The Love Object by Edna O’Brien Read Free Book Online

comfortable. Mrs Farley could make up the time later.
    ‘Green matches everything,’ Mrs Captain Hagerty said as she stirred saccharine into her coffee. One had to say something to these people.
    ‘And lovely vases,’ Mrs Farley went on. ‘Lovely, cut-glass ones, that shimmer.’
    Mrs Farley was getting quite lyrical. She hadn’t mentioned her womb for weeks.
    ‘And they had ever such a funny card on the counter in front of the vases,’ Mrs Farley said, and then blushed as she recited it, the way a child would recite!
‘Lovely to look at,
    Delightful to hold,
    But if you break me
    Consider me sold.’
    ‘Quite,’ Mrs Captain Hagerty said. Enough was enough. She stood up to make some more telephone calls. Mrs Farley had to drink down the last of her coffee hurriedly.
    That night, in her small front room, Mrs Farley looked at her husband’s face in the faint, blue glow from the television screen and decided she would ask him when he wakened up. Even in dim light her husband was plain: fat, with round, pug-like cheeks and a paunch. Awake or asleep he tried to disguise the paunch by placing folded hands across it, and as far as she was concerned, merely drew attention to it. Yes, she’d ask him. She’d done everything to please him all evening. He’d had steak and kidney pie, a pint of director’s bitter from the pub, and the right television channel going. He only tolerated the channel which carried advertisements, insisting that the other lot were socialists. It seemed foolish because he slept through it anyhow, but he was a stubborn man and had to have his way.
    ‘Dan,’ she said when she saw him stir. ‘D’you know what I was just thinking about? D’you remember the winter of the big freeze and you found a lump of coal on the road and brought it home and it turned out to be ice that was black with soot?’
    ‘I remember it,’ he said. It was the only memory they ever resorted to. The ice had melted in the grate, ruining the chopped sticks which Mrs Farley had put there. In the end they’d gone out to a pub to get warm. It was nineteen forty-seven, the year of her first miscarriage. They often went to pubs then and had beer and salt-beef sandwiches.
    ‘Yes, I was just thinking about it,’ she said, ‘when I was looking at you there asleep. Funny how you think of things for no reason.’
    ‘I remember it,’ he said. ‘It was in Hartfield Road, just beyond the railway bridge … I was coming along, very cold it was …’
    From a distance she heard his voice receding into the story and she lowered the television.
    ‘Dan,’ she said when he had finished. ‘I did something reckless today. I couldn’t help it.’
    ‘What reckless?’ He was wide awake now, his tongue dampening the corners of his mouth.
    ‘I put a pound down on a three-piece suite.’
    ‘We have all the furniture we need,’ he said. ‘Still paying for those damn beds, I am.’
    A year before Mrs Farley had implored him to get single, divan beds. She wasn’t well she said, and would be happier in a single bed. She needed privacy. It inconvenienced him no end.
    ‘A three-piece suite for only four pounds,’ she said. ‘It is a most beautiful, olive green.’
    ‘It must be worm-eaten, you wouldn’t get anything for four pounds.’
    ‘I beat him down,’ she said. ‘They were asking nine, but I beat him down. I think it was my eyes that did it.’ The sleepy salesman hadn’t even noticed her.
    ‘I’m not buying it,’ he said. ‘You can take that for definite.’
    ‘You remember,’ she said, ‘that you said you might get me an umbrella for my birthday, well, if you’re getting me anything, I’d rather have the money.’
    If he gave her three pounds and if she did an hour extra for Mrs Captain Hagerty, and skimped on the food for herself, she might have the eight pounds balance by May the 10th, which was the day Mr Farley was going on the outing to Brighton. She’d invited her friend in. They had nowhere to meet,