William Trevor - Two Lives

‘We sit in the front room of an evening. There’s the wireless to listen to. Elmer buys the magazines when the YMCA has finished with them, hardly anything they cost him. They’re there in the front room, she could look at them if she wanted to.’

Mr Dallon noticed that his wife’s eyes had a distended look. They bulged and goggled. Never in all the years he’d known her did he remember seeing her eyes like that. Turning to him, she said:

‘Mary Louise is always in that attic. I told you she went up there, the day I called. Apparently she locks herself in.’

‘There’s that and other things, Mr Dallon.’ Rose’s tone was brisk in confirmation. ‘As we’ve been saying.’

‘You’d ask her a question, Mr Dallon, and she’d not reply.’

‘Why does she go up to an attic?’

‘We’ve asked her that, Mr Dallon, Elmer has asked her repeatedly. She doesn’t deign to reply.’

‘Another thing is, there are certain tasks I have myself and certain that Matilda has, and a small number that are Mary Louise’s. We reached that agreement, but to tell you the truth the entire house could be a rubbish dump for all she’d care.’

‘A rubbish dump?’

‘Filthy dirty,’ Rose explained. ‘If she has a mood on she won’t lift a finger. She puts the plates on the table unwashed from the last time. There’s grime and filth on the plates and she doesn’t so much as blink.’

‘Then again, in the shop, Mr Dallon. A person will come in looking for oilcloth and she’ll say we don’t stock it. When the fact of the matter is we have oilcloth in three different weights and more than a dozen patterns.’

‘To tell the truth, we can’t get rid of it.’ Rose allowed herself a deviation, though her lips remained tightened in a knot even as she spoke. ‘Nobody goes much for oilcloth these days, but Elmer says don’t throw it out so we don’t.’

‘Yesterday, for instance, we heard her saying to a person that oilcloth might be obtained next door, in Renehan’s.’

‘Perhaps Mary Louise wasn’t aware –’

‘There is no commodity in the shop we haven’t pointed out to her.’

‘She locks the attic door on herself, Mr Dallon. There’s a lot of property that she’s moved from one attic to the next. It wasn’t hers to touch, as a matter of fact, but never mind that. You rap on the door and ask her if she’s sick. She doesn’t say a word.’

‘Not a word,’ Matilda confirmed.

‘We thought ourselves,’ Mrs Dallon brought herself to say, ‘that Mary Louise was perhaps disappointed because a family hasn’t been started.’

‘Wouldn’t you say it’s a godsend it hasn’t, Mrs Dallon?’

‘I’ll give you an example,’ Matilda offered. ‘I was closing the shop a week or so back and I said to her, “Wait a minute, Mary Louise, I want to try on a few of the skirts that came in this morning. ” All I intended was that she’d give me an opinion – sometimes someone else is better than yourself. Well, she stood as still as a statue at the bottom of the stairs that goes up to the office, like she’d been put into the corner at school. “How’s that? ” I said when I’d slipped on the first one, a blue and mauve dog’s tooth it was. D’you know the reply I received?’

Together, the Dallons indicated they didn’t.

‘She said I looked ridiculous in that skirt. Then she walked away. Ridiculous. No reason given.’

‘Another thing.’ Once more, Rose took up the catalogue of shortcomings. ‘There’s a little porcelain egg-cup our mother had. Now, no one uses that egg-cup except myself. “Rose can have my egg-cup,” my mother said a week before she died. I walked into the kitchen one day and there she was, eating an egg out of it.’

‘These days she sometimes takes her food in the kitchen,’ Matilda explained. ‘She won’t enter the dining-room if she has a mood on.’

‘ “That’s a special egg-cup, Mary Louise,” I said, not cross, just gently. I said it even though I’d told her before. “I’d rather you didn’t use it, Mary Louise,” I said.’

Mrs Dallon was about to say that anyone can forget a request like that, or confuse one egg-cup with another. She began to speak, but Rose shook her head before she’d said more than half a dozen words.

‘A week later I found it chipped on the rim. You couldn’t have it on the table now.’

‘It’s going up to the attic I’d worry about more,’ Mrs Dallon confessed. ‘And eating her food in the kitchen. Why does she do that?’

‘That’s the difficulty we have,’ Matilda said. ‘You wouldn’t know why she’d do anything. That’s why we’re sitting here.’

Mr Dallon asked how Elmer felt.

‘Elmer’s tormented by it,’ Rose replied. ‘You have only to look at the unfortunate man.’

Not here, any more than in the town, did they intend to mention that their brother had been driven to drink. With the girl gone from the house he’d be back to normal within a day, neither had the slightest doubt about that. He’d come and go as he had before the unfortunate entanglement, without bringing the odour of a distillery into the house every time he returned to it. A veil would be spread over the period of unpleasantness.

‘But what on earth d’you think is the matter with Mary Louise?’ Mrs Dallon agitatedly exclaimed. ‘What’s troubling her?’

‘That’s why we’re sitting here, Mrs Dallon,’ Matilda repeated. ‘In order to gain your assistance. We were wondering could it be mental?’

‘Mental?’

‘If you were in the house ten minutes with her the word would come into your head. Is it a normal thing for any person to spend three-quarters of the day in an attic?’

‘I thought it was just the evenings.’

‘The evenings is the main time. But sometimes you look round in the shop and she’s not to be seen. Well, you saw for yourself.’

‘Sundays too,’ Matilda put in. ‘An entire Sunday morning. Many’s the time.’

‘Another thing, she’ll go out on her bicycle on a Sunday after dinner and you’d worry in case she’s ridden into a bog or something. Nine and ten o’clock she’s not back.’

‘She comes over here on a Sunday, but she’s never as late as that.’

‘Nine or ten, isn’t it, Matilda?’

‘Oh, easily. With the long evenings she’s out till all hours.’

‘There was one night she didn’t come in at all.’

‘What?’ Just for an instant Mrs Dallon sounded hysterical. Her husband raised a hand, as though to calm her. ‘What?’ she said again, whispering now.

‘The day you called in she walked out of the house and didn’t come in till six o’clock the next morning.’

‘But where on earth was she?’

‘Matilda and I were all for going to the Guards. “She’s gone over to Culleen,” Elmer said.’

‘She wasn’t here.’

‘Well, there you are then. To tell you the truth, Mrs Dallon, we’re worried the entire time. The state she’s in she could end up anywhere on that cycle. You hear terrible things these days.’

‘We didn’t know any of this.’ Mr Dallon slowly shook his head, the skin of his face puckered with concern.

‘She’s riding wildly about the country, God knows where she goes. There was another time we had to make Elmer go out looking for her.’

Matilda didn’t add that they had watched Elmer going straight to Hogan’s, that he hadn’t returned until after ten, an hour after Mary Louise had returned herself. Neither sister revealed that Elmer had argued that it was up to his wife to decide if she wanted to go for a bicycle ride, and how long she should remain away. Rose said:

‘ “I wouldn’t have it,” she said to Mrs Riordan in the shop a week ago. “The wide lapels don’t suit you.” The woman had her money on the counter. You can’t run a shop like that. If Elmer knew the half of it he’d jump out of his skin.’