The Love Object by Edna O'Brien

Author:Edna O'Brien [O'Brien, Edna]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Short Stories, Fiction
ISBN: 9780224613576
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 1968-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

Cords

EVERYTHING WAS READY, THE suitcase closed, her black velvet coat-collar carefully brushed, and a list pinned to the wall reminding her husband when to feed the hens and turkeys, and what foodstuffs to give them. She was setting out on a visit to her daughter Claire in London, just like any mother, except that her daughter was different: she’d lost her faith, and she mixed with queer people and wrote poems. If it was stories one could detect the sin in them, but these poems made no sense at all and therefore seemed more wicked. Her daughter had sent the money for the air-ticket. She was going now, kissing her husband goodbye, tender towards him in a way that she never was, throughout each day, as he spent his time looking through the window at the wet currant bushes, grumbling about the rain, but was in fact pleased at the excuse to hatch indoors, and asked for tea all the time, which he lapped from a saucer, because it was more pleasurable.

‘The turkeys are the most important,’ she said, kissing him good-bye, and thinking faraway to the following Christmas, to the turkeys she would sell, and the plumper ones she would give as gifts.

‘I hope you have a safe flight,’ he said. She’d never flown before.

‘All Irish planes are blessed, they never crash,’ she said, believing totally in the God that created her, sent her this venial husband, a largish farmhouse, hens, hardship, and one daughter who’d changed, become moody, and grown away from them completely.

The journey was pleasant once she’d got over the shock of being strapped down for the take-off. As they went higher and higher she looked out at the very white, wispish cloud and thought of the wash tub and hoped her husband would remember to change his shirt while she was away. The trip would have been perfect but that there was a screaming woman who had to be calmed down by the air hostess. She looked like a woman who was being sent to a mental institution, but did not know it.

Claire met her mother at the airport and they kissed warmly, not having seen each other for over a year.

‘Have you stones in it?’ Claire said, taking the fibre suitcase. It was doubly secured with a new piece of binding twine. Her mother wore a black straw hat with clusters of cherries on both sides of the brim.

‘You were great to meet me,’ the mother said.

‘Of course I’d meet you,’ Claire said, easing her mother right back on the taxi seat. It was a long ride, and they might as well be comfortable.

‘I could have navigated,’ the mother said, and Claire said nonsense a little too brusquely. Then to make amends she asked gently how the journey was.

‘Oh I must tell you, there was this very peculiar woman and she was screaming.’

Claire listened and stiffened, remembering her mother’s voice that became low and dramatic in a crisis, the same voice that said, ‘Sweet

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