The Ante-Room

Book 295: Virago Modern Classics

by Kate O'Brien

Genres: General Fiction; Classics; Marriage & Divorce; Historical Fiction; Literary Fiction; Romance

Synopsis

Ireland, 1880 and a prosperous, provincial family observes the three great autumnal feasts of the Church. As Teresa Mulqueen lies dying, her family gather round her and beneath this drama another, no less poignant, unfolds. Unmarried daughter Agnes awaits the return of her sister Marie-Rose and brother-in-law Vincent. She adores her sister, but secretly, pasionately, loves Vincent. And their marriage, she knows, is unhappy...Ahead lies a terrible battle between her uncompromising faith and the intensity of her love. In this delicately imagined novel, originally published in 1934, Kate O'Brien lays bare the struggles between personal need and the Catholic faith with the sympathy and insight which is the hallmark of her craft.

Release date: May 19, 2016

Publisher: Virago

Print pages: 340

Sample

By eight o’clock the last day of October was about as well lighted as it would be. Tenuous sunshine, swathed in river mist, outlined the blocks and spires of Mellick, but broke into no high lights on the landscape or in the sky. It was to be a muted day.

Roseholm, the white house where the Mulqueens lived, stood amid trees and lawns on the west side of the river. Viewed from the town in fine weather, it could often seem to blaze like a small sun, but it lay this morning as blurred as its surroundings. It neither received nor wanted noise or light, for its preoccupation now was to keep these two subdued. And this morning that was easy; there was no wind about to rattle doors or tear through dying leaves, but only an air that moved elegiacally and carried a shroud of mist.

Agnes Mulqueen slept with her curtains open, so that at eight o’clock, though still almost asleep, she was aware of movement and light. She turned in her bed, and the weak sun fell upon her face though her eyelids still resisted it.

One by one the Mass bells ceased to ring in Mellick, and as their last note dropped away the clock in the hall at Roseholm, always slow, boomed out its cautious strokes. Agnes stirred and sighed. Once, when every whisper in the house had seemed to aggravate her mother’s suffering, she had suggested silencing that clock. But Teresa would not have it. ‘When I can’t hear it any more,’ she said, ‘I’ll know I’m at the Judgment Seat.’

Agnes opened her eyes and pulled herself into a sitting posture. Bells and clock and thin autumnal light were calling her back to things she did not wish to face. They had done so every morning for a long time now.

There was a knock at the door. Old Bessie entered with hot water.

‘Good mornin’, Miss Agnes, good mornin’ to you, child.’

Agnes made a reluctant effort at response.

‘Let you get up smart now, Miss. The Master’ll be in from Mass in half an hour’s time.’

‘How did Mother sleep, Bessie?’

‘Ah, betther then, thanks be to God. Sister Emmanuel is after sayin’ below that she had a quiet night, the creature. Ah, the poor misthress! ’Tis she’s the saint if ever I seen wan! God help us all! God help us all!’

Praying and shaking her head, old Bessie waddled from the room.

God help us all. Agnes bent her head into the support of her two hands. The baby frills on the neck and cuffs of her white nightgown, and the silky dark plait of hair that lay on the curve of her long back made her seem younger than twenty-five. She stayed very still, her knees bent upwards to take the weight of her hands and head. But there was more neutrality than weariness in the attitude, as if her soul were a camel, crouched to receive the usual baggage of its day’s march. And here it was assembled for her now, according to routine.

Sometimes at this hour of the morning she found herself inclined to idle and melancholy reminiscence. She wondered then if other lives had more unity than hers, which seemed to have only a circumstantial and not a spiritual consistency. Her early childhood, for instance, except for a few comic and catastrophic memories, and a suspicion that then already her sister Marie-Rose had seemed specially to decorate the scene for her, might have been from her present vantage point someone else’s, uninteresting, normal, happy and unhappy. Schooldays with their violences, their ludicrous peaks and chasms, intellectual triumphs and emotional shames, their crazy, agonising spurts of fun, their priggishness, savagery and vanity, seemed again the experience of another person, neither the child of early memory, nor the young woman who remembered. Though through that time the thread of Marie-Rose indeed ran vividly. The little sister, two years older than herself, had then been for her prettiness and grace and sweet, supporting friendliness an absolute mania, an adolescent craze. Hero-worship had begun to flame, perhaps, on an evening of their first term, when she was ten and Marie-Rose just twelve. A new-made friend of Agnes’s had informed her that she was, by popular vote, the plainest girl in the school. This affirmation of what she herself believed had so shattered Agnes that unwisely she yielded to Marie-Rose’s commands to tell her what the matter was. The savage, ribald public vengeance which she took then, golden-headed twelve-year-old, upon the luckless insulter of her little sister, had been both shocking and delicious – and had turned her for a while, in Agnes’s eyes, into a dangerous, delightful Joan of Arc. But schooldays were not particularly happy thereafter, nevertheless. The idea stayed that she was ugly and awkward, and that Marie-Rose’s denial of these facts was quixotry. Her mental superiority to most of her schoolfellows, including Marie-Rose, was no real comfort, for she observed, through her sister and some other girls, that beauty carried the surest weapons. And she conceded the naturalness of this. So, jealous of every pretty face except Marie-Rose’s, for the empire of which she fought many a vigorous field, she became at school priggish and shy and insolent, a gusty awkward creature, whom now, smiling at her, she could call stranger, except for the linking love for Marie-Rose, which proved her to be very Agnes.

And then there had been another Agnes – gone too, but much regretted. The home-from-school and just-out Agnes, who, encouraged by family standards to be extravagant in adornment, and encouraged and guided most exhilaratingly to that end by Marie-Rose, had discovered cautiously, had at last been unable longer to deny to the long mirror, that she was, after all her doubtings, beautiful. Ah, then the world had blossomed! Marie-Rose, two years her senior, had been a worldly and amusing foil, a merry guide, at her first ball, at her first dinner-party. Sharing this room, sharing this bed, as they had done since nursery days, sharing each other’s secrets and giggles, ribbons and perfumes – the hero-worship long forgotten, they had become the very best of boon companions, and had together grown extremely frivolous. The days wore a radiant inconsequence – flirtations, conquests, billets-doux, and long advisings, long confidings every night in bed with Marie-Rose.

And then they met Vincent – Vincent de Courcy O’Regan – and Marie-Rose married him, and with her going, for ever now, to their beloved Dublin, loneliness settled down for its remaining inmate on the room that had hitherto been only half her own.

Then, her occupation gone, Agnes had time to observe what was happening to the other members of her father’s house. This, from being a noisy place, had suddenly, it seemed to her, grown very quiet. Her eldest brother, Ignatius, who was eleven years older than her, had long been gone away, and now was in Australia, a Redemptorist missionary. Reggie, the next brother, who lately did nothing for his living, hung about at home; Alice, Agnes’s eldest sister, married to a country doctor, lived in the wilds of Galway, overwhelmed by many babies. Daniel was on the Stock Exchange in Dublin; John, a barrister, lived in London, in the Middle Temple – and Marie-Rose had married Vincent. Young Joe, still at school when Marie-Rose was married, went up to the University the following autumn to begin his medical studies.

No wonder then that Roseholm had grown quiet. And it was in that autumn too that Teresa, Agnes’s mother, gave up her pretence of being perfectly well, and entered into the long illness, the chain of operations and treatments, ups and downs, hopes and fears, that was not ended yet. For two and a half years now Teresa Mulqueen had fought a losing battle with life, and as pain alternately half-strangled and then half-released, whilst never ceasing to defeat her, the quiet house grew deadly quiet. People moved creepingly now on the stairs and slid past the board that creaked on the first landing. Teresa herself lay too still and spent to make a noise; Reggie, her son, whose only stay and light she was, was too much frightened by her plight and his to let any protest break that might define it; and Danny, her husband, jealous of the lifted look that Reggie could bring to the tortured woman’s face, and he could not, jealous and sick with pity, could do no more to ease things for himself than potter to and fro in false and chatty cheerfulness. It was too quiet a house, in which the only permissible noise was Reggie’s Chopin-playing.

‘I’ll open both doors, and then you’ll hear fine, Mother darling.’

‘Try to get to the end of it for me this time, will you?’

‘I’ll try.’

But he never got to the end.

It was too quiet a house for Agnes, on whose courage and direction it had come to depend entirely now. And as it had no room for gaiety, neither had it place for the irrelevant griefs of the young and strong. There was no space in it where a heart might scold against a private wound, and so, though Agnes had been mortally hurt on the day when she and Marie-Rose met Vincent, in three years she had learnt to fix her eyes upon the griefs of others and, for her sanity’s sake, ignore her own.

Still, in the hour of waking, she sometimes reflected coldly upon the unrelated phases of her life, through which the only unifying thread was Marie-Rose. The lives she read about in novels were not like that. There one thing always led to another, whereas what struck her about her own span of experience was that no section of it seemed to have offered preparation or warning for the next.

That was not true, however, of her present day-to-day existence. At each falling asleep she knew what she would presently wake to; at every waking her spirit went through the same dull exercise of pulling itself together for the foreseen.

Still with her head bent on her knees, she said her usual Morning Offering – the simple one that she had learnt to say at school:

‘Oh, my God, I offer Thee all the thoughts, words and actions of this day, that Thou mayst make it wholly Thine.’ The formula both saddened and consoled her – and this double effect was, she often thought, one of the menaces of prayer, which made its ideal of purity almost unattainable. Prayer that should humble gave relief by self-inflation. Agnes often wondered how it was possible to accept and honour God and yet steer clear of heroics. Would it be more honest, more prayerful, not to pray at all? But that would be a deliberate spiritual pride, and would lead her further into the desert than she had courage to go.

Desert, indeed? She lifted her head and laughed. She must be feeling very sorry for herself this morning. She got out of bed, pulled on her dressing-gown and crossed to the further window. She had always loved the prospect that it gave, and by now it was so fully associated with memories and meditations that looking at it was an escape from the rigidity of time. To-day its furthest eastern backcloth of high, snowcapped mountains was not visible, for the sky was woolly, but the town spread along the river-bank wore its usual mood of unobtrusive dignity, varied masses of grey and brown broken here by a spire, there by the gentle tones of fading sycamores. There was a pious Sunday morning stir about it now; she could hear the discreet sound of carriage wheels, and see figures moving up and down the hilly side-streets that crossed the town from the water’s edge. She remembered going to tea with her grandfather long ago – she must have been about five – in one of those hilly streets; an ugly old man who had kept tame greenfinches.

There were a good many ships in dock this week, at Vereker’s Wharf, at Hennessy’s and at Considine’s, where her father was director. The river was full and choppy, and by the Boat Club pier deserted wags and pleasure-boats bobbed uneasily around the buoys. How many times had she and Marie-Rose set off for picnics from that pier? Far down the stream she could hear the dredger coughing, and she remembered once again her little sister’s silly joke about: ‘Your poor husband’s asthma is very bad, my dear!’ – a joke so feeble that Agnes had had to forbid it in the bedroom. Nowadays she often heard the fluty, giggling voice repeat it to her memory, catching itself back on a delighted half-breath while she, Agnes, rushed to administer punishment. Foolish doings like that had seemed to be great fun. But here was her father now, turning in at the gate and coming up the drive. He must have gone to seven o’clock Mass. How old and small he looked – he was getting very fat. Through the half-stripped trees she could see him trying to roll his umbrella as he walked. But she must hurry – she was very late this morning.

Teresa Mulqueen had also heard the Mass bells ring, the hall clock strike, the distant dredger cough, sounds to which her day had always begun for thirty-seven years. So well did she know those sounds that often now, when in pain or in a morphia half-dream, she was uncertain whether she heard or only remembered them. But this morning, after a night which she must not let herself think about, there had suddenly been some real sleep and a lull. She was awake, and the pain was vague, hardly there at all, you might say. God was merciful.

She must use the chance to think – it wasn’t often she felt as clear in the head as this. But first she would say her morning prayers. That was due to God, who had granted her this hour of blessed release. The least she might do was pray to Him sometimes when she could give her mind to what she was doing, for she knew that often lately she answered prayers that Sister Emmanuel said, and said some of her own, without being able to think at all of what they meant.

She fumbled about the counterpane for her rosary beads.

‘Sister Emmanuel,’ she croaked – she had hardly any voice nowadays – ‘Sister Emmanuel, where did you put my beads from me this morning?’

Nurse Cunningham came to her bedside.

She was a pretty, firm-featured woman of thirty, who had recently been sent down from Dublin as day-nurse to this case by the specialist in charge of it. Teresa would have preferred to see the holy old face of the Blue Nun who took care of her at night.

‘Sister Emmanuel is gone for to-day, Mrs Mulqueen, and you’ve got to put up with me, I’m afraid. But here are your beads.’ She put them into Teresa’s hand, and straightened her pillow skilfully. ‘That better?’ she asked, with a bright smile.

Teresa nodded. She did not resent the cheerfulness, although it exhausted her; she understood that it was trained into the young woman, but she thought of how the old nun would have given them to her in silence, or would maybe have gone on murmuring the sweet Latin of her Office while she did whatever had to be done to the pillow.

She fingered the silver cross.

‘I believe in God, the Father Almighty …’ What feast of the Church was it to-day? ‘Do you know whose feast it is, Nurse, by any chance?’

‘It’s Sunday, Mrs Mulqueen – the 31st October – I don’t know—’

‘Well, now – the Eve of All Saints’. A glorious day; and to-morrow better still, and after that the Suffering Souls – I’m glad you reminded me. I’ll say the Glorious Mysteries—’

She shut her eyes and let the brown beads slip through her worn-out fingers. First Glorious Mystery, the Resurrection. Our Father who art in Heaven – there had always been great fun in this house on the Eve of All Saints’. The girls used to come home from school for it and have a party; Danny used to be great at playing snap-apple with them. Well, this time there wouldn’t be much fun – but only Dr Coyle coming from Dublin to-morrow night, she supposed, if he was to see her on Tuesday. She groaned a little in anxiety. She must have another operation. She had the strength for it, she knew she had. She could not leave her unprotected son – not yet, not yet. Not until she could see him somehow prepared to live without her. Dr Coyle must keep her alive – no matter how. But she must say her rosary now. Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee … it was time some of them were coming in to say good morning to her, surely. Oh, Reggie, my son. But she must pray awhile, she must try to mind her prayers.

Beyond the draught-screen that guarded her bedroom door she thought she heard a movement, but her senses did not function surely now beyond the immediate region of her bed. Yes, here was someone. Agnes, tall, light-footed, came and bent to kiss her.

‘Good morning, Mother.’

‘Good morning, child. I wondered when you were coming in to see me.’

‘I’m afraid I’m late. I’m sorry, Mother.’

‘It’s to your father you should be saying that, and he waiting for his breakfast, I suppose. I don’t know how this house is going at all these times.’

Teresa had always had an inclination to nag her youngest daughter, and now on her better days it revisited her. Agnes smiled at the good sign.

‘It’s going badly,’ she said, with graciousness. Teresa looked pleased.

‘You needn’t tell me.’

‘You’re looking well,’ the girl went on. She never inquired of Teresa herself about her nights, wanting to keep her mother’s thoughts from them. Looking down at her now she felt the irony of the true thing she had said. Teresa did look better – but better than what? Not better than death certainly, which was the only good thing left to want for her.

‘Do you know the day it is?’ she queried.

‘The Eve of All Saints’,’ said Teresa proudly.

‘Clever!’ said Agnes, laughing at her. ‘And I suppose you’re thinking of getting up to play snap-apple?’

‘Well, I was thinking it’s a pity you’ll have no fun to-night, child.’

Agnes laughed, almost too much.

‘Snap-apple days are over,’ she said. ‘Do you realise I’m twenty-five?’

Teresa was exhausted by her own talkativeness. She closed her eyes. Twenty-five was young, she thought. When she was twenty-five she was carrying Reggie. A hot summer it was, and she felt wretched nearly all the time. It didn’t seem long ago. How old was Reggie now? But the dear name, which was now the only one that never, in her sick dreams and fantasies, moved dissociate from a face and a meaning, stabbed hard with a clear and sane reminder of present grief. Reggie was thirty-five, wasted, unhappy, dangerous – dependent for his own decency and for his whole interest in life, on his devotion to her – and she was leaving him – and God had not answered her yet or told her where he was to turn then, so that he would do no harm in his weakness, and yet might be a little happy, a little less than desolate. That was what she had to think about with whatever strength these interludes conferred – not silly nonsense about fun for Agnes. Agnes could look out for herself – but Reggie – what was to become of him when she was gone? God must hear and answer. Either He must save her life – never mind how middlingly, so that her son might have her shielding always – or He must provide another shield. And where could that be found – for a man unfit to love, unfit to marry? Oh, God must be implored, since He was merciful and died for sinners. God must let her live, like this, if necessary, for five years more, for ten years. To keep him safe, to keep him interested, to keep his misery from making misery. Teresa’s eyes were closed, and Agnes, observing the passionate constriction of the withered and bitten brown mouth, knew where her thoughts were, knew the despairing prayer that that defeated frame was urging up to heaven. She saw her mother’s dilemma, but, with impatience, did not see why Reggie could not be compelled to face his own.

The history of this dilemma was never mentioned in Roseholm, and to this day Agnes did not know how much or little of it her brothers and sisters understood. But during the last year it had become one of her duties to be in the house when Dr Curran called, and to hear what he had to say about her mother’s condition and occasionally about her brother’s. This general practitioner had been appointed t. . .