Two Lives

25

She walks about the town. After thirty-one years she is a stranger and the town has changed, as her husband warned her. There is more of a bustle to it, more vehicles about, people hurry more. The goods in the shop windows look more interesting, French cheese and wines you’d never see in the old days, new kinds of sweets. The bill-posters are different, the old Electric’s gone.

Glances, sometimes a stare, are cast in her direction. No one knows her well enough to address her; a few remember; hearsay attaches her to the town. She doesn’t mind, one way or the other, and concerns herself instead with the place she has left behind. The last of the cars would have arrived by now; those permitted to go would have gone. It was said that the obstreperous were to be moved to a house near Mullingar. She wonders about that: if the remaining inmates have been taken away, if all chatter and arguing have ceased, if the hammering and whistling of workmen have begun. Soon, people who do not suffer from dementia paralytica or morbid impulses or melancholia will sleep in the rooms, men who have spent the day shooting or fishing, women dreaming beside them in chiffon nightdresses. Motor-cars will take up their positions on the smooth tarmac of the car park, a different one from time to time parked on top of his flowerbed.

That’s why she has come back: she nods to herself in Father Mathew Street, reminding herself of her reason. That’s why she didn’t make a fuss or run the risk of being taken to Mullingar with the obstreperous: tomorrow she’ll walk out to the graveyard.

‘It wasn’t because I went there,’ she told them – Sister Hannah and Mrs Leavy, Belle D and all the others. ‘It wasn’t because I went there that I had to leave the town. There was another reason, a worse reason by a long way.’