‘Will I help you?’ she was saying, and he screwed his eyes up to see her properly. ‘Will I put the light out?’ she said, and a moment later she did so. He leaned back, turning himself round, finding a pillow for his head. At the Tate School the housekeeper could be seen putting on her vest, her reflection in the glass of the window that swung outwards. He shouldn’t be falling asleep, Elmer said to himself, but nevertheless did so.
5
‘Your Ovaltine, dear.’
Miss Foye places a tray containing a mug on the bedside table. The night-time tray is always the same one – made of tin, round and with a lip, blue flowers on a green ground. She asked about the flowers once and Miss Foye said she thought they were hydrangeas, a nice bunch of hydrangeas.
‘Be a good girl now, don’t let it get cold.’
‘What’s it all about, Miss Foye?’
In the dormitory the other women are obediently sipping their Ovaltine. Miss Foye always waits until all of them have finished, then collects the mugs on the tray and turns the light out. There are seven women in the dormitory: ‘Miss Foye’s best girls’ she calls them because they are able to sleep together without disturbing one another. Each night the last one to receive her Ovaltine receives the tray as well. Fairness is important in the house.
‘You know, dear, what it’s all about. I saw you listening to him.’
‘I didn’t understand.’
‘Drink up, love. Please now. Miss Foye is tired.’
‘I don’t want to leave the house.’
‘It’s not for us to say a thing like that. They know better.’
‘Who knows?’
‘The medicals, dear.’
‘They don’t know better where you’d want to be.’
‘Drink your drink, dear. Please now.’
Miss Foye moves away. She collects the empty mugs from the other bedside tables, one between each bed. She bids the women good-night, and each replies. She calls them Miss Foye’s best girls.
‘I remember the day I came to the house,’ the woman who is giving her trouble tonight remarks. ‘A Thursday afternoon.’
‘Good girl now. Finish up. Of course you do.’
‘ “You’ll be happier here, ” you said.’
‘You would say that in those days. Don’t cry, dear. Miss Foye is tired.’
But the woman does cry. She finishes her drink and hands back the mug, and when Miss Foye has turned the light out she sobs beneath the bedclothes so that the others cannot hear her.
6
Mary Louise served in the shop, instructed by Matilda and Rose. They showed her where everything was, and how to make out a bill, and how to roll and unroll the bolts of material. She heard them muttering to one another about her, Rose saying she was slow to pick things up.
In the kitchen she was allocated certain tasks, specifically to lay the table in the dining-room before each meal and to carry in the plates and dishes when the food was ready, afterwards to wash them while Matilda dried. Rose liked using the vacuum cleaner on the stairs and in the dining-room and the front room, the bedrooms and landings. Matilda dusted and attended to the front-room fire in winter; all the cooking was done by Rose. Mary Louise made the bed she shared with her husband, Matilda and Rose each made her own.
When she’d been a member of the household for a few months Mary Louise explored a narrow staircase behind a door on the upper landing. There were two attics when she reached the top of it. The toys that had belonged to Elmer and his sisters were neatly arranged on the deep shelves of a cupboard, toys that by the look of them might have belonged to an earlier generation of Quarrys also. Framed pictures were stacked against a wall, books piled against another. Outmoded display dummies stood like statues, some of them shrouded with sheets. An old sewing-machine, replaced by the one Matilda used in the dining-room, had been kept. So had sofas and chairs in need of re-upholstering, and a rocking-horse. A tea-chest contained unidentified objects wrapped in yellowing newspaper – china, Mary Louise presumed. In the steeply pitched roof there was a single window in each of the two rooms. There was a stillness up there and the fusty airlessness was somehow comforting. With the door at the bottom of the staircase closed behind her, Mary Louise sensed the only real privacy she was offered, and on occasions when she knew where everyone was she took to quietly slipping up the steep uncarpeted stairs, taking her shoes off so that her footsteps wouldn’t echo through the house. She sat in an armchair, sinking down into its depths. She closed her eyes and thought about things, about how she missed the farmhouse and the fields at Culleen, and riding her bicycle along the familiar roads. She enjoyed serving in the shop, and she knew Rose was wrong to say she was slow. She was quicker than either of the sisters at grasping a customer’s needs. She could already gauge precisely the amount of brown paper required to wrap whatever had been purchased, and her parcels were tidier than theirs, the string looped so that they might easily be carried. When discount was mentioned by a customer she knew better than to quote a figure without consulting Elmer first, but she also knew that soon the day would come when she’d be able to anticipate his wishes down to the last ha’penny. As second-best to Dodd’s Medical Hall, the drapery was interesting enough. It was when the shop closed that melancholy set in.
In the past, in the days when Mary Louise had been a modest customer herself, Matilda and Rose had always been agreeable. She remembered buying hooks and eyes and other necessities in Quarry’s, and groceries in Foley’s during her years at Miss Mullover’s schoolroom. She remembered a time when she could only just see over the counter in Quarry’s, being in the shop with her mother and being lifted on to a round-bottomed chair that was still there. Matilda had once asked her what age she was. Rose had run into the back and returned with a sweet oatcake. Now they were like two other people.
Her mother, in whom she confided during one of her Sunday visits to Culleen, said it maybe wasn’t easy for them, having a newcomer about the place, their long-established routine shaken up. It wasn’t easy for her either, Mary Louise began to reply, but her mother just shook her head. ‘You’re looking well,’ she observed in the silence that developed, implying that that, too, was important.
There were other matters, which Mary Louise did not discuss with her mother, nor with anyone. She would have with Tessa Enright, but Tessa Enright had gone to Dublin to train as a physiotherapist and only returned to the town at Christmas. No correspondence had developed between the two girls, except that Mary Louise had found out her friend’s address and had written to invite her to the wedding. She hadn’t been able to come.
There were other girls, still in the neighbourhood, whom Mary Louise had known well at school, but none had been as close as Tessa Enright, and certainly none would have been a candidate for the confidences Mary Louise felt she couldn’t share with her mother. Nor could she have shared them with Letty, and when she thought about it she wondered about Tessa Enright: even if she had never gone away and their friendship had continued to thrive, this particular subject might have been easier to raise with a girl who was married herself.