An Irish Country Christmas (40 page)

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 fancy 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.

Barry’s nostrils were filled with the scent of incense. The last time he’d been aware of that aroma had been at the wedding of a Catholic friend the previous year. He’d thought Freddy, a classmate, was too young to be getting married. Maybe Freddy had been right, but Patricia had said to him at Sonny and Maggie’s wedding in August that marriage wasn’t in her stars—not yet.

Barry hung his coat on a peg and looked around.

He stood in a small vestibule with a parquet floor and wood-panelled walls like those in the great hall of his old school, Campbell College.

O’Reilly had opened one of a set of double doors, which Barry could see led to the hall proper. A wooden crucifix was fastened to the door lintel. “Right,” said O’Reilly, “let’s have a peek inside, see if we can root out Cissie and let her know we are men of our word.”

As Children with Their Play

“Come in, come in.” Reverend Robinson, who stood at the back of the hall, spoke softly. His voice was barely audible over the harmonium and the children’s voices. Barry remembered meeting him for the first time at Sonny and Maggie’s wedding.

“Mr. Robinson,” Barry said in muted tones, marvelling at the presence of a Protestant man of the cloth in what in many parts of Ulster would be regarded as the territory of the Antichrist. “How are you?”

The minister smiled, shook his head, and held a finger to his lips.

Barry understood and nodded in agreement. He looked around and saw that he was standing in a single room. The walls were yellow-painted breeze block, and the triangular trusses supporting the roof were visible above him. Coloured paper chains hung from them in loops.

“Fear not,” said he, for mighty dread had seized their troubled mind . . .

He smiled. So they were rehearsing “While Shepherds Watched Their Flocks by Night.” His friends at primary school always called that one “While Shepherds Washed Their Socks by Night.”

“Glad tidings of great joy I bring to you, and all mankind.”

Some of the little boys clearly had as much feeling for the notes as he’d had as a child. Their off-key warblings were distinctly heard over the more tuneful efforts of their classmates.

Barry could remember his own childhood pageants. He’d been allowed into the choir but had received strict instructions to mouth the
words silently. His music teacher, Miss Fanshawe, had seemed to be under the impression she was rehearsing the famous Belfast Harlandic Male Voice Choir instead of a group of youngsters.

The young woman who was conducting today was a distinct improvement over the angular Miss Fanshawe. She stood with her back to Barry. He could see shoulders, a narrow waist to which tumbled a single plait of long copper hair, slim hips, and a pair of shapely calves beneath the hem of her black knee-length skirt.

Barry was quite willing to remain silent and hope she would turn around once the carol was over. He’d very much like to see her face.

“To you, in David’s town, this day, is born of David’s line . . .”

He managed to stop staring at the woman and looked down to where Father O’Toole, wearing a rollneck sweater and corduroy trousers, sat at a harmonium below and in front of the stage. He pedalled furiously and thumped on the keyboard. Barry could see beads of perspiration on the priest’s forehead.

“The heavenly Babe you there shall find . . .”

He glanced at the Reverend Robinson, who was smiling and keeping time with one hand. Considering the unrelenting sectarian hatred that disfigured so much of the Six Counties, the presence of these two men under one roof seemed to Barry to be a sign that there might be a flicker of hope for the future. It was a hope that the violence that had been done for centuries—and that could break out again in the name of that heavenly babe, the gentle Jesus meek and mild—would one day stop.

And it wasn’t only the priest and the pastor who could get along. Barry saw rank upon rank of folding chairs that marched over a wooden-plank floor with a central aisle between the ranks.

Next Monday night those chairs would be filled with parents, grandparents, brothers, sisters, cousins, aunts, and uncles from both denominations. There’d be teachers from MacNeill Primary, the Protestant school that years ago had been endowed in the family name by an earlier Marquis of Ballybucklebo. They’d be sitting with the nuns who taught at the Catholic school attached to their convent of Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrows.

When would somebody wake up to the fact that one of the first steps to religious misunderstanding was to educate the children separately? Barry wondered.

He noticed Flo Bishop and Mrs. Brown sitting in the front row. Cissie Sloan sat between them. From back here he couldn’t make out if Cissie was talking, but judging by the way her companions seemed to be listening to nothing but the music, perhaps she was, for once, resting her jaws.

“Good-will henceforth from heaven to men Begin, and never ceeee-ease.”