Two Lives Part 2

'Will we go down?' he suggested.

'All right.'

'You don't want to change your duds or anything?'

'She said to be quick. I'm OK the way I am.' Mary Louise took her hat off and placed it on the dressing-table. The fluted looking-gla.s.s in which it was reflected was cracked, a sharp black line jaggedly diagonal. There were cigarette burns on the dressing-table's surface.

'I'd say we'd be comfy all right,' he repeated.

In the dining-room other people were finishing their meal, spreading jam on slices of bread. The woman in the headscarf showed the newcomers to two places at a table where three men were already seated. Families occupied other tables.

'Wait till I get you a cup of tea,' the woman said. 'Is that tea still warm, Mr Mulholland?'

Mr Mulholland, a moustached man, smaller and older than Elmer Quarry, felt the metal of the teapot and said it was. The other men at the table were middle-aged also, one of them grey-haired, the other bald.

'Thanks, sir,' Elmer said when Mr Mulholland pa.s.sed him the milk and sugar.

'Fine day,' the bald man said.

A plate of fried food was placed in front of Mary Louise and a similar one in front of her husband. Everything would be quiet at home, she thought. The wedding guests would have gone, all the clearing up would be complete. Her father would have changed back into his ordinary clothes, and so would James and her mother. Letty would probably be putting the food on the table.

Mr Mulholland was a traveller in various stationery lines. The grey-haired man was a bachelor, employed in the ESB, who came to the Strand Hotel for his tea every day of his life. The bald man lived in the Strand, a bachelor also.

These facts came out in dribs and drabs. Her husband, Mary Louise noticed, was very much at home with these three men, and appeared to be interested in the information they volunteered. He told them about the drapery. He was still wearing the carnation in his b.u.t.tonhole, so they knew about the wedding even before he mentioned it.

'Well, I thought it was the case,' Mr Mulholland said. 'As soon as the pair of you walked into the room I said to myself that's a honeymoon.'

Mary Louise felt herself turning pink. The men were examining her, and she could guess what they were thinking. You could see it in their eyes that they were noticing she was a lot younger than Elmer, the same thought that had been in the eyes of the guard of the train and in the landlady's eyes.

'Would it be an occasion for a drink?' the bald man suggested. 'The three of us have a drink in McBirney's of an evening.'

'You'd have pa.s.sed McBirney's on the way from the bus,' Mr Mulholland said.

'I think I saw it, sir,' Elmer agreed. 'We'll maybe see how things are after we've had a little stroll down by the sea.'

'We'll be in McBirney's till they close,' the grey-haired man said.

Soon after that the men went away, leaving Elmer and Mary Louise alone at the table. The families began to drift from the dining-room also, the children staring at Mary Louise as they pa.s.sed.

'Wasn't that decent of them?' Elmer remarked. 'Wasn't it friendly?'

'Yes, it was.'

She didn't feel hungry. Her husband spread gooseberry jam on a slice of white bread and stirred sugar into his tea, and Mary Louise thought that what she'd like to do would be to walk on the seash.o.r.e by herself. She'd only been to the sea once before, eleven years ago, when Miss Mullover had taken the whole school on the bus, starting off at eight o'clock in the morning. They'd all bathed except Mary Louise's delicate cousin and Miss Mullover herself, who'd taken off her stockings and paddled. Miss Mullover had forbidden them to let the sea come up further than their waists, but Berty Figgis had disobeyed and was later deprived of a slice of jam-roll.

'Eat up, dear,' Elmer said.

'I think I've had enough.'

'Your mother had a great tuck-in for us.'

'Yes, she did.'

'Everyone was pleased with it.'

She smiled. A cigarette-b.u.t.t left behind by one of the men had been inadequately extinguished. It smouldered in the ashtray, a curl of smoke giving off an acrid odour. Mary Louise wanted to put it out properly but didn't feel like touching it with her fingers.

'Are you game for a walk, dear?' Elmer said. He was about to add that it was the sea air they'd paid for, but somehow that didn't sound appropriate. He said instead that he'd known a Mulholland years ago, one of the clerks in the gasworks. The jam he was eating was better than Rose's. It was thicker, for a start. He liked thick jam.

'I'd love a breath of air,' she said.

So when he had finished his cup of tea and had another slice of bread and jam they walked on the strand. The sea was out. The damp sand was firm beneath their feet, smooth and dark, the surface broken here and there by a tiny coiled hillock. Sand worms, Elmer said. She wondered what sand worms were, but didn't ask.

A dog barked at the distant edge of the sea, chasing seagulls! Two children were collecting something in a bucket. She remembered shivering after the bathe the day Miss Mullover had brought them, and how Miss Mullover had made them run on the sand to warm themselves up. 'No, leave your shoes and socks off, Berty,' Miss Mullover's voice came back to her, cross with Berty Figgis again.

'Sh.e.l.lfish,' Elmer said, referring to what the children were collecting in their bucket.

They went on walking, slowly as they always did on a walk. Elmer had an unhurried gait; he liked to take things at a pace that by now Mary Louise had become used to. The sun was setting, streaking the surface of the sea with bronze highlights.

'Miss Mullover took us to the seaside.' She told him about that day. He said that in his time in the schoolroom there hadn't been such excursions. 'Algebra the whole time,' he said, making a joke.

The sand ended. They clambered over shingle and rocks, but in a moment he suggested that the walking was uncomfortable so they turned back. They could still, very faintly, hear the dog barking at the seagulls.

'Would you like that, dear?' he suggested. 'Call in and have a drink with those men?'

Elmer was not, himself, a drinking man. He did not disapprove of the consumption of alcohol, only considered the practice unnecessarily expensive and a waste of time. But when the man had suggested a drink in McBirney's he had recalled immediately the gla.s.s of whiskey he'd drunk earlier in the day and had been aware of a desire to supplement it, putting this unusual urge down to the pressures of the occasion. He'd woken twice in the night with the abuse of his sisters still ringing in his consciousness, and he'd been apprehensive in the church in case one of them would make a show of herself by weeping, and at the occasion afterwards in case anything untoward was said. He'd been glad to get away in Kilkelly's car, but in the train another kind of nervousness had begun to afflict him. He couldn't quite put his finger on what it was or where precisely it came from, but none the less it was there, like very faint pins and needles, coming and going in waves.

'If you'd like to,' she said.

It surprised her that he suggested this. When the invitation had been issued she didn't think he meant it when he said they might look in at the public house. She'd thought he was being polite.

'Okey-doke,' he said.

They hardly said anything on the walk back. They pa.s.sed by the hotel, eventually reaching McBirney's public house, which was a gaunt building, colour-washed in yellow. Two iron beer barrels were on the pavement outside, with bicycles propped against them. Inside, the three men were drinking pints of stout.

'Cherry brandy,' Mary Louise said when the bald man asked her what she'd like. A woman who'd damaged the Hillman a couple of years ago by backing into it in Bridge Street had given Mr Dallon a bottle of cherry brandy by way of compensation. For the last two Christmases a gla.s.s had been taken in the farmhouse.

'Whiskey,' Elmer requested. 'A small measure of whiskey, sir.'

A conversation began about scaffolding. A bricklayer in Leitrim, known to the bald man, had apparently fallen to his death because the scaffolding on a house had been inadequately bolted together. The grey-haired man said he preferred the older type of scaffolding, the timber poles and planks, with rope lashing. You knew where you were with it.

'The unfortunate thing is,' the bald man pointed out, 'the lashed scaffold is outmoded.'

The cherry brandy was sweet and pleasant. Mary Louise was glad she'd thought of asking for it. After a few sips she felt happier than she had on the strand or in the dining-room or the bedroom. Some boys of her own age were laughing and drinking in a corner of the bar. Two elderly men were sitting at a table, not speaking. Mary Louise was the only girl present.

'I was married myself,' Mr Mulholland confided to her while the others continued to discuss different kinds of scaffolding, 'in 1941. The day the Bismarck Bismarck went down.' went down.'

She nodded and smiled. She wished she'd asked Elmer to take the carnation out of his lapel so that people wouldn't know they'd been married only a matter of hours. She'd seen the boys in the corner glancing at it a few times.

'The old ways can't always be improved, sir,' she heard Elmer saying, and then the grey-haired man said it was his round. He asked her if she'd like the same again, and she said she would.

'Excuse me a minute, Mrs Quarry,' the bald man said. 'I have to see a man about a dog.'

It was the first time anyone had addressed her directly as Mrs Quarry. When the landlady had used the term it hadn't been quite the same. Mary Louise Quarry, she said to herself.

'Paddy or JJ?' the grey-haired man asked Elmer, and Elmer said JJ without knowing why. She'd take off the little green jacket first, he supposed, and he wondered whether it would be the blouse or the skirt next. He looked at her. Her hair wasn't tidy after the walk they'd taken, and she'd gone a bit red in the face due to the stuff she was drinking. The sister wasn't as good-looking, no doubt about that.

'May the twenty-seventh,' Mr Mulholland said. 'Glasnevin, and the skies opened.'

Mary Louise had lost track of the conversation. She was puzzled for a moment, then realized Mr Mulholland was still talking about his wedding. The grey-haired man put a fresh gla.s.s of cherry brandy into her hand and took away the empty one.

'The wife's a Glasnevin woman,' Mr Mulholland said.

'Is that in Dublin?'

'We live there to this day. 21, St Patrick's Avenue.'

The conversation about scaffolding resumed, the bald man having returned. Then Mary Louise heard her husband talking about his shop, and a moment later she heard him saying, 'We're Protestants,' and heard the grey-haired man saying he'd guessed it.

'The same house she was married from,' Mr Mulholland said.

'I see.'

'We brought up seven there. When her father died she got the property, though the mother had a right to an upstairs room. They didn't get on, himself and the mother.'

'I don't know Dublin well.'

'You'd always be welcome in Glasnevin, Kitty.'

'Thanks very much.'

Mr Mulholland lowered his voice. His wife was having the change of life, he said. 'You'd understand that, Kitty? An upsetting period for her.'

'My name's not Kitty, actually.'

'I thought he called you Kitty.'

'My name's Mary Louise.'

'Welcome to the married state, Mary Louise.'

Mary Louise laughed. Mr Mulholland was funny, the way Letty's friend Gargan had been funny. Gargan did an imitation of a Chinaman, and told endless stories about the Englishman, the Irishman and the Scotsman. He also did imitations of Charlie Chaplin.

'There was a fellow opposite the shop one time,' Elmer was saying, 'dismantling a scaffold. He was up at the top of it throwing down the metal joints, and didn't one go through the roof of a van!'

'Some of those fellows are dangerous all right,' the grey-haired man agreed.

'A few years ago it was,' Elmer said. 'One of Joe Claddy's men.'

As she sipped more of her drink, Mary Louise felt glad they had come to the bar. Elmer was more loquacious than he'd been all day. It seemed to her now that she'd been silly to want him to take the carnation out of his b.u.t.tonhole. If she'd asked him to he'd probably have said it would be a waste of a good carnation, and of course he'd have been right. Reminded of it by Elmer's recollection of the scaffolding joint going through the roof of a van, she told Mr Mulholland about the woman who'd given the family a bottle of cherry brandy because she'd backed into the Hillman.

'It's why I have a taste for it,' she said.

'The wife likes a medium sherry,' Mr Mulholland said.

The bald man recalled an occasion when he was driving along the Cork road outside Mitchelstown and a ladder fell off the lorry in front of him. He described the damage to the car's radiator and one of the headlights.

'Tell them about the Hillman,' Mr Mulholland urged Mary Louise, and when she'd done so Elmer said he'd never heard that before.

'She got a taste for the brandy that time,' Mr Mulholland said.

They all laughed. Mr Mulholland put his arm around Mary Louise's waist and squeezed it. She had never been in a public house before and had often wondered what one was like. All she'd had were Letty's descriptions because Letty had often gone into MacDermott's or the lounge of Hogan's Hotel with Gargan. Letty used to smoke in those days. She used to come into the bedroom at night smelling of cigarettes and sometimes of drink. She never smoked in the farmhouse itself, though, it being purely a social thing with her.

'Excuse me a minute,' the bald man said, and again went away, repeating that he had to see a man about a dog.

Mary Louise told Mr Mulholland about the farm, answering questions he put to her. She heard Elmer saying it was difficult for a draper's shop to move with the times, that self-service wasn't always suitable.

'Oh, definitely,' the grey-haired man agreed.

She found herself telling Mr Mulholland about cycling from Culleen to school every day with Letty and James. She described Miss Mullover's schoolroom, with the map of Ireland that showed the rivers and the mountains and the other one that showed the counties in different colours. They would all crouch round the stove on a very cold day, permitted to leave their desks by Miss Mullover. Twelve or thirteen pupils there were, sometimes a few more, sometimes less, depending.

'What'll you have?'

The bald man had rejoined them. He had a Woolworth's bladder, he said, and Mr Mulholland reprimanded him. Mr Mulholland put his arm round Mary Louise's waist again, as if to protect her from such observations. She said she'd like another cherry brandy.

One of the boys in the corner began to sing, softly beating time on the surface of the table with his fingers. Mary Louise could feel the palm of Mr Mulholland's hand ma.s.saging her hip-bone, but she knew he meant no harm. She remembered the safety-pin she'd brought to the Electric the first time she'd gone there with Elmer. She smiled. Ridiculous it seemed now; ridiculous of Letty to suggest it.

'Sorry about that reference I made,' the bald man apologized, handing her another drink. They'd find the place they were staying to their liking, he predicted. Family run. He hadn't made a complaint in twenty-two years.

'It seems nice,' Mary Louise agreed.

Mr Mulholland had moved away and was telling Elmer about the different kinds of stationery he travelled in: receipt books, account books, notepapers, occasion cards, ma.s.s cards, printed vouchers, printed invoices, envelopes of all descriptions. It wouldn't be as bad as she thought, having to share the big bed; the things Letty said were silly. Elmer had stopped saying sir to the men; he kept nodding and wagging his head while he listened to Mr Mulholland. 'Elmer Quarry's always polite to you,' her father had commented the Sunday evening after Elmer had told him he'd proposed marriage. A shopkeeper had to be, Letty had icily interjected. Politeness made money for shopkeepers.

'I keep the books in Traynor's,' the bald man said. He didn't reveal what Traynor's was, but from subsequent remarks Mary Louise was left with the impression that it had to do with animal foodstuffs.

'I see,' she said.

Listening to Mr Mulholland, Elmer privately reflected that he'd never drunk so much whiskey in a single day. No drink was kept in the house, and never had been, but sometimes at the funeral of a customer he felt he should accept what he was offered, and on Christmas Eve Renehan from the hardware next door always came in about half-past four and invited him to walk down the street to Hogan's lounge. He had a mineral then, while Renehan took gin and hot water. Renehan usually fell in with other men in Hogan's, and Elmer left them to it. Counting the gla.s.s of whiskey after the wedding ceremony, he'd had three already that day, and he wondered what Rose and Matilda would say if they could see him standing in a bar with his young wife and three strangers. Probably they'd be too astonished to say anything.

'I know what you mean,' he acknowledged Mr Mulholland's revelations concerning the necessity in any business for clearly printed up-market stationery. In a moment he'd buy a round himself, and then the grey-haired man would buy a round, and that would be that. Naturally you'd have a drink when you were on a holiday, naturally you wouldn't behave the way you would if you were still at home. Sixty-six pounds it would cost at the Strand.

Elmer turned to the bar to order the drinks. He remembered going by the Fahys' back-yard one time when the big double doors were open and seeing Mrs Fahy's clothes hanging on the line with her husband's. He'd stopped to look at them, fourteen or fifteen he'd been. Afterwards he'd thought about them, Mrs Fahy folding them after she'd taken them off, salmon-coloured some of the garments were. Remembering now, a jitter of excitement disturbed Elmer's stomach, like a breeze pa.s.sing through it. He turned to glance down at the calves of Mary Louise's legs, but they were difficult to discern in the gloom. Sometimes he would glance out of the accounting-office window and see one of the counters spread over with suspender-belts and roll-ons, and some woman making up her mind, fingering the material or the elastic.

'You did right well with this one,' the bald man murmured out of the side of his mouth when Elmer gave him his drink. 'A lovely girl, Mr Quarry.'

Elmer didn't respond. He felt embarra.s.sed by what had been said, although he wasn't sure why. Mr Mulholland raised his gla.s.s and proposed a toast to the happy couple.

'Was I out of turn?' The bald man's surrept.i.tious murmur continued. 'I think I forgot myself there.'