Mary Louise looked at one after another: Robert as a baby, Robert at three or four, Robert in an overcoat and cap, much as she remembered him from their childhood. She handed them back.
‘We didn’t go in much for the camera,’ her aunt said.
There were other photographs and she was shown them – of the house and of people she didn’t know, of her aunt when she was a girl, and Robert’s father, with a moustache.
‘Thanks for showing me, Aunt Emmeline.’
Soon after she turned out of the avenue she heard an echo of her cousin’s voice.
‘One hot summer day in 1853 two young men lay in the shade of a tall lime tree by the River Moskva, not far from Kountsovo…’
Mary Louise was correct in imagining that the townspeople were interested in her childlessness. As well, it was considered that she was becoming strange, and often a connection was made. Women coming into the shop noticed what they agreed were oddities, and remarked upon them to one another. They said so in the other shops – in Renehan’s next door, in Foley’s, and elsewhere. They said so chattily, inquisitively, forebodingly, depending on who they were. The young wife was abstracted, they said; you addressed her and often she didn’t hear you. You asked for Silko and she turned round and reached down the silk samples. She wasn’t as friendly as she’d been; sometimes she hardly smiled at you, and then remembered and smiled effusively.
One day Letty came to the shop to tell her sister that she was engaged to Dennehy. She was immediately struck by what she afterwards described to her mother as ‘Mary Louise’s peculiar manner’. She had asked if they could go upstairs for a few minutes and Mary Louise led her to the big front room, a room Letty had never been in before. They sat on either side of the empty fire grate. Dennehy had bought the farmhouse and the yard of outbuildings to which so often they’d driven in search of privacy. Letty tried to remember the rooms, measuring them in her mind to establish if any was as large as this one. She extolled her fiancé’s virtues, and his devotion, and all they had planned for the future. She turned her head away when she said she was head over heels with him, and had been from the first time he took her out. He was anxious to know Mary Louise better, she passed on.
‘She didn’t speak a word,’ Letty reported later. ‘She sat there hardly changing her expression.’
There was some exaggeration in this, but the statements none the less conveyed an accurate reflection of the truth since they also took into account Letty’s own considerable surprise.
‘Is she sick?’ Mrs Dallon asked.
Letty shook her head. Her sister wasn’t sick. It was nothing like that.
‘Oh, I’ve noticed something,’ Mrs Dallon said, recalling her visit to the Quarrys at the time of her nephew’s death. Thinking that over afterwards, she had reached the conclusion that Mary Louise’s behaviour had to do with not yet being pregnant. Increasingly, her younger daughter’s moodiness – despondency transformed into elation, and then the grim mournfulness of the last couple of months – had appeared to Mrs Dallon to be an outcome of this fact. Neither she nor her husband had ever found it necessary to discuss, or even to mention, the known fact that for generations the Quarrys had taken the marriage step as a necessity rather than a desire. Mary Louise had wanted to be in the town, she had chosen to go out with Elmer Quarry. The Dallons, in the privacy of their bedroom or alone in the kitchen when James was out playing cards and Letty was out with Dennehy, did not openly progress from these facts to wonder aloud about Mary Louise’s subsequent happiness. They had not used that word to one another before the marriage; they did not after it. It was not a word that naturally belonged in their vocabulary. They would have felt easier if Elmer Quarry had been younger, or even been someone else altogether and more of a companion for the girl. But other factors had to be taken into consideration. It was pure ill fortune that, as yet, there was no pregnancy.
‘She didn’t say she was glad or anything,’ Letty went on. ‘All she did was nod. I told her about the house and she didn’t even ask where it is.’
‘Was she maybe disappointed you didn’t ask her to be your bridesmaid?’
‘You can’t have a married woman a bridesmaid. I told her, but afterwards I wondered did she hear.’
‘She should see Dr Cormican. You can get tests these days.’
‘I don’t think it’s that.’
‘What else then?’
‘He’s drinking.’
‘Who is?’
‘Elmer.’
‘Have sense, Letty. The man doesn’t touch a drop. The Quarrys never have.’
‘He’s taken to it. It’s all over town.’
Had Letty known it, she might have added that the unexpected resort to whiskey on Elmer Quarry’s part was assumed in the town to be related to the childless marriage, which his sisters now openly implied he regarded as a mistake.
‘Hogan’s bar,’ Letty said. ‘I’ve seen him there myself.’
‘My God!’
‘You’d want to shake her when she’s sitting there saying nothing. But the next minute you’d be sorry for her.’
Mrs Dallon later repeated the whole conversation, word for word, to her husband. He, too, was ignorant of the fact that Elmer Quarry had taken to spending time in Hogan’s bar. It had never been mentioned to him by anyone at the cattle-fairs, but Mrs Dallon pointed out that it probably wouldn’t be, the subject being delicate.
‘Once a family’s started it’ll all settle down,’ Mr Dallon said.
‘Please God it will.’
But Mrs Dallon could not sleep that night. She lay there remembering the details of Mary Louise’s own birth, so very late the baby had been, and then the easy time she’d had compared with Letty, and James. Growing up, Mary Louise had been a wide-eyed little girl, not sharp like Letty, nor rushy like James. Sometimes her dreaminess would irritate you, sometimes she forgot to do things and you’d think she’d forgotten deliberately but she never had. There’d been the day she’d fallen through the outhouse trap-door, when she’d lain on the straw for ages before the barking of the sheepdogs attracted their attention. There’d been the time Miss Mullover had written on her end-of-term letter that she was paying attention at last. Dr Cormican had thought she might have a grumbling appendix and they’d worried about the hospital charges, but it turned out to be nothing at all. She’d never looked more radiant than she did in her wedding-dress, with the Limerick veil borrowed from Emmeline.
Towards dawn Mrs Dallon slept. She dreamed, but afterwards remembered nothing, aware only vaguely that Mary Louise, as a baby and a child and a bride, had passed from her waking consciousness into a muddle of fantasy.
*
On Christmas Day Mary Louise sat with her husband and her sisters-in-law in church and afterwards they gave one another presents, as the Quarrys by tradition always did at that particular time, before the turkey was carved. Bitter weather came in January, and Mary Louise imagined the stream with the trout in it frozen over, and wondered if herons went away in winter.
Rose and her sister passed on to certain of their customers their belief that their sister-in-law was not in her right mind. There was something queer in that family, they said, James Dallon far from the full shilling and the cousin who’d died a peculiarity by all accounts. Increasingly in the new year the daily thoughts of the sisters were influenced by their observation of their sister-in-law and the disintegration, as they saw it, which she had brought about in their brother. They did not, in their gossiping with certain of their customers, ever touch upon this latter subject, feeling it to be one that shamed the family.
‘What harm’ll it do?’ Matilda said early in February after they had yet again discussed – but more seriously now – the notion of visiting the Dallons’ farmhouse and expressing their concern. They talked about this for a further week, and on the twentieth of the month arranged with Kilkelly at the garage to be driven to Culleen the following day.