‘Was it him did for the turkey too?’ The old woman made no effort to conceal her anger.
‘No. I don’t think so.’
‘It must be those other bowsies, then.’
In her long yellow dress and silver shoes Rachael helped tidy the kitchen and prepare for the breakfasts until the old woman was completely pacified, and the two sat down like ancient allies to scalding tea and thickly buttered toast. Through the thin wall they heard O’Reilly’s alarm clock go off.
‘They’re not worth half the trouble they put us to,’ the old woman grumbled.
They heard him rise, unlock the door, go upstairs to the bathroom, and as he came down Rachael went out to meet him in the hallway. It was several minutes before she returned to the kitchen, and then it was to borrow a kettle of boiling water. Outside on the street it was a white world. The windscreen of O’Reilly’s car was frosted over, the doorhandles stuck.
‘You were right to make him leave you home. They should be all learned a bit of manners,’ Mrs McKinney said approvingly as she took the empty kettle back, the noise of the car warming up coming from outside.
O’Reilly was a long time leaving Rachael home, and when he came back he checked that no one had been looking for him on the site, reported sick, and went to bed. He did not get up till the following morning.
When Mrs McKinney saw the state of Cronin and Ryan later that morning, she decided to postpone the business of the turkey for a day or two. They tried to drink a glass of Bols eggnog in the Midland’s as a cure before work, but it made them violently ill, and they had to go back to bed.
The town had not had such a piece of scandal since some members of the Pioneer excursion to Knock had to be taken from the bus in Longford for disorderly conduct three years before. Circling the Virgin’s Shrine in a solid downpour while responding with Hail Marys to the electronic Our Fathers had proved too severe a trial for three recent recruits.
I was stopped on my way to school, was stopped again on my way back, to see if I could add anything to the news of the night, but everything, down to the devastated turkey, seemed to be already known.
Rachael and O’Reilly were married in early January. Only Cronin was invited to the wedding from the Bridge Restaurant, he and O’Reilly having become great pals again. He told us that it was quiet and very pleasant, just a few people, the way weddings should be. We made a collection in the restaurant, and with the money Mrs McKinney bought a mantel clock in a mahogany frame and had all our names inscribed on a bright metal scroll. After a honeymoon in London, the new couple went to Galway, where he took up his position with the County Council.
It was some years before Rachael and O’Reilly were seen again. A crowd up for the Christmas shopping saw them in Henry Street a Saturday morning before Christmas. They were both wearing sheepskin coats. Rachael’s coat fell to her ankles and a beautiful fair-haired child held her hand as they walked. She had lost her lean beauty but was still a handsome woman. A small boy rode on O’Reilly’s shoulders. The boy was pointing excitedly at the jumping monkeys on the pavement and the toy trumpets the sellers blew. Sometimes when they paused at the shops the mother would turn away from the glitter of the silver snow to smile on them both. They disappeared into Arnott’s before anybody had gathered enough courage to greet them.
Within a decade O’Reilly had risen to be a county engineer, and a few years afterwards became the county manager. Everywhere local officials gather it is heard whispered along the grapevine, as if to ease the rebuke of his rise over older and less forceful, less lucky men, that O’Reilly would not be half the man he is if he had not married Rachael.
Oldfashioned
The Protestants had so dwindled that there was no longer a living in Ardcarne: the old Georgian parsonage had been closed, its avenue of great beech trees, the walled orchard, the paddock and lawn and garden, all let run wild. The church with its Purser windows was opened once every year for harvest thanksgiving to keep certain conditional endowments. There was always a turnout on that one Sunday, from the big farms and houses, gamekeepers and stewards of the Rockingham estate, and some years Sir Cecil and Lady Stafford King-Harmon came from the Nash house above Lough Key, in which there were so many windows it was said there was one for every day of the year.
The Catholic church, hiding its stark ugliness amid the graveyard evergreens in the centre of the village, was so crowded for both Masses on Sundays that often children and old people would faint in the bad air and have to be carried outside. Each day saw continual traffic to the blue-and-white presbytery, blue doors and windows, white walls, at the end of the young avenue of limes. They came for references, for birth certificates, to arrange for calls to the sick and dying, for baptism, marriages, churchings, to report their neighbours: they brought offerings and payments of dues. No one came in the late evening except on the gravest matters, for by then Canon Glynn and Danny, who had retired early from the civil service to come and live with his brother, could be extremely irritable, and often smelled of whiskey. ‘You could get run,’ was the word that was out.
A green mail car crossed the bridge to the post office each morning and evening at nine o’clock and six. Stephen Maughan crossed the same bridge on his heavy carrier bicycle every Thursday evening with fresh herrings off the Sligo train, setting up the bicycle on its legs outside the post office to shout, ‘If you don’t buy you can’t fry,’ to the annoyance of the Miss Applebees within, Annie and Lizzie, with their spectacles and neat white hair and their glittering brass scales. There were two pubs, Charlie’s and Henry’s, and they both had grocery stores as well. There was a three-teacher school, a dancehall, a barracks with three guards and a sergeant.
There was much traffic on the roads, carts, bicycles, people on foot who always climbed on the walls or grass margins when the occasional motor was heard. People could be seen walking the whole seven miles to Boyle before the big matches, and after the digging of the potatoes, when the dreaded long nights had to be faced, holding wet batteries stiffly. Every summer Sunday the cattle were driven from the football field at the back of Charlie’s and the fouled lines marked white again with lime. To the slow sog of the football in the distance, handball of sorts was played against the back of Jimmy Shivnan’s forge, the bounce uncertain because of the unswept stones, and there, too, the coins were tossed from the backs of rulers and greasy pocket combs, each copper row arranged so that all the harps faced upwards before being thrown. Everywhere there was the craving for news. News, any news, passing like flame from mouth to eager mouth, slowly savoured in the eyes. ‘Bruen’s cow rolled over into a drain, was found dead on her back, the feet in the air …’ ‘Where? When? Who came on the cow? Was she long on her back? That’ll put them back a step. It’s no joke no matter who it happens to. Terror what life puts people through.’ ‘A sewing machine was the only thing left standing four floors up in a bombed factory in Coventry.’ ‘Imagine … four floors up … a sewing machine standing on a girder out there on its own … a terror … a sight.’
Suddenly the war was over. Britain had to be rebuilt. The countryside emptied towards London and Luton. The boat trains were full and talk was of never-ending overtime. After weeks in England, once-easy gentle manners, set free from the narrow rule of church and custom, grew loud, uncertain, coarse.
At home a vaguely worried church joined a dying language to declare that learning Irish would help to keep much foreign corrupting influence out. Red Algier tractors with long steering columns and the sound of low-flying airplanes — they were said to have the original Messerschmitt engine — started to replace the horse and cart. A secondary school was opened by the Brothers in the town. The word Salamanca, having endured for most of a century as a mighty ball booted on the wind out of defence in Charlie’s field, grew sails again on an open sea, became distant spires within a walled city in the sun. Race memories of hedge schools and the poor scholar were stirred, as boys, like uncertain flocks of birds on bicycles, came long distances from the villages and outlying farms to grapple with calculus and George Gordon and the delta of the River Plate.