The novel is set in Dublin and nearby in about 1960. It centers on the life and love affair of Caithleen Brady and her friend “Baba”. Cait, who is in her early twenties, falls in love with Eugene Gaillard, who is older than her and separated from his wife. The first part of the book deals with Cat’s and Baba’s friendship and Cait’s falling in love with Eugene. Later on Cait goes to stay in Eugene’s country house. Eventually their relationship fails because of her inability to match Eugene’s emotional control and sophistication. The extract is the complete final chapter of the book. Cait has left Eugene. She expects and hopes that he will stop her from sailing to England but he never appears. “I work in a delicatessen shop in Bayswater and go to London University at night to study English. Baba works in Soho, but not in a strip tease club, as she had hoped.She’s learning to be a receptionist in a big hotel. We share a small bed-sitting-room, and my aunt sends a parcel of butter every other week. Baba says that it makes us look like a right pair of eejits , getting that mopey parcel tied with hairy twine, and I keep telling my aunt that butter is not rationed here, but still she sends it. It’s all she can do to prove her love. It is a hot summer, and I miss the fields and the soft breeze; and I sometimes think of a brown mountain stream with willows and broom pods banging over it; and I think of the day I went fishing there with him, and he wore big boots and waded upstream. At unguarded moments, in the last tube, or drying my face by sticking my head out the window (we weren’t allowed in the garden), I ask myself why I ever left him; why I didn’t cling on tight, the way the barnades cling to the rocks. He wrote to me after I came here- a very nice letter, saying what a nice girl I was, and what a pity that he hadn’t been younger (in mind) or I hadn’t been older. I answered that letter and he wrote again, but I haven’t heard from him now for a couple of months and I take it that he has gone back to his wife, or that he’s busy in South America doing that picture on irrigation. If I saw him again I would run to kiss him, but even if I don’t see him I have a picture of him in my mind, walking through the woods, saying, in answer to my fear that he might leave me, that the experience of knowing love and of being destined, one day, to remember it, is the common lot of most people. <We all leave one another. We die, we change- it’s mostly change – we outgrow our best friends; but even if I do leave you, I will have passed on to you something of myself; you will be a different person because of knowing me; it’s inescapable…> he said. It’s quite true. Even Baba notices that I’m changing, and she says if I don’t give up this learning at night, I’ll end up as a right drip, wearing flat shoes and glasses. What Baba doesn’t know is that I’m finding my feet, and when I’m able to talk I imagine that I won’t be so alone, or so very far away from the world he tried to draw me into, too soon.” |
| Girl with Green Eyes Edna O'Brien |
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