Country Girls (eBook)

Edna O'brien (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2025 | 1. Auflage
224 Seiten
Faber & Faber (Verlag)
978-0-571-39667-2 (ISBN)

Infos

The groundbreaking debut novel that set the world alight, from the beloved great Edna O'Brien. We want to live. Drink gin. Squeeze into the front of big cars and drive up outside big hotels. We want to go places. Caithleen is a romantic: she dreams of finding a handsome man who will sweep her away and look after her. Her friend Baba thinks this makes her a right-looking eejit. What she wants is money and glamour. Life. As much of it as she can get. But neither love nor excitement seem possible in their small village, or their convent school. And when they finally make it to Dublin, they find that home isn't as easy to escape as they thought.

Edna O'Brien wrote more than twenty celebrated works of fiction, including her classic The Country Girls trilogy, as well as plays and four works of non-fiction, which have been translated into over thirty languages. Her final novel Girl was awarded the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year in 2020. She was the recipient of many honours, including the Irish PEN Lifetime Achievement Award, the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, the PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature, and the David Cohen Prize for Literature, as well as being appointed an honorary Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2017. In 2021, O'Brien was also named Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. Born and raised in the west of Ireland, she lived in London for many years before her death in July 2024.

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2

“I shall convey you, Caithleen, over the wet winding roads.”

“It’s not wet, Jack, and for God’s sake, don’t talk of rain; it’s as fatal as opening umbrellas in the house. It just reminds it to rain.”

He smiled and touched my elbow with his hand. “Caithleen, you must know that poem of Colum’s—‘wet winding roads, brown bogs and black water, and my thoughts on white ships and the King of Spain’s daughter.’ Except of course,” said he, grinning to himself, “my thoughts are nearer home.”

We were passing Mr. Gentleman’s gate, and the padlock was on it.

“Is Mr. Gentleman away?” I asked.

“Indubitably. Odd fish, Caithleen. Odd fish.” I said that I didn’t think so. Mr. Gentleman was a beautiful man who lived in the white house on the hill. It had turret windows and an oak door that was like a church door, and Mr. Gentleman played chess in the evenings. He worked as a solicitor in Dublin, but he came home at the weekends, and in the summertime he sailed a boat on the Shannon. Mr. Gentleman was not his real name, of course, but everyone called him that. He was French, and his real name was Mr. de Maurier, but no one could pronounce it properly, and anyhow, he was such a distinguished man with his gray hair and his satin waistcoats that the local people christened him Mr. Gentleman. He seemed to like the name very well, and signed his letters J. W. Gentleman. J.W. were the initials of his Christian names and they stood for Jacques and something else.

I remembered the day I went up to his house. It was only a few weeks before that Dada had sent me with a note—it was to borrow money, I think. Just at the top of the tarmac avenue, two red setters shot around the side of the house and jumped on me. I screamed and Mr. Gentleman came out the conservatory door and smiled. He led the dogs away and locked them in the garage.

He brought me into the front hall and smiled again. He had a sad face, but his smile was beautiful, remote; and very condescending. There was a trout in a glass case that rested on the hall table, and it had a printed sign which read: caught by j. w. gentleman at lough derg. weight 20 lb.

From the kitchen came the smell and sizzle of a roast. Mrs. Gentleman, who was reputed to be a marvelous cook, must have been basting the dinner.

He opened Dada’s envelope with a paper knife and frowned while he was reading it.

“Tell him that I will look the matter over,” Mr. Gentleman said to me. He spoke as if there were a damson stone in his throat. He had never lost his French accent, but Jack Holland said this was an affectation.

“Have an orange?” he said, taking two out of the cut-glass bowl on the dining-room table. He smiled and saw me to the door. There was a certain slyness about his smile, and as he shook my hand I had an odd sensation, as if someone were tickling my stomach from the inside. I crossed over the smooth lawn, under the cherry trees, and out onto the tarmac path. He stayed in the doorway. When I looked back the sun was shining on him and on the white Snowcemmed house, and the upstairs windows were all on fire. He waved when I was closing the gate and then went inside. To drink elegant glasses of sherry; to play chess, to eat soufflés and roast venison, I thought, and I was just on the point of thinking about tall eccentric Mrs. Gentleman when Jack Holland asked me another question.

“You know something, Caithleen?”

‘What, Jack?”

At least he would protect me if we met my father.

“You know many Irish people are royalty and unaware of it. There are kings and queens walking the roads of Ireland, riding bicycles, imbibing tea, plowing the humble earth, totally unaware of their great heredity. Your mother, now, has the ways and the walk of a queen.”

I sighed. Jack’s infatuation with the English language bored me.

He went on: “‘My thoughts on white ships and the King of Spain’s daughter’—except that my thoughts are much nearer home.” He smiled happily to himself. He was composing a paragraph for his column in the local paper—“Walking in the crystal-clear morning with a juvenile lady friend, exchanging snatches of Goldsmith and Colum, the thought flashed through my mind that I was moving amid …”

The towpath petered out just there and we went onto the road. It was dry and dusty where we walked, and we met the carts going over to the creamery and the milk tanks rattled and the owners beat their donkeys with the reins and said, “Gee-up there.” Passing Baba’s house I walked faster. Her new Pink-Witch bicycle was gleaming against the side wall of their house. Their house was like a doll’s house on the outside, pebble-dashed, with two bow windows downstairs and circular flower beds in the front garden. Baba was the veterinary surgeon’s daughter. Coy, pretty, malicious Baba was my friend and the person whom I feared most after my father.

“Your mam at home?” Jack finally asked. He hummed some tune to himself.

He tried to sound casual, but I knew perfectly well that this was why he had waited for me under the ivy wall. He had brought over his cow to the paddock he hired from one of our neighbors and then he had waited for me at the wicker gate. He didn’t dare come up. Not since the night Dada had ordered him out of the kitchen. They were playing cards and Jack had his hand on Mama’s knee under the table. Mama didn’t protest, because Jack was decent to her, with presents of candied peel and chocolate and samples of jam that he got from commercial travelers. Then Dada let a card fall and bent down to get it; and next thing the table was turned over sideways and the china lamp got broken. My father shouted and pulled up his sleeves, and Mama told me to go to bed. The shouting, high and fierce, came up through the ceiling because my room was directly over the kitchen. Such shouting! It was rough and crushing. Like the noise of a steamroller. Mama cried and pleaded, and her cry was hopeless and plaintive.

“There’s trouble brewing,” said Jack, bringing me from one world of it more abruptly to another. He spoke as if it were the end of the world for me.

We were walking in the middle of the road and from behind came the impudent ring of a bicycle bell. It was Baba, looking glorious on her new puce bicycle. She passed with her head in the air and one hand in her pocket. Her black hair was plaited that day and tied at the tips with blue ribbons that matched her ankle socks exactly. I noticed with envy that her legs were delicately tanned.

She passed us and then slowed down, dragging her left toe along the blue tarred road, and when we caught up with her, she grabbed the lilac out of my arms and said, “I’ll carry that for you.” She laid it into the basket on the front of her bicycle and rode off singing, “I will and I must get married,” out loud to herself. So she would give Miss Moriarty the lilac and get all the praise for bringing it.

“You don’t deserve this, Caithleen,” he said.

“No, Jack. She shouldn’t have taken it. She’s a bully.” But he meant something quite different, something to do with my father and with our farm.

We passed the Greyhound Hotel, where Mrs. O’Shea was polishing the knocker. She had a hairnet on and pipe cleaners so tight in her head that you could see her scalp. Her bedroom slippers looked as if the greyhounds had chewed them. More than likely they had. The hotel was occupied chiefly by greyhounds. Mr. O’Shea thought he would get rich that way. He went to the dogs in Limerick every night and Mrs. O’Shea drank port wine up at the dressmaker’s. The dressmaker was a gossip.

“Good morning, Jack; good morning, Caithleen,” she said over-affably. Jack replied coldly; her business interfered with his. He had a grocery and bar up the street, but Mrs. O’Shea got a lot of drinkers at night because she kept good fires. The men drank there after hours and she had bribed the police not to raid her. I almost walked over two hounds that were asleep on the mat outside the shop door. Their noses, black and moist, were jutting out on the pavement.

“Hello,” I said. My mother warned me not to be too free with her, as she had given my father so much credit that ten of their cows were grazing on our land for life.

We passed the hotel, the gray, damp ruin that it was, with window frames rotting and doors scratched all over from the claws of young and nervous greyhounds.

“Did I tell you, Caithleen, that her ladyship has never given a commercial traveler anything other than fried egg or tinned salmon for lunch?”

“Yes, Jack, you told me.” He had told me fifty times, it was one of his ways of ridiculing her; by lowering her he hoped to lower the name of the hotel. But the locals liked it, because it was friendly drinking in the kitchen late at night.

We stood for a minute to look over the bridge, at the black-green water that flowed by the window...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 9.9.2025
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Romane / Erzählungen
• ISBN-10: 0-571-39667-4 / 0571396674
• ISBN-13: 978-0-571-39667-2 / 9780571396672