Country Days Read Free Page B

town on my own before and had a fierce job in finding his house. The wife answered the door and put me into the sitting-room. I felt that I had better not take up a good chair, so I sat on one that had no back. The wife came in and told me to sit over on another chair. But I clung to my own chair, crippled with shyness, and said that I was fine on this one. She got very annoyed and said, “That’s not a chair; that’s the coffee table.”
    Fr Tom laughed as he remembered, and I said, “Far away from coffee tables a lot of us were reared.”
    “Yes,” he said, “but all that does not matter if the heart is in the right place.”
    In the months that followed, any time that I rang Eileen or visited her, she had callers. The neighbours were in constant attendance and somebody called every night. During the day the farm still had to be run and it was now her sole responsibility. It worried her that she might not be able to cope, but after the first few hesitant months she came to grips with it.She had dark, anguish-filled days, but she had great faith, and prayer was her constant companion. In the evenings when the cows had been milked, she spent hours working in the garden and found healing in the earth. But it was the neighbours who were her greatest support. She was lucky to be living in a part of the country where the rural community put their arms around her and helped to make her grief more bearable.
    It meant a lot to both of us that our paths had crossed again. We would keep in touch in the future because friendship, like everything valuable in life, needs a certain amount of care.

S OMEWHERE TO L AY M Y H EAD
    T HE PHONE RANG as I came down the stairs. I picked it up to be met by an ominous silence, but when I strained my ear I could hear bronchial breathing. A jagged, hollow cough which sounded as if it was coming from the bottom of a barrel wheezed into my ear, and I knew then that it was the Major. A very old, retired British army man, over six foot tall, bottle-thin and upright, with a high bald head and a purple nose, he lived outside the village in the restored corner of an old ruined castle. There was still a pregnant silence on the phone, and I could sense that he was cranking up his ancient vocal cogs as he prepared to grind his crackling voice into action. After a certain amount of spluttering “ahum, ahum”, he suddenly hiccuped into top gear.
    “Alice!” he barked.
    “Yes, Major,” I answered. I felt like saluting smartly, clicking my heels together and adding “all present and correct”.
    “That confounded parcel,” he growled. “Who the blazes sent me that?”
    As far as the Major was concerned, nothing of anyimportance had left the post office that morning except his parcel.
    “No idea,” I assured the Major.
    “Good God!” he spluttered. “Do you mean to tell me that you have no idea who sent it?”
    “No idea at all,” I told him.
    I was keeping my side of the conversation to a minimum because the Major had the happy knack of tying you up in knots without even trying.
    “Have you any idea what’s in it?” he demanded.
    “No,” I told him.
    “Well, it’s not mine,” he assured me.
    I decided then that I would chance a question to sort things out, with the hope that our parcel enquiry would not wander too far off the point.
    “How did you get it so?” I asked.
    “Damned if I know,” he spluttered.
    “Who is it addressed to?” I pursued.
    “The Mayor,” he announced.
    “Well, that explains it,” I assured him.
    “Explains what?” he barked.
    “The names are so alike that they got mixed up, and that is how you got it.”
    “Preposterous,” he spluttered. “You should have sent the confounded thing to the Mayor.”
    “But we have no Mayor, Major,” I told him, feeling that I was getting my Majors and Mayors in a tangle. The Major always succeeded in getting everyone around him confused while he blustered on, oblivious to the situation.
    “And why haven’t we