Two Lives by William Trevor Read Free Book Online Page A

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 passed.
    ‘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 seashore 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-butt left behind by one of the men had been inadequately extinguished. It smouldered in theashtray, 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.
    ‘Shellfish,’ 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 glass 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