Two Lives

28

Waking in the middle of one night, Elmer found himself thinking about Bridget asleep in Hogan’s Hotel – just as, when a boy, he’d imagined Mrs Fahy and the housekeeper at the school in Wexford asleep. The hotel manageress’s clothes were on a chair in her bedroom, her stockings draped over the top of them. Although Elmer had never said so to his sisters, or in any way intimated it to his wife, he’d been relieved when Mary Louise decided she wanted to sleep in the attic. There was more room in the bed; you could pull the bed-clothes round you when it was cold and not have to leave an area of them for someone else. All in all, he liked it better.

Elmer, when he was a boy also, had often heard about the wife of Hanlon the solicitor, who suffered from a fear of going out. It was necessary for a priest to come to the house to give her Mass, and for a hairdresser to come also. The nun who ran the library at the convent brought books to the house twice a week. ‘The unfortunate woman can’t so much as set foot in her garden,’ Elmer recalled his father saying in the dining-room. ‘Seemingly she’ll spend an hour at the bottom of the stairs, unable to approach the front door. You’d be sorry for poor Hanlon.’

Passing the Hanlons’ house, Elmer had often seen the solicitor’s wife sitting in the bow window of a downstairs room, looking at the robins in the flowerbeds. A scrawn of a woman, his father had described her as, and from what he could see this was correct. She had developed the affliction soon after her marriage, and Elmer wondered if Mary Louise wasn’t suffering from something similar, not that Mary Louise had a fear of going out, far from it.

‘No doctor could treat a condition like that,’ his father had pronounced in the dining-room. ‘A nervous complaint, I’d call it.’ Mr Quarry, as square and bulkily-made as Elmer himself, liked to address his family on such topics of interest in the dining-room. Half your education, he used to say, you received in the home. Elmer knew his father would have designated Mary Louise as one suffering from a nervous complaint also, and he resolved to have the expression ready should he again be approached on the subject by her parents or by the snooty sister. He had been struck by the same misfortune as the solicitor. He had married in good faith, giving a penniless girl a home. You could have Dr Cormican coming and going every day of the week for all the good it would do. A medical man had never once entered the Hanlons’ house, he recalled his father reporting in the dining-room. Money down the drain it would have been.

The despondency Elmer had experienced during the week of the seaside honeymoon, and its continuance after he and Mary Louise returned, had finally lost its bitter pain. It could be muddled away, he had discovered, and though occasionally it distressfully returned, all he had to do was to open the safe in the accounting office and reach behind the strong-box.

‘My God, what’s this?’ Matilda screamed one evening in the dining-room, the first of the three of them to place a forkful of rissole in her mouth. She spat it out immediately. It tasted dreadful, she screamed.

Rose, who had made the rissoles, bridled. There was nothing wrong with them, she maintained. They’d had them yesterday at dinnertime: what they were eating now were those that were left over, heated up. She tasted what was already on her own fork, then spat it out too.

‘They’ve gone bad,’ Matilda said.

‘How could they have gone bad? Weather like this, how could they?’

Elmer pushed his plate away. If the rissoles were bad he had no intention of being foolhardy. Sometimes meat which Rose re-cooked for the second or third time didn’t taste of anything at all.

‘They were perfect yesterday,’ Rose repeated.

Elmer said he would spread cheese on his bread if there was cheese available.

‘Was the sirloin all right when it came in?’ Matilda inquired, and Rose snappishly replied that of course it was. The same sirloin, with an undercut, arrived from the butcher every Friday, was roasted on Sunday, eaten cold on Monday, chopped up for rissoles on Tuesday. What remained of the rissoles appeared on the table again every Wednesday evening. All their lives this had been so; all their lives the Quarrys had consumed the Wednesday-evening rissoles without mishap.

‘Are there maggots in them?’ Matilda pressed apart the mush of potato and meat with her fork. ‘I think something moved in my mouth.’

Rose told her to have sense. There were no maggots in the rissoles. They had been made as they always were, the meat and potato bound together with half a cup of milk, a beaten egg yolk fixing the breadcrumbs around each one of them.

The sisters continued to examine the food on their plates, poking with their forks and peering at the chopped meat and the crisp covering of egg and breadcrumbs. Gingerly, Rose lifted a fragment of this crispness to her lips. It tasted all right, she said.

Since neither sister had heeded Elmer’s request for cheese, he rose and crossed to the sideboard. In the big centre drawer he found a round packet of Galtee spreadable triangles. He returned to the table with two of them and eased away the silver-paper wrapping.

‘Look at this green stuff.’ Matilda’s voice had risen again. ‘For God’s sake, what’s this stuff, Rose?’

She held her plate out. Rose investigated her own rissole further, then cut in half the two on Elmer’s plate. A virulent shade of green tinged the centre of each.

‘Food mildew,’ Matilda said. ‘How long did you keep the potatoes?’

Rose didn’t answer. She’d never heard the expression ‘food mildew’ before and guessed that Matilda had made it up. If the rissoles had gone bad it wasn’t her fault. She cut a slice of bread in half and buttered it. Two rissoles had been kept back in the kitchen by Her Ladyship, as two always were on a Wednesday evening. Rose wondered if she’d eaten them. It would be like her not to notice the taste or the colour they’d gone.

‘You can get poisoned from food mildew,’ Matilda said.

Afterwards, in Hogan’s, those words echoed unpleasantly as Elmer listened to Gerry telling him about a victory achieved by a greyhound that was said to be the fastest animal since Master McGrath. In his mind’s eye he saw again the halved rissoles on the plate in the dining-room. ‘I sold her Rodenkil,’ Renehan’s voice echoed also.

If there were rats in the attics you’d know about it, not a shadow of doubt. She was all over the place due to the nervous complaint. She’d maybe put some of the Rodenkil into a cup and left it around by mistake. It wouldn’t be difficult for Rose, if she was rushed or the light was bad, to get the cup muddled up with another one. Elmer pushed his glass across the bar. There’d be the mother and father of a commotion if he so much as opened his mouth.

‘It’s the way he has of crouching in the trap,’ Gerry said. ‘Off like a bomb he is.’

There was another woman Elmer remembered his father talking about in the dining-room, some woman whose name he couldn’t remember, who lived out in the hills somewhere. She used to hoard fire-lighters. For no rational purpose she had the house filled to the brim with wax fire-lighters. If you’d put a match to the place, his father used to say, it wouldn’t last longer than a minute.

That night Elmer didn’t linger in the hall of the hotel, but hurried back after he’d had one more drink. He waited until he heard his sisters ascending the stairs to their rooms and then made his way to the kitchen. He searched in the cupboards, and then in the adjoining scullery, in the safe and the refrigerator. He lifted plates off bowls and jars, he examined packets and unlabelled paper-bags. In the waste-bin he found the contaminated rissoles, but nowhere was there a supply of the green substance, carelessly left about.

Moving cautiously so as not to rouse his sisters, Elmer descended the stairs again, entered the shop and mounted the brief stairway to the accounting office. He opened the safe and poured himself a measure of whiskey. He sat for a while, then as cautiously as before made his way through the house to the attics.

Mary Louise, not yet asleep, heard a fumbling at the door. The handle was turned. ‘Mary Louise,’ her husband’s voice whispered.

The noise interrupted a pleasant recollection. A boy in a striped smock was standing in the snow, the landlady and her daughter were huddled on the doorstep. It was the moment of parting: a sleigh stood waiting.

‘Mary Louise,’ the whisper repeated. ‘Mary Louise, are you awake?’

Knuckles rapped the panels of the door, not noisily as they had the last time Elmer had come to the attic, but surreptitiously, as though some secret existed between them.

Mary Louise didn’t move from her chair by the embers of the fire. Eventually she heard him creeping away. The recollection that had possessed her would not return, try as she would to induce it. This was usually so when there was an interruption, when other people poked themselves in. She remained by the fire for another twenty minutes, but all there was to think about was going to school with Letty and James, and spreading their schoolbooks out on the kitchen table, and the recitation of poetry that had been set.

‘Listen,’ Elmer said, drawing Renehan aside in the ironmongery. ‘Don’t sell Mary Louise any more Rodenkil.’ His wife had become a bit forgetful he said: she had a way of leaving things about. He’d be worried in case someone would pick up the Rodenkil and maybe omit to read the warning on the packet.

‘I know what you mean,’ Renehan said. He’d been attaching price tags to saucepans when Elmer asked if he could have a private word with him. He still held a saucepan in his hand.

‘Good man yourself,’ Elmer said.

That evening it was said in the town that Elmer Quarry’s wife had tried to poison herself.

Having had a night to mull over the mystery of the rissoles, Rose and Matilda reached the same conclusion: the rissoles had been interfered with. If rissoles had been cooked in the house in precisely the same manner for more than a lifetime and nothing had ever gone bad in them before, why should something go bad in them now? In the night they had both recalled an episode in the past, during the time when the Quarrys still employed a maid. Kitty this one had been called, ‘a lump of a girl’ their mother referred to her as, who was once caught licking the sugar in the sugar-bowl when she was setting the table. Any sweets that were left about she helped herself to, until Mrs Quarry decided to put a stop to that by coating a few toffees with soap. Not a word was said, but a sweet was never taken again.

‘Her Ladyship,’ Rose said. ‘What’s she to do all day except think up devilment to annoy us?’

This view confirmed the thought that had occurred to Matilda also: that Mary Louise, with time on her hands, sought to irritate her husband and her sisters-in-law by introducing some unpleasant-tasting substance into their food. In Matilda’s view, and in Rose’s, there was other evidence of the desire to vex: tea-towels hung sopping wet in the scullery when they should be hung on the line over the stove, forks put back in the wrong section of the cutlery drawer, the blue milk-jug put on a shelf instead of hung up, the potato-masher not hung up either, coal and sticks carted up to the attic, footsteps above their heads, ages spent washing herself, the sight of her trailing round the town on a bicycle so that people would begin to talk.

‘She fried an egg for herself,’ Rose remembered. ‘She knew not to touch the rissoles.’

They put these conclusions to their brother, leaving the shop unattended, which before Mary Louise’s arrival in the household they would have never done. Definitely something had been introduced into the rissoles, Rose said. Maybe some kind of cascara, anything that would cause embarrassment and distress. Matilda reminded Elmer of the maid who’d helped herself to the sweets: measures had had to be taken and where was the difference in this case? The maid was guilty of stealing and had to be stopped. Measures should be taken now.

‘Beyond a shadow of a doubt,’ Rose said.

‘The rissoles were in a soup-plate in the fridge, Elmer, covered over with another plate. She cut them open and put something inside.’

They watched his face. His jaw slackened; the tip of his tongue moistened his lips, passing slowly from one corner of his mouth to the other. He had taken off his jacket, as he sometimes did in the accounting office. The waistcoat beneath was fully buttoned, a pencil and a ballpoint pen clipped into one of the upper pockets.

‘There’s people that live and breathe only wanting to be a nuisance,’ Rose said.

The tea-towels were mentioned, and the forks in the cutlery drawer, the potato-masher and the blue milk-jug. Elmer unsuccessfully attempted to interrupt. They couldn’t hold their heads up, Matilda said. They couldn’t walk into a shop in the town without a silence falling.

‘I’ll speak to Mary Louise,’ Elmer promised.

‘What good does it do?’ Matilda’s tone was dangerously sarcastic. ‘If you’ve spoken to her once, haven’t you spoken to her a thousand times?’

Elmer’s shirt felt sticky on his back. He’d begun to sweat as soon as they’d started on about something being deliberately introduced into their food. He’d raised a hand to wipe away the beads of perspiration he could feel gathering on his forehead, hoping they wouldn’t notice what he was doing. He could feel the sweat, damply warm, on his legs and in his armpits. He had changed the combination of the safe after the incident concerning the money. He hadn’t told them that, in case they’d ask what the new sequence of numbers was. He kept the Jameson bottle on its side so that it couldn’t easily be seen behind the strong-box, but even so it was better that no one should have access to the safe. If ever the Jameson was mentioned again he had it ready to say that the bottle had been in the safe since their father’s day, kept there in case anyone fainted in the shop.

‘Will I get her to come down here?’ Rose offered. ‘Will I go up and tell her you want her?’

Elmer began to undo the buttons of his waistcoat. He stopped because he could feel his fingers trembling and knew they’d notice. If nerve trouble had caused a solicitor’s wife to be frightened of approaching her front door it wasn’t outside the bounds of possibility that a person could imagine a plate of rissoles would be attacked by rats that didn’t exist. But how on earth could he even begin to explain that to them?

‘Leave her in peace,’ he said.

‘In peace!’ Rose’s eyes widened. ‘In peace!’

‘There’s been no peace in this house, Elmer, since the night you took that girl to the pictures.’

‘Will I tell her you want her?’ Rose pressed her offer again.

‘I’ll go up myself,’ Elmer said.

But there was no response when he rattled the handle of the attic door, when he rapped loudly and banged with his fist. It wasn’t normal not to answer, there was no getting away from that. But then he looked in the yard and discovered that her bicycle wasn’t there. In the shop he imparted that information to his sisters. If they heard her returning, he asked them to tell him.

The gondola was silent on the water, the stone of the buildings dank and slimily green. Later there was the ebb and flow of the dull blue sea, the shells and seaweed left on the sand when it receded. You looked back and saw the fat domes of the churches, the statues high in the sky…

She dipped about the pages, opening the books at random. She loved doing that. She watched while Yelena Nikolayevna, sleepless all night, kept clasping her knees with her hands and resting her head on them. She watched while Yelena Nikolayevna crossed to the window and held her aching forehead against the panes to cool it.

‘… The rain that began as a spatter became a sheet of water, glistening as it fell from a sky as black as night. Yelena Nikolayevna sheltered in a ruined chapel. A beggarwoman waited…’

Among the gravestones she tidied her hair and smeared a little lipstick on to her lips, smiling at her reflection in the glass of her compact.

At Culleen the watch wasn’t missed for some time. Drawers were searched, furniture was pulled out in case it had fallen down behind something. The general belief was that it would eventually turn up.

In fact it didn’t, and one afternoon when Mrs Dallon was washing eggs at the sink she remembered the feeling of surprise when Mary Louise had said she’d like to see her old room again. The statements that had been made by Rose and Matilda returned to startle her and suddenly, an egg held in the palm of her hand, Mrs Dallon felt sick. Waves of nausea passed through her stomach. She felt weak in her legs and for a moment as she stood there she thought she might faint.

‘I’ve come to see Mary Louise,’ she announced in Quarry’s an hour later.

Rose’s response was to glance along the counter to where Matilda was re-rolling a bolt of satin.

‘I rang the bell on the front door,’ Mrs Dallon said. ‘Only there wasn’t an answer.’

‘Your daughter could be out on her bicycle, Mrs Dallon. Then again I doubt your daughter can hear the doorbell up in the attic’

Through the panes of the accounting-office window Mrs Dallon could see the square head of her son-in-law bent over the desk where he did his work. By now she knew the way through the shop into the house.

‘I’ll go up and see if she’s in,’ she said.

Neither Rose nor Matilda tried to stop her. Let her see for herself, both simultaneously thought. Let her climb up the stairs and not be answered when she knocks on the door.

But Mrs Dallon was answered. As soon as she spoke, the key turned in the lock and the door was opened. Mary Louise was tidily dressed, in a navy-blue skirt and blouse, with a brooch that Mrs Dallon had once given her at her throat.

‘Hullo, Mary Louise.’

‘We’ll go downstairs.’

The key was taken from the lock, and the door locked on the outside. In the front room Mary Louise asked her mother if she’d like a cup of tea.

‘No, no, pet. Nothing at all.’

‘Are you well at Culleen?’

‘We are, Mary Louise. We’re all well.’

‘That’s good so.’

Mrs Dallon hesitated. She felt uncomfortable, sitting on the edge of a tightly-stuffed armchair; and was made more so by Mary Louise’s unruffled manner, her air of being calmly in command of herself.

‘That day you came out to Culleen, Mary Louise? A while ago?’

Mary Louise nodded.

‘You went up to your aunt’s room.’

Mary Louise frowned. She shook her head. Then the frown cleared as swiftly as it had come. She made a gesture with her hands, indicating that she couldn’t remember going into her aunt’s room. It hardly mattered, the gesture implied also.

‘It’s only we’ve been hunting high and low for a watch she had there. A watch that used to be Robert’s.’

Mary Louise nodded sympathetically.

‘You didn’t see it that day, pet? A watch on a chain?’

‘He’d have wanted me to have it. If he’d known he was going to die he’d have given it to me.’

The same sickness she had experienced while washing the eggs again afflicted Mrs Dallon. A prickly discomfort affected areas of her body. She was glad she was sitting down.

‘Did you take the watch, pet?’

Mary Louise said she’d looked for the watch and eventually had opened a drawer in the bedside table and there it was.

‘That watch isn’t yours, Mary Louise. It belongs to Aunt Emmeline.’

‘Actually it belonged to Robert’s father. It was the only thing of value he left behind. You can hardly count the soldiers.’

Since neither Mrs Dallon nor her sister had attended the auction they were unaware of the purchases Mary Louise had made. When her mother now displayed bewilderment over her reference to soldiers Mary Louise explained immediately. She had bought the soldiers, she said, and the furniture from her cousin’s bedroom. She didn’t mention buying the clothes from the unemployed man’s wife because for the moment that didn’t seem relevant.

‘Oh, Mary Louise! Oh, my dear child!’

Unsteadily, Mrs Dallon rose and crossed to where Mary Louise was standing, between the windows. She put her arms around her daughter. She stroked her hair. She had to blink back tears, and was surprised to find – having stepped back a few paces and blown her nose – that Mary Louise herself was still quite composed, was in fact smiling, as though amused.

‘You’re not well, child.’

Mary Louise denied that. She repeated that her cousin would have given her the watch had he known he was going to die that night. They’d often spoken about his father. They’d often wondered what exactly his father had been like.

‘Oh, Mary Louise!’

Mrs Dallon sat down again. I am never going to leave this room, she thought. I cannot leave her. I cannot walk away. The prickles of discomfort had gone from her shoulders. She no longer felt sick in her stomach, but all over her body she was aware of a coldness, like ice in her bloodstream.

‘They’re funny names,’ Mary Louise said. ‘Funny names for Letty to choose. Kevin Aloysius.’

‘We weren’t talking about that, dear.’

‘Well, there you are.’

Afterwards Mrs Dallon repeated to her sister and her husband every statement Mary Louise had made. She recalled the inflections in her speech, her smiles, the way she had remained standing between the two windows of the big front room, the way she had not appeared to notice the disjointed wildness of the conversation. The bad news was not shared with James, since it was considered that at present no one was capable of breaking it to him as gently as his youth deserved. That night neither of the Dallons slept. They lay in silence in their bedroom, the room in which all other family worries had been discussed over the years. Mrs Dallon could still hear the sound of traffic in the street below while her daughter went on so, saying she was all right and commenting on the names chosen for Letty’s baby.

‘I’m worried, Mrs Dallon,’ Elmer said, arriving at Culleen in Kilkelly’s car during the afternoon of the next day. ‘A terrible thing’s after happening.’

He meant the poisoning of the rissoles; and the Dallons, who had imagined that nothing worse could occur than the filching of the watch, realized within a minute that they were wrong. In order to avoid worrying them further, Letty had passed on nothing of the accusation that a safe had been broken into. They heard about this now. They heard about the furniture arriving in the house.

‘They can exaggerate,’ Elmer conceded. ‘Rose and Matilda can. They can be extravagant in what they say. So that at first you wouldn’t believe them, but then you’d have to.’

A nightmare of understanding formed in the kitchen. Isolated fragments connected, like jigsaw pieces transformed into a picture.

‘For God’s sake, what caused it?’ Mr Dallon muttered.

The question was too complicated for Elmer to answer. He wanted to say that he had married Mary Louise in good faith, that he was the last person who’d go about making inquiries about a prospective wife. Instead, he said nothing.

‘But why,’ Mrs Dallon whispered, ‘why would she do that with the rat poison?’

‘Any more, why would she buy furniture when the house is full of it, Mrs Dallon? You have to ask that, too.’

The watch was not mentioned. The feeling was that the watch was a Dallon matter, that knowledge of it was not yet a son-in-law’s concern.

‘My sisters don’t know about what I told you,’ Elmer said. ‘They know about the money but not the other. I don’t think they’d stop in the house if they knew.’

‘We had a word with Dr Cormican after your sisters came out here a while back,’ Mr Dallon said.

‘I heard they came out here.’

‘They came out and told us things.’

Elmer softly sighed. He said:

‘There’ll be steps I’ll have to take.’

‘What steps?’ Mrs Dallon cried, suddenly shrill.

‘They guessed it was Mary Louise who interfered with the rissoles. Only they don’t know what she put in them. It isn’t safe in the house the way things are.’

‘What steps will you take?’ Mrs Dallon repeated, calming a little.

Elmer didn’t reply. ‘What did Dr Cormican say when you saw him, Mrs Dallon?’

‘He said if Mary Louise was sick he’d be sent for.’

‘That’s what I’ll do then.’

When Kilkelly’s car reached the outskirts of the town Elmer asked the driver to stop. He paid him off and entered the first public house he came to, a place he’d never been in before. It was dingy and cheerless, empty except for himself, but it suited his mood. He didn’t want to have to talk to anyone, nor be addressed by name.

At Culleen, when James came into the kitchen after his day’s work, he found his father and mother and his Aunt Emmeline sitting around the kitchen table. It surprised him that they should all be there at this particular time of day, not busy with their usual tasks. They were conversing very quietly when he entered the kitchen, their voices hardly raised above a whisper. They ceased immediately.

‘What’s up?’ James asked, turning on both taps at the sink and working soap into his hands under the running water.

‘Mary Louise isn’t well, James,’ his father said.

‘Has she the ‘flu?’

‘Mary Louise has been doing funny things, boy. We’re worried for her.’

‘What kind of funny things?’ James turned from the sink, the taps still running behind him, his hands dripping water on to the flagged floor. It was then that he saw his mother had been crying. His Aunt Emmeline looked as if she might have been crying also. His father’s mouth was pulled down at the corners.

‘What kind of funny things?’

They told him then, first asking him to sit down. That evening Mr Dallon drove over to tell Letty.

Alone in her bungalow, Miss Mullover found herself recalling Mary Louise’s childhood fascination with Joan of Arc. Had she been wrong, she wondered now, not to find more significance in it than she had? When Mary Louise had confessed at her sister’s wedding party that she and her cousin had been in love at the time of his death Miss Mullover had wondered if the confession, so abruptly offered to her, somehow belonged in that same realm of the imagination. More than once she had wondered so since, ending always with bewilderment. What she felt certain of was that the marriage of convenience that had taken place between a young girl and a draper could now be spoken of in the same breath as certain other marriages in the town – that of the couple who communicated through their pet, that of the wife who’d danced secretly in the Dixie dancehall, of the bread deliverer who’d run away with a tinker girl by mistake. Marriages collapsed for all sorts of reasons, but presumably you never really knew why unless you were involved in one. Not that it mattered if other people knew or not, Miss Mullover supposed, but still could not prevent herself from wondering about the future of Elmer Quarry and Mary Louise.

‘That’s a terrible thing to do, Mary Louise.’

‘Terrible?’

‘You poisoned the food with rat poison,’ Elmer said.

She smiled. I must not be mischievous she had written a hundred times after the episode of the worms in Possy Luke’s desk. Downstrokes heavy, perfect loops, otherwise it would all have to be done again. Tessa Enright hadn’t owned up.

‘You could have killed us stone dead,’ he said.

‘Yes.’

He had made up his mind: she could tell from the look in his eyes. Everything was there in his eyes, even – for a moment – something like distress.

‘Yes,’ she said again. ‘Yes.’ She thought of asking him if they’d let her bring her things with her, but she didn’t. She was sure they would; the watch and the clothes at least, the books and the collar-stud.