August Is a Wicked Month by Edna O’Brien

was something in his proposal that made her think of lying next to the dead.
    ‘Do I have to?’
    ‘You don’t have to,’ he said humbly. So humbly that she knew she must, and waving good night pointlessly to the empty room she went with him up two flights of marble – stairs and entered a room with a door whose back and sides were covered in green baize so that it opened softly and closed again with the same hushed and sinister softness. She thought of a morgue. He pointed straight away to the bathroom leading through another doorway and she vanished there and took a long time over undressing. It was a big bathroom. In a large whisky vat there were soft stones of talcum powder, coloured a light mauve and smelling of stock in summer rain. She crumpled some and let them fall in the valley between her breasts and crushed some on her legs that were white where the sun lotion unevenly stopped, above her knee. She did this to, not to excite him but so that the light, mauve, summer smell might see her through. Far from being on the threshold of sin she saw herself as about to make a sacrifice.
    He had already climbed into the enormous bed and was lying there in a blue nightshirt with a label that said ‘All Action Garment.’ She saw it as she stroked his neck.
    ‘You found everything you wanted?’ he said, ghastly polite. She’d found a bathrobe. Tell me what you like,’ she said, ‘your fetishes…’ She was trying to be funny and trying to be loving but doing it badly.
    ‘Hold it,’ he said. As she did an enormous memory thirst took hold of her and she drank a tumbler of Perrier from the bedside cabinet.
    ‘You want a drink?’ she asked.
    ‘No, little one,’ he said, and thanked her for the hands that stroked and wakened him.
    ‘ Not for years…’ he said.
    ‘Don’t think of it,’ she said. If they got on to their respective lonelinesses it would be unbearable altogether.
    ‘You are a good person,’ he said, ‘kind.’
    That sickly word.
    ‘I’m a nurse at heart,’ she said. ‘Didn’t you know that?’
    ‘Nurse,’ he said, mawkishly funny, ‘can I have my medicine?’
    ‘Provided you don’t spill,’ she said, mawkish too.
    ‘Nurse,’ he said, ‘I’ll be a good boy.’ She imagined herself back as a student nurse, appalled by the occupation she had unwittingly chosen for herself. Doing the routine moves and saying the routine words, she remembered how she’d met her husband at a bus stop the very day she ran out of the operating theatre in terror and he asked why she cried. He offered to help her. Kindness. The most unkindest thing of all.
    ‘You’re a soft, soft woman,’ Sidney said. Little did he know that it was his costly creams and his mauve talc that put the false softness and the false dew upon her.
    ‘I’m glad,’ she said, ‘that it meets your requirements, sir…’
    ‘You’re so original,’ he said, and then she lost the sense of the many senseless things he said and willed herself into a state of forgetfulness.
    Afterwards she felt that she had failed him. She had wanted it to be a gift but it turned out hurried and nervous. Neither of them removed their clothes and she lay in the towel robe and he in the long, blue, ‘All Action‘ nightshirt.
    ‘I’ll have to wash,’ she said, soon.
    ‘Have I made a mess on you?’ he said, not even looking at her stomach, smeared as it was. He’d been a gentleman, he’d been careful.
    ‘Just a little,’ she said. She was thinking of egg white in its various stages of being whipped. He was telling the four-poster roof how happy and younger and glad he felt.
    ‘Is there anything you want?’ he said.
    ‘Nothing.’
    ‘A little trip, to some new place?’ He was going to Marrakesh the following day for a few weeks.
    ‘We’re all going,’ he said, ‘a house party.’
    ‘ Bobby?’ she asked, but not frantic now.
    ‘I think we’re all booked to go.’
    ‘I can’t come,’ she said. He’d give her his card all the