‘Privately between us, I believe she has,’ her aunt said.
‘I didn’t know.’
‘It’s always kept quiet for a while, news of a mixed marriage. Dennehy’s priest will be having a go at Letty.’
‘Letty would never turn.’
‘The priest’ll want the children though.’
Mary Louise felt that none of it concerned her. In the past Letty would have ages ago told her everything. They would have lain awake in the bedroom that soon was to be empty and Letty would have gone through every development in her romance, the nature and circumstances of the proposal, and the persuasion of the parish priest. When Gargan had been taking her out she’d come back to the bedroom at night with all sorts of information, often waking Mary Louise up to tell her: what Gargan had tried on, what he’d confided to her about his boyhood desires, revelations made about the customers at the bank, who was solvent and who was not. Now, apparently, her sister was going to marry a man Mary Louise had only spoken to once or twice and about whom Letty had told her nothing whatsoever. After the wedding everything in the farmhouse would be different – Aunt Emmeline would occupy the bedroom that had been theirs, James might marry the Eddery girl or someone like her. None of it was any longer Mary Louise’s world. Her world was the drapery and the house above it, her sisters-in-law, her husband, the attic rooms, the memory of her cousin’s love. The town she had so longed to live in was hers, its air odorous with turf smoke, its people interested in her seemingly barren state.
‘The priests always have a go for the children,’ her aunt said. ‘Well, understandably, I dare say.’
‘I must get back.’ She hesitated. ‘I don’t suppose there’s a photograph to spare of Robert?’
For the first time her aunt appeared surprised. Then she went away and returned with an album in which a dozen or so photographs were loosely caught between the pages. None was pasted in. ‘The ones of Robert are precious to me,’ she said. ‘There’s none of him grown up.’
Mary Louise looked at one after another: Robert as a baby, Robert at three or four, Robert in an overcoat and cap, much as she remembered him from their childhood. She handed them back.
‘We didn’t go in much for the camera,’ her aunt said.
There were other photographs and she was shown them – of the house and of people she didn’t know, of her aunt when she was a girl, and Robert’s father, with a moustache.
‘Thanks for showing me, Aunt Emmeline.’
Soon after she turned out of the avenue she heard an echo of her cousin’s voice.
‘One hot summer day in 1853 two young men lay in the shade of a tall lime tree by the River Moskva, not far from Kountsovo…’
Mary Louise was correct in imagining that the townspeople were interested in her childlessness. As well, it was considered that she was becoming strange, and often a connection was made. Women coming into the shop noticed what they agreed were oddities, and remarked upon them to one another. They said so in the other shops – in Renehan’s next door, in Foley’s, and elsewhere. They said so chattily, inquisitively, forebodingly, depending on who they were. The young wife was abstracted, they said; you addressed her and often she didn’t hear you. You asked for Silko and she turned round and reached down the silk samples. She wasn’t as friendly as she’d been; sometimes she hardly smiled at you, and then remembered and smiled effusively.
One day Letty came to the shop to tell her sister that she was engaged to Dennehy. She was immediately struck by what she afterwards described to her mother as ‘Mary Louise’s peculiar manner’. She had asked if they could go upstairs for a few minutes and Mary Louise led her to the big front room, a room Letty had never been in before. They sat on either side of the empty fire grate. Dennehy had bought the farmhouse and the yard of outbuildings to which so often they’d driven in search of privacy. Letty tried to remember the rooms, measuring them in her mind to establish if any was as large as this one. She extolled her fiancé’s virtues, and his devotion, and all they had planned for the future. She turned her head away when she said she was head over heels with him, and had been from the first time he took her out. He was anxious to know Mary Louise better, she passed on.
‘She didn’t speak a word,’ Letty reported later. ‘She sat there hardly changing her expression.’
There was some exaggeration in this, but the statements none the less conveyed an accurate reflection of the truth since they also took into account Letty’s own considerable surprise.
‘Is she sick?’ Mrs Dallon asked.
Letty shook her head. Her sister wasn’t sick. It was nothing like that.
‘Oh, I’ve noticed something,’ Mrs Dallon said, recalling her visit to the Quarrys at the time of her nephew’s death. Thinking that over afterwards, she had reached the conclusion that Mary Louise’s behaviour had to do with not yet being pregnant. Increasingly, her younger daughter’s moodiness – despondency transformed into elation, and then the grim mournfulness of the last couple of months – had appeared to Mrs Dallon to be an outcome of this fact. Neither she nor her husband had ever found it necessary to discuss, or even to mention, the known fact that for generations the Quarrys had taken the marriage step as a necessity rather than a desire. Mary Louise had wanted to be in the town, she had chosen to go out with Elmer Quarry. The Dallons, in the privacy of their bedroom or alone in the kitchen when James was out playing cards and Letty was out with Dennehy, did not openly progress from these facts to wonder aloud about Mary Louise’s subsequent happiness. They had not used that word to one another before the marriage; they did not after it. It was not a word that naturally belonged in their vocabulary. They would have felt easier if Elmer Quarry had been younger, or even been someone else altogether and more of a companion for the girl. But other factors had to be taken into consideration. It was pure ill fortune that, as yet, there was no pregnancy.
‘She didn’t say she was glad or anything,’ Letty went on. ‘All she did was nod. I told her about the house and she didn’t even ask where it is.’
‘Was she maybe disappointed you didn’t ask her to be your bridesmaid?’
‘You can’t have a married woman a bridesmaid. I told her, but afterwards I wondered did she hear.’
‘She should see Dr Cormican. You can get tests these days.’
‘I don’t think it’s that.’
‘What else then?’
‘He’s drinking.’
‘Who is?’
‘Elmer.’
‘Have sense, Letty. The man doesn’t touch a drop. The Quarrys never have.’
‘He’s taken to it. It’s all over town.’
Had Letty known it, she might have added that the unexpected resort to whiskey on Elmer Quarry’s part was assumed in the town to be related to the childless marriage, which his sisters now openly implied he regarded as a mistake.
‘Hogan’s bar,’ Letty said. ‘I’ve seen him there myself.’
‘My God!’
‘You’d want to shake her when she’s sitting there saying nothing. But the next minute you’d be sorry for her.’
Mrs Dallon later repeated the whole conversation, word for word, to her husband. He, too, was ignorant of the fact that Elmer Quarry had taken to spending time in Hogan’s bar. It had never been mentioned to him by anyone at the cattle-fairs, but Mrs Dallon pointed out that it probably wouldn’t be, the subject being delicate.
‘Once a family’s started it’ll all settle down,’ Mr Dallon said.
‘Please God it will.’
But Mrs Dallon could not sleep that night. She lay there remembering the details of Mary Louise’s own birth, so very late the baby had been, and then the easy time she’d had compared with Letty, and James. Growing up, Mary Louise had been a wide-eyed little girl, not sharp like Letty, nor rushy like James. Sometimes her dreaminess would irritate you, sometimes she forgot to do things and you’d think she’d forgotten deliberately but she never had. There’d been the day she’d fallen through the ou
thouse trap-door, when she’d lain on the straw for ages before the barking of the sheepdogs attracted their attention. There’d been the time Miss Mullover had written on her end-of-term letter that she was paying attention at last. Dr Cormican had thought she might have a grumbling appendix and they’d worried about the hospital charges, but it turned out to be nothing at all. She’d never looked more radiant than she did in her wedding-dress, with the Limerick veil borrowed from Emmeline.
Towards dawn Mrs Dallon slept. She dreamed, but afterwards remembered nothing, aware only vaguely that Mary Louise, as a baby and a child and a bride, had passed from her waking consciousness into a muddle of fantasy.
*
On Christmas Day Mary Louise sat with her husband and her sisters-in-law in church and afterwards they gave one another presents, as the Quarrys by tradition always did at that particular time, before the turkey was carved. Bitter weather came in January, and Mary Louise imagined the stream with the trout in it frozen over, and wondered if herons went away in winter.
Rose and her sister passed on to certain of their customers their belief that their sister-in-law was not in her right mind. There was something queer in that family, they said, James Dallon far from the full shilling and the cousin who’d died a peculiarity by all accounts. Increasingly in the new year the daily thoughts of the sisters were influenced by their observation of their sister-in-law and the disintegration, as they saw it, which she had brought about in their brother. They did not, in their gossiping with certain of their customers, ever touch upon this latter subject, feeling it to be one that shamed the family.
‘What harm’ll it do?’ Matilda said early in February after they had yet again discussed – but more seriously now – the notion of visiting the Dallons’ farmhouse and expressing their concern. They talked about this for a further week, and on the twentieth of the month arranged with Kilkelly at the garage to be driven to Culleen the following day.
Mary Louise no longer went secretly to the attic rooms but openly ascended the flight of stairs, even leaving the door at the bottom open. There’d been comment of course. Elmer had asked her if she was looking for something up there, and when Rose raised the matter in the dining-room Mary Louise replied that she went to the attics for privacy. She had taken to locking the door of the one she preferred and once Matilda rattled the handle, but she ignored the sound. ‘Are you all right in there, Mary Louise?’ her sister-in-law called out, and she didn’t reply. She had moved everything out into the room next door except the armchair she sat in. When they said there was something they wanted she was able to tell them that.
It was often cold in her attic but that never mattered. She tucked her legs under her in the armchair and thought of her cousin in his grave, the bones revealed in his face, flesh putrefying. She blamed God for that; in her attic she made an enemy of God because all she had left was the echo of her cousin’s voice – the way he had of pronouncing certain words, the timbre of his intonations, the images his voice conveyed.
‘I dreamed I was sad and sometimes cried. But through the tears and the melancholy, inspired by the music of the verse or the beauty of the evening, there always rose upwards, like the grasses of early spring, shoots of happy feeling…’
Again and again his voice repeated it. Hers now joined in. For these were words they must learn by heart, he’d said.
19
She packs her things, empty of emotion. How many women have come and gone in thirty-one years? Some of them have died, others been moved because they had to be. The food has been indifferent for thirty-one years, often worse than that. In winter they have felt cold from time to time, due to economies.
‘You’ll be all right,’ Miss Foye reassures. ‘You’ll be OK outside.’
‘I thought I’d die here.’
‘Oh, now, now.’
Miss Foye smiles it all away. It occurs to her that this one has been longer in the house than any of the others. She might say so in a sentimental way, but decides against it. A thought like that can be upsetting.
20
‘We would not have come,’ Rose said, ‘in normal circumstances.’
‘We didn’t want to come,’ Matilda emphasized.
‘No, we didn’t want to come at all. We held back – oh, for how long, Matilda? Would you say a year?’
‘A good year.’
The panic that the first utterances of the sisters had stirred in Mrs Dallon did not quieten. Even before they stepped into the house, while Kilkelly’s man was turning the car in the yard and bringing it to a halt to wait for them, they had offered an explanation for their unannounced presence, repeating in a different way what Letty had reported: there was something the matter with Mary Louise.
‘She hasn’t been herself, certainly.’ Mr Dallon’s narrow grey face was enlivened by a reflection of his wife’s anxiety.
‘Well, of course we don’t know what being herself is,’ Rose said. ‘Strictly speaking. What I mean, Mr Dallon, is we only know the person Elmer brought into the household. To be candid with you, she was strange from the first.’
‘Though of course, Mr Dallon, not as unusual as she is now. Not of course by a long chalk.’
Distractedly Mrs Dallon poured the tea she’d made, and even asked if the man waiting in the car would like a cup. The sisters said not to bother, but Mr Dallon felt the man should be offered something, and carried a cup out. Certainly Mary Louise had become quieter, he reflected on this journey. Letty had been on about it again last evening: anyone would be quieter, she’d said, married to Quarry. But the marriage had taken place ages ago, she added, and every time she saw her Mary Louise was quieter still. When he returned to the kitchen Rose was saying:
‘We sit in the front room of an evening. There’s the wireless to listen to. Elmer buys the magazines when the YMCA has finished with them, hardly anything they cost him. They’re there in the front room, she could look at them if she wanted to.’
Mr Dallon noticed that his wife’s eyes had a distended look. They bulged and goggled. Never in all the years he’d known her did he remember seeing her eyes like that. Turning to him, she said:
‘Mary Louise is always in that attic. I told you she went up there, the day I called. Apparently she locks herself in.’
‘There’s that and other things, Mr Dallon.’ Rose’s tone was brisk in confirmation. ‘As we’ve been saying.’
‘You’d ask her a question, Mr Dallon, and she’d not reply.’
‘Why does she go up to an attic?’
‘We’ve asked her that, Mr Dallon, Elmer has asked her repeatedly. She doesn’t deign to reply.’
‘Another thing is, there are certain tasks I have myself and certain that Matilda has, and a small number that are Mary Louise’s. We reached that agreement, but to tell you the truth the entire house could be a rubbish dump for all she’d care.’
‘A rubbish dump?’
‘Filthy dirty,’ Rose explained. ‘If she has a mood on she won’t lift a finger. She puts the plates on the table unwashed from the last time. There’s grime and filth on the plates and she doesn’t so much as blink.’
‘Then again, in the shop, Mr Dallon. A person will come in looking for oilcloth and she’ll say we don’t stock it. When the fact of the matter is we have oilcloth in three different weights and more than a dozen patterns.’
‘To tell the truth, we can’t get rid of it.’ Rose allowed herself a deviation, though her lips remained tightened in a knot even as she spoke. ‘Nobody goes much for oilcloth these days, but Elmer says don’t throw it out so we don’t.’
‘Yesterday, for instance, we heard her saying to a person that oilcloth might be obtained next door, in Renehan’s.’
‘Perhaps Mary Louise wasn’t aware –’
‘There is no commodity in the shop we haven’t pointed out to her.’
‘She locks the attic door on herself, Mr Dallon. There’s a lot of property that she’s moved from one attic to the next. It wasn’t hers to tou
ch, as a matter of fact, but never mind that. You rap on the door and ask her if she’s sick. She doesn’t say a word.’
‘Not a word,’ Matilda confirmed.
‘We thought ourselves,’ Mrs Dallon brought herself to say, ‘that Mary Louise was perhaps disappointed because a family hasn’t been started.’
‘Wouldn’t you say it’s a godsend it hasn’t, Mrs Dallon?’
‘I’ll give you an example,’ Matilda offered. ‘I was closing the shop a week or so back and I said to her, “Wait a minute, Mary Louise, I want to try on a few of the skirts that came in this morning. ” All I intended was that she’d give me an opinion – sometimes someone else is better than yourself. Well, she stood as still as a statue at the bottom of the stairs that goes up to the office, like she’d been put into the corner at school. “How’s that? ” I said when I’d slipped on the first one, a blue and mauve dog’s tooth it was. D’you know the reply I received?’
Together, the Dallons indicated they didn’t.
‘She said I looked ridiculous in that skirt. Then she walked away. Ridiculous. No reason given.’
‘Another thing.’ Once more, Rose took up the catalogue of shortcomings. ‘There’s a little porcelain egg-cup our mother had. Now, no one uses that egg-cup except myself. “Rose can have my egg-cup,” my mother said a week before she died. I walked into the kitchen one day and there she was, eating an egg out of it.’
‘These days she sometimes takes her food in the kitchen,’ Matilda explained. ‘She won’t enter the dining-room if she has a mood on.’
‘ “That’s a special egg-cup, Mary Louise,” I said, not cross, just gently. I said it even though I’d told her before. “I’d rather you didn’t use it, Mary Louise,” I said.’
Mrs Dallon was about to say that anyone can forget a request like that, or confuse one egg-cup with another. She began to speak, but Rose shook her head before she’d said more than half a dozen words.