Mary Louise turned away, pedalling back the way she’d come, but had hardly gone more than a few yards when a car, thick with dust, rounded the bend she was approaching. The horn was sounded, her Aunt Emmeline waved, and then the car drew up. Feeling stupid and caught out, cross because she should have avoided this neighbourhood, Mary Louise dismounted. She knew she’d gone red in the face, and hoped it would be assumed that she was simply out of breath.
‘Heavens above!’ her aunt exclaimed, winding down the car window. ‘Are you visiting us, Mary Louise?’
She shook her head. She tried to think of an excuse, but none would come. There was no reason in the world why she should be here on a Sunday evening. She said the first thing that came into her head.
‘I wondered how Robert was.’
‘You’ve been to see him?’
‘No, no. I just wondered –’
‘Robert’s not bad at all these days. Come on down, dear. He’d love to see you.’
The head – shaggy-haired, the skin of the forehead reddened by exposure to the weather, as the cheeks below it were – was withdrawn. The car moved forward, hesitated, then turned in wildly to the entrance, and advanced at speed on the avenue. Mary Louise rode after it.
Robert – a wiry, gangling child with mischievous eyes – was now a pale young man, and the mischief in his eyes had turned into what seemed like amusement. He wore glasses, which he had not in the past; but his spare, bony frame reminded Mary Louise of the child he’d been. A shock of dark hair kept falling over his forehead; an adult’s smile hovered on his lips.
‘Heavens above!’ he exclaimed, exactly as his mother had. ‘Mary Louise!’
He sat by a fire in a large untidy room. Tables and armchairs were covered with drawings of winter trees, and papers with scribbles in green ink on them, and books. In a window alcove battalions of toy soldiers were engaged in warfare. Fishing-rods and nets were a muddle in a corner. Glass doors led to a conservatory where a vine grew.
The time Mary Louise and Letty had cycled over with the butter they had not been invited to penetrate further into this house than the kitchen: all she saw now was strange to her. But she had often heard the house talked about, usually in the same breath as her Aunt Emmeline’s husband, who had died before she was born. Her mother’s sister had married money, it was said, a statement invariably followed by the reminder that the money hadn’t lasted because the man she married was a gambler. ‘Charm to burn,’ Mr Dallon used to say, and – unlike the money – the charm had lasted to the end. Mary Louise never knew what it was her uncle had died of, and had sometimes wondered if it was the same affliction that Robert suffered from.
‘I was out looking for primroses,’ she lied to her cousin in the untidy room, having noticed a few by the side of the avenue. She always went to Culleen on a Sunday, she added, but today she’d ridden about a bit, thinking to pick spring flowers.
Becoming fuller as he listened, her cousin’s smile straightened the line of his lips, which otherwise were on a slant. He didn’t seem interested in the reasons for her presence.
‘I met Aunt Emmeline,’ she doggedly added.
‘Does marriage suit you, Mary Louise?’
She replied that she was used to it by now. The words came scuttling out: she hadn’t meant to answer the question quite like that, and realized he knew she was being evasive.
‘Well, I suppose you would be used to it. What a silly question!’
He took his spectacles off and wiped them on a handkerchief He was wearing brown corduroy trousers and a tweed jacket, and brown brogue shoes. A watch-chain hung from the buttonhole of his left lapel and disappeared into the pocket beneath it. The family rumour was that this watch had been returned from a soft-hearted pawnbroker when he heard that Robert’s father had died without leaving much behind.
‘D’you serve in that shop?’
‘Part of the day I serve there.’
‘I often wondered.’
Her Aunt Emmeline brought in tea. She placed a tray on a small table which she cleared of books and papers, and pulled the table closer to the fire. A dog had followed her, a Kerry Blue.
‘We don’t often have a visitor,’ her aunt said, and Mary Louise could see that she was pleased, delighted even. She eked out a living selling apples and grapes, and the vegetables she grew. The pair of them wouldn’t have survived, Mary Louise had heard her father say, were it not for the apples and the grapes.
‘D’you remember you and Tessa Enright putting worms in that girl’s desk?’ Robert said. ‘Who was that girl?’
‘Possy Luke.’
‘She screeched like she’d been bitten.’
‘Poor Possy! She was afraid of worms.’
Their schooldays were talked about, and her aunt asked after Mary Louise’s family. She’d heard about Letty going out with the vet. She knew him; she said he was likeable.
‘How’s James getting on?’ Robert asked.
‘James is fine.’
This appeared to be true. Her brother didn’t complain as much as he used to; he didn’t fly off the handle so easily. For the first time in his life he seemed to be aware that he was the farm’s inheritor, that the work he did was for himself. This transformation had come about since Mary Louise’s marriage, and had intensified since Letty had begun to go out with the vet.
‘And how are the Quarrys?’ her aunt inquired.
They, too, were fine, Mary Louise replied.
‘Well, that’s good.’
‘I mustn’t stay long.’
‘Oh, don’t be in a hurry, dear. We don’t see much of you.’
Robert laughed. ‘We don’t see her at all.’
She told them how the bicycle ride, and the long hill, had years ago been too much for Letty and herself, how it had jaded them, which was why James had been given the task of delivering the weekly gift of butter. She thought she’d better say that, in case offence had ever been taken.
‘That’s why we know James better,’ her aunt said.
‘He used to play bagatelle with me,’ Robert said. ‘He loved bagatelle.’
‘He plays cards with the Edderys now.’
They laughed. But she wondered if she should have mentioned cards in view of the stories about the gambling that had left her aunt and her cousin penurious. Again she felt warmth creeping into her cheeks, and hoped they wouldn’t notice.
‘Stay and talk to Robert for a little,’ her aunt begged. The soft plea in her tone had an edge of anxiety to it. She rose as she spoke and poured them each another cup of tea. Then she went away, the Kerry Blue ambling sleepily after her.
‘She thinks I don’t see people,’ Robert said when the door closed behind her. ‘Which of course is true.’
‘What do you do all day, Robert?’
‘I come downstairs to this room. I’m very fond of this room. I light the fire when it’s chilly. We have breakfast together in the kitchen. The rest of the day depends on all sorts of things.’
She remembered his being driven to school by his mother when everyone else either walked or cycled. She had always associated him with his mother, that weather-chapped face behind the steering-wheel. She never saw her aunt in the town these days, and she wondered where the shopping was done. She had passed a general store and a petrol pump a couple of miles back. It would be there, she guessed.
‘A quiet life,’ her cousin said.
‘Yes.’
The crooked smile expanded and straightened. He was watching her: all the time he was talking she could feel him watching her.