An Irish Country Village Page 12

  Barry didn’t know whether to laugh or tremble. O’Reilly might have said “planning.” Barry knew only too well that what he actually meant was plotting, and when O’Reilly set his mind to that activity the Lord above alone could predict the outcome.

  Drink! For You Know Not Why

  You Go, Nor Where

  “Out,” said O’Reilly, stopping the Rover in the lane behind his house. “I’ll shove the car in the garage. We’ll walk to the Duck.”

  Barry stepped into the lane, massaging his knuckles. They were quite bloodless, so tightly had he clung to the sides of his seat as O’Reilly hurled the car along the main Bangor-to-Belfast road. He hadn’t taken any comfort from the lines of a biblical verse painted on the side of a barn outside Bangor. It was a well-known landmark, but the promise that “whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have eternal life,” had seemed hollow when O’Reilly took the well-named Devil’s Elbow curve on two wheels. O’Reilly wanted to go to the Duck, and he wasn’t going to waste any time getting there.

  Now they’d arrived in Ballybucklebo, Barry reckoned he’d earned a drink too.

  O’Reilly shut the garage doors, and Barry heard joyous barking as Arthur Guinness greeted the homecoming of his lord and master by slamming himself against O’Reilly’s back gate.

  “Hang on,” said O’Reilly. “He wants his walk.” He opened the gate only to be ignored by his canine devotee, who rushed at Barry.

  “Sit!” yelled Barry, feeling as King Canute must have when he ordered the tide to forget about coming in.

  Arthur for once neglected to hump Barry’s leg. Instead he rose up, put both forepaws on Barry’s chest, and licked his face.

  “Gerroff!” O’Reilly yelled, yanking on Arthur’s collar.

  The dog obeyed. “I suppose, I should be grateful that this time he went in for a bit of foreplay before the main event,” Barry said, using the back of his hand to brush the mud from the front of his sports jacket.

  “Och, sure he’s only an affectionate big lump, aren’t you, Arthur?”

  “Aarow,” said Arthur, looking adoringly at O’Reilly.

  “He’s about as affectionate as a cross between Casanova and Don Juan on testosterone. He’s a bloody sex maniac.”

  “Not at all,” said O’Reilly. “He’s just full of the joys of spring and he’s missing his exercise.” He glanced at his watch. “Tell you what; we’ve plenty of time. You go on down to the Duck; I’ll take Arthur for a walk, and meet you there later.”

  Barry hesitated. It was only last night on his way back from the O’Hagans’ place that he’d thought about going in by himself for a quick one—but had decided against it. “Why don’t I wait for you at the house?”

  “Because,” said O’Reilly, “I don’t want to waste time coming back here. I’ll be going past the pub on my way home from the shore. I’ll be ready for my pint, and Arthur’ll want his Smithwicks, won’t you?”

  “Aaargh,” Arthur agreed, furiously wagging his tail.

  Dear God, the bloody dog understands English, Barry thought, at least when it comes to beer. He just wished the big Labrador would comprehend “sit” and “gerroff.”

  “Come on,” said O’Reilly. “Heel.” He strode off.

  Barry wasn’t sure if the last remark was addressed to him or to Arthur, but the dog kept his nose exactly in line with O’Reilly’s leg, and Barry trotted at O’Reilly’s shoulder.

  “Jesus,” said O’Reilly, waiting for the traffic light to change. “It’s hot.”

  Barry had to agree. The sun hung high above the village. The flowers in the municipal flower bed beside the Maypole were dusty, drooping, and dispirited. Even Arthur must be feeling the effects, he thought. The dog’s pink tongue flopped and he panted heavily. Barry took off his jacket.

  The light changed and O’Reilly strode across the road accompanied by the faithful hound. “Won’t be long,” he said, “but I’ve got to get this great lummox fit. Duck season starts next month.”

  Barry had to hurry to keep up. He remembered O’Reilly saying he and Arthur enjoyed a day’s wildfowling as much as Barry enjoyed time on a trout stream.

  O’Reilly stopped on the corner of Main Street and Shore Road. His next remark caught Barry off guard. “Arthur’s not the only one. I have to get you fit too.”

  He frowned. “You mean I’ve to start exercising?”

  “No, son.” He clapped Barry on the shoulder. “I mean I’ve got to get you ready to run things on your own so Arthur and I can get away now and again. You trot on to the Duck and keep your ears open.”

  Before Barry could answer, O’Reilly had set off at a comfortable jog, yelling, “Hey on out, Arthur,” sending the dog to lollop towards the shore.

  Barry stood for a moment. Damn you, O’Reilly, he thought. You’ve done it to me again. It’s the same as when you told me you’d not signed Major Fotheringham’s death certificate. Was that for legal reasons, or was it because you wanted to force a postmortem? Did you really want to take Arthur for a run, or had you sensed I was a bit reticent about going into the Duck by myself? And what have I to keep my ears open about?

  He turned left and walked the short distance to the Black Swan, took a deep breath, and feeling like the sheriff in a western about to face the baddies, pushed his way through the louvred, batwing doors.

  After the brightness of the day, the dim light in the bar made it difficult for him to see. He could hear the low hum of conversation, and how it faded. Someone coughed. Someone clinked a glass on the marble bar. The air was tainted with tobacco smoke and the smell of beer. As his eyes adjusted he could make out the details of the single room, the black ceiling beams, the nicotine-stained and off-white plaster between the wooden joists, the tiled floor, the single bar with rows of spirits on the shelves behind it. O’Reilly had once told him the building dated back to 1648, when it had been part of a coaching inn, and that apart from there no longer being stables, it hadn’t been altered since then.

  Two men Barry did not know stood at the bar, one with his back turned, the other seemingly fascinated by a Guinness poster on the far wall, a poster Barry knew had been issued by the brewery some time in the forties and had probably been there ever since.

  In the room itself, all but one of the few tables were empty. It was midafternoon and he knew most of the regulars would still be at their work. Three other men, all in collarless shirts and moleskin trousers, each wearing a duncher, the tweed cap that was the uniform of the workingman, occupied a table at the back of the room. One was smoking a dudeen, a short-stemmed clay pipe. All seemed to have developed a deep interest in the half-filled, straight pint glasses in front of them. None was known to Barry.

  The publican, Willy Dunleavy, as ever sporting his floral-patterned waistcoat, stood behind the bar polishing a glass with a tea towel. Barry surmised that Willy’s daughter, Mary, would be at work at Miss Moloney’s dress shop.

  Barry moved to the bar. “Afternoon, Willy.”

  “Aye,” said Willy. “Hot out.” He renewed his efforts to make the glass shine.

  “Indeed it is,” said Barry, waiting to be asked, “What’ll it be?” Finally he said, “I’m expecting Doctor O’Reilly to join me.”

  “Is that a fact?”

  The usual Ulster barman’s response, “Will you have something while you’re waiting?” was not forthcoming.

  “Not too busy today, Willy,” Barry said.

  “No.”

  God, Barry thought, trying to drag any conversation out of the normally loquacious Willy Dunleavy today was like trying to pull teeth without an anaesthetic. And it seemed that as far as the customers at the bar were concerned, Barry might as well be a visiting wraith. When he glanced at the far table he could see the men there staring at him expectantly. Barry was hot and thirsty. Right, he thought, what had Frederick the Great said? “L’audace l’audace, toujours l’audace.”

  “I’ll have a pint please, Willy.”

  The barman held the rec
ently polished glass under the beer tap and silently started to pour.

  Barry had to decide. Should he make one more effort to start a conversation or should he hold his tongue?

  “Here.” Willy set the glass on the bar top.

  Barry rummaged in his pocket for change. He put a pound note on the counter. “Put one in the stable for Doctor O’Reilly and . . .”—why not?—“a Smithwicks for Arthur.”

  Willy seemed to brighten slightly at the mention of the dog’s name. He nodded, took the money, made change, and gave it to Barry. Not a word was spoken, although Barry could hear snatches of conversation coming from the occupied table.

  “. . . your head’s cut. That mare? Couldn’t jump fences if her arse was on fire.”

  “I’m no’ so sure about that. Have you seen the way she carries her tail?”

  Barry heard a loud guffaw and the words, “No wonder. Your man that owns her feagues her, so he does.”

  Barry frowned. Feague? He’d not heard the word before and was tempted to wander over and ask the speaker exactly what it meant, but he realized that if he did he might be rebuffed. He’d wait and ask O’Reilly later.

  He carried his pint to a vacant table and hung his jacket over the chair back. The first mouthful of the stout, even if it was bitter, was familiar and somehow comforting. Barry took a second pull and wiped the foam from his upper lip.

  He’d been quite prepared to obey O’Reilly’s admonition to keep his ears open, but as the only topic of conversation seemed to be about racehorses it hardly seemed worth the effort.

  He leant back in his chair and considered his own situation. If his reception in here was anything to go by, his stock was not high in the village since the news had broken of Major Fotheringham’s sudden death.

  Someone had started the buzz. Barry wondered who? It wouldn’t have been O’Reilly, and it was unlikely to have been Mrs. Fotheringham. Probably one of the undertaker’s men who had come to take the corpse to the mortuary at the Royal. If he got a chance he’d ask Mr. Coffin, the village mortician. Not that it really mattered. What was important was that since the word got out, many of O’Reilly’s patients had treated Barry with suspicion.

  Not all of them, but it was too early to know if the antibiotics he’d prescribed for Myrtle MacVeigh would work. They should. There was no reason to suspect Colin Brown’s sutured hand wouldn’t heal properly. The jockey Fergus Finnegan’s acute conjunctivitis ought to be better by Friday.

  Julie MacAteer and Helen from the dress shop had seemed to be grateful for his efforts. So were Kieran and Ethel O’Hagan. Donal Donnelly had been prepared to discuss his secret Arkle ploy.

  Barry took a deeper swallow. On balance, perhaps his account was not as deeply in the red as he had feared. Perhaps O’Reilly was right about Barry keeping his head tucked in and simply getting on with his job, and damn it all, he didn’t want to leave.

  But then—but then there was Patricia. For her sake, he knew he really wanted her to win the scholarship. But for his? Barry drank, surprised to see that his glass was almost empty and noticing his head was a tiny bit fuzzy. What about for his sake? He could see clearly that deep in him he wanted Patricia to fail. To stay at Queens in Belfast. To stay close by him.

  In vino veritas, he thought, wondering if he should order another pint.

  He heard the doors creak open and slam shut, heard O’Reilly announcing, “Afternoon, all.” Barry was surprised that there was virtually no response. “Christ,” said O’Reilly, “it’s like a bloody morgue in here.”

  Willy said quietly, “Good afternoon, Doctor O’Reilly. I’ve one on the pour for you.”

  “Good,” roared O’Reilly. “My tongue’s hanging out. It’s hot as Hades out there.”

  Barry was aware of something bashing against his leg. Arthur, idiotic grin on his face, stood beside the table trying to beat Barry to death with his tail. “I’ve called a Smithwicks for Arthur.”

  “I should bloody well hope so, and your glass is empty.”

  “Right away, Doctor,” Willy said, lining up another pint glass.

  Barry waited for O’Reilly to join him, but instead he saw the big man lean across the bar. “You, Willy Dunleavy, have a face on you like a bulldog that’s just licked piss off a nettle. What’s up?”

  Barry strained to hear, but Willy had lowered his voice and was muttering into O’Reilly’s ear. He had no difficulty making out O’Reilly’s side. He felt as if he were listening to a telephone conversation, trying to make sense of it while hearing only one participant’s words.

  “What? Can’t be. The bangster was in here this morning?”

  A bangster was a bully. Was O’Reilly referring to Councillor Bishop? He’d said he was going to the Duck after he left the surgery.

  “Och, Willy, have a titter of wit. He can’t do that. He’s trying to bamboozle you . . . Jesus bloody Christ, I don’t believe it.” With that, O’Reilly grabbed his pint and Barry’s second, headed for the table, and called over his shoulder, “Don’t forget Arthur’s.” He smacked Barry’s glass down so forcibly that some of the head slopped onto the tabletop. Then he sat in his chair and sank half his pint in one swallow. “Better,” he said.

  Willy appeared with a metal basin and shoved it under the table. Arthur flopped down, and Barry could hear the slurping noises. Like master, like dog, he thought.

  “Welcome back.” Barry wanted to ask him what that peculiar word “feague” meant. “Fingal, can I ask you something?”

  “Later,” said O’Reilly. “You said, ‘Welcome back.’ Some bloody welcome. No wonder the place is half empty and there’s no craic,” he said, looking Barry in the eye.

  Still disappointed that no one had spoken to him, Barry swallowed and said, “You mean because I came in?”

  O’Reilly guffawed. “Don’t flatter yourself you’re so important.”

  Barry bristled. “I didn’t mean—”

  “It’s nothing to do with you.” He finished his pint. “One more, Willy.” O’Reilly fished out his briar. “Willy and these poor buggers think Armageddon’s just round the corner.”

  “Why?”

  “You remember Helen said Mary was worried someone was trying to take over the pub?”

  “Yes.” Barry made a quick deduction. “Bishop?”

  “None other than.”

  Willy appeared with O’Reilly’s pint. “Thanks,” he said. “How much?”

  “We’ll pretend it’s your birthday, Doctor,” Willy said. “On me.” He walked away.

  O’Reilly shook his head. “Willy’s worried, and he’s a bloody good reason to be.” He lit his pipe. “What do you know about property ownership?”

  “Not much,” Barry said, thinking he’d not have to worry about things like that until he was making more than an assistant’s salary.

  “It’s the land, you see.”

  “Fingal, what’s ‘the land’?”

  O’Reilly emitted a mushroom cloud that would have done justice to the Americans’ hydrogen bomb that destroyed the Bikini Atoll in 1954. “Land. It’s the stuff places are built on. Unless you happen to be one of those peculiar people who live in a house built on stilts over water.”

  “Fingal, just get to the point.”

  “All right. In Ireland you can buy the lump of mud your house sits on. That’s called freehold. But most premises pay rent to a landlord who actually owns the real estate. Leasehold. A lot of leases are longstanding.” He started into his second pint. “The Duck’s on a ninety-nine-year lease.”

  “Seems like a long time.”

  “Aye, it is except . . .” O’Reilly took another drink. “Willy took over a lease that started in eighteen sixty-five. It expires next month.”

  “Surely he can renew it?” Even in the dim light Barry could detect the pallor in O’Reilly’s nose.

  “You’d think so, but would you care to take a stagger at who holds the title to the property?”

  “Bishop?”

  “You’ve just
won all the marbles. None other than himself, and do you know what he wants to do?”

  “Take over the pub?” Barry looked round a room that went back nearly four hundred years.

  “That’s only the half of it. He wants to gut it and redo it with chrome, and plastic, and piped music . . . no more locals sitting round singing come-all-ye’s. You’ll never see the likes of Donal Donnelly, half stocious, bawling out, ‘Come all ye dry-land sailors and listen to my song. It’s only forty verses so I won’t detain you long.’ ”

  The thought saddened Barry. He’d heard Irish songs at his grandfather’s knee, knew the words of many even if he couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket. “It’s like that Liam Clancy song, isn’t it, Fingal? ‘Winds of change are blowing—old ways are going . . .’ ”

  “And more’s the pity. There’ll be no more storytelling. No eejit up on his hind legs declaiming his party piece of poetry. Do you know what there’ll be? Bloody top-of-the-pops rubbish from loudspeakers at ten million decibels whether the customers want to listen to it or not.” O’Reilly banged his fist on the table. “We’ll have to stop it or he’ll lose all the local trade.” He glanced at the men at the bar, then at the men at the other table. “He can’t do that. The Duck’s . . . God, Barry, it sounds trite, but it’s the heart of Ballybucklebo.”

  “Nothing trite about it, Fingal. It’s true. So why does he want to do it?”

  “Remember the coach load of Yankees we saw?”

  “Yes.”

  “Bishop wants to go after the tourist trade.”

  “No.”

  “Yes. Can’t you just see it? A big neon sign in fake Celtic script outside saying, Mother Macree’s Olde Irish Shebeen, and maybe Donal Donnelly outside the front door dressed like a leprechaun, silver buckles on his shoes, stovepipe hat, and a bloody great shillelagh in his fist, sitting on a stool, with his cap on the pavement and a big sign, Will Say Begorrah for a pound.”

  The image of Donal, despite Barry’s concern, made him laugh.

  “It’s no bloody laughing matter,” O’Reilly said. “Come on, finish up. It’s time we were home.”