An Irish Country Christmas by Patrick Taylor Read Free Book Online Page A

tilted steeple.
    The boughs of old yews in the churchyard were bent, and from their white and dark green branches drops and drips pattered to the ground, digging small pits in the otherwise even carpet. Like a scene from a Christmas card, a single robin redbreast perched on a lower branch, its scarlet feathers in cheerful contrast to its wintry surroundings.
    Barry wondered why so many Christmas card publishers favoured scenes with a Dickensian flavour. Probably because when Dickens had been writing
A Christmas Carol
and Currier and Ives were producingtheir famous prints, all of Europe had been in the grip of what meteorologists refer to as the Little Ice Age. Lord alone knew the last time the Thames had frozen over in modern times, but it certainly had back then.
    Barry glanced at his watch. He would be five minutes early, but with Doctor O’Reilly
hors de combat
, today was going to be the first time he would run the practice alone. And he wanted to get started. Barry rose, wiped his lips on his napkin, crumpled the Belfast linen square on the tabletop, and went into the hall.
    The door opposite lay open to what had been the downstairs lounge when Number 1 Main Street had been a private house. He knew that had O’Reilly been a specialist, the facility would be referred to as his “consulting rooms,” and had he been an American it would be his “office.” In Irish general practice, the time-hallowed term for the place was “the surgery,” and it was in the surgery he would be spending the morning dealing with the kind of patient O’Reilly often called the “worried well.” Few if any would have serious ailments, but all would be concerned enough to have taken the trouble to come here.
    He walked to the waiting room and opened the door a crack. Even though he had been here for five months, the god-awful roses on the wallpaper still had the power to make him wince. He could picture Oscar Wilde, for whom Barry’s senior partner Fingal Flahertie had been named, uttering his famous last words: “Either that wallpaper goes, or I do.”
    He’d once heard of an incautious senior consultant at the Royal Victoria Hospital in Belfast paraphrase the lines during a spat with the hospital’s senior nursing officer, the matron. “Either you go or I do.” Matron was still there.
    Barry opened the door fully.
    “Morning, Doctor Laverty,” several voices said. It was a muted greeting. Only about a dozen of the wooden chairs were occupied. Was it simply because the roads were bad and anyone with a relatively trivial complaint was waiting until the weather improved before coming in? Or was it that . . . ? Bugger it, he told himself. Stop worrying about the new doctor and get on with your job.
    “Right, who’s first?” he asked, wondering if one day somebody might think to introduce an appointments system.
    An angular, middle-aged woman rose. She was wearing a stylishly cut navy blue raincoat, the lines of which were not exactly complimented by her massive rubber galoshes. Her pepper-and-salt hair was pulled back into a severe bun. Her hatchet face wore a scowl that Barry thought might have been stitched on by a plastic surgeon bearing a grudge. She did not use the customary “Me, Doctor,” but merely glared at the other occupants as if daring them to challenge her priority.
    “Miss Moloney,” he said. “How nice to see you.” You hypocrite, Laverty, he thought. “Please come this way.”
    Miss Moloney was the proprietress of the Ballybucklebo Boutique, the local ladies dress shop. No one had seen her in the village since she’d had an unfortunate run-in with Helen Hewitt, the redhead who had been Julie MacAteer’s bridesmaid. Back in August, Miss Moloney had aquired new stock to be sold to the ladies of the village for a wedding—Sonny and Maggie’s wedding. She’d not bargained for her shop assistant Helen, whom she had been persecuting mercilessly. The day before the big sale Helen had removed every single