Part 15 (2/2)

Rose didn't answer. She'd never heard the expression 'food mildew' before and guessed that Matilda had made it up. If the rissoles had gone bad it wasn't her fault. She cut a slice of bread in half and b.u.t.tered it. Two rissoles had been kept back in the kitchen by Her Ladys.h.i.+p, as two always were on a Wednesday evening. Rose wondered if she'd eaten them. It would be like her not to notice the taste or the colour they'd gone.

'You can get poisoned from food mildew,' Matilda said.

Afterwards, in Hogan's, those words echoed unpleasantly as Elmer listened to Gerry telling him about a victory achieved by a greyhound that was said to be the fastest animal since Master McGrath. In his mind's eye he saw again the halved rissoles on the plate in the dining-room. 'I sold her Rodenkil,' Renehan's voice echoed also.

If there were rats in the attics you'd know about it, not a shadow of doubt. She was all over the place due to the nervous complaint. She'd maybe put some of the Rodenkil into a cup and left it around by mistake. It wouldn't be difficult for Rose, if she was rushed or the light was bad, to get the cup muddled up with another one. Elmer pushed his gla.s.s across the bar. There'd be the mother and father of a commotion if he so much as opened his mouth.

'It's the way he has of crouching in the trap,' Gerry said. 'Off like a bomb he is.'

There was another woman Elmer remembered his father talking about in the dining-room, some woman whose name he couldn't remember, who lived out in the hills somewhere. She used to h.o.a.rd fire-lighters. For no rational purpose she had the house filled to the brim with wax fire-lighters. If you'd put a match to the place, his father used to say, it wouldn't last longer than a minute.

That night Elmer didn't linger in the hall of the hotel, but hurried back after he'd had one more drink. He waited until he heard his sisters ascending the stairs to their rooms and then made his way to the kitchen. He searched in the cupboards, and then in the adjoining scullery, in the safe and the refrigerator. He lifted plates off bowls and jars, he examined packets and unlabelled paper-bags. In the waste-bin he found the contaminated rissoles, but nowhere was there a supply of the green substance, carelessly left about.

Moving cautiously so as not to rouse his sisters, Elmer descended the stairs again, entered the shop and mounted the brief stairway to the accounting office. He opened the safe and poured himself a measure of whiskey. He sat for a while, then as cautiously as before made his way through the house to the attics.

Mary Louise, not yet asleep, heard a fumbling at the door. The handle was turned. 'Mary Louise,' her husband's voice whispered.

The noise interrupted a pleasant recollection. A boy in a striped smock was standing in the snow, the landlady and her daughter were huddled on the doorstep. It was the moment of parting: a sleigh stood waiting.

'Mary Louise,' the whisper repeated. 'Mary Louise, are you awake?'

Knuckles rapped the panels of the door, not noisily as they had the last time Elmer had come to the attic, but surrept.i.tiously, as though some secret existed between them.

Mary Louise didn't move from her chair by the embers of the fire. Eventually she heard him creeping away. The recollection that had possessed her would not return, try as she would to induce it. This was usually so when there was an interruption, when other people poked themselves in. She remained by the fire for another twenty minutes, but all there was to think about was going to school with Letty and James, and spreading their schoolbooks out on the kitchen table, and the recitation of poetry that had been set.

'Listen,' Elmer said, drawing Renehan aside in the ironmongery. 'Don't sell Mary Louise any more Rodenkil.' His wife had become a bit forgetful he said: she had a way of leaving things about. He'd be worried in case someone would pick up the Rodenkil and maybe omit to read the warning on the packet.

'I know what you mean,' Renehan said. He'd been attaching price tags to saucepans when Elmer asked if he could have a private word with him. He still held a saucepan in his hand.

'Good man yourself,' Elmer said.

That evening it was said in the town that Elmer Quarry's wife had tried to poison herself.

Having had a night to mull over the mystery of the rissoles, Rose and Matilda reached the same conclusion: the rissoles had been interfered with. If rissoles had been cooked in the house in precisely the same manner for more than a lifetime and nothing had ever gone bad in them before, why should something go bad in them now? In the night they had both recalled an episode in the past, during the time when the Quarrys still employed a maid. Kitty this one had been called, 'a lump of a girl' their mother referred to her as, who was once caught licking the sugar in the sugar-bowl when she was setting the table. Any sweets that were left about she helped herself to, until Mrs Quarry decided to put a stop to that by coating a few toffees with soap. Not a word was said, but a sweet was never taken again.

'Her Ladys.h.i.+p,' Rose said. 'What's she to do all day except think up devilment to annoy us?'

This view confirmed the thought that had occurred to Matilda also: that Mary Louise, with time on her hands, sought to irritate her husband and her sisters-in-law by introducing some unpleasant-tasting substance into their food. In Matilda's view, and in Rose's, there was other evidence of the desire to vex: tea-towels hung sopping wet in the scullery when they should be hung on the line over the stove, forks put back in the wrong section of the cutlery drawer, the blue milk-jug put on a shelf instead of hung up, the potato-masher not hung up either, coal and sticks carted up to the attic, footsteps above their heads, ages spent was.h.i.+ng herself, the sight of her trailing round the town on a bicycle so that people would begin to talk.

'She fried an egg for herself,' Rose remembered. 'She knew not to touch the rissoles.'

They put these conclusions to their brother, leaving the shop unattended, which before Mary Louise's arrival in the household they would have never done. Definitely something had been introduced into the rissoles, Rose said. Maybe some kind of cascara, anything that would cause embarra.s.sment and distress. Matilda reminded Elmer of the maid who'd helped herself to the sweets: measures had had to be taken and where was the difference in this case? The maid was guilty of stealing and had to be stopped. Measures should be taken now.

'Beyond a shadow of a doubt,' Rose said.

'The rissoles were in a soup-plate in the fridge, Elmer, covered over with another plate. She cut them open and put something inside.'

They watched his face. His jaw slackened; the tip of his tongue moistened his lips, pa.s.sing slowly from one corner of his mouth to the other. He had taken off his jacket, as he sometimes did in the accounting office. The waistcoat beneath was fully b.u.t.toned, a pencil and a ballpoint pen clipped into one of the upper pockets.

'There's people that live and breathe only wanting to be a nuisance,' Rose said.

The tea-towels were mentioned, and the forks in the cutlery drawer, the potato-masher and the blue milk-jug. Elmer unsuccessfully attempted to interrupt. They couldn't hold their heads up, Matilda said. They couldn't walk into a shop in the town without a silence falling.

'I'll speak to Mary Louise,' Elmer promised.

'What good does it do?' Matilda's tone was dangerously sarcastic. 'If you've spoken to her once, haven't you spoken to her a thousand times?'

Elmer's s.h.i.+rt felt sticky on his back. He'd begun to sweat as soon as they'd started on about something being deliberately introduced into their food. He'd raised a hand to wipe away the beads of perspiration he could feel gathering on his forehead, hoping they wouldn't notice what he was doing. He could feel the sweat, damply warm, on his legs and in his armpits. He had changed the combination of the safe after the incident concerning the money. He hadn't told them that, in case they'd ask what the new sequence of numbers was. He kept the Jameson bottle on its side so that it couldn't easily be seen behind the strong-box, but even so it was better that no one should have access to the safe. If ever the Jameson was mentioned again he had it ready to say that the bottle had been in the safe since their father's day, kept there in case anyone fainted in the shop.

'Will I get her to come down here?' Rose offered. 'Will I go up and tell her you want her?'

Elmer began to undo the b.u.t.tons of his waistcoat. He stopped because he could feel his fingers trembling and knew they'd notice. If nerve trouble had caused a solicitor's wife to be frightened of approaching her front door it wasn't outside the bounds of possibility that a person could imagine a plate of rissoles would be attacked by rats that didn't exist. But how on earth could he even begin to explain that to them?

'Leave her in peace,' he said.

'In peace!' Rose's eyes widened. 'In peace peace!'

'There's been no peace in this house, Elmer, since the night you took that girl to the pictures.'

'Will I tell her you want her?' Rose pressed her offer again.

'I'll go up myself,' Elmer said.

But there was no response when he rattled the handle of the attic door, when he rapped loudly and banged with his fist. It wasn't normal not to answer, there was no getting away from that. But then he looked in the yard and discovered that her bicycle wasn't there. In the shop he imparted that information to his sisters. If they heard her returning, he asked them to tell him.

The gondola was silent on the water, the stone of the buildings dank and slimily green. Later there was the ebb and flow of the dull blue sea, the sh.e.l.ls and seaweed left on the sand when it receded. You looked back and saw the fat domes of the churches, the statues high in the sky...

She dipped about the pages, opening the books at random. She loved doing that. She watched while Yelena Nikolayevna, sleepless all night, kept clasping her knees with her hands and resting her head on them. She watched while Yelena Nikolayevna crossed to the window and held her aching forehead against the panes to cool it.

'... The rain that began as a spatter became a sheet of water, glistening as it fell from a sky as black as night. Yelena Nikolayevna sheltered in a ruined chapel. A beggarwoman waited...'

Among the gravestones she tidied her hair and smeared a little lipstick on to her lips, smiling at her reflection in the gla.s.s of her compact.

At Culleen the watch wasn't missed for some time. Drawers were searched, furniture was pulled out in case it had fallen down behind something. The general belief was that it would eventually turn up.

In fact it didn't, and one afternoon when Mrs Dallon was was.h.i.+ng eggs at the sink she remembered the feeling of surprise when Mary Louise had said she'd like to see her old room again. The statements that had been made by Rose and Matilda returned to startle her and suddenly, an egg held in the palm of her hand, Mrs Dallon felt sick. Waves of nausea pa.s.sed through her stomach. She felt weak in her legs and for a moment as she stood there she thought she might faint.

'I've come to see Mary Louise,' she announced in Quarry's an hour later.

Rose's response was to glance along the counter to where Matilda was re-rolling a bolt of satin.

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