Two Lives (22 page)

Renehan finished his drink and left Hogan’s bar. Elmer was still on his own when Letty and her husband entered it a quarter of an hour later. Behind the bar Gerry was reading the
Evening Herald
. No one else was present.

‘Elmer,’ Letty said.

‘I had a bit of business here,’ he began.

‘We want to talk about Mary Louise.’

Dennehy said he’d get the drinks. Letty led the way to a table in a corner. ‘And whatever Mr Quarry’s having,’ Elmer heard Dennehy ordering. At the same time his sister-in-law said:

‘We wanted to catch you on your own, Elmer. I’ve left messages for Mary Louise only she doesn’t ring me back.’

‘I’ll tell her –’

‘Rose said something about a safe.’

‘That’s a private matter, actually.’

‘What’s Rose talking about, Elmer?’

Elmer explained what had occurred was that Mary Louise, in a hurry for some money one day, had borrowed a sum from the safe in the accounting office. It was nothing, he said. A storm in a tea-cup.

‘Rose said they have to keep their handbags under lock and key.

To Elmer’s relief, Dennehy arrived at that moment with the drinks. ‘Good luck!’ Dennehy said, raising his glass and then occupying himself with the lighting of a cigarette.

‘What’s the matter with Mary Louise, Elmer?’

‘Ah, she’s all right. Mary Louise likes to be on her own, and it’s a thing my sisters don’t understand. She likes to go out on her bicycle, and then again she likes to have an area of her own in the house. That’s all that’s in it. No more than that.’

‘Your sisters went out to Culleen a few months ago. They made certain statements about Mary Louise.’

‘What kind of statements?’

‘They said she was away in the head.’

Elmer gave a jump. He finished the liquid in his glass and signalled to Gerry to replenish it, as well as the two glasses of his companions. Noticing the gesture, Letty shook her head. Dennehy nodded.

‘I didn’t know that,’ Elmer said.

‘Didn’t you know they went out to Culleen?’

‘To tell you the truth, I didn’t.’

‘I haven’t seen Mary Louise since our wedding. There wasn’t much the matter with her then. Except, of course, she doesn’t have a lot to say for herself any more.’

‘We’ve all noticed that, Letty.’

‘She was always talkative in the past.’

There were no rats in the attics. If there were rats in the attics you’d hear them scampering about above your head.
For all he knew, it was all over the town that she’d been buying rat poison.

‘My parents wanted her to see Dr Cormican,’ Letty said.

‘It would do no harm. A check-up wouldn’t hurt anyone.’

‘She said she wouldn’t.’

‘Let me have a word with her, Letty.’

‘I’m in every day. Tell her I’m waiting for her phone call.’

Abruptly, Letty stood up. She’d had only a sip or two of her drink. All the time they were talking, Elmer noticed, she hadn’t stopped frowning, a small pucker of worry at the top of her forehead.

‘I’ll be seeing you,’ he said loudly in case Gerry would think they weren’t on terms.

‘Come out to the house,’ Dennehy invited, hastily finishing his drink. Letty didn’t say anything.

Elmer returned to the bar and ordered a double measure of whiskey.

‘God, isn’t that shocking?’ Gerry remarked as he handed back some change, and for a moment Elmer thought he was referring to some aspect of the conversation that had taken place in the bar. But Gerry, one eye still on the
Evening Herald
, was drawing his attention to the murder of King Feisal of Iraq.

Not interested in this far-off violence, Elmer nevertheless deplored the event. All it amounted to, he was thinking, was more of their outrageousness. There’d been no call to go visiting the Dallons, and definitely no call to say his wife was mentally affected or to mention the money borrowed from the safe. The truth was that Mary Louise had settled down the way she wanted to settle down, which was what he’d been endeavouring to explain to the sister. She slept up in the attic now, no reason why she shouldn’t if that was what she wanted.

*

The chimney-sweep lit the first fire in the grate to make certain the chimney was drawing well. Mary Louise carried up coals and wood from the cellar. Her presence was unnecessary in the shop because customers were few; her serving there had been part of a general pretence, or so it seemed to her now. Days went by now during which she addressed neither her husband nor her sisters-in-law. Sleeping in the attic room, she no longer experienced feelings of shame when she first awoke in the mornings. In the kitchen she washed the dishes the household’s food had been eaten from. She continued to perform the other household chores she’d been allocated, but always took her meals on her own. Whenever she felt like it she rode away from the town on her bicycle, going to the graveyard mostly, sometimes walking in the fields near her aunt’s house. The house was empty now, though not yet sold.

Often she thought she would like to be more alone than she was. The voices of her sisters-in-law and of Elmer were tiresome. The tread of feet on the stairs was tiresome, the clatter of dishes, the rattle of the shop bell. To press away such sounds she played a game that reminded her of games played in her childhood: she closed her eyes and watched herself wandering from room to room, in and out of her sisters-in-law’s bedrooms, opening the windows of the big front room, making the dining-room different. On the first-floor landing there was a glass chandelier in pink and scarlet. There was a smell of flowers and newly ironed table-linen. In the kitchen a cook moved her saucepans on the range; raw mutton waited on a table beside high piles of plates that rattled when the cabbage was chopped. In the yard chickens screamed, chased by someone intent upon wringing their necks.

Outside, blue shutters covered the windows of the shop; the entrance doors were locked and bolted. Somewhere, at the heart of everything, her cousin belonged, as delicately present as the confection of refurbished rooms. Everything was fragile:
only too easily it could all be broken, like porcelain falling on flagstones. Gently, fingers to their lips, she and her cousin laughed.

People no longer mentioned his wife to Elmer. In the town she was talked about less than she had been, accepted now as an eccentric person. She was seen regularly on her bicycle, wrapped up closely, a headscarf tied around her head. In January of the new year – 1959 – she visited her sister and admired the fittings in the kitchen, and listened while Letty told her what it was like to be pregnant. Her mother, in January also, called in at the shop again, only to be informed by Rose that Mary Louise no longer deigned to serve there. Mrs Dallon rang the bell at the halldoor of the house, but there was no reply. She returned to the shop and demanded to speak to Elmer, who shambled down the stairs from the accounting office, seeming to Mrs Dallon to be unsteady on his feet. He brought her upstairs to the house and asked her to wait in the front room, which Mary Louise entered a few minutes later. She smiled, and appeared to be normal except for her silence. ‘You don’t come to see us any more,’ her mother gently chided her. Mary Louise promised to come the following Sunday, but she didn’t arrive, on that Sunday or on subsequent ones.

Elmer himself still worried about the rat poison that had been bought. He didn’t mention it to his sisters, nor to anyone else, but he questioned Mary Louise as casually as he could about the presence of rats in the attics where she spent so much time. ‘I think I caught them,’ she replied. ‘They took the Rodenkil I put down.’ He asked her what she had done with the poison that remained and she said she still had it in case the rats returned. Elmer shook his head: that wasn’t a good idea, he suggested, in case she’d ever get the stuff on her hands or maybe someone else might pick it up, not knowing what it
was. Now that she’d destroyed the rats it would be better to throw the poison out; if rats returned more could be bought. Mary Louise kept nodding. She’d wrap up what poison remained, she promised, and put it in the dustbin.

After Mary Louise’s visit Letty’s concern didn’t lessen, but by now she was reconciled to the changes in her sister, accepting them because there was nothing else she could do. Then her baby was born and made demands on both her attention and her thoughts. She had expected that Mary Louise would ride out to see the infant, and felt aggrieved when she didn’t. Kevin Aloysius the child was called, Aloysius being a Dennehy family name.

Rose and Matilda bided their time. They were pleased that Mary Louise no longer served in the shop; the dining-room without her was almost like old times. Yet there continued to be the irritation of what Matilda had once described as her ‘smug face’, the agreeableness that spread into it when you addressed her but which didn’t last, being quickly replaced by a dead look, as though she couldn’t be bothered listening to you for more than a minute at the most. There was the irritation of her presence in the lavatory or the bathroom when they wished to use one or the other, and her half-witted confining of herself in an attic. Above all, there was the appalling toll she was continuing to take of their brother. Sometimes in the mornings his eyes were so bloodshot you’d imagine he couldn’t see properly. He had put on weight; his pallor was unhealthy; the next thing, he’d get the shakes in his hands, like old Crowe who came round with crab-apples every autumn. Not knowledgeable about the nature of addiction, the sisters believed that when the wife he’d erroneously married was either returned to her family or incarcerated in a suitable asylum, Elmer would revert to his normal self. He would call in at the YMCA billiard-room for the occasional game of billiards instead of spending his evenings in Hogan’s Hotel. He
would go out for summer walks the way he used to. His interest in business matters, having noticeably declined, would revive. That the shop would see the present generation out and pass to distant relatives in Athy mattered as little now as it had before the whole unfortunate episode of the marriage. It was only a pity Elmer hadn’t been able to see that there was a natural threesome in the shop and in the house.

The sisters bided their time because they were certain that any day now there would be another occurrence similar to the theft of the money. On this occasion the culprit might not manage so easily to wriggle out of it. Both of them felt that since so much trouble had been caused it was only fair that matters should come to a head.

Mary Louise no longer broke down into fits of private weeping, as she had during the first weeks and months of her loss. It seemed to her that her own flesh and bones were so much lumber, real but without real interest.

‘Of course I haven’t,’ she replied again when her cousin asked her if she’d fallen asleep. ‘Of course not, Robert.’

Susan Emily
, the moss-touched letters said,
wife of Charles. Safe now in Heaven’s Arms. Peace, Perfect Peace
. The words were there beneath a net of other words, belonging with the drone of bees. When she closed her eyes in the graveyard, towers and pavilions were etched against the green of parkland. A tablecloth was spread beneath old limes.
‘The coachman and a footman and a maid brought the baskets from the coach…’

His voice continuing, and hers embracing it, was their act of love. There was a purity in it that delighted Mary Louise, now that she had moved herself away from her sisters-in-law and her husband. All she wished for was her cousin’s watch to hang on her attic wall, on the nail that was already there, beside the fireplace. And if ever silence came in the house she
would send out invitations – gold-edged, with her cousin’s name on them also, giving a date and a time, with RSVP on the bottom left-hand corner.

Mrs Dallon was surprised, and pleased, when James came into the kitchen to say that he’d just seen Mary Louise from the high field, riding out in their direction. She pushed the kettle on to the hot ring of the range, and asked James to go and tell his father. In weary defeat she had come to accept part at least of the Quarry sisters’ catalogue of accusations. There was nothing more that could be done, nothing more that could be said: everything would have been different, Mrs Dallon still believed, if a child had been born. Perhaps one day that would happen, but she felt more pessimistic than she had in the past.

‘Sit down, pet. It’s great to see you.’

Mary Louise took her coat off. In answer to her mother’s questions, she replied that she was well. Mrs Dallon cut slices of brown bread and put butter and lemon curd on the table.

‘The wanderer returns,’ Mr Dallon said, pulling his Wellington boots off at the door.

‘Letty’d love to see you.’ Mrs Dallon spoke with nervous haste, as though anxious to obliterate as soon as possible anything in her husband’s levity that might have caused offence. In their bedroom she had repeatedly voiced her fear that some time in the past Mary Louise had taken offence. They had maybe seemed hesitant when Elmer Quarry proposed. Letty had been too outspoken. These attitudes had perhaps rankled and, combining with the attitudes of two trouble-making sisters-in-law, were the cause of Mary Louise’s isolation. When Elmer began to drink the poor girl had felt she could turn to no one. Any girl would be ashamed when a husband took to drink.

‘I hear it’s quiet in there these days,’ Mr Dallon remarked,
referring to the town. He crossed the kitchen in his stockinged feet. He sat down and reached for a slice of bread.

‘There’s not much doing,’ Mary Louise agreed.

He remembered her standing beside him in the yard when she was eleven or twelve, with some blackberries she’d picked into an old sweet tin. They’d give her a white coat when she went to work in the chemist’s, she said. He didn’t subscribe to the argument that she had taken offence. In his opinion this was – on his wife’s part – a search for some consoling factor, any explanation being better than none at all. But when the argument had been put forward he hadn’t dismissed it: if it gave some comfort, what harm was done?

‘It’s the times that are in it,’ he pronounced. ‘The people haven’t the money.’