As she cycled on the empty road, Mary Louise felt at first that she was riding away from a fantasy. It wasn’t in the least like reality that Robert had taken her hand, that she had told him so much, that twice they had kissed. And yet all that had happened. What had occurred was the next thing to adultery; she was a sinful wife.
But she experienced neither regret nor the shadow of guilt. All afternoon the glow of her sinning had possessed her, and now she didn’t want it to fade. She wanted to sense for ever the imprint of his lips, the coolness of his hand in hers. She wanted to hear him say again, as clearly, that she was beautiful and that he loved her.
In the hedges the summer’s cow parsley was withered, only its brittle stalks remaining. Sloes and haws had already formed among the thorns. Somewhere, near where she rode, a bird-scare went off, and then again, becoming fainter as she cycled on. A woman, trimming the fuchsia hedge outside her cottage, waved and said it was a lovely day.
‘Oh, lovely,’ Mary Louise called back, reminded of the fuchsia in the blackly-dressed woman’s hair. ‘Lovely.’
*
That night, a few minutes before midnight, Robert dreamed that it was he who accompanied his cousin on her honeymoon to the seaside. The three men described to him were standing on a road, and on a wide, endless strand a flock of seagulls swooped down to the edge of the sea. Miss Mullover said he was not permitted to bathe, not even to paddle. ‘You are a disgraceful child!’ Miss Mullover reprimanded Berty Figgis. As soon as the birds touched the sand they were seen to be herons.
He put his arm around his cousin’s waist and as they walked on the strand they talked about his father. In that moment Robert died.
15
She walks in the garden. She likes it best in the garden and always has, ever since she came to the house. She knows the name of every flower, she has a flowerbed of her own.
No one knows what will become of the place, and maybe it doesn’t matter. Maybe a place changing its purpose, maybe a house falling into ruins, is of no possible importance, a grain of sand turning over on a shore, nothing more. Even so, it is sad that her flowerbed may perhaps become choked with weeds.
She does not take the medication and does not intend to; not once does she intend to take it. ‘You’re naughty, you know,’ Miss Foye said once, but she didn’t say it about the medication even though she suspects. Miss Foye likes the paid-for inmates, she likes the cheques coming in. Generally naughty was what Miss Foye meant, a tendency that way. The nurses watch her swallowing it down, but Miss Foye knows there’s more to swallowing than meets the eye. Cute as a fox, Miss Foye is, over a thing like that.
16
James Dallon was inflating a tractor tyre in the yard when a man he didn’t know got out of a blue van and asked if this was the Dallons’ house. The man said something about having called in for the raspberries and the last of the peas at James’s aunt’s house, but James didn’t know what he was talking about. Then the man said he had a message. He didn’t smile. He didn’t seem happy. James brought him into the kitchen.
Later that morning Mrs Dallon drove over to comfort her sister. They sat together in the kitchen for most of the day, Mrs Dallon making tea and toast in the afternoon, and poaching an egg for each of them. She wanted to spend the night, but her sister wouldn’t permit that. They talked about the time when they were girls together, before their marriages; about when the men they’d married first came into their lives, and the different lives they’d had because of that. They talked about the birth of their children, how Robert had only just survived. They talked about the existence he had had.
A reference to Mary Louise’s Sunday visits did not fall naturally into the conversation, except that her aunt said, ‘Mary Louise was good to him.’ Mrs Dallon took this to mean in the past, when they were children in Miss Mullover’s schoolroom. The small misunderstanding was neither here nor there.
In the room where her nephew had spent most of his time she was shown his books, and the soldiers in the window alcove. ‘Take some grapes back with you,’ her sister offered at the end of the day, for she had come to terms by now with a death that she had always known would be like this, swift and out of the blue.
‘Oh no, dear, please,’ Mrs Dallon protested, but the grapes were cut none the less.
The Reverend Harrington came to the house, and later the same undertaker who, years ago, had laid out Robert’s father. Robert’s attachment to a graveyard that wasn’t used any more was not known since he had kept that a secret, shared only with his cousin. A grave was to be dug beside his father’s in the graveyard of the country church regularly attended by the household, where the Reverend Harrington offered holy communion once a month and officiated every Sunday at half-past six evensong.
There had been great happiness in Robert’s life, the clergyman comforted in the kitchen. Robert had been amused by all sorts of things, given to laughter and to fun. All that was better than a longer lifetime – sixty or seventy years – passed in grumbling bitterness. The mother who was now alone found it hard to take consolation from this, but did not let it show.
‘You’ll take a bunch or two of grapes, Mr Harrington?’ she offered, and the Reverend Harrington, too, drove off with grapes in his car.
Mrs Dallon considered it odd of her younger daughter to faint when she was told of her cousin’s death since she had hardly known him, except years ago at school. Quite without pain, he’d died in his sleep, Mrs Dallon had been saying, having come into the shop to break the news and to pass on the funeral details. Mary Louise went as white as paper. The next moment her legs gave way and she collapsed in a heap behind the counter.
Elmer came hurrying from the accounting office and he and Mr Renehan – hastily summoned from next door – between them carried Mary Louise upstairs. She came to on the way and struggled to her feet on the first-floor landing. She wept, in front of them at first, before turning her back on everyone and hurrying up the second flight of stairs. Mrs Dallon wanted to be with her and after a consultation with Elmer and his sisters she mounted, in turn, the second flight of stairs. But the door of the room they’d said was Mary Louise’s and Elmer’s bedroom was open and Mary Louise wasn’t in it. In case in her flurry she had misunderstood what she’d been told Mrs Dallon tried the other doors, but again found only empty rooms and a narrow, uncarpeted stairway.
Tea in the meantime had been made, and Dr Cormican sent for. Mary Louise’s sisters-in-law made Mrs Dallon sit down in the big front room, Elmer returned to take charge of the shop and to keep an eye out for the doctor, Mr Renehan offered Mrs Dallon sympathy on the family loss. When she was still explaining to the sisters that her nephew had never been strong and had not, in fact, led a normal life, Mary Louise’s footsteps were heard upstairs.
‘Was she in the lav?’ Rose suggested, and Matilda said something about the time of the month.
But when she’d opened the door to the attic stairway Mrs Dallon had thought, but could not be certain, that she heard the sound of distant sobbing above her. Certainly her daughter had not been in the lavatory, the door of which she’d also opened. It puzzled her that as well as fainting so dramatically Mary Louise had apparently run away to an attic. At the time she hadn’t felt she should ascend the poorly-lit attic stairs, but now wished she had.
‘She doesn’t know I’m here,’ she said when footsteps crossed the landing and continued to descend. ‘Mary Louise!’ she called, hurrying from the room. ‘Mary Louise!’