Often she thought she would like to be more alone than she was. The voices of her sisters-in-law and of Elmer were tiresome. The tread of feet on the stairs was tiresome, the clatter of dishes, the rattle of the shop bell. To press away such sounds she played a game that reminded her of games played in her childhood: she closed her eyes and watched herself wandering from room to room, in and out of her sisters-in-law’s bedrooms, opening the windows of the big front room, making the dining-room different. On the first-floor landing there was a glass chandelier in pink and scarlet. There was a smell of flowers and newly ironed table-linen. In the kitchen a cook moved her saucepans on the range; raw mutton waited on a table beside high piles of plates that rattled when the cabbage was chopped. In the yard chickens screamed, chased by someone intent upon wringing their necks.
Outside, blue shutters covered the windows of the shop; the entrance doors were locked and bolted. Somewhere, at the heart of everything, her cousin belonged, as delicately present as the confection of refurbished rooms. Everything was fragile: only too easily it could all be broken, like porcelain falling on flagstones. Gently, fingers to their lips, she and her cousin laughed.
People no longer mentioned his wife to Elmer. In the town she was talked about less than she had been, accepted now as an eccentric person. She was seen regularly on her bicycle, wrapped up closely, a headscarf tied around her head. In January of the new year – 1959 – she visited her sister and admired the fittings in the kitchen, and listened while Letty told her what it was like to be pregnant. Her mother, in January also, called in at the shop again, only to be informed by Rose that Mary Louise no longer deigned to serve there. Mrs Dallon rang the bell at the halldoor of the house, but there was no reply. She returned to the shop and demanded to speak to Elmer, who shambled down the stairs from the accounting office, seeming to Mrs Dallon to be unsteady on his feet. He brought her upstairs to the house and asked her to wait in the front room, which Mary Louise entered a few minutes later. She smiled, and appeared to be normal except for her silence. ‘You don’t come to see us any more,’ her mother gently chided her. Mary Louise promised to come the following Sunday, but she didn’t arrive, on that Sunday or on subsequent ones.
Elmer himself still worried about the rat poison that had been bought. He didn’t mention it to his sisters, nor to anyone else, but he questioned Mary Louise as casually as he could about the presence of rats in the attics where she spent so much time. ‘I think I caught them,’ she replied. ‘They took the Rodenkil I put down.’ He asked her what she had done with the poison that remained and she said she still had it in case the rats returned. Elmer shook his head: that wasn’t a good idea, he suggested, in case she’d ever get the stuff on her hands or maybe someone else might pick it up, not knowing what it was. Now that she’d destroyed the rats it would be better to throw the poison out; if rats returned more could be bought. Mary Louise kept nodding. She’d wrap up what poison remained, she promised, and put it in the dustbin.
After Mary Louise’s visit Letty’s concern didn’t lessen, but by now she was reconciled to the changes in her sister, accepting them because there was nothing else she could do. Then her baby was born and made demands on both her attention and her thoughts. She had expected that Mary Louise would ride out to see the infant, and felt aggrieved when she didn’t. Kevin Aloysius the child was called, Aloysius being a Dennehy family name.
Rose and Matilda bided their time. They were pleased that Mary Louise no longer served in the shop; the dining-room without her was almost like old times. Yet there continued to be the irritation of what Matilda had once described as her ‘smug face’, the agreeableness that spread into it when you addressed her but which didn’t last, being quickly replaced by a dead look, as though she couldn’t be bothered listening to you for more than a minute at the most. There was the irritation of her presence in the lavatory or the bathroom when they wished to use one or the other, and her half-witted confining of herself in an attic. Above all, there was the appalling toll she was continuing to take of their brother. Sometimes in the mornings his eyes were so bloodshot you’d imagine he couldn’t see properly. He had put on weight; his pallor was unhealthy; the next thing, he’d get the shakes in his hands, like old Crowe who came round with crab-apples every autumn. Not knowledgeable about the nature of addiction, the sisters believed that when the wife he’d erroneously married was either returned to her family or incarcerated in a suitable asylum, Elmer would revert to his normal self. He would call in at the YMCA billiard-room for the occasional game of billiards instead of spending his evenings in Hogan’s Hotel. He would go out for summer walks the way he used to. His interest in business matters, having noticeably declined, would revive. That the shop would see the present generation out and pass to distant relatives in Athy mattered as little now as it had before the whole unfortunate episode of the marriage. It was only a pity Elmer hadn’t been able to see that there was a natural threesome in the shop and in the house.
The sisters bided their time because they were certain that any day now there would be another occurrence similar to the theft of the money. On this occasion the culprit might not manage so easily to wriggle out of it. Both of them felt that since so much trouble had been caused it was only fair that matters should come to a head.
Mary Louise no longer broke down into fits of private weeping, as she had during the first weeks and months of her loss. It seemed to her that her own flesh and bones were so much lumber, real but without real interest.
‘Of course I haven’t,’ she replied again when her cousin asked her if she’d fallen asleep. ‘Of course not, Robert.’
Susan Emily, the moss-touched letters said, wife of Charles. Safe now in Heaven’s Arms. Peace, Perfect Peace. The words were there beneath a net of other words, belonging with the drone of bees. When she closed her eyes in the graveyard, towers and pavilions were etched against the green of parkland. A tablecloth was spread beneath old limes. ‘The coachman and a footman and a maid brought the baskets from the coach…’
His voice continuing, and hers embracing it, was their act of love. There was a purity in it that delighted Mary Louise, now that she had moved herself away from her sisters-in-law and her husband. All she wished for was her cousin’s watch to hang on her attic wall, on the nail that was already there, beside the fireplace. And if ever silence came in the house she would send out invitations – gold-edged, with her cousin’s name on them also, giving a date and a time, with RSVP on the bottom left-hand corner.
Mrs Dallon was surprised, and pleased, when James came into the kitchen to say that he’d just seen Mary Louise from the high field, riding out in their direction. She pushed the kettle on to the hot ring of the range, and asked James to go and tell his father. In weary defeat she had come to accept part at least of the Quarry sisters’ catalogue of accusations. There was nothing more that could be done, nothing more that could be said: everything would have been different, Mrs Dallon still believed, if a child had been born. Perhaps one day that would happen, but she felt more pessimistic than she had in the past.