Part 12 (2/2)

'Hullo, Mary Louise.'

Every time she met her, the girl seemed more reticent. You had to prise responses out of her now. 'This tongue's good,' she said, but the recommendation elicited no comment whatsoever. Then, as if reading those thoughts, Mary Louise answered a polite query about her husband's well-being by suddenly becoming garrulous. Elmer was a harmless man, she said; he meant no ill-will. He had never struck anyone in his life; he never got into a rage; he never shouted; in all sorts of ways he didn't bother her.

'D'you remember, Miss Mullover, how my cousin always finished his transcription first? He used to scribble on the inside of his jotter cover. My cousin Robert?'

Miss Mullover, surprised, failed to remember that.

'We were in love you know, my cousin Robert and I. In your schoolroom we were in love. We still were when he died. We've always belonged to one another.'

Elmer and Bleheen were interrupted at the bar. Mary Louise was suggesting they should go home.

'Home's where the heart is,' Elmer said, remembering the expression suddenly, something his mother used to say. He lowered his voice. He'd had the whole thing explained, he said: an invitation had been issued but it had never reached the house. He was to carry her mother's apologies back to Rose and Matilda.

'Can we go now, Elmer?'

'We'll take a quick one for the road in that case,' Bleheen said, raising his empty gla.s.s for attention.

'Five minutes, dear,' Elmer put in, 'while Mr Bleheen charges his batteries.'

The remark was not made humorously but even so the artificial-inseminator laughed. 'The three of us'll charge our batteries,' he declared. 'What'll you take yourself, dear?'

'No, I'm all right, Mr Bleheen.'

Mrs Dennehy appeared at her side, reminding her about the display of wedding presents upstairs. 'Your mother's been up, along with your aunt. Wouldn't you slip up yourself?'

'Go up and enjoy yourself dear,' Elmer urged; but Mary Louise said they'd better be getting back. She'd ask her mother to describe the wedding presents when she saw her next.

'Well, wasn't it a great send-off for your sister?' Bleheen said in the car. 'Not a ha'penny spared.'

Elmer, beside him in the front, agreed. The time by the dashboard clock was five past five. As soon as they heard the key in the lock they'd be out on the landing, waiting, the way they'd taken to doing. They'd start in at once about the house smelling like a distillery, as though any normal person could go out to a party and not return bringing traces of festivity with him. Mary Louise would walk past them, different from the way she used to be, not timid in their presence any more. What he'd do would be to stay where he was for a few minutes in the hall, and then walk into the accounting office. After ten minutes or so he'd slip down to Hogan's.

'All right, are you, dear?' He half turned his head to address his wife, but she didn't appear to hear him.

23.

Miss Foye kisses her. He carries her two suitcases. The Quarrys are decent people, she hears Mrs Leavy say, they have that reputation. While she was waiting in the hall Mrs Leavy told further stories about the old days in the asylums, relating the frightening scenes she and her friend Elsie witnessed when they looked over the brick wall.

The women wave, as they waved at Brid Beamish. The asylums were built as charitable inst.i.tutions, the fas.h.i.+on in mercy then, as the drugs are now. She waves back, and winds the window of the car down and waves again.

She has left the house before, on two occasions: for the funeral of her father, and a year and a half later for that of her mother. At both she'd been reminded of the death of her cousin, not that reminding was necessary; but the words of farewell were the same, the repet.i.tion causing her to reflect that the dead become nothing when you weary of doing their living for them. You pick and choose among the dead; the living are thrust upon you.

'Are they still alive?' she asks, the silence suddenly broken, the question emerging naturally from her thoughts.

'Who's that?'

'Your sisters.'

The car responds to the shock he experiences, juddering in its motion. He halts it to adjust himself, steering it into the gateway of a field. He turns to look at her.

'Why shouldn't my sisters be alive?'

'We all die some time.'

'Of course they haven't died.'

'I was not to know.'

'You'd have been told, dear.'

She doesn't say she might have been told and not been interested. She doesn't say anything, but listens while he warns her there'll be changes she'll notice, in the town and in his daily life.

'Do you remember what I told you about the shop?'

She considers for a moment, then admits she doesn't.

'I sold it out to the Renehans nine years ago. They joined the two premises together.'

'Yes, I remember that.'

The television tells you what the world is like, old Sister Hannah used to say, the changes that have come. If you can be bothered to pay attention, the television will tell you all you want to know.

'Over the shop's the same,' he says.

'Yes, I'm sure it is.'

Sister Hannah's the wise one. A person's life isn't orderly, Sister Hannah maintains; it runs about all over the place, in and out through time. The present's hardly there; the future doesn't exist. Only love matters in the bits and pieces of a person's life.

24.

On the day of the auction at her aunt's house Mary Louise cycled out of the town just before eight o'clock. The streets were quiet. Mrs Renehan was out with her c.o.c.ker spaniel. The bell of the Church of Our Lady was chiming. A lorry with barrels on it was drawn up at the bottom of the town, waiting to make deliveries, its driver and his companion reading newspapers in the cab. Bakers' shops and paper-shops were open. In the window of Foley's the elderly a.s.sistant was laying out rows of rashers. Two nuns made their way to the new convent cla.s.srooms on the Clonmel road.

Mary Louise wondered if he knew. If you believed in heaven there was no reason to suppose that he wouldn't. She imagined him with his half smile watching her, knowing what she was up to. When she was seven or eight her mother had taken Letty and herself to the auction there'd been when old Colonel Esdaile died, three weeks after his wife had gone. She remembered a white marble statue in the garden, a draped woman. 'Not another like it in Ireland,' the auctioneer had bellowed. 'Every detail in place, down to the toenails.' And he was right: the toenails were delicately incised, she and Letty had gone to look. Mrs Dallon had hoped to bid for a job lot that consisted of a clothes line, scrubbing brushes and a bucket, but unfortunately the auctioneer, running out of time, placed it beyond her reach by throwing it in with two other selections of household items.

The morning was mild and sunny. Primroses still bloomed on the verges. Buds dotted the hedges, catkins were heavy on the new season's shoots. Still softly green, cow parsley and elder bided their time.

There was a car ahead of Mary Louise on the green avenue. It moved slowly, as if wary of an unfamiliar surface. She watched it draw away from her and finally turn on to the gra.s.s before it reached the house. She could just see figures moving away from it. When she was closer a cardboard sign read Park Here Park Here.

'The sale won't start till two, miss,' a man in the kitchen said. He was sitting at the table with another man and a boy. There was a blue Thermos flask on the table, and three cups without saucers. The boy was eating a doughnut he'd taken from a torn-open paper bag beside the flask.

'I just want to look around,' Mary Louise said.

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