Collected Stories

The Property of Colette Nervi

Drumgawnie the crossroads was known as, and for miles around the land was called Drumgawnie also. There was a single shop at the crossroads, next to a pink house with its roof gone. There was an abandoned mill, with tall grain stores no longer used for any purpose. Drumgawnie Rath, a ring of standing stones that predated history, was half a mile across the fields where Odd Garvey grazed his cattle.

It was in 1959, an arbitrary date as far as the people who lived in and around Drumgawnie were concerned, that visitors began to take an interest in the stones, drawing their cars up by the mill and the grain stores. English or French people they usually were, spring or summertime tourists who always called in at the shop to inquire the way. Mrs Mullally, who owned the shop, had thought of erecting a small sign but in the end had abandoned the notion on the grounds that one day, perhaps, a visitor might glance about her premises and purchase something. None ever had.

‘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 came 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 given 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.

‘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 Sundays 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.