“Call me Ned,” the man was saying, gloating at the fact that she was in his shop, his humble abode, affording him the radiance of her presence. Her radiance had infected him. He could see it was a party as he piled the various purchases into a box, the webbed leaves of the pineapple on top like some sort of hieratic plumage. He totted the damage on the back of his hand, cancelling out sums that were already there and winking as he gave her a big discount. To add to her well-being, he said that he would drive her home, would not hear of her hawking all this stuff in her high heels and her good coat. It was a green nap coat that she had bought on the installment plan. There was a chestnut in the pocket, a polished and cocoa-coloured one that she had found on the street that had escaped the marauding children, clinging to its bristly bed.
“You can’t bring me home … can’t leave your shop,” she said, almost chastisingly, because she could see that he was smitten. Life is all or nothing, either you are a grey shrew of a thing, a reject, or a human beacon that people stop to warm themselves by.
“It’s an honour,” he said, and opened and slammed the drawer of the cash register to give himself something to do. A distraught mother called through the open doorway to ask if she could have half a head of cabbage and Nell wanted, yearned to say, “Have the whole head, I’ll pay, because I am happy,” but the woman had fled. Other customers were more imperious, pinching the fruits and asking the country of their origin. One woman made a big to-do about the ripeness of the avocado pear, so that he launched into a foolproof method of testing an avocado, said one finger went on the white of the eye and another finger on top of the avocado, to test the relative softnesses, and if they corresponded, then “Bob’s your uncle.” He touched several of them clumsily. The woman was so appalled that she changed her mind about her appetizer, said aloud that she was going to have fish pâté instead. He winked at Nell, and when the woman had gone out, he let it be known by the merest curl of his lips that he had no time for such people, called themselves ladies or toffs, but they were not ladies or toffs like some.
“Saw you on the High Street the other day,” he said.
“Me?”
“Yes, you.”
“How come you picked me out?” she said.
“I didn’t pick you out, you stood out,” he said, and looked at her with such naked admiration that she had to turn away. Hanging from the ceiling were strands of laurel and plastic fruit so grimed with dust, so shrivelled, that she thought if a match was put to them the whole place would catch fire. In his elation he danced, trampling on cabbage butts and berries, saying yes, he had picked her out and now here she was in his abode. He wore boots such as countrymen wear, old, gnarled boots, black-green, that turned up at the toes.
“Big party?” he asked then, unable to conceal the longing that he felt.
“Quite big,” she said. In truth, she did not know. Duncan had said he would bring a few friends, make it a ceilidh. Just as she had given up, believed herself to be outcast, along came Duncan, a round blond barrel of a man with blue eyes and an amber smile; Duncan, mesmeriser, drinker, and fallen cherub. He looked like a labourer in a stockinette jersey that was too small for him, shouting “Bullshit, bullshit” to a woman who in a high quavering voice was singing a plaintive song addressed to a young lover, bemoaning his desertion of her, how he had taken the east and the west, had taken the sun and the stars from her, and, she believed, was taking God from her.
As Nell came into the party, he smiled, handed her the wine bottle that he was drinking from, and said, “Transubstantiate, Sister.” Sister. Soon after, he left, but on the way out handed her a crumpled matchbook, saying that she was to read it and then forget it. She ran to the bathroom and read, “Let us see the Northern Lights together”—underneath was his phone number. When she did ring him a few days later, he was puzzled at first, couldn’t remember, then did. He was in the theatre and she could hear shouting and hammering in the background. He enquired where she lived, then asked if he and his mates could come for the bread.
All morning she had been busy. First the butcher arrived, delivering the goose, which she filled with two kinds of stuffing, potato and sweetbread, a recipe she had copied from a newspaper. Then out on the High Street with all the other shoppers, wanting to proclaim, to cry out, “Hey, hey, I’m having a party, my first party ever.” It was as if the youth which she had never lived had been lying in wait and had come to possess her now. Where would it lead? A little afraid voice within her kept piping up, saying she mustn’t be so extravagant, she must work doubly hard in the weeks to follow, pour herself into her work. Another voice said, “Live, live.” Many of the shoppers, women of her own age or thereabouts, were fraught, women with wrinkles and sour faces, pushing prams and go-carts, as if not children were in them but sacks of coal. In the greengrocer’s now she ordered prodigally, vegetables, fruits, candied fruits, nuts, a sheaf of flowers. The grey doom-filled days were behind her; she had even discarded certain items in her wardrobe because they reeked of despair, black veiling and so forth, mournful things. With his bare hand Ned cracked a walnut for her and held it out so that she could partake of the morsels. The severed walnut looked violated, brought a fleeting memory of pain, her own or her mother’s, and this in its turn brought back her dream of the night before. Her mother came through the bedroom door, not as a living mother, but as a ghost in a blue flannel nightgown, identical to the one Nell herself had on, then slipped into bed beside her and said she would be always there, the silent onlooker at work, at play, or wherever.
In the van with Ned she was already running the rolling pin over the icing sugar to ease out all the little bumps, and she knew that in her kitchen in an enamel bowl the yeast bread was rising, each spore swelling next to its neighbouring spore, so that what had been compact like Plasticine was at this moment brimming over, a pregnant thing, pregnant as she herself was with thoughts of Duncan. The van seemed to be Ned’s homestead. There was a tea chest with old clothes spilling out of it, on the dashboard his tea mug with the sign “Cancer,” his safety razor, rags, bookmaker slips, a mirror that once had had shells around it, and numerous signs that read BACK IN FIVE MINUTES or BACK IN TEN MINUTES or AT THE BOOKMAKER’S NEXT DOOR.
When he saw her sitting room he became awed, embarrassed. The long refectory table and the long-stemmed cranberry glasses were too grand all together. He took off his cap and gaped at things. No, he would not have anything, he must dash. Hurrying out, he said that if she forgot anything she had only to pick up the “dog and bone.”
All afternoon she worked, so that by dusk it was only a question of stirring the gravy and putting greaseproof paper over the cooked goose to keep it moist and consulting the mirror to make sure her makeup had not smeared. They were late. She had already had a drink and played the same record twice as she waited on tenterhooks for the doorbell. It was a song in which one man sat another man down to tell him that love is all there is. The singer on the cover had a ponytail and a sad, studious face. In a way it was the happiest moment of the evening, because in her mind she saw how it would all work, how he would stand next to her, how they would be shy, would become closer, simply because they were surrounded by all this furor and by his friends. She had not asked anyone that she knew, wanting it to be a party solely for him.
The room was like a chapel, duskly lit, flowers and candles everywhere, and a starched white cloth on the table. The flowers were jasmine, winter jasmine in big jugs, and in other jugs sprays of leaves, because of course with the wanton way she had spent, she had had to economise on something. In her bedroom there was a little bunch of snowdrops, a secret posy, the green edging of the petal exactly the same color as the drooping bell-like leaves. He would go up there with her for a moment, if only to kiss her once. All day she tried to stave off the thought and the tenderness of that kiss, and it was as if it had already happened, so that what was not yet realised existed as a memory, a tremor, and at the same time was a presage of something beautiful to come.
When the first peal of the bell sounded, she walked towards the door confidently, as if she were someone else, then felt rather taken aback to find three men there, complete strangers to her.
“Is this Duncan’s gig?” one of them said.
“He’s not here,” she said a little brusquely.
“But it’s his gig,” the man said.
“Yes,” she said, allowing them in, and as they trailed behind her she enquired where Duncan was.
“He’s on his way,” another said.
“He is coming?” she said, her voice that little bit nettled.
“Yeah,” one of them said, adding that Duncan had gone to the pub to pick up a few friends and get bottles. He said the name of the pub as an added assurance. In the sitting room they sat close together, downing whiskies and talking amongst themselves in low voices about the show. It was Gulliver’s Travels.
“When does it open?” she asked.
“Maybe never,” one of them said, and laughed, and then they all laughed nervously, recounting the row with the producer that very day, Duncan telling him to get the hell out of the theatre, to choose his door, choose his window, the producer refusing to leave, then the two of them having a fistfight in the gallery, and in the end the ejected producer yelling, “You’re fired, you’re fired.”
The next to arrive was a tall young man, very aristocratic, with a cigarette holder between his teeth. He introduced himself as Andrew and introduced the tiny man standing next to him as his fool. The stagehands knew him and were deferential towards him insofar as they broke off their murmurings and looked in his direction, ready to answer any question or obey a command.
“Where is Duncan?” he asked, his voice nasal and condescending.
“At the Elm,” one of them said sheepishly.
“At the Elm. Shit,” he said, and turned, grabbed his fool by the lapel, and started to storm out.
“I sent the car away,” the fool said.
“How about some Pocheen?” she said hurriedly, sensing that if she was to lose Andrew she would lose Duncan, too, since Andrew was the pivot, everything about him spoke it: his arrogance, his motor coat, the cigarette holder, the sneer with which he addressed the others. He looked at her as if he just might insult her, then changed his mind and said, “Pocheen,” and repeated the word with reverence, then waited while she ran to retrieve the lemonade bottle that was hidden in a pillowcase upstairs, a gift from the homeland. Holding the bottle to his nose, he smelled it, reeled back as if already intoxicated, and said in a slightly mellower voice, “This is it, gang. This is where it’s at.
“Brain fuck. Total brain fuck,” he said as he drank greedily from the bottle and wiped his lips to free them of the fire, his long legs in their fawn corduroy jodhpurs jigging out before him.
Next to come was Cissy, a loud-voiced, plumpish woman with orange hair, who seemed trussed into the velvet cat suit that she wore.
“It’s the Styx,” she said as she entered, then kissed them all, called them darling, and, looking askance at Nell, said half-mocking, “And who might you be, Cathleen ni Houlihan or Deirdre of the Sorrows!” Taking the glass that Nell offered her, she announced brazenly that it was her birthday and that she had just received the most divine present, simply divine.
“Not those,” Andrew said, touching his own ear to draw attention to the hideousness of her plastic orange danglers.
“Revenge, darling, revenge,” and she went on to regale them with a little incident that had happened as she was dressing to come to the party. She was in her bath when the doorbell rang. She’d called out of the bathroom window, to be told by an oaf that there was a delivery, a present for Mrs. Liddell, her own true self.
“Present from whom?” she said, becoming grand as she reenacted her hauteur.
“From her ex and the second Mrs. Liddell,” she said, exaggerating the tone and lumpiness of the voice, then mimed putting on her dressing gown, running down the stairs in her tootsies, expecting an azalea or maybe a crate of vino, and seeing in its basket of straw this little skinless pink thing, this poodle, a few hairs on it like flecks of cotton wool, and here she gloried as she described how quickly she’d thought on her feet, thrusting the basket back into the oaf’s arms, saying, “Take it straight back to them,” to which he said he wouldn’t like to think of what would befall him or for that matter the poor little doggie. Before he could expatiate on that fate, she had closed the door, and through the letter box told him to take it to the fucking dogs’ home or flush it down the loo or take it anywhere he wished.
“Bitch. Mega bitch,” Andrew was saying as he rocked back and forth laughing, his boots with their very high heels clicking as he raised them in the air.
“Life has made me a bitch,” she said and, fearing that she’d been a little too dismissive with Nell, looked at her and said, “Nice pad you have here.”
It was over an hour before he arrived, and then with a motley of people.
“God save all,” he said, and she knew that he was drunk by the way he flinched. Having seen him only once before, and fleetingly at that, she had not been sure if she was attracted to him, but when she saw him for the second time walking towards her, his head down a little, his smile so shy and apologetic, and his squat hands reaching out in a gesture of conciliation, she felt her whole body tremble with desire.
“Sorry, sorry, Sister,” he said again and again, and squeezed her hand. Then some of his entourage followed in quick succession and she knew that the eager girl who tottered on exceedingly high heels like a flamingo was his girlfriend. It was quite easy to see by the way she sighted him across the room, picked her way among the cushions, and clasped his hand.
“This is Nell and this is Sue,” he said, obviously flustered, and to reaffirm her claim on him Sue ran her other hand through his hair.
Nell excused herself, said she would get them some food, and then in the kitchen languished, did not know what she was doing as she carved the goose and put helpings of stuffing onto plates.
“Listen, mate, you’re not the only one,” Cissy said, uncorking some wine and muttering that it didn’t really matter much, since he couldn’t fuck, wasn’t a number-one fuck, simply a two-minute wonder.
“You’re all heartless,” Nell said, feeling now that her house, her kitchen, and her expectations were violated.
“Yes, we’re all heartless, darling,” Cissy said, and stuck her tongue out, going back with a bottle in either hand.
By midnight things had reached a feverish pace. She drank when anyone remembered to hand her a glass, and she could feel herself getting tipsy. Some came, others left, because either they were bored or they went to get more booze, and the telephone rang endlessly, so that she found herself shouting out, “Is there a Keith here? Is there a Miranda here?” and once she had to go upstairs to look for a singer who had locked himself in the children’s bedroom with a Negress. His wife had followed, was in the landing, tottering in white fringed boots.
“Is my husband in there?” she asked as if she was about to cry.
“No … no,” Nell said, and drew her away, said he was in the garden, she had seen him go out in the garden with his guitar.
In the sitting room, Andrew lurched towards her and said what about Irish coffees, where were they? She didn’t know. Her eyes were on Duncan and Sue. They sat close together, Sue with her hand inside his pocket, her body rocking rhythmically to simulate the pleasure she was giving him.
“It’s vile … vile,” she heard herself say, and Andrew followed her, grabbed her by her lace collar, and said that yes, he could see that she fancied Duncan but that she was to put it right out of her head, period. It sent blasts of iced nausea through him. Duncan had been married, had had a wife and kids and all that shit, and it had gone wrong, putrid, like it always does, so she was to put him out of her mind and out of her crotch.
“We’re soulmates,” she said.
“Bog-road soulmates … but not body mates,” he said, turned and called into the room, saying it was time for them to split. Some thanked her, some didn’t; others picked up bottles in which there was wine left, while Sue shook Duncan to waken him up. Since she had left the room he had drifted into sleep, in shame perhaps.
“Wake up … wake up, baby,” Sue was saying, her hand under his stockinette jersey as she tickled him.
“Let him sleep,” Nell said, seeing in it a glimmer of victory.
“Like hell I will,” Sue said, and began to pummel his body. So this is how it would be; they would both be there while he slept and both be there when he wakened, like the women at the foot of the Cross. The room looked as if a herd had passed through it—plates, cushions, and records were strewn all over the floor, the ashtrays piled with ashes, cigarette papers from the joints they had rolled, and, incongruously, a florin which someone had left as payment for a telephone call.
“Baby, baby,” Sue shouted at him, but he simply turned and buried his face in the folds of the loose velvet cover. She tried coaxing him and then, realising that it was useless, she took a pen from the side table and wrote a message on the back of his wrist, then gathered herself into her black voluminous cape and left, saying she hoped that they had not made too much of a mess.
“Shakespeare was wrong,” he said, his lips coming awake but his eyes still closed.
“Why?” she said. She had sat all night, not touching him, not once, but so near that it felt like touch.
“It’s not a stage … it’s not ‘All the world’s a stage’ … it’s a dream stage,” he said, then opened his eyes and looked around to see where he was.
“They’ve gone,” Nell said as he surveyed the pillaged room, his eyes taking in every detail, even the little clocklike petals of the jasmine, and then looking down at his hand he read the scrawl, “See you tonight, shmuck,” and dropped his hand, saying, “Bullshit, bullshit.
“Do you forgive me?” he asked, his voice very gentle.
“Forgive you what?”
“For all that garbage last night.”
“Do you remember it?”
“No … not much … I remember one thing, though … one thing,” and here he put his hand out and touched her cheek, eerily delicate for a man with such sturdy hands, the forefingers flat, spatula-like; his father’s hands, as he said. They were to see the Northern Lights together. He remembered that. Already her mind was on stilts, thinking, When, where, and yippee. In supposed jest but really to get nearer to him, she covered his face with her chiffon scarf, to shut out the dawn light, and gradually their hands met, then clasped, the insides of their fingers softly feeling, softly finding out, as they rocked back and forth like children. First he talked nonsense, said the usual nonsensical things, then less so, as he stood up, flexed his muscles, walked about, looked at her, looked at her books and her records, and then looked back at her, with such tenderness, and astonishment that he had found her among the dross. What he tried to say was not easy for him and not customary for him: “A total fusion … flesh and intellect … I want to think with my balls … correction … with my everything … I want to feel you … I want to know you … no broken ends … no explanations … the summa of love,” and here he became sad as he asked the porous air, How the fuck do you sing summa and what key is it in?
Taking strands of her hair and twisting it into tight plaits, he pulled it, so that it rasped at the roots, and told her that they must not fall in love.
“Why not?” she asked.
“Because I’m stuck and I’m trying to unstick,” he said, and kissed her, and in the doing, he could just as easily have said, “I love you,” because the kiss was from somewhere deep within him, a deep, solemn, aching kind of kiss.
After he had gone she drew the curtains and fell into one of the longest, sweetest sleeps she had ever known, then wakened in the afternoon, spouting a line from a dream—“It all depends on the music and the modulation.” He had said, How do you sing it and what key is it in? They thought alike. Suddenly remembering him, she thought how, when he held her, the clasp had something of the fervour of her own land, ancient, turbulent, and beyond pity.