‘Tell them that I’m not to be disturbed. Tell them not to go banging on the door. The door will be locked.’
‘I’ll tell them.’
‘I’m most obliged. I’ll recompense you in due course.’
I heard him move about for a little while downstairs. Then his door closed.
The others were so long in coming that I was beginning to think they must have met with some accident. They made much noise. I heard them try O’Reilly’s door several times, calling out before they came upstairs. Cronin was wild with drink, Ryan just merry and foolish.
‘Bloody O’Reilly got home. He’s locked the door.’ Cronin staggered violently as he spoke.
‘He was up here,’ I said. ‘He asked not to be disturbed when you came home.’
‘Not to be disturbed.’ Cronin glared.
‘I’m just giving the message.’
‘That’s the notice he has hung on the doorknob,’ Ryan giggled.
‘I made a speech,’ Cronin said. ‘A most impressive speech.’
‘What sort of speech?’ I asked as gently as possible in the hope of diverting the drilling stare.
‘That it was the bounden duty of every single man to get married. Of course I was referring to O’Reilly in particular, but it had universal significance as well. To show that I was serious I proposed that I myself be married immediately. This week if possible.’
Any temptation to laugh was out. It would be far too dangerous.
‘Of course you make no effort to get married. You just lie here in bed,’ he continued. The stare would not be diverted, and then suddenly he jumped on me in the bed, but his movements were so slow and drunken that all I had to do was draw my knees upwards and to the side for him to roll across the bed out on the floor the far side. This was repeated three times. ‘Make no effort. Just lie there,’ he kept saying, and each time the breathing grew heavier. I was afraid the farce could go on for some time, until, rising, he caught sight of himself in the wardrobe mirror.
‘I’ve never seen myself in a dress suit before. I am most impressed. Instead of giving it back, I think I’ll buy it. I’ll wear it in my professional capacity. The farmers will be most impressed.’ Dress suits seemed to be having a formalizing effect on speech.
I used the diversion to rise and dress. Then another car drew up outside. Looking out the window, Ryan, who all this time had stood there grinning and smiling, said, ‘Rachael’s back. She’s looking to get O’Reilly to drive her home.’
‘How did she get this far?’
‘With Johnny from the mill and his girl. She wouldn’t come with us. They had to leave Johnny’s girl home first. We’d better go down. They have no key.’
‘It is our duty to go down,’ Cronin said.
I sat for a long time on the bed’s edge before following them down.
A piece of cardboard hung from the doorknob of O’Reilly’s room. I lifted it and read please do not disturb.
Rachael was sitting at the corner of the small table in the kitchen, and with her was Johnny Byrne, the foreman of the mill. She was smoking, plainly upset, but it made her the more beautiful. She’d pulled a jacket over her bare shoulders, and silver shoes showed beneath the long yellow dress. Ryan and Cronin had taken Mrs McKinney’s cooked turkey from the fridge and placed it on the high wooden table. Cronin was waving a turkey leg about as he inspected himself in Paddy McKinney’s shaving mirror.
‘It’s no trouble now for me to run you the rest of the way home,’ Johnny was saying to Rachael.
‘No thanks, Johnny.’
‘We’ll get him up now. It is our duty,’ Cronin suddenly said.
We heard him rattling the doorknob in the hallway. ‘Get up, O’Reilly. Rachael’s here. You have to run her home.’
After a lot of rattling and a threat to break down the door, a hollow voice sounded within the room as if spoken through a sheet by a man whose life was fast ebbing. ‘Please inspect notice and go away,’ at which point Rachael went out and ushered Cronin back into the kitchen. He was amazingly docile in her hands. Ryan was peeling the turkey breastbone clean with his fingers.
‘You must leave him alone. It’s between us.’ Rachael moved him gently back towards the turkey on the table.
‘Even if you got him up now he’d hardly be fit to drive you home,’ Johnny Byrne said.
‘We could give him coffee,’ and after a time she added, ‘I’ll try just once more.’ She called him, asking him to let her into the room. All that came in the silence were loud, simulated snores.
‘It’d only take a minute to run you home,’ Johnny said when she came back into the kitchen.
‘No, Johnny. I’ll wait. You should go home now. You won’t find till you have to go to work,’ and reluctantly, pausing a number of times, he rose and left. Having stripped the turkey clean, Cronin and Ryan fell asleep in chairs. In the garishly lit kitchen, I sat in Byrne’s place at the table. A foolish, sentimental, idle longing grew: to leave her home, to marry her, to bring up O’Reilly’s child with her in some vague, long vista of happiness; and after an hour I said, ‘I could get one of their car keys,’ indicating the sleeping inseminators, ‘and drive you home.’
‘No,’ she said firmly. ‘I’ll wait now till morning.’
She was there when Mrs McKinney came down to get the breakfasts in the morning, there to face her bustling annoyance at the disturbances of the rowdy night turn to outrage at the sight of the pillaged turkey on the table.
‘I’m sorry to be here. I’m waiting for Peter to get up. He was drunk and locked the door. He took me to the dance and he has to take me home,’ she explained with a quiet firmness.
‘Was it him did for the turkey too?’ The old woman made no effort to conceal her anger.
‘No. I don’t think so.’
‘It must be those other bowsies, then.’
In her long yellow dress and silver shoes Rachael helped tidy the kitchen and prepare for the breakfasts until the old woman was completely pacified, and the two sat down like ancient allies to scalding tea and thickly buttered toast. Through the thin wall they heard O’Reilly’s alarm clock go off.
‘They’re not worth half the trouble they put us to,’ the old woman grumbled.
They heard him rise, unlock the door, go upstairs to the bathroom, and as he came down Rachael went out to meet him in the hallway. It was several minutes before she returned to the kitchen, and then it was to borrow a kettle of boiling water. Outside on the street it was a white world. The windscreen of O’Reilly’s car was frosted over, the doorhandles stuck.
‘You were right to make him leave you home. They should be all learned a bit of manners,’ Mrs McKinney said approvingly as she took the empty kettle back, the noise of the car warming up coming from outside.
O’Reilly was a long time leaving Rachael home, and when he came back he checked that no one had been looking for him on the site, reported sick, and went to bed. He did not get up till the following morning.
When Mrs McKinney saw the state of Cronin and Ryan later that morning, she decided to postpone the business of the turkey for a day or two. They tried to drink a glass of Bols eggnog in the Midland’s as a cure before work, but it made them violently ill, and they had to go back to bed.
The town had not had such a piece of scandal since some members of the Pioneer excursion to Knock had to be taken from the bus in Longford for disorderly conduct three years before. Circling the Virgin’s Shrine in a solid downpour while responding with Hail Marys to the electronic Our Fathers had proved too severe a trial for three recent recruits.