Two Lives (21 page)

‘What d’you want me to do?’ Elmer asked at last.

The next morning Rose saw the furniture lorry drawing up and snapped at the two men when they appeared in the shop.
No one wanted furniture, she said. ‘Take it back where it came from,’ she ordered.

But Mary Louise stepped round the counter and directed the men to the back door of the house. Rose’s protests were ignored, as were the additional ones of Matilda: it was Mary Louise the men had bargained with concerning the expenses agreed upon.

‘I’m afraid it’s up at the top of the house,’ she apologized.

The men were obliging. Upstairs or downstairs, it was all in the day’s work. ‘What’s troubling them in the shop?’ one of them asked.

Mary Louise explained it was a misunderstanding. Her sisters-in-law hadn’t known the furniture had been bought. Her sisters-in-law were abrupt in their manner.

‘That’s the final straw,’ Rose said, red in the face, glaring in the accounting office. ‘She’s filling our attics with rubbish.’

‘I spoke to her last night, Rose. I said you were upset.’

‘And what good did it do? What good’s speaking to her? We told you what to do.’

‘I can’t go doing wild things like that, Rose.’

‘It’s an hour’s drive in Kilkelly’s car. There’s a garden to walk in. She’ll be with her kind.’

Over the years Elmer had become used to what he considered to be the outrageous side of both his sisters. It was nourished by a harsh matter-of-factness and fed on the confidence of their double presence in the household. When Rose, a few years ago, laid down that they should not pay Hickey the builder the full amount of his bill because he had been four months late in attending to the work and had thereby succeeded in making the job a bigger one, Matilda had unswervingly supported her. When Matilda insisted that Miss O’Rourke from the technical school should be obliged to accept a cardigan that had been singed by her cigarette, Rose didn’t
hesitate either, even though the cardigan was of a colour that in no way suited Miss O’Rourke, and had quite by accident come into contact with the cigarette Miss O’Rourke had momentarily placed on the counter. There had been many similar instances, all of them revolving round the fact that when Elmer’s sisters felt themselves to be right they experienced no embarrassment in demanding excessive amends. They had little patience with the courtesies of moderation or compromise; pussyfooting was not in their nature.

‘One of those men’s carried in a box full of toys,’ Matilda reported, leaving the shop unattended in her excitement.

‘There you are, Elmer. Your wife’s gone into her childhood.’

‘A big cardboard box,’ Matilda said. ‘Filled up to the brim.’

The bell on the shop door jangled and both sisters hurried back to their duties. During the last twenty-four hours the excitement that possessed them had reached a fresh climax. It was an excitement that had begun when they first realized their brother’s wife made regular journeys to the attic rooms, had intensified when they discovered she’d moved most of the furniture from one attic to the other and had taken to locking the door, had intensified further with each subsequent deviation from what the sisters regarded as normal behaviour. Mary Louise’s disappearance the day before had been delight enough: not in their wildest hopes had they anticipated the ecstasy of money purloined in order to buy toys at an auction. For a single moment Matilda wondered if her sister-in-law could possibly have given birth to an infant which, for peculiar reasons, she chose to keep hidden in an attic room and for whom she was now making purchases. As well as the box of brightly-coloured soldiers, Matilda had watched a dismantled bed and a mattress, as well as other bedroom articles, being carried from the lorry. But a baby’s cries would have been heard, especially at night, and the girl could not possibly have
disguised her figure: the theory was abandoned almost as soon as it was born. Crazier, really, Matilda reflected, to have obtained toys in order to play with them yourself, at twenty-five years of age.

Elmer’s footfall was heavy on the attic stairs. His knuckles rapped on the panels of the door. He tried the handle. Several times he spoke her name. Then he went away, heavily descending.

She would get the chimney-sweep in so that she could have a fire in the tiny grate. She wouldn’t mind carrying sticks and coal up, or cleaning out the ashes. A fire would take the chill off the air.

She untied the string around the mattress and settled the mattress on the bed, which the men had erected for her. For all of his twenty-four years he had lain on it. For all of his twenty-four years he had woken every day to the scene of the hay-cart, and the dog chasing a rat in the stubble. Every day he had opened and closed the wardrobe’s pale doors.

She placed his collar-stud on the dressing-table where she could readily see it. She arranged the soldiers on the floor, remembering as best she could how they had been. She hung his clothes up.

25

She walks about the town. After thirty-one years she is a stranger and the town has changed, as her husband warned her. There is more of a bustle to it, more vehicles about, people hurry more. The goods in the shop windows look more interesting, French cheese and wines you’d never see in the old days, new kinds of sweets. The bill-posters are different, the old Electric’s gone.

Glances, sometimes a stare, are cast in her direction. No one knows her well enough to address her; a few remember; hearsay attaches her to the town. She doesn’t mind, one way or the other, and concerns herself instead with the place she has left behind. The last of the cars would have arrived by now; those permitted to go would have gone. It was said that the obstreperous were to be moved to a house near Mullingar. She wonders about that: if the remaining inmates have been taken away, if all chatter and arguing have ceased, if the hammering and whistling of workmen have begun. Soon, people who do not suffer from dementia paralytica or morbid impulses or melancholia will sleep in the rooms, men who have spent the day shooting or fishing, women dreaming beside them in chiffon nightdresses. Motor-cars will take up their positions on the smooth tarmac of the car park, a different one from time to time parked on top of his flowerbed.

That’s why she has come back: she nods to herself in Father Mathew Street, reminding herself of her reason. That’s why
she didn’t make a fuss or run the risk of being taken to Mullingar with the obstreperous: tomorrow she’ll walk out to the graveyard.

‘It wasn’t because I went there,’ she told them – Sister Hannah and Mrs Leavy, Belle D and all the others. ‘It wasn’t because I went there that I had to leave the town. There was another reason, a worse reason by a long way.’

26

‘Rats?’ Mr Renehan said.

‘We have them in the attics.’

‘Rats are most unpleasant. Is it a trap you’re thinking of?’

‘Or maybe poison. D’you keep poison, Mr Renehan?’

‘I do of course. Rodenkil. Or Ridemquik. Something like that would do the trick.’

Bleheen the inseminator was in the shop, buying nails from one of the Renehan boys. He smiled blandly at Mary Louise, and she remembered how his car had kept swerving all over the road on the evening of Letty’s wedding party. He asked her how she was keeping and she said all right. In the days when she had gone to the Electric Cinema Bleheen was often there also, either alone or with one of the widows whose company he was investigating in his search for a suitable wife. For reasons of his own he limited himself to widows.

‘And a little yoke for coring apples,’ he said when the Renehan boy had weighed out the nails. ‘I have a weakness for stewed apples,’ he informed Mary Louise, ‘with a drop of Bird’s custard.’

She nodded. A woman buying press-studs in the drapery one day had told her Bleheen would never marry. He could take every widow in Ireland to the pictures but in the end he’d remain the way he was, set in his ways and cautious.

‘I had that little yoke,’ he said, ‘only I threw it out with the apple peelings by mistake.’

Mary Louise imagined him cooking his own meals, peeling apples and potatoes the way a man would. He went on talking to her about domestic matters. She didn’t listen. ‘
The whole party gathered in the drawing-room. Arkady picked up the latest number of some journal. Anna Sergeyevna rose, and it was then that he glanced at Katya…’

It was better for Bleheen not to marry if he didn’t love anyone. He was right to be choosy, even if choosiness meant he’d be a bachelor till he died. Suddenly Mary Louise wondered if her mother and father loved one another. Never in her life had she thought about that before. Never before had it been in the scheme of things that love should enter into any consideration of her parents.

‘I’d say the Rodenkil,’ Mr Renehan advised. ‘We sell a lot of Rodenkil.’

Letty became pregnant soon after her marriage. Dennehy bought her a second-hand Morris Minor; she loved the house they had settled in. All her life she’d had to look after hens, feeding them and finding their eggs: as long as she lived, she said, she didn’t intend to lift a finger again for a hen, even though there were poultry runs in the yard. Her husband planned to keep a cow or two as well, but they agreed between them that he would see to the needs of all such animals himself. Letty made curtains and chair-covers on the sewing-machine her parents had given her as a wedding present; carpets were bought, the last of the decorating completed. ‘You could grow something there,’ her Aunt Emmeline suggested, pointing at two forgotten whitewashed tubs on either side of the front door. A week later her aunt arrived at the house and spent a few minutes turning over the soil and adding manure. She found an overgrown patch behind the house where vegetables had once been cultivated. This, too, she proceeded to reclaim.

Letty’s concern about her sister was the only real agitation in the euphoria of her marriage. It came and went, nagging for a little longer each time she heard something new on the waves of gossip that spread from the town. She had known, since the time of the event itself, the details of the sisters’ visit to Culleen; she had known of her parents’ fruitless consultation with Dr Cormican, and their subsequent conversation with Mary Louise. She had since heard about the purchases made at the auction, and had heard also that Mary Louise was rarely to be found serving in the shop any more. All of it bewildered Letty. As an older sister, she had shared with her brother the task of keeping an eye on Mary Louise when all three were children. She still remembered the feel of a clammy, small hand in hers and her insistence that it should remain there. She had comforted away tears; she had been cross when necessary. More unhappily she remembered her opposition to Mary Louise’s engagement to Elmer Quarry. She’d felt sick when she heard he had invited her sister to the Electric Cinema. On the wedding night – reflecting, without knowing it, the thoughts of her cousin – she couldn’t keep her mind away from what Mary Louise was enduring. With his small teeth and his small eyes, Elmer Quarry reminded her of a pig. Alone in the bedroom she had shared all her life with Mary Louise, she had miserably wept that night.

The telephone in Letty’s house – a necessity for her husband in his professional life – was something of a novelty for her. There wasn’t one at Culleen, and rarely in the past had she had occasion to use one. But there the instrument was, on a shelf at the back of the hall, with a pencil and notebook hanging from a hook above it, and the directory on a shelf beneath. One morning, bored with sewing, she telephoned Quarry’s drapery, to remind Mary Louise that she had not yet visited her as she’d promised.

‘Yes?’ Rose said.

‘Could I speak to Mary Louise, please?’

Who’s that?’

‘It’s her sister.’

Letty heard Rose’s breathing, and faintly in the background the sound of the bell at the shop door.

‘It’s Letty,’ Letty said.

‘Oh, yes.’ It annoyed Rose that she’d had to climb the stairs to the accounting office because Elmer wasn’t there, only to discover that she’d been summoned on behalf of her sister-in-law. It particularly annoyed her that it should be Letty, since the matter of the wedding invitation still rankled.

‘Is Mary Louise around?’

Rose hesitated. She wasn’t in a hurry to give any information about Mary Louise’s whereabouts, feeling she needed time to think. At length she said:

‘Your sister isn’t.’

‘Is that Rose? Or Matilda?’

‘It’s Rose Quarry speaking.’

‘Would you ask Mary Louise if she’d phone me? Two four five.’

Rose thought she’d say yes and then omit to do so. But on an impulse she changed her mind. She said:

‘We hardly ever lay eyes on your sister these days.’

‘Is Mary Louise all right?’

‘I’d say she wasn’t. You could inform your parents things have progressed from bad to worse. We’re beside ourselves, the state she’s in.’

‘State? What state, Rose?’

‘You have to keep everything locked up. We have our handbags under lock and key the entire time. She broke into the safe in the office.’

To Rose’s considerable satisfaction, there was a silence at the other end. It continued for several moments, before Letty said:

‘What’re you talking about, Rose?’

‘We’d be obliged if you’d keep it in the family, Mrs Dennehy.’

With that, Rose returned the receiver to its hook. Elmer had specifically requested that the matter of the money taken from the safe should not be mentioned outside the house, but until the Dallons were aware of the extent of the girl’s contrariness they apparently wouldn’t act in any way whatsoever. Rose returned to the shop and reported the conversation to Matilda, who said she’d done the right thing.

Elmer shook his head. There weren’t any rats in the house. A cat that hung about the yard saw to all that kind of thing. A few mice now and again that his sisters caught in traps were the height of any trouble.

‘I sold her Rodenkil,’ Renehan said. ‘I believe she mentioned the attics.’

Elmer vaguely nodded, the gesture implying that he’d forgotten about the attics: privately he doubted that there were rats in the attics any more than anywhere else.