Two Lives

23

Miss Foye kisses her. He carries her two suitcases. The Quarrys are decent people, she hears Mrs Leavy say, they have that reputation. While she was waiting in the hall Mrs Leavy told further stories about the old days in the asylums, relating the frightening scenes she and her friend Elsie witnessed when they looked over the brick wall.

The women wave, as they waved at Bríd Beamish. The asylums were built as charitable institutions, the fashion in mercy then, as the drugs are now. She waves back, and winds the window of the car down and waves again.

She has left the house before, on two occasions: for the funeral of her father, and a year and a half later for that of her mother. At both she’d been reminded of the death of her cousin, not that reminding was necessary; but the words of farewell were the same, the repetition causing her to reflect that the dead become nothing when you weary of doing their living for them. You pick and choose among the dead; the living are thrust upon you.

‘Are they still alive?’ she asks, the silence suddenly broken, the question emerging naturally from her thoughts.

‘Who’s that?’

‘Your sisters.’

The car responds to the shock he experiences, juddering in its motion. He halts it to adjust himself, steering it into the gateway of a field. He turns to look at her.

‘Why shouldn’t my sisters be alive?’

‘We all die some time.’

‘Of course they haven’t died.’

‘I was not to know.’

‘You’d have been told, dear.’

She doesn’t say she might have been told and not been interested. She doesn’t say anything, but listens while he warns her there’ll be changes she’ll notice, in the town and in his daily life.

‘Do you remember what I told you about the shop?’

She considers for a moment, then admits she doesn’t.

‘I sold it out to the Renehans nine years ago. They joined the two premises together.’

‘Yes, I remember that.’

The television tells you what the world is like, old Sister Hannah used to say, the changes that have come. If you can be bothered to pay attention, the television will tell you all you want to know.

‘Over the shop’s the same,’ he says.

‘Yes, I’m sure it is.’

Sister Hannah’s the wise one. A person’s life isn’t orderly, Sister Hannah maintains; it runs about all over the place, in and out through time. The present’s hardly there; the future doesn’t exist. Only love matters in the bits and pieces of a person’s life.