‘You’ll never manage that on the bike,’ the woman warned, and further string was fetched. The parcel was folded in two and tied by the man on to the carrier of the bicycle. It would be secure, he said, if she rode carefully and didn’t let the extra weight sway her.
‘Were you mad?’ Rose’s tone was harsh, disguising excitement.
He didn’t reply. When they got going with their questions they could draw the teeth out of your head. If he hadn’t been so upset he wouldn’t have told them that during the first few weeks of his marriage he’d instructed his bride in the ingenuity of the wall-safe, thinking to amuse her.
‘There she is now,’ Matilda said.
It was twenty to seven; the shop had been closed since six. It stood to reason, Rose and Matilda had declared, not once but several times. She’d gone for ever, they’d said, one of them agreeing with the other. They’d hurried upstairs to see if she’d packed her things and then reported, in disappointment, that apparently she hadn’t. But even so they continued to insist that this time their brother’s unsatisfactory wife had run away.
They stood in the accounting office, Rose and Matilda on either side of the desk, Elmer by the open safe. When they heard the sound in the house all three of them knew that Mary Louise had put away her bicycle in the yard and had entered by the back door. They could tell it was her footfall. Rose called her.
‘I have this to return,’ Mary Louise said when she entered the accounting office. She held out most of the notes that had been in the strong-box. The rest of the money she’d used, she explained.
‘Used?’ Rose repeated. ‘Used?’
When he spoke Elmer’s voice was hoarse. He asked his wife where she’d been all day. They’d been beside themselves with worry, he said.
‘I was at my aunt’s auction. I bought a few things.’
Elmer reached out and picked up the notes she had placed on the desk. The rubber band was still around them. Only two of them were missing.
‘You stole money out of the safe,’ Rose said.
Elmer began to protest but the words became a jumble, running into one another incomprehensibly. Mary Louise said:
‘I wouldn’t say stole, Rose.’
‘You stole money out of the safe to go to an auction.’
‘Why didn’t you ask me?’ Elmer’s question was a whisper, just audible in the office.
‘I did, only you were drunk.’
‘My God!’ Rose cried. ‘My God, will you listen to this!’
‘That’s a disgraceful thing to say,’ Matilda interjected. ‘I don’t believe for an instant you asked him.’
‘As a matter of fact, I asked him twice. I asked him the night before last and I asked him last night.’
‘You asked him when you knew – maybe when he was asleep.’
‘I’m not a fool, Matilda. I don’t go round talking to people when they’re asleep.’
‘You go round doing all sorts of things. You go round trying to get people to eat the food left behind on an unwashed plate. You go round locking doors and interfering with property that isn’t yours.’
‘If I were you,’ Rose said to her brother, ‘I’d put the matter in the hands of the Guards. Stealing’s stealing.’
‘The furniture I bought will be coming tomorrow,’ Mary Louise said. ‘It won’t be in anyone’s way.’
With that she left the office. Her footsteps were heard on the stairs a moment later and then in the kitchen, which was partly above the accounting office.
‘Listen, Elmer.’ Rose spoke slowly and emphatically, isolating each word in a deliberate manner. ‘That girl’s worse than the brother. She’s not the full shilling, Elmer.’
‘She has caused disruption in this family,’ Matilda threw in. ‘Rose is right in what she says, Elmer.’
He did not speak. It could be true that she had asked him about the money. She might have said it and, due to evening drowsiness, he mightn’t have heard her. He’d given her the combination ages ago. Since he hadn’t been able to hear her, she might just have used it. God knows why he’d ever given her the thing.
‘The family and the household,’ Matilda reiterated. ‘There isn’t a day you can draw a breath in peace.’
‘Look at the state she’s put you in,’ Rose said. ‘You have a bottle and a glass in that safe, the way there never was in the past. She has you so’s you can’t think straight.’
‘What’s she want furniture for? Is the furniture we have not good enough for her?’
‘She won’t eat with us, Elmer. She won’t sit down in a room upstairs with us. It’s a wonder she’ll lie in a bed with you.’
There was a silence after Rose said that. It continued for a minute and then for another. It went on after that.
‘What d’you want me to do?’ Elmer asked at last.
The next morning Rose saw the furniture lorry drawing up and snapped at the two men when they appeared in the shop. No one wanted furniture, she said. ‘Take it back where it came from,’ she ordered.
But Mary Louise stepped round the counter and directed the men to the back door of the house. Rose’s protests were ignored, as were the additional ones of Matilda: it was Mary Louise the men had bargained with concerning the expenses agreed upon.
‘I’m afraid it’s up at the top of the house,’ she apologized.
The men were obliging. Upstairs or downstairs, it was all in the day’s work. ‘What’s troubling them in the shop?’ one of them asked.
Mary Louise explained it was a misunderstanding. Her sisters-in-law hadn’t known the furniture had been bought. Her sisters-in-law were abrupt in their manner.
‘That’s the final straw,’ Rose said, red in the face, glaring in the accounting office. ‘She’s filling our attics with rubbish.’
‘I spoke to her last night, Rose. I said you were upset.’
‘And what good did it do? What good’s speaking to her? We told you what to do.’
‘I can’t go doing wild things like that, Rose.’
‘It’s an hour’s drive in Kilkelly’s car. There’s a garden to walk in. She’ll be with her kind.’
Over the years Elmer had become used to what he considered to be the outrageous side of both his sisters. It was nourished by a harsh matter-of-factness and fed on the confidence of their double presence in the household. When Rose, a few years ago, laid down that they should not pay Hickey the builder the full amount of his bill because he had been four months late in attending to the work and had thereby succeeded in making the job a bigger one, Matilda had unswervingly supported her. When Matilda insisted that Miss O’Rourke from the technical school should be obliged to accept a cardigan that had been singed by her cigarette, Rose didn’t hesitate either, even though the cardigan was of a colour that in no way suited Miss O’Rourke, and had quite by accident come into contact with the cigarette Miss O’Rourke had momentarily placed on the counter. There had been many similar instances, all of them revolving round the fact that when Elmer’s sisters felt themselves to be right they experienced no embarrassment in demanding excessive amends. They had little patience with the courtesies of moderation or compromise; pussyfooting was not in their nature.
‘One of those men’s carried in a box full of toys,’ Matilda reported, leaving the shop unattended in her excitement.
‘There you are, Elmer. Your wife’s gone into her childhood.’
‘A big cardboard box,’ Matilda said. ‘Filled up to the brim.’
The bell on the shop door jangled and both sisters hurried back to their duties. During the last twenty-four hours the excitement that possessed them had reached a fresh climax. It was an excitement that had begun when they first realized their brother’s wife made regular journeys to the attic rooms, had intensified when they discovered she’d moved most of the furniture from one attic to the other and had taken to locking the door, had intensified further with each subsequent deviation from what the sisters regarded as normal behaviour. Mary Louise’s disappearance the day before had been delight enough: not in their wildest hopes had they anticipated the ecstasy of money purloined in order to buy toys at an auction. For a single moment Matilda wondered if her sister-in-law could possibly have given birth to an infant which, for peculiar reasons, she chose to keep hidden in an attic room and for whom she was now making purchases. As well as the box of brightly-coloured soldiers, Matilda had watched a dismantled bed and a mattress, as well as other bedroom articles, being carried from the lorry. But a baby’s cries would have been heard, especially at night, and the girl could not possibly have disguised her figure: the theory was abandoned almost as soon as it was born. Crazier, really, Matilda reflected, to have obtained toys in order to play with them yourself, at twenty-five years of age.