Sylvia looks at her jacket. This? she asks.
My mother says: It’s very nice. It’s sensible.
I’m a schoolteacher, says Sylvia.
That’s nice.
Yes.
And above this scene of ravening, bewildering, but sympathetic domestic effort the city is upside down in the sky. It is the expression that the city wears, like a face, but without features – pure but diminished light. And how far could a man travel beyond that light before he touched the very wall of inexistence.
Summer’s Wreath
Éilís Ní Dhuibhne
Next thing, I was pregnant.
My mother lost no time in shipping me off to an island in the North Sea. Her plan was that I would give birth to this baby of mine far away from civilisation, i.e. in a place where English wasn’t spoken and nobody knew anyone worth knowing. Or anything. What was going to happen after the birth hadn’t been divulged, but I suppose she planned to find somebody to adopt this baby, or to foster it, or otherwise palm it off on somebody far outside of the family circle. I didn’t have any plans of that kind myself. To tell the truth, I found it impossible to imagine this baby of mine – what it would look like, how it would sound, or what colour its eyes would be, or its hair. (Do they have hair?) I couldn’t even imagine its sex, although on the whole, if I thought about it at all, I assumed it would have to be a girl. Because how could a woman like me, a girl, alone on an island in the North Sea, without a man at her side, have a boy baby? It would be like having a frog, or a seal, or a tortoise. I wouldn’t know what to do with it.
My mother paid Frau Holle well (that’s what I called her; she had another name) to look after me. Which she did, up to a point.
For instance, she gave me a room under the rafters in Rosenhaus, her thatched cottage, and it was oh such a sweet room, with pink flowery wallpaper on the sloping walls, muslin curtains on the delicious little window, and a green reading lamp that shone like a fresh leaf on the desk. There was a desk. That was the great thing! My mother and Frau Holle acknowledged that I would need one, even as I waited for this baby of mine to be born. The desk was under the window, and had a view of a stone wall. This was no common wall, mind you, but a garden wall, ancient and crumbling and draped with a tangle – no, a jungle – of nasturtiums. Orange and yellow petals, a few deep wine red. And those great green dinner plates of leaves that a frog could sit on, if he were so inclined! (The cottage itself had tight pink roses trained to clamber over the porch; like obedient little ballerinas they circled the door and vied with each other to win the prize for Most Fragrant Flower.) When I opened the window of my room (I opened it most of the time, because it could get very hot, up there under the thatch) a sea breeze, like fresh oysters, wafted in, and mixed with that was the scent of the roses. I have never been in a room that smelled more delicious.
Frau Holle kept a few guests, select, in Rosenhaus; she also owned an inn, or a café, or something of that kind, in the village. Her husband was the innkeeper but Frau Holle wore the trousers (well, most of the time she wore a dress that looked like something you’d see in a pantomime: a heavy sack of a skirt bunched over her big bottom, a black bodice laced up the front over her big bosom, and a white lacy blouse billowing over her big red arms). Herr Holle spent all the time at the inn. I never saw him, but took her word for it that he existed. Frau Holle joined him after lunch, and stayed till eight or nine. As soon as she departed for the inn, at one o’clock, Rosaleen came in to clean.
The first thing Rosaleen told me was that she could ride a bicycle and the second was that she was double-jointed. She could also hold a cigarette between her big toe and her next toe and smoke it. ‘Gas, isn’t it?’
(Another gift she had was that she could wriggle her ears.)
The third thing she told me was that she came from Dublin. So how did she end up here on this island?
‘God alone knows!’ she laughed. ‘How did you?’
I didn’t point to my belly, because it wasn’t showing yet, I believed: I’d always been plump, and this worked to my advantage now.
‘I’m writing a book,’ I said, in a quiet voice.
Rosaleen didn’t ask what sort of a book I was writing, or anything else. She just nodded, and maintained a grave silence for a moment or two, as if she thought writing a book was a worthy but undesirable activity, on a par with going on a religious pilgrimage, maybe, or being in hospital undergoing treatment for some chronic and unsavoury disease. Then she changed the subject.
She was a sort of housekeeper for Frau Zimmerman – she, too, kept a few select guests. Everyone on the island kept a few select guests, during the summer months, according to Rosaleen. Loads of people wanted to stay in this gorgeous place, it was so healthy, it was so safe for the youngsters.
Rosaleen’s cleaning of Rosehaus didn’t take long – ‘Sure it’s too clean for its own good already’ – and in the afternoons she took me to the beach, and sometimes in the evenings she asked me if I’d like to come out with her, to a café. Not the café in our village, the Holles’, but another one, in the next village, the main town on the island, where the boats came in. It was about three miles away and we cycled there. Frau Zimmerman owned a bicycle, which Rosaleen was allowed to borrow whenever she needed it. She suggested that I ask Frau Holle for a loan of theirs. I didn’t bother asking. I knew she’d think it was dangerous – my father had never let us ride bicycles in case we’d fall off and break our teeth, which was a euphemism for our maidenheads. No need to worry about that now. I took the bicycle without asking.
I met Floryan at the café in the town. He knew a friend of Rosaleen’s – she knew everyone. This wasn’t something I noticed, at first: in so far as I thought about it, I took it that she and I were special friends, and that this had come about due to her good nature, and contingency. But as time went on I saw that Rosaleen could make friends with almost anybody.
After Floryan was introduced he focused completely on Rosaleen. This annoyed me; I hate being left out, even though I didn’t think him in the least bit attractive, that first night – he wasn’t very tall, but he was very thin, and his hair was so fair it was almost without colour at all – that very fine flat hair which children on the island had, like bleached sea grass. Maybe if he hadn’t ignored me I’d never have taken to him. But he did, completely. I might have been invisible, sitting there at the corner of the table while he and Rosaleen engaged in the kind of animated chat that is first cousin to flirtation; their eyes met often. He had large washed-out blue ones, and hers were brown, those sparkling eyes which always look as if they’re laughing. They could enchant you before you knew it.
He bought her a beer. That was another thing: Rosaleen ordered beer, like the German women, like a man. Never wine, never a cup of coffee and definitely never an ice cream.
Rosaleen remembered my existence when he was at the bar.
‘Kathleen, darling, what will you have?’ I didn’t like her calling me Kathleen, but she forgot, when she’d had a beer or two.
I glanced at my empty dish – I’d had an ice cream, strawberry.
‘Lemonade, thanks.’
I didn’t drink alcohol then. It wasn’t because of the baby, I just hadn’t started on alcohol, as yet, in my life.
Floryan came back to the table and seemed to see me then for the first time, although we had been introduced an hour earlier. He asked me where I was from, always the first question, and then what I was doing on the island, and, because I wanted to impress him, I said I was writing a book.
‘What variety?’ he asked. Another surprise. If anyone got this far, their next question invariably was ‘What’s it about?’ (Which is not a bad question, but it’s not one I could answer, then, or ever.)
I told him. Short stories. In fact I’d started a novel but at that moment, talking to him in the warm, dark inn, I decided to turn the novel into a short story.
He knew what a short story was. Guy de Maupassant, Edgar Allen Poe, Turgenev
, and some other Russian I’d never heard of were mentioned, in a waterfall of words, oddly assembled. I was charmed. Nobody on the island ever seemed to read a thing, not even a newspaper, and here was Floryan, who had read everything, in Russian and German and English and Polish. Soon he mentioned that he too was writing a book. More than one. He’d already published reviews (‘several reviews, many, many’ is what he said) and some essays. But now he was writing a Bildungsroman and a collection of short stories and reviews.
‘All at the same time?’
‘I have so many ideas, they flow out.’
He tapped his head, to show me where all these ideas were, waiting for their chance to escape.
He wasn’t from the island at all, or even from Germany. He’d been born in some place in Poland which I can’t remember, his mother had died when he was six years old. He’d attended university in Kraców, had studied Russian and German and English (and several other subjects) and was hoping to find a niche in the German press and then a publisher for his novel, as yet unwritten.
‘To publication, that is the way,’ he said. ‘The newspaper. Get it known, your name, then they will like you, like honeybees after you, oh yes they will be.’
I believed absolutely everything he said. He seemed to be immensely knowledgeable, wise, and canny. He knew a lot about everything, but especially about the literary world.
All this advice he gave me while Rosaleen was busy chatting to a friend of hers called Dagmar, who sat at the bar among the men. I noticed this because I took a fancy to Dagmar’s clothes: a black smock, and a velvet beret, and a red bow loosely tied around the neck of the smock. I decided I’d try to get a dress just like that – the smock would hide me, but that wasn’t the only reason I desired it. It’d make me feel like a writer, even before I dared call myself one . . . easier for me to become what I wanted to be. I believed, if I copied Dagmar’s style, wore a big pretentious smock instead of the white muslins and the soft merino gowns I had from home, I’d write better.
Rosaleen came down and gave me my lemonade. It was delicious, cool, served in a champagne glass with the edges dipped in sugar.
‘You’re doing fine!’ she winked at me, and went back to Dagmar, with, it seemed to me, a bit of a swagger, a swing of the hips, which gave me pause. I had a look at them, their backs, Rosaleen’s and Dagmar’s, Rosaleen chunky, in the bottle-green blouse, the brown knickerbockers she always wore when she was out, and the other lanky, in her flowing artist’s smock. Even their backs seemed to be chatting to one another. Spine to spine, hip to hip.
*
The sands of the island were fine and golden and immense; they stretched on and on, out to the milky North Sea, which was miles and miles away, and you couldn’t tell where sand stopped and sea began or where sea stopped and sky began. Water, sky, sand all blended into a picture that could have been painted by Monet or one of those French painters; you saw where the inspiration came from when you screwed up your eyes and gazed at the vista.
And behind, the little fringe of spicy pine trees, and behind, the fields of corn, high, waving. The narrow blue roads and the children and grown-ups cycling along them on their bicycles with enormous wheels. Horses too. Once, a motor car, its hood down, its brass accoutrements gleaming, like winking eyes. (How did they get it onto the island?)
We lay on a rug under a pine tree. Me and Rosaleen. Nearby was a café – a café was always nearby, on the island. At this one, more a stall than a proper café, you could get pommes frites, and frankfurters, and hamburgers. Also coffee and ices. There were wicker chairs and tables, striped parasols. Everyone dressed in blindingly white clothes. The children in navy sailor suits, or white knickers and navy jerseys. Sandcastles, tunnels, towns built on the sand.
‘I’m meeting him again,’ I said, referring to Floryan. All our conversation was about people we knew, or that Rosaleen knew and I had heard about. They were endlessly fascinating to us. Frau Holle, Frau Zimmerman, Dagmar, other friends of hers. What they did – painted pictures, kept guest houses, rented out horses or bicycles – what they looked like, what they were feeling, who they liked and who they didn’t like. Who they were married to, or had been married to, and who they were in love with now.
‘Be careful, lovey,’ she said. She blew a smoke ring. ’You could get yourself into big trouble.’
‘Yes,’ I started giggling, and then so did she, and we giggled and giggled till we couldn’t stop, so that a mother in a big black straw hat, shepherding her children down to the sea, glared angrily at us, as if we were giving them a bad example. (The children ignored us; concentrated as they were on tumbling along, they didn’t even hear our giggles, which were in any case all mixed up with the symphony of voices on the wind, and the screams of the seagulls, and the distant whispering of the waves as they began their long journey towards the coast, towards us – a trip which was just starting, very very slowly, now at the turn of the tide, and would gradually speed up until, before high tide, those gentle waves would gallop like a herd of furious wild animals into the straight line of pine trees that separated the genteel and gentle island from the untameable ocean.)
*
We were sitting on his bed. There was nowhere else to sit, in Floryan’s place, which was a hut with a red tin roof, one tiny window looking out on a high fence, a narrow bed and a tea chest for a table. (It had the advantage of being not far from the baths where he worked as some sort of assistant or guard.) It was down a lane – the island was all lanes. You turned off the promenade at the big chessboard, where men shoved the pawns and bishops and castles around all day. The promenade was a place of pomp and splendour, bandstands, parasols of red and yellow, but this lane was dreary, not a bit like Frau Holle’s. No roses or nasturtiums, just depressing little shacks with a few hens scratching the lane outside the front doors. I don’t know who lived there, apart from Floryan. He made no apology for the squalor of his quarters; he accepted them as a natural, temporary, necessary step on his road to fame as a great writer. Sometime in the future, quite soon, he’d be rich and famous. As soon as I saw his shack I realised that right now he had no money at all apart from whatever he earned at the baths. (‘Not much’, Rosaleen knew the sort of money you could earn at these summer jobs, as you learnt German or wrote your book, or otherwise prepared for your brilliant future. She didn’t have any of these aspirations herself, actually, so it wasn’t all that clear to me what she was doing here.)
We’d been with friends of his, in a café, talking about literature, but really mostly about ourselves, our hopes – especially Floryan’s – who we were sending our stories and articles to. Afterwards, because it was late and Rosaleen had disappeared, he asked me to stay with him. He’d sleep on the floor.
He didn’t have a spare blanket. Not that I could see. There was nothing in the hut. His good blazer was hanging on a nail, on the wall, and a few clothes were piled on the tea chest, neatly folded.
He shrugged. ‘It is all right.’
That was like him. There was a bravery in him, a lack of fussing about what he regarded as trivialities. It was as if he was so concentrated on his real work, of reading and writing, that all these effects of the present, the menial job at the baths, the shack, the poor little thin bed, were shadows in a dream from which he would wake up, in the palace that was his birthright. Nobody in Wellington was like that. Or in London. Or even in Germany, where the young men were more sure of themselves than in England, and less sissyish. It must be a Polish thing, I decided.
I pulled off my smock – I’d already got an artist’s smock and a black velvet beret; I’d decided against the red bow – and kissed him, and we slept in the narrow bed. I was pregnant anyway, so there was nothing to lose. He knew many tricks, most of them new to me and quite good. And this was what I expected of someone who was an assistant at the baths, someone who was ready to leap into the water and pull people to safety at any moment, someone who could sleep in his clothes on the hard floor, and who could also s
peak four or five languages. Sex was just another one which he knew fluently, much better than the father of my baby had.
*
Rosaleen tickled my shoulder.
‘Your shoulders are like two nice mushrooms,’ she said, gravely.
I pretended to be offended, but I wasn’t really, and she went on tickling, then stroking, for a few moments.
We’d been in swimming. Now we were sitting on a sand dune, in our wet bathing suits. It was a hot day.
‘You should swim in the nip. It’s a shame to cover that gorgeous body.’
She was sitting a few feet away from me, on her own towel. She didn’t have a proper bathing suit, like mine, but went in in not-very-white knickers and a plain shift, which now clung to her chunky midriff. Her chest was flat as the strand.
‘Yes, well,’ I didn’t know what to reply to this.
She turned to me and her eyes were back to normal – laughing. Mocking?
‘Have you slept with yer man?’
I nodded.
Rosaleen stopped stroking my shoulders, to my regret. It felt very pleasant because her hands were warm, much warmer than Floryan’s. He had poor circulation, maybe because he was so thin, or because he spent his days pulling invalids in and out of freezing cold baths.
So then I told her about the baby. She probably guessed about it anyway, since my stomach stuck out in the wet bathing suit. (I was almost five months gone.) It was a relief, that somebody else knew, apart from Frau Holle. Also, it was a relief, and a surprise, to find out that Frau Holle hadn’t told the whole village.
‘Aren’t you sick?’
‘No.’
‘Were you?’
‘A bit, at the start.’
‘You need to look after yourself, young one!’
‘Frau Holle looks after me!’
‘You shouldn’t be riding that yoke,’ she nodded at my bicycle. ‘You could do yourself an injury.’