Two Lives

  ‘Ye’re off for the two days?’ the driver chattily went on while Mary Louise waited, and she explained that they’d be away, in fact, for eight days in all, nine if you counted the remainder of this one. When Elmer returned they were driven on to the railway junction, which was twelve miles away. They caught the five-to-four train, changed later to a bus, proceeding on their way to the seaside resort they had chosen for their honeymoon. Neither was at ease during the journey. Neither revealed that the night before there had been family opposition to the marriage. Instead they spoke of the wedding guests, and of the occasion at the farmhouse. In the months that had passed since their first visit to the Electric Cinema they had not come to know one another intimately; Each had become familiar with certain traits in the other, promoting a degree of ease that had not been there in the past; but the curiosity of affection was not present on either side. The Electric Cinema had been visited only twice after they’d seen Lilacs in the Spring: Elmer’s courtship of Mary Louise had been conducted, for the main part, during Sunday afternoon strolls that had become customary. He would walk out from Bridge Street and she would cycle in from Culleen. They met on the town’s outskirts, the bicycle was deposited in a gateway, and they walked slowly back the way Mary Louise had ridden. At a crossroads they turned to the right and proceeded along a meandering lane, down a hill, through woods and across a humped bridge. On one of these walks Elmer proposed marriage, and Mary Louise said she’d have to think about it. She spent a month doing so, and when she eventually agreed Elmer passed his tongue over his lips, dried them with a handkerchief and announced that he was going to kiss her, which he did. They were actually on the humped bridge at the time. His voice was hoarse; there was a trace of what Mary Louise imagined to be leeks on his breath. After Gargan and Billie Lyndon, she had argued to herself during the month, there had been no one else for Letty. Had there ever been anyone for his own sisters?

  Elmer had never before embraced a girl. Years ago, when he was a boarder at the school in Wexford, he had experienced desire for the stout housekeeper. He had imagined what it would be like kissing her. In dreams he had removed her clothes.

  ‘God, you’re great,’ he complimented Mary Louise when their lips parted, although in fact he had found the experience a little disappointing. She was blushing, he noticed on the hump-backed bridge. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, her eyes cast down.

  They walked back to the town, her left arm where he had tucked it into his. He asked her what her mother would say when she heard the news. He said he’d have to speak to her father because that was a thing you had to do. While wondering how best to break it to them, he said his sisters would be delighted.

  ‘Will you come out to Culleen?’ Mary Louise suggested.

  ‘Walk out now, d’you mean?’

  ‘Have you a bicycle, Elmer?’

  ‘I never had the need of one.’

  ‘Could you walk out to the house next Sunday maybe? I won’t say a word till then.’

  ‘I’ll come out of course.’

  ‘I’ll only say you’re calling for me.’

  They stopped on the road and embraced again. This time Mary Louise felt his teeth. One of his hands was pressed into the small of her back. She closed her eyes because she’d noticed in films that people always did. He kept his open.

  On their honeymoon journey that particular Sunday was recalled by both of them. On subsequent Sundays there had been further embraces, and all the necessary plans for their wedding had been made on these afternoon walks. ‘We’re delighted,’ Mary Louise remembered her mother saying. Her father had shaken Elmer’s hand.

  ‘The Strand Hotel it’s called,’ Elmer told her as they stepped from the bus in the seaside town. ‘Excuse me,’ he said to a man standing outside a sweetshop, ‘where’s the Strand Hotel?’

  The man said to keep going. You couldn’t miss it, he advised. When the road became sandy under your feet you were there but for another fifty yards. Four minutes at the outside it would take them.

  ‘Thanks, sir.’

  Elmer had a way, Mary Louise had noticed some time ago, of addressing men like that. He called her father sir, and the Reverend Harrington. It was because of the shop, she supposed, something that was natural to him.

  They walked on with their suitcases, past a row of small shops, past two public houses and the Catholic church. The surface became sandy beneath their feet, and then they rounded the bend where the Strand Hotel was, the two words of its title painted across a bow-windowed facade.

  ‘I wrote in for lodgings,’ Elmer stated in the hallway. ‘Quarry the name is.’

  ‘Ah, you did surely, Mr Quarry.’ A woman with a headscarf over her curling-pins greeted them. ‘Mr and Mrs Quarry,’ she added, glancing at Mary Louise, her eyes bright with a landlady’s interest. They passed swiftly from the little black hat that was still perched on the crown of Mary Louise’s head, over her pale green coat and skirt. They rested on her wedding ring. ‘Mr and Mrs Quarry,’ she repeated, as though to reassure her visitors that since the scrutiny was complete all was now in order. She led the way up a narrow staircase.

  It was a boarding-house rather than an hotel. Tea was in the dining-room sharp at six, the woman said, and it being well after that now would they come down quickly? She threw open a window in their room and stood back proudly. You could hear the sea, she said. If you woke in the night you could hear it.

  ‘Grand,’ Elmer said, and the woman went away.

  Mary Louise stood by the bed. For the first time since she’d decided to accept Elmer Quarry’s offer of marriage she experienced the weight of misgiving. Tendrils of doubt had now and again assailed her before; listening to Letty, she could hardly have escaped them. But there had never been a feeling that she had made a ludicrous, laughable mistake. Nor had she ever resolved that as soon as possible she must be released from her promise. During the month she had taken to consider the offer she had gone over the ground again and again, and, having reached a decision, she did not see much point in encouraging second thoughts. But in the bedroom of the Strand Hotel, with the lace curtains flapping on either side of the open window, Mary Louise wanted suddenly to be in the farmhouse, to be laying the places at the kitchen table or feeding the fowls with Letty. Somehow, later on, she was going to have to get her nightdress on to her and get into that bed with the bulky man whose wife she had agreed to be. Somehow she was going to have to accept the presence of his naked feet, the rest of him covered only in the brown and blue pyjamas he was lifting out of his suitcase.

  ‘Comfortable enough,’ he said. ‘I’d say it was comfy, dear.’

  Elmer’s mother had sometimes employed that endearment, and it seemed to him to be equally appropriate between man and wife, now that they were alone in a room. It wasn’t the kind of thing Rose or Matilda would say, but then the circumstances were different. He was glad he had remembered it.

  ‘It’s a lovely place,’ Mary Louise said, still standing by the bed.

  He agreed that it was. He’d been told about the Strand Hotel by Horton’s traveller, now with Tyson’s, who’d said it was second to none. Recalling in the train the dreams he’d had in his boyhood about the stout housekeeper at the boarding-school and later about Mrs Fahy and Mrs Bleddy, two shopkeepers’ wives in the town, he had hoped his wife would change her clothes as soon as they arrived in the hotel. She was nothing like the size of the housekeeper or either of the shopkeepers’ wives; definitely on the skinny side you’d have to call her, none of the sturdiness of her sister. The sister had come into the shop one day nearly a year ago and he’d looked down from the accounting office just as she was taking her purse out of her handbag. She wasn’t bad-looking, he had considered, and he’d thought about the matter for a while, hoping she would return to the shop so that he could observe her again, in fact attending church one Sunday for that very purpose. But the trouble with the sister, which you had to set against the sturdiness of her, was that a few years ago
she’d been seen about the place with Gargan from the bank and after that with young Lyndon. These facts stimulated unease in Elmer; that she was experienced in going out with men made him feel nervous, since it meant they wouldn’t be in the same boat when it came to getting to know one another. Even so, if it hadn’t been for noticing the sister with her purse that day he’d probably never have turned his attention to Mary Louise. That was the way things happened; chance played a part.

  ‘Will we go down?’ he suggested.

  ‘All right.’

  ‘You don’t want to change your duds or anything?’

  ‘She said to be quick. I’m OK the way I am.’ Mary Louise took her hat off and placed it on the dressing-table. The fluted looking-glass in which it was reflected was cracked, a sharp black line jaggedly diagonal. There were cigarette burns on the dressing-table’s surface.

  ‘I’d say we’d be comfy all right,’ he repeated.

  In the dining-room other people were finishing their meal, spreading jam on slices of bread. The woman in the headscarf showed the newcomers to two places at a table where three men were already seated. Families occupied other tables.

  ‘Wait till I get you a cup of tea,’ the woman said. ‘Is that tea still warm, Mr Mulholland?’

  Mr Mulholland, a moustached man, smaller and older than Elmer Quarry, felt the metal of the teapot and said it was. The other men at the table were middle-aged also, one of them grey-haired, the other bald.

  ‘Thanks, sir,’ Elmer said when Mr Mulholland passed him the milk and sugar.

  ‘Fine day,’ the bald man said.

  A plate of fried food was placed in front of Mary Louise and a similar one in front of her husband. Everything would be quiet at home, she thought. The wedding guests would have gone, all the clearing up would be complete. Her father would have changed back into his ordinary clothes, and so would James and her mother. Letty would probably be putting the food on the table.

  Mr Mulholland was a traveller in various stationery lines. The grey-haired man was a bachelor, employed in the ESB, who came to the Strand Hotel for his tea every day of his life. The bald man lived in the Strand, a bachelor also.

  These facts came out in dribs and drabs. Her husband, Mary Louise noticed, was very much at home with these three men, and appeared to be interested in the information they volunteered. He told them about the drapery. He was still wearing the carnation in his buttonhole, so they knew about the wedding even before he mentioned it.

  ‘Well, I thought it was the case,’ Mr Mulholland said. ‘As soon as the pair of you walked into the room I said to myself that’s a honeymoon.’

  Mary Louise felt herself turning pink. The men were examining her, and she could guess what they were thinking. You could see it in their eyes that they were noticing she was a lot younger than Elmer, the same thought that had been in the eyes of the guard of the train and in the landlady’s eyes.

  ‘Would it be an occasion for a drink?’ the bald man suggested. ‘The three of us have a drink in McBirney’s of an evening.’

  ‘You’d have passed McBirney’s on the way from the bus,’ Mr Mulholland said.

  ‘I think I saw it, sir,’ Elmer agreed. ‘We’ll maybe see how things are after we’ve had a little stroll down by the sea.’

  ‘We’ll be in McBirney’s till they close,’ the grey-haired man said.

  Soon after that the men went away, leaving Elmer and Mary Louise alone at the table. The families began to drift from the dining-room also, the children staring at Mary Louise as they passed.

  ‘Wasn’t that decent of them?’ Elmer remarked. ‘Wasn’t it friendly?’

  ‘Yes, it was.’

  She didn’t feel hungry. Her husband spread gooseberry jam on a slice of white bread and stirred sugar into his tea, and Mary Louise thought that what she’d like to do would be to walk on the seashore by herself. She’d only been to the sea once before, eleven years ago, when Miss Mullover had taken the whole school on the bus, starting off at eight o’clock in the morning. They’d all bathed except Mary Louise’s delicate cousin and Miss Mullover herself, who’d taken off her stockings and paddled. Miss Mullover had forbidden them to let the sea come up further than their waists, but Berty Figgis had disobeyed and was later deprived of a slice of jam-roll.

  ‘Eat up, dear,’ Elmer said.

  ‘I think I’ve had enough.’

  ‘Your mother had a great tuck-in for us.’

  ‘Yes, she did.’

  ‘Everyone was pleased with it.’

  She smiled. A cigarette-butt left behind by one of the men had been inadequately extinguished. It smouldered in the ashtray, a curl of smoke giving off an acrid odour. Mary Louise wanted to put it out properly but didn’t feel like touching it with her fingers.

  ‘Are you game for a walk, dear?’ Elmer said. He was about to add that it was the sea air they’d paid for, but somehow that didn’t sound appropriate. He said instead that he’d known a Mulholland years ago, one of the clerks in the gasworks. The jam he was eating was better than Rose’s. It was thicker, for a start. He liked thick jam.

  ‘I’d love a breath of air,’ she said.

  So when he had finished his cup of tea and had another slice of bread and jam they walked on the strand. The sea was out. The damp sand was firm beneath their feet, smooth and dark, the surface broken here and there by a tiny coiled hillock. Sand worms, Elmer said. She wondered what sand worms were, but didn’t ask.

  A dog barked at the distant edge of the sea, chasing seagulls! Two children were collecting something in a bucket. She remembered shivering after the bathe the day Miss Mullover had brought them, and how Miss Mullover had made them run on the sand to warm themselves up. ‘No, leave your shoes and socks off, Berty,’ Miss Mullover’s voice came back to her, cross with Berty Figgis again.

  ‘Shellfish,’ Elmer said, referring to what the children were collecting in their bucket.

  They went on walking, slowly as they always did on a walk. Elmer had an unhurried gait; he liked to take things at a pace that by now Mary Louise had become used to. The sun was setting, streaking the surface of the sea with bronze highlights.

  ‘Miss Mullover took us to the seaside.’ She told him about that day. He said that in his time in the schoolroom there hadn’t been such excursions. ‘Algebra the whole time,’ he said, making a joke.

  The sand ended. They clambered over shingle and rocks, but in a moment he suggested that the walking was uncomfortable so they turned back. They could still, very faintly, hear the dog barking at the seagulls.

  ‘Would you like that, dear?’ he suggested. ‘Call in and have a drink with those men?’

  Elmer was not, himself, a drinking man. He did not disapprove of the consumption of alcohol, only considered the practice unnecessarily expensive and a waste of time. But when the man had suggested a drink in McBirney’s he had recalled immediately the glass of whiskey he’d drunk earlier in the day and had been aware of a desire to supplement it, putting this unusual urge down to the pressures of the occasion. He’d woken twice in the night with the abuse of his sisters still ringing in his consciousness, and he’d been apprehensive in the church in case one of them would make a show of herself by weeping, and at the occasion afterwards in case anything untoward was said. He’d been glad to get away in Kilkelly’s car, but in the train another kind of nervousness had begun to afflict him. He couldn’t quite put his finger on what it was or where precisely it came from, but none the less it was there, like very faint pins and needles, coming and going in waves.

  ‘If you’d like to,’ she said.

  It surprised her that he suggested this. When the invitation had been issued she didn’t think he meant it when he said they might look in at the public house. She’d thought he was being polite.

  ‘Okey-doke,’ he said.

  They hardly said anything on the walk back. They passed by the hotel, eventually reaching McBirney’s public house, which was a gaunt building, colour-washed in yellow. Two ir
on beer barrels were on the pavement outside, with bicycles propped against them. Inside, the three men were drinking pints of stout.

  ‘Cherry brandy,’ Mary Louise said when the bald man asked her what she’d like. A woman who’d damaged the Hillman a couple of years ago by backing into it in Bridge Street had given Mr Dallon a bottle of cherry brandy by way of compensation. For the last two Christmases a glass had been taken in the farmhouse.

  ‘Whiskey,’ Elmer requested. ‘A small measure of whiskey, sir.’

  A conversation began about scaffolding. A bricklayer in Leitrim, known to the bald man, had apparently fallen to his death because the scaffolding on a house had been inadequately bolted together. The grey-haired man said he preferred the older type of scaffolding, the timber poles and planks, with rope lashing. You knew where you were with it.

  ‘The unfortunate thing is,’ the bald man pointed out, ‘the lashed scaffold is outmoded.’

  The cherry brandy was sweet and pleasant. Mary Louise was glad she’d thought of asking for it. After a few sips she felt happier than she had on the strand or in the dining-room or the bedroom. Some boys of her own age were laughing and drinking in a corner of the bar. Two elderly men were sitting at a table, not speaking. Mary Louise was the only girl present.

  ‘I was married myself,’ Mr Mulholland confided to her while the others continued to discuss different kinds of scaffolding, ‘in 1941. The day the Bismarck went down.’

  She nodded and smiled. She wished she’d asked Elmer to take the carnation out of his lapel so that people wouldn’t know they’d been married only a matter of hours. She’d seen the boys in the corner glancing at it a few times.

  ‘The old ways can’t always be improved, sir,’ she heard Elmer saying, and then the grey-haired man said it was his round. He asked her if she’d like the same again, and she said she would.

  ‘Excuse me a minute, Mrs Quarry,’ the bald man said. ‘I have to see a man about a dog.’

  It was the first time anyone had addressed her directly as Mrs Quarry. When the landlady had used the term it hadn’t been quite the same. Mary Louise Quarry, she said to herself.