Rose had just eaten sausages and bacon from the plate. About to run a piece of bread over it in order to soak up the tasty fat that remained, she noticed that a shred of cabbage leaf had remained since the last time it was used.
‘It’s greens all right,’ Rose said. She passed the plate to her sister, who scrutinized it in turn. It was definitely the remains of greens, Matilda said.
Elmer took no notice. Often at mealtimes he was lost in the depths of mathematical calculations that had originated in the accounting office.
‘Take a look at that,’ Matilda invited, and handed Mary Louise the plate, on which the well-peppered grease that Rose had been about to consume was now congealing. The offending piece of cabbage was stuck to the rim, its presence made more permanent by the heating of the plate in the oven. Probably it was cabbage, Mary Louise agreed, since cabbage had been the vegetable at the midday meal.
‘I always took the mop to them when I washed the plates,’ Matilda said. ‘I used always to hold them up to see if there was anything like that left.’
‘I could have eaten it,’ Rose said.
‘You would have shifted it wiping with the bread,’ her sister agreed. ‘You’d have eaten it then definitely.’
‘Someone else’s leavings.’
Mary Louise rose from the table and began to clear the supper dishes away. It could happen to anyone that a speck would be left behind on a plate. It wasn’t as though it were poisonous.
‘I wonder you didn’t see it when you were drying,’ she said to Matilda.
‘When you’re drying you take everything to be clean. You take it for granted.’
‘Use a mop in future.’ Rose’s tone was peremptory, and Matilda glanced at Elmer, wondering if he’d heard. It was clear from the excitement in Matilda’s face that she considered Rose had been more than a little daring to issue so direct an order, as to a child or a servant.
Mary Louise left the dining-room without replying but a few minutes later, when she returned from the kitchen with a tray, she heard raised voices before she opened the door.
‘No more than a pigsty,’ Rose was saying.
Elmer mumbled something. Matilda said:
‘The cheek of the creature, saying you’d see it when you were drying.’
‘Knee-deep in manure that yard was! With people attending a wedding reception!’
Again there was a mumble from Elmer, interrupted by sudden shrillness from Rose.
‘What the sister got up to with Gargan was the talk of the town. It’s a wonder you didn’t marry a tinker and have done with it.’
‘Now look here,’ Elmer protested, and Mary Louise heard his chair being pushed back. His voice, too, had become loud.
‘Look nowhere,’ shrieked Rose. ‘We have her under our feet morning, noon and night.’
‘Your own sister could have eaten the dirt on that plate,’ Matilda reminded him. ‘We could be killed dead as we sit here.’
‘Arrah, don’t be talking nonsense,’ Elmer exclaimed crossly. ‘What harm would a bit of cabbage do anyone?’
‘Washed in soap it could do you harm,’ Matilda insisted. ‘And God knows what you’d find on your plate the next time.’
‘The brother’s a half-wit,’ Rose said.
Elmer didn’t reply to that. Matilda said that you might make a rice pudding in a dish that wallpaper paste had been mixed in. If the dish wasn’t washed properly you’d be eating wallpaper paste. She suggested that Elmer should make inquiries as to whether or not wallpaper paste could kill you dead.
‘She sucks up to the customers,’ Rose said. ‘Palavering all over them. D’you want a slice of cake, Elmer?’
There was a rattle of cups on saucers, and the sound of tea being poured.
‘Is it cherry?’ Elmer said.
‘It is.’
‘I’ll take a slice so.’
There was silence then: the interlude was over. Mary Louise did not enter the dining-room, but returned to the kitchen. She was at the sink when the sisters came in ten minutes later with more of the suppertime dishes. They were quite nice to her, not mentioning the shred of cabbage. Rose offered her a slice of cherry cake but Mary Louise shook her head, not turning round from the sink because she didn’t want them to see she’d been crying.
Elmer went out to the YMCA billiard-room that evening and when he returned Mary Louise was already in bed, with the light out, pretending to be asleep. They’d known she’d be coming back to the dining-room just at that moment. They’d known she’d pause outside the door, arrested by the cross voices. Her tears oozed from the corners of her eyes and ran into her hair, damping her ears and her neck. It hurt her most that they had called her brother a half-wit.
The following afternoon, when Rose and Matilda were engaged in the shop and Elmer was in the accounting office, Mary Louise ascended the bare stairs to the attics. There it was possible to weep noisily, sobbing and panting. She clenched her hands and beat the sides of her thighs with them, punishing her foolishness.
7
She dreams they are eight again, she and Tessa Enright. ‘Once a month you have it,’ Tessa Enright says on a road near Culleen, both of them sent out to look for a ewe that has strayed. ‘You stop it with rags.’
It’s the bane of a girl’s life, Letty says. In the kitchen her mother says to be careful, picking the wedding date. The day she arrives in Miss Foye’s house she has it. ‘Don’t leave me, please,’ she begs that day, but he says he has to.
When they find the sheep it is dead beside a stone. She walks alone out of a wood and there Miss Foye’s house is. ‘You’ll be well off there,’ he says, and she puts her arms around his neck because he is right. He has never been unkind to her.
8
On Christmas Eve 1956 Elmer accompanied Renehan, the hardware merchant from the premises next door, to Hogan’s Hotel. It was half-past four in the afternoon, as it always was when the two made their way along Bridge Street on Christmas Eve. A street musician who only appeared in the town at this time of year was playing a melodeon. The pavements were lively with people from the poor part of the town who left what shopping they could afford to the last couple of hours on Christmas Eve, hoping for bargains. A drunken man lurched in the street, talking to anyone who would listen.
‘A poor year,’ Renehan remarked as they turned into the side entrance that led to the hotel’s bar. It was what the two men talked about on this Christmas occasion: the fluctuations of business during the previous twelve months, difficulties with suppliers in their two different fields of trade, profit and loss. Renehan was an older man, thin and trimly dressed, with a well-kept moustache and a reputation for personal vanity.
‘Shocking,’ Elmer agreed.
The hotel bar was crowded, as festive as the street outside. People like Elmer, not normally seen there, were standing in groups, talking loudly. Paper decorations were strung diagonally across the ceiling.
‘You’ll take the usual intoxicant, Elmer?’ Renehan was known for his ornate, and in this case inaccurate, way of putting things. In his business life he cultivated a joky manner, believing that it attracted customers.
‘As a matter of fact,’ Elmer said, ‘I’ll take a small one.’
Renehan glanced amusedly at his companion. In all the years of this rendezvous the draper had never requested whiskey, not even the year he’d had a cold that should have kept him in bed. Renehan raised his eyebrows the way he’d once seen an actor doing all through a film.
‘That’s married life for you!’ he suggested and gently touched Elmer’s chest with his elbow.
Elmer didn’t reply; you didn’t have to with Renehan. He remained at the back of the bar while the hardware merchant pushed his way through the crowd. He hadn’t drunk whiskey since the night of his honeymoon; last Christmas he’d had a mineral as usual. It might indeed be married life, he reflected as he stood there. Maybe there was more to Renehan’s facetiousness than the man realized.