An Irish Country Cottage Page 17

  She’d been in touch earlier this week with leaders of NICRA and had learned that a march in Newry, planned by the town’s local People’s Democracy committee for today, January 11, but cancelled at the end of December, was on again. Rumours were flying that Major Bunting’s people were going to mount a counter-demonstration.

  Barry staggered under the unwieldy toboggan.

  “Here,” Sue said. “Let me help you.”

  Together they carried the sled out of the building and into the stable yard.

  They’d driven last evening, Friday, to the farm outside Broughshane in County Antrim and woken this morning to a silent world. Even the Friesians in the byre for the winter forbore to low.

  Going tobogganing after lunch had been Sue’s idea, a way to forget, she said, about what might be going on in the wider world. Now they were bundled up, Barry in a pair of borrowed Welly boots and his own anorak over an Aran sweater Kinky had knit several years ago, Sue in a Norwegian boiled-wool sweater, one of his Christmas presents to her, and a camel-coloured duffle coat. His six-foot-long British Medical Students’ Association scarf was wrapped round her neck, hiding her copper hair.

  The idiotic springer Max frolicked round their legs.

  “I’ll tow it,” Barry said. “You show me the way.”

  Sue took his gloved left hand in her mittened one and headed for the gate. Barry marvelled at the unbroken, eye-aching whiteness of the field they were skirting to get to where a nearby range of hills rose against a sky of brittle blue. The sun was low to the south and its rays sparkled like fairy dust on leafless, hoar-frost-festooned willows that Barry knew grew on the near bank of the Braid River.

  The toboggan made a soft hiss sliding over the surface as they began to climb. Their boots crunched through the crust and their breath hung as smoke on the still air.

  “This is hard work. Can you believe Scott of the Antarctic’s lot did this man-hauling business and had planned a round trip of more than seventeen hundred miles on foot,” he said.

  “Silly,” Sue said, and chuckled. “This is hardly a polar expedition.” She grabbed the rope and took some of the strain.

  Max snapped at the snow and tried to eat a mouthful.

  “Daft dog,” Barry said.

  “Look,” Sue said, pointing at tracks alongside the hedge.

  “A badger?”

  Sue shook her head. “Fox. Badgers have five toes, foxes only four, just like Max. Dad’s quite the naturalist. He taught Michael and me so much about the animals and the plants around here when we were little. I hope…”

  And Barry heard the wistfulness in her voice and guessed what she was thinking. Two years ago they had stood together on the banks of the Braid and she had shared her image of Barry and a small fair-haired boy watching the trout rise. “What do you hope, Sue?”

  She shook her head again. “Nothing. Come on, Captain Scott, only one thousand six hundred ninety-nine more miles to go.”

  He broke into a trot. They arrived breathless, panting, and with Max barking and making mock attacks on Barry’s shins.

  “That climb was, er, warming,” Barry said.

  Sue managed to gasp, “Eejit,” and hauled in another lungful.

  “Right,” said Barry, turning the toboggan and pointing it downhill. “I’m no expert, but I watched the bobsled teams in ’64 at the Innsbruck Winter Olympics on the telly. Come to think of it, didn’t a luge competitor get killed in a practice run? But we’ll not think about that now. Anyway, the driver sits up front and the brakeman gives the thing a push, but we’ll do it differently. You sit there, please.” He pointed at the toboggan. “I’ll push on the curve and jump on behind the curled-up bows when I’ve got the thing running and then—”

  “This is a toboggan, Barry, not a manned spacecraft. Come on.” She threw herself on the sled “Come—on.”

  Barry pushed until he had to run, jumped aboard, grabbed the rope, and felt Sue’s arms round his waist.

  The toboggan hurtled down, gathering speed. Max, still barking, had difficulty keeping up.

  The wind of their passage was brisk on Barry’s cheeks and made his eyes water. Sue was whooping like a Western movie Indian on the warpath.

  “Hang on tight,” he yelled, spotting a drift directly ahead. No matter how hard he tugged on the left side of the rope, the toboggan hewed to its path like a train on tracks until, with a burst of flung snow, it ploughed, curved end first, into the drift and spilled over to the right.

  Barry spat out a mouthful of snow and struggled to his feet in time to help a powder-covered Sue to her feet. She was roaring with laughter and when at last she stopped, he hugged her to him.

  He felt her lips on his and tasted the Sue of her. “I love you,” he said.

  “And I love you, Barry,” she said, and for the moment she was his smiling, carefree girl of old. He looked around them. Soft, feathery flakes were drifting to the ground, as if comforting the earth with a protective, new blanket.

  “You were right,” he said, kneeling and righting the toboggan. “That was a lot of fun. Let’s do it again.”

  * * *

  “Last time we drove through snow like this, Barry put the car in the ditch and Maggie MacCorkle let her dog Jasper get out,” O’Reilly said as he turned into the drive to Ballybucklebo House. “Caused all kinds of bother.”

  “I remember it well. You and Barry came home that day worried sick about Jasper.” Kitty said. “You can’t stand the thought that someone, human or animal, might be suffering. Like the time in ’31 when you helped me find which set of dentures belonged to which man on Sir Patrick Dun’s surgical ward because you were afraid I’d get a bollicking from Matron. Dear old bear.” Kitty reached out and touched his shoulder, and he felt a tingle run along his spine.

  “And remember that amazing Dublin coddle we had in the Shelbourne at my thirtieth class reunion?” He parked in the stable yard.

  “I fail to see the connection, Fingal O’Reilly. But trust you,” she said, laughing, “to have such a fond memory of food. You’ve about as much romance in your soul as a black pudding.”

  O’Reilly rummaged in the glove compartment for a torch. “Got it. Come on.” He walked round the car and opened her door, helped her out, then, pulling him to her, kissed her soundly. He pulled away and looked at her in the dim light of the torch he held by his side. Her eyes were sparkling and the snow was falling gently on her glossy dark hair. They stood still, listening to the silence of the falling snow. Then O’Reilly reached into the Rover and pulled a large parcel wrapped in brown paper from the backseat.

  Together they followed the torch’s beam along the path to the Donnellys’ newly furnished cottage. Light spilled from the kitchen window and made the falling flakes seem to flutter like moths. A strong aroma of burning peat filled the air.

  O’Reilly used a brass knocker shaped like a lion’s head. Its rat-a-tat shattered the still night. The top half of the door opened. “Doctor and Mrs.” Donal’s grin was vast. “Come on on in out of that.” Donal opened the bottom half of the door, stood aside, and let the O’Reillys in. “See who’s here, love?”

  Julie was bathing one of the twins in a plastic baby bath in front of the turf fire. “Och, Doctor and Mrs. O’Reilly. Lovely til see youse both. Please ’scuse me, but Saturday night was always bath night at Dun Bwee.” She nodded at two kettles hanging on gallows over a turf fire. “I’ll be done with Susan Brigit in a wee minute. Abi’s already tucked up in her new bed.”

  O’Reilly noticed a galvanised hip bath hanging on the wall between the front wall of the house and the central door leading to the rest of the cottage. The room smelled of peat smoke and fresh paint.

  Tori was sitting on an easy chair, her little legs sticking out over the cushion’s edge. She paid no attention to the new arrivals and continued to scold her dolly. “‘Oo, be a good girl. No more bad dreams or ’oo’ll make Mammy cry.”

  O’Reilly pricked up his ears. It was only a couple of weeks since th
e wee mite had had what would have been the most horrific experience of her whole short life. He looked at Julie and cocked his head, mouthing, but not speaking the words, “bad dreams?”

  Julie nodded as she towelled the wee one dry.

  Donal was fussing, pulling out two chairs from the table at the other end of the room. “Will youse come and have a pew, please, and would youse like a wee cup of tea in your hand?”

  O’Reilly headed for the chairs, sat, and put his parcel on the tabletop. He wondered who had brightened the room with a large terracotta pot of hothouse-grown primroses. O’Reilly approved of roses of any kind.

  Kitty said, “No thanks, Donal. We’re on our way to Royal Ulster Yacht Club to meet Tom and Carol Laverty, Barry’s parents, so we’ve only popped in for a minute.”

  “Right enough.”

  O’Reilly studied the room. The globes of the four wall-mounted gas lights hissed and popped and their blue-white flames lit the room and cast swaying shadows into the corners. A rug with what looked like a red-and-black pattern that looked Persian covered a large part of the packed-earth kitchen floor. The dining room furniture sat on cheap coir carpet. “Begod,” he said, “if I’ve got this right, the work crews only finished yesterday and you’re all set up as if you’d been here forever. I’m impressed.”

  “Och, Doctor O’Reilly,” Julie said, “the village has been furnishing the place since Monday. There wasn’t much to do this morning except lug our few bits and pieces in and put them away. And we done that right quick. It’s important the girls feel at home as soon as possible.”

  O’Reilly saw the concern in her eyes as she glanced at Tori.

  “So, Donal,” she smiled fondly at him, “and me’s getting them into their routine as quick as we can.”

  “That makes very good sense,” O’Reilly said.

  “I’m no child trick-cyclist,” Donal said, “but I didn’t come down the Lagan on a soap bubble yesterday neither. We all had a ferocious shock. Kiddies need normal things around them as soon as possible after a thing like that.” He too glanced at Tori.

  O’Reilly began to wonder if the little girl was having more than the odd nightmare.

  “I’ll just put Brigit down for a wee while,” Julie said as she finished dressing the baby in her nightie, then rose and left the room.

  Donal moved the baby bath to one side, lifted the hip bath down, and set it in front of the fire. He tipped the contents of the baby bath in, emptied the two kettles in, then went to the sink to refill the kettles. “You’d left last Sunday, sir, before we discovered there was no way of heating the water in the bathroom.” Donal hung one full kettle on the gallows and returned to fill the other one. “The marquis’s father built the add-on expecting to put in electricity, but when he died—” Donal screwed up his face. “Something til do with death duties. Anyroad, the electric never got put in, but this afternoon his lordship himself come down with this here hip bath and thon pot of primroses from Lady Myrna, and sure we can manage rightly like this for a few months.”

  O’Reilly was transported back to the Liberties, the Dublin tenements of the 1930s, where he’d worked as a student and then for a year as an assistant to a GP.

  Donal poured cold water from the second kettle into the hip bath, testing its temperature by dipping in his bare elbow. He stopped pouring. “That’s her now, Tori. Get them off you and hop in, pet.”

  “Yes, Daddy.”

  Donal refilled the kettle. “D’y’ever hear,” he sang

  Wash me in the water where you washed your dirty daughter,

  And I shall be whiter than the whitewash on the wall.

  “It’s an ould tune from the trenches in the Great War.”

  O’Reilly had heard it, but Kitty chuckled.

  Julie came back alone as Tori stepped into the bath and sat down. “I can wash myself, Daddy,” she said.

  “Julie, would you like to show Mrs. O’Reilly and me the rest of your domain?” He had an ulterior motive, and as soon as the door into the hall was shut and the gas light lit, he said, “Tell me about Tori’s dreams.”

  Julie swallowed. “She wakes up at night. She’s crying and she says the fire was all her fault, so she does. She’d been playing in the kitchen not long before it broke out. It was way past her bedtime, but she was so excited after Christmas and all, she couldn’t sleep, so we’d let her stay up. Doesn’t matter what Donal and me says. We keep telling her it’s not her fault, but it’s the same thing nearly every night.”

  “Poor wee dote,” said Kitty. “When I worked at the orphanage in Tenerife during the Spanish Civil War, a lot of the children had bad dreams. Not surprising when you think of some of the things they’d lived through.”

  O’Reilly nodded. That a severe shock could cause psychological damage had been known for a long time with things like shellshock and battle fatigue. He vaguely remembered attending a lecture in the late ’50s about “gross stress reaction” that occurred to some people after a serious event. He’d had to deal, less than effectively, he had to admit, with sailors rendered emotionally helpless after HMS Warspite had been hit by a primitive radio-controlled bomb off Salerno in September 1943. He was no child psychologist either, but could this be that kind of a case? If it was, nobody seemed to know how to treat it.

  “What did you do, Mrs. O’Reilly?” Julie asked.

  “We just kept on comforting them as you and Donal are doing for Tori. I don’t know what else to say.”

  “Call me out to see her any time you like,” said O’Reilly. “I’ll try to convince her too.”

  “Thank, you, Doctor, Mrs. O’Reilly.” Julie was near to tears, but she stiffened her shoulders. “Now let me show you round.”

  The place was spick-and-span and well furnished. They returned to the living area to find Tori putting on her pyjamas. “Daddy’s good wee girl,” Donal said as his daughter flung her arms round his neck and said, “I love you, Daddy.”

  The poor wee button might well be traumatised, but with parents like Donal and Julie, she probably had all the support she needed. O’Reilly hoped like hell she did.

  “It’s been lovely seeing the place and how well you two are getting settled, but, Fingal…” She inclined her head to the hip bath.

  O’Reilly realised that it would be Julie’s turn next in the tub. In the Liberties, the man of the house always bathed last. Time he and Kitty were gone. He gave Donal the parcel. “You can open that after we’ve gone, Donal Donnelly, but I know you lost everything. That’s just a wee something. Good night to this house, and thanks.”

  “It’s us should be thanking youse, Doctor and Mrs.,” Donal said, “coming out of your way on a night like this and bringing that there.” He inclined his head to the parcel. “Now you drive carefully, Doctor.”

  “He will,” Kitty said as Donal opened the door and said, “Night. Night.”

  O’Reilly switched on the torch. As they followed its beam, Kitty said, “Only you, Fingal Flahertie O’Reilly, would think of giving Donal Donnelly a complete set of carpenter’s hand tools. It’s a thoughtful, generous gift, my old bear.”

  “Nonsense,” O’Reilly said, opening her car door. “What better way have we of helping a man like Donal get a real start on a new life? And besides, you should have heard the gurning from his mates about him borrowing their tools. If we can’t have peace in the wee North, we can at least have it in Ballybucklebo.”

  18

  To the Milking Shed

  “Here y’are, Sue. Barry.” Edith Nolan handed them each a steaming mug of chocolate as they settled themselves in comfy chairs in the kitchen. The range, an old, black, cast-iron, coke-burning Aga, rumbled and threw off a great heat. “Did you have fun out there? I went out to the henhouse and I thought I could hear the sound of this one laughing, hey.” She leaned over and playfully pulled Sue’s long plait.

  “We had a wonderful time, Mum,” said Sue.

  “We did indeed, but it was getting dark and nippy and it was time to c
ome home.” Barry lifted his cup. “This is a lifesaver, Edith. Thank you.”

  Selbert Nolan, Sue’s dad, was a big man. His well-worn Aran sweater had straw permanently tangled with the wool’s intricate stitches and his cheeks were weathered from years of sitting on a tractor in all weathers. His accent was as thick as Kinky’s champ. “It’ll be nippier yet in the byre half an hour from now when it’s five thirty milking time, hey bye.”

  “Haven’t I been milking cows since I was eleven? I’ll see to it,” said Sue.

  Barry looked over to see his wife’s eyes sparkling and her cheeks glowing from their frolic in the snow.

  “That’s most thoughtful,” her mum said.

  “You’re a good daughter,” Selbert said. “I appreciate that, and it won’t be too heavy work. After my wee adventure in ’67…”

  Selbert didn’t finish the sentence, and Barry was not surprised the man was not naming the condition that almost killed him two years before. Many survivors preferred not to.

  Over the two years since, the Nolans had gradually cut their herd down from twenty to ten. With Sue and her brother Michael grown and settled, the couple didn’t miss the extra money and it was easier for Selbert to manage. “Only six are lactating. And don’t worry about mucking out. I’ll shovel the clap in the morning. I know you can, but no daughter of mine needs to be smelling of cow dung before she has her tea. Leave it be.”