William Trevor - Two Lives

‘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.

‘I was out looking for primroses,’ she lied to her cousin in the untidy room, having noticed a few by the side of the avenue. She always went to Culleen on a Sunday, she added, but today she’d ridden about a bit, thinking to pick spring flowers.