‘She saw what was there before she took the step herself. Isn’t it evens Stephens if she can’t oblige the man?’
‘I wouldn’t mind being a fly on the wall in that house.’
‘I’ll tell you this. In a twelvemonth he’ll be well away.’
Later that night, as she undressed in her small room at the top of the hotel, Bridget was still thinking about Elmer Quarry and the girl who had married him. In particular she’d have liked to be a fly on the wall of their bedroom. She’d have liked to be a fly inside Elmer Quarry’s head, able to see what he was thinking as he lay down beside his young wife, and to know why it was he loitered in the hall of the hotel. But in bed, when she’d turned the light out, she forgot about the Quarrys and thought about the curate she’d been in love with when she was a girl herself, who’d been sent away to another parish. ‘I’ll give it up for you,’ he’d whispered, before Canon Maguire stepped in.
‘We just thought we’d see how you were getting on,’ Mrs Dallon said in the shop. ‘We had to drive in anyway.’
‘We haven’t seen you for a while,’ Mary Louise’s father added.
From behind the counter their daughter acknowledged their explanation. She asked them if they’d like to come upstairs and then led the way. The sisters greeted them with nods of approval.
‘You could swing a cat or two here,’ Mr Dallon said in the big front room.
Mary Louise made tea and brought it to them. Her mother said:
‘We’ve been a bit worried about you, Mary Louise.’
‘Worried? Why worried?’
Neither replied, neither knowing quite how to. Dr Cormican had explained to them that unless Mary Louise complained of being ill and came to see him he could not help. There could be a dozen reasons, he said, why she should choose to spend so much time in a locked room. People got up to greater eccentricities than that. ‘Why don’t you chat with her yourselves?’ he’d suggested.
‘Are you all right, Mary Louise?’ Mr Dallon asked. ‘Is everything OK with you?’
‘Why wouldn’t it be?’
‘Now, Mary Louise,’ her mother began, then checked herself. ‘What we mean is, maybe it’s lonesome for you. Maybe you miss the family and the farm.’
‘I’ve been married two and a half years.’
‘Even so, pet.’
‘Has somebody said something?’
‘The odd person has noticed you have a lonesome look.’
‘You don’t come out to see us on Sundays any more. We miss the visits, Mary Louise.’
‘James misses seeing you. Letty was saying the same the other day.’
‘Letty’ll soon be married herself.’
‘Yes, she will.’
‘If there’s anything troubling you, Mary Louise – ’
‘There’s nothing.’
They talked of other matters, of Letty’s wedding and of Mary Louise’s Aunt Emmeline coming to live at Culleen, of the way James bossed them about these days and how pleased they were that he continued to display initiative. Driving back to the farm, Mr Dallon was silent. The visit had changed his mood. He felt foolish. He should have foreseen that a marriage with such an age difference would not be plain sailing: he should have been against it. But he hadn’t been and that was that. He’d wasted a lot of time listening to the Quarry sisters and then waiting until Dr Cormican was ready for them, and then sitting down over a cup of tea in the middle of the morning. He resented, above all things, wasted time.
‘They’re troublemakers, those women,’ he said.
Mrs Dallon nodded, and agreed that they were. But even as she spoke she shared, without knowing that she did, the Quarrys’ view that Mary Louise’s marriage of convenience had turned out to be a grievous mistake. Mrs Dallon was never to alter that opinion.
Mary Louise did not change her ways. She had come to terms with Elmer and his sisters; she no longer feared the wrath of the two women’s tongues, and long ago she had ceased to wish to please her husband. She opened their bedroom window wider now, for his whiskey breath was so potent in the early part of the night that once or twice she felt light-headed through inhaling it.
Although her mother had hinted at the gossip that had begun, Mary Louise remained unaware of it. Nor did she know that her mother constantly worried, distressfully imagining a solitary figure in a locked room, nor that her father was angry with himself for permitting a marriage involving such an age difference. More and more she kept to the kitchen during mealtimes, in spite of Elmer’s protests that in doing so she was upsetting his sisters. Why should she not? she thought. She didn’t like them.
‘Bersenev took a droshky going back to Moscow and went in search of Insarov. But it took him a long time to find the Bulgarian because Insarov had moved to new lodgings…’
His search dulled the ornaments in the Quarrys’ dining-room, the grim dumb waiter, the sideboard, the double curtains of lace and chintz. Mary Louise hated the dining-room. She hated its Turkey carpet and its brown pictures and the salt and pepper in the left-hand sideboard drawer, and the smell of old food. But when she listened now, eating alone in the kitchen, she often heard the sound of Bersenev’s droshky. Without closing her eyes, there was the brick facade of the house where Insarov lodged.
Yelena Nikolayevna loved Insarov and didn’t know it. Yelena was a tall girl, olive-skinned and grey-eyed, with a complicated nature. She had been fond of her father, then cooled towards him, attaching herself to her mother instead. In the end she had distanced herself from both. Mary Louise tried to imagine that. Nothing even vaguely like it had occurred in her own childhood. Her first memory was of being with Letty, sitting beside Letty’s doll on stubble and Letty saying she must be still because dolls always were. Letty pretended to give her things to eat, as she did with her doll. The sun was warm on her face and head. Not far away a tiny bird was rooting in the stubble, and Letty tried to entice it towards Mary Louise and the doll so that all three could be fed, but the bird flew away. The first time she went to Miss Mullover’s schoolroom it was in the trap, James and Letty taking it in turn to hold the reins. They tied the pony up in the yard of Hogan’s Hotel and then her brother and sister each took one of Mary Louise’s hands. ‘A for Apple,’ Miss Mullover said, the tip of her cane on the rosy apple of her chart, then moving on. ‘B for Boot.’ Miss Mullover gave her letters to copy. ‘Mary Louise,’ she said; and pointed out each letter, saying that was what her name looked like. After the first time they didn’t go to school in the trap any more. Mary Louise sat on the crossbar of James’s bicycle, and he was made to promise that he wouldn’t ride fast. In time Mary Louise learned to ride Letty’s bicycle and Letty inherited her mother’s. On Fridays Miss Mullover always set more homework than she did on other days and James and Letty complained all the way back to the farmhouse. Two verses of poetry, ten spellings, three sums, a composition, history or geography, tables. On Mondays Miss Mullover was always cross, sarcastically reading out a composition if it was very bad, rapping knuckles with her cane. ‘You’ll stay in, James,’ she nearly always snapped on Mondays. ‘Until you know those verses perfectly you’ll not leave this room today.’ When Mary Louise first heard the story of Joan of Arc she imagined the peasant girl kneeling on the ploughed earth, hearing the voices. She imagined her waiting, tied to the stake, watching the building of the fire that was to burn her. Sometimes the boys from the Christian Brothers’ shouted abuse when the three Dallon children rode by, calling them heretics, reminding them that they would burn in hell. James always replied in kind, but Letty took no notice. ‘Why’ll we burn in hell?’ Mary Louise asked, and Letty said they wouldn’t.
Because Robert never came to Culleen when Aunt Emmeline visited the farmhouse, Mary Louise hadn’t known of his existence until she went to school. ‘I’m your cousin,’ he said one day in the school yard, and that was the first memory she had of him. After that she noticed he always finished his transcription before the others, and was best at spelling and tables. Her mother explained what it meant, being a cousin. ‘Aunt Emmeline’s one child,’ her mother said. She was twelve when she fell in love with him.