August Is a Wicked Month by Edna O’Brien Page B

because of that startling face. Blackberries in an off-the-track Kerry road, he said, where there were no cars and no dust to blight the sheen on her. Marrying him she cut herself off, lost the knack of prayer, of superstitions, of going to dances and asking young men, ‘Do you come here often?’, of fierce friendships with other girls and linking and going for walks. She had to discard all those when she teamed with him because he was taking her into the fresh pasture of ideas and collective thought and flute music. It all sounded grand. Except that it wasn’t enough and he didn’t buoy her up when she hankered after the proverbs and accordion music and a statue of the Virgin hewn from blackthorn wood. When she admitted to these needs he put his hand to his mouth and swallowed painfully as if she had just farted sulphur. How superficial she was. The lightning missed her part of the floor by inches and she waited now, patient and truthful, as she rarely was in life. What irony. She always thought he would die first, since he was older, and then the child would be hers exclusively. She knew many people in the world and would miss none of them except that child with its pre-aged face and the nice parts of her and the nice parts of him. Her flitteriness, his pensive ways. The only bit of her life she would re-live were the first few months of her marriage when her husband would make love to her on and off through the night and would afterwards talk to her with such words of sweetness that she was mesmerized as to how any man could love any woman so. And yet, it never being enough. She hungered for more: love, reassurance, as if what had gone in had been mysteriously drained away by some sort of spiritual diabetic flow. And if he punished her now with black looks it was because he knew she had not matched an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth in the deep, exacting algebra of love. The best part was over. It was a relief to die except for the fact of leaving a son. She looked down at the pad on the couch which said, ‘Dear Sidney, Thank you for the pleasant evening,’ and she tore it in tiny pieces rejecting its smarmy falseness now that she had only a few minutes left. Mindless of the rain, the swift green lightning and the powerful thunder she wrote, ‘My dear and only son, I came here to work [a lie] and got killed by mistake.’ But on re-reading it too disgusted her. The third letter was very conspicuously chirpy; it said:
How are you and how is George? Behaving yourself I hope, eating nourishing cereal and doing plops in fields (mind the’ horseflies), and remembering to sleep with your eyes shut and no comics under the pillow. I want to tell you a story, don’t go away. When I was your age I got a shilling from a man going by on a tandem (Exp. a tandem is a bicycle made for two) because he asked me the way to the canal. I used to stand at the gate saying ‘hello’ to people. Anyhow when I got the shilling I went off to the shop where we owed a lot of money because my father was out of work (hammer toes he had at the time) and I asked the grocer to take the shilling off our bill and he told me, do you know what he told me, ‘To go up the river on a bicycle.’ So I kept the shilling. But I think the grocer had a lot of spunk in him to tell me that. And I want you to have lots of spunk in you and if you’re going to do a good, do a big good and don’t go offering shillings around because they won’t get anyone far. Put this in your pocket along with the two hundred and forty-seven sweet papers that are likely to be there. Goodbye, your Mother.
    She addressed it to his father’s house and hoped when he grew up he would understand it. But almost as she licked the scented gum she heard the rain soften and knew that the storm was moving away, and she felt cheated of her death.

Chapter Twelve
    S HE WAS LYING LIKE that, dropping off to sleep when Gwyn came in, in her stocking feet, walking unsteadily with her