An Irish Country Christmas

by Patrick Taylor

  It would be a forlorn hope, O’Reilly knew, and he didn’t want Barry to think that he, O’Reilly, was letting this become a personal matter. He looked at Barry and said, “You know that in Ireland they say you can rape your best friend’s sister and he might forgive you, but if you informed to the British, or reneged on a wager, they’d still be talking about you in a hundred years.”

  “I don’t see what that has to do with Fitzpatrick.”

  “He reneged on a bet with me,” O’Reilly said.

  “He what? Here in North County Down? He must be mad. If the folks knew that, his reputation would vanish overnight.” Barry grinned. “You can blackmail the man, Fingal. Threaten to let the word out.”

  “You’re absolutely spot on. Threaten. I’d never actually tell, but he’d not know that because, as far as I’m concerned, the whole thing’s between him and me.”

  “But if he thought you might do it, he’d know he’d be an outcast,” Barry said.

  “He would, but then he always has been a bit of a one.”

  “And do you honestly think we can get him to see the light? Reason with him or threaten him, get him to change?”

  O’Reilly shook his head. “Leopards and spots . . . but it won’t cost anything to try.”

  “Good. Can I come too? I might be able to help.”

  “I’d like that, Barry.” O’Reilly scowled at his empty plate. “And I’d like the second course of lunch too.”

  As if reading from a script, Kinky came bustling in carrying a tray for the empty plates. “There’ll be no second course, sir. I’ll not have the women of the village laughing because my doctor is starting to look like one of those zeppelins I saw in a documentary on television the other night.”

  “Zeppelin? Zeppelin? Who said that, Kinky?” O’Reilly bristled.

  “No one yet, sir. I just said I wasn’t going to let it happen. Just calm yourself.”

  O’Reilly swallowed. Damn it, he was still hungry. “But there’s got to be a second course. I smelled it cooking not half an hour ago.”

  “Doctor dear,” she said, lifting his plate, “that was no second course. That was sweet mincemeat I’m making for to fill Christmas mince pies, so. I’ve a lot to make, what with the ones for the party and the ones for this house.”

  “Oh.” O’Reilly sighed. “Oh, well.” He knew he’d have to content himself. Sweet mince pies wouldn’t make much of a second course of lunch anyway, but perhaps he could get Kinky to serve some with an early afternoon tea.

  “Now,” she said, carrying her laden tray to the door, “you’ve no calls to make this afternoon, Doctor Laverty dear. No medical calls, that is, but there was one phone call.”

  “Patricia?” Barry spun in his chair, a great smile beaming.

  Kinky shook her head and Barry’s face fell. Poor Barry, O’Reilly thought.

  “No. Not Miss Spence. Cissie Sloan.”

  “Cissie?” Barry frowned. “Has she had a relapse? Is something else wrong with her?”

  “Perhaps,” said O’Reilly with a grin, “she had to stop talking for half an hour and she bust her stays.”

  Barry laughed.

  Kinky tutted. “That’s not entirely fair, Doctor sir, but she does have the gift of the gab, I’ll agree. Anyway she’s not sick,” Kinky said. “She was just wondering if you two gentlemen were going to pop into the parish hall to see how the preparations are coming on.”

  O’Reilly remembered he had promised to drop in last week but had been sidetracked by the drama of Eileen’s missing money. “Why don’t we do that this afternoon, Barry?”

  Barry sighed. “Fair enough. I’ve nothing better to do.”

  “That’s right,” Kinky said, with a twinkle in her eye. O’Reilly knew he was the only one to notice it, along with the great softness in her voice, a softness like that of a mother comforting a disappointed child. “But you will have very soon . . . when your Miss Spence comes home.”

  Folks Who Live Beneath

  the Shadow of the Steeple

  Barry’s nape hairs were still standing on end when he went into the back garden with O’Reilly, and it wasn’t the bitter wind that had made them so. It was eerie. Kinky had the gift. Barry had no doubt about that. But was a pity that when he’d pressed her to be more precise about Patricia’s arrival, Kinky had smiled, shaken her head, and said, “That’s all I know, sir.”

  The tingling in the back of his neck had subsided by the time he passed Arthur’s kennel. The Labrador lollopped out, tail going like a threshing machine with slipped gears, tucked his nose an inch behind O’Reilly’s leg, and stayed perfectly “at heel” without having to be told.

  “He always behaves himself in duck season,” O’Reilly said. “I think he can read the calendar.” He stopped to pat the big dog’s head. “We’re going on Saturday,” he said. “Saturday. Five more days.”

  “Aaarghow,” said Arthur. His tail drooped, and he heaved a massive sigh.

  “But you can come for the ride,” O’Reilly said, as he took the last step to the back gate and opened it.

  Barry and Arthur piled into the Rover. Barry was glad to be out of the half gale. He loved Ulster, but at this time of the year he could almost be persuaded that practising somewhere with a lot more sunshine—Fiji or Tahiti, say—might have some merit. And, he sniffed, in a dry climate he’d not have to put up with the pong of damp dog.

  O’Reilly started the engine and drove off, turning left at the end of the back lane. Barry now knew the layout of the village well. To get to the chapel and its attached Parish Hall, O’Reilly must drive from one end of Ballybucklebo to the other.

  Barry looked at the rows of attached cottages that flanked Main Street on the Bangor side of the village’s lone crossroads. He could have told anyone who asked which of his patients lived in which cottage. He’d made a lot of home visits since he’d started here in July.

  He noticed that many of the homes sported holly wreaths on their front door. Small Christmas trees garlanded with fairy lights filled front parlour windows.

  The car rolled to a stop for the traffic light. It was here in Barry’s first week in Ballybucklebo that O’Reilly, infuriated at Donal Donnelly for stalling his tractor and making him miss several light changes, had roared at Donal, “Was there a particular shade of green you were waiting for?”

  Barry chuckled. Funny how Donal had become so important in the life of Ballybucklebo.

  “What are you chortling about?” O’Reilly asked.

  “Donal,” said Barry, not entirely untruthfully. “Donal and his schemes.”

  “Aye,” said O’Reilly, “he’s so sharp he could cut himself.”

  Barry, still smiling, looked to his left where the Maypole pointed a stiff finger at a dark sky. Ragged clouds, perhaps bearing snow, scudded before the brisk northeaster. He wondered if they might have a white Christmas. The last one he remembered was when he was seven and his father had taken him tobogganing on the hills of Bangor Golf Course.

  He looked across the street to the Black Swan, where Mary Dunleavy was outside washing the front windows with a chamois leather she kept dipping into a bucket of sudsy water. She recognized the car, as every local would, and waved her chamois. He waved back.

  The light changed and the car moved ahead slowly, its progress hindered by a small herd of black-and-white Friesians, their udders full, being driven leisurely along the road by a collie and a man on a bicycle. One cow lifted her tail and dropped a heap of steaming cow clap.

  Even with the car’s windows closed, Barry could smell the pungent aroma. Although the new rustic odor was perhaps less unpleasant than the old one of damp dog, at times he thought he’d be quite grateful to suffer from anosmia, a condition where the sufferer had no sense of smell. Barry had never thought he’d be grateful if Fingal lit his pipe. He was wrong.

  Barry noticed that there weren’t many pedestrians today. That wind was cold, and besides, few housewives would shop for any perishable goods on a Monday. They kn
ew that anything for sale would have been left over since Friday and would not be fresh.

  All the shop windows were decorated. There was spray-on snow, sprigs of holly, tinsel streamers, a cardboard Santa, paper chains of letters spelling “Merry Christmas,” and a crèche attended by an angel with one wing, hovering by a string over the manger. All competed for the attention of the passersby. Main Street, Ballybucklebo, was like Donegal Square in Belfast, but in miniature and more personal.

  Here in the village he might well have treated some of the shop assistants; most would know him by name, and they would go out of their way to be helpful. In Belfast he was often made to feel like no more than a device for carrying cash and perhaps leaving some in the store.

  He loved this place more each day—its smallness, its tight community, its unhurried pace. He wondered how Patricia, a small-town girl herself, would feel about Ballybucklebo after her three years at Cambridge.

  Three years. How much would she have changed after such a long time? He knew how much he himself had grown in the mere five months he’d been here. It would be unreasonable for him to expect Patricia not to be different, and yet—and yet he ached at the thought of the girl he had fallen in love with becoming another person.

  He suspected from her lack of urgency about coming home for Christmas that the process had started after only three months. Perhaps after a couple of years she’d decide she’d outgrown a small-town GP.

  The Rover’s old heater was doing its best, but at the thought of losing Patricia, Barry shivered.

  The university town wasn’t large, but he knew she’d have the opportunity to meet any number of interesting people there, including, damn it, interesting young men.

  Cambridge was a stone’s throw away from London. He remembered being taken to the capital city as a child and being terrified by the noise, and the smell, and the traffic, and the sheer number of people on the streets.

  Here in Ballybucklebo, where the aroma of cow clap lingered in the old Rover, he looked out at the rumps of several cows, and thought he was more likely to be pushed aside by a herd like the one ahead than be run down by a car. Damn it, he went to Belfast only when he really had to.

  Patricia was different. She revelled in new experiences. She’d be stupid not to travel down to London. It was less than an hour’s train ride to Liverpool Street station. After she’d seen Oxford Street and the Strand, how would she feel about Belfast, never mind Ballybucklebo, where Miss Moloney’s was the only dress shop in the village?

  As the car crept past her shop, Barry remembered that he must check to see if the results of Miss Moloney’s blood tests were back. She’d be coming in to the surgery again, perhaps as early as tomorrow. He wondered if she’d added the extra inch to the waist of O’Reilly’s Santa Claus trousers yet.

  “Bloody cows,” O’Reilly muttered. He honked his horn. One cow stopped and turned her head, staring with her soft velvet eyes while mindlessly chewing her cud. “Bloody cows,” he said again and shook his head. “But if you choose to live in the country, you have to put up with them.”

  “It’s better than fighting the traffic in Belfast, Fingal.” Barry slumped back against the worn leather upholstery. And I’m not driving, he thought, nor am I in a great rush to get anywhere. His eyelids drooped.

  “It is, Barry; it surely is.”

  Barry heard enthusiasm in O’Reilly’s voice. When he blinked his eyes open, Barry could see why. The cowherd was ahead of the animals, waving his stick and shouting to make them take the road to the left, the road that skirted the housing estate and wound up into the Ballybucklebo Hills. The cowherd followed the last animal, touching his cap to the Rover and its occupants.

  O’Reilly waved back. “Liam Gillespie’s young brother,” he said. He rolled down the window and roared, “Paddy. What’s the word of Liam?”

  “He’s home and up and doing, thanks, Doc. He’s not quite ready to go back to work yet. These are his beasts. I’m taking them home for milking.”

  “Good man ma da,” yelled O’Reilly, seemingly oblivious to the honking of a car horn behind him. “Give him my best when you see him.” He closed the window and was about to drive on, but before he could accelerate, a red Massey-Harris tractor towing a trailer piled high with manure left the same road the cattle were using and turned onto the Belfast Road immediately ahead of the Rover. “Bugger,” said O’Reilly. He drummed his fingers on the steering wheel for a while and then said, “What can’t be cured must be endured.” It wasn’t the first time Barry had heard the remark.

  Barry was happy enough to sit as the car rolled along at tractor speed. “I was wondering,” he remarked, “if we can’t cure Fitzpatrick, does that mean we have to endure him?”

  “It’s my hope,” O’Reilly said, “that we can get him to change a bit. I don’t really care if he wants to give crushed primrose roots to folks with colds.”

  “They’ll get better on their own anyway,” Barry said, “and if it makes the customer feel better—”

  “It’s just like our black bottle. I do know that, but I’m still going to give him what-for for not using Miss Hagerty.” O’Reilly had to brake as the tractor signaled for a right turn. He turned to Barry. “I’ll not let him get away with it. Miss Hagerty’s a seasoned professional. She deserves to be treated with respect. Damn it all, everyone does, at least until they give us cause to stop respecting them.”

  Barry was not surprised by that remark. He’d seen O’Reilly practice what he preached. “Do unto others, Fingal?”

  “Aye. ‘Before they do it unto you,’ an old friend of mine used to say. I agree, and it is time we did it to that man.” O’Reilly’s voice took an edge. “I could have lost Gertie and her baby.”

  Barry felt for his senior colleague. He could still recall having to deliver a face presentation and how he’d had trouble putting on rubber gloves because his hands were so sweaty. To be stuck with an undiagnosed breech hardly bore thinking about, and yet O’Reilly wasn’t upset about being in a tough obstetrical situation. He was angry on behalf of the patient.

  “I told you I’ll call him . . . and I will.” O’Reilly pulled over to the side of the road and parked behind a string of vehicles straddling the grass verge. “Stay, Arthur,” he said. “Come on, Barry.”

  Barry turned up the collar of his coat against the wind that screeched over the sand dunes between the road and the shore. He narrowed his eyes as the wind brought fine particles of sand with it.

  He hurried his pace to catch up with O’Reilly, who was already turning onto the drive to the one-storey building abutting the grey stone chapel.

  The building brought back memories so clearly that Barry could see and hear the scene.

  In September, shortly before Patricia had left to continue her civil engineering studies at Cambridge, Barry had walked past this chapel with her. He could remember asking her to explain its interesting architecture. He’d been holding her hand, and she’d let it go to shield her eyes from the midafternoon sun as she squinted up at the steeple.

  “It’s about two hundred years old,” she’d said. “You can tell by the three-stage tower. It’s called Early English detailing.”

  “Och, sure,” he said, in a stage Irish brogue with a catch in his voice, “and don’t the English get everywhere in this sorry country, even into Irish church steeples? Wirra, wirra, poor Ireland.”

  She laughed, then said. “Be serious, eejit. You asked me to explain. Do you want me to, or don’t you?”

  “You’re the engineer,” he said. “Please.”

  She pointed up to the tower. “You see how it rises from a sandstone base, with two lancet windows in each face?”

  “Yes. Yes, I can.” He’d had to screw up his eyes because autumn was approaching and the sun was low in the sky.

  “Those circular windows above the pointed ones are called oculi.”

  “That’s Latin for ‘eyes.’ ”

  “Right. That part supports the belfry. It’s a fa
ncy piece of work with louvered-arched windows set between pilasters and topped with balustrading and corner finials, those little minispires. Above them is the thin octagonal spire ending in a point surmounted by a cross. The classical three-stage church tower.”

  “Patricia,” Barry said, impressed by her knowledge, “what in the world got you interested in this stuff in the first place?”

  “I’ve always loved beautiful things.”

  “Like opera?”

  “That’s right . . . and impressive buildings. My dad understood and gave me books about architecture.” She glanced down. “Have you ever seen a picture of the Leaning Tower of Pisa?”

  “Everyone has.”

  “Did you ever wonder why it leans, and more importantly why it doesn’t fall over?”

  “Not really.”

  “I did. I wondered so much that I wanted to find out the answer. I wanted to know how to build things—”

  “So you decided to become an engineer?”

  “Right.”

  “And I admire you for it. I love you for it.”

  And when she’d kissed him her lips were warm and the world had gone away.

  “Are you coming, or are you going to stand there looking up and waiting for the Second Coming?” yelled O’Reilly.

  O’Reilly brought Barry right back into the chilly, windy world. Barry wished Patricia was here now with her warm kisses. Kinky had better be right. He missed Patricia, was chilled without her. Barry trotted ahead.

  The chapel was solid, it was imposing, and—he silently thanked its builders—it provided shelter the moment he stepped into its lee.

  O’Reilly was holding open the door, which he closed as soon as Barry stepped inside. Barry took off his coat. The central heating must have been going at full blast. He could hear what he thought might be a harmonium accompanying a children’s choir. The sounds took him back to his childhood and Sunday school on Sunday afternoons. He smiled. He’d been expelled because he had once taken his pet white mouse to class and scared all the little girls.

  As a child, Patricia had liked buildings, he thought. He’d been fascinated by animals.