‘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.