‘It’s a lovely place,’ Mary Louise said, still standing by the bed.
He agreed that it was. He’d been told about the Strand Hotel by Horton’s traveller, now with Tyson’s, who’d said it was second to none. Recalling in the train the dreams he’d had in his boyhood about the stout housekeeper at the boarding-school and later about Mrs Fahy and Mrs Bleddy, two shopkeepers’ wives in the town, he had hoped his wife would change her clothes as soon as they arrived in the hotel. She was nothing like the size of the housekeeper or either of the shopkeepers’ wives; definitely on the skinny side you’d have to call her, none of the sturdiness of her sister. The sister had come into the shop one day nearly a year ago and he’d looked down from the accounting office just as she was taking her purse out of her handbag. She wasn’t bad-looking, he had considered, and he’d thought about the matter for a while, hoping she would return to the shop so that he could observe her again, in fact attending church one Sunday for that very purpose. But the trouble with the sister, which you had to set against the sturdiness of her, was that a few years ago she’d been seen about the place with Gargan from the bank and after that with young Lyndon. These facts stimulated unease in Elmer; that she was experienced in going out with men made him feel nervous, since it meant they wouldn’t be in the same boat when it came to getting to know one another. Even so, if it hadn’t been for noticing the sister with her purse that day he’d probably never have turned his attention to Mary Louise. That was the way things happened; chance played a part.
‘Will we go down?’ he suggested.
‘All right.’
‘You don’t want to change your duds or anything?’
‘She said to be quick. I’m OK the way I am.’ Mary Louise took her hat off and placed it on the dressing-table. The fluted looking-glass in which it was reflected was cracked, a sharp black line jaggedly diagonal. There were cigarette burns on the dressing-table’s surface.
‘I’d say we’d be comfy all right,’ he repeated.
In the dining-room other people were finishing their meal, spreading jam on slices of bread. The woman in the headscarf showed the newcomers to two places at a table where three men were already seated. Families occupied other tables.
‘Wait till I get you a cup of tea,’ the woman said. ‘Is that tea still warm, Mr Mulholland?’
Mr Mulholland, a moustached man, smaller and older than Elmer Quarry, felt the metal of the teapot and said it was. The other men at the table were middle-aged also, one of them grey-haired, the other bald.
‘Thanks, sir,’ Elmer said when Mr Mulholland passed him the milk and sugar.
‘Fine day,’ the bald man said.
A plate of fried food was placed in front of Mary Louise and a similar one in front of her husband. Everything would be quiet at home, she thought. The wedding guests would have gone, all the clearing up would be complete. Her father would have changed back into his ordinary clothes, and so would James and her mother. Letty would probably be putting the food on the table.
Mr Mulholland was a traveller in various stationery lines. The grey-haired man was a bachelor, employed in the ESB, who came to the Strand Hotel for his tea every day of his life. The bald man lived in the Strand, a bachelor also.
These facts came out in dribs and drabs. Her husband, Mary Louise noticed, was very much at home with these three men, and appeared to be interested in the information they volunteered. He told them about the drapery. He was still wearing the carnation in his buttonhole, so they knew about the wedding even before he mentioned it.
‘Well, I thought it was the case,’ Mr Mulholland said. ‘As soon as the pair of you walked into the room I said to myself that’s a honeymoon.’
Mary Louise felt herself turning pink. The men were examining her, and she could guess what they were thinking. You could see it in their eyes that they were noticing she was a lot younger than Elmer, the same thought that had been in the eyes of the guard of the train and in the landlady’s eyes.
‘Would it be an occasion for a drink?’ the bald man suggested. ‘The three of us have a drink in McBirney’s of an evening.’
‘You’d have passed McBirney’s on the way from the bus,’ Mr Mulholland said.
‘I think I saw it, sir,’ Elmer agreed. ‘We’ll maybe see how things are after we’ve had a little stroll down by the sea.’
‘We’ll be in McBirney’s till they close,’ the grey-haired man said.
Soon after that the men went away, leaving Elmer and Mary Louise alone at the table. The families began to drift from the dining-room also, the children staring at Mary Louise as they passed.
‘Wasn’t that decent of them?’ Elmer remarked. ‘Wasn’t it friendly?’
‘Yes, it was.’
She didn’t feel hungry. Her husband spread gooseberry jam on a slice of white bread and stirred sugar into his tea, and Mary Louise thought that what she’d like to do would be to walk on the seashore by herself. She’d only been to the sea once before, eleven years ago, when Miss Mullover had taken the whole school on the bus, starting off at eight o’clock in the morning. They’d all bathed except Mary Louise’s delicate cousin and Miss Mullover herself, who’d taken off her stockings and paddled. Miss Mullover had forbidden them to let the sea come up further than their waists, but Berty Figgis had disobeyed and was later deprived of a slice of jam-roll.
‘Eat up, dear,’ Elmer said.
‘I think I’ve had enough.’
‘Your mother had a great tuck-in for us.’
‘Yes, she did.’
‘Everyone was pleased with it.’
She smiled. A cigarette-butt left behind by one of the men had been inadequately extinguished. It smouldered in the ashtray, a curl of smoke giving off an acrid odour. Mary Louise wanted to put it out properly but didn’t feel like touching it with her fingers.
‘Are you game for a walk, dear?’ Elmer said. He was about to add that it was the sea air they’d paid for, but somehow that didn’t sound appropriate. He said instead that he’d known a Mulholland years ago, one of the clerks in the gasworks. The jam he was eating was better than Rose’s. It was thicker, for a start. He liked thick jam.
‘I’d love a breath of air,’ she said.
So when he had finished his cup of tea and had another slice of bread and jam they walked on the strand. The sea was out. The damp sand was firm beneath their feet, smooth and dark, the surface broken here and there by a tiny coiled hillock. Sand worms, Elmer said. She wondered what sand worms were, but didn’t ask.
A dog barked at the distant edge of the sea, chasing seagulls! Two children were collecting something in a bucket. She remembered shivering after the bathe the day Miss Mullover had brought them, and how Miss Mullover had made them run on the sand to warm themselves up. ‘No, leave your shoes and socks off, Berty,’ Miss Mullover’s voice came back to her, cross with Berty Figgis again.
‘Shellfish,’ Elmer said, referring to what the children were collecting in their bucket.
They went on walking, slowly as they always did on a walk. Elmer had an unhurried gait; he liked to take things at a pace that by now Mary Louise had become used to. The sun was setting, streaking the surface of the sea with bronze highlights.
‘Miss Mullover took us to the seaside.’ She told him about that day. He said that in his time in the schoolroom there hadn’t been such excursions. ‘Algebra the whole time,’ he said, making a joke.
The sand ended. They clambered over shingle and rocks, but in a moment he suggested that the walking was uncomfortable so they turned back. They could still, very faintly, hear the dog barking at the seagulls.
‘Would you like that, dear?’ he suggested. ‘Call in and have a drink with those men?’