Read Online August Is a Wicked Month by Edna O’Brien - Free Book Online Page A

told her he was Bobby’s understudy. Opposite was Bobby, Denise, and a pretty boy with a less pretty boy, joined to each other by two gold bracelets that were clipped together with a little gold padlock. She tried to smile at them but they were very aloof. There were about twenty people in all: a wide-shouldered man called Jason, whose wife had the fur-tipped stole, and some oriental girls with slit skirts, who never spoke, and the older women chirping like birds, and a platoon of people who said, ‘Isn’t that marvellous?’ whenever the actor, Sidney, or Jason, the powerful element of the group, opened their mouths.
    ‘I definitely dig her, she is a law unto herself,’ the man Jason kept saying of some woman who lived on the East coast of America and wrote for movies.
    ‘How do you mean?’ Sidney said.
    ‘I mean she’s a law unto herself,’ Jason said, and his wife told the group that this girl came to stay with them one week-end when the temperature was in the nineties and wore pretty blouses all the time with sleeves that came right down to the wrist, and then she discovered the girl having a shower in the bathroom and found that she had this big growth on her arm with hair on it. The story sent a shiver through the gathering and Bobby said for God’s sake to get the drinks before they all went to sleep or something. At the word sleep Denise put her head on his shoulder and basked there for a second.
    ‘Don’t forget we’ve a date, I’m twenty-five at midnight,’ she said, pretending to be drunker than she was.
    ‘All rightie,’ Gwyn said as the waiter came with the first bucket of champagne. Vapour clouded the bucket except where his fingers had touched it, in putting it down, and there, four squat prints showed shiny. He brought four other tubs and various squat bottles of whisky with the black-and-white label she knew well, and fruit juice for the slim oriental girls.
    ‘You’re having what?’ Sidney asked as he dealt out numerous packets of cigarettes like a pack of cards. He was proud to be host to so many people and was paying particular attention to Ellen.
    ‘I’d like Pernod,’ she said, and Bobby who was halfway through a tumbler of whisky put it down and said he’d like that too.
    ‘What would I do without you?’ he said, smiling over at her. She smiled back. He said they must look at etchings some time. The evening was beginning to bloom.
    ‘Bobby’s the best in the world, the best in the world,’ the understudy kept telling her. She couldn’t see how he would fill in if Bobby fell sick. He had thicker features and spoke with oily Irish-American gusto, whereas Bobby had a sharp-boned face and spoke in a low, lazy manner.
    ‘Gave me forty-seven suits, no kiddin’,’ he said. ‘And my son got married and on their wedding day they didn’t know it but they had a honeymoon paid for, in Bermuda.’
    ‘Did they go?’ she said, thinking, ‘Supposing they didn’t want to go?’
    ‘Did they go!’ he said, affronted. ‘They had the time of their lives. Never forget it. Forty-seven suits he gave me, no kiddin’.’
    ‘Why don’t you kill him?’ she said, ‘then you could afford to buy your own suits.’ She hated his humbleness, his tell-you-the-honest-truth, jarvey driver’s drivel.
    ‘Hemlock,’ she said. ‘I have it on good authority, boil the roots.’
    ‘I was married to a woman like you once,’ he said, his face ground into a temper.
    ‘And you killed her,’ she said quickly.
    He got up and took his drink and dragged his chair to the end of the table. She pretended not to notice and looked around as if she were looking for someone special. A little boy on a woman’s lap sat with his mouth open, his face enraptured by the noise, the lights and the great, green, spreading tree that was the roof. She missed her son then and thought of the resonance of all their kissing and wished that she could hold him in her arms. She shut her eyes and tried to memorize the shape