Mary Louise no longer went secretly to the attic rooms but openly ascended the flight of stairs, even leaving the door at the bottom open. There’d been comment of course. Elmer had asked her if she was looking for something up there, and when Rose raised the matter in the dining-room Mary Louise replied that she went to the attics for privacy. She had taken to locking the door of the one she preferred and once Matilda rattled the handle, but she ignored the sound. ‘Are you all right in there, Mary Louise?’ her sister-in-law called out, and she didn’t reply. She had moved everything out into the room next door except the armchair she sat in. When they said there was something they wanted she was able to tell them that.
It was often cold in her attic but that never mattered. She tucked her legs under her in the armchair and thought of her cousin in his grave, the bones revealed in his face, flesh putrefying. She blamed God for that; in her attic she made an enemy of God because all she had left was the echo of her cousin’s voice – the way he had of pronouncing certain words, the timbre of his intonations, the images his voice conveyed.
‘I dreamed I was sad and sometimes cried. But through the tears and the melancholy, inspired by the music of the verse or the beauty of the evening, there always rose upwards, like the grasses of early spring, shoots of happy feeling…’
Again and again his voice repeated it. Hers now joined in. For these were words they must learn by heart, he’d said.
19
She packs her things, empty of emotion. How many women have come and gone in thirty-one years? Some of them have died, others been moved because they had to be. The food has been indifferent for thirty-one years, often worse than that. In winter they have felt cold from time to time, due to economies.
‘You’ll be all right,’ Miss Foye reassures. ‘You’ll be OK outside.’
‘I thought I’d die here.’
‘Oh, now, now.’
Miss Foye smiles it all away. It occurs to her that this one has been longer in the house than any of the others. She might say so in a sentimental way, but decides against it. A thought like that can be upsetting.
20
‘We would not have come,’ Rose said, ‘in normal circumstances.’
‘We didn’t want to come,’ Matilda emphasized.
‘No, we didn’t want to come at all. We held back – oh, for how long, Matilda? Would you say a year?’
‘A good year.’
The panic that the first utterances of the sisters had stirred in Mrs Dallon did not quieten. Even before they stepped into the house, while Kilkelly’s man was turning the car in the yard and bringing it to a halt to wait for them, they had offered an explanation for their unannounced presence, repeating in a different way what Letty had reported: there was something the matter with Mary Louise.
‘She hasn’t been herself, certainly.’ Mr Dallon’s narrow grey face was enlivened by a reflection of his wife’s anxiety.
‘Well, of course we don’t know what being herself is,’ Rose said. ‘Strictly speaking. What I mean, Mr Dallon, is we only know the person Elmer brought into the household. To be candid with you, she was strange from the first.’
‘Though of course, Mr Dallon, not as unusual as she is now. Not of course by a long chalk.’
Distractedly Mrs Dallon poured the tea she’d made, and even asked if the man waiting in the car would like a cup. The sisters said not to bother, but Mr Dallon felt the man should be offered something, and carried a cup out. Certainly Mary Louise had become quieter, he reflected on this journey. Letty had been on about it again last evening: anyone would be quieter, she’d said, married to Quarry. But the marriage had taken place ages ago, she added, and every time she saw her Mary Louise was quieter still. When he returned to the kitchen Rose was saying:
‘We sit in the front room of an evening. There’s the wireless to listen to. Elmer buys the magazines when the YMCA has finished with them, hardly anything they cost him. They’re there in the front room, she could look at them if she wanted to.’
Mr Dallon noticed that his wife’s eyes had a distended look. They bulged and goggled. Never in all the years he’d known her did he remember seeing her eyes like that. Turning to him, she said:
‘Mary Louise is always in that attic. I told you she went up there, the day I called. Apparently she locks herself in.’
‘There’s that and other things, Mr Dallon.’ Rose’s tone was brisk in confirmation. ‘As we’ve been saying.’
‘You’d ask her a question, Mr Dallon, and she’d not reply.’
‘Why does she go up to an attic?’
‘We’ve asked her that, Mr Dallon, Elmer has asked her repeatedly. She doesn’t deign to reply.’
‘Another thing is, there are certain tasks I have myself and certain that Matilda has, and a small number that are Mary Louise’s. We reached that agreement, but to tell you the truth the entire house could be a rubbish dump for all she’d care.’
‘A rubbish dump?’
‘Filthy dirty,’ Rose explained. ‘If she has a mood on she won’t lift a finger. She puts the plates on the table unwashed from the last time. There’s grime and filth on the plates and she doesn’t so much as blink.’
‘Then again, in the shop, Mr Dallon. A person will come in looking for oilcloth and she’ll say we don’t stock it. When the fact of the matter is we have oilcloth in three different weights and more than a dozen patterns.’
‘To tell the truth, we can’t get rid of it.’ Rose allowed herself a deviation, though her lips remained tightened in a knot even as she spoke. ‘Nobody goes much for oilcloth these days, but Elmer says don’t throw it out so we don’t.’
‘Yesterday, for instance, we heard her saying to a person that oilcloth might be obtained next door, in Renehan’s.’
‘Perhaps Mary Louise wasn’t aware –’
‘There is no commodity in the shop we haven’t pointed out to her.’
‘She locks the attic door on herself, Mr Dallon. There’s a lot of property that she’s moved from one attic to the next. It wasn’t hers to touch, as a matter of fact, but never mind that. You rap on the door and ask her if she’s sick. She doesn’t say a word.’
‘Not a word,’ Matilda confirmed.
‘We thought ourselves,’ Mrs Dallon brought herself to say, ‘that Mary Louise was perhaps disappointed because a family hasn’t been started.’
‘Wouldn’t you say it’s a godsend it hasn’t, Mrs Dallon?’
‘I’ll give you an example,’ Matilda offered. ‘I was closing the shop a week or so back and I said to her, “Wait a minute, Mary Louise, I want to try on a few of the skirts that came in this morning. ” All I intended was that she’d give me an opinion – sometimes someone else is better than yourself. Well, she stood as still as a statue at the bottom of the stairs that goes up to the office, like she’d been put into the corner at school. “How’s that? ” I said when I’d slipped on the first one, a blue and mauve dog’s tooth it was. D’you know the reply I received?’
Together, the Dallons indicated they didn’t.
‘She said I looked ridiculous in that skirt. Then she walked away. Ridiculous. No reason given.’
‘Another thing.’ Once more, Rose took up the catalogue of shortcomings. ‘There’s a little porcelain egg-cup our mother had. Now, no one uses that egg-cup except myself. “Rose can have my egg-cup,” my mother said a week before she died. I walked into the kitchen one day and there she was, eating an egg out of it.’
‘These days she sometimes takes her food in the kitchen,’ Matilda explained. ‘She won’t enter the dining-room if she has a mood on.’