Saints and Sinners by Edna O’Brien Read Free Book Online

statue of the Virgin, for protection.
    Exactly half an hour after they had retired, it happened. She heard a creak, then the girl's door opening slowly, and she thought it was a bathroom need, but instead she heard her go towards the parents' room on tiptoe, then a tap, a series of taps, light and playful, not the tapping of a sick or overwrought child, not the tapping of a child frightened by dark, or disturbed by a crow in the chimney, not that at all, and in seconds, Delia twigged. Her whole body stiffened in revulsion. She heard the girl go into their room and then she was out of bed, her hand on her own doorknob, opening it very softly, as she moved across the landing barefoot, in their direction, not knowing exactly what she would do. The whole house listened. They were not talking, yet something appalling was transpiring in there, whispers and tittering and giggles. She could not see, yet her eyes seemed to penetrate through the paneled door as if it were transparent, and she pictured them, their hands, their mouths, their limbs, all seeking one another out. They had not dared to put on a light. The girl was probably naked and yielding, allowing them to fondle her, the man fondling her in one way, the woman in another, and before long she knew that it would reach the vileness of an orgy. She would have to go in there and catch them out—the man, lord of his harem, straddled over a girl who was in no way his daughter, and the woman ministering, because that was the surest way she could hold on to a husband. This was no daughter of theirs. Maybe she was a hitchhiker to whom they had given a lift, or perhaps they had placed an advertisement, the words cunningly couched, in their local paper, in the Midlands of England, where they came from, or where they said they came from. There was a poker in that room, laid into the coal scuttle, left there since her last confinement thirty years previous, and she was already picking it up and breaking it on their bare, romping bodies. What detained her she could not say. Everything determined that she could go in and yet she faltered. Then came the exclamations, the three pitches of sound so different—the woman's loud and gloating, the girl's helpless, as if she were almost crying, and the man, like a jackass down in the woods with his lady loves. She hurried back to her room and sat on the edge of her bed, trembling. From a little round box in her bedside drawer, she felt for the sleeping tablet that was turquoise in color, identical to the sea on a postcard that her youngest daughter had once sent from the Riviera. For thrift's sake she halved it, she always halved them. The powder on her tongue tasted bitter, poisonous, and she had no glass of water to wash it down.
    Sleep came and with it a glut of dreams. She was with a group of women who were about to be photographed by two men, obvious rivals who bickered and elbowed each other out of the way. For the actual photograph all were ordered to undress, but she could not, she would not. Stoutly she refused to remove her camisole, which was of coarse, unbleached linen. The woman next to her, whom she recognized as Ellie, the local dressmaker, did undress and waddled about as would a hussy. Then suddenly the dream shifted. She was alone in a big church that was regal, but very profane. The saints, Joseph and Jude and Anthony and Theresa the Little Flower, were all stripped of their robes, and if that was not sacrilege enough, the priest sang lustily, as ifhewere in a beer garden. Then a little altar boy in cardinal red started to prance about and help himself to wine from the chalice. She kept believing that she was not dreaming, except that she was. When she wakened suddenly, at once she remembered the paying guests, their panting, the vile happenings, and how she would have to fry rashers and eggs and sausages for their loathsome breakfasts.
    She threw her clothes on, fumbled with her stockings, which would not draw up as quickly