An Irish Country Love Story (19 page)

“Kinky says Miss Moloney's got some lovely teal blue—”

“Have you had the measles, Kitty?”

“Yes.”

“So have I. Which makes us both unsusceptible contacts, so we don't have to be quarantined. And I, dear Mrs. Fingal Flahertie O'Reilly, am going to take the woman I love for lunch at the Culloden—”

She laughed. “Lunch at the Culloden! You old reprobate, you're welshing on the bet. You'll try anything to get out of buying new curtains.”

He pulled away from the kerb. “Nonsense. I've been planning this little treat since this morning. Long before I was hoodwinked into agreeing to your bet. And, as I was going to say before I was interrupted, after lunch we'll visit Miss Moloney.”

“Lunch and new curtains all on the same day. You are a pet.” Kitty leant over and pecked his cheek.

“I know,” said O'Reilly with a smug grin, “but don't you tell anybody. I have a reputation to uphold. Now, Culloden,” he accelerated, “here we come.”

 

15

That Will Batter the Gateway

“Did you enjoy your lunch, Kitty?”

“I think,” she said, “that, after Kinky of course, the Culloden does the best steak and kidney pie in Ulster. Thank you. A girl could get used to being spoiled.”

That is, of course, the object of the exercise, he thought, but said, “My pleasure.” O'Reilly, replete himself following a plate of beer-battered halibut and chips, listened to the rain bouncing off the Rover's roof as the old car neared the corner at Number One Main on the Bangor to Belfast Road. “I've not forgotten we're going to Miss Moloney's, but I want to pop in home first, pick up a pair of boots that need resoling so I can drop them off at the cobblers.”

“Fair enough.”

“Then home for a leisurely afternoon. There's a rugby game on the telly. Ireland are playing Australia in Dublin.” As he braked he indicated and turned left onto the lane leading to his garage behind his house and the gate to his back garden.

Looking back, Kitty said, “Fingal, there's a lorry's coming down the road at a ferocious tilt.”

O'Reilly stopped the car beside the gate. “Sit you here, girl, and keep dry. I'll just be a tick,” and, ignoring the downpour, he got out to head for the house to get his boots. He heard the sudden explosive hiss of air brakes, turned, and looked back up the road. Begob, Kitty was right. The lorry in question was taking the downhill, nearly ninety-degree, right-hand bend where his house faced the Presbyterian church.

It was a dangerous corner, and for years the council had been threatening halfheartedly to straighten it, but to do so they'd have to expropriate either the church or Number One Main. The Presbyterians had objected with sanctified fervour. Their churchyard with its two-hundred-year-old occupants would have to be disturbed, and the bureaucrats would take away O'Reilly's house over his dead body.

The lorry was going too fast—much too fast—and in this rain the road would be slick. A quick glance reassured him that there were no other vehicles coming this way. The big, articulated vehicle was swaying from side to side. Tyres squealed. Black rubber skid marks appeared on the asphalt. The lorry was halfway into the turn.

“Go on,” O'Reilly begged. “Get round the bloody corner. Please.”

But the cab missed the crown of the bend and, shuddering and clattering, mounted the footpath.

“Bugger it,” O'Reilly yelled as the front wheels destroyed the rosebushes into which he had chucked the hapless Seamus Galvin the day Barry had come to be interviewed in 1964. The cab, to the accompaniment of tearing metal and splintering glass, smashed through the dining room window. The vehicle came to a stop with the bonnet, steam jetting from its radiator, and the front of the cab right through the front wall of Number One Main Street.

O'Reilly ran round the lorry, climbed up on the step, and wrenched the driver's door open.

A man wearing a duncher and dungarees was sitting rigidly, arms braced as his hands clutched the steering wheel. His eyes stared straight ahead, he was trembling all over, and kept repeating, “Oh shite, oh shite, oh shite.”

At least he was conscious and did not appear to be in pain, so it was unlikely that any bones were broken. And as far as O'Reilly could see, the man was not bleeding.

Kitty appeared at O'Reilly's shoulder. “Is he okay?”

“Seems to be,” he said as he took the man's pulse. “Nip inside and call nine-nine-nine. Then go into the dining room and make sure nobody was hurt in the house. I'll see what I can do here, and when you come back bring some hot sweet tea.” It was useful in shock cases, and with a pulse rate of 110 per minute and the pulse itself feeble the man definitely was in shock.

“Right,” she said, and headed off.

O'Reilly said, “Can you hear me? I'm a doctor.”

The driver said, “I can, sir.”

“Have you hurt yourself?”

“I don't think so. I'm just all shook up, so I am.”

“What's your name?”

“Sid. Sid Coulter. From Lisburn.”

A few more questions told him that the man knew where he was and what day it was. Probably no head injury either. “I think,” O'Reilly said, “that apart from banjaxing your lorry you've got away with it. We'll know for certain when the ambulance gets here.”

Barry appeared. “Fingal, what the hell happened? From the kitchen it felt like an earthquake.”

“Lorry skidded,” O'Reilly said.

“Is the driver okay?”

“Seems to be. Is anybody else in there?”

“No. It's Saturday. Nonie's off and Kinky doesn't usually come in at weekends.”

“Good. Now go on back into the house. You're getting soaked. There's nothing you can do here and you're on call. Kitty's phoning nine-nine-nine.”

“I passed her in the hall.”

Kitty appeared. “I've rung for the emergency services. They're on their way.”

“'Bout time. The traffic's starting to pile up.”

“And here.” She handed him a steaming mug. “Hot tea, lots of sugar. Barry was making himself a cuppa.”

“Thanks.” O'Reilly handed the mug to the driver. “Get that into you.” He heard a rapidly approaching
nee-naw, nee-naw.

“Good. Now go on, the pair of you, in out of the rain. There's not much to do here until the police arrive. Kitty, phone Bertie Bishop, would you? Ask him to come round if he can. We're going to need his help to plug that ruddy great hole in our dining room once the lorry's hauled out.”

*   *   *

O'Reilly, together with Kitty and Bertie Bishop, stood in the dining room doorway surveying the damage. Barry had been called out to a case of croup up in the housing estate. The ambulance men had fitted Sid Coulter with a protective neck brace before carrying him to the ambulance, where O'Reilly had made sure the lorry driver had not sustained any serious injuries.

Constable Mulligan and two officers in a police car from Holywood had between them taken the details of the accident and directed traffic until a tow truck had arrived and dragged the battered lorry away. The fire brigade had stood by until the firemen were satisfied there was no risk of fire.

“What a mess,” Kitty said. She gave O'Reilly a sympathetic look as if to say, I know I wanted to get rid of them, but … “New curtains are the least of our worries now,” she said. O'Reilly flashed her a grateful smile.

“Right,” said Bertie. “The first thing is to get onto your insurers. Get permission to protect the house from further spoilage. Have them send an assessor round too.”

“The policy's in my desk. Top right-hand drawer,” O'Reilly said. “Kitty, could you get it and phone?”

“At once.” She went into the surgery.

“Boys-a-boys,” Bertie said. “You're lucky nobody was in here sitting with their back to the window.”

The lorry had shoved one of the dining room chairs underneath the table. Between it and the jagged hole in the outside wall, broken pieces of window frame were jumbled up with pieces of glass, plaster, laths, and bricks.

“Leave it til me, Doctor.” Bertie strode into the room, followed by O'Reilly. They picked their way past the debris to the broken wall. Bertie examined the place where the window had stood. “Right,” he said. “Once we get permission, a wooden frame and canvas'll do the trick. Keep the rain out until Monday. Then I'll get a crew with a skip straight round. Clean out the rubbish.”

“I'd be grateful, Bertie.” O'Reilly could vaguely hear Kitty on the hall phone.

“Och, sure, isn't it what I do, Doctor? Meantime, you'll need til follow up with your insurance people and have them talk to the lorry driver's insurers. It'll cost a penny or two to rebuild, so it will.”

“I thought so,” O'Reilly said. “Can't be helped.”

“The driver's insurance should take care of it,” Bertie said. “It shouldn't need to go to court. That corner's been a known hazard for years.”

Kitty came back. “The Cornhill Insurance people have been most helpful. Disturb as little as possible, they say, but we have permission to put up a bit of weather proofing. It's to their advantage that the less extra damage done the better.”

“Great,” said Bertie. “If I can use your phone I'll get Donal and a couple of other lads round right away to get the hole plugged.”

“In the hall,” O'Reilly said. “Meanwhile, we'll cover up the rest of the furniture in here with dust sheets, and when we've done, Bertie, will you join Mrs. O'Reilly and me upstairs for a cup of tea?”

*   *   *

O'Reilly, Kitty, and Bertie sat round the fire in the cosy upstairs lounge. Distant sounds of sawing and hammering came from below where Donal Donnelly and two other workmen were building the patch for the dining room wall. For some time to come the folks at Number One would have to take their meals up here while reconstruction went ahead. At least the surgery was intact.

“Here, Bertie,” said Kitty, offering a three-tiered cake stand. “Jacob's Afternoon Tea biscuits, Kinky's jam tarts, or McVitie's digestive biscuits.”

“Thanks very much, Mrs. O'Reilly.” He took a jam tart. “My Flo makes these with Kinky's recipe, but, no harm til Flo, hers are never quite the same, so they're not.”

Kitty laughed. “Kinky really is one of a kind.”

O'Reilly said, “And so are you, Bertie. It's very decent of you coming out on a pouring Saturday afternoon to arrange for temporary repairs.”

Bertie swallowed a bite of jam tart. “It's no different to yourself. You don't say, ‘Sorry it's Saturday' if there's an emergency, do you?”

“'Course not,” O'Reilly said, then, “Pass me a digestive, please, love.” He took a bite. “Tell me, Bertie, how long will it take to get the dining room fixed?”

Bertie Bishop pursed his lips. “There may be a wee snag.”

“Oh?” O'Reilly sat forward. “Snag?”

“You see, as long as I've been on council they've been chuntering on about straightening the road at this corner. An accident like today's was bound til happen sooner or later. It's a mercy no one was hurt.”

O'Reilly frowned. “I don't see what that has to do with the price of corn.”

“You see, Doctor, everybody on council knows yourself. They haven't wanted to upset you. We've spoken to the ministry to see if we could go through the churchyard, but there's laws hundreds of years old, so there are. You can't dig up graves without enough paperwork to run the
Belfast Telegraph
for a month.”

What was Bertie hinting at? Had this accident opened some doors to official action on straightening the road through his property? O'Reilly looked around the room in the house that had been a central part of his life since 1946. It held his furniture, his books, his records, his memories. And he could lose it? He gritted his teeth and clenched his fists. Not without a fight he'd not.

Bertie said, “Your house was built for the Presbyterians too.”

“I know,” said O'Reilly. “Old Doctor Flanagan told me about it. When Flanagan's grandfather, Michael, was minister here, a donor put up two hundred and fifty pounds in 1817 and took a two-hundred-year lease from the MacNeills. He built a manse to give to the church, and finished the building in 1818. Michael's son Ethan succeeded him as pastor to the Presbyterian flock. None of Ethan's sons went into the church, but his oldest boy, my old boss Doctor Flanagan, studied medicine. By the time he was ready to set up his medical practice in 1897 the new minister was a bachelor and needed something smaller. The church allowed Doctor Flanagan to buy the old manse from them and his estate eventually sold it to me after the war.”

“I didn't know that,” Bertie said. “But if that's when it was built it's Georgian. I'll have to apply for planning permission to do any renovations and major repairs on a house of that period. There's a group on council wants that there road straightened…”

“I don't believe it,” O'Reilly growled. “Through my house?” He looked at Kitty. Her hands were clasped tightly in her lap, her gaze intent on Bertie.

“I'm sorry, Doctor, Mrs. O'Reilly, but it'll have til be debated at the next meeting.”

“And when's that?” Kitty said quietly.

“Two weeks.”

“So we'll have to live under canvas for two weeks before you can even get started on the repairs?” O'Reilly'd lost interest in his tea and biscuit.

“I'm afraid so, but…” Bertie brightened, “there's another party would like til see a bypass round the south side of Ballybucklebo. There's far too much traffic going through the village now and it's going til get worse.” His smile was self-deprecatory. “I'm the chairman of that group and we've been consulting with contractors in Belfast too. My company could handle the,” Bertie paused, “the demolition—sorry, sir—of Number One…”