Two Lives (26 page)

‘Are you serious?’

‘Oh, I am, sir. They have the plans drawn up.’

‘It’ll damage trade.’

‘Of course it will. Sure, you can’t watch them.’

Elmer nods. The town is congested, no doubt about it, but a one-way traffic system will do more harm than good. He nods again, lending emphasis.

‘Has she settled, sir?’ the barman tentatively inquires a moment later.

‘She has, Gerry. She’s settled well.’

When he brings the trays up she talks to him about Russians. She has all the names off pat, no telling where she picked them up. A fortune it would cost, taking up remains, a whole long battle with the powers that be. Set stuff like that in motion and you wouldn’t know where you’d end up. He was caught once through doing the decent thing; he was caught when they put it to him about the efficacy of the drugs, but if a woman who talks about Russians and opening up graves is back to normal it’s a queer thing. The truth of it is they want them out of those places for economic reasons. He should have known that in the final analysis there’s nothing that doesn’t come down to pounds, shillings and pence.

‘I saw her out walking a week back,’ the barman chattily continues. ‘Fit as a fiddle she looked.’

‘Oh, game ball, Gerry, game ball.’

In mutual, unspoken agreement neither Elmer nor the Dallons have ever revealed the true facts about the purchasing of the rat poison. In the town it is generally believed that Elmer Quarry’s wife was taken to the asylum because she couldn’t be managed any more, which is true enough. At the time it went about the town that she played with toys and imagined rats were going to attack her. On several occasions she had attempted to administer poison to herself. She’d bought clothes from the poor when there was a shopful of clothes underneath where she lived.

‘Well, that’s great, sir.’

‘It is of course, Gerry.’

He’d drive her out again tomorrow and get the bottoms of his trousers soaking wet in the grass. It annoys them to see him driving her out, especially since they don’t know where the drive is heading. It’s enjoyable sometimes to annoy them. ‘Did you find out about a single gravestone?’ she asked this morning, and he promised that the matter was well in hand.

When Elmer leaves the bar he does so by the door that opens on to the street, no longer passing through the hall of the hotel, as once he used to. Bridget retired several years ago, but even before that Elmer hadn’t bothered with loitering in the hall any more.

30

Again she is the only one, a slight figure in the corner of the pew. Two colours – black and brown – are arranged, stylishly, in her coat, its fur collar turned up for warmth. They are repeated in her soft suede shoes. The first wrinkles of old age creep around her eyes and the corners of her mouth, but the beauty that only her cousin ever remarked upon has not yet deserted her. A madonna look, her cousin said to himself the night he died while dreaming of her.

‘Amen,’ she murmurs, thin fingers splayed on her forehead, eyes closed.

The clergyman who stands at the altar is tall, a young man still unmarried, not long the inheritor of five far-flung parishes. Every Sunday, from eight o’clock till nightfall, he makes the rounds of his sparse attendances, spreading the Gospel over many miles, among the few. Often now this woman, until recently accounted mad, is the only occupant of these pews.

‘Lighten our darkness…’
he softly pleads. Shades of green and crimson, of blue and yellow, glow dully in the window behind him, scrolls looping, basketwork and swaddling clothes. No hymns are sung when she is the only one, the psalm is not intoned. Instead of a sermon the two converse.
‘The peace of God, which passeth all understanding…’

She remembers how in childhood, and when she was a girl, church services constituted an outing, how after her marriage
they provided an opportunity to meet her family. She began to enjoy them for themselves during the years she was away.

‘That was very nice,’ she compliments the clergyman. ‘Beautifully conducted.’

‘It’s good of you to come so often.’

‘I was thinking of Miss Mullover during our
Te Deum
. I don’t know why.’

The schoolteacher was long before his time, but often on these Sunday occasions her name crops up. In a schoolroom two children glance at one another with curiosity, mildly anticipating the love there is to be: again that picture forms in his mind.

‘It has always surprised me that she didn’t guess. That she didn’t know we belonged to each other.’

He nods, not signifying understanding, only making the gesture because a response is necessary.

‘Robert and I belonged to one another before we could breathe, certainly before either of us knew the other existed.’

‘You’ve told me.’

‘Is that how love starts, belonging without knowing it? When you look back it seems so.’

Again he nods, acknowledging her greater experience. Beneath his surplice there is a shrugging motion also, honestly reflecting his uncertainty.

‘God gives permission: is that it, d’you think?’

‘Possibly.’

‘And perhaps it’s not allowed, either, that someone else may guess?’

‘Perhaps not.’ He lifts the surplice over his head. Her company is like a child’s. Saying at once what occurs to her may have to do with her incarceration, a habit she picked up from her companions. Having not known her before that time, he cannot easily guess.

‘He bought a motor-car so that he could visit me. It’s
asking less that he should see to the graves. Is it still too much?’

He drapes the surplice over his left arm, smoothing the creases and watching them return. She has told him about reading the novels of Turgenev among the tombstones. She has told him that for eight years she has flushed the prescribed drugs down the lavatory, that she does not take them now because they are not necessary. As she stands in the pew, smiling up at him, her life seems as mysterious as an act of God, her innocence and her boundless love arbitrarily there, her last modest wish destined to go ungranted. The distress engendered in him by these thoughts turns into a familiar apprehension: contemplation of this woman’s life could tease away his faith more surely than all his empty churches.

‘May I take communion?’

It will make him late, but he does not demur. The surplice is replaced, the bread and wine unlocked, and measured out and offered.
‘Do this,’
he mutters,
‘in remembrance of me…’

She remembers her cousin reading the bit that likened death to a fisherman. She remembers her husband bringing the bars of chocolate on his visits, Crunchie and Caramel Crisp. She remembers his saying that he’d had the front woodwork of the shop repainted blue. Best to stick with blue, he explained, you knew where you were with blue. ‘I hear your sister’s in a certain condition again,’ he said as well. He’d bought the chocolate bars in Foley’s.

There is a final prayer, a whispering sound that reminds her of a breeze. If he feels inclined, the fisherman keeps the caught fish in the water, still swimming although it’s netted.

‘I must go now,’ the clergyman says, but listens while she tells him about Turgenev’s fisherman. Inviting her into the world of a novelist had been her cousin’s courtship, all he could manage, as much as she could accept. Yet passion came, like consummation in the end. For thirty-one years she’d clung
to a refuge in which her love affair could spread itself, a safe house offering sanctuary. For thirty-one years she passed as mad and was at peace.

‘I dress for him,’ she says. ‘I make my face up in our graveyard. It is nice I can dress for him again.’

He smiles, recalling how she giggled when she told him that she had never opened the Rodenkil. Still giggling, she said she once had written
I must not be mischievous
a hundred times. She bought the Rodenkil from her husband’s friend on purpose. She stained the rissoles green with the Stephens’ ink she’d taken from her cousin’s bedroom. ‘People think the worst of you,’ she added when she’d said all that, and added further that you could hardly blame them.

‘I’m sorry I delayed you,’ she apologises before she turns to go. ‘I’m a dreadful old nuisance.’

He watches as she walks away. Prosperous, she strikes him as just for a moment, her pretty shoes, her brown and black coat, a fragile figure, yet prosperous in her love. Does she tell Elmer Quarry that she dresses for her cousin? Does he pay for her clothes without question, because he doesn’t want to think about any of it? Does love like hers frighten everyone just a little?

‘Goodbye,’ the clergyman calls after her, and she turns and waves, and then is gone.

Alone in the cold church he sees her again for an instant, the child in the schoolroom, glancing across the desks at her delicate cousin. In the bedroom she touches the collar-stud with her lips and takes from the dressing-table drawer the bottle of Stephens’ ink. Warmed by sunlight, her finger traces the letters on an Attridge gravestone; in the blue-washed cottage she bargains for her cousin’s clothes. She arranges the soldiers in a battle she does not understand; she hangs the watch on the nail by the fireplace. Their voices join, entangled, reading about Russians.

She’ll outlive the Quarrys, the clergyman reflects, and sees her differently: old and alone, moving about from room to room in the house above the shop. ‘I have arranged it,’ his own voice promises, the least he can surely do.

There is the funeral, and then the lovers lie together.

My House in Umbria

1

It is not easy to introduce myself. Gloria Grey, Janine Ann Johns, Cora Lamore: there is a choice, and there have been other names as well. Names hardly matter, I think; it is perhaps enough to say I like Emily Delahunty best. ‘Mrs Delahunty,’ people say, although strictly speaking I have never been married. I am offered the title out of respect to a woman of my appearance and my years; and Quinty – who addresses me more than anyone else – once said when I questioned him on the issue: ‘ “Miss Delahunty” doesn’t suit you.’

I make no bones about it, I am not a woman of the world; I am not an educated woman; what I know I have taught myself. Rumour and speculation – even downright lies ’ have abounded since I was sixteen years old. In any person’s life that side of things is unavoidable, but I believe I have suffered more than most, and take this opportunity to set the record straight. Firstly, my presence on the S.S.
Hamburg
in my less affluent days was as a stewardess, nothing more. Secondly, it is a mischievous fabrication that at the time of the Oleander Avenue scandal I accepted money in return for silence. Thirdly, Mrs Chubbs was dead, indeed already buried, before I met her husband. On the other hand I do not deny that men have offered me gifts, probably all of which I have accepted. Nor do I deny that my years in Africa are marked, in my memory, with personal regret. Unhappiness breeds confusion and misunderstanding. I was far from happy in Ombubu, at the Café Rose.

In the summer of which I now write I had reached my fifty-sixth year – a woman carefully made up, eyes a greenish-blue. Then, as now, my hair was as pale as sand, as smooth as a seashell, the unfussy style reflecting the roundness of my face. My mouth is a full rosebud, my nose classical; my complexion has always been admired. Naturally, there were laughter lines that summer, but my skin, though no longer the skin of a girl, had worn well and my voice had not yet acquired the husky depths that steal away femininity. In Italy men who were strangers to me still gave me a second look, although naturally not with the same excitement as once men did in other places where I’ve lived. I had, in truth, become more than a little plump, and though perhaps I should have dressed with such a consideration in mind this is something I have never been able to bring myself to do: I cannot resist just a hint of drama in my clothes – though not bright colours, which I abhor. ‘I never knew a girl dress herself up so prettily,’ a man who sat on the board of a carpet business used to say, and my tendency to put on a pound or two has not been without admirers. A bag of bones Mrs Chubbs was, according to her husband, which is why – so I’ve always suspected – he took to me in the first place.

Having read so far, you’ll probably be surprised to learn that I’m a woman who prays. When I was a child I went to Sunday school and had a picture of Jesus on a donkey above my bed. In the Café Rose in Ombubu I interested Poor Boy Abraham in praying also, the only person I have ever influenced in this way. ‘He’s retarded, that boy,’ Quinty used to say in his joky way, careless as to whether or not the boy was within earshot. Quinty’s like that, as you’ll discover.

I am the author of a series of fictional romances, composed in my middle age after my arrival in this house. I am no longer active in that field, and did not ever presume to intrude myself into the world of literature – though, in fairness to
veracity, I must allow that my modest works dissect with some success the tangled emotions of which they treat. That they have given pleasure I am assured by those kind enough to write in appreciation. They have helped; they have whiled away the time. I can honestly state that I intended no more, and I believe you’ll find I am an honest woman.

But to begin at the beginning. I was born on the upper stairway of a lodging-house in an English seaside resort. My father owned a Wall of Death; my mother, travelling the country with him, participated in the entertainment by standing upright on the pillion of his motor-cycle while he raced it round the rickety enclosure. I never knew either of them. According to the only account I have – that of Mrs Trice, who had it from the lodging-house keeper – my mother was on her way to the first-floor lavatory when she was taken with child, if you’ll forgive that way of putting it. Within minutes an infant’s cries were heard on the stairway. ‘That was a setback,’ Mrs Trice explained, and further revealed that in her opinion my father and mother had counted on my mother’s continuing performance on the motor-cycle pillion to ‘do the trick’. By this she meant I would be stillborn, since efforts at aborting had failed. It was because I wasn’t that the arrangement was made with Mr and Mrs Trice, of 21 Prince Albert Street, in that same seaside town.