‘Sit down, pet. It’s great to see you.’
Mary Louise took her coat off. In answer to her mother’s questions, she replied that she was well. Mrs Dallon cut slices of brown bread and put butter and lemon curd on the table.
‘The wanderer returns,’ Mr Dallon said, pulling his Wellington boots off at the door.
‘Letty’d love to see you.’ Mrs Dallon spoke with nervous haste, as though anxious to obliterate as soon as possible anything in her husband’s levity that might have caused offence. In their bedroom she had repeatedly voiced her fear that some time in the past Mary Louise had taken offence. They had maybe seemed hesitant when Elmer Quarry proposed. Letty had been too outspoken. These attitudes had perhaps rankled and, combining with the attitudes of two trouble-making sisters-in-law, were the cause of Mary Louise’s isolation. When Elmer began to drink the poor girl had felt she could turn to no one. Any girl would be ashamed when a husband took to drink.
‘I hear it’s quiet in there these days,’ Mr Dallon remarked, referring to the town. He crossed the kitchen in his stockinged feet. He sat down and reached for a slice of bread.
‘There’s not much doing,’ Mary Louise agreed.
He remembered her standing beside him in the yard when she was eleven or twelve, with some blackberries she’d picked into an old sweet tin. They’d give her a white coat when she went to work in the chemist’s, she said. He didn’t subscribe to the argument that she had taken offence. In his opinion this was – on his wife’s part – a search for some consoling factor, any explanation being better than none at all. But when the argument had been put forward he hadn’t dismissed it: if it gave some comfort, what harm was done?
‘It’s the times that are in it,’ he pronounced. ‘The people haven’t the money.’
It disappointed him that Mary Louise didn’t respond. In the yard that day she’d stood chattering for maybe a quarter of an hour, telling him about the window displays in the chemist’s, the scents and powders and lipsticks, Coty, Pond’s, Elizabeth Arden. A warm September evening, he recalled.
‘George Eddery’s gone to England,’ Mrs Dallon said. ‘Selling door-to-door apparently.’
This time Mary Louise did respond, slightly nodding, a shadowy smile altering the set of her features. A chemist’s shop had represented all of town life for her, her father reflected. She’d always been attracted by the town, ever since her first day at Miss Mullover’s. She’d always delighted in it, even when they drove through it on a Sunday and it was closed up and dead.
‘Aunt Emmeline’s not here?’ she said.
‘She’s over at Letty’s,’ Mrs Dallon said. ‘Your Aunt Emmeline’s making a garden for Letty.’
‘I wonder,’ Mary Louise began, and paused. They watched her changing her mind, leaving the sentence she had begun unsaid, substituting another. ‘I’d just like to look,’ she said, ‘at my room.’
Surprise flickered in both their faces. Mrs Dallon’s bewilderment became a frown that only gradually disappeared. Cutting in half a slice of bread, her husband was arrested in the motion for an instant and then, more slowly, proceeded with it.
‘Just for a minute,’ Mary Louise went on, already opening the door that led to the stairs. They listened to the latch falling into place behind her. Mr Dallon pushed his cup towards the teapot. Mechanically, Mrs Dallon filled it. Was there something, after all, in the idea that Mary Louise should return to Culleen? Did she need looking after? Had she herself said as much to her sisters-in-law? Was that why she wanted to see her bedroom again?
‘If she came back, where would Emmeline go?’
Mr Dallon didn’t know what his wife was talking about. His thoughts had not followed the same course as hers. It struck Mr Dallon as very odd indeed that Mary Louise wished to visit a room, once shared with her sister, now occupied by her aunt. He could think of no rational explanation for this.
‘It could be,’ Mrs Dallon continued, ‘she wants to leave him.’
‘Elmer?’
‘On account of he’s drinking. And would you blame her, with those two women to put up with on top of everything else?’
‘But she’d say it if that was the case. She’d say it out, wouldn’t she, instead of going up to Emmeline’s room?’
‘I think what she’s after is to see would both of them fit in it. Like herself and Letty in the old days.’
‘We couldn’t ask Emmeline –’
‘We could if we had to.’
They had been told by Emmeline that Mary Louise had taken to visiting her cousin; the fact had come out one evening when they were sitting by the range. ‘Didn’t you know that? Didn’t she ever tell you?’ Emmeline had said, and they listened to her recounting of the Sunday visits. ‘Kindness itself,’ Emmeline stated firmly. The Dallons received the impression that it had somehow been known – though not to them – that Robert was nearing the end of his life and that their daughter’s attentions had been an act of kindness. ‘She was lonely too, of course,’ Mrs Dallon said, but even so she felt proud that a child of hers should have acted so. Lonely or not, it couldn’t have been much fun, keeping company with a sickly youth.
When Mary Louise returned to the kitchen she put on her coat immediately. She drew from one of its pockets a headscarf with blue and red squares on it and tied it round her head. James came in just then, but she had to go, she said. She was sorry she could not stay to talk to him.
In the attic she hung the watch and chain on the nail by the fireplace. Her cousin had said that the watch lost a minute a day. She would enjoy setting it right, every night before she got into bed.
27
She listens to them abusing him. Who’s going to cook for her? Who’s going to clean up after her? They don’t intend to watch her eating. They’ll none of them last a week at the mercy of a mad woman. All these years he paid money for her to exist in luxury: isn’t that enough? Insult on top of injury. Scandalous what he’s done. They don’t intend to lift a finger, why should they? So how’s he going to manage for an instant, the state he’s in?
‘She’s my wife,’ he says.
‘And we’re to go in trembling of her. Your own sisters at the end of their days, driven tormented with fear.’
‘It’s the way things are. They’re closing all those places down.’
‘You’re doing it to spite us.’
He is a seedy figure now, cigarette-burns on his clothes, his shirt-collars frayed, portions of his jowl forgotten when he shaves. Guilt has made him take her in; guilt made him visit her and pay a little so that she wouldn’t have to drink out of an enamel mug. He’d be ashamed of himself if he’d ever struck her.
‘Robert was buried in the wrong graveyard,’ she tells him when the moment seems right for saying it. ‘Will you help me over that, Elmer?’
He doesn’t reply, and she tells him she never hated him. She tells him she thought about him often during her long time in Miss Foye’s house. ‘Include others in your prayers,’ they used to urge, and she included him.
‘I’m sorry I caused you trouble,’ she says. ‘I’m sorry I made things worse.’
28
Waking in the middle of one night, Elmer found himself thinking about Bridget asleep in Hogan’s Hotel – just as, when a boy, he’d imagined Mrs Fahy and the housekeeper at the school in Wexford asleep. The hotel manageress’s clothes were on a chair in her bedroom, her stockings draped over the top of them. Although Elmer had never said so to his sisters, or in any way intimated it to his wife, he’d been relieved when Mary Louise decided she wanted to sleep in the attic. There was more room in the bed; you could pull the bed-clothes round you when it was cold and not have to leave an area of them for someone else. All in all, he liked it better.