The Collected Stories

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-etre 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