Two Lives

by William Trevor

  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.

  Renehan finished his drink and left Hogan’s bar. Elmer was still on his own when Letty and her husband entered it a quarter of an hour later. Behind the bar Gerry was reading the Evening Herald. No one else was present.

  ‘Elmer,’ Letty said.

  ‘I had a bit of business here,’ he began.

  ‘We want to talk about Mary Louise.’

  Dennehy said he’d get the drinks. Letty led the way to a table in a corner. ‘And whatever Mr Quarry’s having,’ Elmer heard Dennehy ordering. At the same time his sister-in-law said:

  ‘We wanted to catch you on your own, Elmer. I’ve left messages for Mary Louise only she doesn’t ring me back.’

  ‘I’ll tell her –’

  ‘Rose said something about a safe.’

  ‘That’s a private matter, actually.’

  ‘What’s Rose talking about, Elmer?’

  Elmer explained what had occurred was that Mary Louise, in a hurry for some money one day, had borrowed a sum from the safe in the accounting office. It was nothing, he said. A storm in a tea-cup.

  ‘Rose said they have to keep their handbags under lock and key.

  To Elmer’s relief, Dennehy arrived at that moment with the drinks. ‘Good luck!’ Dennehy said, raising his glass and then occupying himself with the lighting of a cigarette.

  ‘What’s the matter with Mary Louise, Elmer?’

  ‘Ah, she’s all right. Mary Louise likes to be on her own, and it’s a thing my sisters don’t understand. She likes to go out on her bicycle, and then again she likes to have an area of her own in the house. That’s all that’s in it. No more than that.’

  ‘Your sisters went out to Culleen a few months ago. They made certain statements about Mary Louise.’

  ‘What kind of statements?’

  ‘They said she was away in the head.’

  Elmer gave a jump. He finished the liquid in his glass and signalled to Gerry to replenish it, as well as the two glasses of his companions. Noticing the gesture, Letty shook her head. Dennehy nodded.

  ‘I didn’t know that,’ Elmer said.

  ‘Didn’t you know they went out to Culleen?’

  ‘To tell you the truth, I didn’t.’

  ‘I haven’t seen Mary Louise since our wedding. There wasn’t much the matter with her then. Except, of course, she doesn’t have a lot to say for herself any more.’

  ‘We’ve all noticed that, Letty.’

  ‘She was always talkative in the past.’

  There were no rats in the attics. If there were rats in the attics you’d hear them scampering about above your head. For all he knew, it was all over the town that she’d been buying rat poison.

  ‘My parents wanted her to see Dr Cormican,’ Letty said.

  ‘It would do no harm. A check-up wouldn’t hurt anyone.’

  ‘She said she wouldn’t.’

  ‘Let me have a word with her, Letty.’

  ‘I’m in every day. Tell her I’m waiting for her phone call.’

  Abruptly, Letty stood up. She’d had only a sip or two of her drink. All the time they were talking, Elmer noticed, she hadn’t stopped frowning, a small pucker of worry at the top of her forehead.

  ‘I’ll be seeing you,’ he said loudly in case Gerry would think they weren’t on terms.

  ‘Come out to the house,’ Dennehy invited, hastily finishing his drink. Letty didn’t say anything.

  Elmer returned to the bar and ordered a double measure of whiskey.

  ‘God, isn’t that shocking?’ Gerry remarked as he handed back some change, and for a moment Elmer thought he was referring to some aspect of the conversation that had taken place in the bar. But Gerry, one eye still on the Evening Herald, was drawing his attention to the murder of King Feisal of Iraq.

  Not interested in this far-off violence, Elmer nevertheless deplored the event. All it amounted to, he was thinking, was more of their outrageousness. There’d been no call to go visiting the Dallons, and definitely no call to say his wife was mentally affected or to mention the money borrowed from the safe. The truth was that Mary Louise had settled down the way she wanted to settle down, which was what he’d been endeavouring to explain to the sister. She slept up in the attic now, no reason why she shouldn’t if that was what she wanted.

  *

  The chimney-sweep lit the first fire in the grate to make certain the chimney was drawing well. Mary Louise carried up coals and wood from the cellar. Her presence was unnecessary in the shop because customers were few; her serving there had been part of a general pretence, or so it seemed to her now. Days went by now during which she addressed neither her husband nor her sisters-in-law. Sleeping in the attic room, she no longer experienced feelings of shame when she first awoke in the mornings. In the kitchen she washed the dishes the household’s food had been eaten from. She continued to perform the other household chores she’d been allocated, but always took her meals on her own. Whenever she felt like it she rode away from the town on her bicycle, going to the graveyard mostly, sometimes walking in the fields near her aunt’s house. The house was empty now, though not yet sold.

  Often she thought she would like to be more alone than she was. The voices of her sisters-in-law and of Elmer were tiresome. The tread of feet on the stairs was tiresome, the clatter of dishes, the rattle of the shop bell. To press away such sounds she played a game that reminded her of games played in her childhood: she closed her eyes and watched herself wandering from room to room, in and out of her sisters-in-law’s bedrooms, opening the windows of the big front room, making the dining-room different. On the first-floor landing there was a glass chandelier in pink and scarlet. There was a smell of flowers and newly ironed table-linen. In the kitchen a cook moved her saucepans on the range; raw mutton waited on a table beside high piles of plates that rattled when the cabbage was chopped. In the yard chickens screamed, chased by someone intent upon wringing their necks.

  Outside, blue shutters covered the windows of the shop; the entrance doors were locked and bolted. Somewhere, at the heart of everything, her cousin belonged, as delicately present as the confection of refurbished rooms. Everything was fragile: only too easily it could all be broken, like porcelain falling on flagstones. Gently, fingers to their lips, she and her cousin laughed.

  People no longer mentioned his wife to Elmer. In the town she was talked about less than she had been, accepted now as an eccentric person. She was seen regularly on her bicycle, wrapped up closely, a headscarf tied around her head. In January of the new year – 1959 – she visited her sister and admired the fittings in the kitchen, and listened while Letty told her what it was like to be pregnant. Her mother, in January also, called in at the shop again, only to be informed by Rose that Mary Louise no longer deigned to serve there. Mrs Dallon rang the bell at the halldoor of the house, but there was no reply. She returned to the shop and demanded to speak to Elmer, who shambled down the stairs from the accounting office, seeming to Mrs Dallon to be unsteady on his feet. He brought her upstairs to the house and asked her to wait in the front room, which Mary Louise entered a few minutes later. She smiled, and appeared to be normal
except for her silence. ‘You don’t come to see us any more,’ her mother gently chided her. Mary Louise promised to come the following Sunday, but she didn’t arrive, on that Sunday or on subsequent ones.

  Elmer himself still worried about the rat poison that had been bought. He didn’t mention it to his sisters, nor to anyone else, but he questioned Mary Louise as casually as he could about the presence of rats in the attics where she spent so much time. ‘I think I caught them,’ she replied. ‘They took the Rodenkil I put down.’ He asked her what she had done with the poison that remained and she said she still had it in case the rats returned. Elmer shook his head: that wasn’t a good idea, he suggested, in case she’d ever get the stuff on her hands or maybe someone else might pick it up, not knowing what it was. Now that she’d destroyed the rats it would be better to throw the poison out; if rats returned more could be bought. Mary Louise kept nodding. She’d wrap up what poison remained, she promised, and put it in the dustbin.

  After Mary Louise’s visit Letty’s concern didn’t lessen, but by now she was reconciled to the changes in her sister, accepting them because there was nothing else she could do. Then her baby was born and made demands on both her attention and her thoughts. She had expected that Mary Louise would ride out to see the infant, and felt aggrieved when she didn’t. Kevin Aloysius the child was called, Aloysius being a Dennehy family name.

  Rose and Matilda bided their time. They were pleased that Mary Louise no longer served in the shop; the dining-room without her was almost like old times. Yet there continued to be the irritation of what Matilda had once described as her ‘smug face’, the agreeableness that spread into it when you addressed her but which didn’t last, being quickly replaced by a dead look, as though she couldn’t be bothered listening to you for more than a minute at the most. There was the irritation of her presence in the lavatory or the bathroom when they wished to use one or the other, and her half-witted confining of herself in an attic. Above all, there was the appalling toll she was continuing to take of their brother. Sometimes in the mornings his eyes were so bloodshot you’d imagine he couldn’t see properly. He had put on weight; his pallor was unhealthy; the next thing, he’d get the shakes in his hands, like old Crowe who came round with crab-apples every autumn. Not knowledgeable about the nature of addiction, the sisters believed that when the wife he’d erroneously married was either returned to her family or incarcerated in a suitable asylum, Elmer would revert to his normal self. He would call in at the YMCA billiard-room for the occasional game of billiards instead of spending his evenings in Hogan’s Hotel. He would go out for summer walks the way he used to. His interest in business matters, having noticeably declined, would revive. That the shop would see the present generation out and pass to distant relatives in Athy mattered as little now as it had before the whole unfortunate episode of the marriage. It was only a pity Elmer hadn’t been able to see that there was a natural threesome in the shop and in the house.