Rosewater and Soda Bread

MRS. DERVLA QUIGLEY
, perpetual widow of James Ignatius Quigley, was the self-proclaimed arbiter of all that was decent and holy in the coastal village of Ballinacroagh.

By no sheer accident was her place of inhabitance situated over the Reek Relics shop, a musty amalgamation of crucifixes, laminated prayer cards, bottled holy water, and any paraphernalia pertaining to Saint Patrick. The dark apartment she shared with her spinster sister afforded Dervla a steady view of Main Mall, a crooked, cobbled main street that, despite all her efforts, had been greatly altered in the last year and a half.

There was a time, Dervla bitterly recalled, when a respectable citizen could sit by her bedroom window and not be battered by the smells of strange lands; a day when the only problem confronting decent folk was whether they should take an umbrella on the way out or brave unprotected the cold, pricking rain that
plagued the western plains of Ireland eleven out of twelve months.

But then, that was before those three in that café came along.

Casting her rheumy eyes out onto Main Mall, Dervla settled her gaze on the squat stone building across the street. Its bright red door and purple shutters were closed, but it was nearly half past six in the morning, and as Dervla knew quite well by now, they would soon be opened for another day of business.

Another day of enduring the licentious smells of strange spices, the heady vapor of dishes that drew regular crowds of gluttons to the café's windows and had prompted
The Connaught Telegraph
to declare it “County Mayo's Best Kept Secret,” a title that still eluded Dervla's caustic sensibilities.

“Divine” and “delicious” were how some had praised the food served behind that crimson door, but she was rather more inclined toward the sobering adjectives “debased” and “detrimental” to describe the goings-on of the Babylon Café.

During weekly meetings of Ballinacroagh's Bible study group, held conveniently downstairs in the religious relics shop, Dervla Quigley was quick to remind her fellow members of the dangers of the Eastern-flavored eatery: “Let's not forget who was behind Thomas McGuire's tragic accident,” she would hiss, turning a portentous eye on the assembly of cobwebbed spinsters and whiskery matrons. “Drove the poor man to near ruin,” Dervla would say, referring to the colossal heart attack that had struck Thomas dead for a whole minute in the café.

As the proud proprietor of Ballinacroagh's three smoky pubs, a title that also qualified him as its most successful businessman, Thomas McGuire had kept a tight rein on the village's thin, and often precarious, economy. A workhorse of boundless stamina, he was rarely seen indulging in the drunken frivolities that passed as craic, or entertainment, in the small country town.

But for the heated caresses of his rotund wife, Cecilia, who enjoyed a nymphomania of epic proportions, Thomas had been a man devoted to the humorless world of stocktaking, profit margins, and the legalized peddling of Ireland's favorite imbibed brew—thick, luscious stout. There were few who could have guessed, then, the fanciful desires that lurked in the bar owner's congested heart.

Not even Dervla Quigley Ballinacroagh's most scrupulous ru-mormonger, had gathered that Thomas would have given up ownership of his three pubs, two spirit shops, and the Wilton Inn on Main Mall, for the chance to open his very own neon-faceted, disco-themed nightclub.

Thomas McGuire's discotheque dream came to light one stormy afternoon, the weekend of the 1986 Patrician Day Dance.

The July festival, commemorating Saint Patrick's spirited Lenten fast, also marked the fourth month since the Babylon Café had opened its bright red door for business. Stealing the awakened appetites of the Wilton Inn's regular lunch crowd was reason enough for Thomas to unleash his mounting fury, but the fact that the café stood on the grounds where he had planned to open his long-awaited mirror-balled nightclub, Polyester Paddy's, sparked what could only be regarded as a moment of certified insanity: he broke into the Babylon Café. There, inside its warm and quiet kitchen, he met his fate.

Bubbling away on the kitchen range, a vast green Aga stove that had lived through four wars (civil or otherwise) and a revolutionary uprising of patriots alike, was a pot of shimmering pomegranate soup. From its open lid escaped a perfume so erotic and tantalizing that, like the bewitching Salome, it revealed false prophets with every veiled motion. The sweet, languid smell of cooking pomegranates clasped itself around Thomas McGuire's hardened heart and did not let go until it
had smothered not only his stale breath but the decades of tyranny the drinks baron had imposed on Ballinacroagh's unwitting inhabitants.

Though Thomas survived the heart attack, saved at the last minute by the café's owners, he never returned to the run of his alcohol empire. The greater part of the publican's days was now spent sitting in a lumpy chair; he resurfaced in public during Christmas and Easter Masses, a pale and withered doppelgänger of his former self.

Yes, thought Dervla, things had definitely changed since those three foreign women moved into town.

Just then the red door across the street swung open. Dervla quickly disappeared behind her pastel chintz curtains, only to reemerge peeping a moment later. The oldest of the three, the one who made all the food, had just stepped out onto the damp sidewalk.

Dervla watched, following the dark-haired woman as she knelt to stop the café door open. The heavy door would shut easily were it not for the help of a stopper, which the woman was now securing at its corner. The doorstopper was none other than a crenellated iron, the same sort Dervla's mother had used to wrinkle out her father's Sunday poplin, heating it up on the turf stove that dominated their front parlor.

Those were the days, recalled the old gossip, when a woman knew her place in the world. No time idling in front of a pot of mash for her mother, no fiddling about with recipes and fancy trimmings, that's for sure. She had more sensible chores to bother about. Sewing on buttons and picking fieldstones, now
that
was a woman's true lot in life.