William Trevor - Two Lives

29

‘I am back in the town.’

‘You’re back because you’re better these days, dear. Because of the medicine. All the old stuff is over and done with.’

‘I’m back because of the grave.’

‘You can’t touch a grave. You have to leave a grave alone.’

‘You can change things if you want to.’

His hand is on the doorknob. More than anything else, Elmer requires a drink. His want is a need; he has scarcely the strength to stand; he came up with her tray and she smiled at him, delaying him by speaking of a graveyard, a subject she has raised before. ‘Let her back into the attics if she asks for it,’ Miss Foye advised, and duly he made the arrangements, putting sheets on the bed himself.

‘I must go now,’ he says.

‘You can open a grave. You can move the remains. Isn’t it funny, that expression, Elmer – remains? To refer to a human person as remains?’

‘Sure, what would be the point of it, dear?’

The first time he visited her in the asylum she said someone whose name he couldn’t catch had stopped keeping a diary. A thick black line had been drawn and that was that. He asked her if it was herself, nervous about any diaries left lying about, but she didn’t reply.

‘Robert and I loved one another,’ she says.

‘Eat up that plateful before it’s cold. And take the pills when you’ve had it. Put the tray outside and I’ll get it later on.

‘I don’t need to take pills, Elmer.’

‘Ah sure, you have to take them. Aren’t they keeping you cured?’

‘All it is is moving the remains from one graveyard to another. I want to be buried with him, Elmer.’

They maintained they wouldn’t set foot on the attic stairs. They refused to so much as butter a slice of bread for her. They said if she came within ten yards of the pantry or the kitchen they’d walk out of the house. ‘I’ll see to her food,’ he interrupted, and since her return he has done so, carrying her up anything that is left over, frying bacon and eggs for her if that is necessary.

‘I have business down in the town,’ he says. ‘I can’t be delaying.’

‘All I want is to be buried with him.’

‘I’ll organize that. Only take your pills now.’

‘Will you drive me out and I’ll show you where the graveyard is?’

‘The first minute I have to spare we’ll go out there. Myself and yourself.’

‘It’s the place where the Attridges are buried. The Attridge family.’

‘I know it well.’

The desire to be away, to be in the bar at Hogan’s, has developed into a soreness that spreads all over his body. That first time, the first occasion he visited her, he said: ‘Well now, and how are you, dear?’ She shook her head, referring to some beggarwoman with second sight. On later visits he told her the news from the town, how Foley’s had been converted into a self-service, with wire baskets, how Sarsfield’s in Lower Bridge Street was the first bar to have the television installed.

‘I really want it,’ she begs. ‘It’s the only thing I want.’

‘No problem about the grave, dear.’

*

Once she was locked away it would be as though she had died. Her advent had been a destruction, and they imagined a fresh beginning for the three of them. But within ten months he was listening at last to Kilkenny’s sales talk at the garage, and then he bought a car purely so that three or four times a year he could visit her. Not once have they sat in that car; not once have they seen, even in the distance, the house she went to. ‘Come over for the drive,’ he used to offer, but neither cared to reply.

They sit in the big front room, its grey wallpaper unchanged in their lifetime, a room their brother has not entered for almost thirty years. They manage their outrage at their sister-in-law’s presence as best they can; they’re too old now for the vigour of such feelings, Rose seventy-four, Matilda seventy-three. ‘You damn fool,’ Rose said when first he told them she was to all intents and purposes cured due to wonder drugs. He repeated words that had been used to him, ‘caring’, and ‘commitment’ and ‘community’. Ridiculous, it sounded, all that coming out of a grown man. He was finished years ago; until then they had used their energy protesting, in an endeavour to conserve what remained. What does it matter now? The shop has gone and with it their standing in the town. Often he does not wear a tie. They have seen him pass out of the halldoor in his old felt slippers. As if he’s feeding a dog, he gathers up the remains and carries the tray up the attic stairs, or carelessly breaks the egg yolk when he fries it, not noticing the splinters of shell that fall into the fat.

‘You damn fool,’ Rose says again, coldly stating the fact, her tone without the emotion that years ago would have made it shrill. She says it often.

‘She has a brother and a sister,’ Matilda reminds him, often also. ‘It isn’t here she belongs. Who says it’s here?’

‘She is my wife.’

These exchanges, and other passages of conversation, are recalled in the grey front room, but are not dwelt upon in further conversation, are not mulled over aloud. Memories possess the two old women, further souring their bitterness. There are echoes of a time that might so easily and so naturally have continued: he’d been the person in their lives when it seemed clear that no one else was waiting to transform their lives. Making cakes for him, roasting meat, darning and mending, changing his sheets, the presents given and received on Christmas Day, he in the accounting office, they receiving in the shop: once, like a promise, there was the perpetuity of all that. Modest enough, God knows; not much to ask.

James at Culleen would like to hand the farm on to any of his sons but none of them wants it. James married Angela Eddery, and both are disappointed about this family rejection but do not let it show. There isn’t a living at Culleen, each of their sons has said, which bewilders James because there always was before. ‘Well, at least it’ll see us out,’ Angela reminds him, and they agree that that’s a blessing to be grateful for.

Soon after Mary Louise’s return Angela reports in the kitchen at Culleen that she has seen her in Bridge Street. She recognized her after an initial hesitation and would have spoken to her if there hadn’t been that moment of doubt. By the time she gathered herself together her sister-in-law had passed on.

‘I suppose she’ll have to come out here.’ James sounds more grudging than he feels, the words too carelessly chosen.

‘Of course she must, James! As often as she likes.’

Over the years Angela has had her ups and downs at Culleen. Often, when feeling low, she has thought of Mary Louise and seen her own life in perspective: she has been grateful for that. Once she and James visited his sister, but afterwards he said he didn’t want to go again. James has always been embarrassed by his sister’s misfortune, and Angela is aware that this has probably been sensed by Mary Louise. She won’t come out to Culleen, Angela intuitively guesses, and feels she could confidently reassure James on that score. She chooses not to.

When Dennehy inherited the premises at Ennistane crossroads he ceased to practise as a vet. He and Letty sold the house they’d had rebuilt at the time of their marriage and moved their family to the public house. Tired of being called out in the middle of the night to attend ailing animals, Dennehy took contentedly to the life of a publican and Letty enjoyed the more substantial income that the change brought with it.

‘She should live with us,’ she remarked when her sister’s emergence from her sanctuary was first mooted. Dennehy raised no objection. The house was large, the bars busy: no matter how odd she was, another woman wouldn’t be noticed about the place.