Two Lives

by William Trevor

  ‘That’s a terrible thing to do, Mary Louise.’

  ‘Terrible?’

  ‘You poisoned the food with rat poison,’ Elmer said.

  She smiled. I must not be mischievous she had written a hundred times after the episode of the worms in Possy Luke’s desk. Downstrokes heavy, perfect loops, otherwise it would all have to be done again. Tessa Enright hadn’t owned up.

  ‘You could have killed us stone dead,’ he said.

  ‘Yes.’

  He had made up his mind: she could tell from the look in his eyes. Everything was there in his eyes, even – for a moment – something like distress.

  ‘Yes,’ she said again. ‘Yes.’ She thought of asking him if they’d let her bring her things with her, but she didn’t. She was sure they would; the watch and the clothes at least, the books and the collar-stud.

  29

  ‘I am back in the town.’

  ‘You’re back because you’re better these days, dear. Because of the medicine. All the old stuff is over and done with.’

  ‘I’m back because of the grave.’

  ‘You can’t touch a grave. You have to leave a grave alone.’

  ‘You can change things if you want to.’

  His hand is on the doorknob. More than anything else, Elmer requires a drink. His want is a need; he has scarcely the strength to stand; he came up with her tray and she smiled at him, delaying him by speaking of a graveyard, a subject she has raised before. ‘Let her back into the attics if she asks for it,’ Miss Foye advised, and duly he made the arrangements, putting sheets on the bed himself.

  ‘I must go now,’ he says.

  ‘You can open a grave. You can move the remains. Isn’t it funny, that expression, Elmer – remains? To refer to a human person as remains?’

  ‘Sure, what would be the point of it, dear?’

  The first time he visited her in the asylum she said someone whose name he couldn’t catch had stopped keeping a diary. A thick black line had been drawn and that was that. He asked her if it was herself, nervous about any diaries left lying about, but she didn’t reply.

  ‘Robert and I loved one another,’ she says.

  ‘Eat up that plateful before it’s cold. And take the pills when you’ve had it. Put the tray outside and I’ll get it later on.

  ‘I don’t need to take pills, Elmer.’

  ‘Ah sure, you have to take them. Aren’t they keeping you cured?’

  ‘All it is is moving the remains from one graveyard to another. I want to be buried with him, Elmer.’

  They maintained they wouldn’t set foot on the attic stairs. They refused to so much as butter a slice of bread for her. They said if she came within ten yards of the pantry or the kitchen they’d walk out of the house. ‘I’ll see to her food,’ he interrupted, and since her return he has done so, carrying her up anything that is left over, frying bacon and eggs for her if that is necessary.

  ‘I have business down in the town,’ he says. ‘I can’t be delaying.’

  ‘All I want is to be buried with him.’

  ‘I’ll organize that. Only take your pills now.’

  ‘Will you drive me out and I’ll show you where the graveyard is?’

  ‘The first minute I have to spare we’ll go out there. Myself and yourself.’

  ‘It’s the place where the Attridges are buried. The Attridge family.’

  ‘I know it well.’

  The desire to be away, to be in the bar at Hogan’s, has developed into a soreness that spreads all over his body. That first time, the first occasion he visited her, he said: ‘Well now, and how are you, dear?’ She shook her head, referring to some beggarwoman with second sight. On later visits he told her the news from the town, how Foley’s had been converted into a self-service, with wire baskets, how Sarsfield’s in Lower Bridge Street was the first bar to have the television installed.

  ‘I really want it,’ she begs. ‘It’s the only thing I want.’

  ‘No problem about the grave, dear.’

  *

  Once she was locked away it would be as though she had died. Her advent had been a destruction, and they imagined a fresh beginning for the three of them. But within ten months he was listening at last to Kilkenny’s sales talk at the garage, and then he bought a car purely so that three or four times a year he could visit her. Not once have they sat in that car; not once have they seen, even in the distance, the house she went to. ‘Come over for the drive,’ he used to offer, but neither cared to reply.

  They sit in the big front room, its grey wallpaper unchanged in their lifetime, a room their brother has not entered for almost thirty years. They manage their outrage at their sister-in-law’s presence as best they can; they’re too old now for the vigour of such feelings, Rose seventy-four, Matilda seventy-three. ‘You damn fool,’ Rose said when first he told them she was to all intents and purposes cured due to wonder drugs. He repeated words that had been used to him, ‘caring’, and ‘commitment’ and ‘community’. Ridiculous, it sounded, all that coming out of a grown man. He was finished years ago; until then they had used their energy protesting, in an endeavour to conserve what remained. What does it matter now? The shop has gone and with it their standing in the town. Often he does not wear a tie. They have seen him pass out of the halldoor in his old felt slippers. As if he’s feeding a dog, he gathers up the remains and carries the tray up the attic stairs, or carelessly breaks the egg yolk when he fries it, not noticing the splinters of shell that fall into the fat.

  ‘You damn fool,’ Rose says again, coldly stating the fact, her tone without the emotion that years ago would have made it shrill. She says it often.

  ‘She has a brother and a sister,’ Matilda reminds him, often also. ‘It isn’t here she belongs. Who says it’s here?’

  ‘She is my wife.’

  These exchanges, and other passages of conversation, are recalled in the grey front room, but are not dwelt upon in further conversation, are not mulled over aloud. Memories possess the two old women, further souring their bitterness. There are echoes of a time that might so easily and so naturally have continued: he’d been the person in their lives when it seemed clear that no one else was waiting to transform their lives. Making cakes for him, roasting meat, darning and mending, changing his sheets, the presents given and received on Christmas Day, he in the accounting office, they receiving in the shop: once, like a promise, there was the perpetuity of all that. Modest enough, God knows; not much to ask.

  James at Culleen would like to hand the farm on to any of his sons but none of them wants it. James married Angela Eddery, and both are disappointed about this family rejection but do not let it show. There isn’t a living at Culleen, each of their sons has said, which bewilders James because there always was before. ‘Well, at least it’ll see us out,’ Angela reminds him, and they agree that that’s a blessing to be grateful for.

  Soon after Mary Louise’s return Angela reports in the kitchen at Culleen that she has seen her in Bridge Street. She recognized her after an initial hesitation and would have spoken to her if there hadn’t been that moment of doubt. By the time she gathered herself together her sister-in-law had passed on.

  ‘I suppose she’ll have to come out here.’ James sounds more grudging than he feels, the words too carelessly chosen.

  ‘Of course she must, James! As often as she likes.’

  Over the years Angela has had her ups and downs at Culleen. Often, when feeling low, she has thought of Mary Louise and seen her own life in perspective: she has been grateful for that. Once she and James visited his sister, but afterwards he said he didn’t want to go again. James has always been embarrassed by his sister’s misfortune, and Angela is aware that this has probably been sensed by Mary Louise. She won’t come out to Culleen, Angela intuitively guesses, and feels she could confidently reassure James on that score. She chooses not to.

  When Dennehy inherited the premises at Ennistane crossroads he ceased to practise as a vet. He and
Letty sold the house they’d had rebuilt at the time of their marriage and moved their family to the public house. Tired of being called out in the middle of the night to attend ailing animals, Dennehy took contentedly to the life of a publican and Letty enjoyed the more substantial income that the change brought with it.

  ‘She should live with us,’ she remarked when her sister’s emergence from her sanctuary was first mooted. Dennehy raised no objection. The house was large, the bars busy: no matter how odd she was, another woman wouldn’t be noticed about the place.

  ‘She should have come here,’ Letty repeats when Mary Louise has been back a while, and two days later she calls to see her sister in order, again, to put the proposition to her. ‘There’ll be a home with us,’ she has earlier assured Miss Foye on her visits, and assured Mary Louise also. The big, noisy public house with all that coming and going, and a family of nephews and nieces, is surely more like it than the company of Elmer Quarry. Years ago Letty came to a private conclusion, shared only with her husband: Mary Louise had been maddened by the gross presence of Elmer Quarry in her bed, his demands had frightened and repelled her to a degree that in the end affected her mind. She could understand it, Letty maintained: you had only to imagine Elmer Quarry standing naked in your bedroom and you’d want to close your eyes for ever. Mary Louise has always been too innocent, too trusting and unworldly, to cope with any of that. Hair sprouted out of Elmer Quarry’s ears, and out of his nostrils, black bristly hair that would sicken you when it came close. The sides of his face had a way of becoming damp with sweat, and that sweat would touch you. He took to drink because when it came down to it Mary Louise couldn’t disguise her revulsion.

  ‘Oh, I belong here,’ Mary Louise insists. ‘I’ll visit you often.’

  Like Angela, Letty knows she won’t.

  How could you have a grave up? How could you disturb the bones of the dead and for no good reason convey them five miles across the countryside to a graveyard that went out of business years ago? In the bar of Hogan’s Hotel Elmer asks himself these questions, cogitating on their source. The cousin she spoke of had been an unfortunate with a delicate heart or lungs, never expected to live. A week ago she’d dragged her way through the long grass and pointed at a corner in the old graveyard where she and the cousin could go. She had it in her head that there’d been something between them.

  ‘Replenish that, like a good man.’ Elmer pushes his glass across the familiar surface of the bar, and Gerry receives it in an equally familiar grasp. He has a way of holding glasses these days, the fingers bent like claws due to arthritis.

  ‘It’s a fact what I was telling you, Mr Quarry. We have a one-way system threatened.’

  ‘Are you serious?’

  ‘Oh, I am, sir. They have the plans drawn up.’

  ‘It’ll damage trade.’

  ‘Of course it will. Sure, you can’t watch them.’

  Elmer nods. The town is congested, no doubt about it, but a one-way traffic system will do more harm than good. He nods again, lending emphasis.

  ‘Has she settled, sir?’ the barman tentatively inquires a moment later.

  ‘She has, Gerry. She’s settled well.’

  When he brings the trays up she talks to him about Russians. She has all the names off pat, no telling where she picked them up. A fortune it would cost, taking up remains, a whole long battle with the powers that be. Set stuff like that in motion and you wouldn’t know where you’d end up. He was caught once through doing the decent thing; he was caught when they put it to him about the efficacy of the drugs, but if a woman who talks about Russians and opening up graves is back to normal it’s a queer thing. The truth of it is they want them out of those places for economic reasons. He should have known that in the final analysis there’s nothing that doesn’t come down to pounds, shillings and pence.

  ‘I saw her out walking a week back,’ the barman chattily continues. ‘Fit as a fiddle she looked.’

  ‘Oh, game ball, Gerry, game ball.’

  In mutual, unspoken agreement neither Elmer nor the Dallons have ever revealed the true facts about the purchasing of the rat poison. In the town it is generally believed that Elmer Quarry’s wife was taken to the asylum because she couldn’t be managed any more, which is true enough. At the time it went about the town that she played with toys and imagined rats were going to attack her. On several occasions she had attempted to administer poison to herself. She’d bought clothes from the poor when there was a shopful of clothes underneath where she lived.

  ‘Well, that’s great, sir.’

  ‘It is of course, Gerry.’

  He’d drive her out again tomorrow and get the bottoms of his trousers soaking wet in the grass. It annoys them to see him driving her out, especially since they don’t know where the drive is heading. It’s enjoyable sometimes to annoy them. ‘Did you find out about a single gravestone?’ she asked this morning, and he promised that the matter was well in hand.

  When Elmer leaves the bar he does so by the door that opens on to the street, no longer passing through the hall of the hotel, as once he used to. Bridget retired several years ago, but even before that Elmer hadn’t bothered with loitering in the hall any more.

  30

  Again she is the only one, a slight figure in the corner of the pew. Two colours – black and brown – are arranged, stylishly, in her coat, its fur collar turned up for warmth. They are repeated in her soft suede shoes. The first wrinkles of old age creep around her eyes and the corners of her mouth, but the beauty that only her cousin ever remarked upon has not yet deserted her. A madonna look, her cousin said to himself the night he died while dreaming of her.

  ‘Amen,’ she murmurs, thin fingers splayed on her forehead, eyes closed.

  The clergyman who stands at the altar is tall, a young man still unmarried, not long the inheritor of five far-flung parishes. Every Sunday, from eight o’clock till nightfall, he makes the rounds of his sparse attendances, spreading the Gospel over many miles, among the few. Often now this woman, until recently accounted mad, is the only occupant of these pews.

  ‘Lighten our darkness…’ he softly pleads. Shades of green and crimson, of blue and yellow, glow dully in the window behind him, scrolls looping, basketwork and swaddling clothes. No hymns are sung when she is the only one, the psalm is not intoned. Instead of a sermon the two converse. ‘The peace of God, which passeth all understanding…’

  She remembers how in childhood, and when she was a girl, church services constituted an outing, how after her marriage they provided an opportunity to meet her family. She began to enjoy them for themselves during the years she was away.

  ‘That was very nice,’ she compliments the clergyman. ‘Beautifully conducted.’

  ‘It’s good of you to come so often.’

  ‘I was thinking of Miss Mullover during our Te Deum. I don’t know why.’

  The schoolteacher was long before his time, but often on these Sunday occasions her name crops up. In a schoolroom two children glance at one another with curiosity, mildly anticipating the love there is to be: again that picture forms in his mind.

  ‘It has always surprised me that she didn’t guess. That she didn’t know we belonged to each other.’

  He nods, not signifying understanding, only making the gesture because a response is necessary.

  ‘Robert and I belonged to one another before we could breathe, certainly before either of us knew the other existed.’

  ‘You’ve told me.’

  ‘Is that how love starts, belonging without knowing it? When you look back it seems so.’

  Again he nods, acknowledging her greater experience. Beneath his surplice there is a shrugging motion also, honestly reflecting his uncertainty.

  ‘God gives permission: is that it, d’you think?’

  ‘Possibly.’

  ‘And perhaps it’s not allowed, either, that someone else may guess?’

  ‘Perhaps not.’ He lifts the surplice over his head. Her c
ompany is like a child’s. Saying at once what occurs to her may have to do with her incarceration, a habit she picked up from her companions. Having not known her before that time, he cannot easily guess.

  ‘He bought a motor-car so that he could visit me. It’s asking less that he should see to the graves. Is it still too much?’

  He drapes the surplice over his left arm, smoothing the creases and watching them return. She has told him about reading the novels of Turgenev among the tombstones. She has told him that for eight years she has flushed the prescribed drugs down the lavatory, that she does not take them now because they are not necessary. As she stands in the pew, smiling up at him, her life seems as mysterious as an act of God, her innocence and her boundless love arbitrarily there, her last modest wish destined to go ungranted. The distress engendered in him by these thoughts turns into a familiar apprehension: contemplation of this woman’s life could tease away his faith more surely than all his empty churches.

  ‘May I take communion?’

  It will make him late, but he does not demur. The surplice is replaced, the bread and wine unlocked, and measured out and offered. ‘Do this,’ he mutters, ‘in remembrance of me…’