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 iron 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.
‘Paddy or JJ?’ the grey-haired man asked Elmer, and Elmer said JJ without knowing why. She’d take off the little green jacket first, he supposed, and he wondered whether it would be the blouse or the skirt next. He looked at her. Her hair wasn’t tidy after the walk they’d taken, and she’d gone a bit red in the face due to the stuff she was drinking. The sister wasn’t as good-looking, no doubt about that.
‘May the twenty-seventh,’ Mr Mulholland said. ‘Glasnevin, and the skies opened.’
Mary Louise had lost track of the conversation. She was puzzled for a moment, then realized Mr Mulholland was still talking about his wedding. The grey-haired man put a fresh glass of cherry brandy into her hand and took away the empty one.
‘The wife’s a Glasnevin woman,’ Mr Mulholland said.
‘Is that in Dublin?’
‘We live there to this day. 21, St Patrick’s Avenue.’
The conversation about scaffolding resumed, the bald man having returned. Then Mary Louise heard her husband talking about his shop, and a moment later she heard him saying, ‘We’re Protestants,’ and heard the grey-haired man saying he’d guessed it.
‘The same house she was married from,’ Mr Mulholland said.
‘I see.’
‘We brought up seven there. When her father died she got the property, though the mother had a right to an upstairs room. They didn’t get on, himself and the mother.’
‘I don’t know Dublin well.’
‘You’d always be welcome in Glasnevin, Kitty.’
‘Thanks very much.’
Mr Mulholland lowered his voice. His wife was having the change of life, he said. ‘You’d understand that, Kitty? An upsetting period for her.’
‘My name’s not Kitty, actually.’
‘I thought he called you Kitty.’
‘My name’s Mary Louise.’
‘Welcome to the married state, Mary Louise.’
Mary Louise laughed. Mr Mulholland was funny, the way Letty’s friend Gargan had been funny. Gargan did an imitation of a Chinaman, and told endless stories about the Englishman, the Irishman and the Scotsman. He also did imitations of Charlie Chaplin.
‘There was a fellow opposite the shop one time,’ Elmer was saying, ‘dismantling a scaffold. He was up at the top of it throwing down the metal joints, and didn’t one go through the roof of a van!’
‘Some of those fellows are dangerous all right,’ the grey-haired man agreed.
‘A few years ago it was,’ Elmer said. ‘One of Joe Claddy’s men.’
As she sipped more of her drink, Mary Louise felt glad they had come to the bar. Elmer was more loquacious than he’d been all day. It seemed to her now that she’d been silly to want him to take the carnation out of his buttonhole. If she’d asked him to he’d probably have said it would be a waste of a good carnation, and of course he’d have been right. Reminded of it by Elmer’s recollection of the scaffolding joint going through the roof of a van, she told Mr Mulholland about the woman who’d given the family a bottle of cherry brandy because she’d backed into the Hillman.
‘It’s why I have a taste for it,’ she said.
‘The wife likes a medium sherry,’ Mr Mulholland said.
The bald man recalled an occasion when he was driving along the Cork road outside Mitchelstown and a ladder fell off the lorry in front of him. He described the damage to the car’s radiator and one of the headlights.
‘Tell them about the Hillman,’ Mr Mulholland urged Mary Louise, and when she’d done so Elmer said he’d never heard that before.
‘She got a taste for the brandy that time,’ Mr Mulholland said.
They all laughed. Mr Mulholland put his arm around Mary Louise’s waist and squeezed it. She had never been in a public house before and had often wondered what one was like. All she’d had were Letty’s descriptions because Letty had often gone into MacDermott’s or the lounge of Hogan’s Hotel with Gargan. Letty used to smoke in those days. She used to come into the bedroom at night smelling of cigarettes and sometimes of drink. She never smoked in the farmhouse itself, though, it being purely a social thing with her.
‘Excuse me a minute,’ the bald man said, and again went away, repeating that he had to see a man about a dog.
Mary Louise told Mr Mulholland about the farm, answering questions he put to her. She heard Elmer saying it was difficult for a draper’s shop to move with the times, that self-service wasn’t always suitable.