He wagged his head. This was a way of his when he was at a loss, a response that could have meant anything. He whistled soundlessly.
Mary Louise sighed. It didn’t matter; she didn’t care. She had no interest in his spending time in the billiard-room or spending it elsewhere. But something had to be said occasionally, else there would be only silence between them. The smell of drink was a smell like any other; all she was doing was making a comment.
He yawned, drawing his pyjamas on. There were good things about him, she reflected, even more good things than she’d been aware of when she married him. He was a little mean in some ways but not in others. She’d seen him taking a lump of coal off the fire, but she could have what she wanted from the shop, and he gave her money for other necessities – a little stack of notes and coins on the first day of every month: he never forgot. If she’d complained about the rudeness of his sisters he might even have spoken to them.
‘Good-night, dear,’ he said, and she reached to turn the light off, as she did every night, because the switch was closer to her.
‘Good-night, Elmer.’
Almost at once he slept. His breathing, soft at first, became deeper, then stertorous. She moved her limbs towards his. Her hands lay lightly on his sleeping body.
13
The women talk of different times. For the years they have known one another they have marked out in their conversations certain periods they favour. Just as Mary Louise claims 1957, so Mrs Leavy of Youghal returns regularly to her infancy in 1921 and ‘22, Dot Sterne to 1984, Belle D to the advent of the Beatles, the Spanish wife to destitution in Gibraltar, 1986. Others have more precisely held to themselves days or moments or occasions, the hour of a tragedy or an act of violence.
People are claimed also, special and belonging, the personal baggage of the house’s inmates. To a conversation that is endlessly renewed Mary Louise contributes the people of Culleen and of the town, her cousin and her aunt, her husband and his sisters. In turn she hears about people she does not know. Every day the house is thronged, the crowds impenetrable sometimes.
‘God knows, it’s nothing new,’ the faded woman who is usually silent alleges in a quieter conversation. It’s nothing new, reflection has revealed to her, that mad women should walk the roads and streets of Ireland. Once upon a time they did, in the old times, before the great brick asylums were built, before each town possessed a barracks for hiding the insane in.
‘What’s she talking about?’ Bríd Beamish, wearing lipstick, asks.
‘Loonies on the loose is what.’ Dot Sterne has rolled her stockings down, hoping Miss Foye will notice and not put her back where she came from.
‘Oh, of course,’ Mrs Leavy agrees. ‘We all knew the brickwork asylums. Many’s the time me and Elsie looked over the wall.’
‘I’m saying the time before the asylums were in existence,’ the faded woman corrects her. ‘I’m saying long ago.’
‘Loonies on the loose,’ Belle D repeats.
‘Crazies,’ a woman who was a priest’s housekeeper adds. ‘The brain in tatters.’
‘It’s a different kettle of fish now,’ Mrs Leavy reminds them. ‘The days of the old crazies is over. We don’t use them expressions no more. This day and age, the nurse told me.’
‘Swallow your medication.’ Small Sadie’s laughter cackles. ‘Right eejits if you don’t swallow the medication.’
‘There’s some would never have set foot in this place if the drugs had been to hand. A bottle of medicine would have kept them well.’ Mrs Leavy has taken the lead. She has placed herself at the head of the inmates who are soon to be released. She is stating their case. She is offering the medical evidence as she had it personally from Miss Foye and a doctor, the bald one, not the one with the beard.
‘Mary Louise should never be setting a foot out of it,’ Small Sadie snaps back. ‘Heathen bloody strumpet.’
She cries as soon as she has spoken, putting her arms around Mary Louise and saying she’s sorry.
14
It seemed natural that her cousin should become Mary Louise’s confidant. In September 1957, two years after her wedding, she told him the details of the courtship there’d been, of the proposal on the humped bridge, of her request for time to think it over, of the engagement and the journey on the wedding day by train and bus, and the arrival at the Strand Hotel.
They had seen, in June, the rose blooming wildly through the tiny derelict church. They had returned repeatedly to the stream, in search of the heron. But Mary Louise’s confidences were offered in the graveyard, among the Attridge headstones.
‘And what were you thinking?’ Robert, fascinated, would interrupt, leading her back to some point that interested him particularly. What had her thoughts been when she sat beside Elmer Quarry for the very first time, during The Flame and the Flesh? Or when she stood in front of the altar? Or when the red-cheeked Reverend Harrington pronounced them man and wife?
She shared with him her emotions during the first few moments in the Strand Hotel, when she experienced misgivings that had not been there before, when her husband said that the place seemed comfortable enough. She described how, in the dining-room, the landlady had indicated a table where three men were already eating. She took him on the walk by the sea, the children collecting shellfish, the dog chasing the seagulls. She led him to McBirney’s bar, told about the cherry brandies she’d drunk, about how Mr Mulholland had called her Kitty, how the bald man had said he had a Woolworth’s bladder.
She’d been drunk in the end, she confessed, and Elmer had been too drunk to take his clothes off. When they’d woken up in the morning they’d both felt terrible. They’d gone for another walk along the strand, during which Elmer said they didn’t feel so hot because they weren’t used to drink. She recalled the remainder of the honeymoon, the same kind of conversations in the dining-room as there’d been in McBirney’s bar on their wedding night. Mr Mulholland said goodbye on the Sunday morning, announcing that it was his due to kiss the bride. After breakfast every day Elmer sat outside the hotel and read the Irish Times from cover to cover while she accompanied to the strand one of the families who were staying at the hotel. She played with the children, helping them to make sandcastles. She bought a bathing-dress and bathed. On the Wednesday the bald man showed them round the animal-foodstuffs place where he worked. On Thursday they watched swing-boats being erected. On Friday they came back.
‘Why did you get married, Mary Louise?’
‘No one knows a thing like that.’
He shook his head. He said that, looking back, people knew.
‘I thought it would be all right. I thought no one else would marry me. I wanted to be in the town.’
‘My God!’
He reached for her hand and held it. He raised it to his cheek. She shouldn’t have told him, she thought, yet in the same moment she knew it didn’t matter. It didn’t matter being here, or letting him take her hand. How could it matter?
‘Tell me anything you want to,’ he urged, and listened, her hand still held.
He heard about a marriage that was unconsummated, about the shock there’d been for husband and wife in the Strand Hotel, about the state they had lived in since. Her voice was a toneless mutter, flattened and dead. Miss Embarrassment her friend had called her; but Mary Louise, who blushed so easily, was pale when she lay bare her confidences. Was it because he was an invalid that she told him? Robert wondered. Was it because he didn’t count, because he seemed to her to be beyond the realm of ordinary humanity, as impotent as her husband?
‘He has begun to drink,’ she said. ‘And I deceive him after only two years by coming here on Sundays.’
‘But I’m your cousin, Mary Louise. Doesn’t he know you come here?’
‘Nobody knows.’
He imagined her in the house, the spinster sisters resenting her presence, hating her even, Elmer Quarry trudging upstairs at mealtimes, drinking his shame away. She told him about the attics, about t
he toys the Quarry children had played with, all carefully kept in a cupboard. And then she said:
‘I used to think I was in love with you, Robert.’
‘With me?’
‘It might have been the time when you were fond of me. We might both have been in love with one another.’
He remembered again the pain of not being allowed to go to school, his anger with his mother, his refusal to understand. They would starve if things went on like this, his mother had said. No matter how early she rose in the mornings there weren’t enough hours of daylight, especially in wintertime. She hadn’t understood either; he couldn’t tell her.
‘When James came here with the butter every week I used to bring the conversation round to you. I often thought of giving a note to James.’
‘I think I’d turned my attentions to Mr Stewart by then.’
Laughter relieved a constriction. Then he said:
‘I’m in love with you still, to tell the truth. I wait for every Sunday with just the same feelings as I had then.’
In turn, for Robert, it didn’t matter either. Telling more of the truth didn’t matter because she would not come back in any case. After the intimacies she’d shared with him she would find it hard to cycle out next Sunday and the Sunday after, as if nothing different had occurred. She didn’t know this, but it would be so.
‘I couldn’t face the wedding party,’ he said.
‘I thought you weren’t up to it.’
‘No. We were going to go. We intended to. “I’ll wait in the car,” I said. But my mother wouldn’t have that.’
‘You couldn’t love me, Robert.’
‘It’s not a choice that people have.’
Did she mean, he wondered, that she couldn’t love him? Did she mean that even before her marriage there couldn’t have been love between them because he was only half a person? It was different for children was no doubt what she meant also: children didn’t always notice.
But Mary Louise contradicted these thoughts almost as they occurred. She wasn’t worth anyone’s love, she said. She had married a man for gain. She had married out of impatience and boredom, and had been handed both back with interest added. She had calculated; she had coldly examined the pros and cons.
Robert laughed. He took her hand again, and again she permitted him to do so. Anyone would do as she had, he said.
‘I wouldn’t have if there’d been our friendship, Robert.’
‘Then I’d have been insisting I was the guilty one.’
He felt the pressure of her fingers on his palm. Was this a sign, a statement she could not bring herself otherwise to make? Now and again, since the time they had been together in Miss Mullover’s schoolroom, he had glimpsed her in the town when by chance they visited it on the same day, not often. Every autumn his mother drove to the Dallons’ farmhouse with grapes and apples. He might have accompanied her but he’d never wished to, fearful of the renewal of emotions. The wedding had been impossible, entirely, to avoid.
‘I’m sorry I said all that, Robert.’
‘It means everything to me that you did.’
On his side, there were facts he might have added to what she’d said: his gloom and wretchedness while his mother chattered in the car, driving back after the wedding; the pain he experienced because he’d selfishly deprived her of an occasion she would have enjoyed; the greater pain of imagining the radiant happiness of the bride. While Mary Louise drank cherry brandy in McBirney’s she had still been in his thoughts, still in her wedding-dress, as last he’d seen her. He had tortured himself while Mary Louise, in the presence of her already unconscious husband, undressed and crept woozily into her marriage bed. While she slept, virginal and alone, he had descended to the bitterest depths of melancholy.
‘What an irony it is!’ was all he observed in this respect, speaking softly in the graveyard.
‘You are the only person in the world I could have told.’
He kissed her gently, their lips just touching. Then he pushed himself to his feet and held his hands out to her. They walked back towards the house, not saying anything else. Both were possessed by a warmth that delighted them, the warmth of secrets at last shared while still remaining secrets, the intimacy of a private truth.
Crossing the sloping field beyond which the house and garden lay, Robert said:
‘Look! There he is.’
They had not, that day, brought the binoculars. But Mary Louise could see, at the very place where they often watched the fish going by, the grey, angular form of the heron they had hoped for so long to catch a glimpse of. Neck extended, it dipped its long beak into the water, no doubt fishing for the trout, although the distance was too great to allow them to observe how successful these efforts were. It stuttered closer to the water on its ungainly legs, then turned, spread out its wings and flew away.
‘Clever creature,’ Robert said.
In the house he read to Mary Louise from a reference book. It was a common heron they’d seen, not a Great White or a Purple: Ardea cinerea. The common heron wasn’t rare, but even so was not often seen. Anglers had been known to persecute it.
He put the book away and hunted among some others. There were many stories by his favourite Russian novelist, he said, but he possessed only three. He spread these volumes out for her, each open at the title page, as if it was important for her to see them.
‘Why did you do that, Robert?’
‘In case you do not come back.’
‘Of course I’ll come back.’
‘No one can be certain.’
The three volumes were left as he had opened them, on one of the tables that contained stacks of other books. If not because of what had been confided, he thought, then because of what had occurred: she would not return.
‘You’ve been so good to me, Robert. I can’t tell you what it means to have been able to talk to you.’
‘May I kiss you in this room, Mary Louise? Just once?’
‘Yes, you may.’ She spoke quickly, without the slightest hesitation.
This time he put his arms around her and pressed her lips a little closer, then held her hand for a moment after they had parted. He said again that she was beautiful.
‘But I’m not in the least,’ she began, as she had before.
‘Actually you are,’ he repeated too.
They had tea in the kitchen, and when Mary Louise had gone Robert carried a cup out to his mother, who was picking raspberries. Was it enough, he wondered, that they had talked so? Would all they had shared make up for her not returning? As he helped to pick the fruit, it seemed to Robert that his cousin’s abrupt incursion into his life had from the very beginning been part of a pattern that their conversation today completed, with the telling of the truth. It seemed as if, outside their wills, their declaration of affection had been ordained. That his own love had persisted while hers had dwindled was just a circumstance; at least they’d honoured what there had been. But could he, he wondered, live off the moments of an afternoon?
As she cycled on the empty road, Mary Louise felt at first that she was riding away from a fantasy. It wasn’t in the least like reality that Robert had taken her hand, that she had told him so much, that twice they had kissed. And yet all that had happened. What had occurred was the next thing to adultery; she was a sinful wife.
But she experienced neither regret nor the shadow of guilt. All afternoon the glow of her sinning had possessed her, and now she didn’t want it to fade. She wanted to sense for ever the imprint of his lips, the coolness of his hand in hers. She wanted to hear him say again, as clearly, that she was beautiful and that he loved her.
In the hedges the summer’s cow parsley was withered, only its brittle stalks remaining. Sloes and haws had already formed among the thorns. Somewhere, near where she rode, a bird-scare went off, and then again, becoming fainter as she cycled on. A woman, trimming the fuchsia hedge outside her cottage, waved and said it was a lovely day.
‘Oh, lovely,?
?? Mary Louise called back, reminded of the fuchsia in the blackly-dressed woman’s hair. ‘Lovely.’
*
That night, a few minutes before midnight, Robert dreamed that it was he who accompanied his cousin on her honeymoon to the seaside. The three men described to him were standing on a road, and on a wide, endless strand a flock of seagulls swooped down to the edge of the sea. Miss Mullover said he was not permitted to bathe, not even to paddle. ‘You are a disgraceful child!’ Miss Mullover reprimanded Berty Figgis. As soon as the birds touched the sand they were seen to be herons.
He put his arm around his cousin’s waist and as they walked on the strand they talked about his father. In that moment Robert died.
15
She walks in the garden. She likes it best in the garden and always has, ever since she came to the house. She knows the name of every flower, she has a flowerbed of her own.
No one knows what will become of the place, and maybe it doesn’t matter. Maybe a place changing its purpose, maybe a house falling into ruins, is of no possible importance, a grain of sand turning over on a shore, nothing more. Even so, it is sad that her flowerbed may perhaps become choked with weeds.
She does not take the medication and does not intend to; not once does she intend to take it. ‘You’re naughty, you know,’ Miss Foye said once, but she didn’t say it about the medication even though she suspects. Miss Foye likes the paid-for inmates, she likes the cheques coming in. Generally naughty was what Miss Foye meant, a tendency that way. The nurses watch her swallowing it down, but Miss Foye knows there’s more to swallowing than meets the eye. Cute as a fox, Miss Foye is, over a thing like that.
16
James Dallon was inflating a tractor tyre in the yard when a man he didn’t know got out of a blue van and asked if this was the Dallons’ house. The man said something about having called in for the raspberries and the last of the peas at James’s aunt’s house, but James didn’t know what he was talking about. Then the man said he had a message. He didn’t smile. He didn’t seem happy. James brought him into the kitchen.