Mary Louise herself was terrified. When the invitation had come, Elmer Quarry following her out on the street to issue it, she blushed and became so agitated in her speech that she began to stammer. On her bicycle, all the way back to the farmhouse, she kept seeing Elmer Quarry’s square shape, and the balding dome of his head when he’d bent down to pick up the glove she’d dropped. Letty had gone out with a man or two, with Gargan from the Bank of Ireland two years ago, with Billie Lyndon of the radio and electrical shop. She had thought Gargan was going to propose, but unfortunately he got promotion and was moved to Carlow. Billie Lyndon married the younger Hayes girl. Letty had taken to saying she wouldn’t be bothered with that kind of thing any more, but Mary Louise knew it wasn’t true. If Gargan came back for her she’d take him like a shot, and if anyone else who was half possible appeared on the scene she’d start dressing herself up again.
‘What’s showing?’ Letty asked.
‘He didn’t say.’
‘Hmm,’ Letty said.
Beggars couldn’t be choosers, Mr Dallon reflected in the end. To marry either of the girls into the Quarrys would mean you’d breathe more easily, and you’d see the sort of future for the two who were left. Mrs Dallon reached similar conclusions: provided James didn’t marry, the farm would sustain himself and Letty, he working the fields and seeing to the milking, she attending to the fowls. The place was right for two, comfortable enough. Three of them left behind would be noticeable, touched with failure, although no one was to blame; a family growing old together was never a good thing, never a stable thing.
The film was called The Flame and the Flesh and Elmer did not in the least enjoy it. But he bought a carton of Rose’s in the confectioner’s shop next to the Electric, and at least there was the consolation of the chocolates, for he had a sweet tooth. When he offered Mary Louise the carton for the fifth time she shook her head and murmured something, which he took to mean she didn’t want any more. He knew that girls had to watch their figures so he ate the remainder of the chocolates himself, removing the wrappings as quietly as he could in order not to cause a disturbance. The film was all about a woman in Italy, with a number of men interested. ‘Wasn’t the picture great?’ Mary Louise enthused when the lights went up, and he agreed it had been.
It was a cold night. Outside the cinema he belted his overcoat and drew on tan leather gloves; he didn’t wear a hat. He noticed that his companion’s cheeks were flushed from the warmth of the cinema and that she’d put on a blue and white woollen cap, which matched her gloves. She’d have bought the wool in the shop, and he thought he could even remember looking down from the accounting office and seeing her choosing it, last summer it would have been.
‘I’ll walk you out a bit towards Culleen,’ he said.
‘Oh, no need, Mr Quarry. Thanks though.’
In the lane that ran by the side of the Electric there was an ungainly chain and padlock on her bicycle, which she undid and dropped into the basket that was attached to the handlebars. When she leaned down to do this lamplight from the street fell on the back of her legs, and for the first time Elmer experienced physical desire where Mary Louise was concerned. Between the hem of her shabby blue coat and the tops of her boots the silk of her stockings gleamed in a way he found disturbing. Once or twice during the film his attention had been held by Lana Turner’s low-cut bodices.
‘Give me the bike to wheel,’ he urged, ignoring Mary Louise’s protest that there was no need to walk through the streets with her.
The Quarrys did not possess a car. Living in the centre of the town, there had never been a need for one, just as in the past there had been no need for a horse-drawn vehicle of any kind. A bus carried you out of the town and another one brought you back again in the evening. Every December, before Christmas, the Quarry sisters took it to do any seasonal shopping there was. Elmer didn’t bother with that. In winter he played billiards in the YMCA billiard-room, a big coal fire blazing in the grate between two glass-fronted bookcases that held a library of good books: Wild West stories and detective yarns, adventure novels by Sapper and Leslie Charteris, the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Elmer often had the place to himself since not many turned up in the YMCA billiard-room these days, but the caretaker always had the fire going in winter, and copies of the Geographical Magazine and the Illustrated London News were always to hand. In summer Elmer went for walks – Bridge Street, South West Street, Boys’ Lane, Father Mathew Street, Upton Road, home by Kilkelly’s Garage.
Intent upon entertaining Mary Louise, and since they happened to pass the YMCA billiard-room, he retailed some of the detail of these two long-established habits. If he possessed a car, he added, he naturally would have called at the farmhouse for her and would now be driving her home in it. Kilkelly often told him he should have a car. ‘A man in your position, Elmer,’ was how Kilkelly – who had the Ford franchise – put it, but Elmer did not quote this statement since it sounded like showing off. Instead, he asked Mary Louise if she had learned to drive the Hillman he often saw the Dallons in, and she replied that she had. This fact Elmer noted; he was interested in things like that.
‘Well, I’ll leave you here,’ he said when they reached the last bungalow that could claim to belong to the town. A full moon cast a light as bright as daylight. The road sparkled where frost had settled in its crevices. Hedges and verges were already whitening; ice had formed in patches.
‘Your light’s all right, is it?’ Elmer solicitously inquired.
Mary Louise tried it. A beam hardly showed up in the moonlight. ‘Thanks for everything,’ she said.
‘Would next week interest you?’
‘Interest?’
‘Friday again.’ Elmer had once heard in the shop that girls liked to wash their hair on Saturdays, and certainly both Rose and Matilda did, once a fortnight. Thoughtfulness never hurt anyone, his mother used to say, which was why he’d mentioned Friday. His own preference would have been Saturday, since the feeling of relaxation, to do with the weekend, began then. With the shop closed until Monday morning, and the streets more active than on other evenings, Elmer often experienced on a Saturday night an urge to mark in some way the difference there was. Usually, though, he just slipped down to the YMCA and played a solitary game of billiards.
‘Friday?’ Mary Louise said.
‘Is Friday convenient? Would Saturday be better?’
‘No, Friday’s all right.’
‘Will we say half-seven?’
Mary Louise nodded. She mounted her bicycle and rode off. The safety-pin Letty had insisted upon had not been opened. He hadn’t tried to hold her hand. Come to that, she thought, they hadn’t even said good-night to one another. There was a kind of intimacy about saying good-night to a person, and both of them had been shy of it. In the Electric, before the lights went down, she’d noticed people looking at them. By this time tomorrow it would be all round the town.
‘Are you in one piece?’ Letty asked when her sister walked into the kitchen with the bicycle lamp in her hand. Their mother and father had gone to bed, but Mary Louise knew they wouldn’t be sleeping. They’d have lain there waiting for the sound of the bicycle wheels and the clatter of the barn door and her footsteps on the cobbles. They’d go on lying there, probably not communicating with one another, just wondering how she’d got on.
‘What was the flick?’ Letty asked.
‘Lana Turner. The Flame and the Flesh.’
‘Holy God!’
‘Bonar Colleano was in it.’
‘Did your man keep his hands to himself?’
‘Of course he did,’ Mary Louise retorted crossly, for the first time feeling a kinship with the man who’d taken her out. Letty had a tongue like a razor blade.
‘Where’s James?’
‘He’s over playing cards with the Edderys.’
‘I’ll go to bed so.’
‘Is that the end of it, Mary Louise?’
‘How d’you mean, the end of it?’
&nbs
p; ‘Is he proposing anything further?’
‘He asked me out Friday.’
‘Don’t go, Mary Louise.’
‘I said I would.’
‘He could nearly be your father. For God’s sake, watch your step.’
Mary Louise did. She developed a cold during the week and gave Letty a note to take in to the shop. In the ordinary course of events a cold wouldn’t have prevented her from going to the pictures, and she hoped Elmer Quarry would deduce that. She hoped he’d guess how she felt, not that she was all that certain how she felt herself. When she was alone, especially lying awake in bed, she didn’t want ever again to have to walk up the stairs of the Electric Cinema with him. But when Letty started on with her advice, and when James put in a word or two also, she naturally tended to defy them. Neither her mother nor her father made a comment, beyond asking her what kind of a film it had been. But she knew what they were thinking, and that caused her mood to revert: once more she wished that she might never find herself repeating the experience of sitting in the Electric Cinema with the inheritor of the drapery. No reply to the note Letty delivered came, although Mary Louise expected there’d be something. She didn’t know why it disappointed her that he hadn’t managed to write a line or two.
At that time, from the town and from the land around it, young men were making their way to England or America, often having to falsify their personal details in order to gain a foothold in whatever city they reached. Families everywhere were affected by emigration, and the Protestant fraction of the population increasingly looked as if it would never recover. There was no fat on the bones of this shrinking community; there were no reserves of strength. Its very life was eroded by the bleak economy of the times.
In conversation, this subject cropped up often at the Dallons’ table. From his card-playing evenings at the Edderys’ James brought back tales of the search for local employment and the enforced exile that usually followed.
Returning with an unsold bullock from yet another cattle-fair, Mr Dallon reported the melancholy opinions of those he had conversed with. At the egg-packing station wages remained low. Talk of expansion at the brickette factory came to nothing.
The Dallons’ kitchen, where all such conversations took place and all meals were taken, had whitewashed walls and an iron range. There was a dresser, painted green, that displayed the cups and saucers and plates in daily use. Around the scrubbed deal table were five green-painted chairs. The door to the yard was green also, and the woodwork of the two windows that looked into the yard. On one of the windowsills a stack of newspapers had accumulated, conserved because they were useful for wrapping eggs in. On the other was the radio that, ten years ago, had replaced a battery-operated model. James and Letty remembered the day the battery wireless had been brought to the farmhouse by Billie Lyndon’s father, how an aerial had had to be attached to the chimney and a second wire connected to a spike that Mr Lyndon drove into the ground outside the window. ‘That’s Henry Hall,’ Mr Lyndon said when a voice was heard announcing a dance tune. Mary Louise couldn’t remember any of it.
‘It’s the way things are,’ Mr Dallon was given to remarking in the kitchen, a general-purpose remark that might be taken to apply to any aspect of life. With a soft sigh, he had employed it often during the war, when the BBC news was gloomy; and after the war when starvation was reported in Europe. But in spite of the note of pessimism that accompanied the observation Mr Dallon was not without hope: he believed as much in things eventually getting better as he did in the probability that they would first become worse. There was a cycle in the human condition he might have reluctantly agreed if prompted, although the expression was not one he would voluntarily have employed.
Mrs Dallon valued her husband’s instinctive assessments and the significance he attached to developments and events. She argued only about lesser matters, and then discreetly: she put her foot down when Mr Dallon set off for the town in clothes he had worn to clean a cowshed; she insisted, once every two months, that he had his hair cut; and in the privacy of their bedroom she argued about how best to handle James, who all too easily developed a resentful look if he felt he was being treated as a farm-hand. James would go, Mrs Dallon predicted, like all the others were going: if they took him for granted they’d wake up one morning to find he wasn’t there any more. Push him too hard in the fields and he’d decide to do something ludicrous, like joining the British army.
In general conversation, these same subjects cropped up when the Protestant families in the neighbourhood greeted one another at St Giles’s church on Sundays: the Goods, the Hayeses, the Kirkpatricks, the Fitzgeralds, the Lyndons, the Enrights, the Yateses, the Dallons. In 1955 they recognized that their survival lay in making themselves part of the scheme of things, as it was now well established. While they still believed in the Protestants they were, they hung together less than they had in the past.
‘You’d need the patience of Job,’ Mr Dallon had confided more than once after the Sunday service, referring to his efforts to teach his son to farm. It was James who mattered. It was he, not his sisters, who would continue to tease a living out of the twenty-seven indifferent acres, and to trade animals at the cattle-fairs: on his success depended the survival of all three of them. ‘Pray to God he doesn’t go marrying some flibbertigibbet!’ This worry of Mrs Dallon’s was voiced, not in the churchyard, but to her husband when they were alone. James being James, any marriage he proposed would naturally be foolish, but if you hinted as much when the time came the chances were that he’d have the thing done in some out-of-the-way parish without anyone knowing. A flibbertigibbet could be the ruin of Culleen, and of Letty and Mary Louise with it – unless, of course, Mary Louise discovered in the meantime the advantages of marrying into the drapery. No word could be said in that direction either, no pressure applied. These days – more than ever before, Mrs Dallon considered – a family had to put its trust in God.
‘Your cold cleared up,’ she observed in the kitchen when she and Mary Louise were making bread a fortnight or so after the outing to the Electric Cinema. ‘I thought we were in for ‘flu.’
‘Yes, the cold went off.’
Mary Louise sounded low, her mother noted, and said to herself that that wasn’t a bad sign. It suggested that her pride had been disturbed because Elmer Quarry had failed to display his disappointment over the cancelled engagement. With a mother’s instinct she guessed that Mary Louise was regretting her hastiness.
When Elmer entered the billiard-room the caretaker – Daly the church sexton – was sitting close to the fire that blazed between the glass-fronted bookcases. In a respectful manner he immediately stood up, pushed back the rexine-covered armchair and replaced on the magazine table the Illustrated London News he’d been perusing. He remarked on the continuing severe weather. He’d be back to lock up, he added, and indicated that there was plenty of coal in the scuttle.
It puzzled Elmer that hardly anyone but himself came in for a game of billiards or an exchange of views by the fire. He couldn’t understand why others didn’t find some attraction in the shadowy billiard-room with the powerful, shaded light over the table, the coal pleasantly hissing, the flames changing colour and causing the mahogany of the bookcases to glow. No refreshments were served in the billiard-room, but that didn’t seem to Elmer to matter in the very least, since refreshment could be taken in your own dining-room, and if you cared to smoke – which he didn’t himself – you could do so endlessly. Daly, a small, elderly man with a limp, was invariably ensconced with a magazine when Elmer arrived, but always rose and went away. It sometimes occurred to Elmer that the caretaker lit the fire and kept it up for his own comfort and convenience.
He chalked a cue and disposed the billiard-balls to his liking, preparatory to an hour’s practice. The day had been a profitable one: seven yards of oilcloth, the tail-end of a roll that had been in the shop for fifteen years, were sold by Matilda to the Mother Superior at the Sacred Heart convent. A coat had
been sold to a farmer’s wife, and an overcoat to her husband, both purchases the fruits of a legacy apparently. The traveller from Fitzpatrick’s had shown him a new line in carded elastic with a mark-up that was the most attractive he’d been offered for years. He had ordered a dozen boxes, and a hundred of Fitzpatrick’s Nitelite nightdresses. Rose had sold ten yards of chiffon for Kate Glasheen’s wedding-dress. You didn’t often have a day like that.
Taking aim, Elmer closed one eye. He paused, then slid the cue smoothly forward. Ball struck ball, the resulting motion precisely as he’d planned. He would continue to wait, he reflected as he moved around the table: one day, sooner or later, she would walk into the shop and he would see what was what from the expression on her face. Rose and Matilda were pleased at the latest turn of events, but events that turned once could turn again. The glimpse of her stockinged calves in the light from the street lamp flashed into Elmer’s consciousness, like a moment from the film they had seen. The Dallons weren’t much of a family: she would walk into the shop.
Mary Louise did so twelve days later, and Elmer came down from the accounting office, solicitous about her cold. The older of his two sisters – showing her a cardigan at the time – was far from pleased when he approached them.
The cold had cleared up, Mary Louise said; it had been heavy, but it had cleared up. The cardigan wasn’t quite right, she added. Attractive though it had seemed in the window, under closer scrutiny the shade wasn’t one that suited her.
‘Wasn’t that the powerful film?’ he remarked while Rose was returning the garment to the window.
‘Yes, it was.’
‘A grand evening.’
‘Yes, it was.’
‘Well, that unfortunate cold was a nuisance! In fairness to yourself, I think I owe you another visit to the pictures.’
He smiled. His teeth were small, she saw, a fact that previously had escaped her.
‘Oh,’ she began.
‘Would Friday interest you? Or Saturday? Would Saturday be better?’