Noticing his presence, other men saluted Elmer across the bar, other shopkeepers for the most part, a couple of bank officials, Hanlon the solicitor. He wondered what they thought, or if they thought anything at all. Fifteen months he’d been married.
‘Compliments of the season!’ Renehan raised his glass and Elmer slightly raised his. The last thing he remembered of that Saturday night was the barman insisting that he wanted to close. The walk back to the Strand Hotel, the hall and the stairs, any parting words: none of that had remained with him. The next thing he could recollect after the barman said he had a home to go to himself was waking up with his clothes still on him.
Renehan offered him a cigarette, as if presuming that since Elmer was drinking whiskey he would have taken up tobacco as well. Elmer shook his head. He’d never smoked a cigarette in his life, he said, and didn’t intend to.
‘The better for it.’ Renehan’s thin brown fingers were illuminated by the flare of a match as he lit his own. He inhaled, and blew a smoke-ring. He mentioned a farmer to whom he had refused credit during the year.
‘The same with myself,’ Elmer said.
They hadn’t revisited McBirney’s bar during their remaining days at the Strand Hotel because he considered that going there in the first place had been a mistake. On their last night one of the men who shared their table in the dining-room was persistent with an invitation, and Mary Louise apparently wished to return to the public house, indeed seemed to have agreed that they would do so. But he’d stuck to his guns. For one thing, the episode had cost a fortune.
Renehan spoke of other customers, of possible bad debts in the months to come. He mentioned farmers on whom an eye needed to be kept, whose fortunes were on the wane. As well as the three sons who worked with him in the shop, Renehan had a daughter who attended to the accounts. In the bar of Hogan’s Hotel the two men had many a time agreed that it made a substantial difference, not having to employ anyone.
‘Is it gin?’ Elmer asked.
‘With a drop of hot water.’
He made his way to the bar. The manageress of the hotel was assisting the barman with the Christmas custom. She was an unmarried woman of Elmer’s age, on the stout side, with plucked eyebrows and hair that reminded Elmer of the landlady’s hair at the Strand Hotel, being the same reddish shade. He had remarked on the similarity at the time, but Mary Louise said she didn’t think she’d ever laid eyes on the manageress of Hogan’s. Bridget her name was.
‘What’ll I get you, Mr Quarry?’ She smiled at him, her hands held out for the glasses. She was wearing a black dress, and a necklace that glittered on the flesh that was exposed where the dress ended. One of her teeth was marked with lipstick. ‘Oh God, I’m sorry! I didn’t say Happy Christmas, Mr Quarry.’
‘Happy Christmas, Bridget. A small one for myself. A gin with hot water in it for Mr Renehan.’
Years ago he had wondered about marrying a Catholic. When the time came, he’d thought he might have to if there wasn’t anyone else about. He’d looked down from the accounting office one day and seen the hotel manageress – assistant manageress she’d been then – holding a summer dress up against her. For a couple of weeks he’d considered making an approach, but then he’d decided there was no hurry. Would the whole thing be a different story now, he wondered, if he’d reached a different decision? Mixed marriages were two a penny these days.
‘How’s everything with you, Mr Quarry?’ she asked, taking his money and quickly returning the change.
‘Tumbling along, Bridget, tumbling along.’
‘Well, that’s great.’ She turned, as she spoke, to serve someone else. He didn’t know why she hadn’t married.
‘Good luck,’ Renehan said, raising his glass again.
In previous years Elmer had drunk his second glass of lemonade quickly, gulping it and then putting the glass down on a nearby surface. He’d usually been back in the shop by ten to five. Now he sipped his whiskey slowly, actually savouring the harsh taste. He found it pleasant in the bar, pleasanter in a way than the empty YMCA billiard-room.
‘Isn’t it an extraordinary thing,’ he said, ‘that Bridget never married?’
Renehan told him a long story about Bridget being in love with a young curate when she was young herself, how it had been the passion of her life.
‘Father Curtin. Whippersnapper with sideburns.’
‘I remember the man well.’
‘Changes were made when the p.p. got a whiff of it.’
‘Ah, they would be all right.’
‘There was talk at the time of Father Curtin leaving the priesthood. Anyway, he didn’t and poor Bridget was left high and dry.’
‘Well, I never heard that one.’
‘It was kept under wraps. There’s not many in this town that knows it to this day.’
‘Only Bridget.’
‘Well, Bridget naturally.’
Other scandals from the past, known to both men, were recalled. Renehan bought two more drinks, and then Elmer did.
‘I’d best be getting back,’ he said, realizing that it was almost six o’clock. Renehan moved away to talk to someone else. Elmer returned to the shop.
Something began that Christmas Eve, although Elmer at the time was not aware of it. Halfway through January, instead of looking in at the YMCA billiard-room, he found himself turning into the side entrance that led to Hogan’s bar. It was much emptier on this occasion, but even so there were a couple of regular drinkers there. Knowing them by sight, Elmer nodded in their direction and ordered himself a glass of whiskey from the barman, Gerry, who also acted as the hotel’s porter. He sat on a high stool at the bar, talking to Gerry about the weather.
A few weeks later this visit was repeated. Elmer left the house above the shop with every intention of playing a lone game of billiards for an hour or two, but found himself again turning into the side entrance. On both occasions he made no reference to this change of plan when he later returned home. The whiskey deadened an ache that oppressed him. It lifted a weight from his spirits, if only for an hour or so. Too much, as on his wedding night, would bring a fog of darkness, but often in the accounting room, watching his sisters and his wife in the shop below, such darkness seemed like a balm.
By the spring of that year Elmer’s visits to the billiard-room had dwindled further, but since they had always fallen off when the days lengthened this passed unnoticed by Daly the caretaker. The difference was that with the advent of autumn they were not resumed. During the intervening months Elmer had had no excuse to leave the house in the evenings, for if he stated – as once or twice he did – that he intended to go for a walk Mary Louise prepared herself to accompany him. So instead he took to calling in briefly at Hogan’s bar in the afternoon, and was glad when September came so that he could spend longer there under the pretext of playing billiards. By the end of the year people in the town had begun to notice that Elmer Quarry was often, these days, in Hogan’s.
Nothing was missed by Rose and Matilda; nothing ever had been. They’d been sharp of eye and ear as children, and the tendency had developed in their spinsterhood. In Matilda’s life – as in Letty’s and Bridget the hotel manageress’s – there had, once upon a time, been romance. Matilda’s fiancé had joined the RAF on the outbreak of the war, and been killed in 1945, months before hostilities ceased. He had not gone down in action, for righting was mostly over for aircraft gunners then, but had died as a result of an accident at an aerodrome in Leicestershire: a devil-may-care pilot, in attempting to fly through an open hangar, had caused a tragic disaster. Rose had never been proposed to, and the spinsterhood of the sisters had developed like two strengthening growths from the same root. The root was the family – generations of Quarrys, of smalltown Protestants made special through not being of the mass. Matilda and Rose were steadfast, not in their beliefs or in their faith, but in what they believed themselves to be: a little superior.