with a Danish pastry perhaps, because he felt quite peckish. Afterwards, as always on a Saturday, he’d go to the pictures.
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 soil: 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
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.
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.
