‘There was foreign people over at the stones,’ he reported to his uncle on the evening the French couple had come. ‘Jabbering away.’
‘Did you approach them? Did you charge them a price for going over our fields?’
Henry vaguely wagged his head, and knowing that such a charge had not been made the old man continued to grumble, his empty gums squashing up baked beans before he swallowed them. Because he had difficulty with crusts, he tore pieces of bread from the centre of a slice and dipped the soft white lumps into the sauce that went with the beans. Mumbling through this food, he said that the number of people who nowadays crossed their land was a disgrace. It was a favourite mealtime topic: every day, whether there had been visitors to the standing stones or not, the old man urged Henry to protest to the police or the Board of Works, or somebody at the courthouse in Rossaphin. He was convinced that a substantial sum of money was owing to the Garvey family because no toll had ever been charged on the right of way to Drumgawnie Rath. Now, at eighty-six, he was too old to do anything about it. He hadn’t been to Mass for ten years, nor spoken to anyone except, his nephew for six. No one ever came to the farmhouse.
In Henry’s view the old man could have kept himself normal by picking up the groceries and the newspaper every day in Mrs Mullally’s shop. In a normal manner he could have whiled away his time with Mrs Mullally or the daughter instead of skulking behind the trees, looking out for visitors. But he wouldn’t enter the shop because he couldn’t bear to hand over money to anyone, so Henry had to see to everything like that. Not that he particularly minded. He had a basket which he hung from the handlebars of his bicycle and he actually enjoyed loitering in shops, Mrs Mullally’s or anyone else’s. He would light a cigarette and sometimes in Mullally’s might have a bottle of lemonade. He would lean his back against the counter and listen to the Mullally girl going on about the Wild West stories she read. She was a decent enough looking creature in her way, the only pity was the leg she was afflicted with.
‘Dressed up to the nines they were,’ Henry continued in the kitchen. ‘A useless type of person, I’d say.’
His uncle emitted a sucking noise. The footsteps made by the visitors wore the grass down. Another thing was, the Board of Works should be informed that cars were being left without charge on the piece of verge by the mill.
‘I don’t think it’s a matter for the Board of Works.’
‘Why wouldn’t it be? Didn’t the Board man come to see me in 1949? Wasn’t it the Board drew attention to the stones before any stranger knew they were there?’
‘If it’s anyone’s concern I’d say it was the County Council’s.’
‘Go into the courthouse in that case. Go into the head clerk and say we’re deprived of grass for the cattle due to footsteps wearing it down.’
Henry promised that he would do as he was asked. He always promised when the subject came up. He ate his beans and bread and drank several cups of tea. He didn’t say that there were other ways of charging for the use of the path through the fields. He didn’t explain that you could get what was owing to you if you were sharp with your eyes and used the intelligence you were born with.
Four years after the Frenchwoman’s mishap with her handbag Dolores became aware – in the late summer of 1972 – of Henry Garvey’s interest in her. During that July and August his manner changed. He no longer stood with his back to her, for instance, smiling through the open door at the roadway outside while she told him the plot of another Wild West novel. Instead he faced her, leaning an elbow on the counter. He even lifted his eyes to her face and scrutinized it. Now arid again his glance moved over her long dark hair and over her shoulders. Once she’d noticed him looking at her hands.
It had never occurred to Dolores, twenty-six now, that romance would come her way. One cold January day, ages ago, the Crowleys had driven her and her mother to the cinema in Ballyreddy, sixteen miles beyond Rossaphin, for the Sunday matinée. Father Deane had had a hand in the arrangement – had no doubt said that it would be an act of charity – and the Crowleys, seeking through his good offices a chance of heavenly life, had acceded easily to his wish. From Here to Eternity the film had been, and Dolores had never forgotten any of it, far richer in romance than anything in her father’s Wild West Library. But that was as close as she had so far come to the world of love and passion, and what neither the intercession of Father Deane nor the kindness of the Crowleys could achieve for her was a place among the Friday-night dancers in Rossaphin. Dolores had never been inside the Rossaphin dance-hall and she guessed she never would. There would be no point: she knew that and accepted it. Yet sometimes she dreamed that miraculously she danced beneath fairyland lights to the music she’d heard on the radio, and was sad for a moment after she woke up.
‘I had him backed both ways,’ Henry Garvey said towards the end of that August. ‘I was fortunate all right.’
He had been talking about the horse, Wonder Boy, a day or two before. It was running on some English race-course, destined to make him a fortune. He had told her about a greyhound called Trumpeter, which had won at Limerick, and another greyhound called Smasheroo. His uncle had died, nearly two years ago now, and she and her mother had gone to the funeral in Rossaphin, driven by the Crowleys. Afterwards they’d all had a cup of tea in Love’s Café and Mrs Mullally had taken the opportunity to purchase some oilcloth in Buckley’s.
Even though old Garvey had been poor company, it was apparent enough that Henry had become lonely in the farmhouse. He came more often to the shop and lingered there longer than he used to. And then, one morning when Dolores was in the middle of telling him the plot of Kid Kelly, she found him scrutinizing her even more closely than before. Her mother was present on that occasion and Dolores knew she had observed, and had understood, Henry Garvey’s interest. After he’d gone her mother was beside herself with delight, although she didn’t say a word. Dolores heard her humming in the kitchen, and her manner was so sprightly when Jimmy Reilly delivered the bacon in the afternoon that he asked her if she’d won the sweep.
‘D’you know what it is,’ Henry Garvey said at the beginning of September, ‘I’m uncertain what to do with myself.’
As he spoke, he pushed his cigarette packet across the counter at her. She was sitting on the black-topped stool which Father Deane had given her as a present, its legs cut down to just the right height. She could sit on it and lean on the counter, just like Henry Garvey was leaning now, on a level with him.
‘The old farmhouse above is shook,’ he said.
Her mother was not there. Her mother had taken to slipping out to the potato slope whenever Henry Garvey appeared, even if it was raining. Dolores knew that the news of the courtship had been passed on to the Crowleys and to the van men who called at the shop, to Father Deane and to all the people who came to the crossroads for their groceries. When she rested in the afternoons she could hear the excited tone of her mother’s voice in the shop below. She was never able to make out the words but she knew that the latest of Henry Garvey’s attentions was being retailed and exaggerated.
‘I’m wondering,’ he said at the beginning of September, ‘would I sell the old fellow’s heifers?’
She made a slight gesture with the hand that held the cigarette, a shrug of the fingers intended to imply that Henry Garvey was his own master, that he alone had the privilege of reaching a decision about his late uncle’s heifers.
‘I have the acres all right, but sure what use is the old house to me? Isn’t it falling down on account of the old fellow wouldn’t permit a bit of cement to be applied to it?’
Dolores, who had never seen the farmhouse, made the same gesture again.
‘And sure you could hardly call them heifers any more. Wouldn’t I be better without the trouble of those lassies?’
He turned his ample smile towards her, the red-brick flesh of his face screwed up into small bulges. She had only once seen him wearing a tie and that was at the funeral of his uncle. On Su
ndays he went to a later Mass than her mother and herself: she supposed he put the tie on for that also.
‘Another factor is,’ he continued, ‘I need a new bicycle.’
In the shop, and in the rooms above it and behind it, on the slope out at the back, he could take her father’s place. He could occupy the chair in which her father had so abruptly died. He could marry into the shop and the house just as her father had, and he would bring with him the rent for the grazing of his fields. Her father had brought nothing.
‘What I’m wondering is,’ he said, ‘could I learn to drive a car?’
She did not reply. She did not even make the same gesture again. She saw herself stepping out of the car he spoke of, the point of the crutch secure on the pavement. She saw herself limping beside him towards the cinema at Ballyreddy, up the steps and down the long passage with framed photographs of film stars on the walls. She saw herself in Rossaphin, not having to wait outside the Provincial Bank for Jimmy Reilly and his van, but going at her leisure in and out of the shops. On a Sunday, Mass would be attended when it was convenient, no need to fit in with the Crowleys. And would there be any harm in going, just once, into the dance-hall and standing there for a while, looking at the dancers and listening to the music?
‘I’m sure you could drive a car,’ she said. ‘If Sheedy can drive that bread van I’d say you could drive a car.’
‘The old bike was a good machine in its day, but the mudguards is overtaken by the rust.’
‘A car would be handy for you, Henry.’
‘There’s nothing I like better than talking about matters like that to you.’
He paid the compliment without looking at her, gazing as he used to out into the roadway. He was nearly twenty years older than she was, but no other man would ever come into this shop and say he liked talking to her about bicycles and cars. No other man would examine her hair arid her hands – or if he did he’d stop it in a hurry, like the new young conductor on the long-distance bus had when he’d realized she was crippled and misshapen.
Henry Garvey left the shop after he’d paid the compliment, and when her mother came in from the back Dolores told her he was considering buying a car. Her mother would have already said prayers, begging Our Lady to make it all right, begging that a crippled woman should not one day find herself alone at the crossroads. The paralysis had been a shock out of nowhere: the attentions of Henry Garvey were just as unexpected, a surprise that came surely from God.
‘A car?’ her mother said. ‘Ah, wouldn’t that be grand, pet?’
The crossroads was nearer to the town than the farmhouse was, the journey would be shorter, and easier without the stony track that led down to the farm. Often, lounging in the shop, he’d smelt a bit of cooking going on in the kitchen; he remembered Mullally in his day, selling stamps and weighing out potatoes. He liked it when she told him about Kid Kelly and One-Draw Hagan, and she appeared to be interested when he outlined his chances in a race. When an animal didn’t come in she appeared to be sympathetic.
‘That’s fixed so,’ he said to her on the day they arranged the marriage. ‘Sure, it’ll be suitable for the pair of us.’
He gave her a present, a necklace he’d found in the handbag he’d taken years ago as payment for all the strangers who had walked across the fields. There were little blue jewels in it: twenty-two of them, she told him, because she counted them. A week or so later he pushed the handbag itself across the counter at her. He’d found it with the necklace, he said, among his mother’s possessions. Tim Howley was teaching him to drive a car, he said.
Dolores knew when Henry Garvey gave her the necklace that Mrs Garvey had never possessed such a piece of jewellery. Her mother knew also, but did not say anything. It wasn’t until the handbag appeared that both of them guessed Henry Garvey had stolen the Frenchwoman’s property. They still did not say anything. In the drawer where the postal orders and the registration book were kept there remained the scrap of paper on which Colette Nervi had written down her address. It had been there for all the intervening time, together with the small sum of money for postage in case the handbag ever came to light. Mrs Mullally destroyed the scrap of paper after Dolores had received her presents, and looking in the drawer one day Dolores discovered that she had done so.
The wedding was to take place in June. Two girls Dolores had been at the convent with were to be bridesmaids, and one of Henry Garvey’s bar-room companions had agreed to act as best man. Everyone for miles around Drumgawnie was invited, all the shop’s customers, the same people who’d attended Mr Mullally’s funeral nineteen years ago, and Odd Garvey’s funeral. The Crowleys were invited, and some Rossaphin people, Jimmy Reilly and Sheedy the bread man. Some of the other van-drivers lived too far beyond the district but all of them, without exception, brought gifts for Dolores a week or so before the wedding-day.
Father Deane had a crutch painted white and asked Mrs Crowley to cover the arm-support in lace to match the wedding-dress. Dolores thought she’d never seen a crutch look so pretty, and wondered if it was a marriage tradition for crippled brides, but did not ask. Henry Garvey’s farmhouse was up for sale, the cattle had already been sold. Mrs Mullally had arranged to move out of her room, into the one that had always been Dolores’s. ‘The simplest thing,’ she said, not dwelling upon the subject.
‘I don’t know will he ever communicate the knack of it,’ Henry Garvey said, referring to Tim Howley’s efforts to teach him to drive a motor-car. The car had a way of jumping about with him, juddering and stalling before he even got it started. He had heavy feet, Tim Howley explained: a man driving a car needed to be sensitive with the clutch and the accelerator. ‘You’d think it would be easy,’ Henry said to Dolores, and she softly encouraged him, urging him to persevere. There would be nothing nicer, she continued in the same soft voice, than having a car. The white crutch was in her bedroom, in a corner by the dressing-table, waiting for the day in June. She had covered the lace on the arm-support with a piece of brown paper from the shop in case it got dirty.
On the night before the wedding Dolores wondered what else there had been in the handbag. Money would have been bet on a horse or a grey-hound, keys perhaps thrown away; somewhere in the unsold farmhouse there’d be a make-up compact. In a month’s time there was to be an auction of the furniture and the few remaining bits of farm machinery: before that happened she would find the compact and hide it carefully away. She would not keep her money in the black handbag, nor her cigarettes and matches; she would not be seen in the shops with it. She would be careful with the gifts of Henry Garvey in case, after all, the lovers from France had reported the loss to the police. Henry Garvey would not notice that the necklace was never seen at her neck because he was not the kind to notice things; nor was he the kind to realize that you had to be careful. She felt drowsily comforted by knowing what she must do, but when she turned the light out and attempted to sleep a chilliness possessed her: what if Henry Garvey rode over in the morning on his mother’s bicycle to say he’d made a mistake? What if he stood with his back to the counter the way he used to, gazing with his smile out into the roadway? He would not say that the folly of the marriage had at last been borne in upon him. He would not say that he had seen in his mind’s eye the ugliness of his bride’s body, the shrivelled limb distorting everything. He would not say it had suddenly occurred to him that the awkward, dragging movement when she walked without her crutch was more than he could look at for the remainder of his life. ‘I gave you stolen presents,’ he’d say instead. ‘I’m too ashamed to marry you.’ And then he’d mount the bicycle and ride away like one of the cowboys of the Wild West.
In the darkness she lit another cigarette, calming herself. If he’d rather, he could have this room on his own and she could share her mother’s. Being a bachelor for so long, that might be a preference he’d have. She’d hate it, in with her mother, but there was an empty back room, never used, which one day might be fixed up for her. There would be a bed
and a wardrobe up at the farm, there might even be a length of linoleum going.
She turned the light on and read. She finished Silent Prairie and began one she hadn’t read for ages, King Cann Strikes Gold! by Chas. D. Wasser. Through a faint dawn the birds eventually began to sing. At half past six she heard her mother moving.
He made a cup of tea in the kitchen. No one would buy the place, the way the roof and the kitchen wall were. The wall would hardly last the winter, the crack had widened suddenly, nearly nine inches it must be now. The old furniture would fetch maybe a hundred pounds.
At the kitchen table he stirred sugar into his tea. He wondered if he’d ever manage the driving. And if he did, he wondered if Mrs Mullally would stand the price of a car. It was a matter he hadn’t mentioned yet, but with all the trouble he was going to over the learning wouldn’t she tumble to it that he had done his share? The three of them were in it together, with the farmhouse the way it was and the girl the way she was. It was only a pity there hadn’t been a ring in the handbag he’d taken as payment for the use of the path across his fields. Still and all, he’d got seven to one on Derby Joan with the money there’d been in the purse, which easily covered the cost of the ring he’d had to buy.
He drank his tea and then moved over to the sink to shave himself. They stocked razor-blades in the shop, which would be useful too.
In front of the altar she leant on the white crutch, wishing she could manage without it but knowing that the effort would be too much. Father Deane’s voice whispered at them, and she could sense the delight in it, the joy that he truly felt. Beside her, Henry Garvey was wearing a tie, as she had known he would. There was a carnation and a few shreds of fern in his buttonhole. He smelt of soap.
She had to kneel, which was always difficult, but in time the ceremony was over and she made her way down the aisle, careful on the tiles, one hand gripping the wooden cross-piece of the crutch, the other holding on to him. Hidden beneath her wedding-dress, the necklace that had been stolen from Colette Nervi was cool on the flesh of her neck, and in those moments on the aisle Dolores recalled the embrace. She saw the lovers as they had been that day, the woman’s leather coat, the man knocking out his pipe. Sunlight glimmered on the red, polished car, and enriched the green of the nettles and the docks. The woman’s fingers were splayed out on her lover’s dark head; the two faces were pressed into each other like the faces of the man and the woman in From Here to Eternity.
The Collected Stories Page 130