William Trevor - Two Lives

Although her mother had hinted at the gossip that had begun, Mary Louise remained unaware of it. Nor did she know that her mother constantly worried, distressfully imagining a solitary figure in a locked room, nor that her father was angry with himself for permitting a marriage involving such an age difference. More and more she kept to the kitchen during mealtimes, in spite of Elmer’s protests that in doing so she was upsetting his sisters. Why should she not? she thought. She didn’t like them.

‘Bersenev took a droshky going back to Moscow and went in search of Insarov. But it took him a long time to find the Bulgarian because Insarov had moved to new lodgings…’

His search dulled the ornaments in the Quarrys’ dining-room, the grim dumb waiter, the sideboard, the double curtains of lace and chintz. Mary Louise hated the dining-room. She hated its Turkey carpet and its brown pictures and the salt and pepper in the left-hand sideboard drawer, and the smell of old food. But when she listened now, eating alone in the kitchen, she often heard the sound of Bersenev’s droshky. Without closing her eyes, there was the brick facade of the house where Insarov lodged.

Yelena Nikolayevna loved Insarov and didn’t know it. Yelena was a tall girl, olive-skinned and grey-eyed, with a complicated nature. She had been fond of her father, then cooled towards him, attaching herself to her mother instead. In the end she had distanced herself from both. Mary Louise tried to imagine that. Nothing even vaguely like it had occurred in her own childhood. Her first memory was of being with Letty, sitting beside Letty’s doll on stubble and Letty saying she must be still because dolls always were. Letty pretended to give her things to eat, as she did with her doll. The sun was warm on her face and head. Not far away a tiny bird was rooting in the stubble, and Letty tried to entice it towards Mary Louise and the doll so that all three could be fed, but the bird flew away. The first time she went to Miss Mullover’s schoolroom it was in the trap, James and Letty taking it in turn to hold the reins. They tied the pony up in the yard of Hogan’s Hotel and then her brother and sister each took one of Mary Louise’s hands. ‘A for Apple,’ Miss Mullover said, the tip of her cane on the rosy apple of her chart, then moving on. ‘B for Boot.’ Miss Mullover gave her letters to copy. ‘Mary Louise,’ she said; and pointed out each letter, saying that was what her name looked like. After the first time they didn’t go to school in the trap any more. Mary Louise sat on the crossbar of James’s bicycle, and he was made to promise that he wouldn’t ride fast. In time Mary Louise learned to ride Letty’s bicycle and Letty inherited her mother’s. On Fridays Miss Mullover always set more homework than she did on other days and James and Letty complained all the way back to the farmhouse. Two verses of poetry, ten spellings, three sums, a composition, history or geography, tables. On Mondays Miss Mullover was always cross, sarcastically reading out a composition if it was very bad, rapping knuckles with her cane. ‘You’ll stay in, James,’ she nearly always snapped on Mondays. ‘Until you know those verses perfectly you’ll not leave this room today.’ When Mary Louise first heard the story of Joan of Arc she imagined the peasant girl kneeling on the ploughed earth, hearing the voices. She imagined her waiting, tied to the stake, watching the building of the fire that was to burn her. Sometimes the boys from the Christian Brothers’ shouted abuse when the three Dallon children rode by, calling them heretics, reminding them that they would burn in hell. James always replied in kind, but Letty took no notice. ‘Why’ll we burn in hell?’ Mary Louise asked, and Letty said they wouldn’t.

Because Robert never came to Culleen when Aunt Emmeline visited the farmhouse, Mary Louise hadn’t known of his existence until she went to school. ‘I’m your cousin,’ he said one day in the school yard, and that was the first memory she had of him. After that she noticed he always finished his transcription before the others, and was best at spelling and tables. Her mother explained what it meant, being a cousin. ‘Aunt Emmeline’s one child,’ her mother said. She was twelve when she fell in love with him.

In the locked attic, or crouched among the Attridge graves, Mary Louise delighted in the intimacies death could not touch, any more than it could touch the love story of Yelena and Insarov. A legacy came to Robert from some distant relative of his father’s: he was no longer poor. On the day after Elmer first invited her to the Electric Cinema Robert arrived at the farmhouse. ‘No,’ she said when Elmer asked her to accompany him again, and went instead in search of the heron with her cousin. When they married they travelled in Italy and France. They sat outside a café by the sea, watching the people strolling by, Robert in a pale suit and a hat that matched it. He leaned across the table to kiss her, as he had the first time in the graveyard. Light as a butterfly, his kisses danced up and down her arm, from the tips of her fingers to her shoulders. The café orchestra began. They drank white wine.

Without closing her eyes, Mary Louise could see the flare of the gas-jets and snowy carriages drawing up. Tall Russians conversed in rooms with polished floors; walls were lined with mirrors, small oval tables covered with velvet and gold-fringed cloths. There was a haziness, in which her cousin’s voice spoke, in which her own voice repeated the difficult Russian names, and then through which they themselves passed back and forth like softly coloured shadows.

21

Bríd Beamish is the first to go. Bríd Beamish received messages from U2. She was told U2 were in trouble. She kept contacting the Garda, saying the IRA were after them. Dave Lee Travis spoke personally to her, sending her messages through his disc-jockey chatter. When her father said he wouldn’t have Dave Lee Travis’ name repeated in the house she lit a cigarette and dropped it into the petrol tank of his Ford Cortina. She travelled to Lincolnshire in search of café life and was missing for a month. Afterwards she said she’d been on the game, an expression that confused her family until someone in a bar told her father what it meant. Schizophrenia was the diagnosis. And mild erotomania.

Bríd Beamish waves at the congregated women. She stands by the open back door of the car her father had to buy when she destroyed his Ford Cortina. Right as rain she’ll be, provided she doesn’t fall down on the medication: presentable is what they mean, and looking at her the women agree she’s a lot more presentable now than she was the day she arrived, no reason not to believe she’ll walk up the aisle. ‘Cheers, dear!’ the Spanish wife calls out, and old Sister Hannah, who developed a great affection for Brid Beamish, who was her confidante, is tearful.

The car door bangs, tyres crunch on the gravel.

‘Back to prostitution,’ Small Sadie predicts in her shrill screech.

22

Letty’s wedding party was very different from Mary Louise’s. It was held in the public house referred to by Rose when the news of Letty’s romance was first mentioned in the dining-room above the shop. As Rose had stated, the public house in question was at a crossroads, a long single-storey building advertised in blue and yellow neon letters as Dennehy’s Lounge. In grey pebble-dash, it stood back from the intersection of roads, with a wide parking space in front of it. Dennehy’s was known for miles around, its regular clientele consisting entirely of country people. Harp Lager had supplied the neon sign, and in return was advertised prominently as well.

After the wedding ceremony a lift was arranged for Mary Louise and Elmer with Bleheen of the artificial-insemination unit, a ferrety man of the same age as Elmer, who was still pursuing his search for a suitable wife. The conversation in the car reminded Mary Louise of the conversation with the three diners at the Strand Hotel on the evening of her own wedding. She sat in the back and didn’t contribute to it.