An Irish Country Christmas Read Free Page B

unflappable woman. She was unlikely to have sent for him for anything trivial on a bloody awful night like this. He’d find out when he got there, but damn it, getting there was going to take longer than he had anticipated.
    At least there’d be no cyclists to get in his way on a god-awful night like tonight, and he’d certainly seen worse weather at sea on the old
Warspite
during the war, nearly twenty years ago now. He missed the camaraderie of the battleship’s wardroom, and his friend Tom Laverty, the navigating officer.
    Funny coincidence, young Barry being Tom’s son. Of course during the war Barry would have been in nappies, and Tom, while being a convivial companion and a damn fine navigator, was, like many men of his generation, reticent about his family life. He’d never mentioned he had a son, and since the war he and Fingal had gone their separate ways, just the way the bloody Rover was trying to do by sliding toward the ditch again. O’Reilly hauled it back on course by brute force on the steering wheel. Tom Laverty was in Australia now on sabbatical. Probably kept in touch with Barry by letter. Perhaps, O’Reilly thought, he’d ask Barry for Tom’s address and drop the man a line himself, let him know how well young Barry was doing as a GP.
    He hoped Barry would be doing all right tonight, driving back to Ballybucklebo in that funny little German car of his. It made you wonder, O’Reilly thought. Twenty years ago the Germans and the British were trying to hammer the living bejesus out of each other. Now the same Germans were happily telling us, as they had done a year ago, in 1963, that we could whistle if we thought we were getting into the European Economic Community. Their antipathy on the trade front didn’t stop them selling us a model of car originally demanded as a “people’s car” by Adolf Hitler.
    Their little car might be built for the people, but it hadn’t been designed to cope with the narrow winding roads of Ulster in midwinter. That was what cars like the old Rover were for.
    O’Reilly turned left off the main Bangor-Belfast Road, dropped into third gear, and began the grind up into the Ballybucklebo Hills. The snow had stopped falling, but all he could see ahead was an unbroken sheet of pure white covering the road. No one else had been up here to leave tracks. On each side of the road the hedges, white-crowned, black-branched, stood stark and frigid. It was a good thing the snow had only been falling for about half an hour. It couldn’t be more than an inch deep.
    He passed a crossroads. The lane to the Gillespies’ farmhouse was a mile further on. The road would slip down into a hollow, then climb again to crest a hill, at the top of which was a stand of sycamores. The gate to the lane was just past the trees and to the left. The lasttime he’d been here was—he had to try to remember—three, no, four years ago.
    The sycamores that now appeared to his left had been in full foliage back when Molly had given birth to the twins. Those trees tonight stood out gauntly against a backdrop of moon-silvered clouds.
    He stopped the car at the lane and climbed out to open the five-bar gate. The fresh snow crunched under his boots, and the wind sighed in the trees. He felt the chill of it on his cheeks. He looked up through a gap in the clouds and saw the black of the sky and three bright stars. He’d not be seeing them if it was still snowing, and for that he was grateful. He’d not like to be stuck at the Gillespies’ overnight. Deep snowdrifts were rare in Ulster but they could happen.
    The gate was difficult to shove against snow, but he was able to ram it far enough open. As he guided the Rover past the gate, he was tempted to leave it open and save himself the trouble of having to reopen it on his way home. He stopped the car and walked back. Neither Molly Gillespie nor her husband Liam would be impressed if their stock wandered out through an open gateway. Come to think of