William Trevor - Two Lives

‘Beyond a shadow of a doubt,’ Rose said.

‘The rissoles were in a soup-plate in the fridge, Elmer, covered over with another plate. She cut them open and put something inside.’

They watched his face. His jaw slackened; the tip of his tongue moistened his lips, passing slowly from one corner of his mouth to the other. He had taken off his jacket, as he sometimes did in the accounting office. The waistcoat beneath was fully buttoned, a pencil and a ballpoint pen clipped into one of the upper pockets.

‘There’s people that live and breathe only wanting to be a nuisance,’ Rose said.

The tea-towels were mentioned, and the forks in the cutlery drawer, the potato-masher and the blue milk-jug. Elmer unsuccessfully attempted to interrupt. They couldn’t hold their heads up, Matilda said. They couldn’t walk into a shop in the town without a silence falling.

‘I’ll speak to Mary Louise,’ Elmer promised.

‘What good does it do?’ Matilda’s tone was dangerously sarcastic. ‘If you’ve spoken to her once, haven’t you spoken to her a thousand times?’

Elmer’s shirt felt sticky on his back. He’d begun to sweat as soon as they’d started on about something being deliberately introduced into their food. He’d raised a hand to wipe away the beads of perspiration he could feel gathering on his forehead, hoping they wouldn’t notice what he was doing. He could feel the sweat, damply warm, on his legs and in his armpits. He had changed the combination of the safe after the incident concerning the money. He hadn’t told them that, in case they’d ask what the new sequence of numbers was. He kept the Jameson bottle on its side so that it couldn’t easily be seen behind the strong-box, but even so it was better that no one should have access to the safe. If ever the Jameson was mentioned again he had it ready to say that the bottle had been in the safe since their father’s day, kept there in case anyone fainted in the shop.

‘Will I get her to come down here?’ Rose offered. ‘Will I go up and tell her you want her?’

Elmer began to undo the buttons of his waistcoat. He stopped because he could feel his fingers trembling and knew they’d notice. If nerve trouble had caused a solicitor’s wife to be frightened of approaching her front door it wasn’t outside the bounds of possibility that a person could imagine a plate of rissoles would be attacked by rats that didn’t exist. But how on earth could he even begin to explain that to them?

‘Leave her in peace,’ he said.

‘In peace!’ Rose’s eyes widened. ‘In peace !’

‘There’s been no peace in this house, Elmer, since the night you took that girl to the pictures.’

‘Will I tell her you want her?’ Rose pressed her offer again.

‘I’ll go up myself,’ Elmer said.

But there was no response when he rattled the handle of the attic door, when he rapped loudly and banged with his fist. It wasn’t normal not to answer, there was no getting away from that. But then he looked in the yard and discovered that her bicycle wasn’t there. In the shop he imparted that information to his sisters. If they heard her returning, he asked them to tell him.

The gondola was silent on the water, the stone of the buildings dank and slimily green. Later there was the ebb and flow of the dull blue sea, the shells and seaweed left on the sand when it receded. You looked back and saw the fat domes of the churches, the statues high in the sky…

She dipped about the pages, opening the books at random. She loved doing that. She watched while Yelena Nikolayevna, sleepless all night, kept clasping her knees with her hands and resting her head on them. She watched while Yelena Nikolayevna crossed to the window and held her aching forehead against the panes to cool it.

‘… The rain that began as a spatter became a sheet of water, glistening as it fell from a sky as black as night. Yelena Nikolayevna sheltered in a ruined chapel. A beggarwoman waited…’

Among the gravestones she tidied her hair and smeared a little lipstick on to her lips, smiling at her reflection in the glass of her compact.

At Culleen the watch wasn’t missed for some time. Drawers were searched, furniture was pulled out in case it had fallen down behind something. The general belief was that it would eventually turn up.

In fact it didn’t, and one afternoon when Mrs Dallon was washing eggs at the sink she remembered the feeling of surprise when Mary Louise had said she’d like to see her old room again. The statements that had been made by Rose and Matilda returned to startle her and suddenly, an egg held in the palm of her hand, Mrs Dallon felt sick. Waves of nausea passed through her stomach. She felt weak in her legs and for a moment as she stood there she thought she might faint.

‘I’ve come to see Mary Louise,’ she announced in Quarry’s an hour later.

Rose’s response was to glance along the counter to where Matilda was re-rolling a bolt of satin.

‘I rang the bell on the front door,’ Mrs Dallon said. ‘Only there wasn’t an answer.’

‘Your daughter could be out on her bicycle, Mrs Dallon. Then again I doubt your daughter can hear the doorbell up in the attic’

Through the panes of the accounting-office window Mrs Dallon could see the square head of her son-in-law bent over the desk where he did his work. By now she knew the way through the shop into the house.

‘I’ll go up and see if she’s in,’ she said.

Neither Rose nor Matilda tried to stop her. Let her see for herself, both simultaneously thought. Let her climb up the stairs and not be answered when she knocks on the door.

But Mrs Dallon was answered. As soon as she spoke, the key turned in the lock and the door was opened. Mary Louise was tidily dressed, in a navy-blue skirt and blouse, with a brooch that Mrs Dallon had once given her at her throat.

‘Hullo, Mary Louise.’

‘We’ll go downstairs.’

The key was taken from the lock, and the door locked on the outside. In the front room Mary Louise asked her mother if she’d like a cup of tea.

‘No, no, pet. Nothing at all.’

‘Are you well at Culleen?’

‘We are, Mary Louise. We’re all well.’

‘That’s good so.’

Mrs Dallon hesitated. She felt uncomfortable, sitting on the edge of a tightly-stuffed armchair; and was made more so by Mary Louise’s unruffled manner, her air of being calmly in command of herself.

‘That day you came out to Culleen, Mary Louise? A while ago?’

Mary Louise nodded.

‘You went up to your aunt’s room.’

Mary Louise frowned. She shook her head. Then the frown cleared as swiftly as it had come. She made a gesture with her hands, indicating that she couldn’t remember going into her aunt’s room. It hardly mattered, the gesture implied also.

‘It’s only we’ve been hunting high and low for a watch she had there. A watch that used to be Robert’s.’

Mary Louise nodded sympathetically.

‘You didn’t see it that day, pet? A watch on a chain?’

‘He’d have wanted me to have it. If he’d known he was going to die he’d have given it to me.’

The same sickness she had experienced while washing the eggs again afflicted Mrs Dallon. A prickly discomfort affected areas of her body. She was glad she was sitting down.

‘Did you take the watch, pet?’

Mary Louise said she’d looked for the watch and eventually had opened a drawer in the bedside table and there it was.

‘That watch isn’t yours, Mary Louise. It belongs to Aunt Emmeline.’

‘Actually it belonged to Robert’s father. It was the only thing of value he left behind. You can hardly count the soldiers.’

Since neither Mrs Dallon nor her sister had attended the auction they were unaware of the purchases Mary Louise had made. When her mother now displayed bewilderment over her reference to soldiers Mary Louise explained immediately. She had bought the soldiers, she said, and the furniture from her cousin’s bedroom. She didn’t mention buying the clothes from the unemployed man’s wife because for the moment that didn’t seem relevant.