pot on the windowsill and I say, ‘They’re for you, and they’re for you, and they’re for you.’”
Suddenly he stops and she sees that he is about to cry but that he does not want her to see him, shrinks from pity. So this is what he does with his pain. He regards them as living, or at least living in that region inside himself which matters. Most likely Hugo and he were lovers; yes, they were lovers, because he singles Hugo out, says that he did not want to go to that party, that he woke up and said he’d had a dream in which his boots were too hefty for swimming. They had gone to bed, they had made love, then Hugo’s dream, then Hugo ignoring his dream, then down to the pier and meeting the others and meeting Paddy. She can almost touch it, the picture is so real.
“So that’s how you manage,” she says quietly and with astonishment.
“Sometimes … some days are worse. You see, I haven’t been to the bottom yet … the very bottom,” he says.
But she already knows. Then she asks his name. He is called Mitch, because his name is Mitchell.
“Maybe you’ll visit me sometime, Mitch,” she says, and gives her address shyly.
“Or if I’m in a show, you’ll come and we’ll have supper.” Supper, symbol of another world, a world so far behind both of them, suave and lighthearted.
“So you will be acting?”
“I hope to … The thing is … at the moment I just don’t sleep.”
Their bodies more or less fall onto one another, in a sudden embrace. He is all vertebrae, so that it is like holding a musical instrument that is about to break yet won’t, will keep faith with something within, innocence perhaps.
46
At home there was no barking. He had left. They had left. What met her on the kitchen floor were the gifts that she had given him: necessities, as she called them. A radio, a blender, a coffeepot, and a packet of fresh coffee beans. Seeing them in their heap, she thought, He has not even acknowledged them, he has gone out and left them there, to show his anger and confirm his separateness. The note had slipped down behind. She read it many times, as if eating the words. The words were like little entities that for some reason reminded her of his first teeth. She read, “Ta for these things, but I don’t need them yet. I am never far from you and always at the other end of the telephone. Thanks, too, for everything.” He had signed it with love and a little flourish of hasty kisses. It was the P.S. which touched her most of all: “Do you remember one summer we all went to Arezzo?” The light of memory. Sweetness. A wash of words. A baptism. They were like something touching, touching her, a hand, a voice, a breath, a presence from long, long ago, a presence within absence and, yes, within pain, within death. Everything radiant for a moment, as if she reached, or was reached, beyond the boundaries of herself, as if she had known him and he her before, a friendship that transcended time and place and even those little ruses by which we lay claim on one another.
“I can bear it,” she said, and looked around at the air so harmless, so flaccid, and so still, a stillness such as she had not known since it had happened, or maybe ever. In the stillness there was a silence, but there was no word for that yet because it was so new; pale sanctuary devoid at last of all consolation.
“You can bear it,” the silence said, because that is all there is, this now that then, this present that past, this life this death, and the involuntary shudder that keeps reminding us we are alive.
Also by Edna O’Brien
Fiction
AUGUST IS A WICKED MONTH
CASUALTIES OF PEACE
A PAGAN PLACE
ZEE & CO.
NIGHT
A SCANDALOUS WOMAN
JOHNNY I HARDLY KNEW YOU
A ROSE IN THE HEART
MRS. REINHARDT
SOME IRISH LOVING
RETURNING
A FANATIC HEART
THE HIGH ROAD
ON THE BONE
LANTERN SLIDES
HOUSE OF SPLENDID ISOLATION
DOWN BY THE RIVER
WILD DECEMBERS
IN THE FOREST
THE LIGHT OF EVENING
SAINTS AND SINNERS
THE LOVE OBJECT
THE LITTLE RED CHAIRS
THE COUNTRY GIRLS: THREE NOVELS AND AN EPILOGUE
GIRL
Nonfiction
MOTHER IRELAND
JAMES JOYCE
BYRON IN LOVE
COUNTRY GIRL
About the Author
EDNA O’BRIEN has written more than twenty works of fiction, most recently Girl. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including the PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature, the Irish PEN Lifetime Achievement Award, the National Arts Club Medal of Honor, and the Ulysses Medal. Born and raised in the west of Ireland, she has lived in London for many years. You can sign up for email updates here.
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Epigraphs
Prologue
Part I
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Part II
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
