Part 13 (2/2)

Elmer began to protest but the words became a jumble, running into one another incomprehensibly. Mary Louise said: 'I wouldn't say stole, Rose.'

'You stole money out of the safe to go to an auction.'

'Why didn't you ask me?' Elmer's question was a whisper, just audible in the office.

'I did, only you were drunk.'

'My G.o.d!' Rose cried. 'My G.o.d, will you listen to this!'

'That's a disgraceful thing to say,' Matilda interjected. 'I don't believe for an instant you asked him.'

'As a matter of fact, I asked him twice. I asked him the night before last and I asked him last night.'

'You asked him when you knew maybe when he was asleep.'

'I'm not a fool, Matilda. I don't go round talking to people when they're asleep.'

'You go round doing all sorts of things. You go round trying to get people to eat the food left behind on an unwashed plate. You go round locking doors and interfering with property that isn't yours.'

'If I were you,' Rose said to her brother, 'I'd put the matter in the hands of the Guards. Stealing's stealing.'

'The furniture I bought will be coming tomorrow,' Mary Louise said. 'It won't be in anyone's way.'

With that she left the office. Her footsteps were heard on the stairs a moment later and then in the kitchen, which was partly above the accounting office.

'Listen, Elmer.' Rose spoke slowly and emphatically, isolating each word in a deliberate manner. 'That girl's worse than the brother. She's not the full s.h.i.+lling, Elmer.'

'She has caused disruption in this family,' Matilda threw in. 'Rose is right in what she says, Elmer.'

He did not speak. It could be true that she had asked him about the money. She might have said it and, due to evening drowsiness, he mightn't have heard her. He'd given her the combination ages ago. Since he hadn't been able to hear her, she might just have used it. G.o.d knows why he'd ever given her the thing.

'The family and the household,' Matilda reiterated. 'There isn't a day you can draw a breath in peace.'

'Look at the state she's put you in,' Rose said. 'You have a bottle and a gla.s.s in that safe, the way there never was in the past. She has you so's you can't think straight.'

'What's she want furniture for? Is the furniture we have not good enough for her?'

'She won't eat with us, Elmer. She won't sit down in a room upstairs with us. It's a wonder she'll lie in a bed with you.'

There was a silence after Rose said that. It continued for a minute and then for another. It went on after that.

'What d'you want me to do?' Elmer asked at last.

The next morning Rose saw the furniture lorry drawing up and snapped at the two men when they appeared in the shop. No one wanted furniture, she said. 'Take it back where it came from,' she ordered.

But Mary Louise stepped round the counter and directed the men to the back door of the house. Rose's protests were ignored, as were the additional ones of Matilda: it was Mary Louise the men had bargained with concerning the expenses agreed upon.

'I'm afraid it's up at the top of the house,' she apologized.

The men were obliging. Upstairs or downstairs, it was all in the day's work. 'What's troubling them in the shop?' one of them asked.

Mary Louise explained it was a misunderstanding. Her sisters-in-law hadn't known the furniture had been bought. Her sisters-in-law were abrupt in their manner.

'That's the final straw,' Rose said, red in the face, glaring in the accounting office. 'She's filling our attics with rubbish.'

'I spoke to her last night, Rose. I said you were upset.'

'And what good did it do? What good's speaking to her? We told you what to do.'

'I can't go doing wild things like that, Rose.'

'It's an hour's drive in Kilkelly's car. There's a garden to walk in. She'll be with her kind.'

Over the years Elmer had become used to what he considered to be the outrageous side of both his sisters. It was nourished by a harsh matter-of-factness and fed on the confidence of their double presence in the household. When Rose, a few years ago, laid down that they should not pay Hickey the builder the full amount of his bill because he had been four months late in attending to the work and had thereby succeeded in making the job a bigger one, Matilda had unswervingly supported her. When Matilda insisted that Miss O'Rourke from the technical school should be obliged to accept a cardigan that had been singed by her cigarette, Rose didn't hesitate either, even though the cardigan was of a colour that in no way suited Miss O'Rourke, and had quite by accident come into contact with the cigarette Miss O'Rourke had momentarily placed on the counter. There had been many similar instances, all of them revolving round the fact that when Elmer's sisters felt themselves to be right they experienced no embarra.s.sment in demanding excessive amends. They had little patience with the courtesies of moderation or compromise; p.u.s.s.yfooting was not in their nature.

'One of those men's carried in a box full of toys,' Matilda reported, leaving the shop unattended in her excitement.

'There you are, Elmer. Your wife's gone into her childhood.'

'A big cardboard box,' Matilda said. 'Filled up to the brim.'

The bell on the shop door jangled and both sisters hurried back to their duties. During the last twenty-four hours the excitement that possessed them had reached a fresh climax. It was an excitement that had begun when they first realized their brother's wife made regular journeys to the attic rooms, had intensified when they discovered she'd moved most of the furniture from one attic to the other and had taken to locking the door, had intensified further with each subsequent deviation from what the sisters regarded as normal behaviour. Mary Louise's disappearance the day before had been delight enough: not in their wildest hopes had they antic.i.p.ated the ecstasy of money purloined in order to buy toys at an auction. For a single moment Matilda wondered if her sister-in-law could possibly have given birth to an infant which, for peculiar reasons, she chose to keep hidden in an attic room and for whom she was now making purchases. As well as the box of brightly-coloured soldiers, Matilda had watched a dismantled bed and a mattress, as well as other bedroom articles, being carried from the lorry. But a baby's cries would have been heard, especially at night, and the girl could not possibly have disguised her figure: the theory was abandoned almost as soon as it was born. Crazier, really, Matilda reflected, to have obtained toys in order to play with them yourself, at twenty-five years of age.

Elmer's footfall was heavy on the attic stairs. His knuckles rapped on the panels of the door. He tried the handle. Several times he spoke her name. Then he went away, heavily descending.

She would get the chimney-sweep in so that she could have a fire in the tiny grate. She wouldn't mind carrying sticks and coal up, or cleaning out the ashes. A fire would take the chill off the air.

She untied the string around the mattress and settled the mattress on the bed, which the men had erected for her. For all of his twenty-four years he had lain on it. For all of his twenty-four years he had woken every day to the scene of the hay-cart, and the dog chasing a rat in the stubble. Every day he had opened and closed the wardrobe's pale doors.

She placed his collar-stud on the dressing-table where she could readily see it. She arranged the soldiers on the floor, remembering as best she could how they had been. She hung his clothes up.

25.

She walks about the town. After thirty-one years she is a stranger and the town has changed, as her husband warned her. There is more of a bustle to it, more vehicles about, people hurry more. The goods in the shop windows look more interesting, French cheese and wines you'd never see in the old days, new kinds of sweets. The bill-posters are different, the old Electric's gone.

Glances, sometimes a stare, are cast in her direction. No one knows her well enough to address her; a few remember; hearsay attaches her to the town. She doesn't mind, one way or the other, and concerns herself instead with the place she has left behind. The last of the cars would have arrived by now; those permitted to go would have gone. It was said that the obstreperous were to be moved to a house near Mullingar. She wonders about that: if the remaining inmates have been taken away, if all chatter and arguing have ceased, if the hammering and whistling of workmen have begun. Soon, people who do not suffer from dementia paralytica or morbid impulses or melancholia will sleep in the rooms, men who have spent the day shooting or fis.h.i.+ng, women dreaming beside them in chiffon nightdresses. Motor-cars will take up their positions on the smooth tarmac of the car park, a different one from time to time parked on top of his flowerbed.

That's why she has come back: she nods to herself in Father Mathew Street, reminding herself of her reason. That's why she didn't make a fuss or run the risk of being taken to Mullingar with the obstreperous: tomorrow she'll walk out to the graveyard.

'It wasn't because I went there,' she told them Sister Hannah and Mrs Leavy, Belle D and all the others. 'It wasn't because I went there that I had to leave the town. There was another reason, a worse reason by a long way.'

26.

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