William Trevor - Two Lives

‘Ah, it’s great you came on out,’ Letty greeted her when they entered the lounge bar. Still in her wedding-dress, Letty was smoking a cigarette.

‘No trouble at all,’ Elmer said.

For some weeks there had been unpleasantness in the house because Rose and Matilda had not been included in the wedding invitation. They were indignant, pointing out that since they were family relations the oversight was hurtful. When he asked Mary Louise if she’d have a word with her sister, all she’d done was to shake her head at him.

‘You’ll take a glass, Mr Quarry?’ the bridegroom’s father offered from behind the bar. ‘What’ll I pour you?’

Elmer replied that he’d like some whiskey. ‘An occasion and a half, sir,’ he added agreeably. ‘Wouldn’t we be correct to call it that?’

‘Oh, we would, Mr Quarry. He’s the lucky man for himself.’

‘He is of course.’

There the exchange of views terminated. Elmer returned to Mary Louise’s side. He shook hands with her father and with her mother. He remarked again upon the importance of the occasion.

‘Once in a lifetime, Elmer,’ Mr Dallon said.

‘That’s true enough, sir.’

Mrs Dennehy came up and reminded them that all drinks were on the house. She wore a lot of lipstick, Elmer noticed, for a woman of her age. Into the bargain her fingernails were scarlet. A huge woman she was, with a brassy voice.

‘What’ll I get you all?’ Mrs Dennehy arched her eyebrows, glancing hospitably from face to face. When a choice was made she turned away to fetch the drinks. Elmer wanted to take a look at her back but thought he’d better not. He said:

‘Wasn’t it great we could let Letty have the dress material at cost, Mr Dallon?’

‘It was good of you, Elmer.’

‘Any time we could oblige you in a matter like that, sir, just walk into the shop.’

The least he could do, Rose had said, was to mention the way they’d been treated to his in-laws. She’d come into the accounting office when he was up to his eyes and started on about it again. She’d wanted to know what Mary Louise had said when he’d put the thing to her, and he’d had to make up an excuse. ‘No more manners to them than tinkers,’ his sister snapped at him in the end. ‘What good did getting in with them do you?’

The good it did was that they had an extra pair of hands in the shop and in the house. He put it like that to her because that was the type of talk she understood. They should be glad of an extra pair of hands, he said, but Rose ignored that completely. She mentioned drink. It was the talk of the town, she said.

He took a drink now and again. He went out to get company, the way any man might. What company was there in the snapping and offence-taking that occurred three times a day in the dining-room? You could spend two hours playing billiards down in the YMCA with no cause to open your mouth except to issue a greeting to an elderly caretaker. ‘You’re drinking like a fish,’ Rose said.

Mrs Dennehy returned with a tray of glasses for Mary Louise and her mother and father. There was one for herself also, but nothing for him.

‘To the pair of them,’ Mrs Dennehy began, and Elmer interrupted. He pointed out that he would be unable to join in the toast, on account of having an empty glass. He began to move towards the bar, but Mrs Dennehy said she wouldn’t hear of it at a private function. She seized his glass, giving him her own to look after.

‘Let everyone hold on a minute!’ she commanded in her rumbustious way. ‘No one touch a drop till Mr Quarry is replenished!’

He couldn’t recall her ever coming into the shop. He’d have noticed her all right, the lipstick and the fingernails. He suddenly remembered walking into the front room when he was no more than fifteen, to find a similar build of woman trying on petticoats.

‘A drop of the hard stuff!’ She handed him his glass, and he noticed that there was more than a small one in it. They all joined in the toast except Mary Louise, who took it into her head to walk away. It embarrassed Elmer that she did so, in the company of her mother and father and Mrs Dennehy.

‘We’re pleased about it, Mrs Dennehy,’ Mr Dallon said, but Elmer doubted it: poor Protestants for donkey’s years, why would they be pleased to see their grandchildren brought up holy Romans?

‘I’m right pleased myself. Right pleased!’ Mrs Dennehy exclaimed. Her teeth were in proportion to the rest of her. When she addressed anyone she opened her mouth very wide, which might have contributed to the loudness of her voice. You could see all the way back to her molars.

‘It was a great spread you laid on for our own wedding,’ Elmer confided quietly to his mother-in-law, who seemed to be a bit out of things. ‘You did wonders that day, Mrs Dallon.’

He listened while Mrs Dallon told him that this wedding party, too, should be taking place at Culleen. But Mrs Dennehy had come over a month ago and put it to her that since such large numbers were expected, and since the Dennehys had such spacious premises and were in the business professionally, it might be in order to reverse the usual procedure. Letty had been in favour of that also, and reluctantly Mrs Dallon had given in.

‘Ah, you would of course. And wouldn’t you save a bit while you were at it?’

A familiar euphoria had begun to flow softly through Elmer. He’d taken to keeping a little John Jameson in the wall-safe in the accounting office, for any man would require a drink in certain circumstances. There was an expression Matilda had used one time: trapped like a squirrel she’d said he was. She was thinking of a time when they were children and a man had come into the shop with three squirrels in a cage, trying to sell them in some ignorant kind of way, beautiful soft fur, he kept saying. Their father had called Elmer and the girls downstairs so that they could get a close look at the creatures, and then had sent the man packing. In Elmer’s view being trapped wasn’t a bad description of his own predicament, but he had no intention of giving Matilda the satisfaction of knowing that he agreed with her. Ridiculous, he’d said when she made her observation. Another thing was that when you’d had a drink or two you got a predicament like that into proportion – which naturally he couldn’t have said to Matilda either.

‘Bullocks are fetching well,’ he remarked to his father-in-law. ‘What’s that I heard a hundredweight?’

‘Thirty-five last week.’

‘You’d not turn up your nose at that, sir.’

Mrs Dallon had watched Elmer finishing the first drink he’d been given quicker than anyone else. He was three-quarters of the way through the second and his neck and forehead had begun to glow. She glanced across the bar to where the bridegroom was standing with Letty and some people she didn’t know. To her relief, Dennehy appeared to be drinking some kind of fruit juice.

‘I haven’t a bullock to sell,’ Mrs Dallon heard her husband saying. ‘Unfortunately.’

She returned her attention to her younger daughter’s husband. His conversation wasn’t sensible. He was rambling in his speech, going on about what some bullock or other had fetched at a fair ten years ago. When Mrs Dennehy had been standing there he’d kept staring into her mouth. At one point he’d stood back in order to get a general view of her.

‘The biggest price ever paid in the town,’ he was saying now.

Dennehy, with his arm round Letty’s waist, was thinking she had a bit of style. She could hold her own on the family premises, calm as a cucumber. The dress suited her beautifully, greenish with shiny stuff run through it, threads that caught the light when she shifted. Underneath it, pinned to her straps, she was wearing the good-luck brooch he’d given her. The emerald engagement ring was still in place, with the gold band beside it.