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.