Two Lives (13 page)

He shook his head. He said that, looking back, people knew.

‘I thought it would be all right. I thought no one else would marry me. I wanted to be in the town.’

‘My God!’

He reached for her hand and held it. He raised it to his cheek. She shouldn’t have told him, she thought, yet in the same moment she knew it didn’t matter. It didn’t matter being here, or letting him take her hand. How could it matter?

‘Tell me anything you want to,’ he urged, and listened, her hand still held.

He heard about a marriage that was unconsummated, about the shock there’d been for husband and wife in the Strand
Hotel, about the state they had lived in since. Her voice was a toneless mutter, flattened and dead. Miss Embarrassment her friend had called her; but Mary Louise, who blushed so easily, was pale when she lay bare her confidences. Was it because he was an invalid that she told him? Robert wondered. Was it because he didn’t count, because he seemed to her to be beyond the realm of ordinary humanity, as impotent as her husband?

‘He has begun to drink,’ she said. ‘And I deceive him after only two years by coming here on Sundays.’

‘But I’m your cousin, Mary Louise. Doesn’t he know you come here?’

‘Nobody knows.’

He imagined her in the house, the spinster sisters resenting her presence, hating her even, Elmer Quarry trudging upstairs at mealtimes, drinking his shame away. She told him about the attics, about the toys the Quarry children had played with, all carefully kept in a cupboard. And then she said:

‘I used to think I was in love with you, Robert.’

‘With
me
?’

‘It might have been the time when you were fond of me. We might both have been in love with one another.’

He remembered again the pain of not being allowed to go to school, his anger with his mother, his refusal to understand. They would starve if things went on like this, his mother had said. No matter how early she rose in the mornings there weren’t enough hours of daylight, especially in wintertime. She hadn’t understood either; he couldn’t tell her.

‘When James came here with the butter every week I used to bring the conversation round to you. I often thought of giving a note to James.’

‘I think I’d turned my attentions to Mr Stewart by then.’

Laughter relieved a constriction. Then he said:

‘I’m in love with you still, to tell the truth. I wait for every Sunday with just the same feelings as I had then.’

In turn, for Robert, it didn’t matter either. Telling more of the truth didn’t matter because she would not come back in any case. After the intimacies she’d shared with him she would find it hard to cycle out next Sunday and the Sunday after, as if nothing different had occurred. She didn’t know this, but it would be so.

‘I couldn’t face the wedding party,’ he said.

‘I thought you weren’t up to it.’

‘No. We were going to go. We intended to. “I’ll wait in the car,” I said. But my mother wouldn’t have that.’

‘You couldn’t love me, Robert.’

‘It’s not a choice that people have.’

Did she mean, he wondered, that she couldn’t love him? Did she mean that even before her marriage there couldn’t have been love between them because he was only half a person? It was different for children was no doubt what she meant also: children didn’t always notice.

But Mary Louise contradicted these thoughts almost as they occurred. She wasn’t worth anyone’s love, she said. She had married a man for gain. She had married out of impatience and boredom, and had been handed both back with interest added. She had calculated; she had coldly examined the pros and cons.

Robert laughed. He took her hand again, and again she permitted him to do so. Anyone would do as she had, he said.

‘I wouldn’t have if there’d been our friendship, Robert.’

‘Then
I’d
have been insisting I was the guilty one.’

He felt the pressure of her fingers on his palm. Was this a sign, a statement she could not bring herself otherwise to make? Now and again, since the time they had been together in Miss Mullover’s schoolroom, he had glimpsed her in the town when by chance they visited it on the same day, not often. Every autumn his mother drove to the Dallons’ farmhouse with grapes and apples. He might have accompanied
her but he’d never wished to, fearful of the renewal of emotions. The wedding had been impossible, entirely, to avoid.

‘I’m sorry I said all that, Robert.’

‘It means everything to me that you did.’

On his side, there were facts he might have added to what she’d said: his gloom and wretchedness while his mother chattered in the car, driving back after the wedding; the pain he experienced because he’d selfishly deprived her of an occasion she would have enjoyed; the greater pain of imagining the radiant happiness of the bride. While Mary Louise drank cherry brandy in McBirney’s she had still been in his thoughts, still in her wedding-dress, as last he’d seen her. He had tortured himself while Mary Louise, in the presence of her already unconscious husband, undressed and crept woozily into her marriage bed. While she slept, virginal and alone, he had descended to the bitterest depths of melancholy.

‘What an irony it is!’ was all he observed in this respect, speaking softly in the graveyard.

‘You are the only person in the world I could have told.’

He kissed her gently, their lips just touching. Then he pushed himself to his feet and held his hands out to her. They walked back towards the house, not saying anything else. Both were possessed by a warmth that delighted them, the warmth of secrets at last shared while still remaining secrets, the intimacy of a private truth.

Crossing the sloping field beyond which the house and garden lay, Robert said:

‘Look! There he is.’

They had not, that day, brought the binoculars. But Mary Louise could see, at the very place where they often watched the fish going by, the grey, angular form of the heron they had hoped for so long to catch a glimpse of. Neck extended, it dipped its long beak into the water, no doubt fishing for the
trout, although the distance was too great to allow them to observe how successful these efforts were. It stuttered closer to the water on its ungainly legs, then turned, spread out its wings and flew away.

‘Clever creature,’ Robert said.

In the house he read to Mary Louise from a reference book. It was a common heron they’d seen, not a Great White or a Purple:
Ardea cinerea
. The common heron wasn’t rare, but even so was not often seen. Anglers had been known to persecute it.

He put the book away and hunted among some others. There were many stories by his favourite Russian novelist, he said, but he possessed only three. He spread these volumes out for her, each open at the title page, as if it was important for her to see them.

‘Why did you do that, Robert?’

‘In case you do not come back.’

‘Of course I’ll come back.’

‘No one can be certain.’

The three volumes were left as he had opened them, on one of the tables that contained stacks of other books. If not because of what had been confided, he thought, then because of what had occurred: she would not return.

‘You’ve been so good to me, Robert. I can’t tell you what it means to have been able to talk to you.’

‘May I kiss you in this room, Mary Louise? Just once?’

‘Yes, you may.’ She spoke quickly, without the slightest hesitation.

This time he put his arms around her and pressed her lips a little closer, then held her hand for a moment after they had parted. He said again that she was beautiful.

‘But I’m not in the least,’ she began, as she had before.

‘Actually you are,’ he repeated too.

They had tea in the kitchen, and when Mary Louise had
gone Robert carried a cup out to his mother, who was picking raspberries. Was it enough, he wondered, that they had talked so? Would all they had shared make up for her not returning? As he helped to pick the fruit, it seemed to Robert that his cousin’s abrupt incursion into his life had from the very beginning been part of a pattern that their conversation today completed, with the telling of the truth. It seemed as if, outside their wills, their declaration of affection had been ordained. That his own love had persisted while hers had dwindled was just a circumstance; at least they’d honoured what there had been. But could he, he wondered, live off the moments of an afternoon?

As she cycled on the empty road, Mary Louise felt at first that she was riding away from a fantasy. It wasn’t in the least like reality that Robert had taken her hand, that she had told him so much, that twice they had kissed. And yet all that had happened. What had occurred was the next thing to adultery; she was a sinful wife.

But she experienced neither regret nor the shadow of guilt. All afternoon the glow of her sinning had possessed her, and now she didn’t want it to fade. She wanted to sense for ever the imprint of his lips, the coolness of his hand in hers. She wanted to hear him say again, as clearly, that she was beautiful and that he loved her.

In the hedges the summer’s cow parsley was withered, only its brittle stalks remaining. Sloes and haws had already formed among the thorns. Somewhere, near where she rode, a bird-scare went off, and then again, becoming fainter as she cycled on. A woman, trimming the fuchsia hedge outside her cottage, waved and said it was a lovely day.

‘Oh, lovely,’ Mary Louise called back, reminded of the fuchsia in the blackly-dressed woman’s hair. ‘Lovely.’

*

That night, a few minutes before midnight, Robert dreamed that it was he who accompanied his cousin on her honeymoon to the seaside. The three men described to him were standing on a road, and on a wide, endless strand a flock of seagulls swooped down to the edge of the sea. Miss Mullover said he was not permitted to bathe, not even to paddle. ‘You are a
disgraceful
child!’ Miss Mullover reprimanded Berty Figgis. As soon as the birds touched the sand they were seen to be herons.

He put his arm around his cousin’s waist and as they walked on the strand they talked about his father. In that moment Robert died.

15

She walks in the garden. She likes it best in the garden and always has, ever since she came to the house. She knows the name of every flower, she has a flowerbed of her own.

No one knows what will become of the place, and maybe it doesn’t matter. Maybe a place changing its purpose, maybe a house falling into ruins, is of no possible importance, a grain of sand turning over on a shore, nothing more. Even so, it is sad that her flowerbed may perhaps become choked with weeds.

She does not take the medication and does not intend to; not once does she intend to take it. ‘You’re naughty, you know,’ Miss Foye said once, but she didn’t say it about the medication even though she suspects. Miss Foye likes the paid-for inmates, she likes the cheques coming in. Generally naughty was what Miss Foye meant, a tendency that way. The nurses watch her swallowing it down, but Miss Foye knows there’s more to swallowing than meets the eye. Cute as a fox, Miss Foye is, over a thing like that.

16

James Dallon was inflating a tractor tyre in the yard when a man he didn’t know got out of a blue van and asked if this was the Dallons’ house. The man said something about having called in for the raspberries and the last of the peas at James’s aunt’s house, but James didn’t know what he was talking about. Then the man said he had a message. He didn’t smile. He didn’t seem happy. James brought him into the kitchen.

Later that morning Mrs Dallon drove over to comfort her sister. They sat together in the kitchen for most of the day, Mrs Dallon making tea and toast in the afternoon, and poaching an egg for each of them. She wanted to spend the night, but her sister wouldn’t permit that. They talked about the time when they were girls together, before their marriages; about when the men they’d married first came into their lives, and the different lives they’d had because of that. They talked about the birth of their children, how Robert had only just survived. They talked about the existence he had had.

A reference to Mary Louise’s Sunday visits did not fall naturally into the conversation, except that her aunt said, ‘Mary Louise was good to him.’ Mrs Dallon took this to mean in the past, when they were children in Miss Mullover’s schoolroom. The small misunderstanding was neither here nor there.

In the room where her nephew had spent most of his time she was shown his books, and the soldiers in the window alcove. ‘Take some grapes back with you,’ her sister offered at
the end of the day, for she had come to terms by now with a death that she had always known would be like this, swift and out of the blue.

‘Oh no, dear, please,’ Mrs Dallon protested, but the grapes were cut none the less.

The Reverend Harrington came to the house, and later the same undertaker who, years ago, had laid out Robert’s father. Robert’s attachment to a graveyard that wasn’t used any more was not known since he had kept that a secret, shared only with his cousin. A grave was to be dug beside his father’s in the graveyard of the country church regularly attended by the household, where the Reverend Harrington offered holy communion once a month and officiated every Sunday at half-past six evensong.

There had been great happiness in Robert’s life, the clergyman comforted in the kitchen. Robert had been amused by all sorts of things, given to laughter and to fun. All that was better than a longer lifetime – sixty or seventy years – passed in grumbling bitterness. The mother who was now alone found it hard to take consolation from this, but did not let it show.

‘You’ll take a bunch or two of grapes, Mr Harrington?’ she offered, and the Reverend Harrington, too, drove off with grapes in his car.

Mrs Dallon considered it odd of her younger daughter to faint when she was told of her cousin’s death since she had hardly known him, except years ago at school. Quite without pain, he’d died in his sleep, Mrs Dallon had been saying, having come into the shop to break the news and to pass on the funeral details. Mary Louise went as white as paper. The next moment her legs gave way and she collapsed in a heap behind the counter.