Later that morning Mrs Dallon drove over to comfort her sister. They sat together in the kitchen for most of the day, Mrs Dallon making tea and toast in the afternoon, and poaching an egg for each of them. She wanted to spend the night, but her sister wouldn’t permit that. They talked about the time when they were girls together, before their marriages; about when the men they’d married first came into their lives, and the different lives they’d had because of that. They talked about the birth of their children, how Robert had only just survived. They talked about the existence he had had.
A reference to Mary Louise’s Sunday visits did not fall naturally into the conversation, except that her aunt said, ‘Mary Louise was good to him.’ Mrs Dallon took this to mean in the past, when they were children in Miss Mullover’s schoolroom. The small misunderstanding was neither here nor there.
In the room where her nephew had spent most of his time she was shown his books, and the soldiers in the window alcove. ‘Take some grapes back with you,’ her sister offered at the end of the day, for she had come to terms by now with a death that she had always known would be like this, swift and out of the blue.
‘Oh no, dear, please,’ Mrs Dallon protested, but the grapes were cut none the less.
The Reverend Harrington came to the house, and later the same undertaker who, years ago, had laid out Robert’s father. Robert’s attachment to a graveyard that wasn’t used any more was not known since he had kept that a secret, shared only with his cousin. A grave was to be dug beside his father’s in the graveyard of the country church regularly attended by the household, where the Reverend Harrington offered holy communion once a month and officiated every Sunday at half-past six evensong.
There had been great happiness in Robert’s life, the clergyman comforted in the kitchen. Robert had been amused by all sorts of things, given to laughter and to fun. All that was better than a longer lifetime – sixty or seventy years – passed in grumbling bitterness. The mother who was now alone found it hard to take consolation from this, but did not let it show.
‘You’ll take a bunch or two of grapes, Mr Harrington?’ she offered, and the Reverend Harrington, too, drove off with grapes in his car.
Mrs Dallon considered it odd of her younger daughter to faint when she was told of her cousin’s death since she had hardly known him, except years ago at school. Quite without pain, he’d died in his sleep, Mrs Dallon had been saying, having come into the shop to break the news and to pass on the funeral details. Mary Louise went as white as paper. The next moment her legs gave way and she collapsed in a heap behind the counter.
Elmer came hurrying from the accounting office and he and Mr Renehan – hastily summoned from next door – between them carried Mary Louise upstairs. She came to on the way and struggled to her feet on the first-floor landing. She wept, in front of them at first, before turning her back on everyone and hurrying up the second flight of stairs. Mrs Dallon wanted to be with her and after a consultation with Elmer and his sisters she mounted, in turn, the second flight of stairs. But the door of the room they’d said was Mary Louise’s and Elmer’s bedroom was open and Mary Louise wasn’t in it. In case in her flurry she had misunderstood what she’d been told Mrs Dallon tried the other doors, but again found only empty rooms and a narrow, uncarpeted stairway.
Tea in the meantime had been made, and Dr Cormican sent for. Mary Louise’s sisters-in-law made Mrs Dallon sit down in the big front room, Elmer returned to take charge of the shop and to keep an eye out for the doctor, Mr Renehan offered Mrs Dallon sympathy on the family loss. When she was still explaining to the sisters that her nephew had never been strong and had not, in fact, led a normal life, Mary Louise’s footsteps were heard upstairs.
‘Was she in the lav?’ Rose suggested, and Matilda said something about the time of the month.
But when she’d opened the door to the attic stairway Mrs Dallon had thought, but could not be certain, that she heard the sound of distant sobbing above her. Certainly her daughter had not been in the lavatory, the door of which she’d also opened. It puzzled her that as well as fainting so dramatically Mary Louise had apparently run away to an attic. At the time she hadn’t felt she should ascend the poorly-lit attic stairs, but now wished she had.
‘She doesn’t know I’m here,’ she said when footsteps crossed the landing and continued to descend. ‘Mary Louise!’ she called, hurrying from the room. ‘Mary Louise!’
Mary Louise had reached the hall. She looked up, her face still tear-stained and pale. She’d put a cardigan on over her blue-flowered dress.
‘I’m all right,’ she said. ‘Don’t worry about me.’
‘The doctor’s coming.’
‘I don’t need the doctor.’
She moved away. A door banged somewhere at the back of the hall. A moment later Rose called out from the front room that Mary Louise had ridden away from the house on her bicycle. She still held the edge of a curtain between her fingers, and Mrs Dallon approached the window to see for herself. But Mary Louise had already disappeared.
The weather had not changed. The early autumn sky, empty of clouds, had been as pale when they had walked, two days before, through the fields. The sun had abandoned not a jot more of its August vigour, the night-time dews stayed not an instant longer.
The brittle stalks of the cow parsley were as they’d been, the same bird-scare sounded in a field of corn. The woman who’d been clipping her fuchsia hedge was not outside her cottage, but the withered clippings were still strewn on the road. The same dog ran after Mary Louise’s bicycle, a brindle-haired terrier with snappy eyes. On the roads there were the same potholes to avoid.
Yet everything was different. Vitality had drained away from all she passed through, leaving it dull. They had found four mushrooms in the sloping field, and in the kitchen he had laid them in a line on the wooden draining-board: vividly she saw them there.
She went to the graveyard and sat as they had sat, among the Attridge stones. Was this a punishment for their sinning? If so, it seemed unfair, since her living was a greater ordeal than his death. She didn’t want ever to ride away, but to die as well, here in their place.
‘I love you, Robert,’ she whispered, knowing what she had not known in the last hours of his lifetime. ‘I love you,’ she said again.
Her tears came then, fresh tears that flowed more freely than before. And when eventually she wiped them away she thought: might there be some error? Had she stupidly misheard what her mother had said? Was he only ill? Was it her Aunt Emmeline who had died? If there had been some error, if she rode down the grassy avenue now and found him mourning his mother in the kitchen, she would not ever leave his side. She would remain in the house with him and care for him as no human being had ever before been cared for. She would make up for everything, none of it a sacrifice, for all she wanted was to be with him, each of them part of the other.
But Robert was dead. Her mother had clearly stated that. You do not make mistakes when informing about death, and she had not misheard. Robert was dead, and had not suffered. Robert was cold as ice already, his body stiff and useless, the amusement gone for ever from his expression.
Mary Louise remained in the graveyard when dusk came. Shivering, and longing for death herself, she stayed when darkness came too. She thought she might never leave the graveyard, and did not do so until the light of dawn.
17
Her flowerbed has always been for him. Being in the house has permitted that, no questions asked, the slow establishment of the chosen plants, the trial and error of their cultivation, buds breaking into colour, the clustering of petals.
‘Oh, I expect it’ll disappear,’ the gardener grumpily replies when she asks about the flowerbed’s fate. He’s not the man whose arm was broken by Sadie swinging a pickaxe. Youngish, unsuited to the place in any case, that one went at once. This man is old; he has been here all her time; no wonder he’s aggrieved. He says the house will become a hotel.
‘My flowerbed
is in memory. I hope they’ll keep the garden.’
‘I hear it said they’ll have it up for a car park.’
Slowly she walks about, imagining the cars drawn up in rows, the different colours. Tessa Enright visited her once, Tessa Hospel as she became, mother of four children, wife of an oyster merchant. They strolled these same paths in the heat of an afternoon and suddenly her friend said: ‘I am in love.’ She had not told another soul and never would. ‘No one except for you.’ She wept into a lacy lilac handkerchief. She said she was ashamed that Mary Louise had been in the house for sixteen years before she visited her. She was in love with an Englishman whom she’d met when she and her husband, with all their children, were on holiday by the sea in France. Her husband was rich; there was a girl for the children. The Englishman had said he could not live without her. ‘Imagine that! To say that so soon! He hardly knew me.’ Tessa Enright hadn’t changed. As thin as fuse-wire, high cheekbones, hair like sun-bleached silk. Her eyes had always had a startled look, her lips still lazily pouted. She would never have visited the house if she hadn’t been desperate for a confidante: here, of all places, her secret would be safe.
Alone in the garden fifteen years later, Mary Louise recalls precisely the shade of lilac of the handkerchief. It was lighter than that of the outfit that accompanied it, the blouse that buttoned to the neck, the very short skirt, the chic little shoes. She recalls being told that the oyster merchant had been met at a party. The Englishman was a person who had to do with boats, who delivered them from one harbour to another, acting for other people. Mary Louise imagines this man, as once she imagined Jeanne d’Arc and later her cousin’s father, and later still the people in the novels her cousin read. She sees the children of her friend controlled by a calm nursemaid; she sees the husband. She places the family in a hotel dining-room, among waiters calling out to one another in French and expertly pouring wine. The Englishman approaches, flannels and a blazer with an emblem on it, brown as a nut, a smile lazing through his features. At some later time, when they are private, her friend puts her arms around him, slipping her hands beneath the blazer with the emblem on it, her fingers touching the muscles in his back.
Mary Louise stoops and lifts a rose petal from where it has fallen. Under no circumstances is it permitted to pick the flowers. Bríd Beamish did so once and was not allowed to enter the garden for seven months, seven being the number of flowers she filched. The petal has no scent, but in the palm of Mary Louise’s hand it seems as beautiful as anything she has ever touched, crimson streaked with white. Roses mostly are what she has planted in her flowerbed, with a border of lily of the valley. She’s glad it was not she who married the oyster merchant and had four children. She’s glad she never had to turn with her intimacies to a childhood companion who is safely locked away and would not, anyway, be believed.
18
The mists of autumn came, clinging to the houses of Bridge Street, smudging the shop windows with drips and rivulets. The smell of the town was of turf smoke mainly, acrid in the damp air. The shortening days were caught between the seasons until November arrived, claiming them for winter.
By the middle of that month, for Mary Louise, the funeral seemed an age ago. She had stood in the small church with her family, in the front pew, across the aisle from the solitary presence of her aunt. There were all sorts of people there – neighbours mainly, a few from the town, Miss Mullover, the Edderys, relations from the other side of the family whom the Dallons had never seen before. In the churchyard the coffin was lowered; the Reverend Harrington intoned; a handful of clay was thrown on the brightly varnished surface. Afterwards nobody knew what to do: the occasion was sad, people felt, so brief a life, too sad for a funeral spread. Yet in the end some of the mourners returned to her aunt’s house.
Ever since the death of her cousin the first thought that entered Mary Louise’s waking consciousness every morning was that the death was a fact. Robert, thin and wiry in the classroom, was no longer there. Robert, smiling in the untidy room he was so fond of, was now a figment in her mind. A shadow pointed at the heron and bent to pick the mushrooms. A shadow kissed her twice. The fading images were not as good as photographs would have been, but she had no photograph of her cousin.
It was because of that that Mary Louise, on a Sunday afternoon in mid-November, cycled again to her aunt’s house. She didn’t quite know what she would say when she arrived, nor what she’d find there. She wondered if she’d be particularly welcome.
In fact she was. Her aunt was in the garden, rooting out her finished runner beans. She wore gum boots and an old mackintosh coat. A fire was smouldering near where she worked.
‘Mary Louise!’
‘Am I interrupting you?’
‘No, no, you’re not. I’m on the last row.’
She pulled out what remained of the row and threw the stalks on to the bonfire. A job she hated, she said, leading the way to the back of the house.
‘I’ve wondered,’ Mary Louise began in the kitchen.
‘Oh, I’m managing all right.’
In the kitchen Mary Louise made tea while her aunt pulled off her boots and hung her mackintosh above the Esse to dry.
‘It’s good of you to come over, Mary Louise.’
‘I was never able to offer you my sympathy.’ She paused, pouring the boiling water into the pot. ‘I needed it all for myself.’
‘Nothing in the world is a greater consolation than that you and Robert were friends those last few months.’
‘I was very fond of Robert, Aunt Emmeline.’
Her aunt had moved to the sink to wash her hands. She ran the taps, scouring her palms and fingers with a brush. Mary Louise poured their two cups of tea.
‘Robert was fond of you too, Mary Louise.’
That was all that was said. The depth of the relationship had clearly not been guessed by her aunt. Nothing about it had worried her in her son’s lifetime. She had seen no reason why a harmless affection should not be permitted in a life that was emotionally deprived.
‘There’s a cake your mother sent over. Your mother has been nice to me.’
An uncut fruitcake was placed on a plate. Mary Louise had hoped she could confide her feelings, that her aunt would understand and listen. But instead she cut slices of the fruitcake, and Mary Louise sensed that the subject should not be pursued. That she and Robert had been fond of each other was one thing; condoning love was quite another.
‘Whenever you feel like it,’ her aunt said, ‘come over and see me.’
The invitation softened what might have seemed like harshness, but being in the house again was painful and Mary Louise knew she would not easily return. The abandoned graveyard and the ruined church through which the rose rambled in high summer were easier places. They were without distractions or voices that did not belong; they did not demand politeness.
‘Might I have a drawing of Robert’s, d’you think?’
‘Oh, of course. Let’s go and see.’
The three books were open on the table, as he had placed them. The French and German battalions were engaged in a conflict he must have arranged after she’d left. The room had been tidied a bit, but not much.
‘I’m getting round to it,’ her aunt said, her tone betraying her failure to find the heart for the task. ‘I don’t come in here much.’
Mary Louise wouldn’t have changed the position of a single thing, not a book or a scribble or a drawing. She wouldn’t have moved by an inch his armchair by the fire. In winter she’d have lit the fire again and kept it going every day.
‘It’s nice you want one,’ her aunt said when a drawing of winter trees had been chosen. ‘Have anything else you’d like.’
Mary Louise looked about her, and the urge not to disturb returned.
‘Maybe these,’ she reluctantly suggested, indicating the three books.
‘Of course you must have them.’
They left the room and in the kitchen had another cup of tea. For a mome
nt they did not speak. Then her aunt said:
‘Your mother said I could live at Culleen. What would you think of that, Mary Louise?’
Her Sunday visits to this house would become known was what Mary Louise thought: daily contact would see to that. But what had mattered in his lifetime didn’t matter now. Even if her revelation of today led in time to the dawning of suspicion in her aunt’s mind, it wouldn’t matter. She only wished she had known, that last Sunday, that she loved her cousin with the passion death had made apparent.
‘It’s lonely for you here, Aunt Emmeline.’
‘Well, that’s what they believe. And yes, it is. Just now it is, though perhaps I’ll get used to it.’
‘It’s sensible.’
‘Yes, it’s sensible. If Letty marries Dennehy there’ll be that bedroom.’
The Bank of Ireland owned more of the house than she did, she added. Getting rid of it would be a weight off her mind. The west side of the roof leaked, gutters needed to be replaced, lead was perforated.
‘I’m fond of James,’ she said. ‘It would be nice to see something of a young person again.’
Mary Louise could discern what was in her aunt’s mind, and in her parents’. The notion there had been – accepted almost as fact in the farmhouse – that Letty and James would see their way into old age together, now that Mary Louise had married, no longer appeared to be valid. More likely, now, it seemed that Letty would marry the vet and James would one day marry also. With a bedroom to spare, in such circumstances it was the natural thing to offer a home to a lone aunt.
‘But I’m not sure, Mary Louise. I’m not sure I wouldn’t be an intrusion.’
Mary Louise shook her head. That was the last thing her aunt would be, she reassured her. If the idea had been put to her the whole family would have discussed it. Her father would have agreed, and so would James. Letty must have made up her mind about Dennehy.