*
Miss Mullover heard that Elmer Quarry had taken to drinking. She recalled the rather heavy, squarely-made child he’d been, solemn-featured, slow when he wrote down his conclusions – liking to do things properly – but swift of thought, except where algebra was concerned. In her small bungalow, regularly visited by ex-pupils of all ages, she reflected that drinking was not a Quarry weakness and that there’d been no talk of it before the marriage. Did they not get on? Did they quarrel? Was it all too much, the sisters being there too? Time was when Matilda and Rose Quarry had been the belles of Protestant whist drives for miles around, lovely-looking girls.
Once, years ago, Miss Mullover had been asked by an ex-pupil to ‘talk to’ her husband because drink was threatening to destroy the marriage. This man, who had never lost either his respect or his affection for his teacher, rode up to her bungalow on a motor-cycle. Awkward and unhappy, he sat down with his crash helmet on the floor by his feet. It wasn’t drink, he insisted, that had done the damage. ‘The trouble is,’ he said, ‘I don’t like her.’
Tannon, the accountant at the brickette factory, drove forty miles every Thursday afternoon to visit the wife of a bank manager in another town. That had been going on for twenty-six years, and had resulted in Tannon’s never marrying. In the emergency period of the war, when petrol was unavailable to private motorists, he had arranged a lift in one of the brickette-factory lorries, his bicycle stowed away in the back so that he could make the return journey. The gossip went that when he arrived at his destination he parked his car in a side street and entered the bank house by a wicket gate in the double doors of the yard. Miss Mullover often wondered what the bank manager’s wife looked like, what age she was and if she had children. A woman with plump lips came to mind, a slack-faced woman, powdered and scented, expensively dressed. She imagined Tannon making his way into the back of the house, dodging the office windows. She imagined all the bank business going on beneath the erring couple, loans being arranged, cash given out, the bank manager on the phone to his head office. A skinny boy Tannon had been, with rabbit teeth and very short trousers above fragile, bony knees.
In the town other such unconventional relationships were talked about. It was said that ever since they’d quarrelled about their daughter’s mixed marriage, a certain elderly couple addressed one another only by way of their dog. One of the post office clerks, the mildest of men when he served you across the counter, gently tearing along the perforated edge of the stamps, was said to be violent in the home. A young wife’s weekly presence in the Dixie dancehall was not known to her husband, who worked through the night at the electricity plant. One of the town’s bread deliverers went off with a tinker girl and then returned, saying it was all a mistake. None of these people had passed through Miss Mullover’s schoolroom, but she’d known all of them, at least to see, as children.
It was dispiriting news that Elmer Quarry had taken up drink.
‘It’s Hogan’s he goes to,’ Rose reported, having followed her brother in Bridge Street. She whispered, halfway up the stairs. Matilda was waiting on the first-floor landing.
‘I thought it would be Hogan’s. It was always Hogan’s with Renehan.’
‘It was different with Renehan.’
‘I’m not saying it wasn’t.’
Rose ascended the remaining steps of the stairs. Matilda led the way to the dining-room. Rose closed the door behind them.
‘I didn’t think he’d go into a public house,’ Matilda said. ‘The bar of a hotel’s different.’
‘I wouldn’t be too sure what he’d get up to. If you could have seen the cut of him, nearly running on the street. Like he was chased by the bats of hell.’
‘I don’t know what to say.’
‘I’ll say it for you, Matilda. She’s driven the man to drink.’
The sisters continued to discuss the matter. They began at what they saw as the beginning – the earliest attention paid to Mary Louise by their brother. They went through the events of the subsequent months; they dwelt upon their own protestations. Their opinion of the mental stability of James Dallon was aired, and related to that of his sister. They considered a step they might take: arranging to be driven out to the Dallons’ farmhouse in Kilkelly’s hired car and asking the Dallons to take their daughter back before further damage was done. They reached no decision about that. Eventually they heard Elmer’s footfall on the stairs and heard him entering the front room, where Her Ladyship was listening to the wireless. They heard his voice raised cheerfully, calling her dear.
The Dallons, reconciled by now to the relationship that had advanced between Letty and Dennehy and pleased that their son was displaying signs of maturity, began to worry about their younger daughter. She stayed hardly any time when she visited them on Sundays, and increasingly did not come at all. As the year advanced – a warm spring giving way to a fine summer – they wondered more often why they were not yet grandparents. They did not say as much to one another, but a bewilderment that was fleeting at first lingered longer during the months that drifted by. Often, of course, such delays occurred: they had to remember that and be patient. Something in the manner of their younger daughter, and the impatient brevity of her Sunday visits, with no effort made to offer an explanation when she did not arrive at the farmhouse at all, concerned them more. Her manner was abstracted. Questions asked about the shop were summarily disposed of, and for the most part went unanswered. Gossip from the town was no longer conveyed to the farmhouse kitchen. The pleasure there had been at first in advising the shop’s customers when colours had to be matched, or on the fit of a dress or the suitability of a hat, appeared to have evaporated. The wit of the drapery travellers was not repeated.
‘You can’t put your finger on it,’ Mrs Dallon remarked before settling to sleep one night.
‘She doesn’t seem discontented, though.’
‘No, she doesn’t seem discontented.’
She’d gather herself together when a family began, both simultaneously thought. One of these Sundays she’d have a bit of news for them, and after that she’d be herself again.
In the quiet of the graveyard he read to her. She lay on her back, watching small white clouds drifting slowly across the curve of the sky. The difficult Russian names weren’t easy to keep track of at first but then, with repetition, became familiar. ‘Are you asleep?’ he sometimes interrupted himself to ask, but she never was. She was seeing in her mind’s eye Pavel Petrovich’s study, its green velvet and walnut furniture, its vivid tapestry. Her cousin’s voice curtly issued Arkady’s orders; distressfully it conveyed to her Mitya’s convulsions. ‘Madame will see you in half an hour,’ a butler said. Swallows flew high, bees hummed in the lilac. A peasant with a patch on his shoulder trotted a white pony through an evening’s shadows. Sprigs of fuchsia decorated the hair of a woman in black.
It was a coolness creeping into the graveyard that caused him, every week, to close whichever book he’d brought. ‘We have stayed too long again,’ he always said, amusing both of them with that most inappropriate remark.
For want of something else to say, Mary Louise pointed out to her husband that he had not, in the past, played billiards in the summer.
‘Summer or winter, dear, it’s relaxing to read the magazines.’
‘I didn’t know they had drink there.’
‘What drink’s that, dear?’
‘I didn’t know they had drink in the YMCA.’
‘There’s no refreshments of any kind, as a matter of fact.’