August Is a Wicked Month (19 page)

‘It’s all out of bottles, sun lotion, rouge, belladonna, everything…’ The apology wrung from him a smile.

‘It was terrible,’ he said as he kissed her cheek.

‘It is terrible,’ she said. Between the time she came back from her husband’s house and waited for him the hours had been savage. She went around and beat upholstered chairs with her fists and knocked her forehead against various walls hoping to knock herself unconscious.

‘How are you?’ she said. He looked pale, aged. It did not take long to learn why. His girl friend had left. Another man. His double really.

‘When will men and women get used to being alone?’ she said.

‘She resented my children,’ he said and was off on some long story about how his children came for breakfast once a month and two of them fancied hot milk on their cereal but she insisted they have cold milk.

‘Wouldn’t take the trouble to heat it,’ he said.

‘Perhaps she thought it might kill the vitamins,’ Ellen said, not so much to defend the woman but because she’d taken to finding numerous rational reasons for the most absurd behaviour. He looked at her startled. Since when had she become so matter of fact? Then, remembering his duties as a mourner, he said,

‘Do you want to tell me about it? ‘

He was on the edge of the chaise, totally ill at ease, not even drinking the whisky she had given him. It was strange to see his beautiful face again and know that what once thrilled and stirred her now only created a void. As if she had become another person. He patted the blue velveteen beside him and asked her to sit.

‘I’ll sit here,’ she said. She could not trust herself to be close to him because of the other matter.

‘You would be more at ease in my arms.’

To that she closed her eyes nervously and started sniffing to make sure there was no odour. At least the whisky smell was all pervasive.

‘I wouldn’t,’ she said. Her monstrous affliction had put her out of the reach of other people. It was funny to think that insanity was the downfall that used to dog her, of how she might go raving mad like the two women who thrust themselves into the solitary lake. But this was something less pitiful; contagious, and unforgivable in fact. Nothing moved or spoke to her from the real world now unless she saw in it an echo of her own cast-away plight. There could be no chance that anyone would want to help her, any more than she had helped her own son. Fate. Or, created by herself, and her own willful follies. Either way these things had all happened and were floating under her memory’s eye and would be sealed eventually by her death. Dumb and insensible to the call of friendship, sex, whisky, comfort, she could only contain herself by repeating to herself that there were in the world strangers, doctors, science, drugs – things that could cure her body at least. She thought of the Confessional and that black grille through which she used to murmur ‘I cursed, I told lies, I had bad thoughts,’ and she remembered that she never came away feeling absolved no matter how great the priest’s strictures had been or how painful the penance. Perhaps it was the same with bodily ailments. Her stomach still bore the pitter-patter marks of muscles strained in childbearing, and a neck operation had left a permanent scar. Nothing healed.

‘You would,’ he said, ‘because I want you more than the last time I saw you.’

The words couldn’t have surprised her more. She opened her eyes and smiled on him.

‘You don’t believe it,’ he said. She thought back to their long day together, their vigil over the wall, the hours in bed, their wet, contented, joined-together bodies and how she’d yearned about his going away, wanting it almost as much as she dreaded it. How nice it would be to snuggle down with him and feel newly warm and welcome it for its own brief passing sake rather than as a life investment. Impossible! Her eyes brimmed with tears. The first in weeks.

‘What is it?’ he said. He put his hand out, sweetly and gently, to steer her from the high-backed chair to the place next to him on the velveteen chaise. A nest. But she dare not risk it. She had washed before he came, but it was still chancy. Also she found that in tense situations it became worse, as if she were crying down there. Across the room, while she sobbed a bit, he talked about many things: the weather, the editorial he had written that night, the kind of car he planned to buy in the autumn. But he kept coming back to it, to them, to his need for her to sit close to him.

‘I thought about you,’ he said. ‘Not just because your son got killed, but about…everything.’ She looked at his pale, earnest face. His tongue moistened his top lip, it was a habit of his. She had not thought of him once. Not once. That was her crime. Under the soft skin and behind the big, melting eyes, her heart was like a nutmeg. Some of it had been grated by life but the very centre never really surrendered to anyone, not to the mother who stole for her, nor to the drunken father, nor to her far-seeing but poisoned husband, and not to the child in the way it should have. No wonder she clung to the parable about white peaches.

‘You know what I want,’ she said. He came and knelt near her and gave her the cigarette he had just lit. She drew her dress farther down over her legs and curled those legs under the chair, shrivelling away from him.

‘I’m not going to rape you,’ he said. ‘I would only make love to you.’

‘You know what I want,’ she said again. ‘To cease to be me.’

He said nonsense, that she was one of the sweetest girls he ever met. The mean joys of vanity possessed her for a moment and then she stopped listening to him and said, to herself, ‘I want to love someone or something, so utterly, and to ask for nothing in return and to die for loving that thing if necessary.’ He crushed her hands, asked her to come back to him, say something.

‘I want to love someone other than myself,’ she said.

‘We all do that a little,’ he said. He was such a flat person to talk to.

‘Pure love.’ It sounded pompous, and she drank from the whisky glass to give some ordinariness to the occasion.

‘It’s your Roman Catholicity,’ he said.

‘It’s how I feel,’ she said flatly. Then smiled. He put his face to her hands and kissed them and looked at them as if he was looking at a clump of flowers.

‘Don’t,’ she said. She kept backing into the chair.

‘Is it because of his death?’ he said.

‘No, I slept with everyone in France, tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor…’ she said, as much to flagellate herself as to disillusion him.

‘You poor girl,’ he said, because of course he did not believe her. ‘I must decide for us both.’

‘You can’t decide for me, no one can,’ she said. He got himself another drink, he walked around, he stood behind her chair and embraced her. She thought, ‘If he finds out by coming near me he will shun me for ever.’ Every time he touched her she felt he was coming nearer to finding out her shame.

‘Hugh,’ she said, not having to look at him because he was behind her, ‘you’ll have to go.’

‘You want me to go?’ he said.

‘Yes.’

She felt him move and heard him put the glass down. He picked up his lighter and his tie which he’d taken off because the night was so warm.

‘Maybe in a month or two, or at Christmas, we’ll make candles,’ she said, trying to be cheerful. He took the packet of French cigarettes and pushed back the ones that had fallen out and put them in his pocket.

‘Can you leave me a cigarette for the morning?’ she said. He left the whole packet.

‘Only one,’ she said.

‘I’ll get some when I go out,’ and he gave a little smile of forgiveness. He was handsome. And not impatient. And there were as many lovable girls in the world as there are stars in the December sky. The futility of what was happening seemed to take her by the throat. And the irony. She felt she might be sick and she had only one idea: to get him out, to wash herself again and again and see it through.

Within a few days she rang a friend who put her on to a nice lady doctor in a very exclusive part of outer London. There was a little fur mouse as a mascot on the doctor’s table and Ellen sat eyeing the mouse and telling her story as calmly as she could. She felt inhibited.

‘This is not your husband.’

‘No, it
was
not my husband.’

The lady doctor made notes and took records: her age, her pregnancy, her present symptoms, and then sat her on the couch. Always at the prospect of being medically examined she cried. This time was no exception, and her limbs tightened.

‘Well if you must be careless you’ve got to pay,’ the lady doctor said grimly as she probed first with a rubber-gloved finger and then with a cold metal instrument. It hurt. In all she did seven tests and by the end of the examination Ellen was quite reconciled to having seven different diseases. Except that she would not know for a few days. Meanwhile at work she wore heavy skirts and two pairs of knickers to insulate herself.

On her second visit she sat once again beholding the mouse and the grim little fat-chested woman.

‘I’ve had a letter,’ the woman said, holding it. ‘And it appears there is a secondary infection, but no gonorrhoea infection…’

‘After all my worrying,’ Ellen said. She felt a bit cheated but relieved all the same. In fact for a minute there was a danger that she might have done something disgraceful like clapping. She got a prescription for pills and a violet lotion, and going out she thought gladly how the lotion would stain all her pants and the stains in themselves would be a testimony of mourning. Ugly irregular purple shapes.

She walked part of the way home across a common, holding the medicine parcel tight. The birches were turning, their leaves like sovereigns. Tufts of rough grass sprouted ochre, the ground beneath was a worn, faded yellow, the light in the air mellow. She had been walking fast. She stopped herself and stood: no need to hurry now, nothing to hurry to, she breathed, not happy, not unhappy – if the days were never to be quite so lustrous-bright again, equally so the nights would not be as black. Or so she liked to think. Leaves fell, she watched them drop off, curl down and lodge in a bed of grass, still heavy with moisture, they were falling all around her, simple and unceremonious; for a month or two at least, a cool and lovely autumn.

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

copyright © 1965 by Edna O’Brien

cover design by Angela Goddard

978-1-4532-4732-7

This edition published in 2012 by Open Road Integrated Media

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New York, NY 10014

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