People came on bicycles or in old motor-cars, country people like Bridie from remote hill farms and villages. People who did not often see other people met there, girls and boys, men and women. They paid Mr Dwyer and passed into his dance-hall, where shadows were cast on pale-blue walls and light from a crystal bowl was dim. The band, known as the Romantic Jazz Band, was composed of clarinet, drums and piano. The drummer sometimes sang.
Bridie had been going to the dance-hall since first she left the Presentation Nuns, before her mother’s death. She didn’t mind the journey, which was seven miles there and seven back: she’d travelled as far every day to the Presentation Nuns on the same bicycle, which had once been the property of her mother, an old Rudge purchased originally in 1936. On Sundays she cycled six miles to Mass, but she never minded either: she’d grown quite used to all that.
‘How’re you, Bridie?’ inquired Mr Justin Dwyer when she arrived in a new scarlet dress one autumn evening. She said she was all right and in reply to Mr Dwyer’s second query she said that her father was all right also. ‘I’ll go up one of these days,’ promised Mr Dwyer, which was a promise he’d been making for twenty years.
She paid the entrance fee and passed through the pink swing-doors. The Romantic Jazz Band was playing a familiar melody of the past, ‘The Destiny Waltz’. In spite of the band’s title, jazz was not ever played in the ballroom: Mr Dwyer did not personally care for that kind of music, nor had he cared for various dance movements that had come and gone over the years. Jiving, rock and roll, twisting and other such variations had all been resisted by Mr Dwyer, who believed that a ballroom should be, as much as possible, a dignified place. The Romantic Jazz Band consisted of Mr Maloney, Mr Swanton, and Dano Ryan on drums. They were three middle-aged men who drove out from the town in Mr Maloney’s car, amateur performers who were employed otherwise by the tinned-meat factory, the Electricity Supply Board and the County Council.
‘How’re you, Bridie?’ inquired Dano Ryan as she passed him on her way to the cloakroom. He was idle for a moment with his drums, ‘The Destiny Waltz’ not calling for much attention from him.
‘I’m all right, Dano,’ she said. ‘Are you fit yourself? Are the eyes better?’ The week before he’d told her that he’d developed a watering of the eyes that must have been some kind of cold or other. He’d woken up with it in the morning and it had persisted until the afternoon: it was a new experience, he’d told her, adding that he’d never had a day’s illness or discomfort in his life.
‘I think I need glasses,’ he said now, and as she passed into the cloakroom she imagined him in glasses, repairing the roads, as he was employed to do by the County Council. You hardly ever saw a road-mender with glasses, she reflected, and she wondered if all the dust that was inherent in his work had perhaps affected his eyes.
‘How’re you, Bridie?’ a girl called Eenie Mackie said in the cloakroom, a girl who’d left the Presentation Nuns only a year ago.
‘That’s a lovely dress, Eenie,’ Bridie said. ‘Is it nylon, that?’
‘Tricel actually. Drip-dry.’
Bridie took off her coat and hung it on a hook. There was a small wash-basin in the cloakroom above which hung a discoloured oval mirror. Used tissues and pieces of cotton-wool, cigarette-butts and matches covered the concrete floor. Lengths of green-painted timber partitioned off a lavatory in a corner.
‘Jeez, you’re looking great, Bridie,’ Madge Dowding remarked, waiting for her turn at the mirror. She moved towards it as she spoke, taking off a pair of spectacles before endeavouring to apply make-up to the lashes of her eye. She stared myopically into the oval mirror, humming while the other girls became restive.
‘Will you hurry up, for God’s sake!’ shouted Eenie Mackie. ‘We’re standing here all night, Madge.’
Madge Dowding was the only one who was older than Bridie. She was thirty-nine, although often she said she was younger. The girls sniggered about that, saying that Madge Dowding should accept her condition – her age and her squint and her poor complexion – and not make herself ridiculous going out after men. What man would be bothered with the like of her anyway? Madge Dowding would do better to give herself over to do Saturday-night work for the Legion of Mary: wasn’t Canon O’Connell always looking for aid?
‘Is that fellow there?’ she asked now, moving away from the mirror. ‘The guy with the long arms. Did anyone see him outside?’
‘He’s dancing with Cat Bolger,’ one of the girls replied. ‘She has herself glued to him.’
‘Lover boy,’ remarked Patty Byrne, and everyone laughed because the person referred to was hardly a boy any more, being over fifty it was said, a bachelor who came only occasionally to the dance-hall.
Madge Dowding left the cloakroom rapidly, not bothering to pretend she wasn’t anxious about the conjunction of Cat Bolger and the man with the long arms. Two sharp spots of red had come into her cheeks, and when she stumbled in her haste the girls in the cloakroom laughed. A younger girl would have pretended to be casual.
Bridie chatted, waiting for the mirror. Some girls, not wishing to be delayed, used the mirrors of their compacts. Then in twos and threes, occasionally singly, they left the cloakroom and took their places on upright wooden chairs at one end of the dance-hall, waiting to be asked to dance. Mr Maloney, Mr Swanton and Dano Ryan played ‘Harvest Moon’ and ‘I Wonder Who’s Kissing Her Now’ and ‘I’ll Be Around’.
Bridie danced. Her father would be falling asleep by the fire; the wireless, tuned in to Radio Eireann, would be murmuring in the background. Already he’d have listened to Faith and Order and Spot the Talent. His Wild West novel, Three Rode Fast by Jake Matall, would have dropped from his single knee on to the flagged floor. He would wake with a jerk as he did every night and, forgetting what night it was, might be surprised not to see her, for usually she was sitting there at the table, mending clothes or washing eggs. ‘Is it time for the news?’ he’d automatically say.
Dust and cigarette smoke formed a haze beneath the crystal bowl, feet thudded, girls shrieked and laughed, some of them dancing together for want of a male partner. The music was loud, the musicians had taken off their jackets. Vigorously they played a number of tunes from State Fair and then, more romantically, ‘Just One of Those Things’. The tempo increased for a Paul Jones, after which Bridie found herself with a youth who told her he was saving up to emigrate, the nation in his opinion being finished. ‘I’m up in the hills with the uncle,’ he said, ‘labouring fourteen hours a day. Is it any life for a young fellow?’ She knew his uncle, a hill farmer whose stony acres were separated from her father’s by one other farm only. ‘He has me gutted with work,’ the youth told her. ‘Is there sense in it at all, Bridie?’
At ten o’clock there was a stir, occasioned by the arrival of three middle-aged bachelors who’d cycled over from Carey’s public house. They shouted and whistled, greeting other people across the dancing area. They smelt of stout and sweat and whiskey.
Every Saturday at just this time they arrived, and, having sold them their tickets, Mr Dwyer folded up his card-table and locked the tin box that held the evening’s takings: his ballroom was complete.
‘How’re you, Bridie?’ one of the bachelors, known as Bowser Egan, inquired. Another one, Tim Daly, asked Patty Byrne how she was. ‘Will we take the floor?’ Eyes Horgan suggested to Madge Dowding, already pressing the front of his navy-blue suit against the net of her dress. Bridie danced with Bowser Egan, who said she was looking great.