William Trevor - Two Lives

Elmer had never before embraced a girl. Years ago, when he was a boarder at the school in Wexford, he had experienced desire for the stout housekeeper. He had imagined what it would be like kissing her. In dreams he had removed her clothes.

‘God, you’re great,’ he complimented Mary Louise when their lips parted, although in fact he had found the experience a little disappointing. She was blushing, he noticed on the hump-backed bridge. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, her eyes cast down.

They walked back to the town, her left arm where he had tucked it into his. He asked her what her mother would say when she heard the news. He said he’d have to speak to her father because that was a thing you had to do. While wondering how best to break it to them, he said his sisters would be delighted.

‘Will you come out to Culleen?’ Mary Louise suggested.

‘Walk out now, d’you mean?’

‘Have you a bicycle, Elmer?’

‘I never had the need of one.’

‘Could you walk out to the house next Sunday maybe? I won’t say a word till then.’

‘I’ll come out of course.’

‘I’ll only say you’re calling for me.’

They stopped on the road and embraced again. This time Mary Louise felt his teeth. One of his hands was pressed into the small of her back. She closed her eyes because she’d noticed in films that people always did. He kept his open.

On their honeymoon journey that particular Sunday was recalled by both of them. On subsequent Sundays there had been further embraces, and all the necessary plans for their wedding had been made on these afternoon walks. ‘We’re delighted,’ Mary Louise remembered her mother saying. Her father had shaken Elmer’s hand.

‘The Strand Hotel it’s called,’ Elmer told her as they stepped from the bus in the seaside town. ‘Excuse me,’ he said to a man standing outside a sweetshop, ‘where’s the Strand Hotel?’

The man said to keep going. You couldn’t miss it, he advised. When the road became sandy under your feet you were there but for another fifty yards. Four minutes at the outside it would take them.

‘Thanks, sir.’

Elmer had a way, Mary Louise had noticed some time ago, of addressing men like that. He called her father sir, and the Reverend Harrington. It was because of the shop, she supposed, something that was natural to him.

They walked on with their suitcases, past a row of small shops, past two public houses and the Catholic church. The surface became sandy beneath their feet, and then they rounded the bend where the Strand Hotel was, the two words of its title painted across a bow-windowed facade.

‘I wrote in for lodgings,’ Elmer stated in the hallway. ‘Quarry the name is.’

‘Ah, you did surely, Mr Quarry.’ A woman with a headscarf over her curling-pins greeted them. ‘Mr and Mrs Quarry,’ she added, glancing at Mary Louise, her eyes bright with a landlady’s interest. They passed swiftly from the little black hat that was still perched on the crown of Mary Louise’s head, over her pale green coat and skirt. They rested on her wedding ring. ‘Mr and Mrs Quarry,’ she repeated, as though to reassure her visitors that since the scrutiny was complete all was now in order. She led the way up a narrow staircase.

It was a boarding-house rather than an hotel. Tea was in the dining-room sharp at six, the woman said, and it being well after that now would they come down quickly? She threw open a window in their room and stood back proudly. You could hear the sea, she said. If you woke in the night you could hear it.

‘Grand,’ Elmer said, and the woman went away.

Mary Louise stood by the bed. For the first time since she’d decided to accept Elmer Quarry’s offer of marriage she experienced the weight of misgiving. Tendrils of doubt had now and again assailed her before; listening to Letty, she could hardly have escaped them. But there had never been a feeling that she had made a ludicrous, laughable mistake. Nor had she ever resolved that as soon as possible she must be released from her promise. During the month she had taken to consider the offer she had gone over the ground again and again, and, having reached a decision, she did not see much point in encouraging second thoughts. But in the bedroom of the Strand Hotel, with the lace curtains flapping on either side of the open window, Mary Louise wanted suddenly to be in the farmhouse, to be laying the places at the kitchen table or feeding the fowls with Letty. Somehow, later on, she was going to have to get her nightdress on to her and get into that bed with the bulky man whose wife she had agreed to be. Somehow she was going to have to accept the presence of his naked feet, the rest of him covered only in the brown and blue pyjamas he was lifting out of his suitcase.

‘Comfortable enough,’ he said. ‘I’d say it was comfy, dear.’

Elmer’s mother had sometimes employed that endearment, and it seemed to him to be equally appropriate between man and wife, now that they were alone in a room. It wasn’t the kind of thing Rose or Matilda would say, but then the circumstances were different. He was glad he had remembered it.

‘It’s a lovely place,’ Mary Louise said, still standing by the bed.

He agreed that it was. He’d been told about the Strand Hotel by Horton’s traveller, now with Tyson’s, who’d said it was second to none. Recalling in the train the dreams he’d had in his boyhood about the stout housekeeper at the boarding-school and later about Mrs Fahy and Mrs Bleddy, two shopkeepers’ wives in the town, he had hoped his wife would change her clothes as soon as they arrived in the hotel. She was nothing like the size of the housekeeper or either of the shopkeepers’ wives; definitely on the skinny side you’d have to call her, none of the sturdiness of her sister. The sister had come into the shop one day nearly a year ago and he’d looked down from the accounting office just as she was taking her purse out of her handbag. She wasn’t bad-looking, he had considered, and he’d thought about the matter for a while, hoping she would return to the shop so that he could observe her again, in fact attending church one Sunday for that very purpose. But the trouble with the sister, which you had to set against the sturdiness of her, was that a few years ago she’d been seen about the place with Gargan from the bank and after that with young Lyndon. These facts stimulated unease in Elmer; that she was experienced in going out with men made him feel nervous, since it meant they wouldn’t be in the same boat when it came to getting to know one another. Even so, if it hadn’t been for noticing the sister with her purse that day he’d probably never have turned his attention to Mary Louise. That was the way things happened; chance played a part.

‘Will we go down?’ he suggested.

‘All right.’

‘You don’t want to change your duds or anything?’

‘She said to be quick. I’m OK the way I am.’ Mary Louise took her hat off and placed it on the dressing-table. The fluted looking-glass in which it was reflected was cracked, a sharp black line jaggedly diagonal. There were cigarette burns on the dressing-table’s surface.

‘I’d say we’d be comfy all right,’ he repeated.

In the dining-room other people were finishing their meal, spreading jam on slices of bread. The woman in the headscarf showed the newcomers to two places at a table where three men were already seated. Families occupied other tables.

‘Wait till I get you a cup of tea,’ the woman said. ‘Is that tea still warm, Mr Mulholland?’

Mr Mulholland, a moustached man, smaller and older than Elmer Quarry, felt the metal of the teapot and said it was. The other men at the table were middle-aged also, one of them grey-haired, the other bald.