William Trevor - Two Lives

Waking in the very early morning and finding herself melancholy became, after the first time, a familiar repetition. She lay beside her sleeping husband, dwelling on her own stupidity and what she recognized now as her simplicity, her stubbornness in not perceiving a reality that was apparent. Before her marriage the Reverend Harrington had made her call to see him at the rectory. It was a joke among the Protestants of the neighbourhood that he always gave a parishioner raspberry cordial with hot water in it when he wished to be serious, and this he duly did, offering biscuits as well. ‘Do you love Elmer?’ he asked bluntly, a month before the marriage. ‘Please don’t be shy with me, Mary Louise.’ She wasn’t shy; no one ever was with the Reverend Harrington. It was easy to tell him a lie, easy to smile and say she did love Elmer Quarry, since she didn’t want to have a conversation like the ones she had with Letty. When she was fourteen she’d thought she was in love with her delicate cousin, and later with James Stewart. But all that was silly when she looked back on it. It was far more real, going for walks with Elmer Quarry and having him tucking her arm into his. It was far more real to think of herself in the shop on a winter’s evening, when the lights were lit and the radiators were warm, and to see herself the mistress of the house above it. There would be card parties in the huge front room, with its marble fireplace and grey flowered wallpaper. There would be music and even dancing, and a great spread on the dining table, the doors between the two rooms spread wide. ‘I’m glad we’ve had this chat,’ the Reverend Harrington had said.

All those memories and imaginings came back to Mary Louise in her sleepless hours. She had cut photographs of James Stewart out of Letty’s Picturegoer and framed them with passe-partout . The cousin she’d thought she’d been in love with hadn’t been healthy enough in the end to continue coming to the schoolroom every day. Grown up now but still thin and weak-looking, suffering from something that couldn’t be cured, he’d been in the church on the wedding day but not at the farmhouse afterwards. While she lay there in the mornings Mary Louise recalled the benign countenance of the clergyman, his good-natured smile, the glass of pink cordial held out to her, the Everyday biscuits. Why had no one told her that it was a terrible thing she was doing? Only Letty had done that and Letty had rampaged and raved like a mad girl so that you couldn’t listen. Her mother had not said a word, her father only asking her if she was sure. Miss Mullover had congratulated her in a most profuse way. Would Tessa Enright have protested, Tessa who wasn’t easily taken in? If she would, why hadn’t she written a letter? Why hadn’t she sent a wire, or come down on the bus, as any friend might? What was the use of the clergyman only asking if you loved him, nothing more? If his sisters didn’t like her why hadn’t they come up to her and said so? Why hadn’t they warned her of their unpleasant intentions? Why hadn’t she herself noticed how tedious it was when he told her yet again that a draper’s shop couldn’t move with the times? On their Sunday walks he had explained that certain haberdashery lines were being carried these days by the supermarkets and that this would increase. Why had she so foolishly listened instead of walking away?

On their walks she had heard about the shop in the past, about the time the overcoats had been sent to Mrs O’Keefe on approval, when a puppy had torn the fur off four of them. She had heard about bad debts, and the rules there were about the acceptance of cheques from strangers, and how some elderly woman came in from the hills every August and bought an outfit of clothes for a son who’d gone to England in 1941 and hadn’t been back since. She had heard of her fiancé’s astonishment that the YMCA billiard-room was not more frequented. She had apparently listened without it ever occurring to her that the repetition of these conversational subjects would one day grate on her nerves. Letty hadn’t warned her about that; if only Letty knew that what she’d kept on about was the least of anyone’s worries.

‘There’s something dried on to this plate,’ Rose complained one evening in the dining-room. ‘Cabbage it looks like.’

Rose had just eaten sausages and bacon from the plate. About to run a piece of bread over it in order to soak up the tasty fat that remained, she noticed that a shred of cabbage leaf had remained since the last time it was used.

‘It’s greens all right,’ Rose said. She passed the plate to her sister, who scrutinized it in turn. It was definitely the remains of greens, Matilda said.

Elmer took no notice. Often at mealtimes he was lost in the depths of mathematical calculations that had originated in the accounting office.

‘Take a look at that,’ Matilda invited, and handed Mary Louise the plate, on which the well-peppered grease that Rose had been about to consume was now congealing. The offending piece of cabbage was stuck to the rim, its presence made more permanent by the heating of the plate in the oven. Probably it was cabbage, Mary Louise agreed, since cabbage had been the vegetable at the midday meal.

‘I always took the mop to them when I washed the plates,’ Matilda said. ‘I used always to hold them up to see if there was anything like that left.’

‘I could have eaten it,’ Rose said.

‘You would have shifted it wiping with the bread,’ her sister agreed. ‘You’d have eaten it then definitely.’

‘Someone else’s leavings.’

Mary Louise rose from the table and began to clear the supper dishes away. It could happen to anyone that a speck would be left behind on a plate. It wasn’t as though it were poisonous.

‘I wonder you didn’t see it when you were drying,’ she said to Matilda.

‘When you’re drying you take everything to be clean. You take it for granted.’

‘Use a mop in future.’ Rose’s tone was peremptory, and Matilda glanced at Elmer, wondering if he’d heard. It was clear from the excitement in Matilda’s face that she considered Rose had been more than a little daring to issue so direct an order, as to a child or a servant.

Mary Louise left the dining-room without replying but a few minutes later, when she returned from the kitchen with a tray, she heard raised voices before she opened the door.

‘No more than a pigsty,’ Rose was saying.

Elmer mumbled something. Matilda said:

‘The cheek of the creature, saying you’d see it when you were drying.’

‘Knee-deep in manure that yard was! With people attending a wedding reception!’

Again there was a mumble from Elmer, interrupted by sudden shrillness from Rose.

‘What the sister got up to with Gargan was the talk of the town. It’s a wonder you didn’t marry a tinker and have done with it.’

‘Now look here,’ Elmer protested, and Mary Louise heard his chair being pushed back. His voice, too, had become loud.

‘Look nowhere,’ shrieked Rose. ‘We have her under our feet morning, noon and night.’

‘Your own sister could have eaten the dirt on that plate,’ Matilda reminded him. ‘We could be killed dead as we sit here.’

‘Arrah, don’t be talking nonsense,’ Elmer exclaimed crossly. ‘What harm would a bit of cabbage do anyone?’

‘Washed in soap it could do you harm,’ Matilda insisted. ‘And God knows what you’d find on your plate the next time.’

‘The brother’s a half-wit,’ Rose said.

Elmer didn’t reply to that. Matilda said that you might make a rice pudding in a dish that wallpaper paste had been mixed in. If the dish wasn’t washed properly you’d be eating wallpaper paste. She suggested that Elmer should make inquiries as to whether or not wallpaper paste could kill you dead.