Two Lives (25 page)

‘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.

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.

‘She should have come here,’ Letty repeats when Mary Louise has been back a while, and two days later she calls to see her sister in order, again, to put the proposition to her. ‘There’ll be a home with us,’ she has earlier assured Miss Foye on her visits, and assured Mary Louise also. The big, noisy public house with all that coming and going, and a family of nephews and nieces, is surely more like it than the company of Elmer Quarry. Years ago Letty came to a private conclusion, shared only with her husband: Mary Louise had been maddened by the gross presence of Elmer Quarry in her bed, his demands had frightened and repelled her to a degree that in the end affected her mind. She could understand it, Letty maintained: you had only to imagine Elmer Quarry standing naked in your bedroom and you’d want to close your eyes for ever. Mary Louise has always been too innocent, too trusting and unworldly, to cope with any of that. Hair sprouted out of
Elmer Quarry’s ears, and out of his nostrils, black bristly hair that would sicken you when it came close. The sides of his face had a way of becoming damp with sweat, and that sweat would touch you. He took to drink because when it came down to it Mary Louise couldn’t disguise her revulsion.

‘Oh, I belong here,’ Mary Louise insists. ‘I’ll visit you often.’

Like Angela, Letty knows she won’t.

How could you have a grave up? How could you disturb the bones of the dead and for no good reason convey them five miles across the countryside to a graveyard that went out of business years ago? In the bar of Hogan’s Hotel Elmer asks himself these questions, cogitating on their source. The cousin she spoke of had been an unfortunate with a delicate heart or lungs, never expected to live. A week ago she’d dragged her way through the long grass and pointed at a corner in the old graveyard where she and the cousin could go. She had it in her head that there’d been something between them.

‘Replenish that, like a good man.’ Elmer pushes his glass across the familiar surface of the bar, and Gerry receives it in an equally familiar grasp. He has a way of holding glasses these days, the fingers bent like claws due to arthritis.

‘It’s a fact what I was telling you, Mr Quarry. We have a one-way system threatened.’