Part 14 (1/2)

'Rats?' Mr Renehan said.

'We have them in the attics.'

'Rats are most unpleasant. Is it a trap you're thinking of?'

'Or maybe poison. D'you keep poison, Mr Renehan?'

'I do of course. Rodenkil. Or Ridemquik. Something like that would do the trick.'

Bleheen the inseminator was in the shop, buying nails from one of the Renehan boys. He smiled blandly at Mary Louise, and she remembered how his car had kept swerving all over the road on the evening of Letty's wedding party. He asked her how she was keeping and she said all right. In the days when she had gone to the Electric Cinema Bleheen was often there also, either alone or with one of the widows whose company he was investigating in his search for a suitable wife. For reasons of his own he limited himself to widows.

'And a little yoke for coring apples,' he said when the Renehan boy had weighed out the nails. 'I have a weakness for stewed apples,' he informed Mary Louise, 'with a drop of Bird's custard.'

She nodded. A woman buying press-studs in the drapery one day had told her Bleheen would never marry. He could take every widow in Ireland to the pictures but in the end he'd remain the way he was, set in his ways and cautious.

'I had that little yoke,' he said, 'only I threw it out with the apple peelings by mistake.'

Mary Louise imagined him cooking his own meals, peeling apples and potatoes the way a man would. He went on talking to her about domestic matters. She didn't listen. 'The whole party gathered in the drawing-room. Arkady picked up the latest number of some journal. Anna Sergeyevna rose, and it was then that he glanced at Katya...'

It was better for Bleheen not to marry if he didn't love anyone. He was right to be choosy, even if choosiness meant he'd be a bachelor till he died. Suddenly Mary Louise wondered if her mother and father loved one another. Never in her life had she thought about that before. Never before had it been in the scheme of things that love should enter into any consideration of her parents.

'I'd say the Rodenkil,' Mr Renehan advised. 'We sell a lot of Rodenkil.'

Letty became pregnant soon after her marriage. Dennehy bought her a second-hand Morris Minor; she loved the house they had settled in. All her life she'd had to look after hens, feeding them and finding their eggs: as long as she lived, she said, she didn't intend to lift a finger again for a hen, even though there were poultry runs in the yard. Her husband planned to keep a cow or two as well, but they agreed between them that he would see to the needs of all such animals himself. Letty made curtains and chair-covers on the sewing-machine her parents had given her as a wedding present; carpets were bought, the last of the decorating completed. 'You could grow something there,' her Aunt Emmeline suggested, pointing at two forgotten whitewashed tubs on either side of the front door. A week later her aunt arrived at the house and spent a few minutes turning over the soil and adding manure. She found an overgrown patch behind the house where vegetables had once been cultivated. This, too, she proceeded to reclaim.

Letty's concern about her sister was the only real agitation in the euphoria of her marriage. It came and went, nagging for a little longer each time she heard something new on the waves of gossip that spread from the town. She had known, since the time of the event itself, the details of the sisters' visit to Culleen; she had known of her parents' fruitless consultation with Dr Cormican, and their subsequent conversation with Mary Louise. She had since heard about the purchases made at the auction, and had heard also that Mary Louise was rarely to be found serving in the shop any more. All of it bewildered Letty. As an older sister, she had shared with her brother the task of keeping an eye on Mary Louise when all three were children. She still remembered the feel of a clammy, small hand in hers and her insistence that it should remain there. She had comforted away tears; she had been cross when necessary. More unhappily she remembered her opposition to Mary Louise's engagement to Elmer Quarry. She'd felt sick when she heard he had invited her sister to the Electric Cinema. On the wedding night reflecting, without knowing it, the thoughts of her cousin she couldn't keep her mind away from what Mary Louise was enduring. With his small teeth and his small eyes, Elmer Quarry reminded her of a pig. Alone in the bedroom she had shared all her life with Mary Louise, she had miserably wept that night.

The telephone in Letty's house a necessity for her husband in his professional life was something of a novelty for her. There wasn't one at Culleen, and rarely in the past had she had occasion to use one. But there the instrument was, on a shelf at the back of the hall, with a pencil and notebook hanging from a hook above it, and the directory on a shelf beneath. One morning, bored with sewing, she telephoned Quarry's drapery, to remind Mary Louise that she had not yet visited her as she'd promised.

'Yes?' Rose said.

'Could I speak to Mary Louise, please?'

Who's that?'

'It's her sister.'

Letty heard Rose's breathing, and faintly in the background the sound of the bell at the shop door.

'It's Letty,' Letty said.

'Oh, yes.' It annoyed Rose that she'd had to climb the stairs to the accounting office because Elmer wasn't there, only to discover that she'd been summoned on behalf of her sister-in-law. It particularly annoyed her that it should be Letty, since the matter of the wedding invitation still rankled.

'Is Mary Louise around?'

Rose hesitated. She wasn't in a hurry to give any information about Mary Louise's whereabouts, feeling she needed time to think. At length she said: 'Your sister isn't.'

'Is that Rose? Or Matilda?'

'It's Rose Quarry speaking.'

'Would you ask Mary Louise if she'd phone me? Two four five.'

Rose thought she'd say yes and then omit to do so. But on an impulse she changed her mind. She said: 'We hardly ever lay eyes on your sister these days.'

'Is Mary Louise all right?'

'I'd say she wasn't. You could inform your parents things have progressed from bad to worse. We're beside ourselves, the state she's in.'

'State? What state, Rose?'

'You have to keep everything locked up. We have our handbags under lock and key the entire time. She broke into the safe in the office.'

To Rose's considerable satisfaction, there was a silence at the other end. It continued for several moments, before Letty said: 'What're you talking about, Rose?'

'We'd be obliged if you'd keep it in the family, Mrs Dennehy.'

With that, Rose returned the receiver to its hook. Elmer had specifically requested that the matter of the money taken from the safe should not be mentioned outside the house, but until the Dallons were aware of the extent of the girl's contrariness they apparently wouldn't act in any way whatsoever. Rose returned to the shop and reported the conversation to Matilda, who said she'd done the right thing.

Elmer shook his head. There weren't any rats in the house. A cat that hung about the yard saw to all that kind of thing. A few mice now and again that his sisters caught in traps were the height of any trouble.

'I sold her Rodenkil,' Renehan said. 'I believe she mentioned the attics.'

Elmer vaguely nodded, the gesture implying that he'd forgotten about the attics: privately he doubted that there were rats in the attics any more than anywhere else.

Renehan finished his drink and left Hogan's bar. Elmer was still on his own when Letty and her husband entered it a quarter of an hour later. Behind the bar Gerry was reading the Evening Herald Evening Herald. No one else was present.

'Elmer,' Letty said.

'I had a bit of business here,' he began.

'We want to talk about Mary Louise.'

Dennehy said he'd get the drinks. Letty led the way to a table in a corner. 'And whatever Mr Quarry's having,' Elmer heard Dennehy ordering. At the same time his sister-in-law said: 'We wanted to catch you on your own, Elmer. I've left messages for Mary Louise only she doesn't ring me back.'

'I'll tell her '

'Rose said something about a safe.'

'That's a private matter, actually.'

'What's Rose talking about, Elmer?'

Elmer explained what had occurred was that Mary Louise, in a hurry for some money one day, had borrowed a sum from the safe in the accounting office. It was nothing, he said. A storm in a tea-cup.

'Rose said they have to keep their handbags under lock and key.

To Elmer's relief, Dennehy arrived at that moment with the drinks. 'Good luck!' Dennehy said, raising his gla.s.s and then occupying himself with the lighting of a cigarette.