‘Does marriage suit you, Mary Louise?’
She replied that she was used to it by now. The words came scuttling out: she hadn’t meant to answer the question quite like that, and realized he knew she was being evasive.
‘Well, I suppose you would be used to it. What a silly question!’
He took his spectacles off and wiped them on a handkerchief He was wearing brown corduroy trousers and a tweed jacket, and brown brogue shoes. A watch-chain hung from the buttonhole of his left lapel and disappeared into the pocket beneath it. The family rumour was that this watch had been returned from a soft-hearted pawnbroker when he heard that Robert’s father had died without leaving much behind.
‘D’you serve in that shop?’
‘Part of the day I serve there.’
‘I often wondered.’
Her Aunt Emmeline brought in tea. She placed a tray on a small table which she cleared of books and papers, and pulled the table closer to the fire. A dog had followed her, a Kerry Blue.
‘We don’t often have a visitor,’ her aunt said, and Mary Louise could see that she was pleased, delighted even. She eked out a living selling apples and grapes, and the vegetables she grew. The pair of them wouldn’t have survived, Mary Louise had heard her father say, were it not for the apples and the grapes.
‘D’you remember you and Tessa Enright putting worms in that girl’s desk?’ Robert said. ‘Who was that girl?’
‘Possy Luke.’
‘She screeched like she’d been bitten.’
‘Poor Possy! She was afraid of worms.’
Their schooldays were talked about, and her aunt asked after Mary Louise’s family. She’d heard about Letty going out with the vet. She knew him; she said he was likeable.
‘How’s James getting on?’ Robert asked.
‘James is fine.’
This appeared to be true. Her brother didn’t complain as much as he used to; he didn’t fly off the handle so easily. For the first time in his life he seemed to be aware that he was the farm’s inheritor, that the work he did was for himself. This transformation had come about since Mary Louise’s marriage, and had intensified since Letty had begun to go out with the vet.
‘And how are the Quarrys?’ her aunt inquired.
They, too, were fine, Mary Louise replied.
‘Well, that’s good.’
‘I mustn’t stay long.’
‘Oh, don’t be in a hurry, dear. We don’t see much of you.’
Robert laughed. ‘We don’t see her at all.’
She told them how the bicycle ride, and the long hill, had years ago been too much for Letty and herself, how it had jaded them, which was why James had been given the task of delivering the weekly gift of butter. She thought she’d better say that, in case offence had ever been taken.
‘That’s why we know James better,’ her aunt said.
‘He used to play bagatelle with me,’ Robert said. ‘He loved bagatelle.’
‘He plays cards with the Edderys now.’
They laughed. But she wondered if she should have mentioned cards in view of the stories about the gambling that had left her aunt and her cousin penurious. Again she felt warmth creeping into her cheeks, and hoped they wouldn’t notice.
‘Stay and talk to Robert for a little,’ her aunt begged. The soft plea in her tone had an edge of anxiety to it. She rose as she spoke and poured them each another cup of tea. Then she went away, the Kerry Blue ambling sleepily after her.
‘She thinks I don’t see people,’ Robert said when the door closed behind her. ‘Which of course is true.’
‘What do you do all day, Robert?’
‘I come downstairs to this room. I’m very fond of this room. I light the fire when it’s chilly. We have breakfast together in the kitchen. The rest of the day depends on all sorts of things.’
She remembered his being driven to school by his mother when everyone else either walked or cycled. She had always associated him with his mother, that weather-chapped face behind the steering-wheel. She never saw her aunt in the town these days, and she wondered where the shopping was done. She had passed a general store and a petrol pump a couple of miles back. It would be there, she guessed.
‘A quiet life,’ her cousin said.
‘Yes.’
The crooked smile expanded and straightened. He was watching her: all the time he was talking she could feel him watching her.
‘I don’t think I’d have been much good at anything noisier.’
She smiled in turn, not knowing whether to deny that, deciding not to. He said:
‘I used to want to be an auctioneer when I was at Miss Mullover’s. I fancied myself shouting the odds. Can you believe it? I really did.’
‘I can’t see you an auctioneer, Robert.’
‘Useless I’d have been.’
‘I wanted to work in Dodd’s. It seemed like paradise.’
‘You got the next best thing.’
‘I thought of Quarry’s too.’
‘And is it paradise, Mary Louise?’
‘Oh, all that was just a childish thing.’
He laughed, still watching her. His eyes were brown, but very dark, nearly black when they lost their luminosity. His glasses, tortoiseshell-rimmed, perfectly round, suited him.
‘Come and look at another childish thing,’ he said.
He pushed himself out of his armchair and led her to the table in the window where the soldiers were displayed. It was the double battle of the Aisne and Champagne, he said.
‘General Nivelle’s plan was to break through the German line between Vailly and Reims. This cluster of German armies was under the command of the Crown Prince himself.’
He pointed to where the German line had held, between Vendresse and La Ville aux Bois. Elsewhere it had been pushed firmly back. Mary Louise wondered which war was being fought, and for what purpose.
‘The Germans mustered a good counter-attack, but even so the French pressed on, breaking through the Chemin des Dames.’
Arrows with neatly printed names indicated all that. Some of the soldiers were lying down. These were the dead, he said.
She plucked up courage. ‘Which war was this?’
‘The one before last. The double battle took place in the spring of 1917.’
She followed him back to the fire. She began to say again that she must go, but already he was explaining that if the Russians hadn’t been preoccupied with their revolution it would have been a different story. She wanted to tell him that in Miss Mullover’s history lessons she’d been fascinated by Jeanne d’Arc. Shyness held her back again.
‘In the end it was the Germans who emerged victorious from the Aisne and Champagne encounter. I’m sorry: this is boring.’
‘No. No, it isn’t.’
‘I was explaining how I spend the day because you asked. I play with soldiers. And read. I read a very great deal.’
Mary Louise was not much of a one for reading herself. As well as Picturegoer, Letty bought Model Housekeeping, and there used to be the Girl’s Friend years ago, when she and Letty were younger. In the farmhouse there was a bookcase on the landing. Mary Louise had read The Garden of Allah and Greenery Street; at school they’d read Lorna Doone. She had never even looked at the titles of the books in the attics of the Quarrys’ house.
‘When it isn’t winter,’ her cousin said, ‘I do things in the vegetable beds. Sometimes I wander down to the stream. There’s a heron on that stream.’
‘I’ve never seen a heron.’
‘You could see one here, Mary Louise.’
He smiled again, and all of a sudden she wanted him to know that once she’d thought herself to be in love with him. She didn’t know why she had that urge, and of course it couldn’t be realized. But she thought it would be nice if he knew that being an invalid didn’t make him pathetic. He probably did know, she thought then: he seemed extraordinarily happy with the limited life he led.
‘It’s been nice seeing you ag
ain,’ was what she said, and before she left the room she promised to return.
‘It would be good of you,’ his mother said in the kitchen. ‘You’ve no idea how much your visit delighted him.’
Mary Louise wanted it to be a secret. She didn’t want it known at Culleen, and certainly not in the Quarrys’ house, that she had spent an hour with her invalid cousin. She almost asked her aunt if they might keep this afternoon as something among the three of them, but she could not find the words. Then it occurred to her that her mother and her aunt were nowadays not often in touch; sometimes a whole year went by. And since her aunt no longer shopped in the town there seemed little likelihood of anything slipping out in conversation there.
As she rode swiftly on the grassy avenue, she tried to remember what being in love with her cousin had felt like. Had it really been much the same, less potent even, than her feelings for the cinema images of James Stewart? For almost twelve years, since she was twelve herself, she had not devoted more than an ordinary, passing thought to the boy who’d been unable to go on attending school, even though he’d been driven in a car. Unfortunate, she had considered him, leaving it at that.
That Sunday evening it was easier in the dining-room when Mary Louise took her usual place between her husband and Matilda. Elmer helped himself to the egg salad Rose had prepared, asking questions about the farm, and vaguely responding to the answers.
‘I hear your sister’s chummed up with Dennehy,’ Matilda said.
‘I think so.’
‘Funny, that.’
The silence that usually followed this favourite comment of Matilda’s did so again. Elmer said eventually:
‘Is that the vet from Ennistane crossroads?’
Rose affirmed this. Dennehy’s father was the publican at Ennistane, she added.
‘Does your mother mind?’ Matilda asked.
‘Mind?’
‘A person like Dennehy.’
‘She didn’t say she minded.’
‘RC of course?’ Elmer always cut lettuce and tomato up very fine, and mashed a hard-boiled egg. Having done so now, he reached out for salad cream.
‘Oh, yes,’ Rose said.
‘They’re not without means, the Dennehys.’ Matilda nodded more than once, to lend significance to this. ‘Perhaps there’s that.’
She spoke lightly, as if she sought to rid her statement of its implication, or to suggest that if the words were examined carefully it would be found that, in spite of the emphasis of her nodding, nothing much was being suggested. Carefully, she scraped butter on to a slice of soda bread. Tidily, she cut the slice in half and then in half again.
‘Even so,’ Rose took up the theme, ‘I’d have thought Mrs Dallon would be concerned.’
Mary Louise looked away. She half-closed her eyes and saw the soldiers on the table, the little printed arrows, the line of cannon. The uniforms were exactly as they’d been in reality, her cousin had explained, every detail right. She wondered where they’d come from. In a poverty-stricken household the wealth of colour seemed quite out of place.
‘Rough,’ Rose said, the word appearing to be thrown out at random, attached to nothing.
Matilda nodded, and again there was a silence. Elmer passed his cup for more tea. Rose poured it. Matilda added milk.
She would go again next Sunday. She would spend no more than ten minutes at Culleen and then ride quickly on. This time she’d find the courage to ask her aunt if it could be a secret. She’d give a reason, she’d think of something during the week.
‘We need to order gimp,’ Elmer was saying. ‘And ticking.’
On Sundays he went through the stock. He had a method, he’d told Mary Louise on one of their pre-marriage walks. Every Sunday morning he took a different line and checked the supply in stock: haberdashery one week, velvets and velveteens the next, chintzes, satins and silks, then hats and dresses, then overcoats, suits, all menswear, socks and braces. On Sunday evenings he went through the books, minutely comparing the entries with last week’s. It wasn’t necessary, any more than it was necessary to keep a record of the particular garments that were repeatedly rejected when sent out on approval. But all this kind of thing interested him. All this was part of trading.
‘I bet a shilling he’ll be in this week,’ Matilda said, referring to the traveller from whom gimp and ticking were ordered. ‘He’s due since February.’
Mary Louise wondered if there’d be a different battle on the table the next time. Would there be two different sides, the uniforms different, the words on the arrows printed in a different language? She imagined her cousin in the vegetable garden that kept his mother and him going. She saw him bent over a bed in the sunshine, weeding between rows of lettuce. How strange his solitary life must be! And how strange for her aunt to have married money that was not there! Was what they implied about Letty true? Was she going out with the vet in the same way as she herself had gone out with Elmer Quarry? Would Letty marry him and sometimes in the night reach out for him, seeking his physical warmth? Or would all that be a different kind of thing for Letty?
‘There’s a couple of those travellers getting slack,’ Elmer said.
She and her cousin had nothing in common; pushed away into a corner, this realization had remained there ever since he’d talked about the battle in France. Reading was what he liked; sometimes when he said something she didn’t understand it. He’d be bored if she kept turning up on Sundays; you could see he liked to be alone in spite of what his mother said.
‘Surprising your mother could accept Dennehy’s roughness,’ Rose said. ‘Surprising, that.’
11
In time all those who can understand realize that nowadays things are being ordered differently. The three doctors who regularly visit the house talk in turn to those whom they believe would be better off in what they make a point of calling ‘the community’. Where there is no family, or if a family does not wish to cooperate, places will be found in sheltered accommodation.
‘Is it community singing?’ Belle D inquires. ‘Is that what they mean?’ Her name is Belle Dymock, but for reasons of her own she has forbidden her surname’s use, while insisting also that her first name should not be employed on its own.
‘The community’s where you came from,’ the Spanish wife replies. Her surname, too, has caused difficulties, not because she dislikes it but because no one can pronounce it. She is not, in fact, Spanish herself, but has acquired her sobriquet through marrying a Spaniard who deserted her in Gibraltar.
‘Did you ever hear the like?’ another woman asks, a faded woman who speaks only when a subject catches her imagination.
‘It’s the tablets,’ Mrs Leavy explains. ‘Medication works wonders.’
They all say that. They say it and repeat it: the new drugs of the 1980s make the miracle possible. The doctor who cares for Belle D has told her she could easily work in the carpet factory again. Pretty Bríd Beamish – no fault of her own she took a wrong turning – will be adorned in wedding finery yet, no reason in the world why she shouldn’t be. All that must be ensured is that the medication is taken, daily and precisely as prescribed. The assistance of family members will be required, assurances insisted upon. ‘Isn’t it the best leave-taking you could have?’ jovially remarks the doctor who has a beard, smiling at the faces of the unsmiling. Father Malley sits with each departing inmate, recalling Our Lady and her mercy.
‘Mary Louise! Come here, Mary Louise!’ Small Sadie beckons, and questions when she is obeyed: ‘Will you go back to the graveyard, Mary Louise? Will you get up to your tricks?’ Laughter cackles from the tiny woman’s throat. In the house she is often likened to a hen because of that noise she makes.
‘What tricks are those, Sadie?’
But Sadie only shakes her head. At night she is locked away alone. She broke a gardener’s arm one time. She’s in the house because too often she believes she has to break things and tear off wallpaper. A week ago she was told she would remain in care for
a while yet.
‘Sadie’s the lucky one!’ she cries in the same shrill way. ‘Poor old eejits, what good is it to you? What good the Holy Apostolic Church? What good the dogs in the traps? Dog eats dog, Thundering Joe and Flashby. Tinned with rabbit.’
‘Oh, hold your damn noise,’ a woman snaps.
12
He brought binoculars in case the heron was about. The soldiers had been his father’s, he said. There were just those she’d seen, French and German: the battles he could reconstruct were limited.
‘You’ve heard about the watch?’ He lifted it from his jacket pocket. They were standing on the shallow bank of the stream he’d spoken of. If Mary Louise kept watching she’d see tiny trout swimming by.
‘It’s a pretty watch.’ She had admired it without saying anything when she’d first noticed him snapping it open. It was slender, golden, its case engraved, the chain finer than was usual.
‘My father, you know.’ He laughed. ‘You have heard, haven’t you?’
‘People tell a story.’
‘It’s true. If he had remembered the soldiers were still in the house he’d have tried to sell them too. I wish I’d known him.’
He explained that at the time when he’d ceased to come to school it hadn’t been because he was weaker than usual, but because his mother couldn’t any longer spare the time to drive there and back twice a day. She couldn’t afford help in the vegetable garden they made their living from: every hour was precious.
‘She taught me in the evenings. Not that I know much.’
‘Actually, you seem to know a lot.’
‘Certain subjects we didn’t bother with at all. I can hardly count, for instance.’ He lifted the binoculars from around his neck and handed them to her. She focused them and searched the undergrowth, upstream and down. He took them from her, then shook his head.
‘We’re out of luck today.’
But at least they saw the trout going by, a couple at a time. You could catch them with a net, he said.
‘Poor little things. I wouldn’t want to.’