Two Lives

4

The wedding took place on Saturday, 10 September 1955. It was a quiet occasion, but even so Mary Louise had a traditional wedding-dress, and Letty a bridesmaid’s dress in matching style. There was a celebration afterwards in the farmhouse. Everyone sat down in the dining-room, a room otherwise rarely used. Mrs Dallon had roasted three chickens, and there was spiced beef as well as bacon to go with them. Before the meal the health of the bride and groom was drunk in sherry or whiskey. The Reverend Harrington, who had conducted the ceremony, allowed himself a further homily.

Miss Mullover, now nearly seventy, small and slight, affected by arthritis, had a special place at the gathering as the one-time mentor of both bride and groom. She’d been surprised when she heard of Mary Louise’s engagement to the draper, but only because of the difference of generation: nothing else about the present alliance caused her undue apprehension. Other girls had passed through her schoolroom, eventually to marry older men. Marie Yates, not yet thirty at the time of her marriage to Canon Moore at almost eighty, came most swiftly to mind: in all her life Miss Mullover had never witnessed such weeping as Marie’s at the funeral of the old clergyman.

But this sanguine view was not unanimously to be found among the wedding guests. The continuing displeasure of Matilda and Rose was matched by Letty’s, which took the form of a coldly distant manner and the firm rejection of any notion that the occasion was a festive one. When, in March, Mary Louise revealed that Elmer had proposed and that she had accepted him, Letty hadn’t spoken to her for three weeks and when the silence was finally broken Letty was so changed that Mary Louise wondered if she would ever again know the old relationship she’d had with her sister.

‘I’m the lucky man,’ Elmer declared in a speech. ‘There’s no one for ten miles around wouldn’t agree on that.’

That was enough, he considered, so he did not say any more. Last night Rose had actually dropped to her knees, tears streaming, begging him to reconsider at this eleventh hour. Matilda, grim-faced on the first-floor landing, had announced that he would regret this folly for the rest of his days. Mary Louise Dallon hadn’t a brain in her head. She was marrying him for his money, since it was a known fact that the Dallons hadn’t two coins in the house to rub together. There was flightiness in her eyes. She would lead him a dance, if not in one way then in another. She would drain him dry in ways he couldn’t even imagine. She would upset him, and disturb him. His sisters didn’t go to bed until half-past two, and even after he’d lain down, exhausted, Elmer could still hear their ranting, and Rose’s weeping.

In a final passion of energy, the night before also, Letty had sought to dissuade her sister. In the warm darkness of the bedroom they shared Mary Louise listened to the persistent murmur, edged with bitterness one moment and scorn the next. A picture was painted of her future in the house above the shop, the two sisters critical of every move she made, the man she was to marry never taking her side. She’d be no more than a maid in the household and a counter girl in the shop. There would be smells and intimacies no girl would care for in the bedroom she’d have to share with the heavily-made draper; her reluctance to meet his demands would be overruled. The three Quarrys would beadily eye her at mealtimes. Dried-up spinsters were always the worst.

But by midday on 10 September the pair were joined together. The best man was one of Elmer’s cousins from Athy, imported into the parish for the occasion, a man Mary Louise had never seen before. The Reverend Harrington – cherub-cheeked and rotund, not long married himself – had asked the necessary questions slowly and with care, his lingering tone designed to imbue the union with an extra degree of sanctity, or so it seemed. In the vestry while the register was signed Mr and Mrs Dallon stood awkwardly, and Rose and Matilda and Letty stood grimly. Sensing unease, the Reverend Harrington chatted about other weddings he had conducted and then recalled the details of his own.

‘Phew!’ Mary Louise’s brother whispered to one of his Eddery cousins in the dining-room of the farmhouse. The exhalation was a reference, not to the nuptials of his sister, but to the agreeable effect of a second glass of whiskey. James could feel it spreading through his chest, a burning sensation that was new to him.

‘I had two bob on a horse today,’ the older Eddery brother revealed. ‘Polly’s Sweetheart.’

James, who spent all he earned in Kilmartin’s the turf accountant’s, was impressed. He hadn’t gone for anything today, he said. He’d heard about Polly’s Sweetheart.

Letty changed out of her bridesmaid’s dress in order to help her mother in the kitchen. The chickens had roasted during the wedding service, the bacon and the spiced beef were cold, cooked the day before. Mrs Dallon’s cheeks were flushed from the small glass of sherry she’d drunk and from the heat of the range. She strained potatoes and peas. Letty tipped them into warmed dishes and carried the dishes into the dining-room. Mr Dallon began to carve the meats while the guests were seating themselves.

‘A great spread,’ Elmer remarked. He was wearing a carnation in the lapel of a muddy-brown suit, his Sunday suit he called it, much less worn than his usual clothing. His short hair had been cut the day before, and the barber’s application of brilliantine still kept it tidily in place. The back of his neck was a little red.

‘Lovely,’ a woman said. ‘Lovely it all is, Mrs Dallon.’

Mrs Dallon, hurrying with two gravy boats, was too occupied to reply. She whispered to her husband and he paused in his carving to say:

‘I’m told to say, start eating. Don’t let the hot stuff get cold.’

Miss Mullover confided to the clergyman’s wife that she loved a past pupil’s wedding. It was surprising the emotions you felt. Mrs Harrington – who knew that at one stage her husband had had heart-searchings about this match – was relieved that Miss Mullover seemed pleased. He would have liked to say Grace, she thought, but unfortunately he’d had a call of nature.

James and the Eddery brothers poured more whiskey, finding the bottle behind a potted fern on a windowsill. The Eddery brothers were smoking cigarettes. They told Mrs Dallon they wanted to finish them before they sat down. They were in no hurry for the chicken and bacon, they said.

Letty, given the task of moving the vegetables about on the table in case anyone was missed out, thought about Gargan the exchange clerk at the Bank of Ireland who’d been promoted to Carlow. They’d gone out together for two years, to the pictures and on bicycle rides, twice to the Chamber of Commerce dance in Hogan’s Hotel. When Gargan had gone to Carlow and enough time had passed to indicate that he wouldn’t be coming back to see her, Billie Lyndon of the radio shop had suggested an evening at the Dixie dancehall and she’d gone there once with him, but had found it rough. It might have been herself and either of them, she thought as she moved the vegetables about. In this moment she might be sitting at the far end of the table, Mrs Gargan or Mrs Lyndon. They’d both mentioned marriage, not exactly proposals but the next best thing, sounding the notion out. In the Electric they had acted similarly: putting an arm along the back of her seat halfway through the big film and then, after another few minutes, grasping her shoulder. With each of them, she’d felt a knee pressing hers. Their fingers had caressed the side of her face. On the way home there’d been the good-night kiss.

‘You were lovely in that dress, Letty,’ Angela Eddery, still a schoolgirl, complimented while she spooned peas on to her plate. ‘Dead spit of Audrey Hepburn.’

Letty knew that wasn’t true. Either Angela Eddery was confusing Audrey Hepburn with someone else or was simply telling a lie. She looked nothing like Audrey Hepburn; she was a different type altogether.

‘Did you make them yourselves?’ Angela Eddery went on. ‘God, I never saw dresses like them.’

‘We made our dresses.’

When she offered the best man one of the potato dishes he said they were in the same line of business today, bridesmaid and best man. Mary Louise had said he was a bachelor, manager of a creamery near Athy. Letty considered he was familiar with her, calling her Letty straight off and talking the way he did. He was taller than Elmer Quarry, but just as paunchy, and balder.

Rose and Matilda, sitting together, didn’t eat much. ‘Oh, I could never manage all that,’ Rose said as soon as she received her plate, staring at its contents as if making a judgement. The chickens would have cost them nothing, Matilda reflected, running about the yard they’d have been.

The Reverend Harrington spoke to Mr Dallon and again Mr Dallon laid down his carving knife and fork. He said that the clergyman had wanted to say Grace but had been out of the room at the right moment. If nobody objected, he’d say it now, even though some people had started. That didn’t matter at all, the Reverend Harrington added hastily. For what we’re about to receive,’ he added also, ‘the Lord make us truly thankful.’

Mary Louise felt sleepy due to Letty’s keeping her awake half the night with her haranguing. She had taken the plunge, she said to herself; she had made her own mind up and had done it; it was her own business, what she had done, it was her own life. She smiled at Miss Mullover, who was leaning across the table to speak to her.

‘D’you remember,’ the schoolteacher asked her, ‘how you used to want to work in Dodd’s Medical Hall?’

Mary Louise did. She’d wanted to serve in the chemist’s because it was the nicest shop in the town. It had the nicest smell, and everything was clean. To serve there you had to wear a white coat. Everyone knew it was special.

‘It’ll be Quarry’s now,’ Miss Mullover went on, and Mary Louise wondered if the old schoolteacher was ga-ga, since it was apparent to everyone present that she had just married into the drapery. The truth was that the counters of Quarry’s had always been her second choice. She’d clearly never said so to Miss Mullover or there’d have been a reference to it, but she’d said so at home. When she’d finished at school, a shop was the best that could be done for her; her father had said that, and she hadn’t minded, thinking of Dodd’s or Quarry’s or even Foley’s grocery and confectionery, two doors down from the drapery in Bridge Street. Word of her availability was put around the town on the next fair day, but it seemed that no assistance was required. Foley’s was reserved for the Foley girls, Renehan the hardware merchant only had men behind the counters and didn’t have to go outside the family either, with three sons. No daughter of his would go into a public house, Mr Dallon laid down, but that possibility did not arise either. For five years Mary Louise had remained at home, helping generally, waiting for a vacancy. That was what she had to weigh in her mind when Elmer Quarry displayed his interest – the long, slow days at Culleen, the kitchen, the yard, the fowl houses, for weeks on end not seeing anyone outside the family except at church or at the egg-packing station. All that was what Letty appeared to have forgotten.

‘Algebra was Elmer’s stumbling block. He could never get the hang of brackets.’ Miss Mullover nodded repeatedly over her food, lending emphasis to the recollection. ‘Twiddly brackets, square brackets, round brackets. He could never get the order right.’

‘Fat lot of use they were.’ Elmer laughed loudly, taking Mary Louise by surprise and causing her to jump. She tried to think if she’d ever heard him laugh before, and she remembered her brother saying he never did. His small teeth were all on display at once. The fat of his face was bunched up into little bags.

‘Algebra poor,’ Miss Mullover recalled. ‘Arithmetic good. I remember writing that. Nineteen thirty-one or thereabouts.’

Mary Louise imagined her husband at that distant time, a podgy boy, she imagined, with podgy knees. He’d have had long trousers at the boarding-school in Wexford.

‘I saw a lot in the schoolroom,’ Miss Mullover reminded Mr Dallon as he sat down at last, the carving complete.

‘You did a great job in the schoolroom, Miss Mullover.’

Mr Dallon reached for salt and pepper. He remembered Mary Louise’s birth, how he’d been worried because she was late arriving but hadn’t said anything because that would only have made matters worse. Had she been a boy the names they had ready were William or possibly Nevil. She was called Louise after his mother; he couldn’t remember how it was that they began to use both her names. He seemed to recall saying himself that the two names had a ring to them.

‘Full of fun she was,’ Miss Mullover was remembering now – meaning, he supposed, that Mary Louise’s liveliness as a child had occasionally landed her in trouble. She’d thrown a stone once in the school yard and had been kept in; she and Tessa Enright had put worms in Possy Luke’s desk and let down the tyres of bicycles. Occasional bolsterousness, Miss Mullover had written on a report.

He supposed she was his favourite, although he didn’t like having to admit, even to himself, that favourites came into it. But Mary Louise, born when they’d thought the family was complete, had acquired – possibly for no more reason than that – a special place in his heart. Solemn-eyed, she had listened when he reprimanded her for her misdemeanours at school. At hay-making or harvesting she had a way of staying close to him, telling him about the ailments that had befallen a little mechanical chicken. When you wound it up it pecked the ground. ‘Pecker’ she called it.

‘You’re happy for her, Mr Dallon?’ Miss Mullover murmured.

He nodded. When she was older she’d wanted to be in the town, or any town. She began to go out with Elmer Quarry and this was how it had ended. It was a marriage of convenience: she knew that and he knew that and Elmer Quarry knew it. They were aware of it and they accepted it. ‘You’re certain, Mary Louise?’ he’d pressed her, and not for a second had she hesitated with her reassurance. She had an innocent way with her: that had always been her over-riding quality. Innocent of the consequences, she had committed her small, childhood sins; innocently, she had always chattered on. You could silence her in an instant; you could snatch away her confidence, and feel guilty as soon as you did so. ‘You won’t tire of it?’ he’d pressed her further. ‘The town and all that?’ Again there was the eager reassurance, leaving unsaid between them the fear he knew she suffered: of being obliged to remain in the farmhouse for ever, with half a life to live. The pretty chemist’s shop, going to dances with some tweed-jacketed young man: that had not happened, and she had concluded that time would not hesitate long enough to allow it. Alone in their pews in the church of St Giles were the Protestant spinsters of the parish, there to be observed week after week, added to at Christmas and Easter by Elmer Quarry’s sisters and others besides.

‘He’s not a troublesome man,’ Miss Mullover softly remarked, as if detecting what was passing through Mr Dallon’s mind. ‘So often when a girl marries you can see some trouble coming.’

Elmer Quarry was decent and reliable, Mr Dallon replied, his voice kept low also. Mary Louise could do worse, he was about to add, but changed his mind because it didn’t sound quite right. But Miss Mullover nodded all the same, silently agreeing that his daughter could have done worse.

At three o’clock the car from Kilkelly’s Garage arrived. Mary Louise had changed into a pale green coat and skirt, and wore a small black hat trimmed with a drawn-up veil. The night before she had packed a suitcase.

The Eddery brothers tied an old creosote tin to the back bumper, but Kilkelly’s driver removed it. When the car drove off James pedalled after it on Mary Louise’s bicycle, and the Eddery boys shouted. Everyone else waved, Letty and Elmer’s sisters half-heartedly.

‘Did the thing go well?’ The driver was the garage’s chief mechanic; he hadn’t had time to change out of his overalls.

‘Ah, it did,’ Elmer replied. ‘Smooth as velvet.’

‘Well, that’s great.’

The car stopped at the drapery. A notice in one of the windows announced that it would re-open on Monday. Elmer went in to collect his suitcase.

‘Ye’re off for the two days?’ the driver chattily went on while Mary Louise waited, and she explained that they’d be away, in fact, for eight days in all, nine if you counted the remainder of this one. When Elmer returned they were driven on to the railway junction, which was twelve miles away. They caught the five-to-four train, changed later to a bus, proceeding on their way to the seaside resort they had chosen for their honeymoon. Neither was at ease during the journey. Neither revealed that the night before there had been family opposition to the marriage. Instead they spoke of the wedding guests, and of the occasion at the farmhouse. In the months that had passed since their first visit to the Electric Cinema they had not come to know one another intimately; Each had become familiar with certain traits in the other, promoting a degree of ease that had not been there in the past; but the curiosity of affection was not present on either side. The Electric Cinema had been visited only twice after they’d seen Lilacs in the Spring: Elmer’s courtship of Mary Louise had been conducted, for the main part, during Sunday afternoon strolls that had become customary. He would walk out from Bridge Street and she would cycle in from Culleen. They met on the town’s outskirts, the bicycle was deposited in a gateway, and they walked slowly back the way Mary Louise had ridden. At a crossroads they turned to the right and proceeded along a meandering lane, down a hill, through woods and across a humped bridge. On one of these walks Elmer proposed marriage, and Mary Louise said she’d have to think about it. She spent a month doing so, and when she eventually agreed Elmer passed his tongue over his lips, dried them with a handkerchief and announced that he was going to kiss her, which he did. They were actually on the humped bridge at the time. His voice was hoarse; there was a trace of what Mary Louise imagined to be leeks on his breath. After Gargan and Billie Lyndon, she had argued to herself during the month, there had been no one else for Letty. Had there ever been anyone for his own sisters?

Elmer had never before embraced a girl. Years ago, when he was a boarder at the school in Wexford, he had experienced desire for the stout housekeeper. He had imagined what it would be like kissing her. In dreams he had removed her clothes.

‘God, you’re great,’ he complimented Mary Louise when their lips parted, although in fact he had found the experience a little disappointing. She was blushing, he noticed on the hump-backed bridge. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, her eyes cast down.

They walked back to the town, her left arm where he had tucked it into his. He asked her what her mother would say when she heard the news. He said he’d have to speak to her father because that was a thing you had to do. While wondering how best to break it to them, he said his sisters would be delighted.

‘Will you come out to Culleen?’ Mary Louise suggested.

‘Walk out now, d’you mean?’

‘Have you a bicycle, Elmer?’

‘I never had the need of one.’

‘Could you walk out to the house next Sunday maybe? I won’t say a word till then.’

‘I’ll come out of course.’

‘I’ll only say you’re calling for me.’

They stopped on the road and embraced again. This time Mary Louise felt his teeth. One of his hands was pressed into the small of her back. She closed her eyes because she’d noticed in films that people always did. He kept his open.

On their honeymoon journey that particular Sunday was recalled by both of them. On subsequent Sundays there had been further embraces, and all the necessary plans for their wedding had been made on these afternoon walks. ‘We’re delighted,’ Mary Louise remembered her mother saying. Her father had shaken Elmer’s hand.

‘The Strand Hotel it’s called,’ Elmer told her as they stepped from the bus in the seaside town. ‘Excuse me,’ he said to a man standing outside a sweetshop, ‘where’s the Strand Hotel?’

The man said to keep going. You couldn’t miss it, he advised. When the road became sandy under your feet you were there but for another fifty yards. Four minutes at the outside it would take them.

‘Thanks, sir.’

Elmer had a way, Mary Louise had noticed some time ago, of addressing men like that. He called her father sir, and the Reverend Harrington. It was because of the shop, she supposed, something that was natural to him.

They walked on with their suitcases, past a row of small shops, past two public houses and the Catholic church. The surface became sandy beneath their feet, and then they rounded the bend where the Strand Hotel was, the two words of its title painted across a bow-windowed facade.

‘I wrote in for lodgings,’ Elmer stated in the hallway. ‘Quarry the name is.’

‘Ah, you did surely, Mr Quarry.’ A woman with a headscarf over her curling-pins greeted them. ‘Mr and Mrs Quarry,’ she added, glancing at Mary Louise, her eyes bright with a landlady’s interest. They passed swiftly from the little black hat that was still perched on the crown of Mary Louise’s head, over her pale green coat and skirt. They rested on her wedding ring. ‘Mr and Mrs Quarry,’ she repeated, as though to reassure her visitors that since the scrutiny was complete all was now in order. She led the way up a narrow staircase.

It was a boarding-house rather than an hotel. Tea was in the dining-room sharp at six, the woman said, and it being well after that now would they come down quickly? She threw open a window in their room and stood back proudly. You could hear the sea, she said. If you woke in the night you could hear it.

‘Grand,’ Elmer said, and the woman went away.

Mary Louise stood by the bed. For the first time since she’d decided to accept Elmer Quarry’s offer of marriage she experienced the weight of misgiving. Tendrils of doubt had now and again assailed her before; listening to Letty, she could hardly have escaped them. But there had never been a feeling that she had made a ludicrous, laughable mistake. Nor had she ever resolved that as soon as possible she must be released from her promise. During the month she had taken to consider the offer she had gone over the ground again and again, and, having reached a decision, she did not see much point in encouraging second thoughts. But in the bedroom of the Strand Hotel, with the lace curtains flapping on either side of the open window, Mary Louise wanted suddenly to be in the farmhouse, to be laying the places at the kitchen table or feeding the fowls with Letty. Somehow, later on, she was going to have to get her nightdress on to her and get into that bed with the bulky man whose wife she had agreed to be. Somehow she was going to have to accept the presence of his naked feet, the rest of him covered only in the brown and blue pyjamas he was lifting out of his suitcase.

‘Comfortable enough,’ he said. ‘I’d say it was comfy, dear.’

Elmer’s mother had sometimes employed that endearment, and it seemed to him to be equally appropriate between man and wife, now that they were alone in a room. It wasn’t the kind of thing Rose or Matilda would say, but then the circumstances were different. He was glad he had remembered it.

‘It’s a lovely place,’ Mary Louise said, still standing by the bed.

He agreed that it was. He’d been told about the Strand Hotel by Horton’s traveller, now with Tyson’s, who’d said it was second to none. Recalling in the train the dreams he’d had in his boyhood about the stout housekeeper at the boarding-school and later about Mrs Fahy and Mrs Bleddy, two shopkeepers’ wives in the town, he had hoped his wife would change her clothes as soon as they arrived in the hotel. She was nothing like the size of the housekeeper or either of the shopkeepers’ wives; definitely on the skinny side you’d have to call her, none of the sturdiness of her sister. The sister had come into the shop one day nearly a year ago and he’d looked down from the accounting office just as she was taking her purse out of her handbag. She wasn’t bad-looking, he had considered, and he’d thought about the matter for a while, hoping she would return to the shop so that he could observe her again, in fact attending church one Sunday for that very purpose. But the trouble with the sister, which you had to set against the sturdiness of her, was that a few years ago she’d been seen about the place with Gargan from the bank and after that with young Lyndon. These facts stimulated unease in Elmer; that she was experienced in going out with men made him feel nervous, since it meant they wouldn’t be in the same boat when it came to getting to know one another. Even so, if it hadn’t been for noticing the sister with her purse that day he’d probably never have turned his attention to Mary Louise. That was the way things happened; chance played a part.

‘Will we go down?’ he suggested.

‘All right.’

‘You don’t want to change your duds or anything?’

‘She said to be quick. I’m OK the way I am.’ Mary Louise took her hat off and placed it on the dressing-table. The fluted looking-glass in which it was reflected was cracked, a sharp black line jaggedly diagonal. There were cigarette burns on the dressing-table’s surface.

‘I’d say we’d be comfy all right,’ he repeated.

In the dining-room other people were finishing their meal, spreading jam on slices of bread. The woman in the headscarf showed the newcomers to two places at a table where three men were already seated. Families occupied other tables.

‘Wait till I get you a cup of tea,’ the woman said. ‘Is that tea still warm, Mr Mulholland?’

Mr Mulholland, a moustached man, smaller and older than Elmer Quarry, felt the metal of the teapot and said it was. The other men at the table were middle-aged also, one of them grey-haired, the other bald.

‘Thanks, sir,’ Elmer said when Mr Mulholland passed him the milk and sugar.

‘Fine day,’ the bald man said.

A plate of fried food was placed in front of Mary Louise and a similar one in front of her husband. Everything would be quiet at home, she thought. The wedding guests would have gone, all the clearing up would be complete. Her father would have changed back into his ordinary clothes, and so would James and her mother. Letty would probably be putting the food on the table.

Mr Mulholland was a traveller in various stationery lines. The grey-haired man was a bachelor, employed in the ESB, who came to the Strand Hotel for his tea every day of his life. The bald man lived in the Strand, a bachelor also.

These facts came out in dribs and drabs. Her husband, Mary Louise noticed, was very much at home with these three men, and appeared to be interested in the information they volunteered. He told them about the drapery. He was still wearing the carnation in his buttonhole, so they knew about the wedding even before he mentioned it.

‘Well, I thought it was the case,’ Mr Mulholland said. ‘As soon as the pair of you walked into the room I said to myself that’s a honeymoon.’

Mary Louise felt herself turning pink. The men were examining her, and she could guess what they were thinking. You could see it in their eyes that they were noticing she was a lot younger than Elmer, the same thought that had been in the eyes of the guard of the train and in the landlady’s eyes.

‘Would it be an occasion for a drink?’ the bald man suggested. ‘The three of us have a drink in McBirney’s of an evening.’

‘You’d have passed McBirney’s on the way from the bus,’ Mr Mulholland said.

‘I think I saw it, sir,’ Elmer agreed. ‘We’ll maybe see how things are after we’ve had a little stroll down by the sea.’

‘We’ll be in McBirney’s till they close,’ the grey-haired man said.

Soon after that the men went away, leaving Elmer and Mary Louise alone at the table. The families began to drift from the dining-room also, the children staring at Mary Louise as they passed.

‘Wasn’t that decent of them?’ Elmer remarked. ‘Wasn’t it friendly?’

‘Yes, it was.’

She didn’t feel hungry. Her husband spread gooseberry jam on a slice of white bread and stirred sugar into his tea, and Mary Louise thought that what she’d like to do would be to walk on the seashore by herself. She’d only been to the sea once before, eleven years ago, when Miss Mullover had taken the whole school on the bus, starting off at eight o’clock in the morning. They’d all bathed except Mary Louise’s delicate cousin and Miss Mullover herself, who’d taken off her stockings and paddled. Miss Mullover had forbidden them to let the sea come up further than their waists, but Berty Figgis had disobeyed and was later deprived of a slice of jam-roll.

‘Eat up, dear,’ Elmer said.

‘I think I’ve had enough.’

‘Your mother had a great tuck-in for us.’

‘Yes, she did.’

‘Everyone was pleased with it.’

She smiled. A cigarette-butt left behind by one of the men had been inadequately extinguished. It smouldered in the ashtray, a curl of smoke giving off an acrid odour. Mary Louise wanted to put it out properly but didn’t feel like touching it with her fingers.

‘Are you game for a walk, dear?’ Elmer said. He was about to add that it was the sea air they’d paid for, but somehow that didn’t sound appropriate. He said instead that he’d known a Mulholland years ago, one of the clerks in the gasworks. The jam he was eating was better than Rose’s. It was thicker, for a start. He liked thick jam.

‘I’d love a breath of air,’ she said.

So when he had finished his cup of tea and had another slice of bread and jam they walked on the strand. The sea was out. The damp sand was firm beneath their feet, smooth and dark, the surface broken here and there by a tiny coiled hillock. Sand worms, Elmer said. She wondered what sand worms were, but didn’t ask.

A dog barked at the distant edge of the sea, chasing seagulls! Two children were collecting something in a bucket. She remembered shivering after the bathe the day Miss Mullover had brought them, and how Miss Mullover had made them run on the sand to warm themselves up. ‘No, leave your shoes and socks off, Berty,’ Miss Mullover’s voice came back to her, cross with Berty Figgis again.

‘Shellfish,’ Elmer said, referring to what the children were collecting in their bucket.

They went on walking, slowly as they always did on a walk. Elmer had an unhurried gait; he liked to take things at a pace that by now Mary Louise had become used to. The sun was setting, streaking the surface of the sea with bronze highlights.

‘Miss Mullover took us to the seaside.’ She told him about that day. He said that in his time in the schoolroom there hadn’t been such excursions. ‘Algebra the whole time,’ he said, making a joke.

The sand ended. They clambered over shingle and rocks, but in a moment he suggested that the walking was uncomfortable so they turned back. They could still, very faintly, hear the dog barking at the seagulls.

‘Would you like that, dear?’ he suggested. ‘Call in and have a drink with those men?’

Elmer was not, himself, a drinking man. He did not disapprove of the consumption of alcohol, only considered the practice unnecessarily expensive and a waste of time. But when the man had suggested a drink in McBirney’s he had recalled immediately the glass of whiskey he’d drunk earlier in the day and had been aware of a desire to supplement it, putting this unusual urge down to the pressures of the occasion. He’d woken twice in the night with the abuse of his sisters still ringing in his consciousness, and he’d been apprehensive in the church in case one of them would make a show of herself by weeping, and at the occasion afterwards in case anything untoward was said. He’d been glad to get away in Kilkelly’s car, but in the train another kind of nervousness had begun to afflict him. He couldn’t quite put his finger on what it was or where precisely it came from, but none the less it was there, like very faint pins and needles, coming and going in waves.

‘If you’d like to,’ she said.

It surprised her that he suggested this. When the invitation had been issued she didn’t think he meant it when he said they might look in at the public house. She’d thought he was being polite.

‘Okey-doke,’ he said.

They hardly said anything on the walk back. They passed by the hotel, eventually reaching McBirney’s public house, which was a gaunt building, colour-washed in yellow. Two iron beer barrels were on the pavement outside, with bicycles propped against them. Inside, the three men were drinking pints of stout.

‘Cherry brandy,’ Mary Louise said when the bald man asked her what she’d like. A woman who’d damaged the Hillman a couple of years ago by backing into it in Bridge Street had given Mr Dallon a bottle of cherry brandy by way of compensation. For the last two Christmases a glass had been taken in the farmhouse.

‘Whiskey,’ Elmer requested. ‘A small measure of whiskey, sir.’

A conversation began about scaffolding. A bricklayer in Leitrim, known to the bald man, had apparently fallen to his death because the scaffolding on a house had been inadequately bolted together. The grey-haired man said he preferred the older type of scaffolding, the timber poles and planks, with rope lashing. You knew where you were with it.

‘The unfortunate thing is,’ the bald man pointed out, ‘the lashed scaffold is outmoded.’

The cherry brandy was sweet and pleasant. Mary Louise was glad she’d thought of asking for it. After a few sips she felt happier than she had on the strand or in the dining-room or the bedroom. Some boys of her own age were laughing and drinking in a corner of the bar. Two elderly men were sitting at a table, not speaking. Mary Louise was the only girl present.

‘I was married myself,’ Mr Mulholland confided to her while the others continued to discuss different kinds of scaffolding, ‘in 1941. The day the Bismarck went down.’

She nodded and smiled. She wished she’d asked Elmer to take the carnation out of his lapel so that people wouldn’t know they’d been married only a matter of hours. She’d seen the boys in the corner glancing at it a few times.

‘The old ways can’t always be improved, sir,’ she heard Elmer saying, and then the grey-haired man said it was his round. He asked her if she’d like the same again, and she said she would.

‘Excuse me a minute, Mrs Quarry,’ the bald man said. ‘I have to see a man about a dog.’

It was the first time anyone had addressed her directly as Mrs Quarry. When the landlady had used the term it hadn’t been quite the same. Mary Louise Quarry, she said to herself.

‘Paddy or JJ?’ the grey-haired man asked Elmer, and Elmer said JJ without knowing why. She’d take off the little green jacket first, he supposed, and he wondered whether it would be the blouse or the skirt next. He looked at her. Her hair wasn’t tidy after the walk they’d taken, and she’d gone a bit red in the face due to the stuff she was drinking. The sister wasn’t as good-looking, no doubt about that.

‘May the twenty-seventh,’ Mr Mulholland said. ‘Glasnevin, and the skies opened.’

Mary Louise had lost track of the conversation. She was puzzled for a moment, then realized Mr Mulholland was still talking about his wedding. The grey-haired man put a fresh glass of cherry brandy into her hand and took away the empty one.

‘The wife’s a Glasnevin woman,’ Mr Mulholland said.

‘Is that in Dublin?’

‘We live there to this day. 21, St Patrick’s Avenue.’

The conversation about scaffolding resumed, the bald man having returned. Then Mary Louise heard her husband talking about his shop, and a moment later she heard him saying, ‘We’re Protestants,’ and heard the grey-haired man saying he’d guessed it.

‘The same house she was married from,’ Mr Mulholland said.

‘I see.’

‘We brought up seven there. When her father died she got the property, though the mother had a right to an upstairs room. They didn’t get on, himself and the mother.’

‘I don’t know Dublin well.’

‘You’d always be welcome in Glasnevin, Kitty.’

‘Thanks very much.’

Mr Mulholland lowered his voice. His wife was having the change of life, he said. ‘You’d understand that, Kitty? An upsetting period for her.’

‘My name’s not Kitty, actually.’

‘I thought he called you Kitty.’

‘My name’s Mary Louise.’

‘Welcome to the married state, Mary Louise.’

Mary Louise laughed. Mr Mulholland was funny, the way Letty’s friend Gargan had been funny. Gargan did an imitation of a Chinaman, and told endless stories about the Englishman, the Irishman and the Scotsman. He also did imitations of Charlie Chaplin.

‘There was a fellow opposite the shop one time,’ Elmer was saying, ‘dismantling a scaffold. He was up at the top of it throwing down the metal joints, and didn’t one go through the roof of a van!’

‘Some of those fellows are dangerous all right,’ the grey-haired man agreed.

‘A few years ago it was,’ Elmer said. ‘One of Joe Claddy’s men.’

As she sipped more of her drink, Mary Louise felt glad they had come to the bar. Elmer was more loquacious than he’d been all day. It seemed to her now that she’d been silly to want him to take the carnation out of his buttonhole. If she’d asked him to he’d probably have said it would be a waste of a good carnation, and of course he’d have been right. Reminded of it by Elmer’s recollection of the scaffolding joint going through the roof of a van, she told Mr Mulholland about the woman who’d given the family a bottle of cherry brandy because she’d backed into the Hillman.

‘It’s why I have a taste for it,’ she said.

‘The wife likes a medium sherry,’ Mr Mulholland said.

The bald man recalled an occasion when he was driving along the Cork road outside Mitchelstown and a ladder fell off the lorry in front of him. He described the damage to the car’s radiator and one of the headlights.

‘Tell them about the Hillman,’ Mr Mulholland urged Mary Louise, and when she’d done so Elmer said he’d never heard that before.

‘She got a taste for the brandy that time,’ Mr Mulholland said.

They all laughed. Mr Mulholland put his arm around Mary Louise’s waist and squeezed it. She had never been in a public house before and had often wondered what one was like. All she’d had were Letty’s descriptions because Letty had often gone into MacDermott’s or the lounge of Hogan’s Hotel with Gargan. Letty used to smoke in those days. She used to come into the bedroom at night smelling of cigarettes and sometimes of drink. She never smoked in the farmhouse itself, though, it being purely a social thing with her.

‘Excuse me a minute,’ the bald man said, and again went away, repeating that he had to see a man about a dog.

Mary Louise told Mr Mulholland about the farm, answering questions he put to her. She heard Elmer saying it was difficult for a draper’s shop to move with the times, that self-service wasn’t always suitable.

‘Oh, definitely,’ the grey-haired man agreed.

She found herself telling Mr Mulholland about cycling from Culleen to school every day with Letty and James. She described Miss Mullover’s schoolroom, with the map of Ireland that showed the rivers and the mountains and the other one that showed the counties in different colours. They would all crouch round the stove on a very cold day, permitted to leave their desks by Miss Mullover. Twelve or thirteen pupils there were, sometimes a few more, sometimes less, depending.

‘What’ll you have?’

The bald man had rejoined them. He had a Woolworth’s bladder, he said, and Mr Mulholland reprimanded him. Mr Mulholland put his arm round Mary Louise’s waist again, as if to protect her from such observations. She said she’d like another cherry brandy.

One of the boys in the corner began to sing, softly beating time on the surface of the table with his fingers. Mary Louise could feel the palm of Mr Mulholland’s hand massaging her hip-bone, but she knew he meant no harm. She remembered the safety-pin she’d brought to the Electric the first time she’d gone there with Elmer. She smiled. Ridiculous it seemed now; ridiculous of Letty to suggest it.

‘Sorry about that reference I made,’ the bald man apologized, handing her another drink. They’d find the place they were staying to their liking, he predicted. Family run. He hadn’t made a complaint in twenty-two years.

‘It seems nice,’ Mary Louise agreed.

Mr Mulholland had moved away and was telling Elmer about the different kinds of stationery he travelled in: receipt books, account books, notepapers, occasion cards, mass cards, printed vouchers, printed invoices, envelopes of all descriptions. It wouldn’t be as bad as she thought, having to share the big bed; the things Letty said were silly. Elmer had stopped saying sir to the men; he kept nodding and wagging his head while he listened to Mr Mulholland. ‘Elmer Quarry’s always polite to you,’ her father had commented the Sunday evening after Elmer had told him he’d proposed marriage. A shopkeeper had to be, Letty had icily interjected. Politeness made money for shopkeepers.

‘I keep the books in Traynor’s,’ the bald man said. He didn’t reveal what Traynor’s was, but from subsequent remarks Mary Louise was left with the impression that it had to do with animal foodstuffs.

‘I see,’ she said.

Listening to Mr Mulholland, Elmer privately reflected that he’d never drunk so much whiskey in a single day. No drink was kept in the house, and never had been, but sometimes at the funeral of a customer he felt he should accept what he was offered, and on Christmas Eve Renehan from the hardware next door always came in about half-past four and invited him to walk down the street to Hogan’s lounge. He had a mineral then, while Renehan took gin and hot water. Renehan usually fell in with other men in Hogan’s, and Elmer left them to it. Counting the glass of whiskey after the wedding ceremony, he’d had three already that day, and he wondered what Rose and Matilda would say if they could see him standing in a bar with his young wife and three strangers. Probably they’d be too astonished to say anything.

‘I know what you mean,’ he acknowledged Mr Mulholland’s revelations concerning the necessity in any business for clearly printed up-market stationery. In a moment he’d buy a round himself, and then the grey-haired man would buy a round, and that would be that. Naturally you’d have a drink when you were on a holiday, naturally you wouldn’t behave the way you would if you were still at home. Sixty-six pounds it would cost at the Strand.

Elmer turned to the bar to order the drinks. He remembered going by the Fahys’ back-yard one time when the big double doors were open and seeing Mrs Fahy’s clothes hanging on the line with her husband’s. He’d stopped to look at them, fourteen or fifteen he’d been. Afterwards he’d thought about them, Mrs Fahy folding them after she’d taken them off, salmon-coloured some of the garments were. Remembering now, a jitter of excitement disturbed Elmer’s stomach, like a breeze passing through it. He turned to glance down at the calves of Mary Louise’s legs, but they were difficult to discern in the gloom. Sometimes he would glance out of the accounting-office window and see one of the counters spread over with suspender-belts and roll-ons, and some woman making up her mind, fingering the material or the elastic.

‘You did right well with this one,’ the bald man murmured out of the side of his mouth when Elmer gave him his drink. ‘A lovely girl, Mr Quarry.’

Elmer didn’t respond. He felt embarrassed by what had been said, although he wasn’t sure why. Mr Mulholland raised his glass and proposed a toast to the happy couple.

‘Was I out of turn?’ The bald man’s surreptitious murmur continued. ‘I think I forgot myself there.’

Elmer realized a compliment was intended. He denied that offence had been given with a dismissive shake of his head.

‘What’s the news, what’s the news, O my bold chevalier?’ sang the boys at the corner table. ‘With your long-barrelled gun of the sea…’

While listening to details of the book-keeping conventions at Traynor’s, it had occurred to Mary Louise that her husband might leave all the drink-buying to the men. Mean as an old crab, James had said he was. But if he had erred in that way, it would more likely have been because he didn’t know about correct behaviour in a public house since she had never, herself, detected signs of meanness in him. And anyway there he was, handing out glasses just like the others had.

‘Thanks, Elmer.’ She smiled at him when he gave her hers.

He wondered what she was wearing under the two-piece. For all he knew, it was stuff she’d bought from Rose or Matilda in the shop. It was his sisters who said you must call it a two-piece these days, not a costume any more, which was what their mother had called it. The first day he served behind the counter a woman had come in and asked to see stockings, thirty denier. She’d run her hand down into one, and ever since he had enjoyed watching a woman doing that.

‘I wouldn’t like to offend your lord and master,’ the bald man confided to Mary Louise. Bewildered, she frowned.

‘I said to him you were a lovely girl. A bridegroom could take a remark the like of that the wrong way.’

Mary Louise laughed, and soon afterwards they all left the bar. Mr Mulholland and the grey-haired man went in one direction; Elmer, Mary Louise and the bald man returned to the Strand Hotel. The landlady had removed the headscarf and the curlers from her hair, which now – henna-shaded – displayed evidence of her earlier attentions. The bald man shook hands with Elmer and Mary Louise in the hall. He took cocoa at night, he confided, pursuing the landlady to the inner depths of the hotel.

When he’d stepped out into the fresh air Elmer had been aware of a sensation of floating in his head. The houses across the street, one pink, the other blue, were vivid in the gathering gloom. The pavement kept slanting away from him as he walked on it, first one way, then the other. In the Strand Hotel he held the banister-rail firmly as he climbed the stairs.

Mary Louise went in search of the bathroom and lavatory. She, too, was experiencing a degree of disturbance, a general muzziness she did not find unpleasant. When she returned to the bedroom she found her husband sitting on the edge of the bed with his jacket off and his tie loosened. His eyes kept closing.

Mary Louise put her nightdress over her petticoat and then slipped off the petticoat and the rest of her underclothes, and her stockings. She didn’t like undressing even when it was only Letty in the room, unless the light was out or Letty averted her eyes. Letty was quite good about things like that. They both agreed without ever having talked about it.

Elmer tried to watch, but his efforts at concentration caused a visual confusion he had not experienced before. A second image of his bride floated out of the first, precisely the same outline, hands and head, the white nightdress picked up from the bed, the body bent, then turned away from him while some sort of groping took place, stockings in her hands. He wanted to tell her she was great, but when he tried to his voice wouldn’t work properly. In the hall, when the man had begun about his cocoa, he’d attempted to compliment the landlady on her jam, but the same thing had occurred. He’d tried to say he liked thick jam, but he couldn’t manage to get the words right.

‘Will I help you?’ she was saying, and he screwed his eyes up to see her properly. ‘Will I put the light out?’ she said, and a moment later she did so. He leaned back, turning himself round, finding a pillow for his head. At the Tate School the housekeeper could be seen putting on her vest, her reflection in the glass of the window that swung outwards. He shouldn’t be falling asleep, Elmer said to himself, but nevertheless did so.