William Trevor - Two Lives

Elmer vaguely nodded, the gesture implying that he’d forgotten about the attics: privately he doubted that there were rats in the attics any more than anywhere else.

Renehan finished his drink and left Hogan’s bar. Elmer was still on his own when Letty and her husband entered it a quarter of an hour later. Behind the bar Gerry was reading the Evening Herald . No one else was present.

‘Elmer,’ Letty said.

‘I had a bit of business here,’ he began.

‘We want to talk about Mary Louise.’

Dennehy said he’d get the drinks. Letty led the way to a table in a corner. ‘And whatever Mr Quarry’s having,’ Elmer heard Dennehy ordering. At the same time his sister-in-law said:

‘We wanted to catch you on your own, Elmer. I’ve left messages for Mary Louise only she doesn’t ring me back.’

‘I’ll tell her –’

‘Rose said something about a safe.’

‘That’s a private matter, actually.’

‘What’s Rose talking about, Elmer?’

Elmer explained what had occurred was that Mary Louise, in a hurry for some money one day, had borrowed a sum from the safe in the accounting office. It was nothing, he said. A storm in a tea-cup.

‘Rose said they have to keep their handbags under lock and key.

To Elmer’s relief, Dennehy arrived at that moment with the drinks. ‘Good luck!’ Dennehy said, raising his glass and then occupying himself with the lighting of a cigarette.

‘What’s the matter with Mary Louise, Elmer?’

‘Ah, she’s all right. Mary Louise likes to be on her own, and it’s a thing my sisters don’t understand. She likes to go out on her bicycle, and then again she likes to have an area of her own in the house. That’s all that’s in it. No more than that.’

‘Your sisters went out to Culleen a few months ago. They made certain statements about Mary Louise.’

‘What kind of statements?’

‘They said she was away in the head.’

Elmer gave a jump. He finished the liquid in his glass and signalled to Gerry to replenish it, as well as the two glasses of his companions. Noticing the gesture, Letty shook her head. Dennehy nodded.

‘I didn’t know that,’ Elmer said.

‘Didn’t you know they went out to Culleen?’

‘To tell you the truth, I didn’t.’

‘I haven’t seen Mary Louise since our wedding. There wasn’t much the matter with her then. Except, of course, she doesn’t have a lot to say for herself any more.’

‘We’ve all noticed that, Letty.’

‘She was always talkative in the past.’

There were no rats in the attics. If there were rats in the attics you’d hear them scampering about above your head. For all he knew, it was all over the town that she’d been buying rat poison.

‘My parents wanted her to see Dr Cormican,’ Letty said.

‘It would do no harm. A check-up wouldn’t hurt anyone.’

‘She said she wouldn’t.’

‘Let me have a word with her, Letty.’

‘I’m in every day. Tell her I’m waiting for her phone call.’

Abruptly, Letty stood up. She’d had only a sip or two of her drink. All the time they were talking, Elmer noticed, she hadn’t stopped frowning, a small pucker of worry at the top of her forehead.

‘I’ll be seeing you,’ he said loudly in case Gerry would think they weren’t on terms.

‘Come out to the house,’ Dennehy invited, hastily finishing his drink. Letty didn’t say anything.

Elmer returned to the bar and ordered a double measure of whiskey.

‘God, isn’t that shocking?’ Gerry remarked as he handed back some change, and for a moment Elmer thought he was referring to some aspect of the conversation that had taken place in the bar. But Gerry, one eye still on the Evening Herald , was drawing his attention to the murder of King Feisal of Iraq.

Not interested in this far-off violence, Elmer nevertheless deplored the event. All it amounted to, he was thinking, was more of their outrageousness. There’d been no call to go visiting the Dallons, and definitely no call to say his wife was mentally affected or to mention the money borrowed from the safe. The truth was that Mary Louise had settled down the way she wanted to settle down, which was what he’d been endeavouring to explain to the sister. She slept up in the attic now, no reason why she shouldn’t if that was what she wanted.

*

The chimney-sweep lit the first fire in the grate to make certain the chimney was drawing well. Mary Louise carried up coals and wood from the cellar. Her presence was unnecessary in the shop because customers were few; her serving there had been part of a general pretence, or so it seemed to her now. Days went by now during which she addressed neither her husband nor her sisters-in-law. Sleeping in the attic room, she no longer experienced feelings of shame when she first awoke in the mornings. In the kitchen she washed the dishes the household’s food had been eaten from. She continued to perform the other household chores she’d been allocated, but always took her meals on her own. Whenever she felt like it she rode away from the town on her bicycle, going to the graveyard mostly, sometimes walking in the fields near her aunt’s house. The house was empty now, though not yet sold.

Often she thought she would like to be more alone than she was. The voices of her sisters-in-law and of Elmer were tiresome. The tread of feet on the stairs was tiresome, the clatter of dishes, the rattle of the shop bell. To press away such sounds she played a game that reminded her of games played in her childhood: she closed her eyes and watched herself wandering from room to room, in and out of her sisters-in-law’s bedrooms, opening the windows of the big front room, making the dining-room different. On the first-floor landing there was a glass chandelier in pink and scarlet. There was a smell of flowers and newly ironed table-linen. In the kitchen a cook moved her saucepans on the range; raw mutton waited on a table beside high piles of plates that rattled when the cabbage was chopped. In the yard chickens screamed, chased by someone intent upon wringing their necks.

Outside, blue shutters covered the windows of the shop; the entrance doors were locked and bolted. Somewhere, at the heart of everything, her cousin belonged, as delicately present as the confection of refurbished rooms. Everything was fragile: only too easily it could all be broken, like porcelain falling on flagstones. Gently, fingers to their lips, she and her cousin laughed.

People no longer mentioned his wife to Elmer. In the town she was talked about less than she had been, accepted now as an eccentric person. She was seen regularly on her bicycle, wrapped up closely, a headscarf tied around her head. In January of the new year – 1959 – she visited her sister and admired the fittings in the kitchen, and listened while Letty told her what it was like to be pregnant. Her mother, in January also, called in at the shop again, only to be informed by Rose that Mary Louise no longer deigned to serve there. Mrs Dallon rang the bell at the halldoor of the house, but there was no reply. She returned to the shop and demanded to speak to Elmer, who shambled down the stairs from the accounting office, seeming to Mrs Dallon to be unsteady on his feet. He brought her upstairs to the house and asked her to wait in the front room, which Mary Louise entered a few minutes later. She smiled, and appeared to be normal except for her silence. ‘You don’t come to see us any more,’ her mother gently chided her. Mary Louise promised to come the following Sunday, but she didn’t arrive, on that Sunday or on subsequent ones.

Elmer himself still worried about the rat poison that had been bought. He didn’t mention it to his sisters, nor to anyone else, but he questioned Mary Louise as casually as he could about the presence of rats in the attics where she spent so much time. ‘I think I caught them,’ she replied. ‘They took the Rodenkil I put down.’ He asked her what she had done with the poison that remained and she said she still had it in case the rats returned. Elmer shook his head: that wasn’t a good idea, he suggested, in case she’d ever get the stuff on her hands or maybe someone else might pick it up, not knowing what it was. Now that she’d destroyed the rats it would be better to throw the poison out; if rats returned more could be bought. Mary Louise kept nodding. She’d wrap up what poison remained, she promised, and put it in the dustbin.