Two Lives (23 page)

It disappointed him that Mary Louise didn’t respond. In the yard that day she’d stood chattering for maybe a quarter of an hour, telling him about the window displays in the chemist’s, the scents and powders and lipsticks, Coty, Pond’s, Elizabeth Arden. A warm September evening, he recalled.

‘George Eddery’s gone to England,’ Mrs Dallon said. ‘Selling door-to-door apparently.’

This time Mary Louise did respond, slightly nodding, a shadowy smile altering the set of her features. A chemist’s shop had represented all of town life for her, her father reflected. She’d always been attracted by the town, ever since her first day at Miss Mullover’s. She’d always delighted in it, even when they drove through it on a Sunday and it was closed up and dead.

‘Aunt Emmeline’s not here?’ she said.

‘She’s over at Letty’s,’ Mrs Dallon said. ‘Your Aunt Emmeline’s making a garden for Letty.’

‘I wonder,’ Mary Louise began, and paused. They watched her changing her mind, leaving the sentence she had begun unsaid, substituting another. ‘I’d just like to look,’ she said, ‘at my room.’

Surprise flickered in both their faces. Mrs Dallon’s bewilderment became a frown that only gradually disappeared. Cutting in half a slice of bread, her husband was arrested in the motion for an instant and then, more slowly, proceeded with it.

‘Just for a minute,’ Mary Louise went on, already opening the door that led to the stairs. They listened to the latch falling into place behind her. Mr Dallon pushed his cup towards the teapot. Mechanically, Mrs Dallon filled it. Was there something, after all, in the idea that Mary Louise should return to Culleen? Did she need looking after? Had she herself said as much to her sisters-in-law? Was that why she wanted to see her bedroom again?

‘If she came back, where would Emmeline go?’

Mr Dallon didn’t know what his wife was talking about. His thoughts had not followed the same course as hers. It struck Mr Dallon as very odd indeed that Mary Louise wished to visit a room, once shared with her sister, now occupied by her aunt. He could think of no rational explanation for this.

‘It could be,’ Mrs Dallon continued, ‘she wants to leave him.’

‘Elmer?’

‘On account of he’s drinking. And would you blame her, with those two women to put up with on top of everything else?’

‘But she’d say it if that was the case. She’d say it out, wouldn’t she, instead of going up to Emmeline’s room?’

‘I think what she’s after is to see would both of them fit in it. Like herself and Letty in the old days.’

‘We couldn’t ask Emmeline –’

‘We could if we had to.’

They had been told by Emmeline that Mary Louise had taken to visiting her cousin; the fact had come out one evening when they were sitting by the range. ‘Didn’t you know that?
Didn’t she ever tell you?’ Emmeline had said, and they listened to her recounting of the Sunday visits. ‘Kindness itself,’ Emmeline stated firmly. The Dallons received the impression that it had somehow been known – though not to them – that Robert was nearing the end of his life and that their daughter’s attentions had been an act of kindness. ‘She was lonely too, of course,’ Mrs Dallon said, but even so she felt proud that a child of hers should have acted so. Lonely or not, it couldn’t have been much fun, keeping company with a sickly youth.

When Mary Louise returned to the kitchen she put on her coat immediately. She drew from one of its pockets a headscarf with blue and red squares on it and tied it round her head. James came in just then, but she had to go, she said. She was sorry she could not stay to talk to him.

In the attic she hung the watch and chain on the nail by the fireplace. Her cousin had said that the watch lost a minute a day. She would enjoy setting it right, every night before she got into bed.

27

She listens to them abusing him. Who’s going to cook for her? Who’s going to clean up after her? They don’t intend to watch her eating. They’ll none of them last a week at the mercy of a mad woman. All these years he paid money for her to exist in luxury: isn’t that enough? Insult on top of injury. Scandalous what he’s done. They don’t intend to lift a finger, why should they? So how’s he going to manage for an instant, the state he’s in?

‘She’s my wife,’ he says.

‘And we’re to go in trembling of her. Your own sisters at the end of their days, driven tormented with fear.’

‘It’s the way things are. They’re closing all those places down.’

‘You’re doing it to spite us.’

He is a seedy figure now, cigarette-burns on his clothes, his shirt-collars frayed, portions of his jowl forgotten when he shaves. Guilt has made him take her in; guilt made him visit her and pay a little so that she wouldn’t have to drink out of an enamel mug. He’d be ashamed of himself if he’d ever struck her.

‘Robert was buried in the wrong graveyard,’ she tells him when the moment seems right for saying it. ‘Will you help me over that, Elmer?’

He doesn’t reply, and she tells him she never hated him. She tells him she thought about him often during her long time in
Miss Foye’s house. ‘Include others in your prayers,’ they used to urge, and she included him.

‘I’m sorry I caused you trouble,’ she says. ‘I’m sorry I made things worse.’

28

Waking in the middle of one night, Elmer found himself thinking about Bridget asleep in Hogan’s Hotel – just as, when a boy, he’d imagined Mrs Fahy and the housekeeper at the school in Wexford asleep. The hotel manageress’s clothes were on a chair in her bedroom, her stockings draped over the top of them. Although Elmer had never said so to his sisters, or in any way intimated it to his wife, he’d been relieved when Mary Louise decided she wanted to sleep in the attic. There was more room in the bed; you could pull the bed-clothes round you when it was cold and not have to leave an area of them for someone else. All in all, he liked it better.

Elmer, when he was a boy also, had often heard about the wife of Hanlon the solicitor, who suffered from a fear of going out. It was necessary for a priest to come to the house to give her Mass, and for a hairdresser to come also. The nun who ran the library at the convent brought books to the house twice a week. ‘The unfortunate woman can’t so much as set foot in her garden,’ Elmer recalled his father saying in the dining-room. ‘Seemingly she’ll spend an hour at the bottom of the stairs, unable to approach the front door. You’d be sorry for poor Hanlon.’

Passing the Hanlons’ house, Elmer had often seen the solicitor’s wife sitting in the bow window of a downstairs room, looking at the robins in the flowerbeds. A scrawn of a woman, his father had described her as, and from what he could see
this was correct. She had developed the affliction soon after her marriage, and Elmer wondered if Mary Louise wasn’t suffering from something similar, not that Mary Louise had a fear of going out, far from it.

‘No doctor could treat a condition like that,’ his father had pronounced in the dining-room. ‘A nervous complaint, I’d call it.’ Mr Quarry, as square and bulkily-made as Elmer himself, liked to address his family on such topics of interest in the dining-room. Half your education, he used to say, you received in the home. Elmer knew his father would have designated Mary Louise as one suffering from a nervous complaint also, and he resolved to have the expression ready should he again be approached on the subject by her parents or by the snooty sister. He had been struck by the same misfortune as the solicitor. He had married in good faith, giving a penniless girl a home. You could have Dr Cormican coming and going every day of the week for all the good it would do. A medical man had never once entered the Hanlons’ house, he recalled his father reporting in the dining-room. Money down the drain it would have been.

The despondency Elmer had experienced during the week of the seaside honeymoon, and its continuance after he and Mary Louise returned, had finally lost its bitter pain. It could be muddled away, he had discovered, and though occasionally it distressfully returned, all he had to do was to open the safe in the accounting office and reach behind the strong-box.

‘My God, what’s this?’ Matilda screamed one evening in the dining-room, the first of the three of them to place a forkful of rissole in her mouth. She spat it out immediately. It tasted dreadful, she screamed.

Rose, who had made the rissoles, bridled. There was nothing wrong with them, she maintained. They’d had them yesterday at dinnertime: what they were eating now were those that were left over, heated up. She tasted what was already on her own fork, then spat it out too.

‘They’ve gone bad,’ Matilda said.

‘How could they have gone bad? Weather like this, how could they?’

Elmer pushed his plate away. If the rissoles were bad he had no intention of being foolhardy. Sometimes meat which Rose re-cooked for the second or third time didn’t taste of anything at all.

‘They were perfect yesterday,’ Rose repeated.

Elmer said he would spread cheese on his bread if there was cheese available.

‘Was the sirloin all right when it came in?’ Matilda inquired, and Rose snappishly replied that of course it was. The same sirloin, with an undercut, arrived from the butcher every Friday, was roasted on Sunday, eaten cold on Monday, chopped up for rissoles on Tuesday. What remained of the rissoles appeared on the table again every Wednesday evening. All their lives this had been so; all their lives the Quarrys had consumed the Wednesday-evening rissoles without mishap.

‘Are there maggots in them?’ Matilda pressed apart the mush of potato and meat with her fork. ‘I think something moved in my mouth.’

Rose told her to have sense. There were no maggots in the rissoles. They had been made as they always were, the meat and potato bound together with half a cup of milk, a beaten egg yolk fixing the breadcrumbs around each one of them.

The sisters continued to examine the food on their plates, poking with their forks and peering at the chopped meat and the crisp covering of egg and breadcrumbs. Gingerly, Rose lifted a fragment of this crispness to her lips. It tasted all right, she said.

Since neither sister had heeded Elmer’s request for cheese, he rose and crossed to the sideboard. In the big centre drawer he found a round packet of Galtee spreadable triangles. He returned to the table with two of them and eased away the silver-paper wrapping.

‘Look at this green stuff.’ Matilda’s voice had risen again. ‘For God’s sake, what’s this stuff, Rose?’

She held her plate out. Rose investigated her own rissole further, then cut in half the two on Elmer’s plate. A virulent shade of green tinged the centre of each.

‘Food mildew,’ Matilda said. ‘How long did you keep the potatoes?’

Rose didn’t answer. She’d never heard the expression ‘food mildew’ before and guessed that Matilda had made it up. If the rissoles had gone bad it wasn’t her fault. She cut a slice of bread in half and buttered it. Two rissoles had been kept back in the kitchen by Her Ladyship, as two always were on a Wednesday evening. Rose wondered if she’d eaten them. It would be like her not to notice the taste or the colour they’d gone.

‘You can get poisoned from food mildew,’ Matilda said.

Afterwards, in Hogan’s, those words echoed unpleasantly as Elmer listened to Gerry telling him about a victory achieved by a greyhound that was said to be the fastest animal since Master McGrath. In his mind’s eye he saw again the halved rissoles on the plate in the dining-room. ‘I sold her Rodenkil,’ Renehan’s voice echoed also.

If there were rats in the attics you’d know about it, not a shadow of doubt. She was all over the place due to the nervous complaint. She’d maybe put some of the Rodenkil into a cup and left it around by mistake. It wouldn’t be difficult for Rose, if she was rushed or the light was bad, to get the cup muddled up with another one. Elmer pushed his glass across the bar. There’d be the mother and father of a commotion if he so much as opened his mouth.

‘It’s the way he has of crouching in the trap,’ Gerry said. ‘Off like a bomb he is.’

There was another woman Elmer remembered his father talking about in the dining-room, some woman whose name
he couldn’t remember, who lived out in the hills somewhere. She used to hoard fire-lighters. For no rational purpose she had the house filled to the brim with wax fire-lighters. If you’d put a match to the place, his father used to say, it wouldn’t last longer than a minute.

That night Elmer didn’t linger in the hall of the hotel, but hurried back after he’d had one more drink. He waited until he heard his sisters ascending the stairs to their rooms and then made his way to the kitchen. He searched in the cupboards, and then in the adjoining scullery, in the safe and the refrigerator. He lifted plates off bowls and jars, he examined packets and unlabelled paper-bags. In the waste-bin he found the contaminated rissoles, but nowhere was there a supply of the green substance, carelessly left about.

Moving cautiously so as not to rouse his sisters, Elmer descended the stairs again, entered the shop and mounted the brief stairway to the accounting office. He opened the safe and poured himself a measure of whiskey. He sat for a while, then as cautiously as before made his way through the house to the attics.

Mary Louise, not yet asleep, heard a fumbling at the door. The handle was turned. ‘Mary Louise,’ her husband’s voice whispered.

The noise interrupted a pleasant recollection. A boy in a striped smock was standing in the snow, the landlady and her daughter were huddled on the doorstep. It was the moment of parting: a sleigh stood waiting.

‘Mary Louise,’ the whisper repeated. ‘Mary Louise, are you awake?’

Knuckles rapped the panels of the door, not noisily as they had the last time Elmer had come to the attic, but surreptitiously, as though some secret existed between them.

Mary Louise didn’t move from her chair by the embers of
the fire. Eventually she heard him creeping away. The recollection that had possessed her would not return, try as she would to induce it. This was usually so when there was an interruption, when other people poked themselves in. She remained by the fire for another twenty minutes, but all there was to think about was going to school with Letty and James, and spreading their schoolbooks out on the kitchen table, and the recitation of poetry that had been set.