Maeve Brennan - The Visitor

Even in a shop, when one sits down for a lemonade, there comes the moment to stand up and pay the cashier and go out on the street again and start walking again. One is bound to be sent scurrying back to the place one came from, which is the other world, the first world, the one with walls around it.

This is quite different. It is a standstill. There is silence upstairs and downstairs, behind the closed doors and in the hall and on the landings. There is no compulsion at all. The slow-turning malicious sightless eye of the crowd is not here. One can spend hour upon hour here, watching through the window the changing sky, or reading books, papers, and magazines, or even sleeping. Inside the house there is no further step to be taken, except perhaps to find a coat and gloves, and go out again onto the street.

It was late February, and frosty weather.

Anastasia came slowly in from the street and closed the front door behind her. She loosened her coat and took off her gloves. At the foot of the stairs the crackle and bang of the newly lighted fire caught her ear and drew her to the sitting-room door. She leaned against the door frame and gazed absently into the room, shrugging her shoulders a little to throw off the chill that clung to her. The dark masses of the room loomed toward her, soft gloom broken briefly by the sputtering fire, and again twice by the large rectangular windows, through which the square could be seen lying like a pale stage backdrop, out there beyond.

She heard Katharine begin her ascent of the stairs from the kitchen, climbing heavily from step to step, carrying the heavy tea tray. Katharine is kind, but she is inquisitive and officious. She owns the place.

Over by the fireplace the first warm waves began to circle out. She went to lean against the mantelpiece and felt the heat on her legs. There in the mirror was Katharine, easing the heavy curtains over so that they joined together and shut out the square and the pale evening sky. The twilight was gone, shut out of the room. There was only the fire left to turn to. It threw noisy sparks up into the chimney and out onto the hearthrug, while at its center it burned away forever without end.

One lamp was switched on and Katharine stood in the middle of the room.

“I can see you in the mirror, Katharine.” All teasingly.

“Indeed you can, I know that well.” Katharine gave her an odd look, half-startled.

She thinks I’m a queer one, thought Anastasia indifferently. Mrs King came into the room in silence. She sat down without speaking, arranging her long black skirt about her long-hidden, unimaginable knees, and examining the tea tray with a critical eye. Katharine peered into the teapot and assured herself that the tea was ready. She went away.

Mrs King glanced up at Anastasia.

“It’s nice to see you down to tea for a change, child. Why don’t you sit down and be comfortable?”

She filled the cups. They added sugar and cream. Anastasia added a little more sugar. The room was very still again, except for the large disturbing movement of the firelight. Once or twice Mrs King stirred uneasily and glanced across the hearth at her granddaughter. There was impatience and distress on her face.

Anastasia thought, As usual I’m being a strain on her. She stood up and put down her cup.

“Excuse me, Grandma. I have a bit of reading to do.”

“Anastasia. Wait a minute. I want to have a word with you.”

She put aside her teacup.

“Look here, Anastasia,” she said decisively. “What plans have you made for yourself?”

“I haven’t made any plans.”

Mrs King sighed with irritation.

“Don’t you think it’s about time you did make some plans?”

“Why? I want to stay here.”

The grandmother raised her hands and dropped them helplessly.

“You are trying to drive me mad,” she said distinctly. “I wish to God, and wish this every day of my life, that you would go away and leave me alone here. You cry, you’re forever opening a door and coming into the room where I happen to be at the moment, and so on and on—”

“I don’t mean it.”

“You’re not happy here, that’s plain. It is really better all around if you go back to Paris as soon as possible.”

“What would I do there?” asked Anastasia weakly.

“At your age there are many things you can find to do. You must have friends there. You can stay with the nuns till you get settled somewhere, if you don’t want to go back to the flat you shared with your mother (God rest her). As a matter of fact, it might not be quite suitable for you to live alone there. There’s that to think of. And you can find some work perhaps, teaching in a school. You might like library work. Have you thought of that?”

“Oh, I have no training, you know that.”

“Never mind about that. I have written to the Mother Superior already. She is delighted to have you as assistant in the library, and you can live at the school with the other teachers.”

Anastasia had retreated across a wide distance in her mind.

She said unevenly, “Whatever I do, I won’t live at the convent. I can work in a library here. I’ll take a room and stay in Dublin.”

“I control your allowance, Anastasia, and I know what’s best for you.”

She got up suddenly.

“I’ll arrange about money, and so on,” she said in a low voice.

She walked rapidly and nervously out of the room. After a moment Anastasia followed her, gathering her coat and gloves as she passed through the hall. Upstairs in her room she closed the window and began to change her dress. With her belt unfastened and hanging loosely she walked over to the window and looked out.

In the late-evening light the garden seemed unreal, a careless impression of a garden with all the colours running into one another. On the end wall was a blurred yellow smudge. That would be the early forsythia. The laburnum tree spread crooked brown arms over the low stone wall. Later it would be a fragrant yellow cloud, shedding its little shining flowers with every ripple of the air. There was a woodshed down there too, almost out of sight from the window, it was so close to the house. It had a slanting corrugated tin roof, and on wet days the rain hammered thunderously down on the roof, filling the interior of the shed with mad imperious sound, so that sometimes a little child playing there would suddenly become terrified, and would run to the kitchen door and enter in breathless haste, to find the sound still persisting, but more remote now, and not so urgent.

This was the shadowy twilight time, when at a little distance familiar things seemed half-strange, when the face of the city seemed averted and almost hidden in the low sky, and drifting clouds came down and fumbled in the outlying hills, to the confusion of the watcher. Anastasia stared listlessly in the direction of the hills, and she fancied she glimpsed them.

That night she had a vivid dream. She dreamed that on a walk down Noon Square she stopped to look behind her, and on turning again to go on her way she found herself tangled in a gardenia bush, which grew up against the window of a big old house. The bush was covered with flowers, creamy white, large and perfect. She stayed to admire them and noticed with a start a wrinkled, purplish old hand that fumbled against the inside of the window without knocking.

A maid came to the door, an old woman, and told her to go away. Anastasia said, with friendly dignity, in her dream, “I am waiting for someone, and as I dropped a piece of paper here, I thought I would wait here.”

But the owner of the wrinkled hand, who was the mistress of the house, came out, and with her came her two aged sisters, and they all stood together on the steps of the house. They were all old, with thin, hostile faces, and they told Anastasia to go away, without listening to her friendly dignified speech.