Two Lives (2 page)

Standing on the edge of the farm’s twenty-seven acres, the house was three miles from the town where Quarry’s drapery had prospered for so long. On Sundays, driving into the town in their black, obsolete Hillman, the Dallons formed almost a quarter of the Protestant congregation; at Christmas and
Easter the numbers swelled to thirty-three or -four. Elmer Quarry and his sisters were church-goers only on these festive occasions, but for the Dallons – especially for Mary Louise and Letty – the weekly occasion of worship provided a social outing they enjoyed.

The town was small, its population just over two and a half thousand. A turf-brickette factory had been opened seven years ago, where once there’d been a tannery. There was a ruined mill, a railway station that was no longer in use, green-stained warehouses on either side of the town’s single bridge over its sluggish river. Shops, public houses, the post office, council offices, two banks, and other businesses offered employment, as did Hogan’s Hotel, three builders, a creamery, an egg-packing station and an agricultural machinery depot. The Electric Cinema was a going concern in 1955; the Dixie dancehall continued to attract Friday-night crowds. The Catholic church – on the town’s northern outskirts – was dedicated to the Virgin as Queen of Heaven; a convent – halfway up the town’s only hill – was of the order of the Sacred Heart. Boys were educated behind the silver-painted railings of the Christian Brothers’ School in Conlon Street, and St Fintan’s vocational college offered opportunities to acquire further skills. Bridge Street, where the pink-washed Hogan’s Hotel and the principal shops were, was narrow and brief, becoming South West Street beyond the bridge. The gaunt, grey steeple of the Protestant church rose from a boundary of yew trees that isolated it from its surroundings. A pocket of lanes around the gasworks and Brown’s Yard comprised the slums. A signpost – black letters on a yellow ground – partially obscured a statue of Daniel O’Connell and gave directions to Clonmel and Cappoquin, Cahir and Carrick-on-Suir. People who lived in the town knew it backwards; those from the surrounding neighbourhoods sometimes regarded it with wonder.

Elmer Quarry first noticed that Mary Louise Dallon was an
agreeable-looking girl in January of the year in question. He was thirty-five then, Mary Louise twenty-one. Paunchy – and as square-looking as the origins of his name suggested – he was attired invariably in a nondescript suit, mud-coloured, faintly striped. His receding hair, cut short, matched this shade; his features were small and regular, a neat configuration in the pale plumpness of his face. Elmer Quarry was not a tall man, but bulky none the less, an entrepreneurial presence, as his father and grandfather had been before him. He was assisted in the drapery by his sisters, Matilda and Rose, both of them his senior by a few years and possessing a handsomeness that had been denied him. Neither had married and both were displeased when Elmer’s glances were cast in the direction of Mary Louise Dallon. Why should the status quo in the house above the shop, and in the shop itself, be disturbed? Quarry’s would sustain the three of them during their lifetime, withering, then dying, with the Protestants of the neighbourhood. Neither Rose nor Matilda was the kind to avoid facing the facts: already Quarry’s was a relic from another age. If the line came to an end the business would pass to distant cousins in Athy, who would probably sell it.

The present Quarrys remembered the time when there were five assistants behind the counters, and an overhead railway network that linked the shop to the accounting office, carrying money and returning change in hollow wooden spheres. There were just the three Quarrys in the shop now; the overhead system had years ago been dismantled and removed. But the red receipt books were as they’d always been, stacked every evening by the tills that had been fitted. Elmer’s father had entered the accounting office every day only after the shop had closed its doors, when the clerk who returned the change in the wooden containers had gone home. But since there was no clerk now and since Matilda and Rose managed easily behind the counters, Elmer increasingly spent more time in the
accounting office. Often he sat there staring down through the small-paned floor-to-ceiling window into the quiet shop below, at the rolls of material stacked on the shelves – nylon, chintz and silk, cotton and linen – at the spools of thread in their shallow glass case, and the dresses and suits on the window dummies. As still as these window dummies his sisters sometimes seemed, one behind either counter, waiting for another customer. Matilda liked to be smart; Rose dressed drearily. Matilda had more of a manner with customers, the best manner of the three, Elmer knew. Rose preferred housework and cooking. He himself belonged more naturally with the ledgers.

The courtship began on 11 January 1955, a Tuesday. Elmer invited Mary Louise to the pictures the following Friday evening. He had no idea what was showing at the Electric, but he considered that didn’t matter. Now and again, perhaps once a year, he and his sisters went to see a film because it had been talked about in the shop. He liked the News best himself, but Rose and Matilda enjoyed something light and musical. He naturally had to tell them he’d invited Mary Louise Dallon. They continued to look displeased, but did not comment.

In the Dallon household the invitation came as a considerable surprise. Mr and Mrs Dallon – a thin, grey pair in their fifties whose appearance was so similar that they might have been twins – recognized all that it implied, and were well aware of the habit among the Quarry men of marrying younger wives. They talked about it in the privacy of their bedroom. Mrs Dallon made a special journey to the town, visited Quarry’s drapery, bought a spool of white thread, and reminded herself of what Elmer looked like by glimpsing him through the panes of the accounting-office window. It might have been worse, she reported to her husband on her return, and later – in their bedroom – they went on talking about the development.

Mary Louise’s older sister, Letty, and her brother James, who was older also, did not react as favourably. James – impetuous, known to be of uncertain temper, and remembered from his schooldays as being a little slow – declared the invitation to be an affront. Elmer Quarry was a man who never laughed and rarely smiled, born to be a draper. Letty – secretly annoyed that her sister had been preferred, not that she’d have set foot in the Electric with Elmer Quarry even if he’d gone down on his knees – warned Mary Louise about what might occur under cover of darkness and advised her to keep handy a safety-pin that could be opened at a moment’s notice. Some of Elmer Quarry’s teeth were false, she declared, a fact she claimed to have culled in the waiting-room of the town’s more reliable dentist, Mr McGreevy.

Mary Louise herself was terrified. When the invitation had come, Elmer Quarry following her out on the street to issue it, she blushed and became so agitated in her speech that she began to stammer. On her bicycle, all the way back to the farmhouse, she kept seeing Elmer Quarry’s square shape, and the balding dome of his head when he’d bent down to pick up the glove she’d dropped. Letty had gone out with a man or two, with Gargan from the Bank of Ireland two years ago, with Billie Lyndon of the radio and electrical shop. She had thought Gargan was going to propose, but unfortunately he got promotion and was moved to Carlow. Billie Lyndon married the younger Hayes girl. Letty had taken to saying she wouldn’t be bothered with that kind of thing any more, but Mary Louise knew it wasn’t true. If Gargan came back for her she’d take him like a shot, and if anyone else who was half possible appeared on the scene she’d start dressing herself up again.

‘What’s showing?’ Letty asked.

‘He didn’t say.’

‘Hmm,’ Letty said.

Beggars couldn’t be choosers, Mr Dallon reflected in the end. To marry either of the girls into the Quarrys would mean you’d breathe more easily, and you’d see the sort of future for the two who were left. Mrs Dallon reached similar conclusions: provided James didn’t marry, the farm would sustain himself and Letty, he working the fields and seeing to the milking, she attending to the fowls. The place was right for two, comfortable enough. Three of them left behind would be noticeable, touched with failure, although no one was to blame; a family growing old together was never a good thing, never a stable thing.

The film was called
The Flame and the Flesh
and Elmer did not in the least enjoy it. But he bought a carton of Rose’s in the confectioner’s shop next to the Electric, and at least there was the consolation of the chocolates, for he had a sweet tooth. When he offered Mary Louise the carton for the fifth time she shook her head and murmured something, which he took to mean she didn’t want any more. He knew that girls had to watch their figures so he ate the remainder of the chocolates himself, removing the wrappings as quietly as he could in order not to cause a disturbance. The film was all about a woman in Italy, with a number of men interested. ‘Wasn’t the picture great?’ Mary Louise enthused when the lights went up, and he agreed it had been.

It was a cold night. Outside the cinema he belted his overcoat and drew on tan leather gloves; he didn’t wear a hat. He noticed that his companion’s cheeks were flushed from the warmth of the cinema and that she’d put on a blue and white woollen cap, which matched her gloves. She’d have bought the wool in the shop, and he thought he could even remember looking down from the accounting office and seeing her choosing it, last summer it would have been.

‘I’ll walk you out a bit towards Culleen,’ he said.

‘Oh, no need, Mr Quarry. Thanks though.’

In the lane that ran by the side of the Electric there was an ungainly chain and padlock on her bicycle, which she undid and dropped into the basket that was attached to the handlebars. When she leaned down to do this lamplight from the street fell on the back of her legs, and for the first time Elmer experienced physical desire where Mary Louise was concerned. Between the hem of her shabby blue coat and the tops of her boots the silk of her stockings gleamed in a way he found disturbing. Once or twice during the film his attention had been held by Lana Turner’s low-cut bodices.

‘Give me the bike to wheel,’ he urged, ignoring Mary Louise’s protest that there was no need to walk through the streets with her.

The Quarrys did not possess a car. Living in the centre of the town, there had never been a need for one, just as in the past there had been no need for a horse-drawn vehicle of any kind. A bus carried you out of the town and another one brought you back again in the evening. Every December, before Christmas, the Quarry sisters took it to do any seasonal shopping there was. Elmer didn’t bother with that. In winter he played billiards in the YMCA billiard-room, a big coal fire blazing in the grate between two glass-fronted bookcases that held a library of good books: Wild West stories and detective yarns, adventure novels by Sapper and Leslie Charteris, the
Encyclopaedia Britannica.
Elmer often had the place to himself since not many turned up in the YMCA billiard-room these days, but the caretaker always had the fire going in winter, and copies of the
Geographical Magazine
and the
Illustrated London News
were always to hand. In summer Elmer went for walks – Bridge Street, South West Street, Boys’ Lane, Father Mathew Street, Upton Road, home by Kilkelly’s Garage.

Intent upon entertaining Mary Louise, and since they happened to pass the YMCA billiard-room, he retailed some
of the detail of these two long-established habits. If he possessed a car, he added, he naturally would have called at the farmhouse for her and would now be driving her home in it. Kilkelly often told him he should have a car. ‘A man in your position, Elmer,’ was how Kilkelly – who had the Ford franchise – put it, but Elmer did not quote this statement since it sounded like showing off. Instead, he asked Mary Louise if she had learned to drive the Hillman he often saw the Dallons in, and she replied that she had. This fact Elmer noted; he was interested in things like that.

‘Well, I’ll leave you here,’ he said when they reached the last bungalow that could claim to belong to the town. A full moon cast a light as bright as daylight. The road sparkled where frost had settled in its crevices. Hedges and verges were already whitening; ice had formed in patches.

‘Your light’s all right, is it?’ Elmer solicitously inquired.

Mary Louise tried it. A beam hardly showed up in the moonlight. ‘Thanks for everything,’ she said.

‘Would next week interest you?’

‘Interest?’

‘Friday again.’ Elmer had once heard in the shop that girls liked to wash their hair on Saturdays, and certainly both Rose and Matilda did, once a fortnight. Thoughtfulness never hurt anyone, his mother used to say, which was why he’d mentioned Friday. His own preference would have been Saturday, since the feeling of relaxation, to do with the weekend, began then. With the shop closed until Monday morning, and the streets more active than on other evenings, Elmer often experienced on a Saturday night an urge to mark in some way the difference there was. Usually, though, he just slipped down to the YMCA and played a solitary game of billiards.

‘Friday?’ Mary Louise said.

‘Is Friday convenient? Would Saturday be better?’

‘No, Friday’s all right.’

‘Will we say half-seven?’

Mary Louise nodded. She mounted her bicycle and rode off. The safety-pin Letty had insisted upon had not been opened. He hadn’t tried to hold her hand. Come to that, she thought, they hadn’t even said good-night to one another. There was a kind of intimacy about saying good-night to a person, and both of them had been shy of it. In the Electric, before the lights went down, she’d noticed people looking at them. By this time tomorrow it would be all round the town.

‘Are you in one piece?’ Letty asked when her sister walked into the kitchen with the bicycle lamp in her hand. Their mother and father had gone to bed, but Mary Louise knew they wouldn’t be sleeping. They’d have lain there waiting for the sound of the bicycle wheels and the clatter of the barn door and her footsteps on the cobbles. They’d go on lying there, probably not communicating with one another, just wondering how she’d got on.