The sisters could not help themselves, and long ago had become lost in assuming they could not: now they did not try. Why should they? And why should they put themselves out by the slightest iota for a penniless creature whom their brother might have bought at a fun-fair if they’d all been living a hundred years ago? He’d married her to breed with. He’d married her because of his sentimental notion that the name should continue above the shop. That kind of compulsion belonged to another age also – and had made sense then, neither would deny that. Now it was only slop.
On Christmas Eve when Elmer had returned to the house with the smell of drink on his breath they both noticed it at once. But they didn’t comment on the fact to one another. They knew their brother always went to Hogan’s on Christmas Eve with Renehan; they’d never thought about what he had to drink there. The whiff of spirits he brought back with him didn’t seem significant, more something to be expected when you returned from a bar. But one evening in January the telltale whiff was there again. Neither of them asked him if he hadn’t been at the YMCA; he said nothing himself; and then – not long afterwards – they smelt it on his breath on another occasion. Still they did not remark on this to one another.
Where the marriage was concerned, the sisters knew that nothing could be changed. Before he’d made the mistake they had pointed it out to him. They had done their best, as sometimes they’d had to as children, being older sisters. The mistake was what all of them had to live with now.
‘He’s drinking on the quiet,’ Rose said at last.
‘Yes.’
They were waiting for him one night on the first-floor landing. His eyes were bleary, both noticed. He kept opening and closing his lips in a way that was unusual for him: they knew his personal habits, the quirks and twitches that were part of him. They did not speak on the landing, nor did he. He passed them by, and went on upstairs. In the front room his wife, Her Ladyship, turned on the wireless. A few minutes later they heard her going upstairs too.
*
A veterinary surgeon began to take Letty out. He came to the farm to examine an ailing heifer, and when he’d finished he sat for a long time over a cup of tea in the kitchen. A fortnight later he called in with his account and invited Letty to the Electric Cinema. He was a good-looking man, red-haired, a few years older than she was, a Catholic called Dennehy. ‘It’s the way things are,’ Mr Dallon remarked to his wife in the privacy of their bedroom. Both of them hoped that nothing would come of the relationship.
The schoolroom next to the church, in which Miss Mullover had taught from 1906 until 1950, closed on her retirement. Arrangements had since been made for the Protestant children of the town and the neighbourhood, either to be driven to a school fifteen miles away or to attend the convent or the Christian Brothers’. Miss Mullover had seen that coming, and even took a little pride in being the last Protestant teacher to have a school in the town: a successor – some flighty thing from the Church of Ireland Training College – might have irritated her more.
‘You’ve settled down?’ she prompted Mary Louise, meeting her one day in South West Street when enough time had passed to permit the question. She’d said the same thing often before, to pupils who had married. Settling was necessary, which was why, ages ago, she’d chosen that particular word. No girl, of whatever age – no man either, when it came to it – could expect to find the first year or so of marriage free of the hazards of personal adjustment. That stood to reason, yet was not always taken into consideration in advance.
‘Oh, yes,’ Mary Louise responded, but a quality in her tone of voice caused Miss Mullover to doubt her. Conversing with her on later occasions, she was confirmed in this opinion, and came to realize – to her great disappointment – that her optimism at the time of the wedding had been misplaced.
9
Memory is sometimes perfect, clear as a light. First thing when she wakes she wallows in it, assisted by the dusky tranquillity of dawn. The morning after the visit she wallows in the favourite year of all her life, the year the Russians put a dog into space, the year of Bill Haley, the year De Valera proclaimed a state of emergency. A nun in the Sacred Heart convent, expected to live to be a hundred, died at ninety-nine. A sewage problem occurred in Conlon Street, necessitating pneumatic drilling, new pipes and re-surfacing. A fawn-coloured tomcat, property of the gasworks manager, attacked a neighbour’s birdcage, detaching it from its hook and provoking threats of legal action. Tyrell’s the vegetable shop closed. Humphrey Bogart, Letty’s favourite – plastered all over the bedroom at Culleen – died. 1957 it was.
‘Mary Louise,’ she whispers in the dawn that comes after the upset of her visitor. ‘Mary Louise Dallon. Mrs Quarry as is.’ He is old now, the sisters older still. He could live for a dozen more years, fourteen or fifteen even, the sisters endlessly. He pays for her keep in Miss Foye’s house, and always has. Years ago the sisters tried to make her father pay but of course there was nothing to spare for that at Culleen. ‘Your husband’s good,’ Miss Foye says often, because not everyone here is paid for. The bigger dormitories are bare; the unpaid-for have enamel mugs and plates. He’s a decent man, driven to drink. It isn’t his fault that they’re closing down the houses. They’ll bundle the obstreperous together, somewhere else will be found for them. She’s never been obstreperous herself.
A figure emerges from the gloom and sits on her bed with a blanket around her: Mrs Leavy from Youghal come over to tell her dreams.
She listens and then she tells her own.
10
On Sundays, having exchanged what news there was over a cup of tea at Culleen, Mary Louise usually began her journey back to the town at about a quarter to five, her spirits drooping as the journey progressed. But one March afternoon in 1957 she turned off the road that led to the town and cycled aimlessly, exploring a neighbourhood she did not know well. She chose a different direction the following week and when, eventually, all the ways became familiar to her she returned repeatedly to a favourite one. She was ironically reminded of the Sunday walks of her courtship, the bicycle left in a gateway, the crossroads where she and Elmer turned to the right, the woods they passed through, the humped bridge. It seemed like a lifetime ago, as deep in the past as the first day she attended Miss Mullover’s schoolroom. Whenever she crossed the humped bridge on her bicycle she reflected again, each time with greater bitterness, that someone might have warned her. Why had it been only Letty? And why had Letty made her concern sound like envy?
One Sunday, having ridden further than usual, she found herself at the head of a grassy avenue. Rusty iron gates, set in a spacious curve of railings that long ago had lost all signs of paint, seemed as though they had been flung back with a gesture in some other generation, remaining so to support a jungle of brambles, and ivy branches as thick as an arm. From the road Mary Louise could see the stark white house to which the avenue led, the modest property of her Aunt Emmeline. Only once before had she been here, when she and Letty were entrusted with a gift: a pound of the butter their mother used to make. The butter was later sent to the house regularly, but after that single occasion the task of delivering it became James’s because his sisters had complained so about a mile-long hill up which they’d had to push their bicycles. As she stared down the avenue, Mary Louise found herself recalling that her Aunt Emmeline’s only child – the cousin with whom, for a while at school, she had imagined she was in love – had been able to attend the wedding service in spite of his invalid state. If his condition had worsened she’d probably have heard. Robert his name was.