William Trevor - Two Lives

It was then that Matilda mentioned a place they’d heard of, an asylum for women who were mentally distressed. They hadn’t made inquiries; a person had mentioned it to them, which told a tale in itself.

‘Very well looked after,’ Rose said. ‘A garden to go into. The food’s second to none.’

‘My God!’ Aghast, Mrs Dallon stared at her visitors. The suggestion was horrible; the thought of it made her feel sick in the stomach. No matter how oddly Mary Louise was behaving, why should she be committed to an asylum?

‘Mary Louise is not mad,’ Mr Dallon protested. ‘That doesn’t come into it.’

‘It wasn’t me who thought of that place,’ Rose reminded him. ‘Another person was trying to help.’

‘She should definitely see Dr Cormican.’ He turned to his wife. ‘We’ll drive in and have a word with Cormican.’

The sisters, feeling themselves dismissed by this decision, rose immediately. But before they left Rose said:

‘Naturally, no one would want the poor girl confined in some place when she could be looked after by her own. We don’t want to leave without saying that.’

‘Her own?’

‘Her family we were thinking.’ Rose looked around the kitchen. ‘Where things are familiar to her.’

Apart from words of leave-taking, nothing further was said. Kilkelly’s car carried the sisters back to the town. The Dallons prepared themselves for an immediate visit to Dr Cormican.

More than most people, Bridget, the manageress of Hogan’s Hotel, knew everything that happened in the town. She had noted with interest during the last eighteen months the intensifying of Elmer Quarry’s addiction. It was a curious phenomenon, a considerable surprise that a Quarry should have come to err in this way, since the family was known for its longstanding tradition of sobriety. Bridget was also struck by a related habit Elmer Quarry had developed, that of leaving the bar by the door that led to the hall of the hotel and pausing there for a few minutes. She had observed him watching her through the glass partition of the reception desk, while pretending to admire the antlers on the wall at the bottom of the stairs or to consult the Irish Field calendar of the year’s events. If through curiosity she emerged, he remarked on the weather and asked her how she was. Then he said good-night and went away.

Well used in her professional capacity to the attentions of men, surreptitious or otherwise, Bridget knew she was not mistaken in her surmises about all this. The direct way out of the bar to the street was by the other door: there was no call for any drinker to make his way into the hotel. And there was a quality in Elmer Quarry’s mildly inebriated gaze that precluded any further doubt: when he was boozed up he wanted to take a gander at her. Bridget didn’t mind – if you minded stuff like that you might as well change into another business. But she wondered about the girl Elmer Quarry had married, a kid whom no time ago she remembered seeing on the streets with a school satchel. She’d heard it said it couldn’t be easy for the girl with two harridans breathing down her neck; even worse when Quarry had taken to the bottle and wasn’t averse to eyeing other women.

‘What d’you make of Quarry?’ She put the question to the barman one evening, joining him in the bar when he’d closed it for the night. She usually looked in at this time and had a medium sherry while Gerry finished the glass of stout that had lasted all evening.

‘He’s the better for it with a couple inside him.’ Experienced in such matters, Gerry was firm.

‘It came on him suddenly though. Time was he only took a mineral.’

‘ You’d notice it in the older type of bachelor.’ Gerry paused. He savoured another mouthful of stout, then slowly wiped a residue of foam from his upper lip. ‘The Quarrys marry to get a baby,’ he said.

‘I know they do.’

‘She saw what was there before she took the step herself. Isn’t it evens Stephens if she can’t oblige the man?’

‘I wouldn’t mind being a fly on the wall in that house.’

‘I’ll tell you this. In a twelvemonth he’ll be well away.’

Later that night, as she undressed in her small room at the top of the hotel, Bridget was still thinking about Elmer Quarry and the girl who had married him. In particular she’d have liked to be a fly on the wall of their bedroom. She’d have liked to be a fly inside Elmer Quarry’s head, able to see what he was thinking as he lay down beside his young wife, and to know why it was he loitered in the hall of the hotel. But in bed, when she’d turned the light out, she forgot about the Quarrys and thought about the curate she’d been in love with when she was a girl herself, who’d been sent away to another parish. ‘I’ll give it up for you,’ he’d whispered, before Canon Maguire stepped in.

‘We just thought we’d see how you were getting on,’ Mrs Dallon said in the shop. ‘We had to drive in anyway.’

‘We haven’t seen you for a while,’ Mary Louise’s father added.

From behind the counter their daughter acknowledged their explanation. She asked them if they’d like to come upstairs and then led the way. The sisters greeted them with nods of approval.

‘You could swing a cat or two here,’ Mr Dallon said in the big front room.

Mary Louise made tea and brought it to them. Her mother said:

‘We’ve been a bit worried about you, Mary Louise.’

‘Worried? Why worried?’

Neither replied, neither knowing quite how to. Dr Cormican had explained to them that unless Mary Louise complained of being ill and came to see him he could not help. There could be a dozen reasons, he said, why she should choose to spend so much time in a locked room. People got up to greater eccentricities than that. ‘Why don’t you chat with her yourselves?’ he’d suggested.

‘Are you all right, Mary Louise?’ Mr Dallon asked. ‘Is everything OK with you?’

‘Why wouldn’t it be?’

‘Now, Mary Louise,’ her mother began, then checked herself. ‘What we mean is, maybe it’s lonesome for you. Maybe you miss the family and the farm.’

‘I’ve been married two and a half years.’

‘Even so, pet.’

‘Has somebody said something?’

‘The odd person has noticed you have a lonesome look.’

‘You don’t come out to see us on Sundays any more. We miss the visits, Mary Louise.’

‘James misses seeing you. Letty was saying the same the other day.’

‘Letty’ll soon be married herself.’

‘Yes, she will.’

‘If there’s anything troubling you, Mary Louise – ’

‘There’s nothing.’

They talked of other matters, of Letty’s wedding and of Mary Louise’s Aunt Emmeline coming to live at Culleen, of the way James bossed them about these days and how pleased they were that he continued to display initiative. Driving back to the farm, Mr Dallon was silent. The visit had changed his mood. He felt foolish. He should have foreseen that a marriage with such an age difference would not be plain sailing: he should have been against it. But he hadn’t been and that was that. He’d wasted a lot of time listening to the Quarry sisters and then waiting until Dr Cormican was ready for them, and then sitting down over a cup of tea in the middle of the morning. He resented, above all things, wasted time.

‘They’re troublemakers, those women,’ he said.

Mrs Dallon nodded, and agreed that they were. But even as she spoke she shared, without knowing that she did, the Quarrys’ view that Mary Louise’s marriage of convenience had turned out to be a grievous mistake. Mrs Dallon was never to alter that opinion.

Mary Louise did not change her ways. She had come to terms with Elmer and his sisters; she no longer feared the wrath of the two women’s tongues, and long ago she had ceased to wish to please her husband. She opened their bedroom window wider now, for his whiskey breath was so potent in the early part of the night that once or twice she felt light-headed through inhaling it.