Echoes (32 page)

He admired her dress. He said that it was a lovely sunny color, that she and Clare O'Brien looked the classiest girls in the whole ballroom. She asked would Fiona be here, but he said she had a summer flu. They both agreed that Uncle Dick had turned out to be a demon dancer. He hadn't been off the floor since he came in and insisted on doing formal quicksteps to the rock and roll numbers.

James and Caroline Nolan had arrived, and Gerry had seen them. He escorted Josie back to where he had found her with a big smile. “I wish they all danced like you, Josie Dillon, the Ginger Rogers of Castlebay.” Josie was pink with delight. She was about to tell Clare, but at that moment Clare was whisked off by Uncle Dick. Josie could have died of mortification. Why couldn't Uncle Dick just sit down like other old people, or venture gently into a foxtrot or something? Why did he have to make a fool of her by asking her friend to dance? The band announced a series of Latin American numbers beginning with the “Blue Tango.”

“I'm not great at it, not a semiprofessional like yourself,” Clare had confessed.

“Listen to me once. You're meant to be a bright girl. It's one step rock back, two steps rock back, three steps rock back. Repeat that.”

They hadn't started to dance yet. Clare repeated it.

“Right, hold on tight and follow me, none of this independent doing fandangos on your own.”

He stood beside her but facing in a different direction, he stretched their arms out as if they were pretending to be scarecrows in a field. He waited for the beat and they were off. The man was a wizard. She began to enjoy it and relaxed when it came to the turns. She noticed other people admiring them too, and saw from one part of the room Miss O'Hara, doing a very amateurish version of the same thing with Dr. Power, smiling proudly toward her . . . Gerry Doyle—dancing with Bernie Conway—was looking at her in delight. David Power, dancing with Caroline Nolan, called her attention to the spectacular couple. Clare would have preferred it to have been a younger and more dashing man but she forgot about that after a while. Especially when they went into the cha cha: “. . . rock forward, rock backward, side close side . . .” he said and after a few bars she had all the confidence in the world. They won a spot prize too. A bottle of Jameson Ten Year Old.

“You can have that. My drinking days are over,” Dick Dillon said.

“Your dancing days sure aren't,” Clare said and went, flushed with success, to leave the bottle in the ladies' cloakroom and get a ticket for it.

The Committee were very pleased. They had charged a slightly higher price for admission, which was justified by the many gifts which would be given away, but it also kept out some of the riffraff. Not
all
the riffraff, they noticed, as they saw Mogsy Byrne throwing Chrissie O'Brien around in the way most calculated to show her knickers to the crowd. Still.

There was a brisk trade at the mineral bar. Oranges and lemons and ginger beers were passing with speed across the counter, and there was a percentage on all that for the Committee, too. No real drink could be served in the dance hall, on this night any more than any other. Dancers wanting a break to visit a pub applied for a pass-out card, and a good few had small bottles in hip pockets.

The band, which was there for the season, had dressed itself up to mark the special nature of the night. The men wore rosettes in their buttonholes, and Lovely Helena, the vocalist, wore a big rose at the waist of her tulle and net dress.

Out in the street, youngsters who were considered well below the age tried to peer in and every time the inner door swung open they caught a glimpse of the glitter inside. Through the ventilators the sound of the singing and the clapping of the announcement of yet another prize being delivered were heard, and then blasts from the band again. During the summer people became used to the sound of the dance hall. It was as familiar as the waves crashing on the shore, background music.

Sometimes people shook their heads with amazement and said wasn't it extraordinary that Lionel Donelly of all people would have had the foresight to build a dance hall, to borrow the money and build a big monstrosity that everyone said would be a white elephant. Now there were people driving to it from far and wide. Lionel, who never passed an exam in his life, had gone to England to learn the building trade and learned that people were building dance halls.

Clare went back to the dance floor. She thought she saw David Power coming toward her, but before he was near enough Gerry Doyle reached out his hand for her. It was a slow smoochy dance and he didn't bother holding her at arm's length for a few bars, he put his arms around her at once and she laid her cheek against his. They were the same height. She had worn her flat shoes.

The lights were dimmer for this number, the sparkles of the glittering globe cast a thousand little shines on people. “Once I had a secret love,” sang the girl in the miles of net dress at the microphone. People sang the words softly to each other, oddly assorted people like David Power who sang them into Josie's ear because he hadn't got to Clare O'Brien before Romeo. James Nolan sang them into Bernie Conway's ear, because when he saw Gerry Doyle dancing with her, he thought she must be something special. Dick Dillon and Angela didn't sing them at all because they were concentrating on the curly bits and side chassis. Gerry didn't sing them because he didn't need to, and Clare had her eyes tightly closed.

 

At the last dance Josie was happy because finally James had seen her and flung her into a spirited version of “California, Here I Come”; and a great many other people were happy too. The Committee had made a great deal of money, the dance had been a social success, and all the people who had given spot prizes were pleased with the advertising.

“I have a caravan,” Gerry Doyle told Clare. They had danced together three times, almost enough to be considered a lifetime commitment for Gerry.

“A what?”

“A caravan. All of my own. I'm looking after it for people. They only come at the weekend.”

“Really, that's nice,” Clare said innocently.

“So?”

“So what?”

“Will we go there? You and me?”

“Now?” she asked, her heart beginning to beat faster.

“Sure.”

There was a pause. He was looking straight at her. She must say yes or no. She was not going to make any blustering excuses.

“No,” she said. “Thanks all the same.”

His eyes showed nothing, there wasn't a hint of persuading her to change her mind.

“Right,” he said. “Good night, sweetheart.”

Before her eyes, he went over to Caroline Nolan. She heard him sound surprised to see her, as if he hadn't known she was in the dance hall all night.

Clare watched Caroline smiling delightedly as Gerry suggested something. It was too far away to hear, but when he put his arm around Caroline's shoulder and they walked off together, she knew it had to do with his having a caravan.

 

Dr. Power said he would give Angela a lift in to collect her mother. He never made that journey into the town without driving people in one direction or the other; he was the kindest man that ever lived.

“I saw you leaping about in great style with Dick Dillon,” he teased her.

“Well, would you have believed it? The man could have medals for it. I never got such a surprise.”

“He's a very nice fellow, Dick. Never got a proper chance in that hotel. The old mother always preferred his brother. Still, he consoled himself fairly spectacularly during his day.”

Angela smiled. That was one way of describing a man who had been as heavy a drinker as her own father. Of course, Dick Dillon had been able to have the money to do it in comfort, and the trips to Dublin to be dried out, and now he had stopped. He had seen her home and come in after the dance; she had made tea and bacon sandwiches, and they had talked long into the night.

“What he needs is a steadying hand, Angela,” Dr. Power said.

“Am I going to be hearing this for the rest of my life?”

“Probably. They'll say you could do worse. He's not a bad catch, sensible too nowadays, all the wild oats sown. Oh, they'll say that.”

“But it's not a question of catching—sure it's not? I always thought that if it happened it would be two people suddenly discovering they were more interested in each other than anything else. Not a
catch.
”

“It
should
be like that,” Dr. Power said, negotiating a herd of cows and the boy who was halfheartedly moving them along the road.

“How about you?” She felt impertinent, but he could always laugh it off if he didn't want to answer.

“I met Molly at a dance in Dublin on my twenty-fifth birthday. She had a red dress on and she had her head back laughing and I thought to myself that I'd love her to be laughing like that at things I said. And that was it, I suppose. I went after her relentlessly. It was nothing to do with her being a catch, or me being one.”

“And she did go on laughing, didn't she?”

“Yes, mainly. Sometimes it's a bit quiet and dull here in the winter, and I wish she had more people to meet that would entertain her. Or that we had more children. If you have only one you concentrate on him too much. I'm always thinking about his medical studies and Molly's always wondering about his meals and damp clothes and what he does with himself in Dublin. If we had half a dozen it would be more spread out.”

“But David's sensible, isn't he? And he's as bright as paint.”

“He is, and we've managed to move very successfully from the notion of you and Dick Dillon.”

“He's an old man, with nothing on his mind except his long-lost days of drinking and sometimes the thought of an olde-tyme waltz.”

“He's not ten years older than you. He's a fine man and he's lonely. Don't throw the idea aside too easily, Angela, girl.”

He was being serious. She decided not to make any more jokes.

“It was funny Fiona Doyle going off to London in the middle of the busy season to do that photography course.”

“It was bad timing, but I suppose she had to go when the opportunity came up.” Dr. Power looked straight ahead of him at the road and the small white houses which broke the monotony of the hedges as they went along. Sometimes it was hard to be a country doctor and to hold the heartbeats and consciences of everyone in the parish. He knew only too well what bad timing it was for Fiona Doyle to have to go to London.

 

There had been a haze over the sea when Clare got up at six-thirty. It would be another hot day. A scorcher. Well, that was what they all wanted: eighty hot days with a little rain at night just to keep the farmers happy. Clare picked up all the litter from the corner of the shop which they had cleared for people to stand around having lemonades and fizzy orange, ham sandwiches and chocolate biscuits after the dance. It was good business: there was nowhere else to go except the chip van. But it was wearying clearing up in the morning. She put the returnable bottles all together in a crate, and stuffed the others into the rubbish bin. She opened the doors to let the fresh air in and glanced up the street with its white and colored houses all still asleep. The winter painting done in Castlebay always looked at its best on an early summer morning; the town looked so clean, like sugared almonds. The pink of Conway's post office and the lime-green walls of Miss O'Flaherty's looked just right.

Clare went back to put on the kettle; her mother would be up soon, and not long after that her father would be down moving boxes, worrying over supplies and only just remembering to pause and shave before the early morning caravan people came in looking for their breakfast materials.

The kettle was boiling as Agnes came downstairs. Before she could reach for her shop coat which hung on the back of the kitchen door, Clare saw with a start how thin she had grown, and how tired.

“Why don't you have a bit of a rest today? I can cope with it.”

“
Rest?
On a day like today—it's going to be one of the busiest yet. Are you mad?” her mother wanted to know.

“You look very tired, that's all.”

“Of course, I look tired, and Tommy Craig looks tired up in the bar and Young Mrs. Dillon looks tired. Lord God, Clare, when would we not look tired if not in the middle of the season?”

“Shush shush, I'm not attacking you, Mam. I wanted to know if you could have a couple of hours more rest that's all.”

Agnes softened. “No, I'll be all right when I've had a cup of tea. Nobody looks anything until they've had a cup of tea.” Her thin face smiled a bit, but she wouldn't even sit down to drink it. She was hurrying into the shop and sure enough as soon as she was behind the counter the door pinged and the first customer arrived.

It was nonstop all day. A lot of people seemed to take advantage of the clear blue skies to plan picnics, and Clare was busy cutting sandwiches and wrapping up ice creams in several layers of newspapers.

Caroline Nolan was early. She ran in from her little Morris Minor, which spluttered and made noises outside.

“Picnic things,” she said to Clare, barely politely.

“For how many?” Clare asked.

“I don't know. Can I take things and if we don't need them bring them back?”

“No,” Clare said.

“What?”

“I said you can't. Suppose you brought back tomatoes or bananas that had been out in the sun all day—who else would want them?”

“I meant tins, or things that wouldn't spoil.”

“Why don't you just work out how many might be going?” Clare was impatient with this glowing girl, all fresh and summery in a white dress with big red spots; she looked so clean and awake and lively compared to Clare in her faded dress and her tired thin mother in the yellow shop coat.