Read Online In the Forest by Edna O’Brien - Free Book Online

different eyes. She had been in Jacko’s dozens of times, yet never before took it all in so acutely. She thought I've drunk with him here, I’ve danced with him here, I’ve flirted with him here and now I am staring into the almost empty bar wondering why I sent him away.
    What she stared at were the high stools with their red plastic covers held down with regimented rows of brass studding, the one wall with a strip of embossed velveteen from Jacko’s mother’s time, the other walls white, the globes of light with segments of imitation fruits and a dented St Anthony’s box. Two men are further over by the fire, arguing, grasping each other’s coat collars, in an altercation. She knows them, Denny, a bachelor, small with a grizzled goatee beard and Huw, the swank, in a green corduroy jacket, with leather elbow patching.
    ‘I’m not telling you and that’s that,’ Denny says. ‘All I’m asking is, have you a site to sell?’
    ‘I wouldn’t let you within miles of my place . . . with your women and your greyhounds.’
    ‘At least hear me out.’
    ‘I know what you want . . . you want it cheap and then sell it off to another fecking foreigner.’
    ‘How many acres have you, a hundred, two hundred?’ Huw says, baiting him now.
    ‘More.’
    ‘Water frontage?’
    ‘Water frontage, water views, water works . . . you’re wasting your throttle boy.’
    ‘I’ll pay the asking price.’
    ‘I’m not selling ... I told you last week and the week before and the week before that.’
    ‘What do you want with all that land and you an old bachelor.’
    ‘How many illegitimate kids have you now ... is it five or six? . . . the state paying for them . . . our poor little country bled from the likes of ye . . .’
    ‘You haven’t done too badly with your water frontage.’
    ‘It was my father’s before me.’
    ‘Look, half an acre is all I ask . . . I’m living with a Norse woman and she’s mad to be by water . . . she misses the sea.’
    ‘Asleep on the job, are you?’ Denny says and winks to where Eily is sitting.
    ‘And how is the Princess,’ Huw calls across to her. She had thought him attractive for a few minutes one night in another pub and she always regretted that she had let him see it, because he took sneering advantage of it.
    ‘Fine fine,’ she says distantly.
    ‘Didn’t poor Mrs Burke go quick,’ Denny calls across to her in a friendly voice.
    ‘And how are you, Denny?’ she calls back.
    ‘I’m getting old and foolish,’ he says laughing.
    ‘He’s sitting on a fortune,’ Huw says and suddenly Denny goes towards the door cursing, ‘Feck off, you and your foreign woman and them naked children, running wild.’
    ‘Oh ... a major alcoholic,’ Huw shouts to him as he goes through the door.
    Standing above Eily he begins to read aloud what she has just written - ‘Go up to the village and turn left at the village hall. Go on not too far and take the first left turning and you come to a little road that goes over a tract of bog, you pass a derelict house on the left and further on down there's ponies, piebald ponies in a field, after that there’s an old red caravan with a curtain in the window and you go on down until you come to a view of the lake way beneath you and you will come to a forked track where there is a rusted cattle feeder and you’ll take the centre fork and see the house in among the trees. By the way, you’ll have to walk the last bit of your journey ’ He looked at her, looked to the copy book again and whistled and said, ‘Jesus you’re a number one gypsy, plonking yourself like that in the middle of wilds. No one will go to a party down there.’
    ‘Look Huw, cut it out’ and she snatches the notebook back and nettled by the rejection he takes off his green scarf, dosses it with a spurious and condescending sarcasm and says, ‘You’re all candidates for Valium here.’
    She is unnerved when he has gone and orders another pint. Jacko says nothing. That is