The Collected Stories

‘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.

The bachelors would never marry, the girls of the dance-hall considered: they were wedded already, to stout and whiskey and laziness, to three old mothers somewhere up in the hills. The man with the long arms didn’t drink but he was the same in all other ways: he had the same look of a bachelor, a quality in his face.

‘Great,’ Bowser Egan said, feather-stepping in an inaccurate and inebriated manner. ‘You’re a great little dancer, Bridie.’

‘Will you lay off that!’ cried Madge Dowding, her voice shrill above the sound of the music. Eyes Horgan had slipped two fingers into the back of her dress and was now pretending they’d got there by accident. He smiled blearily, his huge red face streaming with perspiration, the eyes which gave him his nickname protuberant and bloodshot.

‘Watch your step with that one,’ Bowser Egan called out, laughing so that spittle sprayed on to Bridie’s face. Eenie Mackie, who was also dancing near the incident, laughed also and winked at Bridie. Dano Ryan left his drums and sang. ‘Oh, how I miss your gentle kiss,’ he crooned, ‘and long to hold you tight.’

Nobody knew the name of the man with the long arms. The only words he’d ever been known to speak in the Ballroom of Romance were the words that formed his invitation to dance. He was a shy man who stood alone when he wasn’t performing on the dance-floor. He rode away on his bicycle afterwards, not saying good-night to anyone.