‘All right, are you, dear?’ He half turned his head to address his wife, but she didn’t appear to hear him.
23
Miss Foye kisses her. He carries her two suitcases. The Quarrys are decent people, she hears Mrs Leavy say, they have that reputation. While she was waiting in the hall Mrs Leavy told further stories about the old days in the asylums, relating the frightening scenes she and her friend Elsie witnessed when they looked over the brick wall.
The women wave, as they waved at Bríd Beamish. The asylums were built as charitable institutions, the fashion in mercy then, as the drugs are now. She waves back, and winds the window of the car down and waves again.
She has left the house before, on two occasions: for the funeral of her father, and a year and a half later for that of her mother. At both she’d been reminded of the death of her cousin, not that reminding was necessary; but the words of farewell were the same, the repetition causing her to reflect that the dead become nothing when you weary of doing their living for them. You pick and choose among the dead; the living are thrust upon you.
‘Are they still alive?’ she asks, the silence suddenly broken, the question emerging naturally from her thoughts.
‘Who’s that?’
‘Your sisters.’
The car responds to the shock he experiences, juddering in its motion. He halts it to adjust himself, steering it into the gateway of a field. He turns to look at her.
‘Why shouldn’t my sisters be alive?’
‘We all die some time.’
‘Of course they haven’t died.’
‘I was not to know.’
‘You’d have been told, dear.’
She doesn’t say she might have been told and not been interested. She doesn’t say anything, but listens while he warns her there’ll be changes she’ll notice, in the town and in his daily life.
‘Do you remember what I told you about the shop?’
She considers for a moment, then admits she doesn’t.
‘I sold it out to the Renehans nine years ago. They joined the two premises together.’
‘Yes, I remember that.’
The television tells you what the world is like, old Sister Hannah used to say, the changes that have come. If you can be bothered to pay attention, the television will tell you all you want to know.
‘Over the shop’s the same,’ he says.
‘Yes, I’m sure it is.’
Sister Hannah’s the wise one. A person’s life isn’t orderly, Sister Hannah maintains; it runs about all over the place, in and out through time. The present’s hardly there; the future doesn’t exist. Only love matters in the bits and pieces of a person’s life.
24
On the day of the auction at her aunt’s house Mary Louise cycled out of the town just before eight o’clock. The streets were quiet. Mrs Renehan was out with her cocker spaniel. The bell of the Church of Our Lady was chiming. A lorry with barrels on it was drawn up at the bottom of the town, waiting to make deliveries, its driver and his companion reading newspapers in the cab. Bakers’ shops and paper-shops were open. In the window of Foley’s the elderly assistant was laying out rows of rashers. Two nuns made their way to the new convent classrooms on the Clonmel road.
Mary Louise wondered if he knew. If you believed in heaven there was no reason to suppose that he wouldn’t. She imagined him with his half smile watching her, knowing what she was up to. When she was seven or eight her mother had taken Letty and herself to the auction there’d been when old Colonel Esdaile died, three weeks after his wife had gone. She remembered a white marble statue in the garden, a draped woman. ‘Not another like it in Ireland,’ the auctioneer had bellowed. ‘Every detail in place, down to the toenails.’ And he was right: the toenails were delicately incised, she and Letty had gone to look. Mrs Dallon had hoped to bid for a job lot that consisted of a clothes line, scrubbing brushes and a bucket, but unfortunately the auctioneer, running out of time, placed it beyond her reach by throwing it in with two other selections of household items.
The morning was mild and sunny. Primroses still bloomed on the verges. Buds dotted the hedges, catkins were heavy on the new season’s shoots. Still softly green, cow parsley and elder bided their time.
There was a car ahead of Mary Louise on the green avenue. It moved slowly, as if wary of an unfamiliar surface. She watched it draw away from her and finally turn on to the grass before it reached the house. She could just see figures moving away from it. When she was closer a cardboard sign read Park Here.
‘The sale won’t start till two, miss,’ a man in the kitchen said. He was sitting at the table with another man and a boy. There was a blue Thermos flask on the table, and three cups without saucers. The boy was eating a doughnut he’d taken from a torn-open paper bag beside the flask.
‘I just want to look around,’ Mary Louise said.
The two men seemed doubtful, the boy wasn’t interested. The man who’d spoken said that viewing would commence at ten. Ten was what was advertised, he added.
‘I’m a member of the family,’ Mary Louise explained, and the two men appeared to be relieved.
‘Go ahead for yourself in that case,’ the second man said, and Mary Louise passed through the kitchen.
Her aunt had declared she would herself find the auction too painful to attend, and in the circumstances Mary Louise guessed her mother would not drive over either. Other people she knew would arrive, but that didn’t matter, provided they didn’t bother her with their inquisitiveness. She mounted the stairs and opened the door of the first room she came to. Clearly it had been her aunt’s. The mattress was rolled up on the bed, tied with string. Each piece of furniture had a number stuck on it.
In her cousin’s room there were further numbers, black figures on a small blue rectangle. Framed in badly chipped gilt, a picture on the wall facing the bed was 91: farm workers in old-fashioned dress crowding round one of the wheels of a hay-cart, which had broken beneath the strain; near by, a dog was chasing a rat through the stubble. The mattress on this bed also was rolled up and tied. A china water jug, and the basin it stood in, were numbered 97, the wash-stand 96. There was a sun-bleached wardrobe and a dressing-table without a looking-glass, brown linoleum on the floor. The room’s single window had a view of the distant stream, and Mary Louise remembered her cousin telling her that he’d first seen the heron from his bedroom. On the mantelpiece, seeming as if he might have left them there himself, were his binoculars. A corner press, built into the two walls that formed it, was empty. So was the wardrobe. The dressing-table had a single drawer, lined with old newspaper. It, too, was empty, except for a collar-stud and a bottle of green Stephens’ ink, both of which she took.
Downstairs, in the room he had been so fond of, the scattered papers had been cleared. Books were tied into bundles. The French and German soldiers, still battling as he had left them, were numbered 39. She pulled out drawers and searched in the mahogany cupboards on either side of the door, but her cousin’s papers, his drawings and his scribbles, were not there. She had hoped to find them tied up in a bundle like the books – not an item in the auction but simply tidied away. Her Aunt Emmeline might have kept them by her, she decided; she might have packed them into the luggage she had taken to Culleen. One day, if her aunt didn’t want them any more, she’d ask if she could have them.