Two Lives (9 page)

‘Good luck,’ Renehan said, raising his glass again.

In previous years Elmer had drunk his second glass of lemonade quickly, gulping it and then putting the glass down on a nearby surface. He’d usually been back in the shop by ten to five. Now he sipped his whiskey slowly, actually savouring the harsh taste. He found it pleasant in the bar, pleasanter in a way than the empty YMCA billiard-room.

‘Isn’t it an extraordinary thing,’ he said, ‘that Bridget never married?’

Renehan told him a long story about Bridget being in love with a young curate when she was young herself, how it had been the passion of her life.

‘Father Curtin. Whippersnapper with sideburns.’

‘I remember the man well.’

‘Changes were made when the p.p. got a whiff of it.’

‘Ah, they would be all right.’

‘There was talk at the time of Father Curtin leaving the priesthood. Anyway, he didn’t and poor Bridget was left high and dry.’

‘Well, I never heard that one.’

‘It was kept under wraps. There’s not many in this town that knows it to this day.’

‘Only Bridget.’

‘Well, Bridget naturally.’

Other scandals from the past, known to both men, were recalled. Renehan bought two more drinks, and then Elmer did.

‘I’d best be getting back,’ he said, realizing that it was almost six o’clock. Renehan moved away to talk to someone else. Elmer returned to the shop.

Something began that Christmas Eve, although Elmer at the time was not aware of it. Halfway through January, instead of looking in at the YMCA billiard-room, he found himself turning into the side entrance that led to Hogan’s bar. It was much emptier on this occasion, but even so there were a couple of regular drinkers there. Knowing them by sight, Elmer nodded in their direction and ordered himself a glass of whiskey from the barman, Gerry, who also acted as the hotel’s porter. He sat on a high stool at the bar, talking to Gerry about the weather.

A few weeks later this visit was repeated. Elmer left the house above the shop with every intention of playing a lone game of billiards for an hour or two, but found himself again turning into the side entrance. On both occasions he made no reference to this change of plan when he later returned home. The whiskey deadened an ache that oppressed him. It lifted a weight from his spirits, if only for an hour or so. Too much, as on his wedding night, would bring a fog of darkness, but often in the accounting room, watching his sisters and his wife in the shop below, such darkness seemed like a balm.

By the spring of that year Elmer’s visits to the billiard-room had dwindled further, but since they had always fallen off when the days lengthened this passed unnoticed by Daly the caretaker. The difference was that with the advent of autumn they were not resumed. During the intervening months Elmer had had no excuse to leave the house in the evenings, for if he stated – as once or twice he did – that he intended to go for a walk Mary Louise prepared herself to accompany him. So instead he took to calling in briefly at Hogan’s bar in the afternoon, and was glad when September came so that he could spend longer there under the pretext of playing billiards. By the end of the year people in the town had begun to notice that Elmer Quarry was often, these days, in Hogan’s.

Nothing was missed by Rose and Matilda; nothing ever had been. They’d been sharp of eye and ear as children, and the tendency had developed in their spinsterhood. In Matilda’s life – as in Letty’s and Bridget the hotel manageress’s – there had, once upon a time, been romance. Matilda’s fiancé had joined the RAF on the outbreak of the war, and been killed in 1945, months before hostilities ceased. He had not gone down in action, for righting was mostly over for aircraft gunners then, but had died as a result of an accident at an aerodrome in Leicestershire: a devil-may-care pilot, in attempting to fly through an open hangar, had caused a tragic disaster. Rose had never been proposed to, and the spinsterhood of the sisters had developed like two strengthening growths from the same root. The root was the family – generations of Quarrys, of smalltown Protestants made special through not being of the mass. Matilda and Rose were steadfast, not in their beliefs or in their faith, but in what they believed themselves to be: a little superior.

The sisters could not help themselves, and long ago had become lost in assuming they could not: now they did not try. Why should they? And why should they put themselves out by
the slightest iota for a penniless creature whom their brother might have bought at a fun-fair if they’d all been living a hundred years ago? He’d married her to breed with. He’d married her because of his sentimental notion that the name should continue above the shop. That kind of compulsion belonged to another age also – and had made sense then, neither would deny that. Now it was only slop.

On Christmas Eve when Elmer had returned to the house with the smell of drink on his breath they both noticed it at once. But they didn’t comment on the fact to one another. They knew their brother always went to Hogan’s on Christmas Eve with Renehan; they’d never thought about what he had to drink there. The whiff of spirits he brought back with him didn’t seem significant, more something to be expected when you returned from a bar. But one evening in January the telltale whiff was there again. Neither of them asked him if he hadn’t been at the YMCA; he said nothing himself; and then – not long afterwards – they smelt it on his breath on another occasion. Still they did not remark on this to one another.

Where the marriage was concerned, the sisters knew that nothing could be changed. Before he’d made the mistake they had pointed it out to him. They had done their best, as sometimes they’d had to as children, being older sisters. The mistake was what all of them had to live with now.

‘He’s drinking on the quiet,’ Rose said at last.

‘Yes.’

They were waiting for him one night on the first-floor landing. His eyes were bleary, both noticed. He kept opening and closing his lips in a way that was unusual for him: they knew his personal habits, the quirks and twitches that were part of him. They did not speak on the landing, nor did he. He passed them by, and went on upstairs. In the front room his wife, Her Ladyship, turned on the wireless. A few minutes later they heard her going upstairs too.

*

A veterinary surgeon began to take Letty out. He came to the farm to examine an ailing heifer, and when he’d finished he sat for a long time over a cup of tea in the kitchen. A fortnight later he called in with his account and invited Letty to the Electric Cinema. He was a good-looking man, red-haired, a few years older than she was, a Catholic called Dennehy. ‘It’s the way things are,’ Mr Dallon remarked to his wife in the privacy of their bedroom. Both of them hoped that nothing would come of the relationship.

The schoolroom next to the church, in which Miss Mullover had taught from 1906 until 1950, closed on her retirement. Arrangements had since been made for the Protestant children of the town and the neighbourhood, either to be driven to a school fifteen miles away or to attend the convent or the Christian Brothers’. Miss Mullover had seen that coming, and even took a little pride in being the last Protestant teacher to have a school in the town: a successor – some flighty thing from the Church of Ireland Training College – might have irritated her more.

‘You’ve settled down?’ she prompted Mary Louise, meeting her one day in South West Street when enough time had passed to permit the question. She’d said the same thing often before, to pupils who had married. Settling was necessary, which was why, ages ago, she’d chosen that particular word. No girl, of whatever age – no man either, when it came to it – could expect to find the first year or so of marriage free of the hazards of personal adjustment. That stood to reason, yet was not always taken into consideration in advance.

‘Oh, yes,’ Mary Louise responded, but a quality in her tone of voice caused Miss Mullover to doubt her. Conversing with her on later occasions, she was confirmed in this opinion, and came to realize – to her great disappointment – that her optimism at the time of the wedding had been misplaced.

9

Memory is sometimes perfect, clear as a light. First thing when she wakes she wallows in it, assisted by the dusky tranquillity of dawn. The morning after the visit she wallows in the favourite year of all her life, the year the Russians put a dog into space, the year of Bill Haley, the year De Valera proclaimed a state of emergency. A nun in the Sacred Heart convent, expected to live to be a hundred, died at ninety-nine. A sewage problem occurred in Conlon Street, necessitating pneumatic drilling, new pipes and re-surfacing. A fawn-coloured tomcat, property of the gasworks manager, attacked a neighbour’s birdcage, detaching it from its hook and provoking threats of legal action. Tyrell’s the vegetable shop closed. Humphrey Bogart, Letty’s favourite – plastered all over the bedroom at Culleen – died. 1957 it was.

‘Mary Louise,’ she whispers in the dawn that comes after the upset of her visitor. ‘Mary Louise Dallon. Mrs Quarry as is.’ He is old now, the sisters older still. He could live for a dozen more years, fourteen or fifteen even, the sisters endlessly. He pays for her keep in Miss Foye’s house, and always has. Years ago the sisters tried to make her father pay but of course there was nothing to spare for that at Culleen. ‘Your husband’s good,’ Miss Foye says often, because not everyone here is paid for. The bigger dormitories are bare; the unpaid-for have enamel mugs and plates. He’s a decent man, driven to drink. It isn’t his fault that they’re closing down the houses.
They’ll bundle the obstreperous together, somewhere else will be found for them. She’s never been obstreperous herself.

A figure emerges from the gloom and sits on her bed with a blanket around her: Mrs Leavy from Youghal come over to tell her dreams.

She listens and then she tells her own.

10

On Sundays, having exchanged what news there was over a cup of tea at Culleen, Mary Louise usually began her journey back to the town at about a quarter to five, her spirits drooping as the journey progressed. But one March afternoon in 1957 she turned off the road that led to the town and cycled aimlessly, exploring a neighbourhood she did not know well. She chose a different direction the following week and when, eventually, all the ways became familiar to her she returned repeatedly to a favourite one. She was ironically reminded of the Sunday walks of her courtship, the bicycle left in a gateway, the crossroads where she and Elmer turned to the right, the woods they passed through, the humped bridge. It seemed like a lifetime ago, as deep in the past as the first day she attended Miss Mullover’s schoolroom. Whenever she crossed the humped bridge on her bicycle she reflected again, each time with greater bitterness, that someone might have warned her. Why had it been only Letty? And why had Letty made her concern sound like envy?

One Sunday, having ridden further than usual, she found herself at the head of a grassy avenue. Rusty iron gates, set in a spacious curve of railings that long ago had lost all signs of paint, seemed as though they had been flung back with a gesture in some other generation, remaining so to support a jungle of brambles, and ivy branches as thick as an arm. From the road Mary Louise could see the stark white house to
which the avenue led, the modest property of her Aunt Emmeline. Only once before had she been here, when she and Letty were entrusted with a gift: a pound of the butter their mother used to make. The butter was later sent to the house regularly, but after that single occasion the task of delivering it became James’s because his sisters had complained so about a mile-long hill up which they’d had to push their bicycles. As she stared down the avenue, Mary Louise found herself recalling that her Aunt Emmeline’s only child – the cousin with whom, for a while at school, she had imagined she was in love – had been able to attend the wedding service in spite of his invalid state. If his condition had worsened she’d probably have heard. Robert his name was.

Mary Louise turned away, pedalling back the way she’d come, but had hardly gone more than a few yards when a car, thick with dust, rounded the bend she was approaching. The horn was sounded, her Aunt Emmeline waved, and then the car drew up. Feeling stupid and caught out, cross because she should have avoided this neighbourhood, Mary Louise dismounted. She knew she’d gone red in the face, and hoped it would be assumed that she was simply out of breath.

‘Heavens above!’ her aunt exclaimed, winding down the car window. ‘Are you visiting us, Mary Louise?’

She shook her head. She tried to think of an excuse, but none would come. There was no reason in the world why she should be here on a Sunday evening. She said the first thing that came into her head.

‘I wondered how Robert was.’

‘You’ve been to see him?’

‘No, no. I just wondered –’

‘Robert’s not bad at all these days. Come on down, dear. He’d love to see you.’

The head – shaggy-haired, the skin of the forehead reddened by exposure to the weather, as the cheeks below it were – was
withdrawn. The car moved forward, hesitated, then turned in wildly to the entrance, and advanced at speed on the avenue. Mary Louise rode after it.

Robert – a wiry, gangling child with mischievous eyes – was now a pale young man, and the mischief in his eyes had turned into what seemed like amusement. He wore glasses, which he had not in the past; but his spare, bony frame reminded Mary Louise of the child he’d been. A shock of dark hair kept falling over his forehead; an adult’s smile hovered on his lips.

‘Heavens above!’ he exclaimed, exactly as his mother had. ‘Mary Louise!’

He sat by a fire in a large untidy room. Tables and armchairs were covered with drawings of winter trees, and papers with scribbles in green ink on them, and books. In a window alcove battalions of toy soldiers were engaged in warfare. Fishing-rods and nets were a muddle in a corner. Glass doors led to a conservatory where a vine grew.

The time Mary Louise and Letty had cycled over with the butter they had not been invited to penetrate further into this house than the kitchen: all she saw now was strange to her. But she had often heard the house talked about, usually in the same breath as her Aunt Emmeline’s husband, who had died before she was born. Her mother’s sister had married money, it was said, a statement invariably followed by the reminder that the money hadn’t lasted because the man she married was a gambler. ‘Charm to burn,’ Mr Dallon used to say, and – unlike the money – the charm had lasted to the end. Mary Louise never knew what it was her uncle had died of, and had sometimes wondered if it was the same affliction that Robert suffered from.