Part 1 (1/2)

TWO LIVES.

by William Trevor.

1.

A woman, not yet fifty-seven, slight and seeming frail, eats carefully at a table in a corner. Her slices of b.u.t.tered bread have been halved for her, her fried egg mashed, her bacon cut. 'Well, this is happiness!' she murmurs aloud, but none of the other women in the dining-room replies because none of them is near enough to hear. She's privileged, the others say, being permitted to occupy on her own the bare-topped table in the corner. She has her own salt and pepper.

'Hurry now.' Appearing from nowhere, Miss Foye curtly interrupts the woman's private thought. 'You have a visitor waiting.'

'Would be Peter Martyr.' Another woman, overhearing the news about a visitor, makes this suggestion, but at once there's a general objection. Why should the visitor be identified so since the lone woman wouldn't lift a hand to take the knife from his head, Peter Martyr not being of her religion?

'Heretic!' a voice calls out.

'Heathen,' another mutters.

The woman who eats alone pays no attention. They mean no harm; they are not against her; in their confusion they become carried away. But since she has been interrupted, she must make the best of things, she must consume the food: she will not be permitted into the visitor's presence until her plate is clean. She swallows a forkful of egg and bacon pieces without chewing. Grease, congealed, adheres to her tongue and the roof of her mouth. If she vomits she will not be permitted into the visitor's presence. She rinses her mouth with tea. With her fingers she presses more b.u.t.tered bread between her teeth. The others will tell on her if she does not eat all the bread. They will shout out and she'll have to march back to the table. She softens the bread with more tea and washes it away. She pa.s.ses among the women.

'Tell me about the graveyard.' A tiny woman, wizen-faced, rises and walks with her, whispering. 'Tell me, darling, about the graveyard.'

'Sit down, Sadie,' Miss Foye commands. 'Leave her be.'

'She took off every st.i.tch,' another voice accuses and is immediately contradicted: Brid Beamish it was who took off every st.i.tch, who walked the streets for profit.

'It's not our business.' Stately in grey, Miss Foye is brisk. This is her manner. She stands no nonsense. 'Hurry now,' she urges.

In the hall there is a disappointment. The visitor is not a stranger. He stands by the window, and speaks when Miss Foye has gone away. He states the purpose of his visit, all he says a repet.i.tion. 'Nowadays it's what's being done,' he explains, the opposite of anything in the old days: for months Miss Foye and the medicals have been saying it too. Those who have somewhere to go are better off in the community, that has been established. In other countries the change came years ago, Italy, America, places like that. We're always a bit behindhand here.

'Well, you have somewhere to go,' the man reminds her. 'No doubt about that, dear.'

'I thought you might be Insarov. When I heard I had a visitor I said to myself it must be Insarov. To tell the truth, I was interrupted at my supper.'

She smiles and nods, then walks away.

'No, come back,' her husband begs. 'They've asked me to go into it with you.'

Obediently she returns. He means no harm.

2.

Mary Louise Dallon retained in her features the look of a child. In an oval face her blue eyes had a child's wide innocence. Her fair brown hair was soft, and curled without inducement. Her temperament remained untouched by sophistication. Once in her life she was told she was beautiful, but laughed when the statement was made: she saw ordinariness in her bedroom looking-gla.s.s.

In the schoolroom next to the Protestant church Miss Mullover had once taught Mary Louise, and would have retained a memory only of a lively child had it not been for the same child's sudden interest, at ten, in Joan of Arc or Jeanne d'Arc, as Miss Mullover insisted upon. The saint was a source of such unusual fascination that Miss Mullover wondered for a while if the child possessed depths she had overlooked: an imagination that would one day bear fruit. But Mary Louise left the schoolroom with no greater ambition than to work in the local chemist's shop, Dodd's Medical Hall, and in that she was frustrated. Circ.u.mstances obliged her to stay at home, helping in the farmhouse.

In a different generation Miss Mullover had taught Elmer Quarry, who left her schoolroom to board at the Tate School in Wexford, nearly sixty miles away. The three Quarry children Elmer and his sisters came of a family that for many decades had been important in the town. The Dallons out at Culleen had struggled for as long to keep their heads above water.

In later years Miss Mullover observed from a distance the vicissitudes and worries that governed the family life of the Dallons, and the changeless nature of the Quarrys' domestic and mercantile routine. She noted that money meant as much to Elmer Quarry in his middle age as it had to his forebears, that generally he was as cautious as his father and his grandfather had been, that he abundantly enhanced the Quarry reputation for good sense and a Protestant order of priorities. In each generation for more than a century the inheritor of Quarry's drapery had married late in life, establis.h.i.+ng himself in the business before he turned his thoughts to the securing of the line: the old house above the shop in Bridge Street had seen more than its share of young wives made widows before their time. So it was that in 1955 Elmer Quarry was still a bachelor and the only well-to-do Protestant for miles around. All over the county wealth had pa.s.sed into the hands of a new Catholic middle cla.s.s, changing the nature of provincial life as it did so.

The Dallons' roadside farmhouse in the townland of Culleen had never been more than modest, and in 1955 even that modesty was considerably eroded: the whitewashed rendering was here and there fallen away, slates that had slipped out of place or cracked in half had not been replaced, a pane in an upstairs window was broken. Within the farmhouse, rooms were in need of redecoration; paint had chipped, damp loosened the tattered wallpaper of the stairway, the unused dining-room smelt of must and soot. Five Dallons lived in the farmhouse Mary Louise and her sister Letty, her brother James, and her mother and father.

Standing on the edge of the farm's twenty-seven acres, the house was three miles from the town where Quarry's drapery had prospered for so long. On Sundays, driving into the town in their black, obsolete Hillman, the Dallons formed almost a quarter of the Protestant congregation; at Christmas and Easter the numbers swelled to thirty-three or -four. Elmer Quarry and his sisters were church-goers only on these festive occasions, but for the Dallons especially for Mary Louise and Letty the weekly occasion of wors.h.i.+p provided a social outing they enjoyed.

The town was small, its population just over two and a half thousand. A turf-brickette factory had been opened seven years ago, where once there'd been a tannery. There was a ruined mill, a railway station that was no longer in use, green-stained warehouses on either side of the town's single bridge over its sluggish river. Shops, public houses, the post office, council offices, two banks, and other businesses offered employment, as did Hogan's Hotel, three builders, a creamery, an egg-packing station and an agricultural machinery depot. The Electric Cinema was a going concern in 1955; the Dixie dancehall continued to attract Friday-night crowds. The Catholic church on the town's northern outskirts was dedicated to the Virgin as Queen of Heaven; a convent halfway up the town's only hill was of the order of the Sacred Heart. Boys were educated behind the silver-painted railings of the Christian Brothers' School in Conlon Street, and St Fintan's vocational college offered opportunities to acquire further skills. Bridge Street, where the pink-washed Hogan's Hotel and the princ.i.p.al shops were, was narrow and brief, becoming South West Street beyond the bridge. The gaunt, grey steeple of the Protestant church rose from a boundary of yew trees that isolated it from its surroundings. A pocket of lanes around the gasworks and Brown's Yard comprised the slums. A signpost black letters on a yellow ground partially obscured a statue of Daniel O'Connell and gave directions to Clonmel and Cappoquin, Cahir and Carrick-on-Suir. People who lived in the town knew it backwards; those from the surrounding neighbourhoods sometimes regarded it with wonder.

Elmer Quarry first noticed that Mary Louise Dallon was an agreeable-looking girl in January of the year in question. He was thirty-five then, Mary Louise twenty-one. Paunchy and as square-looking as the origins of his name suggested he was attired invariably in a nondescript suit, mud-coloured, faintly striped. His receding hair, cut short, matched this shade; his features were small and regular, a neat configuration in the pale plumpness of his face. Elmer Quarry was not a tall man, but bulky none the less, an entrepreneurial presence, as his father and grandfather had been before him. He was a.s.sisted in the drapery by his sisters, Matilda and Rose, both of them his senior by a few years and possessing a handsomeness that had been denied him. Neither had married and both were displeased when Elmer's glances were cast in the direction of Mary Louise Dallon. Why should the status quo in the house above the shop, and in the shop itself, be disturbed? Quarry's would sustain the three of them during their lifetime, withering, then dying, with the Protestants of the neighbourhood. Neither Rose nor Matilda was the kind to avoid facing the facts: already Quarry's was a relic from another age. If the line came to an end the business would pa.s.s to distant cousins in Athy, who would probably sell it.

The present Quarrys remembered the time when there were five a.s.sistants behind the counters, and an overhead railway network that linked the shop to the accounting office, carrying money and returning change in hollow wooden spheres. There were just the three Quarrys in the shop now; the overhead system had years ago been dismantled and removed. But the red receipt books were as they'd always been, stacked every evening by the tills that had been fitted. Elmer's father had entered the accounting office every day only after the shop had closed its doors, when the clerk who returned the change in the wooden containers had gone home. But since there was no clerk now and since Matilda and Rose managed easily behind the counters, Elmer increasingly spent more time in the accounting office. Often he sat there staring down through the small-paned floor-to-ceiling window into the quiet shop below, at the rolls of material stacked on the shelves nylon, chintz and silk, cotton and linen at the spools of thread in their shallow gla.s.s case, and the dresses and suits on the window dummies. As still as these window dummies his sisters sometimes seemed, one behind either counter, waiting for another customer. Matilda liked to be smart; Rose dressed drearily. Matilda had more of a manner with customers, the best manner of the three, Elmer knew. Rose preferred housework and cooking. He himself belonged more naturally with the ledgers.

The courts.h.i.+p began on 11 January 1955, a Tuesday. Elmer invited Mary Louise to the pictures the following Friday evening. He had no idea what was showing at the Electric, but he considered that didn't matter. Now and again, perhaps once a year, he and his sisters went to see a film because it had been talked about in the shop. He liked the News best himself, but Rose and Matilda enjoyed something light and musical. He naturally had to tell them he'd invited Mary Louise Dallon. They continued to look displeased, but did not comment.

In the Dallon household the invitation came as a considerable surprise. Mr and Mrs Dallon a thin, grey pair in their fifties whose appearance was so similar that they might have been twins recognized all that it implied, and were well aware of the habit among the Quarry men of marrying younger wives. They talked about it in the privacy of their bedroom. Mrs Dallon made a special journey to the town, visited Quarry's drapery, bought a spool of white thread, and reminded herself of what Elmer looked like by glimpsing him through the panes of the accounting-office window. It might have been worse, she reported to her husband on her return, and later in their bedroom they went on talking about the development.

Mary Louise's older sister, Letty, and her brother James, who was older also, did not react as favourably. James impetuous, known to be of uncertain temper, and remembered from his schooldays as being a little slow declared the invitation to be an affront. Elmer Quarry was a man who never laughed and rarely smiled, born to be a draper. Letty secretly annoyed that her sister had been preferred, not that she'd have set foot in the Electric with Elmer Quarry even if he'd gone down on his knees warned Mary Louise about what might occur under cover of darkness and advised her to keep handy a safety-pin that could be opened at a moment's notice. Some of Elmer Quarry's teeth were false, she declared, a fact she claimed to have culled in the waiting-room of the town's more reliable dentist, Mr McGreevy.

Mary Louise herself was terrified. When the invitation had come, Elmer Quarry following her out on the street to issue it, she blushed and became so agitated in her speech that she began to stammer. On her bicycle, all the way back to the farmhouse, she kept seeing Elmer Quarry's square shape, and the balding dome of his head when he'd bent down to pick up the glove she'd dropped. Letty had gone out with a man or two, with Gargan from the Bank of Ireland two years ago, with Billie Lyndon of the radio and electrical shop. She had thought Gargan was going to propose, but unfortunately he got promotion and was moved to Carlow. Billie Lyndon married the younger Hayes girl. Letty had taken to saying she wouldn't be bothered with that kind of thing any more, but Mary Louise knew it wasn't true. If Gargan came back for her she'd take him like a shot, and if anyone else who was half possible appeared on the scene she'd start dressing herself up again.

'What's showing?' Letty asked.

'He didn't say.'

'Hmm,' Letty said.

Beggars couldn't be choosers, Mr Dallon reflected in the end. To marry either of the girls into the Quarrys would mean you'd breathe more easily, and you'd see the sort of future for the two who were left. Mrs Dallon reached similar conclusions: provided James didn't marry, the farm would sustain himself and Letty, he working the fields and seeing to the milking, she attending to the fowls. The place was right for two, comfortable enough. Three of them left behind would be noticeable, touched with failure, although no one was to blame; a family growing old together was never a good thing, never a stable thing.

The film was called The Flame and the Flesh The Flame and the Flesh and Elmer did not in the least enjoy it. But he bought a carton of Rose's in the confectioner's shop next to the Electric, and at least there was the consolation of the chocolates, for he had a sweet tooth. When he offered Mary Louise the carton for the fifth time she shook her head and murmured something, which he took to mean she didn't want any more. He knew that girls had to watch their figures so he ate the remainder of the chocolates himself, removing the wrappings as quietly as he could in order not to cause a disturbance. The film was all about a woman in Italy, with a number of men interested. 'Wasn't the picture great?' Mary Louise enthused when the lights went up, and he agreed it had been. and Elmer did not in the least enjoy it. But he bought a carton of Rose's in the confectioner's shop next to the Electric, and at least there was the consolation of the chocolates, for he had a sweet tooth. When he offered Mary Louise the carton for the fifth time she shook her head and murmured something, which he took to mean she didn't want any more. He knew that girls had to watch their figures so he ate the remainder of the chocolates himself, removing the wrappings as quietly as he could in order not to cause a disturbance. The film was all about a woman in Italy, with a number of men interested. 'Wasn't the picture great?' Mary Louise enthused when the lights went up, and he agreed it had been.

It was a cold night. Outside the cinema he belted his overcoat and drew on tan leather gloves; he didn't wear a hat. He noticed that his companion's cheeks were flushed from the warmth of the cinema and that she'd put on a blue and white woollen cap, which matched her gloves. She'd have bought the wool in the shop, and he thought he could even remember looking down from the accounting office and seeing her choosing it, last summer it would have been.

'I'll walk you out a bit towards Culleen,' he said.

'Oh, no need, Mr Quarry. Thanks though.'

In the lane that ran by the side of the Electric there was an ungainly chain and padlock on her bicycle, which she undid and dropped into the basket that was attached to the handlebars. When she leaned down to do this lamplight from the street fell on the back of her legs, and for the first time Elmer experienced physical desire where Mary Louise was concerned. Between the hem of her shabby blue coat and the tops of her boots the silk of her stockings gleamed in a way he found disturbing. Once or twice during the film his attention had been held by Lana Turner's low-cut bodices.

'Give me the bike to wheel,' he urged, ignoring Mary Louise's protest that there was no need to walk through the streets with her.

The Quarrys did not possess a car. Living in the centre of the town, there had never been a need for one, just as in the past there had been no need for a horse-drawn vehicle of any kind. A bus carried you out of the town and another one brought you back again in the evening. Every December, before Christmas, the Quarry sisters took it to do any seasonal shopping there was. Elmer didn't bother with that. In winter he played billiards in the YMCA billiard-room, a big coal fire blazing in the grate between two gla.s.s-fronted bookcases that held a library of good books: Wild West stories and detective yarns, adventure novels by Sapper and Leslie Charteris, the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Encyclopaedia Britannica. Elmer often had the place to himself since not many turned up in the YMCA billiard-room these days, but the caretaker always had the fire going in winter, and copies of the Elmer often had the place to himself since not many turned up in the YMCA billiard-room these days, but the caretaker always had the fire going in winter, and copies of the Geographical Magazine Geographical Magazine and the and the Ill.u.s.trated London News Ill.u.s.trated London News were always to hand. In summer Elmer went for walks Bridge Street, South West Street, Boys' Lane, Father Mathew Street, Upton Road, home by Kilkelly's Garage. were always to hand. In summer Elmer went for walks Bridge Street, South West Street, Boys' Lane, Father Mathew Street, Upton Road, home by Kilkelly's Garage.

Intent upon entertaining Mary Louise, and since they happened to pa.s.s the YMCA billiard-room, he retailed some of the detail of these two long-established habits. If he possessed a car, he added, he naturally would have called at the farmhouse for her and would now be driving her home in it. Kilkelly often told him he should have a car. 'A man in your position, Elmer,' was how Kilkelly who had the Ford franchise put it, but Elmer did not quote this statement since it sounded like showing off. Instead, he asked Mary Louise if she had learned to drive the Hillman he often saw the Dallons in, and she replied that she had. This fact Elmer noted; he was interested in things like that.

'Well, I'll leave you here,' he said when they reached the last bungalow that could claim to belong to the town. A full moon cast a light as bright as daylight. The road sparkled where frost had settled in its crevices. Hedges and verges were already whitening; ice had formed in patches.

'Your light's all right, is it?' Elmer solicitously inquired.

Mary Louise tried it. A beam hardly showed up in the moonlight. 'Thanks for everything,' she said.