‘You have to cross the little stream,’ she informed a French couple in the early summer of 1968. ‘Continue on past where you’ve drawn your car in and then there’s rocks you can step on to see you over the bit of water. Go neither right nor left after that until you’ll strike the stones standing up in the grass.’
In her bedroom Dolores Mullally, then aged twenty-two, watched from her window, the lacy half-curtain pulled back at the edge. She had heard the car coming to a halt by the mill, and minutes later foreign voices had become louder as the visitors approached the shop. She had pushed herself up from her bed and limped across to the window. The woman was wearing a black leather coat, a thin woman with a smiling, slanted face, strange-looking and beautiful. The man had a moustache and a slender pipe.
Dolores imagined these foreign people asking her mother about the standing stones, and her mother telling them, using the same expressions she always did. When her mother wasn’t there and Dolores gave the directions herself she never used expressions like ‘to see you over the bit of water’ or ‘you’ll strike the stones standing up in the grass’. All that was her mother’s old-fashioned way of putting things. Dolores simply said that the visitors must cross the stream at a place they’d see and then keep straight on. Her father, no longer alive, had once carried her to see the standing stones and she hadn’t found them much to look at. But a visitor who had spent the whole afternoon examining them and had afterwards returned to the shop to verify the way to the Rossaphin road had stated that they were the most extraordinary stones of their kind in the whole of Europe. ‘I think he was maybe drunk,’ Dolores’s mother had commented, and her father had agreed.
As soon as they left the shop the Frenchman took the woman’s arm affectionately, both of them laughing at something or other. Dolores watched them walking on the left-hand side of the road, towards the mill and the towering grain stores. There had been prosperity in the place once, her father and her mother had said, at the time when the mill operated. Its owner had lived in the pink-distempered house with the fallen-in roof, a man called Mr Hackett, who had grown some special kind of plums in his garden.
The French couple stood for a moment by their car, a small, bright red vehicle, hired in Dublin, Dolores guessed. A group of English people and an American woman, returning from the stones some years ago, had been unable to start theirs and had telephoned the Dan Ryan car-hire organization from the shop. It was then, for the first time, that Dolores had realized it was possible for visitors from other countries to hire motorcars and to drive all over Ireland in them.
The Frenchman removed the pipe from his mouth and knocked it out on the edge of his shoe. He unlocked one of the car doors and took from it two pairs of short green gum-boots, which he and the woman put on. They stowed their shoes in the car and then the man put his arms about his companion. He bent her head backwards, leaning his body against her and pushing his lips on to hers, although Dolores could not quite see that detail of the embrace. He released the woman and she at once placed her hands, fingers splayed out, on his black hair, drawing his face down to hers again. After a moment they separated and set off, hand in hand, their arms stretched across the path they walked along. On either side of them nettles and docks grew in great profusion; daisy-heads and buttercups decorated the grass of the path; ragwort was everywhere. The afternoon was sunny, puffy little clouds were stationary in the sky. On the red roof of the car there was what appeared to be a shadow, small and rectangular and vividly black: it was an object, Dolores realized when she screwed her eyes up, not a shadow at all. Carelessly the two had left it there.
She dropped the edge of the half-curtain and limped back to her bed, where she had been reading Holster in the Dust by Tom K. Kane. She picked a cigarette from a packet of Afton Major, open on the candlewick counterpane. She lit it and inhaled. Because of her bad leg she lay down for an hour or so almost every afternoon, unless it was the time of year when the seed potatoes had to be put in on the slope at the back or the later time when the grown potatoes had to be gathered. Years ago, when Dolores was twelve, old Dr McDowell had suggested that a rest in the afternoon might be a relief. The leg, shrivelled to the bone as a result of infantile paralysis, necessitated the use of a crutch, although in making her way across her bedroom or the kitchen, or sometimes moving about in the shop, Dolores could manage without this aid, limping from one steadying surface to the next. The evening sun-rays reddened the canyon, she read. Dust was acrid in One-Draw’s nostrils and grimy on his cheeks. Her father had bought these yellow-backed books of the Wild West Library, which were closely printed on absorbent paper, a perpendicular line down the centre of each page, separating the prose as in a newspaper. Their soft covers were tattered now, creases running through horses and riders and gun-smoke, limp spines bent and split. Her father had bought one in Mackie’s the newsagent’s every Friday, making the journey to Rossaphin in the horse and cart, taking Dolores with him. He had brought to the town the carrots and cabbages he grew on the slope, turnips and potatoes when he had them, plums from the forgotten garden next door. A waste of time, Dolores’s mother had always maintained, because of the small profit there’d been, and when Mr Mullally died the practice had ceased and the horse had been sold. The cart was still in the yard at the back, its faded orange-painted wood just beginning to rot. Even though her father had died fourteen years ago, Dolores still missed those weekly journeys and the feeling of excitement their anticipation had engendered.
The shop, patronized by everyone in the neighbourhood, kept Mrs Mullally and her daughter going. The bus dropped off newspapers there, groceries and confectionery were stocked, and a rudimentary post office maintained. At the time of Drumgawnie’s greater prosperity Mrs Mullally’s father had run it profitably, with a public house as well. Dolores’s own father, once employed in Mr Hackett’s milling business, had married into the shop after the closing of the mill. In his lifetime it was still thought that Dolores’s affliction might miraculously right itself as she grew up, but this had not happened. He died in the kitchen armchair, having complained for several months of pains in the chest which Dr McDowell had not taken seriously. ‘Well, Mother of God, isn’t it the most surprising thing in three decades of practising medicine?’ Dolores remembered him saying in the kitchen, the body already covered with a bedsheet. ‘McDowell was drunk as a fish,’ her mother was afterwards to remark. ‘His breath would’ve knocked you down.’ Not used to that particular smell, Dolores had imagined it to be a variation of the disinfectant in Dr McDowell’s house in Rossaphin.
One-Draw slid from the saddle. His eyes were slits, measuring the distance. ‘Cassidy!’ he shouted. ‘Reach, Cassidy!’ There was no reply, no movement. Not a sound in the canyon.
Dolores folded down the corner of the page to keep her place. She lit another Afton Major. There was never any pain in her leg; it was just the ugliness of it, the difficult, unattractive movement, the crutch she hated so. She’d become used over the years to all the cumbersome arrangements that had to be made for her, the school bus coming specially to the crossroads to take her to the convent in Rossaphin, the Crowleys calling in on a Sunday to take her and her mother to Mass in their Ford. Once a year, three weeks before Christmas, she and her mother went for the day to shop in Rossaphin, driven on that occasion also by the Crowleys. They had a meal in Love’s Café and didn’t return to the crossroads until six o’clock. Her mother had to get special permission to close the post-office counter, which was something Father Deane was able to arrange, just as it was he who persuaded the Crowleys to be kind in the way they were.
Now and again, between one December and the next, Dolores managed to get in to Rossaphin on the bus, but the journey home again had to be arranged carefully and in advance, with the cooperation of one of the drivers who called regularly at the shop. Sheedy, who brought the bread, was no good because he came out in the morning, but the Mitchelstown Cheese man always passed through Rossaphin in the late afternoon and then ca
me on to the crossroads, and Jimmy Reilly, who brought the bacon, came in the afternoon also. Having chosen a particular day and made the arrangement to meet one or other of the delivery men at a time and a place, Dolores usually had three hours or a bit more on her own. Her mother didn’t like it though; her mother worried in case the van men might forget. Neither of them ever had, but something once did go wrong with Jimmy Reilly’s engine and Dolores was left waiting outside the Provincial Bank until five o’clock when she should have been collected at two. A boy had come up to her with a message, and then Father Deane had appeared on his bicycle. He rang the bell of the bank and the manager’s wife had allowed Dolores to sit on a chair in the hall until the Crowleys arrived in their Ford. The tears were running down her mother’s cheeks when eventually she arrived back at the crossroads, and after that Dolores never again went into Rossaphin on her own.
She squashed her cigarette-butt on the ashtray that lay beside Holster in the Dust on the candlewick counterpane. The ashtray was made of glass, with green letters advertising 7-Up on it, a free gift from one of the delivery men. She’d easily finish Holster in the Dust tonight, Dolores considered, she’d even start Guns of the Apache Country. She’d read both of them before, but not recently.
She tidied the counterpane, brushing the wrinkles from it. She paused for a moment by the looking-glass on her dressing-table to smear fresh lipstick on to her lips and to run a comb through her long black hair. Her face was round, her chin a pleasant curve. Her father had told her that her eyes were like a dog’s he’d once owned, meaning it as a compliment. They were brown and serious, as if all the time Dolores was intent on thoughts she chose not to share with other people. But mostly what she thought about were the adventures of the Wild West Library.
‘Are you rested, pet?’ her mother inquired in the shop. ‘You didn’t smoke too much?’
‘Only two,’ Dolores lied.
‘You’re better off without, pet.’
Dolores nodded. ‘That’s a well-dressed pair went up to the stones.’
‘Did you see them? You should stay lying down, pet.’
‘I’ll look after the shop now.’
Her mother said that Mrs Connell hadn’t come in for her bread yet, nor Whelan for his Independent. ‘French those people said they were.’
She sliced a couple of rashers as she spoke and took them away on the palm of her hand, through the small store-room at the back of the shop, into the kitchen. In a moment the smell of frying would drift through the store-room, as it did every evening at this time, and soon afterwards Dolores would put up the wire shutter on the post-office counter and lock the drawer where the postal orders and the stamps and the registration book were kept. She’d take the key into the kitchen with her when eventually she went to sit down to her tea. She would hang it on a hook on the dresser, but the shop itself would remain open and anyone who came into it would rap on the counter for attention, knowing that that was expected.
‘Mademoiselle,’ the Frenchman said, and went on talking. Dolores couldn’t understand him. He wasn’t smiling any more, and his thin companion in her leather coat wasn’t smiling either. They were agitated: the man kept gesturing, moving his hands about; the woman frowned, muttering in French to herself. Dolores shook her head. ‘Je ne sais pas,’ the Frenchman said. ‘Peut-être ici.’
He looked around the shop. The woman looked also, on the counter, on the post-office counter, on the cartons that had arrived yesterday and had not yet been opened, on the floor.
‘I didn’t catch what you said,’ Dolores explained, but the woman continued to speak French.
‘Le sac. Le sac noir.’
‘The handbag of my friend,’ the man said. ‘We lose the handbag.’
‘Lose?’
‘I place it,’ the woman said. ‘It is that I place it.’
Dolores reached for her crutch. She lifted the flap of the counter and helped in the search. She called loudly to her mother and when her mother arrived, wiping her hands on her apron, she explained that a handbag had been lost, that it might have been left in the shop.
‘I would have noticed,’ Mrs Mullally said quickly.
‘Ah, oui, oui,’ the man agreed.
‘She was carrying a handbag,’ Mrs Mullally said, a defensive note entering her voice. ‘She definitely walked out of the shop with it. A square handbag, under her arm.’
Dolores tried to remember: had the woman had a handbag when they walked together to the car? Had she had it when they’d embraced? And then she did remember: the square dark shadow on the red roof, too vivid to be just a shadow.
‘She put it on top of the car,’ she said, and as she spoke she seemed to see what at the time had passed unnoticed: the woman’s arm raised in the moment just before the embrace, the handbag in her hand and then on the red metal that glittered in the sunlight. Dolores had been too intent on the embrace to have observed this properly, but she was certain it had happened.
‘Oh, yes,’ she said, nodding to lend emphasis to her claim. ‘You put it on the roof of your car.’
‘You observe?’ the Frenchman asked.
‘I saw from a window upstairs.’
‘Ah, merci, mademoiselle. Merci beaucoup.’ It was the woman who spoke. The man said they were grateful, thanking Dolores in English.
She watched, leaning against the doorway of the shop. Her mother accompanied the French couple across the road and then disappeared from sight because of the incline down to the mill. Dolores had sensed her mother’s anxiety, the feeling there’d been in her mother’s mind that an accusation was being made. She thought of going upstairs to her bedroom to watch again from the window, and was about to do so when the smell of burning bacon wafted from the kitchen. Hurriedly, she shuffled through the shop and the store-room.
‘They never found it,’ her mother said, returning ten minutes later. ‘They moved the car to see if it had fallen off. They’d been up and down to the stones four times, they said, looking on the path in case she dropped it.’
‘She put it on the car, she couldn’t have dropped it.’
‘Ah, sure, you can’t watch them.’
‘So it’s gone, is it?’
‘They wrote down an address for me in case it would surface some day. She was down in the mouth, that woman.’
Dolores saw the beautiful, slanted face pulled further to one side, the mouth dragged into a corner of itself, tears threatening. The man would put his arm around the smartly clad shoulders, so very slight beneath the leather. He would comfort his lover and promise her another handbag because people like that, who could hire a motor-car, who could come all the way from France to see some stones in a field, wouldn’t have to bother about the expense.
‘Did you tell them to go to the gardai at Rossaphin?’
‘I didn’t mention the gardai to them.’ Mrs Mullally spoke firmly again, and Dolores knew that she hadn’t suggested the police because she didn’t want it to become known that a handbag had disappeared in this manner at the crossroads. ‘Sure, won’t they find the thing in their motor-car somewhere?’
Dolores nodded, silently agreeing that somehow or other this would be the outcome of the matter. When they had returned from the stones the woman must have taken the handbag from the roof without noticing what she was doing, and she must have bundled it into the car without noticing either. Dolores cut a piece of fried bread and dipped it into the little mound of salt on the side of her plate. She began to think about One-Draw Hagan and his enemy, Red Cassidy.
‘Only Henry Garvey was about,’ her mother continued, ‘driving in the old man’s heifers. He’d have been too far away to catch what was going on.’
Dolores nodded again. Perhaps when the lovers returned to the car there had been another embrace, which had driven everything from their minds – like in Travellin’ Saddles when Big Daunty found his Indian love and both of them went into a swoon, lost to the world. Colette Nervi, it said on the piece of paper the French lovers had give
n her mother. 10 rue St Just, Toulouse, France. They had insisted on giving her money also, so that she could send them a letter in case the handbag ever turned up.
Henry Garvey was a large, slow man of forty, known in the neighbourhood for his laziness and his easy-going nature. His uncle, Odd Garvey, had outlived both of Henry’s parents, and the two lived together in the farm-house which the whole Garvey family had once occupied. Odd Garvey, small and wizened in his old age, had never married – due to meanness, so it was locally said. He was reputed to be affected in the head, though this impression which he gave was perhaps no more than another reflection of a miserly nature. The farmhouse he occupied with his nephew was in need of considerable repair, its roof leaky, its walls wet with rising damp. Henry spent as little time as he could there, preferring to ride his mother’s ancient bicycle into Rossaphin every morning and to remain there until it was time to fetch the heifers in. He laid bets, and drank in a number of selected public houses while waiting for the afternoon’s racing to begin. He bet on greyhounds as well as horses, and had been known in one bar or another to offer odds on a variety of propositions, including the year of his uncle’s decease. A permanent smile split his sunburned face, the easy, lazy smile of a man who was never in a hurry. Sometimes in the evenings he rode back into Rossaphin again, to drink more stout and to talk about racehorses. His uncle owned the farmhouse and the heifers, Henry the fields and the brood of turkeys he fattened every year for Christmas. He received payment from his uncle for the grazing of the heifers and from two other farmers for the grass he let them have on an annual basis: with his turkey profits, this made him a living of a kind. His four sisters had long ago left the neighbourhood, only one of them remaining in Ireland.
The Collected Stories Page 129