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the dishes.
That evening Eilis called at Nancy Byrne’s at nine, aware that she had not made enough effort with her appearance. She had washed her hair and put on a summer dress, but she thought that she looked dowdy and was resigned to the idea that if Nancy danced more than one dance with George Sheridan then she was going home on her own. She was glad that Rose had not seen her before she left, as she would have made her do something more with her hair and put on some make-up and generally try to look smarter.
“Now, the rule is,” Nancy said, “that we are not even looking at George Sheridan and he might be with a whole crowd from the rugby club, or he might not even be there at all. They often go to Courtown on a Sunday night, that crowd. So we are to be deep in conversation. And I’m not dancing with anyone else, just in case he came in and saw me. So if someone is coming over to ask us to dance, we just stand up and go to the ladies’.”
It was clear that Nancy, using help from her sister and her mother, with both of whom she had finally shared the news that she had danced with George Sheridan the previous Sunday, had gone to a great deal of trouble. She had had her hair done the day before. She was wearing a blue dress that Eilis had seen only once before and she was now applying make-up in front of the bathroom mirror as her mother and sister made their way in and out of the room, offering advice and commentary and admiration.
They walked in silence from Friary Street into Church Street and then around to Castle Street and into the Athenaeum and up the stairs to the hall. Eilis was not surprised at how nervous Nancy was. It was a year since her boyfriend had let her down badly by turning up one night with another girl in this very same hall and staying with the other girl all night, barely acknowledging Nancy’s existence as she sat watching. Later, he had gone to England, coming home briefly only to get married to the girl he had been with that night. It was not just that George Sheridan was handsome and had a car, but he ran a shop that did a thriving business in the Market Square; it was a business he would inherit in full on his mother’s death. For Nancy, who worked in Buttle’s Barley-Fed Bacon behind the counter, going out with George Sheridan was a dream that she did not wish to wake from, Eilis thought, as she and Nancy glanced around the hall, pretending they were not on the lookout for anyone in particular.
There were some couples dancing and a few men standing near the door.
“They look like they are at a cattle mart,” Nancy said. “And God, it’s the hair oil I hate.”
“If one of them comes over, I’ll stand up immediately,” Eilis said, “and you tell them that you have to go with me to the cloakroom.”
“We should have bottle glasses and buck teeth and have left our hair all greasy,” Nancy said.
As the place filled up there was no sign of George Sheridan. And even as men crossed the hall to ask women to dance, no one approached either Nancy or Eilis.
“We’ll get a name for being wallflowers,” Nancy said.
“You could be called worse,” Eilis said.
“Oh, you could. You could be called the Courtnacuddy Bus,” Nancy replied.
Even when they had both stopped laughing and had gone back to looking around the hall, one of them would begin giggling again and it would start the other one off too.
“We must look mad,” Eilis said.
Nancy beside her, however, had suddenly become serious. As Eilis looked over at the bar where soft drinks were on sale, she saw that George Sheridan, Jim Farrell and a number of their friends from the rugby club had arrived and there were a number of young women with them. Jim Farrell’s father owned a pub in Rafter Street.
“That’s it,” Nancy whispered. “I’m going home.”
“Wait, don’t do that,” Eilis said. “We’ll go to the ladies’ at the end of this set and then discuss what to do.”
They waited and crossed the floor, empty of dancers; Eilis presumed that George Sheridan had spotted them. In the ladies’ she told Nancy to do nothing, just to wait, and they would go back