Two Lives Read Online Free PDF Page A

groom. She’d been surprised when she heard of Mary Louise’s engagement to the draper, but only because of the difference of generation: nothing else about the present alliance caused her undue apprehension. Other girls had passed through her schoolroom, eventually to marry older men. Marie Yates, not yet thirty at the time of her marriage to Canon Moore at almost eighty, came most swiftly to mind: in all her life Miss Mullover had never witnessed such weeping as Marie’s at the funeral of the old clergyman.
    But this sanguine view was not unanimously to be found among the wedding guests. The continuing displeasure of Matilda and Rose was matched by Letty’s, which took theform of a coldly distant manner and the firm rejection of any notion that the occasion was a festive one. When, in March, Mary Louise revealed that Elmer had proposed and that she had accepted him, Letty hadn’t spoken to her for three weeks and when the silence was finally broken Letty was so changed that Mary Louise wondered if she would ever again know the old relationship she’d had with her sister.
    ‘I’m the lucky man,’ Elmer declared in a speech. ‘There’s no one for ten miles around wouldn’t agree on that.’
    That was enough, he considered, so he did not say any more. Last night Rose had actually dropped to her knees, tears streaming, begging him to reconsider at this eleventh hour. Matilda, grim-faced on the first-floor landing, had announced that he would regret this folly for the rest of his days. Mary Louise Dallon hadn’t a brain in her head. She was marrying him for his money, since it was a known fact that the Dallons hadn’t two coins in the house to rub together. There was flightiness in her eyes. She would lead him a dance, if not in one way then in another. She would drain him dry in ways he couldn’t even imagine. She would upset him, and disturb him. His sisters didn’t go to bed until half-past two, and even after he’d lain down, exhausted, Elmer could still hear their ranting, and Rose’s weeping.
    In a final passion of energy, the night before also, Letty had sought to dissuade her sister. In the warm darkness of the bedroom they shared Mary Louise listened to the persistent murmur, edged with bitterness one moment and scorn the next. A picture was painted of her future in the house above the shop, the two sisters critical of every move she made, the man she was to marry never taking her side. She’d be no more than a maid in the household and a counter girl in the shop. There would be smells and intimacies no girl would care for in the bedroom she’d have to share with the heavily-made draper; her reluctance to meet his demands would beoverruled. The three Quarrys would beadily eye her at mealtimes. Dried-up spinsters were always the worst.
    But by midday on 10 September the pair were joined together. The best man was one of Elmer’s cousins from Athy, imported into the parish for the occasion, a man Mary Louise had never seen before. The Reverend Harrington – cherub-cheeked and rotund, not long married himself – had asked the necessary questions slowly and with care, his lingering tone designed to imbue the union with an extra degree of sanctity, or so it seemed. In the vestry while the register was signed Mr and Mrs Dallon stood awkwardly, and Rose and Matilda and Letty stood grimly. Sensing unease, the Reverend Harrington chatted about other weddings he had conducted and then recalled the details of his own.
    ‘Phew!’ Mary Louise’s brother whispered to one of his Eddery cousins in the dining-room of the farmhouse. The exhalation was a reference, not to the nuptials of his sister, but to the agreeable effect of a second glass of whiskey. James could feel it spreading through his chest, a burning sensation that was new to him.
    ‘I had two bob on a horse today,’ the older Eddery brother revealed. ‘Polly’s Sweetheart.’
    James, who spent all he earned in Kilmartin’s the turf