He laughed. He pushed the shock of hair back from his forehead, which was his most familiar gesture. The smaller the trout were, he said, the better they tasted. Then he said:
‘They’re an intimidating pair, aren’t they, your husband’s sisters?’
‘A bit, I suppose.’
‘You live in the same house as them?’
‘Oh, yes. Above the shop.’
‘I’m not so sure I’d entirely care for that.’
They walked back the way they’d come. He said:
‘At your wedding my mother and I were in the second pew. I kept wondering what you’d look like. You passed up the aisle with your father but I only saw your back.’
‘I turned round when the whole thing was over.’
‘You were Mrs Quarry then.’
‘Yes, I was.’
‘I hadn’t seen you before that for ages.’ He paused. ‘Actually, you were beautiful that day. If you want to know, that’s what I thought.’
The flush came into her face. She looked away.
‘To tell you the truth, I’ve always thought you were a beauty.’
‘A beauty! Oh, go away with you, Robert!’
‘I always thought that,’ he repeated evenly.
He didn’t look at her; he wasn’t watching her, as he had on the previous Sunday. He stooped to pick a dandelion.
‘But I’m not in the least –’
‘You are, Mary Louise.’
She wanted him to go on, to say it again, to go into detail. But about to speak, he hesitated and then was silent.
‘I’m not beautiful in the least.’
‘Doesn’t Elmer Quarry think you are?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Ask him and he’ll tell you. Of course he does.’
They were not walking in the direction of the house any more. He had veered off to the left, crossing the slope of a field.
‘Do you ever read Russian novels?’ he suddenly asked, disappointing her with this change of subject.
She shook her head.
‘I have a favourite Russian novelist,’ he said.
He continued on the subject as they walked. He spoke of people with difficult Russian names. He described a man with a long thin face and a tapering, flat-topped nose.
‘Where’re we going?’
‘There’s a graveyard. A most peculiar place.’
He related the plot of a story, so meticulously describing a hero and a heroine that they formed in her mind, their features like features seen on the screen of the Electric, a little more shadowy at first, but then acquiring clarity.
‘I used to think once,’ he confessed, ‘that I might try to write stuff like that.’
‘And did you try?’
‘I wasn’t any good at it.’
‘Oh, I’m sure –’
‘No, I wasn’t any good at it.’
They reached the graveyard, by the side of a lane that appeared to be no longer used. Its small iron gate could not be moved, he said, but the wall was not difficult to clamber over. He took her hand to help her.
‘I’d love to be buried here,’ he said. ‘It isn’t full but no one bothers with it now.’
It was hot among the headstones. The grass was long between the graves, like hay waiting to be cut even though it was spring.
‘A secret place,’ he said.
‘Yes, it is.’
Stunted thorn trees bounded it within its stone wall. If ever there had been paths they were no longer to be discerned. Some headstones lurched crookedly; those flat upon the graves had mostly sunk at one end.
‘I love it here,’ he said.
They sat down on the long grass, leaning against a headstone that recorded a death in the Attridge family. Other Attridges were all around them, other branches of the family, other generations. James Attridge, born 1742, died September 1803, Safe Now in Heavenly Love. Percival Attridge, 1769–1828. Charlotte Jane Attridge, died 1840, aged one year. Susan Emily, wife of Charles. Safe Now in Heaven’s Arms. Peace, Perfect Peace.
‘It’s funny there isn’t a church,’ Mary Louise said.
‘It’s half a mile away. Derelict now.’
‘They’re Protestants buried here, aren’t they?’
‘Yes, they’re Protestants.’
‘A pity about the church.’
‘There’s a rosebush growing all over it. In and out of the windows. June’s the time to see that little church.’
‘I’d like to see it.’
‘I’ll show you some time. And the heron’s really there too, you know. I didn’t make the heron up.’
‘I didn’t think you made the heron up. Why would you do that?’
‘To make you come back.’
She wanted to say she’d thought her ignorance about the things he liked would bore him, but she couldn’t find the courage. She traced a pattern on her pale green skirt with the tip of a forefinger. Her legs were tucked beneath her. The stone was warm on her back.
‘I’d have come back anyway.’
‘When I had to be taken away from Miss Mullover’s because there wasn’t time to drive me I wanted to try cycling. I did one day, but it didn’t work.’ He smiled. He was wearing the same corduroy trousers and the same tweed jacket he’d been wearing last week. His tie was tweed also, quite colourful, greens and reds. ‘I tried to arrange to go in with the milk lorry, but that didn’t work either because it went some roundabout way, and I wouldn’t have been able to get home again.’
‘You see buses for country children these days.’
‘D’you know why I wanted to continue at school so much?’
‘No, I don’t.’
‘D’you mind if I tell you?’
‘Why should I mind?’
‘It might embarrass you.’
‘Tessa Enright used to say everything embarrasses me. Miss Embarrassment she called me.’
‘I was fond of you, Mary Louise.’
She closed her eyes. She felt a flush, hot as a red-hot poker, creeping over her neck, into her cheeks, over her forehead, down into her shoulders even. It was so intense it made her skin feel tight. She’d never had one as bad as this, she thought.
‘I have embarrassed you,’ he said, and added hastily: ‘It all belongs to that time. It has nothing to do with now. It was awful not being able to turn my head to look at you, like having part of me cut away. I can’t tell you what it was like. And yet what good would any of it have been?’
‘When you’re that age –’
‘Oh, I know, I know.’
She felt the colour draining away from her face and neck. A drop of perspiration itched on her chin, but she didn’t lift a hand, not wishing to draw attention to it, nor to distract him.
‘I’ve always wanted to tell you,’ he said.
She nodded, not knowing how to respond in any other way. She might have said she had thought herself to be in love with him: it was the natural thing to do, yet she could not. Did she know of his glances in Miss Mullover’s schoolroom without quite realizing it? What connection had there been? Something had been there, between them, something real – even if only for a week or two, before she transferred her affections to James Stewart. Yet a week or two was surely enough: that seemed so now.
‘You’ll still come back, Mary Louise? We’re cousins, after all. And anyway, you’re married now.’
‘Of course I’ll come back.’
‘People should know when they’ve been admired. That’s what I feel.’
‘It’s nice of you to tell me, Robert.’
The conversation ended there. Soon afterwards they walked back to the house, where the binoculars were hung on a hook in the passage outside the kitchen, and then there was tea beside the fire, as there had been the Sunday before. ‘Let me read you this,’ he said, taking a book from one of the piles around him.
It was time for her to go, but instead she watched him, opening the book, smiling, turning a page or two, raising his eyebrows before murmuring somethi
ng about the length of the introduction, and then beginning:
‘A gentleman in the early forties, wearing check trousers and a dusty overcoat, came out on to the low porch of the coaching-inn…’
She believed she had never listened to a voice as beautiful. Delight caressed each word he uttered, gentleness or vigour matched phrase and sentence. If all he’d read was a timetable she would have been entranced.
‘The date was the twentieth of May in the year 1859…’
It was later than it had been last week by more than two hours when Mary Louise left. On the outskirts of the town she dismounted and unscrewed the valve of her bicycle’s back tyre. She’d had a puncture, she said when she arrived in the dining-room. The meal was over, and had been for some time.
The vet, Dennehy, was attentive. He and Letty saw His Kind of Woman, brought back for a second showing at the Electric, and The Harder They Fall, and Cast a Dark Shadow. Dennehy liked dancing and when he suggested the Dixie dancehall Letty did not demur, as she had in the past. It wasn’t too bad, she even agreed after they’d been there a couple of times.
Dennehy always collected her in his car. He would arrive at the farmhouse, drive into the yard and blow his horn twice, then smoke a cigarette while he waited. If Mr Dallon passed through the yard Dennehy got out and passed the time talking to him, usually about livestock prices. Sometimes Dennehy took Letty to a restaurant that had opened in a town nineteen miles away, the Rainbow Café; sometimes, when it wasn’t a night that the Dixie dancehall was open, or they’d seen the film at the Electric, they spent the evening in MacDermott’s bar. On the way home from wherever they’d been Dennehy invariably made a detour, driving to an unoccupied farm and parking in the yard. The headlights passingly illuminated tattered curtains hanging in the windows of the house, a blue halldoor in a discoloured cement façade. ‘An old fellow died there,’ Dennehy revealed. ‘You’d get a bargain with that place.’ In the yard he turned the headlights off and drew Letty into an embrace. He took liberties she had not permitted Gargan or Billie Lyndon to take. In time she laid her head back against the car seat and gave herself up to them.
*
Miss Mullover heard that Elmer Quarry had taken to drinking. She recalled the rather heavy, squarely-made child he’d been, solemn-featured, slow when he wrote down his conclusions – liking to do things properly – but swift of thought, except where algebra was concerned. In her small bungalow, regularly visited by ex-pupils of all ages, she reflected that drinking was not a Quarry weakness and that there’d been no talk of it before the marriage. Did they not get on? Did they quarrel? Was it all too much, the sisters being there too? Time was when Matilda and Rose Quarry had been the belles of Protestant whist drives for miles around, lovely-looking girls.
Once, years ago, Miss Mullover had been asked by an ex-pupil to ‘talk to’ her husband because drink was threatening to destroy the marriage. This man, who had never lost either his respect or his affection for his teacher, rode up to her bungalow on a motor-cycle. Awkward and unhappy, he sat down with his crash helmet on the floor by his feet. It wasn’t drink, he insisted, that had done the damage. ‘The trouble is,’ he said, ‘I don’t like her.’
Tannon, the accountant at the brickette factory, drove forty miles every Thursday afternoon to visit the wife of a bank manager in another town. That had been going on for twenty-six years, and had resulted in Tannon’s never marrying. In the emergency period of the war, when petrol was unavailable to private motorists, he had arranged a lift in one of the brickette-factory lorries, his bicycle stowed away in the back so that he could make the return journey. The gossip went that when he arrived at his destination he parked his car in a side street and entered the bank house by a wicket gate in the double doors of the yard. Miss Mullover often wondered what the bank manager’s wife looked like, what age she was and if she had children. A woman with plump lips came to mind, a slack-faced woman, powdered and scented, expensively dressed. She imagined Tannon making his way into the back of the house, dodging the office windows. She imagined all the bank business going on beneath the erring couple, loans being arranged, cash given out, the bank manager on the phone to his head office. A skinny boy Tannon had been, with rabbit teeth and very short trousers above fragile, bony knees.
In the town other such unconventional relationships were talked about. It was said that ever since they’d quarrelled about their daughter’s mixed marriage, a certain elderly couple addressed one another only by way of their dog. One of the post office clerks, the mildest of men when he served you across the counter, gently tearing along the perforated edge of the stamps, was said to be violent in the home. A young wife’s weekly presence in the Dixie dancehall was not known to her husband, who worked through the night at the electricity plant. One of the town’s bread deliverers went off with a tinker girl and then returned, saying it was all a mistake. None of these people had passed through Miss Mullover’s schoolroom, but she’d known all of them, at least to see, as children.
It was dispiriting news that Elmer Quarry had taken up drink.
‘It’s Hogan’s he goes to,’ Rose reported, having followed her brother in Bridge Street. She whispered, halfway up the stairs. Matilda was waiting on the first-floor landing.
‘I thought it would be Hogan’s. It was always Hogan’s with Renehan.’
‘It was different with Renehan.’
‘I’m not saying it wasn’t.’
Rose ascended the remaining steps of the stairs. Matilda led the way to the dining-room. Rose closed the door behind them.
‘I didn’t think he’d go into a public house,’ Matilda said. ‘The bar of a hotel’s different.’
‘I wouldn’t be too sure what he’d get up to. If you could have seen the cut of him, nearly running on the street. Like he was chased by the bats of hell.’
‘I don’t know what to say.’
‘I’ll say it for you, Matilda. She’s driven the man to drink.’
The sisters continued to discuss the matter. They began at what they saw as the beginning – the earliest attention paid to Mary Louise by their brother. They went through the events of the subsequent months; they dwelt upon their own protestations. Their opinion of the mental stability of James Dallon was aired, and related to that of his sister. They considered a step they might take: arranging to be driven out to the Dallons’ farmhouse in Kilkelly’s hired car and asking the Dallons to take their daughter back before further damage was done. They reached no decision about that. Eventually they heard Elmer’s footfall on the stairs and heard him entering the front room, where Her Ladyship was listening to the wireless. They heard his voice raised cheerfully, calling her dear.
The Dallons, reconciled by now to the relationship that had advanced between Letty and Dennehy and pleased that their son was displaying signs of maturity, began to worry about their younger daughter. She stayed hardly any time when she visited them on Sundays, and increasingly did not come at all. As the year advanced – a warm spring giving way to a fine summer – they wondered more often why they were not yet grandparents. They did not say as much to one another, but a bewilderment that was fleeting at first lingered longer during the months that drifted by. Often, of course, such delays occurred: they had to remember that and be patient. Something in the manner of their younger daughter, and the impatient brevity of her Sunday visits, with no effort made to offer an explanation when she did not arrive at the farmhouse at all, concerned them more. Her manner was abstracted. Questions asked about the shop were summarily disposed of, and for the most part went unanswered. Gossip from the town was no longer conveyed to the farmhouse kitchen. The pleasure there had been at first in advising the shop’s customers when colours had to be matched, or on the fit of a dress or the suitability of a hat, appeared to have evaporated. The wit of the drapery travellers was not repeated.
‘You can’t put your finger on it,’ Mrs Dallon remarked before settling to sleep one night.
‘She doesn’t seem
discontented, though.’
‘No, she doesn’t seem discontented.’
She’d gather herself together when a family began, both simultaneously thought. One of these Sundays she’d have a bit of news for them, and after that she’d be herself again.
In the quiet of the graveyard he read to her. She lay on her back, watching small white clouds drifting slowly across the curve of the sky. The difficult Russian names weren’t easy to keep track of at first but then, with repetition, became familiar. ‘Are you asleep?’ he sometimes interrupted himself to ask, but she never was. She was seeing in her mind’s eye Pavel Petrovich’s study, its green velvet and walnut furniture, its vivid tapestry. Her cousin’s voice curtly issued Arkady’s orders; distressfully it conveyed to her Mitya’s convulsions. ‘Madame will see you in half an hour,’ a butler said. Swallows flew high, bees hummed in the lilac. A peasant with a patch on his shoulder trotted a white pony through an evening’s shadows. Sprigs of fuchsia decorated the hair of a woman in black.
It was a coolness creeping into the graveyard that caused him, every week, to close whichever book he’d brought. ‘We have stayed too long again,’ he always said, amusing both of them with that most inappropriate remark.
For want of something else to say, Mary Louise pointed out to her husband that he had not, in the past, played billiards in the summer.
‘Summer or winter, dear, it’s relaxing to read the magazines.’
‘I didn’t know they had drink there.’
‘What drink’s that, dear?’
‘I didn’t know they had drink in the YMCA.’
‘There’s no refreshments of any kind, as a matter of fact.’
In their bedroom he stood with his trousers off, knowing what she meant and pretending not to. The conversation they were having was ridiculous. He’d categorically told her, ages ago, before they were even married, that he never bothered going to the YMCA billiard-room in the summer because what was attractive there was the winter cosiness of the fire, and the curtains drawn. He had described the curtains, heavy brown brocade purchased in Quarry’s in his father’s time.
‘You sometimes have a smell of drink on you,’ she said.