The love object;: Stories
Edna O'Brien
Language: English
Pages: 172
ISBN: B0006BYKUY
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
they met the following Saturday. Each time she looked younger. Her cheeks were seasoned like an apple and her eyes shone. There was no telling, of course, about her figure because in winter clothes she was shapeless like everyone else. ‘It’s my hair,’ she said. She’d given herself a home perm and put a little peroxide in the water. If Mr Farley knew he’d kill her, so she had to sit well out of the light. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I’ve been told I have hair the texture of a baby’s.’ He touched the
might not. ‘Oh it ain’t gonna rain no more, no more, it ain’t gonna rain no more; How in the hell can the old folks say it ain’t gonna rain no more.’ So sang Brogan, whose party it was, in the upstairs room of the Commercial Hotel. Unbuttoning his brown waistcoat, he sat back and said what a fine spread it was. They had carried the goose up on a platter and it lay in the centre of the mahogany table with potato stuffing spilling out of it. There were sausages also and polished glasses rim
birds were busy with their song. She met the fat woman. ‘You have been derouted,’ the woman said, ‘and so have I.’ And they bowed mockingly. An archaeologist had been on a dig where a wooden temple was discovered. ‘Tell me about your temple,’ she said. ‘I would say it’s 400 B.C.,’ he said, nothing more. Dry, dry. A boy who called himself Jasper and wore mauve shirts received letters under the name of John. The letters were arranged on the hall table, each person’s under a separate stone. Her
‘Poor Michael,’ I said. A feeble apology. I was thinking that if he had abetted my suicide he would then have been committed to the memory of it. ‘A lovely young girl,’ he said, wistful. ‘Poor girl,’ I said, mustering up pity. There seemed to be nothing else to say. He had shamed me out of it. I stood up and made an effort at normality – I took some glasses off a side – table and moved in the direction of the kitchen. If dirty glasses are any proof of drinking, then quite a lot of it had been
silly game again or embark upon another adventure story. At these times I did not allow my mind to wander, but in the evenings when their father came I used to withdraw to the sitting-room and have a drink. Well that was disastrous. The leisure enabled me to brood, also I have very weak bulbs in the lamps and the dimness gives the room a quality that induces reminiscence. I would be transported back. I enacted various kinds of reunion with my lover, but my favourite one was an unexpected meeting