William Trevor - Two Lives

‘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.