Hearing this, Mr McCarthy paused in the lacing of a boot. He thought of his braces, taut now about his shoulders; he thought of a foot fetish he had read about in the public library.
‘I love you that much,’ whispered Mavie.
‘And I you,’ said Mr McCarthy.
‘I dream of you at nights.’
‘I dream of you, my dear,’
Mavie sighed and looked over her shoulder, ill at ease. ‘I cannot think of you dreaming of me.’
‘I dream of you in my narrow twin bed, with that woman in the twin beside it.’
‘Don’t speak like that. Don’t talk to me of the bedroom.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘I can’t bear the thought of the twin beds in that room. I’ve told you before, honey.’
‘Oh, Mavie, Mavie, if we could be together.’
‘I love you that much.’
For a moment there was silence in the kitchen. Then, having tilted his cup to drain it of tea, Mr McCarthy rose to go.
As he crossed the floor his eyes fell on a birthday card propped up on the mantelshelf. It registered with him at once that the day was Mavie’s birthday, and for a moment he considered remarking on that fact. Then he remembered the time and he kissed her on the head, his usual form of farewell. ‘The forty-seventh time,’ he murmured. ‘Today was the forty-seventh.’
She walked with him along the passage to the door of the flat. She watched him mount the basement steps and watched his legs move briskly by the railings above. His footsteps died away and she returned to the kitchen and poured herself a cup of tea. She thought of him keeping his Saturday appointment, a business appointment he had always called it, and afterwards returning on a bus to his suburb. She saw him entering a door, opening it with a latchkey, being greeted by a dog and two children and the big, dark woman who was his wife. The dog barked loudly and the woman shrilled abuse, upbraiding her husband for a misdemeanour or some piece of forgetfulness or some small deceit discovered. Marie could feel his tiredness as he stood in his own hall, the latchkey still poised between his fingers, like a man at bay. Her eyes closed as she held that image in her mind; tears slipped from beneath their lids.
The bus let Mr McCarthy down at an Odeon cinema. He moved rapidly, checking his watch against a brightly lit clock that hung out over a shop. He was reckoning as he walked that there was time to have another cup of tea, with a Danish pastry perhaps, because he felt quite peckish. Afterwards, as always on a Saturday, he’d go to the pictures.
The Ballroom of Romance
On Sundays, or on Mondays if he couldn’t make it and often he couldn’t, Sunday being his busy day, Canon O’Connell arrived at the farm in order to hold a private service with Bridie’s father, who couldn’t get about any more, having had a leg amputated after gangrene had set in. They’d had a pony and cart then and Bridie’s mother had been alive: it hadn’t been difficult for the two of them to help her father on to the cart in order to make the journey to Mass. But two years later the pony had gone lame and eventually had to be destroyed; not long after that her mother had died. ‘Don’t worry about it at all,’ Canon O’Connell had said, referring to the difficulty of transporting her father to Mass. ‘I’ll slip up by the week, Bridie.’
The milk lorry called daily for the single churn of milk, Mr Driscoll delivered groceries and meal in his van, and took away the eggs that Bridie had collected during the week. Since Canon O’Connell had made his offer, in 1953, Bridie’s father hadn’t left the farm.
As well as Mass on Sundays and her weekly visits to a wayside dance-hall Bridie went shopping once every month, cycling to the town early on a Friday afternoon. She bought things for herself, material for a dress, knitting wool, stockings, a newspaper, and paper-backed Wild West novels for her father. She talked in the shops to some of the girls she’d been at school with, girls who had married shop-assistants or shopkeepers, or had become assistants themselves. Most of them had families of their own by now. ‘You’re lucky to be peaceful in the hills,’ they said to Bridie, ‘instead of stuck in a hole like this.’ They had a tired look, most of them, from pregnancies and their efforts to organize and control their large families.
As she cycled back to the hills on a Friday Bridie often felt that they truly envied her her life, and she found it surprising that they should do so. If it hadn’t been for her father she’d have wanted to work in the town also, in the tinned-meat factory maybe, or in a shop. The town had a cinema called the Electric, and a fish-and-chip shop where people met at night, eating chips out of newspaper on the pavement outside. In the evenings, sitting in the farmhouse with her father, she often thought about the town, imagining the shop-windows lit up to display their goods and the sweet-shops still open so that people could purchase chocolates or fruit to take with them to the Electric cinema. But the town was eleven miles away, which was too far to cycle, there and back, for an evening’s entertainment.
‘It’s a terrible thing for you, girl,’ her father used to say, genuinely troubled, ‘tied up to a one-legged man.’ He would sigh heavily, hobbling back from the fields, where he managed as best he could. ‘If your mother hadn’t died,’ he’d say, not finishing the sentence.
If her mother hadn’t died her mother could have looked after him and the scant acres he owned, her mother could somehow have lifted the milk-churn on to the collection platform and attended to the few hens and the cows. ‘I’d be dead without the girl to assist me,’ she’d heard her father saying to Canon O’Connell, and Canon O’Connell replied that he was certainly lucky to have her.
‘Amn’t I as happy here as anywhere?’ she’d say herself, but her father knew she was pretending and was saddened because the weight of circumstances had so harshly interfered with her life.
Although her father still called her a girl, Bridie was thirty-six. She was tall and strong: the skin of her fingers and her palms were stained, and harsh to touch. The labour they’d experienced had found its way into them, as though juices had come out of vegetation and pigment out of soiclass="underline" since childhood she’d torn away the rough scotch grass that grew each spring among her father’s mangolds and sugar beet; since childhood she’d harvested potatoes in August, her hands daily rooting in the ground she loosened and turned. Wind had toughened the flesh of her face, sun had browned it; her neck and nose were lean, her lips touched with early wrinkles.
But on Saturday nights Bridie forgot the scotch grass and the soil. In different dresses she cycled to the dance-hall, encouraged to make the journey by her father. ‘Doesn’t it do you good, girl?’ he’d say, as though he imagined she begrudged herself the pleasure. ‘Why wouldn’t you enjoy yourself?’ She’d cook him his tea and then he’d settle down with the wireless, or maybe a Wild West novel. In time, while still she danced, he’d stoke the fire up and hobble his way upstairs to bed.
The dance-hall, owned by Mr Justin Dwyer, was miles from anywhere, a lone building by the roadside with treeless boglands all around and a gravel expanse in front of it. On pink pebbled cement its title was painted in an azure blue that matched the depth of the background shade yet stood out well, unfussily proclaiming The Ballroom of Romance. Above these letters four coloured bulbs – in red, green, orange and mauve – were lit at appropriate times, an indication that the evening rendezvous was open for business. Only the façade of the building was pink, the other walls being a more ordinary grey. And inside, except for pink swing-doors, everything was blue.
On Saturday nights Mr Justin Dwyer, a small, thin man, unlocked the metal grid that protected his property and drew it back, creating an open mouth from which music would later pour. He helped his wife to carry crates of lemonade and packets of biscuits from their car, and then took up a position in the tiny vestibule between the drawn-back grid and the pink swing-doors. He sat at a card-table, with money and tickets spread out before him. He’d made a fortune, people said: he owned other ball-rooms also.