close as she had so far come to the world of love and passion, and what neither the intercession of Father Deane nor the kindness of the Crowleys could achieve for her was a place among the Friday-night dancers in Rossaphin. Dolores had never been inside the Rossaphin dance-hall and she guessed she never would. There would be no point: she knew that and accepted it. Yet sometimes she dreamed that miraculously she danced beneath fairyland lights to the music she’d heard on the radio, and was sad for a moment after she woke up.
‘I had him backed both ways,’ Henry Garvey said towards the end of that August. ‘I was fortunate all right.’
He had been talking about the horse, Wonder Boy, a day or two before. It was running on some English race- course, destined to make him a fortune. He had told her about a greyhound called Trumpeter, which had won at Limerick, and another greyhound called Smasheroo. His uncle had died, nearly two years ago now, and she and her mother had gone to the funeral in Rossaphin, driven by the Crowleys. Afterwards they’d all had a cup of tea in Love’s Cafe and Mrs Mullally had taken the opportunity to purchase some oilcloth in Buckley’s.
Even though old Garvey had been poor company, it was apparent enough that Henry had become lonely in the farmhouse. He came more often to the shop and lingered there longer than he used to. And then, one morning when Dolores was in the middle of telling him the plot of
‘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
