Two Lives (12 page)

Once, years ago, Miss Mullover had been asked by an ex-pupil to ‘talk to’ her husband because drink was threatening to destroy the marriage. This man, who had never lost either his respect or his affection for his teacher, rode up to her bungalow on a motor-cycle. Awkward and unhappy, he sat down with his crash helmet on the floor by his feet. It wasn’t drink, he insisted, that had done the damage. ‘The trouble is,’ he said, ‘I don’t like her.’

Tannon, the accountant at the brickette factory, drove forty miles every Thursday afternoon to visit the wife of a bank manager in another town. That had been going on for twenty-six years, and had resulted in Tannon’s never marrying. In the emergency period of the war, when petrol was unavailable to private motorists, he had arranged a lift in one of the brickette-factory lorries, his bicycle stowed away in the back so that he could make the return journey. The gossip went that when he arrived at his destination he parked his car in a side street and entered the bank house by a wicket gate in the double doors of the yard. Miss Mullover often wondered what the bank manager’s wife looked like, what age she was and if she had children. A woman with plump lips came to mind, a slack-faced woman, powdered and scented, expensively dressed. She imagined Tannon making his way into
the back of the house, dodging the office windows. She imagined all the bank business going on beneath the erring couple, loans being arranged, cash given out, the bank manager on the phone to his head office. A skinny boy Tannon had been, with rabbit teeth and very short trousers above fragile, bony knees.

In the town other such unconventional relationships were talked about. It was said that ever since they’d quarrelled about their daughter’s mixed marriage, a certain elderly couple addressed one another only by way of their dog. One of the post office clerks, the mildest of men when he served you across the counter, gently tearing along the perforated edge of the stamps, was said to be violent in the home. A young wife’s weekly presence in the Dixie dancehall was not known to her husband, who worked through the night at the electricity plant. One of the town’s bread deliverers went off with a tinker girl and then returned, saying it was all a mistake. None of these people had passed through Miss Mullover’s schoolroom, but she’d known all of them, at least to see, as children.

It was dispiriting news that Elmer Quarry had taken up drink.

‘It’s Hogan’s he goes to,’ Rose reported, having followed her brother in Bridge Street. She whispered, halfway up the stairs. Matilda was waiting on the first-floor landing.

‘I thought it would be Hogan’s. It was always Hogan’s with Renehan.’

‘It was different with Renehan.’

‘I’m not saying it wasn’t.’

Rose ascended the remaining steps of the stairs. Matilda led the way to the dining-room. Rose closed the door behind them.

‘I didn’t think he’d go into a public house,’ Matilda said. ‘The bar of a hotel’s different.’

‘I wouldn’t be too sure what he’d get up to. If you could have seen the cut of him, nearly running on the street. Like he was chased by the bats of hell.’

‘I don’t know what to say.’

‘I’ll say it for you, Matilda. She’s driven the man to drink.’

The sisters continued to discuss the matter. They began at what they saw as the beginning – the earliest attention paid to Mary Louise by their brother. They went through the events of the subsequent months; they dwelt upon their own protestations. Their opinion of the mental stability of James Dallon was aired, and related to that of his sister. They considered a step they might take: arranging to be driven out to the Dallons’ farmhouse in Kilkelly’s hired car and asking the Dallons to take their daughter back before further damage was done. They reached no decision about that. Eventually they heard Elmer’s footfall on the stairs and heard him entering the front room, where Her Ladyship was listening to the wireless. They heard his voice raised cheerfully, calling her dear.

The Dallons, reconciled by now to the relationship that had advanced between Letty and Dennehy and pleased that their son was displaying signs of maturity, began to worry about their younger daughter. She stayed hardly any time when she visited them on Sundays, and increasingly did not come at all. As the year advanced – a warm spring giving way to a fine summer – they wondered more often why they were not yet grandparents. They did not say as much to one another, but a bewilderment that was fleeting at first lingered longer during the months that drifted by. Often, of course, such delays occurred: they had to remember that and be patient. Something in the manner of their younger daughter, and the impatient brevity of her Sunday visits, with no effort made to offer an explanation when she did not arrive at the farmhouse at all, concerned them more. Her manner was abstracted. Questions
asked about the shop were summarily disposed of, and for the most part went unanswered. Gossip from the town was no longer conveyed to the farmhouse kitchen. The pleasure there had been at first in advising the shop’s customers when colours had to be matched, or on the fit of a dress or the suitability of a hat, appeared to have evaporated. The wit of the drapery travellers was not repeated.

‘You can’t put your finger on it,’ Mrs Dallon remarked before settling to sleep one night.

‘She doesn’t seem discontented, though.’

‘No, she doesn’t seem discontented.’

She’d gather herself together when a family began, both simultaneously thought. One of these Sundays she’d have a bit of news for them, and after that she’d be herself again.

In the quiet of the graveyard he read to her. She lay on her back, watching small white clouds drifting slowly across the curve of the sky. The difficult Russian names weren’t easy to keep track of at first but then, with repetition, became familiar. ‘Are you asleep?’ he sometimes interrupted himself to ask, but she never was. She was seeing in her mind’s eye Pavel Petrovich’s study, its green velvet and walnut furniture, its vivid tapestry. Her cousin’s voice curtly issued Arkady’s orders; distressfully it conveyed to her Mitya’s convulsions.
‘Madame will see you in half an hour,’
a butler said. Swallows flew high, bees hummed in the lilac. A peasant with a patch on his shoulder trotted a white pony through an evening’s shadows. Sprigs of fuchsia decorated the hair of a woman in black.

It was a coolness creeping into the graveyard that caused him, every week, to close whichever book he’d brought. ‘We have stayed too long again,’ he always said, amusing both of them with that most inappropriate remark.

For want of something else to say, Mary Louise pointed out to
her husband that he had not, in the past, played billiards in the summer.

‘Summer or winter, dear, it’s relaxing to read the magazines.’

‘I didn’t know they had drink there.’

‘What drink’s that, dear?’

‘I didn’t know they had drink in the YMCA.’

‘There’s no refreshments of any kind, as a matter of fact.’

In their bedroom he stood with his trousers off, knowing what she meant and pretending not to. The conversation they were having was ridiculous. He’d categorically told her, ages ago, before they were even married, that he never bothered going to the YMCA billiard-room in the summer because what was attractive there was the winter cosiness of the fire, and the curtains drawn. He had described the curtains, heavy brown brocade purchased in Quarry’s in his father’s time.

‘You sometimes have a smell of drink on you,’ she said.

He wagged his head. This was a way of his when he was at a loss, a response that could have meant anything. He whistled soundlessly.

Mary Louise sighed. It didn’t matter; she didn’t care. She had no interest in his spending time in the billiard-room or spending it elsewhere. But something had to be said occasionally, else there would be only silence between them. The smell of drink was a smell like any other; all she was doing was making a comment.

He yawned, drawing his pyjamas on. There were good things about him, she reflected, even more good things than she’d been aware of when she married him. He was a little mean in some ways but not in others. She’d seen him taking a lump of coal off the fire, but she could have what she wanted from the shop, and he gave her money for other necessities – a little stack of notes and coins on the first day of every month: he never forgot. If she’d complained about the rudeness of his sisters he might even have spoken to them.

‘Good-night, dear,’ he said, and she reached to turn the light off, as she did every night, because the switch was closer to her.

‘Good-night, Elmer.’

Almost at once he slept. His breathing, soft at first, became deeper, then stertorous. She moved her limbs towards his. Her hands lay lightly on his sleeping body.

13

The women talk of different times. For the years they have known one another they have marked out in their conversations certain periods they favour. Just as Mary Louise claims 1957, so Mrs Leavy of Youghal returns regularly to her infancy in 1921 and ‘22, Dot Sterne to 1984, Belle D to the advent of the Beatles, the Spanish wife to destitution in Gibraltar, 1986. Others have more precisely held to themselves days or moments or occasions, the hour of a tragedy or an act of violence.

People are claimed also, special and belonging, the personal baggage of the house’s inmates. To a conversation that is endlessly renewed Mary Louise contributes the people of Culleen and of the town, her cousin and her aunt, her husband and his sisters. In turn she hears about people she does not know. Every day the house is thronged, the crowds impenetrable sometimes.

‘God knows, it’s nothing new,’ the faded woman who is usually silent alleges in a quieter conversation. It’s nothing new, reflection has revealed to her, that mad women should walk the roads and streets of Ireland. Once upon a time they did, in the old times, before the great brick asylums were built, before each town possessed a barracks for hiding the insane in.

‘What’s she talking about?’ Bríd Beamish, wearing lipstick, asks.

‘Loonies on the loose is what.’ Dot Sterne has rolled her stockings down, hoping Miss Foye will notice and not put her back where she came from.

‘Oh, of course,’ Mrs Leavy agrees. ‘We all knew the brickwork asylums. Many’s the time me and Elsie looked over the wall.’

‘I’m saying the time before the asylums were in existence,’ the faded woman corrects her. ‘I’m saying long ago.’

‘Loonies on the loose,’ Belle D repeats.

‘Crazies,’ a woman who was a priest’s housekeeper adds. ‘The brain in tatters.’

‘It’s a different kettle of fish now,’ Mrs Leavy reminds them. ‘The days of the old crazies is over. We don’t use them expressions no more. This day and age, the nurse told me.’

‘Swallow your medication.’ Small Sadie’s laughter cackles. ‘Right eejits if you don’t swallow the medication.’

‘There’s some would never have set foot in this place if the drugs had been to hand. A bottle of medicine would have kept them well.’ Mrs Leavy has taken the lead. She has placed herself at the head of the inmates who are soon to be released. She is stating their case. She is offering the medical evidence as she had it personally from Miss Foye and a doctor, the bald one, not the one with the beard.

‘Mary Louise should never be setting a foot out of it,’ Small Sadie snaps back. ‘Heathen bloody strumpet.’

She cries as soon as she has spoken, putting her arms around Mary Louise and saying she’s sorry.

14

It seemed natural that her cousin should become Mary Louise’s confidant. In September 1957, two years after her wedding, she told him the details of the courtship there’d been, of the proposal on the humped bridge, of her request for time to think it over, of the engagement and the journey on the wedding day by train and bus, and the arrival at the Strand Hotel.

They had seen, in June, the rose blooming wildly through the tiny derelict church. They had returned repeatedly to the stream, in search of the heron. But Mary Louise’s confidences were offered in the graveyard, among the Attridge headstones.

‘And what were you
thinking
?’ Robert, fascinated, would interrupt, leading her back to some point that interested him particularly. What had her thoughts been when she sat beside Elmer Quarry for the very first time, during
The Flame and the Flesh
? Or when she stood in front of the altar? Or when the red-cheeked Reverend Harrington pronounced them man and wife?

She shared with him her emotions during the first few moments in the Strand Hotel, when she experienced misgivings that had not been there before, when her husband said that the place seemed comfortable enough. She described how, in the dining-room, the landlady had indicated a table where three men were already eating. She took him on the walk by the sea, the children collecting shellfish, the dog chasing the seagulls. She led him to McBirney’s bar, told about the cherry
brandies she’d drunk, about how Mr Mulholland had called her Kitty, how the bald man had said he had a Woolworth’s bladder.

She’d been drunk in the end, she confessed, and Elmer had been too drunk to take his clothes off. When they’d woken up in the morning they’d both felt terrible. They’d gone for another walk along the strand, during which Elmer said they didn’t feel so hot because they weren’t used to drink. She recalled the remainder of the honeymoon, the same kind of conversations in the dining-room as there’d been in McBirney’s bar on their wedding night. Mr Mulholland said goodbye on the Sunday morning, announcing that it was his due to kiss the bride. After breakfast every day Elmer sat outside the hotel and read the
Irish Times
from cover to cover while she accompanied to the strand one of the families who were staying at the hotel. She played with the children, helping them to make sandcastles. She bought a bathing-dress and bathed. On the Wednesday the bald man showed them round the animal-foodstuffs place where he worked. On Thursday they watched swing-boats being erected. On Friday they came back.

‘Why did you get married, Mary Louise?’

‘No one knows a thing like that.’