Free The Love Object by Edna O’Brien

anyone in at any time, keeping the door locked when he was out on the farm. Once we climbed in through the window and found things in such a muddle – his good suit laid out flat on the floor, a shirt soaking in a bucket of dirty green water, a milk can in which there was curdled buttermilk, a bicycle chain, a broken Sacred Heart and several pair’s of worn, distorted, cast-off boots that she resolved never to set foot in it again.
    ‘What the hell is it?’ Hickey said. Then there was a thud. He must have knocked something over while he searched for his flashlamp.
    ‘If it’s fine tomorrow, we’ll cut the turf,’ Mama said.
    Hickey asked if she’d wakened him at that hour to tell him something he already knew – they discussed it at tea-time.
    ‘Open the door,’ she said. ‘I have a bit of news for you, about the rug.’
    He opened the door just a fraction. ‘Who sent it?’ he asked.
    ‘That party from Ballinsloe,’ she said.
    ‘That party’ was her phrase for her two visitors who had come to our house years before – a young girl, and an older man who wore brown gauntlet gloves. Almost as soon as they’d arrived, my father went out with them in their motor-car. When they returned to our house an hour later, I gathered from the conversation that they had been to see our local doctor, a friend of Dad’s. The girl was the sister of a nun, who was headmistress at the convent where my sisters were. She had been crying. I guessed then, or maybe later, that her tears had to do with her having a baby and that Dada had taken her to the doctor so that she could find out for certain if she were pregnant and make preparations to get married. It would have been impossible for her to go to a doctor in her own neighbourhood, and I had no doubt but that Dada was glad to do a favour for the nun, as he could not always pay the fees for my sisters’ education. Mama gave them tea on a tray – not a spread with hand-embroidered cloth and bone-china cups – and shook hands with them coolly when they were leaving. She could not abide sinful people.
    ‘Nice of them to remember,’ Hickey said, sucking air between his teeth and making bird noises. ‘How did you find out?’
    ‘I just guessed,’ Mama told him.
    ‘Oh, Christ!’ Hickey said, closing his door with a fearful bang and getting back into bed with such vehemence that I could hear the springs revolt.
    Mama carried me up the stairs, because my feet were cold, and said that Hickey had not one ounce of manners.
    Next day, when Dad came home sober, she told him the story, and that night she wrote to the nun. In due course, a letter came to us – with holy medals and scapulars enclosed for me – saying that neither the nun nor her married sister had sent a gift. I expect the girl had married the man with the gauntlet gloves.
    ‘’Twill be one of life’s mysteries,’ Mama said, as she beat the rug against the pier, closed her eyes to escape the dust and reconciled herself to never knowing.
    But a knock came on our back door four weeks later, when we were upstairs changing the sheets on the beds. ‘Run down and see who it is,’ she said.
    It was a namesake of Dada’s from the village, a man who always came to borrow something – a donkey, or a mowing machine, or even a spade.
    ‘Is your mother in?’ he asked, and I went halfway up the stairs and called her down.
    ‘I’ve come for the rug,’ he said.
    ‘What rug?’ Mama asked. It was the nearest she ever got to lying. Her breathe caught short and she blushed a little.
    ‘I hear you have a new rug here. Well, ’tis our rug, because my wife’s sister sent it to us months ago and we never got it.’
    ‘What are you talking about?’ she said in a very sarcastic voice. He was a cowardly man, and it was said that he was so ineffectual he would call his wife in from the garden to pour him a cup of tea. I suppose my mother hoped that she would frighten him off.
    ‘The rug the postman brought here one