An Irish Country Christmas (31 page)

“Right.” O’Reilly stood and shoved the table aside. He was oblivious to everything because he knew Kinky, who was a dab hand at fending off trivial calls, wouldn’t phone him unless it really was an emergency. He left the dining room and charged along the hall, not bothering to apologise to a guest he jostled on the way past.

The receiver lay on the desk. He grabbed it. “Hello? Kinky?”

“Doctor O’Reilly. I’ve just had Miss Hagerty, the midwife, on the phone. She’s with a patient, Gertie Gorman, at Twenty-seven Shore Road.”

Gorman? O’Reilly didn’t recognize the name.

“The woman’s in labour, Miss Hagerty doesn’t think it’s going smoothly, and she can’t reach the woman’s doctor. Doctor Laverty’s in Belfast, so she wants to know would you go and help, sir?”

“Of course. Kinky, call Miss Hagerty, tell her I’m on my way, and then bring the maternity bags through to the kitchen. I’ll be there in half an hour.” He handed the receiver to John. “Hang that up for me.”

O’Reilly trotted back to the dining room and explained the situation to Kitty and to the headwaiter, who agreed to sort out the bill the next time O’Reilly came in.

“Come on, Kitty,” he said. “Drive me home.”

As he hustled her along the hall, he said, “I’m sorry about this. When we get home I’ll take the Rover, and you head home yourself—”

“The hell I will, Fingal,” she said, grabbing her coat from the cloakroom. “I’m a nurse, remember? I’m coming with you.”

On with the Dance! Let Joy Be Unconfined
.

It was a short way from O’Kane’s pub, the Oak Inn, to Bostock House, the nurses’ home. Barry, Jack, and Mandy walked companionably side by side, Mandy’s stiletto heels clicking on the pavement.

Barry felt the chill December air on his cheeks and nose, heard the descant of the siren of a rapidly approaching ambulance as the
nee-naw, nee-naw
rose above the constant basso rumble of the traffic.

He inhaled the brassy city smells of exhaust fumes and chimney smoke. The noise and stink were so different from the quiet and the clean air of Ballybucklebo. He remembered with affection his recent years of training here in Belfast but knew now he could never live here.

As they approached the nurses’ home he heard, faintly at first but louder as they neared the redbrick building, the sounds of a traditional jazz band.

The three friends climbed the stone steps to the entrance of the home. Joe, the doorman and general factotum, a retired boxer, and jealous guardian of his young charges, sat at a table taking tickets. Jack handed over three. It had been decent of him to buy them and refuse Barry’s offer to repay him.

“Doctor Mills?” Joe took the tickets. He was bald as a billiard ball. His battered face with its squashed nose broke into a wide, gap-toothed grin that spread from one cauliflower ear to the other. “How’s the world abusing you?”

“Can’t complain, Joe,” Jack said. “Nice to be back at Bostock.”

“It’s great to see you, so it is, and you too, Doctor Laverty, sir.”

“And you, Joe.” Funny, Barry thought, a couple of years ago he and Jack had been chased across the lawns by an enraged Joe. They had brought two student nurses back after their curfew. It had been Jack’s idea to taunt Joe so that he lost his temper, chased his tormentors, and left the door unguarded long enough for the two young women to nip inside undetected, thus avoiding being reported to the matron.

By the way Joe was greeting them, perhaps he had forgotten that particular episode. Then again, it had been widely believed among the medical students that Joe had taken one too many punches to the head, leaving him at least one stook short of a stack.

Barry went into the noisy, crowded foyer. Cut-out Santas and snowmen were stuck to the hospital-green walls. A fir tree stood in the far corner. Coloured glass baubles dangled from every tinsel-draped branch. A gold star at the tree’s very top drooped sideways, acting as a pointer to a sign reading
Merry Christmas
.

The place was very warm. Barry waited in the queue behind Jack and Mandy, took off his overcoat, and then left it in the cloakroom. He reflexively smoothed down his blonde tuft and straightened his Old Campbellian tie.

Couples and single men and women came and went through a set of open double doors leading to the home’s main hall. It was used for assemblies, amateur theatricals, and tonight it was doing duty as a dance hall.

Barry recognized the strains of “Muskrat Ramble” being played inside the hall. He tried to hum along, cursed his tone deafness, and smiled at himself. If Patricia were here, she could have sung along in her deep contralto. His smile faded. If she were here? He ached for her to be here, wondered about making an excuse and heading back for home. Damn her intransigence.

“See you inside, Barry.” Jack, holding tightly to Mandy’s hand, led her to the dance floor. Barry watched them go, Mandy’s buttocks mincing saucily under her tight red knee-length skirt, the curve of her calves accented by her sheer black stockings and her heels. Barry smiled. She really did have great legs. He felt a little stirring inside his pants. God, it had been a long time since he’d been near a girl.

“Nyeh, how are you, Barry?” He turned to see an old friend, Harry Sloan, a budding pathologist who prefaced many of his remarks with that peculiar braying noise. He was the one who had speeded up the microscopic examination of slides of heart tissue—from a patient of Barry’s who had died in August—when Barry had needed the results urgently. He still was in Harry’s debt.

“Fine thanks, Harry.”

“I thought you had a steady bird. In the cloakroom is she?”

Barry took a deep breath, shook his head, and exhaled forcibly. “No, I’m on my own.” And despite thinking of Patricia only a few moments ago, he didn’t want to be reminded of her again. Not just now. Not when merely thinking of her refusal to accept his offer made his anger rise.

“Nyeh. Blew you out, did she?” Harry shook his prematurely white-haired head and tutted gently.

Barry pursed his lips. “Not exactly, but she won a scholarship to Cambridge and she’s not home for the holidays yet.” If she’s even going to come at all, he thought.

Harry’s grin was wide. “Aye. So when the cat’s away, the mice’ll play, is that it?”

Barry shrugged. “Something like that,” he said. He realized he was here in part to try to punish Patricia, although how his going to a dance would affect her in the slightest, unless he told her, wasn’t entirely clear. And there was some truth in what Harry said. Barry had been faithful to Patricia since she left for England in September, but he
had
felt that frisson just looking at Mandy’s legs. And the room next door was full of attractive, single young women.

“Come on then,” Harry said, moving toward the double doors. “Let’s go and have a look at the talent.”

Inside the hall the lighting had been dimmed, and Barry blinked as he waited for his eyes to get used to the low light and the prickly feeling caused by the tobacco smoke. The band, playing on a stage at the far end of the room, was well into “When the Saints Go Marching In.” He could now read the letters painted on the bass drum. The White Eagles. He’d often danced to this well-known Belfast-based group at medical student affairs.

A large ball suspended from the ceiling spun so that the light reflected from the myriad small mirrors on its surface threw constantly moving bright patches against the walls, the floor, and the dancers. The patterns could have been made by a monochrome kaleidoscope. The dance floor was packed. Some couples maneuvered around, dancing a quickstep. Most happily jived, the men twisting and twirling their partners in flashing heels, with pirouetting legs giving glimpses of thigh above stocking tops, as skirts whirled merrily like the canopies of a multitude of carousels.

The trumpeter held a high note and the drummer whaled away happily as the music shuddered to its climax. Some couples stayed together as they left the floor; others thanked their partners and returned to their own side of the hall, men to the right, ladies to the left. The lights brightened. Barry felt Harry nudge him.

“Do you see that wee blonde?” He nodded to a girl talking to a petite brunette. “Her name’s Jane Duggan. I took her out a few times last year. She’s a bit of a flyer, so she is.”

“Oh?”

“I’m going to ask her for the next dance. Will you ask her friend?”

Barry hesitated. Would Patricia be hurt if she found out? Damn it, if she was here in Ulster he wouldn’t be at the dance in the first place—or if he was, she’d be with him, gammy leg and all. And it wasn’t as if he was going to take the brunette to bed. It was only a dance. “Sure,” he said.

Together they crossed the floor. For a moment, Barry thought of a story of the young man who had asked a girl from the Gallaghers’ tobacco factory for a dance, only to be told, “Nah. Ask my sister. I’m sweating something fierce.”

“So anyway,” the brunette was saying, “Sister nearly went harpic . . .” Barry smiled. Harpic was a toilet cleaner with the slogan Cleans Round the Bend. He heard Harry ask the blonde to dance. Then he saw him take her by the hand and lead her out onto the floor.

Barry smiled at the brunette. “May I have the next dance?” He saw her dark eyes wrinkle at the corners, her full lips curve into a smile. Her dark hair—it was impossible to make out its true colour in the hall’s
light—hung to her shoulders, then curled in at the bottom to frame her face, the way Diana Rigg wore hers in the TV show
The Avengers
. He guessed she was about twenty or twenty-one.

“My pleasure.” She offered a hand. He took it.

“Barry Laverty,” he said, “from Ballybucklebo.” Her hand was pleasantly cool in his. She wore a lime green V-necked sweater that showed a hint of cleavage, and a wide black patent-leather belt. Her knee-length pleated skirt was dark green.

“Peggy Duff. I’m living in Knock. We’re nearly neighbours.”

Barry was usually shy around girls, finding himself as often as not stuck with some inane opening gambit like “Do you come here often?” or a remark about the weather. But he suddenly remembered what he had overheard her saying. “Why did Sister go bananas?”

She laughed, a deep throaty chuckle that ended in a snort. “When I was a first-year student nurse, she sent me to clean all the old men’s false teeth. I wasn’t thinking, and I collected them all in one basin and washed them . . .”

“I’ll bet you had hell’s delight finding out what teeth belonged to which patient.” Barry laughed.

“It took me two days of trial and error.” She laughed again. “Sister was
not
happy with me.”

He liked her easy ability to laugh at herself. “I’m sure she got over it,” he said.

The lights dimmed. The band swung into a slow number, “Saint James Infirmary.” He took Peggy to the floor, put his right arm round her waist, and held her right hand with his left, their arms outstretched. This was the position he had learnt at the dancing classes at his boys’ boarding school. His partner there had been a wooden chair, and it certainly had not been as soft as the girl he was now holding close. Nor did it wear a perfume like Peggy’s. He recognized it as Je Reviens because, it seemed like an aeon ago, he’d once bought a bottle as a birthday present for a certain student nurse. One he’d known before Patricia.

He worked them jerkily around the floor. Barry’s tone deafness was complemented by his inability to keep on the beat. He knew film stars
like Glenn Ford and Henry Fonda would have whirled this girl around and wooed her with their expertise. Barry Laverty, however, pushed her around the floor with a step somewhere between a waltz and the shuffling of a patient with some neurological disorder. At least he managed to avoid stepping on her feet.

They didn’t speak during the dance, but she did allow him to hold her more closely and put his cheek against hers. He could feel the softness of her breasts, and he let his hand slip down below the small of her back. She did not pull it back up but rather pushed a little harder against him. He felt again the arousal he had when he had watched Mandy’s retreating backside. Sorry, Patricia, he thought, and he gently brushed his lips on Peggy’s cheek, but you should be here with me. You really should.

He was a little breathless when the music stopped, and it was not from the exertion of dancing. They stood apart, but he held on to her hand and she didn’t object.

“You’re no Fred Astaire,” she said with a smile. “Do you really want to dance some more, or would you like to buy me a drink?”

“I thought you’d never ask,” he said, relieved that he would not have to stumble clumsily about anymore. “The bar’s out in the foyer.” Still holding her hand, he guided her around the edge of the dance floor. He didn’t see Harry and his blonde partner anywhere, but did wave to Jack and Mandy as they spun past. Barry took Peggy through the double doors and into the foyer. “What would you like?”

“Vodka and orange, please.”

He found a chair for her, left her sitting, and joined the line in front of the little bar. He turned and looked at her. Peggy really was a most attractive girl. Not as beautiful as Patricia, he reminded himself—no one was—but Jack Mills would describe Peggy Duff as “restful on the eye.” Very restful.