‘Who weren’t invited?’ Mrs Dallon said.
‘Weren’t we talking about my sisters?’
‘Your sisters were invited, Elmer. I wrote the invitation out myself.’
He shook his head. The pair of them were fit to be tied, he said.
‘You didn’t get a written card yourself, Elmer. You and Mary Louise were taken for granted. But all the others on our side I wrote out.’
‘They heard about that all right. Only nothing came to the house for themselves.’
She had given the invitation to Mary Louise. One Sunday in March, having not been at the farmhouse since before Christmas, Mary Louise had arrived, as she used to in the past. Mrs Dallon had actually been writing out the invitations at the time and she’d given her the one for Matilda and Rose. Mary Louise had said they wouldn’t attend a Catholic wedding, but then had picked up the envelope, promising to pass it on to them anyway.
‘I’m sorry, Elmer. Please tell your sisters I’m very sorry. The invitation…’ Mrs Dallon paused and then began her sentence again. ‘The invitation must somehow have gone astray. That’s most upsetting.’
‘I wouldn’t have mentioned it only they took it hard.’
Listening to all this, Mr Dallon remembered Rose suggesting that Mary Louise should return to Culleen, to be looked after in the farmhouse. Suddenly he wished that that could be so, that she could be rescued from Elmer’s sisters. Clearly she’d been unable to bring herself to deliver the invitation to them. God alone knew what kind of a life she was leading.
‘Did you mind me remarking on it?’ Elmer’s bulk swayed a little, the top half of his body seeming to bow repeatedly. ‘Only they have me demented on that subject.’
At the other end of the long lounge-bar Baney Neligan was going through the words of a song, and Dennehy was doing his best to prevent him from singing them. Letty had specifically requested that there shouldn’t be singing. Her parents would hate it, she’d said.
‘Are you married yourself?’ he heard someone ask Mary Louise.
‘Yes, I am actually.’
‘You’re blind, Ger!’ someone else exclaimed. ‘This woman has a ring on her finger.’
Apologies were offered, and then the people moved away. Dennehy kept introducing Mary Louise to the wedding guests, but she didn’t seem much inclined to converse. Out of the corner of his eye he could see that she was on her own again, but to his relief he noticed her brother and the Eddery boys approaching her.
‘The hard man!’ Father Mannion, who had conducted the wedding service, struck him on the shoulder. Baney Neligan began to sing.
‘Is Mr Insarov young?’ ashed Zoya.
‘He’s a hundred and forty-four,’ Shubin snapped.
‘What are you laughing at, Mary Louise?’ James asked her, and she said she was only smiling.
‘How’re you doing, Mary Louise?’ one of the Eddery boys asked.
Her brother and the Eddery boys were smoking. They were drinking from pint glasses, holding them nonchalantly as if they were well used to glasses of that size.
‘I’m OK,’ she said.
‘God, I’ll never forget that.’ One of the Eddery boys recalled how he and his brother had tied the empty creosote tin to the bumper of Kilkelly’s car on Mary Louise’s wedding day.
The three of them laughed. The younger of the Eddery boys asked her if she liked it in the town. He wouldn’t be able to stand a town himself, he’d feel closed in.
‘D’you feel closed in?’ the older brother asked.
‘You get used to it.’
‘Din Lafferty came back from Birmingham.’
Mary Louise said she didn’t think she’d like Birmingham.
‘Lafferty couldn’t take it at all.’
When she and Elmer returned from their honeymoon his sisters welcomed them on the first-floor landing, Rose saying she’d wet the tea immediately because they must be parched. But first Elmer took her to the bedroom that had been his parents’ bedroom, which would now be theirs. The air was fusty there, the windows tightly closed, the wide double bed not made up. ‘They’ll tell you where the sheets are,’ he said, and in the dining-room he reminded his sisters that he would be moving out of his old room, that in future it could maybe be used to store stuff in.
‘D’you know Din Lafferty?’ the older Eddery brother asked her, and she said she’d seen him a few times in the past.
‘A right gawk,’ James said.
She moved away.
‘Come to see an old fellow?’ Her father smiled at her. Her mother and her aunt had been taken upstairs by Mrs Dennehy to admire the wedding presents. Elmer was at the bar with Bleheen.
‘Has Aunt Emmeline moved in yet?’ she asked her father.
‘Any day now.’
‘She’s lonely with Robert dead.’
‘Ah, it’s an awful old house for her. Sad old memories.’
‘What was he like, that man she married?’
‘Useless.’
‘In what way useless?’ Mary Louise asked.
‘He led that poor woman a dance. He’d have seen her starve before he’d step off a racecourse.’
She reminded her father that once he’d said the man they spoke of had charm to burn, but she didn’t receive a direct comment on that now.
‘I wouldn’t give you tuppence for him, Mary Louise. An awful streel of a fellow.’
‘Robert wouldn’t have been Robert if it hadn’t been for him.’
‘Well, no, that’s true, I suppose.’
There was surprise in her father’s voice, and for a moment Mary Louise almost told him that she and Robert had loved one another, first as children, and then when she was a married woman. Her father would keep it to himself, not wishing to cause anxiety: that was the way he was. She might have told him that Elmer came drunk to bed. She might have given the reason for their childless marriage. Her father would not have passed that on either. And would it matter that he knew all this, that the truth had been shared? It mightn’t matter at all, but at the same time it would distress him.
‘Father Mannion,’ a voice said, and a priest held out a hand for her father to shake. ‘How’re you doing, Mr Dallon?’
The priest was smiling, a big, pink, boyish face on a middle-aged man, a pink neck and forehead. He held his hand out to Mary Louise also, and she laid hers in it. ‘How are you, Mrs Quarry?’ he said.
She hated being called that. Ever since the funeral she had hated it. She didn’t listen when the priest and her father discussed some matter in businesslike tones, her father regularly nodding, the priest reaching out to press his arm every now and again. Gazing at the black cloth of Father Mannion’s sleeve, Mary Louise recalled the bottom sheet spread out on the bed that first evening in the Quarrys’ house, her own hands smoothing it. She walked round the bed itself to tuck it in, then spread the second sheet and smoothed away the wrinkles in that also. She remembered now the coldness of those sheets when later they slept together in his parents’ bed, he on the left side, she to the right.
‘Zinaida drank iced water all day,’ her cousin said, and Mary Louise turned away to smile. The old princess complained that so much iced water could not be good for a girl with a weak chest. As for herself, she had a toothache…
‘You have to be unmarried to be a bridesmaid,’ Letty said. ‘I told you, didn’t I, Mary Louise?’
‘Yes, you did.’
‘Is it that that upset you?’
Mary Louise said she hadn’t thought twice about the matter. Angela Eddery, in the same greenish shade as Letty, was the bridesmaid because the Edderys were distant relations.