Two Lives Read Free Page A

was the consolation of the chocolates, for he had a sweet tooth. When he offered Mary Louise the carton for the fifth time she shook her head and murmured something, which he took to mean she didn’t want any more. He knew that girls had to watch their figures so he ate the remainder of the chocolates himself, removing the wrappings as quietly as he could in order not to cause a disturbance. The film was all about a woman in Italy, with a number of men interested. ‘Wasn’t the picture great?’ Mary Louise enthused when the lights went up, and he agreed it had been.
    It was a cold night. Outside the cinema he belted his overcoat and drew on tan leather gloves; he didn’t wear a hat. He noticed that his companion’s cheeks were flushed from the warmth of the cinema and that she’d put on a blue and white woollen cap, which matched her gloves. She’d have bought the wool in the shop, and he thought he could even remember looking down from the accounting office and seeing her choosing it, last summer it would have been.
    ‘I’ll walk you out a bit towards Culleen,’ he said.
    ‘Oh, no need, Mr Quarry. Thanks though.’
    In the lane that ran by the side of the Electric there was an ungainly chain and padlock on her bicycle, which she undid and dropped into the basket that was attached to the handlebars. When she leaned down to do this lamplight from the street fell on the back of her legs, and for the first time Elmer experienced physical desire where Mary Louise was concerned. Between the hem of her shabby blue coat and the tops of her boots the silk of her stockings gleamed in a way he found disturbing. Once or twice during the film his attention had been held by Lana Turner’s low-cut bodices.
    ‘Give me the bike to wheel,’ he urged, ignoring Mary Louise’s protest that there was no need to walk through the streets with her.
    The Quarrys did not possess a car. Living in the centre of the town, there had never been a need for one, just as in the past there had been no need for a horse-drawn vehicle of any kind. A bus carried you out of the town and another one brought you back again in the evening. Every December, before Christmas, the Quarry sisters took it to do any seasonal shopping there was. Elmer didn’t bother with that. In winter he played billiards in the YMCA billiard-room, a big coal fire blazing in the grate between two glass-fronted bookcases that held a library of good books: Wild West stories and detective yarns, adventure novels by Sapper and Leslie Charteris, the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Elmer often had the place to himself since not many turned up in the YMCA billiard-room these days, but the caretaker always had the fire going in winter, and copies of the Geographical Magazine and the Illustrated London News were always to hand. In summer Elmer went for walks – Bridge Street, South West Street, Boys’ Lane, Father Mathew Street, Upton Road, home by Kilkelly’s Garage.
    Intent upon entertaining Mary Louise, and since they happened to pass the YMCA billiard-room, he retailed someof the detail of these two long-established habits. If he possessed a car, he added, he naturally would have called at the farmhouse for her and would now be driving her home in it. Kilkelly often told him he should have a car. ‘A man in your position, Elmer,’ was how Kilkelly – who had the Ford franchise – put it, but Elmer did not quote this statement since it sounded like showing off. Instead, he asked Mary Louise if she had learned to drive the Hillman he often saw the Dallons in, and she replied that she had. This fact Elmer noted; he was interested in things like that.
    ‘Well, I’ll leave you here,’ he said when they reached the last bungalow that could claim to belong to the town. A full moon cast a light as bright as daylight. The road sparkled where frost had settled in its crevices. Hedges and verges were already whitening; ice had formed in patches.
    ‘Your light’s all right, is it?’