Two Lives

8

On Christmas Eve 1956 Elmer accompanied Renehan, the hardware merchant from the premises next door, to Hogan’s Hotel. It was half-past four in the afternoon, as it always was when the two made their way along Bridge Street on Christmas Eve. A street musician who only appeared in the town at this time of year was playing a melodeon. The pavements were lively with people from the poor part of the town who left what shopping they could afford to the last couple of hours on Christmas Eve, hoping for bargains. A drunken man lurched in the street, talking to anyone who would listen.

‘A poor year,’ Renehan remarked as they turned into the side entrance that led to the hotel’s bar. It was what the two men talked about on this Christmas occasion: the fluctuations of business during the previous twelve months, difficulties with suppliers in their two different fields of trade, profit and loss. Renehan was an older man, thin and trimly dressed, with a well-kept moustache and a reputation for personal vanity.

‘Shocking,’ Elmer agreed.

The hotel bar was crowded, as festive as the street outside. People like Elmer, not normally seen there, were standing in groups, talking loudly. Paper decorations were strung diagonally across the ceiling.

‘You’ll take the usual intoxicant, Elmer?’ Renehan was known for his ornate, and in this case inaccurate, way of putting things. In his business life he cultivated a joky manner, believing that it attracted customers.

‘As a matter of fact,’ Elmer said, ‘I’ll take a small one.’

Renehan glanced amusedly at his companion. In all the years of this rendezvous the draper had never requested whiskey, not even the year he’d had a cold that should have kept him in bed. Renehan raised his eyebrows the way he’d once seen an actor doing all through a film.

‘That’s married life for you!’ he suggested and gently touched Elmer’s chest with his elbow.

Elmer didn’t reply; you didn’t have to with Renehan. He remained at the back of the bar while the hardware merchant pushed his way through the crowd. He hadn’t drunk whiskey since the night of his honeymoon; last Christmas he’d had a mineral as usual. It might indeed be married life, he reflected as he stood there. Maybe there was more to Renehan’s facetiousness than the man realized.

Noticing his presence, other men saluted Elmer across the bar, other shopkeepers for the most part, a couple of bank officials, Hanlon the solicitor. He wondered what they thought, or if they thought anything at all. Fifteen months he’d been married.

‘Compliments of the season!’ Renehan raised his glass and Elmer slightly raised his. The last thing he remembered of that Saturday night was the barman insisting that he wanted to close. The walk back to the Strand Hotel, the hall and the stairs, any parting words: none of that had remained with him. The next thing he could recollect after the barman said he had a home to go to himself was waking up with his clothes still on him.

Renehan offered him a cigarette, as if presuming that since Elmer was drinking whiskey he would have taken up tobacco as well. Elmer shook his head. He’d never smoked a cigarette in his life, he said, and didn’t intend to.

‘The better for it.’ Renehan’s thin brown fingers were illuminated by the flare of a match as he lit his own. He inhaled, and blew a smoke-ring. He mentioned a farmer to whom he had refused credit during the year.

‘The same with myself,’ Elmer said.

They hadn’t revisited McBirney’s bar during their remaining days at the Strand Hotel because he considered that going there in the first place had been a mistake. On their last night one of the men who shared their table in the dining-room was persistent with an invitation, and Mary Louise apparently wished to return to the public house, indeed seemed to have agreed that they would do so. But he’d stuck to his guns. For one thing, the episode had cost a fortune.

Renehan spoke of other customers, of possible bad debts in the months to come. He mentioned farmers on whom an eye needed to be kept, whose fortunes were on the wane. As well as the three sons who worked with him in the shop, Renehan had a daughter who attended to the accounts. In the bar of Hogan’s Hotel the two men had many a time agreed that it made a substantial difference, not having to employ anyone.

‘Is it gin?’ Elmer asked.

‘With a drop of hot water.’

He made his way to the bar. The manageress of the hotel was assisting the barman with the Christmas custom. She was an unmarried woman of Elmer’s age, on the stout side, with plucked eyebrows and hair that reminded Elmer of the landlady’s hair at the Strand Hotel, being the same reddish shade. He had remarked on the similarity at the time, but Mary Louise said she didn’t think she’d ever laid eyes on the manageress of Hogan’s. Bridget her name was.

‘What’ll I get you, Mr Quarry?’ She smiled at him, her hands held out for the glasses. She was wearing a black dress, and a necklace that glittered on the flesh that was exposed where the dress ended. One of her teeth was marked with lipstick. ‘Oh God, I’m sorry! I didn’t say Happy Christmas, Mr Quarry.’

‘Happy Christmas, Bridget. A small one for myself. A gin with hot water in it for Mr Renehan.’

Years ago he had wondered about marrying a Catholic. When the time came, he’d thought he might have to if there wasn’t anyone else about. He’d looked down from the accounting office one day and seen the hotel manageress – assistant manageress she’d been then – holding a summer dress up against her. For a couple of weeks he’d considered making an approach, but then he’d decided there was no hurry. Would the whole thing be a different story now, he wondered, if he’d reached a different decision? Mixed marriages were two a penny these days.

‘How’s everything with you, Mr Quarry?’ she asked, taking his money and quickly returning the change.

‘Tumbling along, Bridget, tumbling along.’

‘Well, that’s great.’ She turned, as she spoke, to serve someone else. He didn’t know why she hadn’t married.

‘Good luck,’ Renehan said, raising his glass again.

In previous years Elmer had drunk his second glass of lemonade quickly, gulping it and then putting the glass down on a nearby surface. He’d usually been back in the shop by ten to five. Now he sipped his whiskey slowly, actually savouring the harsh taste. He found it pleasant in the bar, pleasanter in a way than the empty YMCA billiard-room.

‘Isn’t it an extraordinary thing,’ he said, ‘that Bridget never married?’

Renehan told him a long story about Bridget being in love with a young curate when she was young herself, how it had been the passion of her life.

‘Father Curtin. Whippersnapper with sideburns.’

‘I remember the man well.’

‘Changes were made when the p.p. got a whiff of it.’

‘Ah, they would be all right.’

‘There was talk at the time of Father Curtin leaving the priesthood. Anyway, he didn’t and poor Bridget was left high and dry.’

‘Well, I never heard that one.’

‘It was kept under wraps. There’s not many in this town that knows it to this day.’

‘Only Bridget.’

‘Well, Bridget naturally.’

Other scandals from the past, known to both men, were recalled. Renehan bought two more drinks, and then Elmer did.

‘I’d best be getting back,’ he said, realizing that it was almost six o’clock. Renehan moved away to talk to someone else. Elmer returned to the shop.

Something began that Christmas Eve, although Elmer at the time was not aware of it. Halfway through January, instead of looking in at the YMCA billiard-room, he found himself turning into the side entrance that led to Hogan’s bar. It was much emptier on this occasion, but even so there were a couple of regular drinkers there. Knowing them by sight, Elmer nodded in their direction and ordered himself a glass of whiskey from the barman, Gerry, who also acted as the hotel’s porter. He sat on a high stool at the bar, talking to Gerry about the weather.

A few weeks later this visit was repeated. Elmer left the house above the shop with every intention of playing a lone game of billiards for an hour or two, but found himself again turning into the side entrance. On both occasions he made no reference to this change of plan when he later returned home. The whiskey deadened an ache that oppressed him. It lifted a weight from his spirits, if only for an hour or so. Too much, as on his wedding night, would bring a fog of darkness, but often in the accounting room, watching his sisters and his wife in the shop below, such darkness seemed like a balm.

By the spring of that year Elmer’s visits to the billiard-room had dwindled further, but since they had always fallen off when the days lengthened this passed unnoticed by Daly the caretaker. The difference was that with the advent of autumn they were not resumed. During the intervening months Elmer had had no excuse to leave the house in the evenings, for if he stated – as once or twice he did – that he intended to go for a walk Mary Louise prepared herself to accompany him. So instead he took to calling in briefly at Hogan’s bar in the afternoon, and was glad when September came so that he could spend longer there under the pretext of playing billiards. By the end of the year people in the town had begun to notice that Elmer Quarry was often, these days, in Hogan’s.

Nothing was missed by Rose and Matilda; nothing ever had been. They’d been sharp of eye and ear as children, and the tendency had developed in their spinsterhood. In Matilda’s life – as in Letty’s and Bridget the hotel manageress’s – there had, once upon a time, been romance. Matilda’s fiancé had joined the RAF on the outbreak of the war, and been killed in 1945, months before hostilities ceased. He had not gone down in action, for righting was mostly over for aircraft gunners then, but had died as a result of an accident at an aerodrome in Leicestershire: a devil-may-care pilot, in attempting to fly through an open hangar, had caused a tragic disaster. Rose had never been proposed to, and the spinsterhood of the sisters had developed like two strengthening growths from the same root. The root was the family – generations of Quarrys, of smalltown Protestants made special through not being of the mass. Matilda and Rose were steadfast, not in their beliefs or in their faith, but in what they believed themselves to be: a little superior.

The sisters could not help themselves, and long ago had become lost in assuming they could not: now they did not try. Why should they? And why should they put themselves out by the slightest iota for a penniless creature whom their brother might have bought at a fun-fair if they’d all been living a hundred years ago? He’d married her to breed with. He’d married her because of his sentimental notion that the name should continue above the shop. That kind of compulsion belonged to another age also – and had made sense then, neither would deny that. Now it was only slop.

On Christmas Eve when Elmer had returned to the house with the smell of drink on his breath they both noticed it at once. But they didn’t comment on the fact to one another. They knew their brother always went to Hogan’s on Christmas Eve with Renehan; they’d never thought about what he had to drink there. The whiff of spirits he brought back with him didn’t seem significant, more something to be expected when you returned from a bar. But one evening in January the telltale whiff was there again. Neither of them asked him if he hadn’t been at the YMCA; he said nothing himself; and then – not long afterwards – they smelt it on his breath on another occasion. Still they did not remark on this to one another.

Where the marriage was concerned, the sisters knew that nothing could be changed. Before he’d made the mistake they had pointed it out to him. They had done their best, as sometimes they’d had to as children, being older sisters. The mistake was what all of them had to live with now.

‘He’s drinking on the quiet,’ Rose said at last.

‘Yes.’

They were waiting for him one night on the first-floor landing. His eyes were bleary, both noticed. He kept opening and closing his lips in a way that was unusual for him: they knew his personal habits, the quirks and twitches that were part of him. They did not speak on the landing, nor did he. He passed them by, and went on upstairs. In the front room his wife, Her Ladyship, turned on the wireless. A few minutes later they heard her going upstairs too.

*

A veterinary surgeon began to take Letty out. He came to the farm to examine an ailing heifer, and when he’d finished he sat for a long time over a cup of tea in the kitchen. A fortnight later he called in with his account and invited Letty to the Electric Cinema. He was a good-looking man, red-haired, a few years older than she was, a Catholic called Dennehy. ‘It’s the way things are,’ Mr Dallon remarked to his wife in the privacy of their bedroom. Both of them hoped that nothing would come of the relationship.

The schoolroom next to the church, in which Miss Mullover had taught from 1906 until 1950, closed on her retirement. Arrangements had since been made for the Protestant children of the town and the neighbourhood, either to be driven to a school fifteen miles away or to attend the convent or the Christian Brothers’. Miss Mullover had seen that coming, and even took a little pride in being the last Protestant teacher to have a school in the town: a successor – some flighty thing from the Church of Ireland Training College – might have irritated her more.

‘You’ve settled down?’ she prompted Mary Louise, meeting her one day in South West Street when enough time had passed to permit the question. She’d said the same thing often before, to pupils who had married. Settling was necessary, which was why, ages ago, she’d chosen that particular word. No girl, of whatever age – no man either, when it came to it – could expect to find the first year or so of marriage free of the hazards of personal adjustment. That stood to reason, yet was not always taken into consideration in advance.

‘Oh, yes,’ Mary Louise responded, but a quality in her tone of voice caused Miss Mullover to doubt her. Conversing with her on later occasions, she was confirmed in this opinion, and came to realize – to her great disappointment – that her optimism at the time of the wedding had been misplaced.