Two Lives

by William Trevor

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  TWO LIVES

  William Trevor was born in 1928 at Mitchelstown, County Cork, spent his childhood in provincial Ireland, and now lives in Devon. He attended a number of Irish schools and later Trinity College, Dublin. He is a member of the Irish Academy of Letters. He has written many novels, including The Old Boys (1964), winner of the Hawthornden Prize; The Children of Dynmouth (1976) and Fools of Fortune (1983), both winners of the Whitbread Fiction Award; The Silence in the Garden (1988), winner of the Yorkshire Post Book of the Year Award; Two Lives (1991), which was shortlisted for the Sunday Express Book of the Year Award and includes the Booker-shortlisted novella Reading Turgenev, Felicia’s Journey (1994), which won both the Whitbread and Sunday Express Book of the Year Awards; Death in Summer (1998); and, most recently, The Story of Lucy Gault (2002), which was shortlisted for both the Man Booker Prize and the Whitbread Fiction Award. A celebrated short-story writer, his most recent collections are After Rain (1996); The Hill Bachelors, which won the Macmillan Silver Pen Award and the Irish Times Literature Prize; and A Bit on the Side (2004). He is also the editor of The Oxford Book of Irish Short Stories (1989). He has written plays for the stage and for radio and television; several of his television plays have been based on his short stories. Most of his books are available in Penguin.

  In 1976 William Trevor received the Allied Irish Banks Prize, and in 1977 he was awarded an honorary CBE in recognition of his valuable services to literature. In 1992 he received the Sunday Times Award for Literary Excellence. In 1999 he was awarded the prestigious David Cohen British Literature Prize in recognition of a lifetime’s literary achievement. And in 2002, he was knighted for his services to literature.

  Many critics and writers have praised his work: to Hilary Mantel he is ‘one of the contemporary writers I most admire’ and to Carol Shields ‘a worthy chronicler of our times’. In the Spectator Anita Brookner wrote, ‘These novels will endure. And in every beautiful sentence there is not a word out of place’, and John Banville believes William Trevor’s novels to be ‘among the most subtle and sophisticated fiction being written today’.

  BY THE SAME AUTHOR

  NOVELS

  The Old Boys

  The Boarding-House

  The Love Department

  Mrs Eckdorf in O’Neill’s Hote

  Miss Gomez and the Brethren

  Elizabeth Alone

  The Children of Dynmouth

  Other People’s Worlds

  Fools of Fortune

  The Silence in the Garden

  Felicia’s Journey

  Death in Summer

  The Story of Lucy Gault

  NOVELLAS

  Nights at the Alexandra

  Two Lives

  SHORT STORIES

  The Day We Got Drunk on Cake

  The Ballroom of Romance

  Angels at the Ritz

  Lovers of Their Time

  Beyond the Pale

  The News from Ireland

  Family Sins

  The Collected Stories

  After Rain

  The Hill Bachelors

  A Bit on the Side

  PLAY

  Scenes from an Album

  NON-FICTION

  A Writer’s Ireland

  Excursions in the Real World

  FOR CHILDREN

  Juliet’s Story

  WILLIAM TREVOR

  TWO LIVES

  READING TURGENEV

  AND

  MY HOUSE IN UMBRIA

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  For Jane

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

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  Penguin Books Ltd. Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  www.penguin.com

  First published by Viking 1991

  Published in Penguin Books 1992

  26

  Copyright © William Trevor, 1991

  All rights reserved

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  ISBN: 978-0-14-192980-4

  Reading Turgenev

  1

  A woman, not yet fifty-seven, slight and seeming frail, eats carefully at a table in a corner. Her slices of buttered bread have been halved for her, her fried egg mashed, her bacon cut. ‘Well, this is happiness!’ she murmurs aloud, but none of the other women in the dining-room replies because none of them is near enough to hear. She’s privileged, the others say, being permitted to occupy on her own the bare-topped table in the corner. She has her own salt and pepper.

  ‘Hurry now.’ Appearing from nowhere, Miss Foye curtly interrupts the woman’s private thought. ‘You have a visitor waiting.’

  ‘Would be Peter Martyr.’ Another woman, overhearing the news about a visitor, makes this suggestion, but at once there’s a general objection. Why should the visitor be identified so since the lone woman wouldn’t lift a hand to take the knife from his head, Peter Martyr not being of her religion?

  ‘Heretic!’ a voice calls out.

  ‘Heathen,’ another mutters.

  The woman who eats alone pays no attention. They mean no harm; they are not against her; in their confusion they become carried away. But since she has been interrupted, she must make the best of things, she must consume the food: she will not be permitted into the visitor’s presence until her plate is clean. She swallows a forkful of egg and bacon pieces without chewing. Grease, congealed, adheres to her tongue and the roof of her mouth. If she vomits she will not be permitted into the visitor’s presence. She rinses her mouth with tea. With her fingers she presses more buttered bread between her teeth. The others will tell on her if she does not eat all the bread. They will shout out and she’ll have to march back to the table. She softens the bread with more tea and washes it away. She passes among the women.

  ‘Tell me about the graveyard.’ A tiny woman, wizen-faced, rises and walks with her, whispering. ‘Tell me, darling, about the graveyard.’

  ‘Sit down, Sadie,’ Miss Foye commands. ‘Leave her be.’

  ‘She took off every stitch,’ another voice accuses and is immediately contradicted: Bríd Beamish it was who took off every stitch, who walked the streets for profit.

  ‘It’s not our business.’ Stately in grey, Miss Foye is brisk. This is her manner. She stands no nonsense. ‘Hurry now,’ she urges.

  In the hall there is a disappointment. The visitor is not a stranger. He stands by the window, and speaks when Miss Foye has gone away. He states the purpose of his visit, all he says a repetition. ‘Nowadays it’s what’s being done,’ he explains, the opposite of anything in the old days: for months Miss Foye and the medicals have been saying it too. Those who have somewhere to go are better off in the community, that has been established. In other countries the change came years
ago, Italy, America, places like that. We’re always a bit behindhand here.

  ‘Well, you have somewhere to go,’ the man reminds her. ‘No doubt about that, dear.’

  ‘I thought you might be Insarov. When I heard I had a visitor I said to myself it must be Insarov. To tell the truth, I was interrupted at my supper.’

  She smiles and nods, then walks away.

  ‘No, come back,’ her husband begs. ‘They’ve asked me to go into it with you.’

  Obediently she returns. He means no harm.

  2

  Mary Louise Dallon retained in her features the look of a child. In an oval face her blue eyes had a child’s wide innocence. Her fair brown hair was soft, and curled without inducement. Her temperament remained untouched by sophistication. Once in her life she was told she was beautiful, but laughed when the statement was made: she saw ordinariness in her bedroom looking-glass.

  In the schoolroom next to the Protestant church Miss Mullover had once taught Mary Louise, and would have retained a memory only of a lively child had it not been for the same child’s sudden interest, at ten, in Joan of Arc – or Jeanne d’Arc, as Miss Mullover insisted upon. The saint was a source of such unusual fascination that Miss Mullover wondered for a while if the child possessed depths she had overlooked: an imagination that would one day bear fruit. But Mary Louise left the schoolroom with no greater ambition than to work in the local chemist’s shop, Dodd’s Medical Hall, and in that she was frustrated. Circumstances obliged her to stay at home, helping in the farmhouse.

  In a different generation Miss Mullover had taught Elmer Quarry, who left her schoolroom to board at the Tate School in Wexford, nearly sixty miles away. The three Quarry children – Elmer and his sisters – came of a family that for many decades had been important in the town. The Dallons – out at Culleen – had struggled for as long to keep their heads above water.

  In later years Miss Mullover observed from a distance the vicissitudes and worries that governed the family life of the Dallons, and the changeless nature of the Quarrys’ domestic and mercantile routine. She noted that money meant as much to Elmer Quarry in his middle age as it had to his forebears, that generally he was as cautious as his father and his grandfather had been, that he abundantly enhanced the Quarry reputation for good sense and a Protestant order of priorities. In each generation for more than a century the inheritor of Quarry’s drapery had married late in life, establishing himself in the business before he turned his thoughts to the securing of the line: the old house above the shop in Bridge Street had seen more than its share of young wives made widows before their time. So it was that in 1955 Elmer Quarry was still a bachelor and the only well-to-do Protestant for miles around. All over the county wealth had passed into the hands of a new Catholic middle class, changing the nature of provincial life as it did so.

  The Dallons’ roadside farmhouse in the townland of Culleen had never been more than modest, and in 1955 even that modesty was considerably eroded: the whitewashed rendering was here and there fallen away, slates that had slipped out of place or cracked in half had not been replaced, a pane in an upstairs window was broken. Within the farmhouse, rooms were in need of redecoration; paint had chipped, damp loosened the tattered wallpaper of the stairway, the unused dining-room smelt of must and soot. Five Dallons lived in the farmhouse – Mary Louise and her sister Letty, her brother James, and her mother and father.

  Standing on the edge of the farm’s twenty-seven acres, the house was three miles from the town where Quarry’s drapery had prospered for so long. On Sundays, driving into the town in their black, obsolete Hillman, the Dallons formed almost a quarter of the Protestant congregation; at Christmas and Easter the numbers swelled to thirty-three or -four. Elmer Quarry and his sisters were church-goers only on these festive occasions, but for the Dallons – especially for Mary Louise and Letty – the weekly occasion of worship provided a social outing they enjoyed.

  The town was small, its population just over two and a half thousand. A turf-brickette factory had been opened seven years ago, where once there’d been a tannery. There was a ruined mill, a railway station that was no longer in use, green-stained warehouses on either side of the town’s single bridge over its sluggish river. Shops, public houses, the post office, council offices, two banks, and other businesses offered employment, as did Hogan’s Hotel, three builders, a creamery, an egg-packing station and an agricultural machinery depot. The Electric Cinema was a going concern in 1955; the Dixie dancehall continued to attract Friday-night crowds. The Catholic church – on the town’s northern outskirts – was dedicated to the Virgin as Queen of Heaven; a convent – halfway up the town’s only hill – was of the order of the Sacred Heart. Boys were educated behind the silver-painted railings of the Christian Brothers’ School in Conlon Street, and St Fintan’s vocational college offered opportunities to acquire further skills. Bridge Street, where the pink-washed Hogan’s Hotel and the principal shops were, was narrow and brief, becoming South West Street beyond the bridge. The gaunt, grey steeple of the Protestant church rose from a boundary of yew trees that isolated it from its surroundings. A pocket of lanes around the gasworks and Brown’s Yard comprised the slums. A signpost – black letters on a yellow ground – partially obscured a statue of Daniel O’Connell and gave directions to Clonmel and Cappoquin, Cahir and Carrick-on-Suir. People who lived in the town knew it backwards; those from the surrounding neighbourhoods sometimes regarded it with wonder.

  Elmer Quarry first noticed that Mary Louise Dallon was an agreeable-looking girl in January of the year in question. He was thirty-five then, Mary Louise twenty-one. Paunchy – and as square-looking as the origins of his name suggested – he was attired invariably in a nondescript suit, mud-coloured, faintly striped. His receding hair, cut short, matched this shade; his features were small and regular, a neat configuration in the pale plumpness of his face. Elmer Quarry was not a tall man, but bulky none the less, an entrepreneurial presence, as his father and grandfather had been before him. He was assisted in the drapery by his sisters, Matilda and Rose, both of them his senior by a few years and possessing a handsomeness that had been denied him. Neither had married and both were displeased when Elmer’s glances were cast in the direction of Mary Louise Dallon. Why should the status quo in the house above the shop, and in the shop itself, be disturbed? Quarry’s would sustain the three of them during their lifetime, withering, then dying, with the Protestants of the neighbourhood. Neither Rose nor Matilda was the kind to avoid facing the facts: already Quarry’s was a relic from another age. If the line came to an end the business would pass to distant cousins in Athy, who would probably sell it.

  The present Quarrys remembered the time when there were five assistants behind the counters, and an overhead railway network that linked the shop to the accounting office, carrying money and returning change in hollow wooden spheres. There were just the three Quarrys in the shop now; the overhead system had years ago been dismantled and removed. But the red receipt books were as they’d always been, stacked every evening by the tills that had been fitted. Elmer’s father had entered the accounting office every day only after the shop had closed its doors, when the clerk who returned the change in the wooden containers had gone home. But since there was no clerk now and since Matilda and Rose managed easily behind the counters, Elmer increasingly spent more time in the accounting office. Often he sat there staring down through the small-paned floor-to-ceiling window into the quiet shop below, at the rolls of material stacked on the shelves – nylon, chintz and silk, cotton and linen – at the spools of thread in their shallow glass case, and the dresses and suits on the window dummies. As still as these window dummies his sisters sometimes seemed, one behind either counter, waiting for another customer. Matilda liked to be smart; Rose dressed drearily. Matilda had more of a manner with customers, the best manner of the three, Elmer knew. Rose preferred housework and cooking. He himself belonged more naturally with the ledgers.

  The courts
hip began on 11 January 1955, a Tuesday. Elmer invited Mary Louise to the pictures the following Friday evening. He had no idea what was showing at the Electric, but he considered that didn’t matter. Now and again, perhaps once a year, he and his sisters went to see a film because it had been talked about in the shop. He liked the News best himself, but Rose and Matilda enjoyed something light and musical. He naturally had to tell them he’d invited Mary Louise Dallon. They continued to look displeased, but did not comment.

  In the Dallon household the invitation came as a considerable surprise. Mr and Mrs Dallon – a thin, grey pair in their fifties whose appearance was so similar that they might have been twins – recognized all that it implied, and were well aware of the habit among the Quarry men of marrying younger wives. They talked about it in the privacy of their bedroom. Mrs Dallon made a special journey to the town, visited Quarry’s drapery, bought a spool of white thread, and reminded herself of what Elmer looked like by glimpsing him through the panes of the accounting-office window. It might have been worse, she reported to her husband on her return, and later – in their bedroom – they went on talking about the development.

  Mary Louise’s older sister, Letty, and her brother James, who was older also, did not react as favourably. James – impetuous, known to be of uncertain temper, and remembered from his schooldays as being a little slow – declared the invitation to be an affront. Elmer Quarry was a man who never laughed and rarely smiled, born to be a draper. Letty – secretly annoyed that her sister had been preferred, not that she’d have set foot in the Electric with Elmer Quarry even if he’d gone down on his knees – warned Mary Louise about what might occur under cover of darkness and advised her to keep handy a safety-pin that could be opened at a moment’s notice. Some of Elmer Quarry’s teeth were false, she declared, a fact she claimed to have culled in the waiting-room of the town’s more reliable dentist, Mr McGreevy.