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
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.
‘There was foreign people over at the stones,’ he reported to his uncle on the evening the French couple had come. ‘Jabbering away.’
‘Did you approach them? Did you charge them a price for going over our fields?’
Henry vaguely wagged his head, and knowing that such a charge had not been made the old man continued to grumble, his empty gums squashing up baked beans before he swallowed them. Because he had difficulty with crusts, he tore pieces of bread from the centre of a slice and dipped the soft white lumps into the sauce that went with the beans. Mumbling through this food, he said that the number of people who nowadays crossed their land was a disgrace. It was a favourite mealtime topic: every day, whether there had been visitors to the standing stones or not, the old man urged Henry to protest to the police or the Board of Works, or somebody at the courthouse in Rossaphin. He was convinced that a substantial sum of money was owing to the Garvey family because no toll had ever been charged on the right of way to Drumgawnie Rath. Now, at eighty-six, he was too old to do anything about it. He hadn’t been to Mass for ten years, nor spoken to anyone except, his nephew for six. No one ever came to the farmhouse.
In Henry’s view the old man could have kept himself normal by picking up the groceries and the newspaper every day in Mrs Mullally’s shop. In a normal manner he could have whiled away his time with Mrs Mullally or the daughter instead of skulking behind the trees, looking out for visitors. But he wouldn’t enter the shop because he couldn’t bear to hand over money to anyone, so Henry had to see to everything like that. Not that he particularly minded. He had a basket which he hung from the handlebars of his bicycle and he actually enjoyed loitering in shops, Mrs Mullally’s or anyone else’s. He would light a cigarette and sometimes in Mullally’s might have a bottle of lemonade. He would lean his back against the counter and listen to the Mullally girl going on about the Wild West stories she read. She was a decent enough looking creature in her way, the only pity was the leg she was afflicted with.
‘Dressed up to the nines they were,’ Henry continued in the kitchen. ‘A useless type of person, I’d say.’
His uncle emitted a sucking noise. The footsteps made by the visitors wore the grass down. Another thing was, the Board of Works should be informed that cars were being left without charge on the piece of verge by the mill.
‘I don’t think it’s a matter for the Board of Works.’
‘Why wouldn’t it be? Didn’t the Board man come to see me in 1949? Wasn’t it the Board drew attention to the stones before any stranger knew they were there?’
‘If it’s anyone’s concern I’d say it was the County Council’s.’
‘Go into the courthouse in that case. Go into the head clerk and say we’re deprived of grass for the cattle due to footsteps wearing it down.’
Henry promised that he would do as he was asked. He always promised when the subject came up. He ate his beans and bread and drank several cups of tea. He didn’t say that there were other ways of charging for the use of the path through the fields. He didn’t explain that you could get what was owing to you if you were sharp with your eyes and used the intelligence you were born with.
Four years after the Frenchwoman’s mishap with her handbag Dolores became aware – in the late summer of 1972 – of Henry Garvey’s interest in her. During that July and August his manner changed. He no longer stood with his back to her, for instance, smiling through the open door at the roadway outside while she told him the plot of another Wild West novel. Instead he faced her, leaning an elbow on the counter. He even lifted his eyes to her face and scrutinized it. Now arid again his glance moved over her long dark hair and over her shoulders. Once she’d noticed him looking at her hands.
It had never occurred to Dolores, twenty-six now, that romance would come her way. One cold January day, ages ago, the Crowleys had driven her and her mother to the cinema in Ballyreddy, sixteen miles beyond Rossaphin, for the Sunday matinee. Father Deane had had a hand in the arrangement – had no doubt said that it would be an act of charity – and the Crowleys, seeking through his good offices a chance of heavenly life, had acceded easily to his wish.
