Two Lives (3 page)

‘What was the flick?’ Letty asked.

‘Lana Turner.
The Flame and the Flesh
.’

‘Holy God!’

‘Bonar Colleano was in it.’

‘Did your man keep his hands to himself?’

‘Of course he did,’ Mary Louise retorted crossly, for the first time feeling a kinship with the man who’d taken her out. Letty had a tongue like a razor blade.

‘Where’s James?’

‘He’s over playing cards with the Edderys.’

‘I’ll go to bed so.’

‘Is that the end of it, Mary Louise?’

‘How d’you mean, the end of it?’

‘Is he proposing anything further?’

‘He asked me out Friday.’

‘Don’t go, Mary Louise.’

‘I said I would.’

‘He could nearly be your father. For God’s sake, watch your step.’

Mary Louise did. She developed a cold during the week and gave Letty a note to take in to the shop. In the ordinary course of events a cold wouldn’t have prevented her from going to the pictures, and she hoped Elmer Quarry would deduce that. She hoped he’d guess how she felt, not that she was all that certain how she felt herself. When she was alone, especially lying awake in bed, she didn’t want ever again to have to walk up the stairs of the Electric Cinema with him. But when Letty started on with her advice, and when James put in a word or two also, she naturally tended to defy them. Neither her mother nor her father made a comment, beyond asking her what kind of a film it had been. But she knew what they were thinking, and that caused her mood to revert: once more she wished that she might never find herself repeating the experience of sitting in the Electric Cinema with the inheritor of the drapery. No reply to the note Letty delivered came, although Mary Louise expected there’d be something. She didn’t know why it disappointed her that he hadn’t managed to write a line or two.

At that time, from the town and from the land around it, young men were making their way to England or America, often having to falsify their personal details in order to gain a foothold in whatever city they reached. Families everywhere were affected by emigration, and the Protestant fraction of the population increasingly looked as if it would never recover. There was no fat on the bones of this shrinking community; there were no reserves of strength. Its very life was eroded by the bleak economy of the times.

In conversation, this subject cropped up often at the Dallons’ table. From his card-playing evenings at the Edderys’ James brought back tales of the search for local employment and the enforced exile that usually followed.

Returning with an unsold bullock from yet another cattle-fair, Mr Dallon reported the melancholy opinions of those he had conversed with. At the egg-packing station wages remained low. Talk of expansion at the brickette factory came to nothing.

The Dallons’ kitchen, where all such conversations took place and all meals were taken, had whitewashed walls and an iron range. There was a dresser, painted green, that displayed the cups and saucers and plates in daily use. Around the scrubbed deal table were five green-painted chairs. The door to the yard was green also, and the woodwork of the two windows that looked into the yard. On one of the windowsills a stack of newspapers had accumulated, conserved because they were useful for wrapping eggs in. On the other was the radio that, ten years ago, had replaced a battery-operated model. James and Letty remembered the day the battery wireless had been brought to the farmhouse by Billie Lyndon’s father, how an aerial had had to be attached to the chimney and a second wire connected to a spike that Mr Lyndon drove into the ground outside the window. ‘That’s Henry Hall,’ Mr Lyndon said when a voice was heard announcing a dance tune. Mary Louise couldn’t remember any of it.

‘It’s the way things are,’ Mr Dallon was given to remarking in the kitchen, a general-purpose remark that might be taken to apply to any aspect of life. With a soft sigh, he had employed it often during the war, when the BBC news was gloomy; and after the war when starvation was reported in Europe. But in spite of the note of pessimism that accompanied the observation Mr Dallon was not without hope: he believed as much in things eventually getting better as he did in the probability that they would first become worse. There was a cycle in the human condition he might have reluctantly agreed if prompted, although the expression was not one he would voluntarily have employed.

Mrs Dallon valued her husband’s instinctive assessments and the significance he attached to developments and events. She argued only about lesser matters, and then discreetly: she put her foot down when Mr Dallon set off for the town in clothes he had worn to clean a cowshed; she insisted, once every two months, that he had his hair cut; and in the privacy of their bedroom she argued about how best to handle James, who all too easily developed a resentful look if he felt he was being treated as a farm-hand. James would go, Mrs Dallon predicted, like all the others were going: if they took him for granted they’d wake up one morning to find he wasn’t there any more. Push him too hard in the fields and he’d decide to do something ludicrous, like joining the British army.

In general conversation, these same subjects cropped up when the Protestant families in the neighbourhood greeted one another at St Giles’s church on Sundays: the Goods, the Hayeses, the Kirkpatricks, the Fitzgeralds, the Lyndons, the Enrights, the Yateses, the Dallons. In 1955 they recognized that their survival lay in making themselves part of the scheme of things, as it was now well established. While they still believed in the Protestants they were, they hung together less than they had in the past.

‘You’d need the patience of Job,’ Mr Dallon had confided more than once after the Sunday service, referring to his efforts to teach his son to farm. It was James who mattered. It was he, not his sisters, who would continue to tease a living out of the twenty-seven indifferent acres, and to trade animals at the cattle-fairs: on his success depended the survival of all three of them. ‘Pray to God he doesn’t go marrying some flibbertigibbet!’ This worry of Mrs Dallon’s was voiced, not in the churchyard, but to her husband when they were alone. James being James, any marriage he proposed would naturally be foolish, but if you hinted as much when the time came the chances were that he’d have the thing done in some out-of-the-way
parish without anyone knowing. A flibbertigibbet could be the ruin of Culleen, and of Letty and Mary Louise with it – unless, of course, Mary Louise discovered in the meantime the advantages of marrying into the drapery. No word could be said in that direction either, no pressure applied. These days – more than ever before, Mrs Dallon considered – a family had to put its trust in God.

‘Your cold cleared up,’ she observed in the kitchen when she and Mary Louise were making bread a fortnight or so after the outing to the Electric Cinema. ‘I thought we were in for ‘flu.’

‘Yes, the cold went off.’

Mary Louise sounded low, her mother noted, and said to herself that that wasn’t a bad sign. It suggested that her pride had been disturbed because Elmer Quarry had failed to display his disappointment over the cancelled engagement. With a mother’s instinct she guessed that Mary Louise was regretting her hastiness.

When Elmer entered the billiard-room the caretaker – Daly the church sexton – was sitting close to the fire that blazed between the glass-fronted bookcases. In a respectful manner he immediately stood up, pushed back the rexine-covered armchair and replaced on the magazine table the
Illustrated London News
he’d been perusing. He remarked on the continuing severe weather. He’d be back to lock up, he added, and indicated that there was plenty of coal in the scuttle.

It puzzled Elmer that hardly anyone but himself came in for a game of billiards or an exchange of views by the fire. He couldn’t understand why others didn’t find some attraction in the shadowy billiard-room with the powerful, shaded light over the table, the coal pleasantly hissing, the flames changing colour and causing the mahogany of the bookcases to glow. No refreshments were served in the billiard-room, but that
didn’t seem to Elmer to matter in the very least, since refreshment could be taken in your own dining-room, and if you cared to smoke – which he didn’t himself – you could do so endlessly. Daly, a small, elderly man with a limp, was invariably ensconced with a magazine when Elmer arrived, but always rose and went away. It sometimes occurred to Elmer that the caretaker lit the fire and kept it up for his own comfort and convenience.

He chalked a cue and disposed the billiard-balls to his liking, preparatory to an hour’s practice. The day had been a profitable one: seven yards of oilcloth, the tail-end of a roll that had been in the shop for fifteen years, were sold by Matilda to the Mother Superior at the Sacred Heart convent. A coat had been sold to a farmer’s wife, and an overcoat to her husband, both purchases the fruits of a legacy apparently. The traveller from Fitzpatrick’s had shown him a new line in carded elastic with a mark-up that was the most attractive he’d been offered for years. He had ordered a dozen boxes, and a hundred of Fitzpatrick’s Nitelite nightdresses. Rose had sold ten yards of chiffon for Kate Glasheen’s wedding-dress. You didn’t often have a day like that.

Taking aim, Elmer closed one eye. He paused, then slid the cue smoothly forward. Ball struck ball, the resulting motion precisely as he’d planned. He would continue to wait, he reflected as he moved around the table: one day, sooner or later, she would walk into the shop and he would see what was what from the expression on her face. Rose and Matilda were pleased at the latest turn of events, but events that turned once could turn again. The glimpse of her stockinged calves in the light from the street lamp flashed into Elmer’s consciousness, like a moment from the film they had seen. The Dallons weren’t much of a family: she would walk into the shop.

Mary Louise did so twelve days later, and Elmer came down from the accounting office, solicitous about her cold. The
older of his two sisters – showing her a cardigan at the time – was far from pleased when he approached them.

The cold had cleared up, Mary Louise said; it had been heavy, but it had cleared up. The cardigan wasn’t quite right, she added. Attractive though it had seemed in the window, under closer scrutiny the shade wasn’t one that suited her.

‘Wasn’t that the powerful film?’ he remarked while Rose was returning the garment to the window.

‘Yes, it was.’

‘A grand evening.’

‘Yes, it was.’

‘Well, that unfortunate cold was a nuisance! In fairness to yourself, I think I owe you another visit to the pictures.’

He smiled. His teeth were small, she saw, a fact that previously had escaped her.

‘Oh,’ she began.

‘Would Friday interest you? Or Saturday? Would Saturday be better?’

She chose Friday. They saw
Lilacs in the Spring
.

3

Arrangements are being explained to her: she doesn’t listen. The words are no more than a gabble, a sound like a dog grieving in the distance or the wail of wind through branches. Jeanne d’Arc worked a plough like a man; she wasn’t a mimsy thing like Possy Luke with her cracked spectacles. Miss Mullover said Jeanne d’Arc’s courage was beyond all comprehension.

‘Good of you to come over.’ Miss Foye has returned. Her strict tone interrupts the visitor’s drone, still going on about the way things are now being done. There is a smile on Miss Foye’s plump face. Forty-two she is, a known fact. Courted by a road surveyor.

‘We’ll take it easy,’ the man remarks, lowering his voice. ‘We won’t rush our fences.’

They glance at her, both of them. She introduces a vacancy into her eyes, staring over their heads, upwards, at the ceiling.

‘It’ll be a saving for you,’ Miss Foye observes.

He shakes his head, implying that that isn’t a consideration. ‘All I want to do is the right thing. Will the house close down, Miss Foye?’

‘We have fourteen to place elsewhere, fourteen that can’t go back where they came from. The house’ll put up its shutters then.’

‘You’ll be OK yourself?’

‘To tell the truth I would be finishing with it anyway.’

Miss Foye looks coy. A month ago a ruby stone appeared on her engagement finger. Miss Foye is to become the wife of the road surveyor, an autumnal romance if ever there was one. ‘There’s juice in the old girl yet,’ Dot Sterne remarked when the news spread. ‘Isn’t that one bold for her age?’

‘Friday week.’ He says it, Miss Foye nods. Friday week’ll be grand. It’ll give everyone time, only fair to an inmate to let her get used to the change in advance. ‘D’you hear us, dear?’ she asks, raising her tone. ‘D’you follow what you’ve been told?’

The woman smiles, first at Miss Foye, then at her visitor. She shakes her head. She hasn’t heard a thing, she says.

4

The wedding took place on Saturday, 10 September 1955. It was a quiet occasion, but even so Mary Louise had a traditional wedding-dress, and Letty a bridesmaid’s dress in matching style. There was a celebration afterwards in the farmhouse. Everyone sat down in the dining-room, a room otherwise rarely used. Mrs Dallon had roasted three chickens, and there was spiced beef as well as bacon to go with them. Before the meal the health of the bride and groom was drunk in sherry or whiskey. The Reverend Harrington, who had conducted the ceremony, allowed himself a further homily.

Miss Mullover, now nearly seventy, small and slight, affected by arthritis, had a special place at the gathering as the one-time mentor of both bride and groom. She’d been surprised when she heard of Mary Louise’s engagement to the draper, but only because of the difference of generation: nothing else about the present alliance caused her undue apprehension. Other girls had passed through her schoolroom, eventually to marry older men. Marie Yates, not yet thirty at the time of her marriage to Canon Moore at almost eighty, came most swiftly to mind: in all her life Miss Mullover had never witnessed such weeping as Marie’s at the funeral of the old clergyman.

But this sanguine view was not unanimously to be found among the wedding guests. The continuing displeasure of Matilda and Rose was matched by Letty’s, which took the
form of a coldly distant manner and the firm rejection of any notion that the occasion was a festive one. When, in March, Mary Louise revealed that Elmer had proposed and that she had accepted him, Letty hadn’t spoken to her for three weeks and when the silence was finally broken Letty was so changed that Mary Louise wondered if she would ever again know the old relationship she’d had with her sister.