The High Road by Edna O'Brien

Author:Edna O'Brien
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

YOUR EX-SON, ANDY

I felt a shiver, as if he had just stepped into the room. I imagined him pale, thin. I even imagined he had blond hair and blond eyelashes.

The moment it was light, I stood in the landing, outside her room, waiting for her. She came out, calling the servants:

“Conchita … Conchita … Pepe … Pepe.”

When she saw me she realized that something was amiss and asked if I had seen a ghost, adding that the house was supposed to have the statutory ghost, a woman no less who had drowned herself in the artificial lake. I wanted to embrace her but somehow her coldness and her cleverness were deterring me. Half of me was saying, “Go ahead and tell her,” while the other half was apologizing for having spent the night. I kept rehearsing it, I even saw her drop her defenses and weep, telling me some key moment, as where she was when she heard it, when the news was broken to her, and who she turned to.

“I played some tapes,” I began to say.

“Don’t you love Callas … don’t you love that sleepwalking aria … her trance,” she said.

“Another tape came on … a young man’s,” I said. She stiffened. All seemed havoc for a moment, the very center of her being smashed, and rage issued from her like the vapor from erupting lava. She knew.

“Pepe will take you home,” she said and she called loudly, harshly, like a street vendor. I could see clearly her terror, her blue vitreous eyes, the bone of her nose aquiver, her morning gown voile, and I thought that if I could say it, something tender would occur between us and the stone inside her would dissolve. I thought of the blood of martyrs in churches in Italy which though solidified turns to liquid one day a year. The prayers of the faithful cause them to melt. All that was needed was faith. Even as I tried, I knew that I could not take those few but immeasurable steps between me and her, between me and life, and that in two or three minutes I would be gone, dispatched, and rubbing her hands she would order breakfast and shout out to herself: “Imbeciles … that’s what people are … liars … imbeciles … ogres”—and walking to the breakfast room she would snap off the dead heads of the roses and think that in the future she must be more careful, she must take precautions, because one must, one simply must protect oneself from people, horrid, prying, inquisitive, thieving, stupid, callous people.

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