Part 3 (1/2)

Elmer realized a compliment was intended. He denied that offence had been given with a dismissive shake of his head.

'What's the news, what's the news, O my bold chevalier?' sang the boys at the corner table. 'With your long-barrelled gun of the sea...'

While listening to details of the book-keeping conventions at Traynor's, it had occurred to Mary Louise that her husband might leave all the drink-buying to the men. Mean as an old crab, James had said he was. But if he had erred in that way, it would more likely have been because he didn't know about correct behaviour in a public house since she had never, herself, detected signs of meanness in him. And anyway there he was, handing out gla.s.ses just like the others had.

'Thanks, Elmer.' She smiled at him when he gave her hers.

He wondered what she was wearing under the two-piece. For all he knew, it was stuff she'd bought from Rose or Matilda in the shop. It was his sisters who said you must call it a two-piece these days, not a costume any more, which was what their mother had called it. The first day he served behind the counter a woman had come in and asked to see stockings, thirty denier. She'd run her hand down into one, and ever since he had enjoyed watching a woman doing that.

'I wouldn't like to offend your lord and master,' the bald man confided to Mary Louise. Bewildered, she frowned.

'I said to him you were a lovely girl. A bridegroom could take a remark the like of that the wrong way.'

Mary Louise laughed, and soon afterwards they all left the bar. Mr Mulholland and the grey-haired man went in one direction; Elmer, Mary Louise and the bald man returned to the Strand Hotel. The landlady had removed the headscarf and the curlers from her hair, which now henna-shaded displayed evidence of her earlier attentions. The bald man shook hands with Elmer and Mary Louise in the hall. He took cocoa at night, he confided, pursuing the landlady to the inner depths of the hotel.

When he'd stepped out into the fresh air Elmer had been aware of a sensation of floating in his head. The houses across the street, one pink, the other blue, were vivid in the gathering gloom. The pavement kept slanting away from him as he walked on it, first one way, then the other. In the Strand Hotel he held the banister-rail firmly as he climbed the stairs.

Mary Louise went in search of the bathroom and lavatory. She, too, was experiencing a degree of disturbance, a general muzziness she did not find unpleasant. When she returned to the bedroom she found her husband sitting on the edge of the bed with his jacket off and his tie loosened. His eyes kept closing.

Mary Louise put her nightdress over her petticoat and then slipped off the petticoat and the rest of her underclothes, and her stockings. She didn't like undressing even when it was only Letty in the room, unless the light was out or Letty averted her eyes. Letty was quite good about things like that. They both agreed without ever having talked about it.

Elmer tried to watch, but his efforts at concentration caused a visual confusion he had not experienced before. A second image of his bride floated out of the first, precisely the same outline, hands and head, the white nightdress picked up from the bed, the body bent, then turned away from him while some sort of groping took place, stockings in her hands. He wanted to tell her she was great, but when he tried to his voice wouldn't work properly. In the hall, when the man had begun about his cocoa, he'd attempted to compliment the landlady on her jam, but the same thing had occurred. He'd tried to say he liked thick jam, but he couldn't manage to get the words right.

'Will I help you?' she was saying, and he screwed his eyes up to see her properly. 'Will I put the light out?' she said, and a moment later she did so. He leaned back, turning himself round, finding a pillow for his head. At the Tate School the housekeeper could be seen putting on her vest, her reflection in the gla.s.s of the window that swung outwards. He shouldn't be falling asleep, Elmer said to himself, but nevertheless did so.

5.

'Your Ovaltine, dear.'

Miss Foye places a tray containing a mug on the bedside table. The night-time tray is always the same one made of tin, round and with a lip, blue flowers on a green ground. She asked about the flowers once and Miss Foye said she thought they were hydrangeas, a nice bunch of hydrangeas.

'Be a good girl now, don't let it get cold.'

'What's it all about, Miss Foye?'

In the dormitory the other women are obediently sipping their Ovaltine. Miss Foye always waits until all of them have finished, then collects the mugs on the tray and turns the light out. There are seven women in the dormitory: 'Miss Foye's best girls' she calls them because they are able to sleep together without disturbing one another. Each night the last one to receive her Ovaltine receives the tray as well. Fairness is important in the house.

'You know, dear, what it's all about. I saw you listening to him.'

'I didn't understand.'

'Drink up, love. Please now. Miss Foye is tired.'

'I don't want to leave the house.'

'It's not for us to say a thing like that. They know better.'

'Who knows?'

'The medicals, dear.'

'They don't know better where you'd want to be.'

'Drink your drink, dear. Please now.'

Miss Foye moves away. She collects the empty mugs from the other bedside tables, one between each bed. She bids the women good-night, and each replies. She calls them Miss Foye's best girls.

'I remember the day I came to the house,' the woman who is giving her trouble tonight remarks. 'A Thursday afternoon.'

'Good girl now. Finish up. Of course you do.'

' ”You'll be happier here, ” you said.'

'You would say that in those days. Don't cry, dear. Miss Foye is tired.'

But the woman does cry. She finishes her drink and hands back the mug, and when Miss Foye has turned the light out she sobs beneath the bedclothes so that the others cannot hear her.

6.

Mary Louise served in the shop, instructed by Matilda and Rose. They showed her where everything was, and how to make out a bill, and how to roll and unroll the bolts of material. She heard them muttering to one another about her, Rose saying she was slow to pick things up.

In the kitchen she was allocated certain tasks, specifically to lay the table in the dining-room before each meal and to carry in the plates and dishes when the food was ready, afterwards to wash them while Matilda dried. Rose liked using the vacuum cleaner on the stairs and in the dining-room and the front room, the bedrooms and landings. Matilda dusted and attended to the front-room fire in winter; all the cooking was done by Rose. Mary Louise made the bed she shared with her husband, Matilda and Rose each made her own.

When she'd been a member of the household for a few months Mary Louise explored a narrow staircase behind a door on the upper landing. There were two attics when she reached the top of it. The toys that had belonged to Elmer and his sisters were neatly arranged on the deep shelves of a cupboard, toys that by the look of them might have belonged to an earlier generation of Quarrys also. Framed pictures were stacked against a wall, books piled against another. Outmoded display dummies stood like statues, some of them shrouded with sheets. An old sewing-machine, replaced by the one Matilda used in the dining-room, had been kept. So had sofas and chairs in need of re-upholstering, and a rocking-horse. A tea-chest contained unidentified objects wrapped in yellowing newspaper china, Mary Louise presumed. In the steeply pitched roof there was a single window in each of the two rooms. There was a stillness up there and the fusty airlessness was somehow comforting. With the door at the bottom of the staircase closed behind her, Mary Louise sensed the only real privacy she was offered, and on occasions when she knew where everyone was she took to quietly slipping up the steep uncarpeted stairs, taking her shoes off so that her footsteps wouldn't echo through the house. She sat in an armchair, sinking down into its depths. She closed her eyes and thought about things, about how she missed the farmhouse and the fields at Culleen, and riding her bicycle along the familiar roads. She enjoyed serving in the shop, and she knew Rose was wrong to say she was slow. She was quicker than either of the sisters at grasping a customer's needs. She could already gauge precisely the amount of brown paper required to wrap whatever had been purchased, and her parcels were tidier than theirs, the string looped so that they might easily be carried. When discount was mentioned by a customer she knew better than to quote a figure without consulting Elmer first, but she also knew that soon the day would come when she'd be able to antic.i.p.ate his wishes down to the last ha'penny. As second-best to Dodd's Medical Hall, the drapery was interesting enough. It was when the shop closed that melancholy set in.

In the past, in the days when Mary Louise had been a modest customer herself, Matilda and Rose had always been agreeable. She remembered buying hooks and eyes and other necessities in Quarry's, and groceries in Foley's during her years at Miss Mullover's schoolroom. She remembered a time when she could only just see over the counter in Quarry's, being in the shop with her mother and being lifted on to a round-bottomed chair that was still there. Matilda had once asked her what age she was. Rose had run into the back and returned with a sweet oatcake. Now they were like two other people.

Her mother, in whom she confided during one of her Sunday visits to Culleen, said it maybe wasn't easy for them, having a newcomer about the place, their long-established routine shaken up. It wasn't easy for her either, Mary Louise began to reply, but her mother just shook her head. 'You're looking well,' she observed in the silence that developed, implying that that, too, was important.

There were other matters, which Mary Louise did not discuss with her mother, nor with anyone. She would have with Tessa Enright, but Tessa Enright had gone to Dublin to train as a physiotherapist and only returned to the town at Christmas. No correspondence had developed between the two girls, except that Mary Louise had found out her friend's address and had written to invite her to the wedding. She hadn't been able to come.

There were other girls, still in the neighbourhood, whom Mary Louise had known well at school, but none had been as close as Tessa Enright, and certainly none would have been a candidate for the confidences Mary Louise felt she couldn't share with her mother. Nor could she have shared them with Letty, and when she thought about it she wondered about Tessa Enright: even if she had never gone away and their friends.h.i.+p had continued to thrive, this particular subject might have been easier to raise with a girl who was married herself.

So Mary Louise kept to herself an awkwardness that had arisen in the bedroom she shared with her husband. But as the year came to an end, and the spring and summer of the following year pa.s.sed by, she was increasingly aware of the interest taken in her person by people who came into the shop. As soon as they'd requested whatever it was they needed, women would glance down her body, the movement of their eyes briefly halting when it reached her stomach, then swiftly retracted. She knew what was in their minds. On Sundays she was also aware of it in her mother's mind, and in Letty's. 'You're looking well': the repeated observation of her mother's acquired an edgy significance, seeming now to be a question almost. In the bedroom the matter was not discussed, either: Elmer said nothing, and never had. He watched her brus.h.i.+ng her hair, seated in front of the dressing-table mirror, and she could see him also, already in his pyjamas, a vagueness in his eyes that had not been there in the past. At first she smiled into the mirror at him, but she stopped because he didn't seem to notice.

'No need to bang that door, Mary Louise,' Rose reprimanded her one morning when she closed the dining-room door because there was a draught. She had pushed at it with her shoulder because her hands were carrying a tray that contained four plates of porridge. It wasn't her fault that the door caught in the draught and banged. 'Close the door after you, Mary Louise,' Rose had commanded a week before.

'Sorry,' she said, pa.s.sing round the plates of porridge. Any one of the three of them might have risen and closed the door, since it was clear that it had been difficult for her to do so. 'Sorry,' she had said on the earlier occasion, not voicing her thoughts then either.