At three o’clock the car from Kilkelly’s Garage arrived. Mary Louise had changed into a pale green coat and skirt, and wore a small black hat trimmed with a drawn-up veil. The night before she had packed a suitcase.
The Eddery brothers tied an old creosote tin to the back bumper, but Kilkelly’s driver removed it. When the car drove off James pedalled after it on Mary Louise’s bicycle, and the Eddery boys shouted. Everyone else waved, Letty and Elmer’s sisters half-heartedly.
‘Did the thing go well?’ The driver was the garage’s chief mechanic; he hadn’t had time to change out of his overalls.
‘Ah, it did,’ Elmer replied. ‘Smooth as velvet.’
‘Well, that’s great.’
The car stopped at the drapery. A notice in one of the windows announced that it would re-open on Monday. Elmer went in to collect his suitcase.
‘Ye’re off for the two days?’ the driver chattily went on while Mary Louise waited, and she explained that they’d be away, in fact, for eight days in all, nine if you counted the remainder of this one. When Elmer returned they were driven on to the railway junction, which was twelve miles away. They caught the five-to-four train, changed later to a bus, proceeding on their way to the seaside resort they had chosen for their honeymoon. Neither was at ease during the journey. Neither revealed that the night before there had been family opposition to the marriage. Instead they spoke of the wedding guests, and of the occasion at the farmhouse. In the months that had passed since their first visit to the Electric Cinema they had not come to know one another intimately; Each had become familiar with certain traits in the other, promoting a degree of ease that had not been there in the past; but the curiosity of affection was not present on either side. The Electric Cinema had been visited only twice after they’d seen Lilacs in the Spring: Elmer’s courtship of Mary Louise had been conducted, for the main part, during Sunday afternoon strolls that had become customary. He would walk out from Bridge Street and she would cycle in from Culleen. They met on the town’s outskirts, the bicycle was deposited in a gateway, and they walked slowly back the way Mary Louise had ridden. At a crossroads they turned to the right and proceeded along a meandering lane, down a hill, through woods and across a humped bridge. On one of these walks Elmer proposed marriage, and Mary Louise said she’d have to think about it. She spent a month doing so, and when she eventually agreed Elmer passed his tongue over his lips, dried them with a handkerchief and announced that he was going to kiss her, which he did. They were actually on the humped bridge at the time. His voice was hoarse; there was a trace of what Mary Louise imagined to be leeks on his breath. After Gargan and Billie Lyndon, she had argued to herself during the month, there had been no one else for Letty. Had there ever been anyone for his own sisters?
Elmer had never before embraced a girl. Years ago, when he was a boarder at the school in Wexford, he had experienced desire for the stout housekeeper. He had imagined what it would be like kissing her. In dreams he had removed her clothes.
‘God, you’re great,’ he complimented Mary Louise when their lips parted, although in fact he had found the experience a little disappointing. She was blushing, he noticed on the hump-backed bridge. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, her eyes cast down.
They walked back to the town, her left arm where he had tucked it into his. He asked her what her mother would say when she heard the news. He said he’d have to speak to her father because that was a thing you had to do. While wondering how best to break it to them, he said his sisters would be delighted.
‘Will you come out to Culleen?’ Mary Louise suggested.
‘Walk out now, d’you mean?’
‘Have you a bicycle, Elmer?’
‘I never had the need of one.’
‘Could you walk out to the house next Sunday maybe? I won’t say a word till then.’
‘I’ll come out of course.’
‘I’ll only say you’re calling for me.’
They stopped on the road and embraced again. This time Mary Louise felt his teeth. One of his hands was pressed into the small of her back. She closed her eyes because she’d noticed in films that people always did. He kept his open.
On their honeymoon journey that particular Sunday was recalled by both of them. On subsequent Sundays there had been further embraces, and all the necessary plans for their wedding had been made on these afternoon walks. ‘We’re delighted,’ Mary Louise remembered her mother saying. Her father had shaken Elmer’s hand.
‘The Strand Hotel it’s called,’ Elmer told her as they stepped from the bus in the seaside town. ‘Excuse me,’ he said to a man standing outside a sweetshop, ‘where’s the Strand Hotel?’
The man said to keep going. You couldn’t miss it, he advised. When the road became sandy under your feet you were there but for another fifty yards. Four minutes at the outside it would take them.
‘Thanks, sir.’
Elmer had a way, Mary Louise had noticed some time ago, of addressing men like that. He called her father sir, and the Reverend Harrington. It was because of the shop, she supposed, something that was natural to him.
They walked on with their suitcases, past a row of small shops, past two public houses and the Catholic church. The surface became sandy beneath their feet, and then they rounded the bend where the Strand Hotel was, the two words of its title painted across a bow-windowed facade.
‘I wrote in for lodgings,’ Elmer stated in the hallway. ‘Quarry the name is.’
‘Ah, you did surely, Mr Quarry.’ A woman with a headscarf over her curling-pins greeted them. ‘Mr and Mrs Quarry,’ she added, glancing at Mary Louise, her eyes bright with a landlady’s interest. They passed swiftly from the little black hat that was still perched on the crown of Mary Louise’s head, over her pale green coat and skirt. They rested on her wedding ring. ‘Mr and Mrs Quarry,’ she repeated, as though to reassure her visitors that since the scrutiny was complete all was now in order. She led the way up a narrow staircase.
It was a boarding-house rather than an hotel. Tea was in the dining-room sharp at six, the woman said, and it being well after that now would they come down quickly? She threw open a window in their room and stood back proudly. You could hear the sea, she said. If you woke in the night you could hear it.
‘Grand,’ Elmer said, and the woman went away.
Mary Louise stood by the bed. For the first time since she’d decided to accept Elmer Quarry’s offer of marriage she experienced the weight of misgiving. Tendrils of doubt had now and again assailed her before; listening to Letty, she could hardly have escaped them. But there had never been a feeling that she had made a ludicrous, laughable mistake. Nor had she ever resolved that as soon as possible she must be released from her promise. During the month she had taken to consider the offer she had gone over the ground again and again, and, having reached a decision, she did not see much point in encouraging second thoughts. But in the bedroom of the Strand Hotel, with the lace curtains flapping on either side of the open window, Mary Louise wanted suddenly to be in the farmhouse, to be laying the places at the kitchen table or feeding the fowls with Letty. Somehow, later on, she was going to have to get her nightdress on to her and get into that bed with the bulky man whose wife she had agreed to be. Somehow she was going to have to accept the presence of his naked feet, the rest of him covered only in the brown and blue pyjamas he was lifting out of his suitcase.
‘Comfortable enough,’ he said. ‘I’d say it was comfy, dear.’
Elmer’s mother had sometimes employed that endearment, and it seemed to him to be equally appropriate between man and wife, now that they were alone in a room. It wasn’t the kind of thing Rose or Matilda would say, but then the circumstances were different. He was glad he had remembered it.