Cahal didn’t stop. In his mirror the road had gone dark again. He saw something white lying there but said to himself he had imagined it. In the back of the Cortina the embrace continued.
Sweat had broken on the palms of Cahal’s hands, on his back and his forehead. She’d thrown herself at the side of the car and his own door was what she’d made contact with. Her mother was the unmarried woman of that cottage, many the time he’d heard that said in the garage. Fitzie Gill had shown him damage to his wing and said the child must have had a stone in her hand. But usually there wasn’t any damage, and no one had ever mentioned damage to the child herself.
Bungalows announced the town, all of them lit up now. The Spanish began again, and he was asked if he could tell them what time the bus went to Galway. There was confusion because he thought they meant tonight, but then he understood it was the morning. He told them and when they paid him in Macey’s yard the man handed him a pencil and a notebook. He didn’t know what that was for, but they showed him, making gestures, and he wrote down the time of the bus. They shook hands with him before they went into the hotel.
In the very early morning, just after half past one, Cahal woke up and couldn’t sleep again. He tried to recall what he’d seen of the football, the moves there’d been, the saves, the yellow card shown twice. But nothing seemed quite right, as if the television pictures and snatches of the commentary came from a dream, which he knew they hadn’t. He had examined the side of the car in the garage and there’d been nothing. He had switched out the lights of the garage and locked up. He’d watched the football in Shannon’s and hadn’t seen the end because he lost interest when nothing much was happening. He should have stopped; he didn’t know why he hadn’t. He couldn’t remember braking. He didn’t know if he’d tried to, he didn’t know if there hadn’t been time.
The Ford Cortina had been seen setting out on the Loye road, and then returning. His father knew the way he’d gone, past the unmarried woman’s cottage. The Spaniards would have said in the hotel they’d seen the Virgin. They’d have said in the hotel they were going on to Galway. They could be found in Galway for questioning.
In the dark Cahal tried to work it out. They would have heard the bump. They wouldn’t have known what it was, but they’d have heard it while they were kissing one another. They would remember how much longer it was before they got out of the car in Macey’s yard. It hadn’t been a white dress, Cahal realized suddenly: it trailed on the ground, too long for a dress, more like a nightdress.
He’d seen the woman who lived there a few times when she came in to the shops, a dressmaker they said she was, small and wiry with dark inquisitive eyes and a twist in her features that made them less appealing than they might have been. When her child had been born to her the father had not been known—not even to herself, so it was said, though possibly without justification. People said she didn’t speak about the birth of her child.
As Cahal lay in the darkness, he resisted the compulsion to get up in order to go back and see for himself; to walk out to the blue cottage, since to drive would be foolish; to look on the road for whatever might be there, he didn’t know what. Often he and Minnie Fennelly got up in the middle of the night in order to meet in the back shed at her house. They lay on a stack of netting there, whispering and petting one another, the way they couldn’t anywhere in the daytime. The best they could manage in the daytime was half an hour in the Ford Cortina out in the country somewhere. They could spend half the night in the shed.
He calculated how long it would take him to walk out to where the incident had occurred. He wanted to; he wanted to get there and see nothing on the road and to close his eyes in relief. Sometimes dawn had come by the time he parted from Minnie Fennelly, and he imagined that too, the light beginning as he walked in from the country feeling all right again. But more likely he wouldn’t be.
‘One day that kid’ll be killed,’ he heard Fitzie Gill saying, and someone else said the woman wasn’t up to looking after the kid. The child was left alone in the house, people said, even for a night while the woman drank by herself in Leahy’s, looking around for a man to keep her company.
That night, Cahal didn’t sleep again. And all the next day he waited for someone to walk into the garage and say what had been found. But no one did, and no one did the next day either, or the day after that. The Spaniards would have gone on from Galway by now, the memories of people who had maybe noticed the Ford Cortina would be getting shaky. And Cahal counted the drivers whom he knew for a fact had experienced similar incidents with the child and said to himself that maybe, after all, he’d been fortunate. Even so, it would be a long time before he drove past that cottage again, if ever he did.
Then something happened that changed all that. Sitting with Minnie Fennelly in the Cyber Cafe´ one evening, Minnie Fennelly said, ‘Don’t look, only someone’s staring at you.’
‘Who is it?’
‘D’you know that dressmaker woman?’
They’d ordered chips and they came just then. Cahal didn’t say anything, but knew that sooner or later he wasn’t going to be able to prevent himself from looking around. He wanted to ask if the woman had her child with her, but in the town he had only ever seen her on her own and he knew that the child wouldn’t be there. If she was it would be a chance in a thousand, he thought, the apprehension that had haunted him on the night of the incident flooding his consciousness, stifling everything else.
‘God, that one gives me the creeps!’ Minnie Fennelly muttered, splashing vinegar on to her chips.
Cahal looked round them. He caught a glimpse of the dressmaker, alone, before he quickly looked back. He could still feel her eyes on his back. She would have been in Leahy’s; the way she was sitting suggested drunkenness. When they’d finished their chips and the coffee they’d been brought while they were waiting, he asked if she was still there.
‘She is, all right. D’you know her? Does she come into the garage?’
‘Ah no, she hasn’t a car. She doesn’t come in.’
‘I’d best be getting back, Cahal.’
He didn’t want to go yet, while the woman was there. But if they waited they could be here for hours. He didn’t want to pass near her, but as soon as he’d paid and stood up he saw they’d have to. When they did she spoke to Minnie Fennelly, not him.
‘Will I make your wedding-dress for you?’ the dressmaker offered. ‘Would you think of me at all when it’ll be the time you’d want it?’
And Minnie Fennelly laughed and said no way they were ready for wedding-dresses yet.
‘Cahal knows where he’ll find me,’ the dressmaker said. ‘Amn’t I right, Cahal?’
‘I thought you didn’t know her,’ Minnie Fennelly said when they were outside.
Three days after that, Mr Durcan left his pre-war Riley in because the hand-brake was slipping. He’d come back for it at four, he arranged, and said before he left: ‘Did you hear that about the dressmaker’s child?’
He wasn’t the kind to get things wrong. Fussy, with a thin black moustache, his Riley sports the pride of his bachelor life, he was as tidy in what he said as he was in how he dressed.
‘Gone missing,’ he said now. ‘The gardaí´ are in on it.’
It was Cahal’s father who was being told this. Cahal, with the cooling system from Gibney’s bread van in pieces on a workbench, had just found where the tube had perished.