Time and Tide by Edna O'Brien

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

* * *

A vexed flare of the nostrils was reiterated in the thin stony smile. She stared down at his mementos—a silver-mounted wine cork, a photograph of his wife as a young woman, the house in London, a house where Charles Dickens had lived, and her own handwriting, wild and importunate.

“What would you have them write?” he asked, pointing to the sheaf of papers.

“Their guts,” she said.

“Their guts,” he said, and laughed a bitter laugh, yet conceded that she was right. He had something to add to that. When the time came and the world was to be treated to his memoirs, he would not give of his guts either, though he was as tormented as the next man. She didn’t smile or didn’t try to curry favour, it was too late for that.

“I suppose you despise me for that,” he said, almost bitterly. He need not suppose that she didn’t, since the whole office despised him for the way he strung two women along, couldn’t make up his mind; even his ninety-three-year-old mother despised him, said, “Choose, William, choose one or the other … for pity’s sake, choose.” The thing was, he couldn’t, he was like the camel in the fable, halfway between food and water—when he went forward, his thirst was met, and when he went backwards, his hunger was met, but never both. He looked at her so earnestly, so pitifully, and she thought she must make it as easy as possible for him.

“Will you give me a reference?” she said, smiling a weak smile so as not to make him feel too bad.

“For what?”

“For…”

“Good God, no, I’m not that stuffy … though I may seem it,” and to prove it he took a whisky bottle from behind a leather-bound dictionary set, winked, poured large measures, and, with an archness that almost made her weep, said, “Here’s to the next twenty or thirty or forty years.”

He kept walking, partly because he was restless and partly because he had waxed sentimental, recalling the first day when he had met her in the lift by accident, this eager girl who had come in off the street to look for a job, had not even an appointment, and was pumping him for ideas. Yes, he remembered that first day and how he had been bewitched, as indeed any man would be, and she thought, How strange, he does not see me as I am at all, he sees some other, he sees freedom, he sees confidence, he sees bewitchment.

“And I’ve never touched you,” he said with a strange, boyish innocence, a boyish nostalgia, and as if to make it respectable then, he said that if ever she needed him, if ever she was in trouble, she must come to him, she must count on that.

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