by Mary Lavin
But he knew. ‘It’s of Mona you’re thinking, isn’t it?’ he asked gently.
Gratefully, she nodded her head.
‘Listen, Lucy,’ he said kindly but carefully. ‘Listen to me. Mona would be the first to understand. She would be the first to want me to be happy, happy and well cared for. Do you know what I was thinking today while I was waiting for my meal to be served up to me?’ As he saw the sympathetic inquiry in her eye, he broke off to answer it. ‘Oh, indeed yes, the same story. It was after three when I got it. And if you saw it when it was put in front of me.’ He shuddered. ‘Uneatable! The poor girl does her best, but she lacks direction. She can’t be blamed. But what’s this I was saying? Oh, yes. I was saying that while I was sitting there waiting for my meal to be dished up, and knowing well how unappetising it would be, ice cold, the chop stuck to the plate, I thought to myself that it would break Mona’s heart if she could see me. And do you know what else I thought, Lucy? I thought that Heaven couldn’t be Heaven for her if she were able to look down at me in that moment.’ He closed his eyes. Then, opening them wide, he looked bravely on a new day of thought. ‘God surely spares them such sights,’ he said.
It was certainly comforting to think so. All the same, she felt guilty, and she said so. ‘I can’t help it, Sam,’ she whispered.
He took her hand. ‘Guilty for what, Lucy? Is it for the past?’
She felt like laughing. ‘Oh, no, no,’ she cried. ‘For the present. I feel I’m taking you away from her.’
‘It was God who took her away from me Lucy,’ he said. He was so wise. ‘Aren’t you only taking me back?’
Gentle, and yet discriminating. How could she but trust him? But he was looking at his watch. It couldn’t be time for his train already? ‘Oh no, no,’ he said reassuringly. ‘It’s just that time flies, and we have a lot to arrange. First, let me put your mind finally at rest about poor Mona. Let me tell you, Lucy, that she urged me to marry again.’ He nodded his head and lowered his voice. ‘She spoke of it just before the end. I won’t repeat her exact words. Such things are sacred, but you can rest assured we’d have her blessing on what we are about to do.’ He closed his eyes again, this time as if in prayer, and when he opened them it was briskly, as one rises from prayer strengthened to take a new command of things. ‘We have nothing to fear from our consciences,’ he said. ‘Tell me about your family. Did I understand you to say when you opened the door that they have been causing you anxiety?’
Although it was really the other way round, Lucy nodded.
She frowned. ‘They could give a lot of annoyance,’ he said, ‘unless, that is to say unless we go about things a clever way.’
Thinking there could be no ambiguity in a truism, Lucy agreed happily. ‘What we must do,’ said Sam, ‘is spring it on them.’ Then, before she had time to say anything, he snapped his fingers. ‘Why tell them at all, for that matter. I could have a word with the priest and get things arranged quietly. Then I could slip down the night before on the late train and we could be married as early as possible.’
Lucy was speechless. She couldn’t say anything, yet distinctly he appeared to be listening.
‘Ah, you’re right,’ he said, exactly as if she had spoken. ‘You’re right, Lucy. It wouldn’t do. The town is too full of gossips. Our little secret would be common property in five minutes. No, we’ll have to think of something else.’ He pondered for a minute. ‘You could come up to Dublin and we could be married up there.’ But almost at once he shook his head. ‘No, no. That wouldn’t do either. You’d want to be married here, in your own parish. It’s quite natural. For sentiment’s sake if for no other reason. It’s different, perhaps, for me, but I’m able to put myself in your place. There will be enough that will be strange to you.’ He pondered again. ‘I’ll tell you what we’ll do,’ he said, and she had only time to notice in passing that the conditional mood had given way to the future positive. ‘I will come down on the evening train, but I won’t come all the way,’ and he was so pleased with his little ruse, he winked at her. ‘I’ll get off at a small station somewhere up the line, and in the morning I’ll hire a car and come across country just in time for the ceremony. You will only have to walk up the street as if there was nothing at all afoot. And then, before anyone gets wind of it, the deed will be done.’
Lucy was stunned. ‘Do you mean elope?’
‘Elope?’ It was a word Sam himself hadn’t heard for years, but, seeing how it brought a light into Lucy’s eyes, he repeated it. ‘Elope, that’s it!’ he said.
‘And who’d tell my family?’ she asked, doubtful in spite of a rising excitement.
‘We can tell them ourselves when all is over,’ Sam said. ‘There’s only Louise and Bay in the town, isn’t that all? We can walk around and confront them, beard them in their dens.’
Lucy laughed guiltily. ‘Arm in arm!’ she said.
‘That’s the idea,’ said Sam. ‘Let them lump it or like it. And as for the ones in America, well, we needn’t think about them. It can’t matter to them one way or another, nor the ones in Dublin, either, although they can be told in the same way as the ones down here. We can walk around and call on them that night if it isn’t too late when we get there.’
‘To Dublin? Is that where we’ll go?’ She’d given no thought at all to the honeymoon. In the old days, honeymoons were mostly spent in Kilkee or Tramore. ‘Is it to Dublin we’d go?’ she repeated.
Sam had given no thought to the matter, either. He was sobered by his omission. ‘I’ve taken a lot of time off lately, I’m afraid,’ he said, ‘with one thing and another, when Mona was ill, and later for the funeral. I’d find it a bit awkward to ask for more time in so short a space. But wait a minute!’ he cried. He really was resourceful. ‘We’re forgetting that it will be all new to you, the house, I mean. The house will be a big change for you after this place. It’s a nice little house, snug and dry.’
He made it sound so like a nest Lucy had to smile.
‘That’s my girl!’ he said approvingly. ‘I knew you’d take the right attitude. And let me tell you something. Honeymoons are overrated. Believe you me! I can give you my solemn assurance on that. What is more, I have yet to meet the married couple that hasn’t the same to say. That’s one part of the business with which they’d dispense if they had to do it over again. Yes, take it from me, honeymoons are grossly overrated. I have no hesitation at all in asking for your trust on this point, Lucy. None whatever.’
‘Will I not see it so till, till afterwards, the house, I mean?’ she asked timidly, trying hard not to sound doubtful.
‘Isn’t that best, don’t you think?’ He was very cheerful. ‘It’s in good order. You’ve nothing to worry about on that score. You’ll have nothing to do but walk in the door. Not only is it fully fitted, fully equipped, but as I’ll only be one night gone from it, it will be well aired into the bargain.’ Remembering that in this respect Lucy did not know what she was being spared, he threw up his eyes in token of some past experience of his own. Then he lowered them to rest gently on her. ‘I can only say that it’s no more than we deserve, Lucy, after our long wait, our long, long wait,’ he repeated sighing. ‘Lucy, you’re not going to make it much longer, are you?’
‘Oh, Sam!’ He made her feel so dilatory that she looked anxiously at the calendar on the wall behind his back. ‘Lent begins next month,’ she said. ‘We’ll have to wait till after that, anyway.’
But Sam had whisked the calendar off its nail and was examining it. ‘Unless we hustle, and get it over before Lent,’ he said. ‘I don’t see what there is to stop us, do you?’
And so one day in early February, with a bunch of snowdrops pinned to her lapel, Lucy became a bride.
‘Let me do that, Lucy. You might strain yourself,’ admonished Sam, as he took her dressing-case and put it up with the other suitcases on the luggage rack of the tra
in. Doing so, he looked tenderly at her. ‘It wasn’t such an ordeal after all, was it?’ he asked, and he leaned across and patted her on the knee. ‘You look bewildered,’ he said, and he laughed. ‘Well, cheer up, love; it’s all over now.’
Bewildered she was. More than the ceremony seemed to have ended. What, for instance, was she to make of her family’s new attitude towards her? Had they got wind of things in advance, that they had taken her news so coolly? What had happened to their fears of a scandal? Above all, what had become of their concern for themselves? Now it was only of her they thought.
‘Well, it’s your own business, Lucy,’ said Louise, almost as soon as she’d opened the door to them, when, as planned, she and Sam went round, arm in arm, after the wedding. She hadn’t given them time to open their mouths. One look and Louise guessed. Their being together at that hour of the day may have made the telling superfluous, of course. And then there was her bunch of snowdrops. And oh yes, Sam had a snowdrop in his buttonhole.
Bay wasn’t surprised, either. ‘It was more or less what I expected,’ she said when Louise’s youngest had been sent up the street to inform her and bring her down. ‘Well, I hope you’ll be happy,’ she added.
‘Oh, naturally, we all hope that,’ said Louise.
And later, when Lucy and Sam were in the train and the family was standing on the platform, Bay’s parting words were not the most encouraging. ‘You must make the best of it now,’ she called out as the train began to slide away from the platform.
‘We’re off!’ cried Sam, and although he urged her to lean out and wave to them, she had barely time to raise her hand before the railway bridge snuffed them out. There was nothing to do after that but settle into her seat. Sam remained standing. Closing the window, he turned his attention to the luggage. ‘I’ll fold our coats and put them on top of the cases, out of the way,’ he said.
His back was to her. But anyway she hardly heard him. Her mind still echoed with her sister’s words. ‘I hope you know what you’re doing.’ Did she know what she was doing? What had she done? Had she, in her endeavour to hide her intention from others, hidden it in part from herself as well? She stared out the carriage window. The flat fields through which they were travelling were familiar to her still, but field by field they were being flung back to either side as if flung out of existence. ‘Oh, Sam, did we do right?’ she whispered.
Sam’s mind, however, was on the overcoats. It was a mistake to have turned them inside out. With their slippy silk linings, they kept sliding off the rack. He had to stand up again and take them down and turn them right side out before he put them back. ‘That’s better,’ he said contentedly, surveying them once more before he sat down. But he’d heard her. ‘It’s funny you should say that,’ he said then. ‘Mona asked me that same question. In the same circumstances, too. But she had cause to ask. Poor Mona! There was a little cloud on her happiness.’ He sighed.
‘A cloud? What was it!’ she asked in dismay.
‘She was very tenderhearted,’ said Sam. He made a discreet sign of the cross. On the opposite seat, Lucy felt obliged to do the same. ‘She was never able to enjoy her own happiness if it cast a shadow over that of someone else.’
In the past few weeks, Lucy had heard many references to Mona, but somehow she’d never really thought much about her. For that matter, she hadn’t thought about her for years. Sam and Mona were married almost immediately after the bogus episode of the engagement ring, and Lucy had taken care to be away at the time of the wedding; she went to Lisdoonvarna for several weeks, although it wasn’t the best time of year for the spa. And when she came back, people had the grace not to speak about them to her. Then perhaps the fact that they had no children made it seem after a time as if they had passed out of existence. But in the train, when Sam spoke of her, Lucy suddenly pictured Mona again, as she must have been on the morning of her wedding trip. It might have been on this same train that they took their departure. It could have been in this very carriage they travelled. Perhaps on this very seat Mona, too, had sat. Suddenly she leaned forward. ‘Sam, would you like to change places?’ she cried.
‘But why?’ Sam asked.
‘Well, some people say it’s bad to sit with your back to the engine,’ she said. ‘It could make you sick.’
Sam was just about to cross his feet contentedly. ‘Not me,’ he said. ‘But I’ll change with you all the same if you like.’
‘Please, Sam,’ she said faintly.
When they’d changed seats, he looked at her with a worried expression. ‘Do you feel better now?’ he asked. ‘Mind you, Mona liked to face the engine, too, although I always think it’s better to feel sick than to get a cinder in your eye.’
‘You mean she sat on this side?’
‘Yes, always on that side,’ said Sam amiably, ‘unless the carriage was crowded. In which case—’
But the train roared through a tunnel just then, and Lucy couldn’t hear. What did it matter anyway, she asked herself, and she was prepared to think about something else when they flashed out into the open again. From either side, the green fields rushed towards her, but it was the green fields of life that had rushed towards Mona. It was all very well to say that in the old days Mona couldn’t hold a candle to her, but what figure would she cut now if placed by the side of that green, young girl? Fresh apprehensions chilled her, and she forgot that for Sam those early memories of Mona had long been overlaid by others, less exciting. By a strange transference, she began to think of Sam as young and green, too. I must look awful, she thought, putting up her hand nervously to her hair, to her forehead, to her cheek. She hadn’t slept well the night before, and she wasn’t used to early rising. She must be a sight. She didn’t dare look in a mirror.
As if he were a mirror, however, Sam at that moment gave her back her reflection. ‘You look a bit tired,’ he said, and he sighed. ‘Mona failed a lot in late years,’ he said. ‘She looked very badly towards the end.’
Lucy looked at him fixedly. To talk about Mona was hardly the best cure for her at that moment, but it might be better than thinking about her. ‘I never saw her again,’ she said. ‘Not after—’
She didn’t need to finish the sentence. He nodded understandingly. ‘She was strong enough, you know,’ he said, easily conversationally. ‘I used to think she wasn’t, but I was wrong. She was able for plenty of hard work. There was no doubt of that. We hadn’t much money in the early days, and she worked hard to save every penny. I often went to bed at night and left her downstairs, and do you know what she’d be at? Glazing my collars, or waxing my shoes. I had no control over her when it came to work. But in the end she got pulled down by those pregnancies.’
Lucy started.
‘Didn’t you know?’ said Sam, seeing her surprise. ‘She had four or five miscarriages. She did indeed. And it nearly broke her heart. It was a real cross. She’d have been a good mother, just as she was a good wife, but it was not to be, it seems.’ He shook his head. ‘Many a time, I came home from work and found her sitting in the dark, brooding over it. I used to do my best to console her, but it was no use. I used to tell her that she was a mother. Time and time again, I’d tell her that. ‘You are a mother, Mona.’ That her children never came to full term did not deprive her of that title. But she was inconsolable. You see, Lucy, it wasn’t of herself she was thinking but of me.’ His voice dropped. ‘The most unselfish of women. Do you know what she said to me one day? She said that if she’d known that she’d never give me a family, she wouldn’t have married me at all. Can you imagine anything more unselfish? To think that she could bring herself to wish another woman in her place.’
‘Oh, she couldn’t have meant it, Sam,’ Lucy protested.
Sam shook his head. ‘Indeed she did. You’ve no notion of her depth. And what is more, Lucy, it was you she was thinking about at the time.’
That was too much.
‘Oh, no!’ she cried, putting her two hands up to her face. It was one thing to know that she had held her place in his heart. It was another thing altogether for Mona to have known it. ‘She didn’t mention me by name, Sam, did she?’
‘Well, maybe not on that occasion,’ said Sam piously. ‘She had great delicacy,’ he added. ‘But I may as well tell you your name was not unmentioned in our home. She often spoke of you, especially in our early days, because you see, she knew she had only come second with me.’ He leaned forward. ‘Ah, yes, Lucy, your name was a household word with us in the early days of our marriage. Indeed, it became a kind of joke in the end. Ah, don’t be offended. It was a playful little joke; there was no harm in it. Ah, there was a rare quality in Mona, that she could turn the tragic into the comic. In her place, another woman would surely have nourished bitterness against you, especially when she remembered what you were in those days, because, that’s another thing, she was fully aware of how much better-looking you were than her. I often heard her say that beauties like you were no longer to be seen.’ He shook his head and sighed deeply this time. For a moment, Lucy thought it was for the passing of that beauty he sighed, but it was not. ‘Ungrudging!’ he said. ‘Generous-hearted! That was Mona!’ And to her dismay he took out his handkerchief. But when he unfolded it, it appeared it was only to blow his nose. ‘Her unselfishness was never more in evidence than at the end,’ he said then. ‘When she felt the end was near, it was not of herself but of me she was thinking. She couldn’t bear the thought of me being neglected. Do you know, Lucy, one day when I went into the hospital I had a button missing off my waistcoat, and when she saw it the tears ran down her face. “You can’t say but I always had you well turned out, Sam,” she said. “I can’t bear to think you’d ever be otherwise.” It was on that day she made me promise I wouldn’t let any thought of her stand in my way if I saw fit to marry again. But I told you that, didn’t I?’ he asked, suddenly anxious.