Two Lives (18 page)

‘It was a great spread you laid on for our own wedding,’ Elmer confided quietly to his mother-in-law, who seemed to be a bit out of things. ‘You did wonders that day, Mrs Dallon.’

He listened while Mrs Dallon told him that this wedding party, too, should be taking place at Culleen. But Mrs Dennehy had come over a month ago and put it to her that since such large numbers were expected, and since the Dennehys had such spacious premises and were in the business professionally, it might be in order to reverse the usual procedure. Letty had been in favour of that also, and reluctantly Mrs Dallon had given in.

‘Ah, you would of course. And wouldn’t you save a bit while you were at it?’

A familiar euphoria had begun to flow softly through Elmer. He’d taken to keeping a little John Jameson in the wall-safe in the accounting office, for any man would require a drink in certain circumstances. There was an expression Matilda had used one time: trapped like a squirrel she’d said he was. She was thinking of a time when they were children and a man had come into the shop with three squirrels in a cage, trying
to sell them in some ignorant kind of way, beautiful soft fur, he kept saying. Their father had called Elmer and the girls downstairs so that they could get a close look at the creatures, and then had sent the man packing. In Elmer’s view being trapped wasn’t a bad description of his own predicament, but he had no intention of giving Matilda the satisfaction of knowing that he agreed with her. Ridiculous, he’d said when she made her observation. Another thing was that when you’d had a drink or two you got a predicament like that into proportion – which naturally he couldn’t have said to Matilda either.

‘Bullocks are fetching well,’ he remarked to his father-in-law. ‘What’s that I heard a hundredweight?’

‘Thirty-five last week.’

‘You’d not turn up your nose at that, sir.’

Mrs Dallon had watched Elmer finishing the first drink he’d been given quicker than anyone else. He was three-quarters of the way through the second and his neck and forehead had begun to glow. She glanced across the bar to where the bridegroom was standing with Letty and some people she didn’t know. To her relief, Dennehy appeared to be drinking some kind of fruit juice.

‘I haven’t a bullock to sell,’ Mrs Dallon heard her husband saying. ‘Unfortunately.’

She returned her attention to her younger daughter’s husband. His conversation wasn’t sensible. He was rambling in his speech, going on about what some bullock or other had fetched at a fair ten years ago. When Mrs Dennehy had been standing there he’d kept staring into her mouth. At one point he’d stood back in order to get a general view of her.

‘The biggest price ever paid in the town,’ he was saying now.

Dennehy, with his arm round Letty’s waist, was thinking she
had a bit of style. She could hold her own on the family premises, calm as a cucumber. The dress suited her beautifully, greenish with shiny stuff run through it, threads that caught the light when she shifted. Underneath it, pinned to her straps, she was wearing the good-luck brooch he’d given her. The emerald engagement ring was still in place, with the gold band beside it.

‘Hullo,’ someone said, half behind him so that he had to turn his head. He dropped his arm from Letty’s waist and smiled at Mary Louise. ‘She’s all over the place,’ Letty had said earlier, asking him to be nice to her.

‘Hullo, Mary Louise, how are you?’

‘I’m fine. Are you OK yourself?’

‘Never better. Have you something in that glass?’

‘Oh yes, thanks.’

He heard Letty saying the honeymoon was a secret. When they’d still been undecided she’d mentioned places he’d never heard of before. Tramore he’d thrown in himself, and Tramore they’d agreed on.

‘I hope it’s all right with you, Mary Louise? The wedding?’

She nodded, a very slight movement of her head, her expression solemn. She looked as though she had weighed the matter up, as if she had actually wondered if it was all right or not. Dennehy felt reassured, but even so he wished his future sister-in-law was a little more forthcoming. She had committed an act of madness when she’d married Elmer Quarry, Letty said, and in her company Dennehy couldn’t help agreeing. Protestant girl or not, surely she could have done better than a draper nearly twice her age?

‘You heard I bought a house at Rathtrim?’ he said.

‘Letty told me that.’

‘We’ve had the builders in.’

‘It’ll be like she wants in that case.’

‘Oh, it’s not bad at all.’ He drank some of his pineapple
juice. There was a small measure of gin in it, which gave it an edge. ‘They’ve only a few small things left to do. They’ll do them while we’re away.’

‘I’m sure they’ll have it ready for you.’

‘They’ll hear me a mile or two if they haven’t.’

The lounge-bar filled up. Mrs Dallon was joined by her sister Emmeline, who said she didn’t know anyone except the Edderys and Miss Mullover. Letty had invited other people she’d know, Mrs Dallon said, but they hadn’t arrived yet. Apparently they were sharing a car. ‘Would you say Elmer’s sober?’ she whispered, and both women observed him for a moment. He was still talking about livestock prices. They moved closer, still listening.

‘Are your sisters keeping well?’ Mrs Dallon interrupted when he’d gone on a little longer. It was typical of them not to attend Letty’s wedding, she had already observed to her sister. Typical to be snooty.

Elmer said his sisters were fine. Neither of those girls had ever had a day’s sickness in her life, he said. When they were small they’d maybe had the measles, he couldn’t remember was it measles or chicken-pox, but they never caught a cold. They could be in the shop all day with the stove going and germs coming in with the customers, but never a cold between them. The same with indigestion, nothing like it at all. Which was more than he could say for himself.

Mrs Dallon glanced at her sister and then at her husband. She’d never heard Elmer Quarry talking like that before, in the shop or out of it. After his own wedding he’d been propriety itself.

‘Will I get you another?’ he suggested, reaching out for their three glasses. Mrs Dallon put her hand over the top of hers. Winter’s Tale sherry it was, but a glass was enough.

‘Well, it’s good of you, Elmer,’ Mr Dallon said. ‘Will he get you something, Emmeline?’

‘Ah, no, no, I’m all right.’

‘He’s footless,’ Mrs Dallon said when Elmer had gone off.

‘He’s had a few certainly,’ her sister agreed.

Mr Dallon hadn’t noticed anything amiss, but on hearing this he realized that the draper was more easy-going than usual. He’d taken it with a pinch of salt when Letty had said her brother-in-law was drinking.

‘Stotious,’ Mrs Dallon pronounced.

While he was waiting for the drinks to be poured Elmer considered that there was no reason why he shouldn’t refer to the unpleasantness back in the house, since Rose and Matilda were under discussion and the conversation had to be kept going. He’d been asked how they were and there was no reason why the thing couldn’t be hinted at. He could hint at it when he gave out their drinks to them, best to get it out of the way, best not to have it hanging there.

‘Who weren’t invited?’ Mrs Dallon said.

‘Weren’t we talking about my sisters?’

‘Your sisters were invited, Elmer. I wrote the invitation out myself.’

He shook his head. The pair of them were fit to be tied, he said.

‘You didn’t get a written card yourself, Elmer. You and Mary Louise were taken for granted. But all the others on our side I wrote out.’

‘They heard about that all right. Only nothing came to the house for themselves.’

She had given the invitation to Mary Louise. One Sunday in March, having not been at the farmhouse since before Christmas, Mary Louise had arrived, as she used to in the past. Mrs Dallon had actually been writing out the invitations at the time and she’d given her the one for Matilda and Rose. Mary Louise had said they wouldn’t attend a Catholic wedding, but
then had picked up the envelope, promising to pass it on to them anyway.

‘I’m sorry, Elmer. Please tell your sisters I’m very sorry. The invitation…’ Mrs Dallon paused and then began her sentence again. ‘The invitation must somehow have gone astray. That’s most upsetting.’

‘I wouldn’t have mentioned it only they took it hard.’

Listening to all this, Mr Dallon remembered Rose suggesting that Mary Louise should return to Culleen, to be looked after in the farmhouse. Suddenly he wished that that could be so, that she could be rescued from Elmer’s sisters. Clearly she’d been unable to bring herself to deliver the invitation to them. God alone knew what kind of a life she was leading.

‘Did you mind me remarking on it?’ Elmer’s bulk swayed a little, the top half of his body seeming to bow repeatedly. ‘Only they have me demented on that subject.’

At the other end of the long lounge-bar Baney Neligan was going through the words of a song, and Dennehy was doing his best to prevent him from singing them. Letty had specifically requested that there shouldn’t be singing. Her parents would hate it, she’d said.

‘Are you married yourself?’ he heard someone ask Mary Louise.

‘Yes, I am actually.’

‘You’re blind, Ger!’ someone else exclaimed. ‘This woman has a ring on her finger.’

Apologies were offered, and then the people moved away. Dennehy kept introducing Mary Louise to the wedding guests, but she didn’t seem much inclined to converse. Out of the corner of his eye he could see that she was on her own again, but to his relief he noticed her brother and the Eddery boys approaching her.

‘The hard man!’ Father Mannion, who had conducted the
wedding service, struck him on the shoulder. Baney Neligan began to sing.

‘Is Mr Insarov young?’ ashed Zoya.

‘He’s a hundred and forty-four,’ Shubin snapped.

‘What are you laughing at, Mary Louise?’ James asked her, and she said she was only smiling.

‘How’re you doing, Mary Louise?’ one of the Eddery boys asked.

Her brother and the Eddery boys were smoking. They were drinking from pint glasses, holding them nonchalantly as if they were well used to glasses of that size.

‘I’m OK,’ she said.

‘God, I’ll never forget that.’ One of the Eddery boys recalled how he and his brother had tied the empty creosote tin to the bumper of Kilkelly’s car on Mary Louise’s wedding day.

The three of them laughed. The younger of the Eddery boys asked her if she liked it in the town. He wouldn’t be able to stand a town himself, he’d feel closed in.

‘D’you feel closed in?’ the older brother asked.

‘You get used to it.’

‘Din Lafferty came back from Birmingham.’

Mary Louise said she didn’t think she’d like Birmingham.

‘Lafferty couldn’t take it at all.’

When she and Elmer returned from their honeymoon his sisters welcomed them on the first-floor landing, Rose saying she’d wet the tea immediately because they must be parched. But first Elmer took her to the bedroom that had been his parents’ bedroom, which would now be theirs. The air was fusty there, the windows tightly closed, the wide double bed not made up. ‘They’ll tell you where the sheets are,’ he said, and in the dining-room he reminded his sisters that he would be moving out of his old room, that in future it could maybe be used to store stuff in.

‘D’you know Din Lafferty?’ the older Eddery brother asked her, and she said she’d seen him a few times in the past.

‘A right gawk,’ James said.

She moved away.

‘Come to see an old fellow?’ Her father smiled at her. Her mother and her aunt had been taken upstairs by Mrs Dennehy to admire the wedding presents. Elmer was at the bar with Bleheen.

‘Has Aunt Emmeline moved in yet?’ she asked her father.

‘Any day now.’

‘She’s lonely with Robert dead.’

‘Ah, it’s an awful old house for her. Sad old memories.’

‘What was he like, that man she married?’

‘Useless.’

‘In what way useless?’ Mary Louise asked.

‘He led that poor woman a dance. He’d have seen her starve before he’d step off a racecourse.’

She reminded her father that once he’d said the man they spoke of had charm to burn, but she didn’t receive a direct comment on that now.

‘I wouldn’t give you tuppence for him, Mary Louise. An awful streel of a fellow.’

‘Robert wouldn’t have been Robert if it hadn’t been for him.’

‘Well, no, that’s true, I suppose.’

There was surprise in her father’s voice, and for a moment Mary Louise almost told him that she and Robert had loved one another, first as children, and then when she was a married woman. Her father would keep it to himself, not wishing to cause anxiety: that was the way he was. She might have told him that Elmer came drunk to bed. She might have given the reason for their childless marriage. Her father would not have passed that on either. And would it matter that he knew all this, that the truth had been shared? It mightn’t matter at all, but at the same time it would distress him.

‘Father Mannion,’ a voice said, and a priest held out a hand for her father to shake. ‘How’re you doing, Mr Dallon?’

The priest was smiling, a big, pink, boyish face on a middle-aged man, a pink neck and forehead. He held his hand out to Mary Louise also, and she laid hers in it. ‘How are you, Mrs Quarry?’ he said.

She hated being called that. Ever since the funeral she had hated it. She didn’t listen when the priest and her father discussed some matter in businesslike tones, her father regularly nodding, the priest reaching out to press his arm every now and again. Gazing at the black cloth of Father Mannion’s sleeve, Mary Louise recalled the bottom sheet spread out on the bed that first evening in the Quarrys’ house, her own hands smoothing it. She walked round the bed itself to tuck it in, then spread the second sheet and smoothed away the wrinkles in that also. She remembered now the coldness of those sheets when later they slept together in his parents’ bed, he on the left side, she to the right.

‘Zinaida drank iced water all day,’
her cousin said, and Mary Louise turned away to smile. The old princess complained that so much iced water could not be good for a girl with a weak chest. As for herself, she had a toothache…