William Trevor - Two Lives

‘Oh, Mary Louise! Oh, my dear child!’

Unsteadily, Mrs Dallon rose and crossed to where Mary Louise was standing, between the windows. She put her arms around her daughter. She stroked her hair. She had to blink back tears, and was surprised to find – having stepped back a few paces and blown her nose – that Mary Louise herself was still quite composed, was in fact smiling, as though amused.

‘You’re not well, child.’

Mary Louise denied that. She repeated that her cousin would have given her the watch had he known he was going to die that night. They’d often spoken about his father. They’d often wondered what exactly his father had been like.

‘Oh, Mary Louise!’

Mrs Dallon sat down again. I am never going to leave this room, she thought. I cannot leave her. I cannot walk away. The prickles of discomfort had gone from her shoulders. She no longer felt sick in her stomach, but all over her body she was aware of a coldness, like ice in her bloodstream.

‘They’re funny names,’ Mary Louise said. ‘Funny names for Letty to choose. Kevin Aloysius.’

‘We weren’t talking about that, dear.’

‘Well, there you are.’

Afterwards Mrs Dallon repeated to her sister and her husband every statement Mary Louise had made. She recalled the inflections in her speech, her smiles, the way she had remained standing between the two windows of the big front room, the way she had not appeared to notice the disjointed wildness of the conversation. The bad news was not shared with James, since it was considered that at present no one was capable of breaking it to him as gently as his youth deserved. That night neither of the Dallons slept. They lay in silence in their bedroom, the room in which all other family worries had been discussed over the years. Mrs Dallon could still hear the sound of traffic in the street below while her daughter went on so, saying she was all right and commenting on the names chosen for Letty’s baby.

‘I’m worried, Mrs Dallon,’ Elmer said, arriving at Culleen in Kilkelly’s car during the afternoon of the next day. ‘A terrible thing’s after happening.’

He meant the poisoning of the rissoles; and the Dallons, who had imagined that nothing worse could occur than the filching of the watch, realized within a minute that they were wrong. In order to avoid worrying them further, Letty had passed on nothing of the accusation that a safe had been broken into. They heard about this now. They heard about the furniture arriving in the house.

‘They can exaggerate,’ Elmer conceded. ‘Rose and Matilda can. They can be extravagant in what they say. So that at first you wouldn’t believe them, but then you’d have to.’

A nightmare of understanding formed in the kitchen. Isolated fragments connected, like jigsaw pieces transformed into a picture.

‘For God’s sake, what caused it?’ Mr Dallon muttered.

The question was too complicated for Elmer to answer. He wanted to say that he had married Mary Louise in good faith, that he was the last person who’d go about making inquiries about a prospective wife. Instead, he said nothing.

‘But why,’ Mrs Dallon whispered, ‘why would she do that with the rat poison?’

‘Any more, why would she buy furniture when the house is full of it, Mrs Dallon? You have to ask that, too.’

The watch was not mentioned. The feeling was that the watch was a Dallon matter, that knowledge of it was not yet a son-in-law’s concern.

‘My sisters don’t know about what I told you,’ Elmer said. ‘They know about the money but not the other. I don’t think they’d stop in the house if they knew.’

‘We had a word with Dr Cormican after your sisters came out here a while back,’ Mr Dallon said.

‘I heard they came out here.’

‘They came out and told us things.’

Elmer softly sighed. He said:

‘There’ll be steps I’ll have to take.’

‘What steps?’ Mrs Dallon cried, suddenly shrill.

‘They guessed it was Mary Louise who interfered with the rissoles. Only they don’t know what she put in them. It isn’t safe in the house the way things are.’

‘What steps will you take?’ Mrs Dallon repeated, calming a little.

Elmer didn’t reply. ‘What did Dr Cormican say when you saw him, Mrs Dallon?’

‘He said if Mary Louise was sick he’d be sent for.’

‘That’s what I’ll do then.’

When Kilkelly’s car reached the outskirts of the town Elmer asked the driver to stop. He paid him off and entered the first public house he came to, a place he’d never been in before. It was dingy and cheerless, empty except for himself, but it suited his mood. He didn’t want to have to talk to anyone, nor be addressed by name.

At Culleen, when James came into the kitchen after his day’s work, he found his father and mother and his Aunt Emmeline sitting around the kitchen table. It surprised him that they should all be there at this particular time of day, not busy with their usual tasks. They were conversing very quietly when he entered the kitchen, their voices hardly raised above a whisper. They ceased immediately.

‘What’s up?’ James asked, turning on both taps at the sink and working soap into his hands under the running water.

‘Mary Louise isn’t well, James,’ his father said.

‘Has she the ‘flu?’

‘Mary Louise has been doing funny things, boy. We’re worried for her.’

‘What kind of funny things?’ James turned from the sink, the taps still running behind him, his hands dripping water on to the flagged floor. It was then that he saw his mother had been crying. His Aunt Emmeline looked as if she might have been crying also. His father’s mouth was pulled down at the corners.

‘What kind of funny things?’

They told him then, first asking him to sit down. That evening Mr Dallon drove over to tell Letty.

Alone in her bungalow, Miss Mullover found herself recalling Mary Louise’s childhood fascination with Joan of Arc. Had she been wrong, she wondered now, not to find more significance in it than she had? When Mary Louise had confessed at her sister’s wedding party that she and her cousin had been in love at the time of his death Miss Mullover had wondered if the confession, so abruptly offered to her, somehow belonged in that same realm of the imagination. More than once she had wondered so since, ending always with bewilderment. What she felt certain of was that the marriage of convenience that had taken place between a young girl and a draper could now be spoken of in the same breath as certain other marriages in the town – that of the couple who communicated through their pet, that of the wife who’d danced secretly in the Dixie dancehall, of the bread deliverer who’d run away with a tinker girl by mistake. Marriages collapsed for all sorts of reasons, but presumably you never really knew why unless you were involved in one. Not that it mattered if other people knew or not, Miss Mullover supposed, but still could not prevent herself from wondering about the future of Elmer Quarry and Mary Louise.

‘That’s a terrible thing to do, Mary Louise.’

‘Terrible?’

‘You poisoned the food with rat poison,’ Elmer said.

She smiled. I must not be mischievous she had written a hundred times after the episode of the worms in Possy Luke’s desk. Downstrokes heavy, perfect loops, otherwise it would all have to be done again. Tessa Enright hadn’t owned up.

‘You could have killed us stone dead,’ he said.

‘Yes.’

He had made up his mind: she could tell from the look in his eyes. Everything was there in his eyes, even – for a moment – something like distress.

‘Yes,’ she said again. ‘Yes.’ She thought of asking him if they’d let her bring her things with her, but she didn’t. She was sure they would; the watch and the clothes at least, the books and the collar-stud.