William Trevor - Two Lives

‘Your light’s all right, is it?’ Elmer solicitously inquired.

Mary Louise tried it. A beam hardly showed up in the moonlight. ‘Thanks for everything,’ she said.

‘Would next week interest you?’

‘Interest?’

‘Friday again.’ Elmer had once heard in the shop that girls liked to wash their hair on Saturdays, and certainly both Rose and Matilda did, once a fortnight. Thoughtfulness never hurt anyone, his mother used to say, which was why he’d mentioned Friday. His own preference would have been Saturday, since the feeling of relaxation, to do with the weekend, began then. With the shop closed until Monday morning, and the streets more active than on other evenings, Elmer often experienced on a Saturday night an urge to mark in some way the difference there was. Usually, though, he just slipped down to the YMCA and played a solitary game of billiards.

‘Friday?’ Mary Louise said.

‘Is Friday convenient? Would Saturday be better?’

‘No, Friday’s all right.’

‘Will we say half-seven?’

Mary Louise nodded. She mounted her bicycle and rode off. The safety-pin Letty had insisted upon had not been opened. He hadn’t tried to hold her hand. Come to that, she thought, they hadn’t even said good-night to one another. There was a kind of intimacy about saying good-night to a person, and both of them had been shy of it. In the Electric, before the lights went down, she’d noticed people looking at them. By this time tomorrow it would be all round the town.

‘Are you in one piece?’ Letty asked when her sister walked into the kitchen with the bicycle lamp in her hand. Their mother and father had gone to bed, but Mary Louise knew they wouldn’t be sleeping. They’d have lain there waiting for the sound of the bicycle wheels and the clatter of the barn door and her footsteps on the cobbles. They’d go on lying there, probably not communicating with one another, just wondering how she’d got on.

‘What was the flick?’ Letty asked.

‘Lana Turner. The Flame and the Flesh .’

‘Holy God!’

‘Bonar Colleano was in it.’

‘Did your man keep his hands to himself?’

‘Of course he did,’ Mary Louise retorted crossly, for the first time feeling a kinship with the man who’d taken her out. Letty had a tongue like a razor blade.

‘Where’s James?’

‘He’s over playing cards with the Edderys.’

‘I’ll go to bed so.’

‘Is that the end of it, Mary Louise?’

‘How d’you mean, the end of it?’

‘Is he proposing anything further?’

‘He asked me out Friday.’

‘Don’t go, Mary Louise.’

‘I said I would.’

‘He could nearly be your father. For God’s sake, watch your step.’

Mary Louise did. She developed a cold during the week and gave Letty a note to take in to the shop. In the ordinary course of events a cold wouldn’t have prevented her from going to the pictures, and she hoped Elmer Quarry would deduce that. She hoped he’d guess how she felt, not that she was all that certain how she felt herself. When she was alone, especially lying awake in bed, she didn’t want ever again to have to walk up the stairs of the Electric Cinema with him. But when Letty started on with her advice, and when James put in a word or two also, she naturally tended to defy them. Neither her mother nor her father made a comment, beyond asking her what kind of a film it had been. But she knew what they were thinking, and that caused her mood to revert: once more she wished that she might never find herself repeating the experience of sitting in the Electric Cinema with the inheritor of the drapery. No reply to the note Letty delivered came, although Mary Louise expected there’d be something. She didn’t know why it disappointed her that he hadn’t managed to write a line or two.

At that time, from the town and from the land around it, young men were making their way to England or America, often having to falsify their personal details in order to gain a foothold in whatever city they reached. Families everywhere were affected by emigration, and the Protestant fraction of the population increasingly looked as if it would never recover. There was no fat on the bones of this shrinking community; there were no reserves of strength. Its very life was eroded by the bleak economy of the times.

In conversation, this subject cropped up often at the Dallons’ table. From his card-playing evenings at the Edderys’ James brought back tales of the search for local employment and the enforced exile that usually followed.

Returning with an unsold bullock from yet another cattle-fair, Mr Dallon reported the melancholy opinions of those he had conversed with. At the egg-packing station wages remained low. Talk of expansion at the brickette factory came to nothing.

The Dallons’ kitchen, where all such conversations took place and all meals were taken, had whitewashed walls and an iron range. There was a dresser, painted green, that displayed the cups and saucers and plates in daily use. Around the scrubbed deal table were five green-painted chairs. The door to the yard was green also, and the woodwork of the two windows that looked into the yard. On one of the windowsills a stack of newspapers had accumulated, conserved because they were useful for wrapping eggs in. On the other was the radio that, ten years ago, had replaced a battery-operated model. James and Letty remembered the day the battery wireless had been brought to the farmhouse by Billie Lyndon’s father, how an aerial had had to be attached to the chimney and a second wire connected to a spike that Mr Lyndon drove into the ground outside the window. ‘That’s Henry Hall,’ Mr Lyndon said when a voice was heard announcing a dance tune. Mary Louise couldn’t remember any of it.

‘It’s the way things are,’ Mr Dallon was given to remarking in the kitchen, a general-purpose remark that might be taken to apply to any aspect of life. With a soft sigh, he had employed it often during the war, when the BBC news was gloomy; and after the war when starvation was reported in Europe. But in spite of the note of pessimism that accompanied the observation Mr Dallon was not without hope: he believed as much in things eventually getting better as he did in the probability that they would first become worse. There was a cycle in the human condition he might have reluctantly agreed if prompted, although the expression was not one he would voluntarily have employed.

Mrs Dallon valued her husband’s instinctive assessments and the significance he attached to developments and events. She argued only about lesser matters, and then discreetly: she put her foot down when Mr Dallon set off for the town in clothes he had worn to clean a cowshed; she insisted, once every two months, that he had his hair cut; and in the privacy of their bedroom she argued about how best to handle James, who all too easily developed a resentful look if he felt he was being treated as a farm-hand. James would go, Mrs Dallon predicted, like all the others were going: if they took him for granted they’d wake up one morning to find he wasn’t there any more. Push him too hard in the fields and he’d decide to do something ludicrous, like joining the British army.

In general conversation, these same subjects cropped up when the Protestant families in the neighbourhood greeted one another at St Giles’s church on Sundays: the Goods, the Hayeses, the Kirkpatricks, the Fitzgeralds, the Lyndons, the Enrights, the Yateses, the Dallons. In 1955 they recognized that their survival lay in making themselves part of the scheme of things, as it was now well established. While they still believed in the Protestants they were, they hung together less than they had in the past.

‘You’d need the patience of Job,’ Mr Dallon had confided more than once after the Sunday service, referring to his efforts to teach his son to farm. It was James who mattered. It was he, not his sisters, who would continue to tease a living out of the twenty-seven indifferent acres, and to trade animals at the cattle-fairs: on his success depended the survival of all three of them. ‘Pray to God he doesn’t go marrying some flibbertigibbet!’ This worry of Mrs Dallon’s was voiced, not in the churchyard, but to her husband when they were alone. James being James, any marriage he proposed would naturally be foolish, but if you hinted as much when the time came the chances were that he’d have the thing done in some out-of-the-way parish without anyone knowing. A flibbertigibbet could be the ruin of Culleen, and of Letty and Mary Louise with it – unless, of course, Mary Louise discovered in the meantime the advantages of marrying into the drapery. No word could be said in that direction either, no pressure applied. These days – more than ever before, Mrs Dallon considered – a family had to put its trust in God.