Two Lives

18

The mists of autumn came, clinging to the houses of Bridge Street, smudging the shop windows with drips and rivulets. The smell of the town was of turf smoke mainly, acrid in the damp air. The shortening days were caught between the seasons until November arrived, claiming them for winter.

By the middle of that month, for Mary Louise, the funeral seemed an age ago. She had stood in the small church with her family, in the front pew, across the aisle from the solitary presence of her aunt. There were all sorts of people there – neighbours mainly, a few from the town, Miss Mullover, the Edderys, relations from the other side of the family whom the Dallons had never seen before. In the churchyard the coffin was lowered; the Reverend Harrington intoned; a handful of clay was thrown on the brightly varnished surface. Afterwards nobody knew what to do: the occasion was sad, people felt, so brief a life, too sad for a funeral spread. Yet in the end some of the mourners returned to her aunt’s house.

Ever since the death of her cousin the first thought that entered Mary Louise’s waking consciousness every morning was that the death was a fact. Robert, thin and wiry in the classroom, was no longer there. Robert, smiling in the untidy room he was so fond of, was now a figment in her mind. A shadow pointed at the heron and bent to pick the mushrooms. A shadow kissed her twice. The fading images were not as good as photographs would have been, but she had no photograph of her cousin.

It was because of that that Mary Louise, on a Sunday afternoon in mid-November, cycled again to her aunt’s house. She didn’t quite know what she would say when she arrived, nor what she’d find there. She wondered if she’d be particularly welcome.

In fact she was. Her aunt was in the garden, rooting out her finished runner beans. She wore gum boots and an old mackintosh coat. A fire was smouldering near where she worked.

‘Mary Louise!’

‘Am I interrupting you?’

‘No, no, you’re not. I’m on the last row.’

She pulled out what remained of the row and threw the stalks on to the bonfire. A job she hated, she said, leading the way to the back of the house.

‘I’ve wondered,’ Mary Louise began in the kitchen.

‘Oh, I’m managing all right.’

In the kitchen Mary Louise made tea while her aunt pulled off her boots and hung her mackintosh above the Esse to dry.

‘It’s good of you to come over, Mary Louise.’

‘I was never able to offer you my sympathy.’ She paused, pouring the boiling water into the pot. ‘I needed it all for myself.’

‘Nothing in the world is a greater consolation than that you and Robert were friends those last few months.’

‘I was very fond of Robert, Aunt Emmeline.’

Her aunt had moved to the sink to wash her hands. She ran the taps, scouring her palms and fingers with a brush. Mary Louise poured their two cups of tea.

‘Robert was fond of you too, Mary Louise.’

That was all that was said. The depth of the relationship had clearly not been guessed by her aunt. Nothing about it had worried her in her son’s lifetime. She had seen no reason why a harmless affection should not be permitted in a life that was emotionally deprived.

‘There’s a cake your mother sent over. Your mother has been nice to me.’

An uncut fruitcake was placed on a plate. Mary Louise had hoped she could confide her feelings, that her aunt would understand and listen. But instead she cut slices of the fruitcake, and Mary Louise sensed that the subject should not be pursued. That she and Robert had been fond of each other was one thing; condoning love was quite another.

‘Whenever you feel like it,’ her aunt said, ‘come over and see me.’

The invitation softened what might have seemed like harshness, but being in the house again was painful and Mary Louise knew she would not easily return. The abandoned graveyard and the ruined church through which the rose rambled in high summer were easier places. They were without distractions or voices that did not belong; they did not demand politeness.

‘Might I have a drawing of Robert’s, d’you think?’

‘Oh, of course. Let’s go and see.’

The three books were open on the table, as he had placed them. The French and German battalions were engaged in a conflict he must have arranged after she’d left. The room had been tidied a bit, but not much.

‘I’m getting round to it,’ her aunt said, her tone betraying her failure to find the heart for the task. ‘I don’t come in here much.’

Mary Louise wouldn’t have changed the position of a single thing, not a book or a scribble or a drawing. She wouldn’t have moved by an inch his armchair by the fire. In winter she’d have lit the fire again and kept it going every day.

‘It’s nice you want one,’ her aunt said when a drawing of winter trees had been chosen. ‘Have anything else you’d like.’

Mary Louise looked about her, and the urge not to disturb returned.

‘Maybe these,’ she reluctantly suggested, indicating the three books.

‘Of course you must have them.’

They left the room and in the kitchen had another cup of tea. For a moment they did not speak. Then her aunt said:

‘Your mother said I could live at Culleen. What would you think of that, Mary Louise?’

Her Sunday visits to this house would become known was what Mary Louise thought: daily contact would see to that. But what had mattered in his lifetime didn’t matter now. Even if her revelation of today led in time to the dawning of suspicion in her aunt’s mind, it wouldn’t matter. She only wished she had known, that last Sunday, that she loved her cousin with the passion death had made apparent.

‘It’s lonely for you here, Aunt Emmeline.’

‘Well, that’s what they believe. And yes, it is. Just now it is, though perhaps I’ll get used to it.’

‘It’s sensible.’

‘Yes, it’s sensible. If Letty marries Dennehy there’ll be that bedroom.’

The Bank of Ireland owned more of the house than she did, she added. Getting rid of it would be a weight off her mind. The west side of the roof leaked, gutters needed to be replaced, lead was perforated.

‘I’m fond of James,’ she said. ‘It would be nice to see something of a young person again.’

Mary Louise could discern what was in her aunt’s mind, and in her parents’. The notion there had been – accepted almost as fact in the farmhouse – that Letty and James would see their way into old age together, now that Mary Louise had married, no longer appeared to be valid. More likely, now, it seemed that Letty would marry the vet and James would one day marry also. With a bedroom to spare, in such circumstances it was the natural thing to offer a home to a lone aunt.

‘But I’m not sure, Mary Louise. I’m not sure I wouldn’t be an intrusion.’

Mary Louise shook her head. That was the last thing her aunt would be, she reassured her. If the idea had been put to her the whole family would have discussed it. Her father would have agreed, and so would James. Letty must have made up her mind about Dennehy.

‘Privately between us, I believe she has,’ her aunt said.

‘I didn’t know.’

‘It’s always kept quiet for a while, news of a mixed marriage. Dennehy’s priest will be having a go at Letty.’

‘Letty would never turn.’

‘The priest’ll want the children though.’

Mary Louise felt that none of it concerned her. In the past Letty would have ages ago told her everything. They would have lain awake in the bedroom that soon was to be empty and Letty would have gone through every development in her romance, the nature and circumstances of the proposal, and the persuasion of the parish priest. When Gargan had been taking her out she’d come back to the bedroom at night with all sorts of information, often waking Mary Louise up to tell her: what Gargan had tried on, what he’d confided to her about his boyhood desires, revelations made about the customers at the bank, who was solvent and who was not. Now, apparently, her sister was going to marry a man Mary Louise had only spoken to once or twice and about whom Letty had told her nothing whatsoever. After the wedding everything in the farmhouse would be different – Aunt Emmeline would occupy the bedroom that had been theirs, James might marry the Eddery girl or someone like her. None of it was any longer Mary Louise’s world. Her world was the drapery and the house above it, her sisters-in-law, her husband, the attic rooms, the memory of her cousin’s love. The town she had so longed to live in was hers, its air odorous with turf smoke, its people interested in her seemingly barren state.

‘The priests always have a go for the children,’ her aunt said. ‘Well, understandably, I dare say.’

‘I must get back.’ She hesitated. ‘I don’t suppose there’s a photograph to spare of Robert?’

For the first time her aunt appeared surprised. Then she went away and returned with an album in which a dozen or so photographs were loosely caught between the pages. None was pasted in. ‘The ones of Robert are precious to me,’ she said. ‘There’s none of him grown up.’

Mary Louise looked at one after another: Robert as a baby, Robert at three or four, Robert in an overcoat and cap, much as she remembered him from their childhood. She handed them back.

‘We didn’t go in much for the camera,’ her aunt said.

There were other photographs and she was shown them – of the house and of people she didn’t know, of her aunt when she was a girl, and Robert’s father, with a moustache.

‘Thanks for showing me, Aunt Emmeline.’

Soon after she turned out of the avenue she heard an echo of her cousin’s voice.

‘One hot summer day in 1853 two young men lay in the shade of a tall lime tree by the River Moskva, not far from Kountsovo…’

Mary Louise was correct in imagining that the townspeople were interested in her childlessness. As well, it was considered that she was becoming strange, and often a connection was made. Women coming into the shop noticed what they agreed were oddities, and remarked upon them to one another. They said so in the other shops – in Renehan’s next door, in Foley’s, and elsewhere. They said so chattily, inquisitively, forebodingly, depending on who they were. The young wife was abstracted, they said; you addressed her and often she didn’t hear you. You asked for Silko and she turned round and reached down the silk samples. She wasn’t as friendly as she’d been; sometimes she hardly smiled at you, and then remembered and smiled effusively.

One day Letty came to the shop to tell her sister that she was engaged to Dennehy. She was immediately struck by what she afterwards described to her mother as ‘Mary Louise’s peculiar manner’. She had asked if they could go upstairs for a few minutes and Mary Louise led her to the big front room, a room Letty had never been in before. They sat on either side of the empty fire grate. Dennehy had bought the farmhouse and the yard of outbuildings to which so often they’d driven in search of privacy. Letty tried to remember the rooms, measuring them in her mind to establish if any was as large as this one. She extolled her fiancé’s virtues, and his devotion, and all they had planned for the future. She turned her head away when she said she was head over heels with him, and had been from the first time he took her out. He was anxious to know Mary Louise better, she passed on.

‘She didn’t speak a word,’ Letty reported later. ‘She sat there hardly changing her expression.’

There was some exaggeration in this, but the statements none the less conveyed an accurate reflection of the truth since they also took into account Letty’s own considerable surprise.

‘Is she sick?’ Mrs Dallon asked.

Letty shook her head. Her sister wasn’t sick. It was nothing like that.

‘Oh, I’ve noticed something,’ Mrs Dallon said, recalling her visit to the Quarrys at the time of her nephew’s death. Thinking that over afterwards, she had reached the conclusion that Mary Louise’s behaviour had to do with not yet being pregnant. Increasingly, her younger daughter’s moodiness – despondency transformed into elation, and then the grim mournfulness of the last couple of months – had appeared to Mrs Dallon to be an outcome of this fact. Neither she nor her husband had ever found it necessary to discuss, or even to mention, the known fact that for generations the Quarrys had taken the marriage step as a necessity rather than a desire. Mary Louise had wanted to be in the town, she had chosen to go out with Elmer Quarry. The Dallons, in the privacy of their bedroom or alone in the kitchen when James was out playing cards and Letty was out with Dennehy, did not openly progress from these facts to wonder aloud about Mary Louise’s subsequent happiness. They had not used that word to one another before the marriage; they did not after it. It was not a word that naturally belonged in their vocabulary. They would have felt easier if Elmer Quarry had been younger, or even been someone else altogether and more of a companion for the girl. But other factors had to be taken into consideration. It was pure ill fortune that, as yet, there was no pregnancy.

‘She didn’t say she was glad or anything,’ Letty went on. ‘All she did was nod. I told her about the house and she didn’t even ask where it is.’

‘Was she maybe disappointed you didn’t ask her to be your bridesmaid?’

‘You can’t have a married woman a bridesmaid. I told her, but afterwards I wondered did she hear.’

‘She should see Dr Cormican. You can get tests these days.’

‘I don’t think it’s that.’

‘What else then?’

‘He’s drinking.’

‘Who is?’

‘Elmer.’

‘Have sense, Letty. The man doesn’t touch a drop. The Quarrys never have.’

‘He’s taken to it. It’s all over town.’

Had Letty known it, she might have added that the unexpected resort to whiskey on Elmer Quarry’s part was assumed in the town to be related to the childless marriage, which his sisters now openly implied he regarded as a mistake.

‘Hogan’s bar,’ Letty said. ‘I’ve seen him there myself.’

‘My God!’

‘You’d want to shake her when she’s sitting there saying nothing. But the next minute you’d be sorry for her.’

Mrs Dallon later repeated the whole conversation, word for word, to her husband. He, too, was ignorant of the fact that Elmer Quarry had taken to spending time in Hogan’s bar. It had never been mentioned to him by anyone at the cattle-fairs, but Mrs Dallon pointed out that it probably wouldn’t be, the subject being delicate.

‘Once a family’s started it’ll all settle down,’ Mr Dallon said.

‘Please God it will.’

But Mrs Dallon could not sleep that night. She lay there remembering the details of Mary Louise’s own birth, so very late the baby had been, and then the easy time she’d had compared with Letty, and James. Growing up, Mary Louise had been a wide-eyed little girl, not sharp like Letty, nor rushy like James. Sometimes her dreaminess would irritate you, sometimes she forgot to do things and you’d think she’d forgotten deliberately but she never had. There’d been the day she’d fallen through the outhouse trap-door, when she’d lain on the straw for ages before the barking of the sheepdogs attracted their attention. There’d been the time Miss Mullover had written on her end-of-term letter that she was paying attention at last. Dr Cormican had thought she might have a grumbling appendix and they’d worried about the hospital charges, but it turned out to be nothing at all. She’d never looked more radiant than she did in her wedding-dress, with the Limerick veil borrowed from Emmeline.

Towards dawn Mrs Dallon slept. She dreamed, but afterwards remembered nothing, aware only vaguely that Mary Louise, as a baby and a child and a bride, had passed from her waking consciousness into a muddle of fantasy.

*

On Christmas Day Mary Louise sat with her husband and her sisters-in-law in church and afterwards they gave one another presents, as the Quarrys by tradition always did at that particular time, before the turkey was carved. Bitter weather came in January, and Mary Louise imagined the stream with the trout in it frozen over, and wondered if herons went away in winter.

Rose and her sister passed on to certain of their customers their belief that their sister-in-law was not in her right mind. There was something queer in that family, they said, James Dallon far from the full shilling and the cousin who’d died a peculiarity by all accounts. Increasingly in the new year the daily thoughts of the sisters were influenced by their observation of their sister-in-law and the disintegration, as they saw it, which she had brought about in their brother. They did not, in their gossiping with certain of their customers, ever touch upon this latter subject, feeling it to be one that shamed the family.

‘What harm’ll it do?’ Matilda said early in February after they had yet again discussed – but more seriously now – the notion of visiting the Dallons’ farmhouse and expressing their concern. They talked about this for a further week, and on the twentieth of the month arranged with Kilkelly at the garage to be driven to Culleen the following day.

Mary Louise no longer went secretly to the attic rooms but openly ascended the flight of stairs, even leaving the door at the bottom open. There’d been comment of course. Elmer had asked her if she was looking for something up there, and when Rose raised the matter in the dining-room Mary Louise replied that she went to the attics for privacy. She had taken to locking the door of the one she preferred and once Matilda rattled the handle, but she ignored the sound. ‘Are you all right in there, Mary Louise?’ her sister-in-law called out, and she didn’t reply. She had moved everything out into the room next door except the armchair she sat in. When they said there was something they wanted she was able to tell them that.

It was often cold in her attic but that never mattered. She tucked her legs under her in the armchair and thought of her cousin in his grave, the bones revealed in his face, flesh putrefying. She blamed God for that; in her attic she made an enemy of God because all she had left was the echo of her cousin’s voice – the way he had of pronouncing certain words, the timbre of his intonations, the images his voice conveyed.

‘I dreamed I was sad and sometimes cried. But through the tears and the melancholy, inspired by the music of the verse or the beauty of the evening, there always rose upwards, like the grasses of early spring, shoots of happy feeling…’

Again and again his voice repeated it. Hers now joined in. For these were words they must learn by heart, he’d said.