William Trevor - Two Lives

‘She didn’t say she was glad or anything,’ Letty went on. ‘All she did was nod. I told her about the house and she didn’t even ask where it is.’

‘Was she maybe disappointed you didn’t ask her to be your bridesmaid?’

‘You can’t have a married woman a bridesmaid. I told her, but afterwards I wondered did she hear.’

‘She should see Dr Cormican. You can get tests these days.’

‘I don’t think it’s that.’

‘What else then?’

‘He’s drinking.’

‘Who is?’

‘Elmer.’

‘Have sense, Letty. The man doesn’t touch a drop. The Quarrys never have.’

‘He’s taken to it. It’s all over town.’

Had Letty known it, she might have added that the unexpected resort to whiskey on Elmer Quarry’s part was assumed in the town to be related to the childless marriage, which his sisters now openly implied he regarded as a mistake.

‘Hogan’s bar,’ Letty said. ‘I’ve seen him there myself.’

‘My God!’

‘You’d want to shake her when she’s sitting there saying nothing. But the next minute you’d be sorry for her.’

Mrs Dallon later repeated the whole conversation, word for word, to her husband. He, too, was ignorant of the fact that Elmer Quarry had taken to spending time in Hogan’s bar. It had never been mentioned to him by anyone at the cattle-fairs, but Mrs Dallon pointed out that it probably wouldn’t be, the subject being delicate.

‘Once a family’s started it’ll all settle down,’ Mr Dallon said.

‘Please God it will.’

But Mrs Dallon could not sleep that night. She lay there remembering the details of Mary Louise’s own birth, so very late the baby had been, and then the easy time she’d had compared with Letty, and James. Growing up, Mary Louise had been a wide-eyed little girl, not sharp like Letty, nor rushy like James. Sometimes her dreaminess would irritate you, sometimes she forgot to do things and you’d think she’d forgotten deliberately but she never had. There’d been the day she’d fallen through the outhouse trap-door, when she’d lain on the straw for ages before the barking of the sheepdogs attracted their attention. There’d been the time Miss Mullover had written on her end-of-term letter that she was paying attention at last. Dr Cormican had thought she might have a grumbling appendix and they’d worried about the hospital charges, but it turned out to be nothing at all. She’d never looked more radiant than she did in her wedding-dress, with the Limerick veil borrowed from Emmeline.

Towards dawn Mrs Dallon slept. She dreamed, but afterwards remembered nothing, aware only vaguely that Mary Louise, as a baby and a child and a bride, had passed from her waking consciousness into a muddle of fantasy.

*

On Christmas Day Mary Louise sat with her husband and her sisters-in-law in church and afterwards they gave one another presents, as the Quarrys by tradition always did at that particular time, before the turkey was carved. Bitter weather came in January, and Mary Louise imagined the stream with the trout in it frozen over, and wondered if herons went away in winter.

Rose and her sister passed on to certain of their customers their belief that their sister-in-law was not in her right mind. There was something queer in that family, they said, James Dallon far from the full shilling and the cousin who’d died a peculiarity by all accounts. Increasingly in the new year the daily thoughts of the sisters were influenced by their observation of their sister-in-law and the disintegration, as they saw it, which she had brought about in their brother. They did not, in their gossiping with certain of their customers, ever touch upon this latter subject, feeling it to be one that shamed the family.

‘What harm’ll it do?’ Matilda said early in February after they had yet again discussed – but more seriously now – the notion of visiting the Dallons’ farmhouse and expressing their concern. They talked about this for a further week, and on the twentieth of the month arranged with Kilkelly at the garage to be driven to Culleen the following day.

Mary Louise no longer went secretly to the attic rooms but openly ascended the flight of stairs, even leaving the door at the bottom open. There’d been comment of course. Elmer had asked her if she was looking for something up there, and when Rose raised the matter in the dining-room Mary Louise replied that she went to the attics for privacy. She had taken to locking the door of the one she preferred and once Matilda rattled the handle, but she ignored the sound. ‘Are you all right in there, Mary Louise?’ her sister-in-law called out, and she didn’t reply. She had moved everything out into the room next door except the armchair she sat in. When they said there was something they wanted she was able to tell them that.

It was often cold in her attic but that never mattered. She tucked her legs under her in the armchair and thought of her cousin in his grave, the bones revealed in his face, flesh putrefying. She blamed God for that; in her attic she made an enemy of God because all she had left was the echo of her cousin’s voice – the way he had of pronouncing certain words, the timbre of his intonations, the images his voice conveyed.

‘I dreamed I was sad and sometimes cried. But through the tears and the melancholy, inspired by the music of the verse or the beauty of the evening, there always rose upwards, like the grasses of early spring, shoots of happy feeling…’

Again and again his voice repeated it. Hers now joined in. For these were words they must learn by heart, he’d said.

19

She packs her things, empty of emotion. How many women have come and gone in thirty-one years? Some of them have died, others been moved because they had to be. The food has been indifferent for thirty-one years, often worse than that. In winter they have felt cold from time to time, due to economies.

‘You’ll be all right,’ Miss Foye reassures. ‘You’ll be OK outside.’

‘I thought I’d die here.’

‘Oh, now, now.’

Miss Foye smiles it all away. It occurs to her that this one has been longer in the house than any of the others. She might say so in a sentimental way, but decides against it. A thought like that can be upsetting.

20

‘We would not have come,’ Rose said, ‘in normal circumstances.’

‘We didn’t want to come,’ Matilda emphasized.

‘No, we didn’t want to come at all. We held back – oh, for how long, Matilda? Would you say a year?’

‘A good year.’

The panic that the first utterances of the sisters had stirred in Mrs Dallon did not quieten. Even before they stepped into the house, while Kilkelly’s man was turning the car in the yard and bringing it to a halt to wait for them, they had offered an explanation for their unannounced presence, repeating in a different way what Letty had reported: there was something the matter with Mary Louise.

‘She hasn’t been herself, certainly.’ Mr Dallon’s narrow grey face was enlivened by a reflection of his wife’s anxiety.

‘Well, of course we don’t know what being herself is,’ Rose said. ‘Strictly speaking. What I mean, Mr Dallon, is we only know the person Elmer brought into the household. To be candid with you, she was strange from the first.’

‘Though of course, Mr Dallon, not as unusual as she is now. Not of course by a long chalk.’

Distractedly Mrs Dallon poured the tea she’d made, and even asked if the man waiting in the car would like a cup. The sisters said not to bother, but Mr Dallon felt the man should be offered something, and carried a cup out. Certainly Mary Louise had become quieter, he reflected on this journey. Letty had been on about it again last evening: anyone would be quieter, she’d said, married to Quarry. But the marriage had taken place ages ago, she added, and every time she saw her Mary Louise was quieter still. When he returned to the kitchen Rose was saying: