by Maeve Binchy
Then an idea formed in my mind.
I would build a health centre so that the people of this area wouldn’t have to be on their knees in this cold wet place praying to a saint who was two thousand years dead that a cure would be found for a loved one. Maybe, I thought to myself, this is the way the well worked: you got your problem solved once you left it.
The dog trotted along beside me happily.
He was never going to leave me now.
I took him to the nearest Garda station. They looked at him thoughtfully. He had no collar and he wasn’t well kept. Someone had brought him to lose him in the woods.
I was shocked.
A lovely, friendly dog like that.
‘You might give him a home yourself?’ suggested the young Garda.
‘Come on then,’ I said to the dog and he leaped eagerly into the car.
I decided to call him Zloty. It was the old Polish currency. He answered so readily that you’d think it was his original name.
Back home again in Doon, I was determined that the place would have some kind of medical centre. If anyone needed specialist treatment, or a scan, or an X-ray, they had to take the bumpy road into Rossmore. Yes, I had heard all about this bypass road that was meant to be built. But it could all be just dreams for the next decades. And anyway in Rossmore they didn’t have all the facilities that patients needed – sometimes they had to make the long journey to Dublin, adding to their stress and strain.
Wouldn’t it be great to have all these opportunities on their doorstep?
The people in this place were all very nice and easy to talk to. I stayed in the local hotel, and Zloty slept in a big outhouse. I met Ciaran Brown from the bank, and Sean Kenny the local attorney, and the Foley family, and Maggie Kiernan who told everyone how desperately she wanted to have a baby and eventually she did. There was a very ladylike woman, Hannah Harty, who was a bookkeeper and the soul of discretion in a very gossip-prone place. So when I bought a plot of land through Sean Kenny, he suggested that I should ask Hannah to look after the paperwork for me, and nobody would know my business.
And there were two doctors in the town, a very crabby sort of fellow, Dermot, and a much younger smarter lad called Jimmy White. Unfortunately I had registered with Dr Dermot before Jimmy White came to town so I had to stick with him. He was a slow, lazy guy, just looked at my prescribed medication and told me to continue with it. Then he went off on a vacation. After a bit I felt short of breath. I consulted Jimmy White who sent me for a stress test and an ultrasound. And a heart specialist changed my beta blockers and I was fine again.
That was a bad time for everyone. Old man Foley died, then Sean Kenny’s mother and Ciaran Brown’s father died, all within ten days. We had a path worn to the churchyard for funerals.
Poor Jimmy White was distraught.
‘It would have to happen on my watch,’ he confided to me one night. ‘The people here think that the sun shines out of Dermot’s arse and that all those old people wouldn’t have died if he had been here.’
‘But that’s impossible,’ I said. ‘I mean, they were old and frail, their time had come.’
‘Tell that to the Foleys, the Browns and the Kennys,’ he said glumly.
‘That was certainly bad timing,’ I sympathised.
‘Yeah, or maybe – as I think in my more paranoid moments – it was planned,’ he suggested.
I gave him a look and Jimmy White said hastily that no, of course it wasn’t possible, even Dr Dermot couldn’t have killed them off by voodoo from his vacation. I thought about it myself for a while. Maybe that weaselish little doctor did actually wait until all those old folk were going to take their last journeys.
Was I becoming as paranoid as Jimmy?
Anyway I had plenty to keep me occupied. I had a building firm in Ireland, which was fairly relaxed. Very relaxed. Finn Ferguson often said that when God made time he made plenty of it. Planning permissions were a nightmare; assembling a team was very different from back home. Everyone seemed to be running several jobs in tandem, I would sigh to that nice Hannah Harty sometimes, and she was always very positive and full of practical advice.
Perhaps I should tell the foreman Finn Ferguson that if his wife liked to go to America on a shopping trip, my sisters would look after her and take her to the right stores. It worked like a dream and the woman came back not only with three suitcases of merchandise but with the news that Mark Kovac & Family Building Contractors were huge in the USA. Finn, the foreman, stopped treating me just as bumbling old Chester and called me sir after that. He still would have a beer with me now and then, and often brought a bone for Zloty as well. He would tell me of his worries about the new road that might or might not be built around Rossmore.
Once one of these huge firms got the contract for building the bypass and established themselves in the town of Rossmore, then a little company like Finn Ferguson’s would be edged out of the jobs he already had. People would be seduced by big companies with huge earth movers and cranes, and his living would go down the plughole. I assured him that the thing to do was to specialise. To get a name for doing one kind of building very well.
When the Danny O’Neill Health Centre opened there would be a beautiful glossy brochure about it, which of course Finn could use to get himself more clients.
This galvanised Finn to take a less leisurely attitude to the building, I was very relieved to observe.
‘You’re a very decent skin, you know, Chester, I mean, sir,’ he said. ‘A lot of people say that about you. I heard Miss Harty telling Canon Cassidy when he came over here last week, she said you were the angel this place has always been looking out for.’
I liked Hannah and was disappointed that she seemed to fancy Dr Dermot. I asked her once if she had ever been in love, and she said no, but at the age of fifty-two she didn’t think it was a luxury that might come her way. Her mother had always said that Dr Dermot would make a good catch and she had invested a lot of time in trying to realise that. But he was a man independent and set in his ways.
‘Or a little selfish maybe?’ I suggested. Wrong way to go, Chester.
Hannah Harty defended him. He had worked tirelessly for this place. Nobody could think he was selfish.
I said I was just an outsider; I didn’t really know. But I did know. And he was selfish. I saw this more and more.
He would accept a drink from me in the hotel, but never buy the other half. I heard from Hannah how she would make him a steak and kidney pie or cook him a roast chicken because men were so hopeless. But the hotel had a perfectly good dining room where he could have entertained her and yet he never did. He was certainly very arrogant to young Jimmy White, so much so that the young man told me he would have to fold his tent and steal away. There was no living for him here.
Meanwhile my own plans were going ahead. Finn the building foreman now loved me like a brother and had recruited people from all over the country to build the Danny O’Neill Health Centre in Doon. It was growing like a mushroom every day before our eyes.
The people could hardly believe that there would be X-ray facilities and heart monitoring machines and a therapeutic swimming pool, all on their own door-steps, with a dozen or more treatment rooms planned for those who might want to rent them. It was the medicine of the future, the newspapers said. Already there had been enquiries from a dental practice, a Pilates class, and a yoga class, as well as several specialists interested in the possibility of having a clinic there twice a week. It was all a matter of bringing health care to the people rather than letting patients travel great distances, adding to their distress. I had been hoping Jimmy White would be part of it, but no, he was gone before it was up and running.
Hannah Harty had obviously handed over the bulk of my work to a firm of accountants by now but she still did my own personal books for me. I enjoyed our sessions together.
Finn would come for a Friday drink at the hotel around six and bring me up to date with what had happened during
the week, then Hannah Harty would join us, countersign some cheques for Finn, and then she and I would have dinner.
She always had her hair nicely done at the beauty parlour for our meetings. She liked to talk about Dr Dermot and because I’m basically easy going I let her chatter on. She used to meet him on Saturday, so I think the fancy hairdo was really in his honour. But I noticed that there were more and more occasions when Dr Dermot wasn’t going to be able to make their Saturday meeting.
He had a case conference about a patient. He had a golf game where they were depending on him. He had friends from overseas passing through. Friends who were never named or introduced.
Hannah had begun to wonder whether Dr Dermot might be avoiding her. I tutted and said surely not, which was just what she wanted to hear.
‘And of course you still do his books for him?’
‘Well, yes, but he just leaves the material there in a tray nowadays, he’s not there himself.’ She was very troubled.
‘Maybe he’s busy, on urgent cases.’
‘Ah, Chester, you know Dermot,’ she said. ‘There’s never anything very urgent. I think he’s afraid our names are being linked.’
‘But he should be proud of that surely?’ I said.
She bit her lip, her eyes filled with tears and she shook her head sadly. I wanted to go down and take that annoying Dr Dermot by his thin shoulders and shake the life out of him. Why should he upset a decent woman like Hannah Harty? A woman that any normal man would be proud to escort around the place. And maybe share a life with.
And as that thought went across my mind, it was followed by another thought. Hannah Harty is much too good for that little weasel. She’s the kind of woman that I personally would be happy to spend much more time with. I wondered why I hadn’t seen this before.
I hoped that she didn’t think she had confided too much in me and therefore could never learn to see me as a person. Well, I would never know unless I moved things on a bit. So I suggested that when she had picked up Dr Dermot’s papers tomorrow, she and I might take a drive together.
‘That’s if he’s not there of course,’ Hannah said.
He wasn’t there, so we drove off to see an old castle that had a waterfall in the grounds. And the next week we went to an art exhibition, and the week after that we went together to the wedding of Finn Ferguson’s daughter. By now she was talking a lot less of Dr Dermot, and her name was most definitely up with mine or linked with mine or whatever the expression they used around here.
The three months’ visit had turned into six months. And despite the best efforts of Finn the foreman, the building seemed to take for ever. I thought less and less about going back to Kovac’s in America. Lots of things were keeping me here. The need to make our grandpa’s name connected to a centre of excellence, a place that would be at the heart of the community he had loved so much and mourned so long in America.
I told my brothers that I probably saw this as a permanent position. They were pleased for me and assured me that they could well manage without me and they had long realised that I had found a life that involved me deeply back in Ireland. They didn’t realise how much I was involved.
And they hadn’t heard of Hannah Harty.
She was such a help to me in so many ways: she found a designer to do a restful decor for the Danny O’Neill Health Centre, she got Finn’s new son-in-law to do the landscaping, she gave little dinner parties and invited Ciaran Brown from the bank and his wife, and Sean Kenny the lawyer, and his wife. And Maggie Kiernan and her husband when they could get a baby-sitter.
She did ask Dr Dermot from time to time but he never was free to accept. And then she didn’t ask him any more.
One day he cornered me about the new centre. He hadn’t changed at all, he was still very pleased with himself. He had heard it was going to be opened by a government minister. He was laughing at the thought. Hadn’t they little to do with their time?
I reminded him that on several occasions I had invited him to take rooms there. I thought that if he had all the referral places on the premises, he finally might actually start sending people for the tests and scans they needed. But he hadn’t listened.
He had even ridiculed the idea, saying that he had his own perfectly good surgery, thank you very much.
I explained that I would then be offering the rooms to other doctors, and he said he wished me luck taking money from eejits and losers. But of course I hadn’t done that. The Danny O’Neill Health Centre was going to make sure that the people of this place got proper medical treatment, not like my grandpa and his great number of brothers and sisters scattered all over the globe, each one of them in poor health as they headed for a new life in a new land.
But it was only now, when he realised that a real live government minister was going to come and open the premises, that Dr Dermot showed any interest in it.
‘I suppose that place will be a licence to print money for you, Chester,’ he said to me with his usual sneer.
It was hardly worth arguing with him. He wasn’t the kind of man who would understand that I had put my own money into it, invited others to contribute and gathered a team. The notion that I wasn’t in it for a profit would have been beyond his grasp.
‘Ah, you know the way it is.’ I shrugged. I had learned a few of these meaningless phrases since coming to this land.
‘I don’t at all know the way it is, I’m the last to know anything around here,’ the doctor snapped. ‘And a patient told me this morning that you have notions about Miss Harty, that was news to me too.’
‘I am a great admirer of Hannah Harty, that is true, your patient was not wrongly informed,’ I said pompously.
‘Well, as long as it’s only admiring from afar, no one would quarrel with that.’
He was actually warning me off, staking his claim to a woman whom he had ignored and humiliated. I felt bile rise in my throat. But I had got as far as this in life by keeping my temper. I wouldn’t risk everything now. And I realised that I really did feel a primeval rage against this man as a rival.
But I have seen too many people lose things over rage. I would not give anger its head.
‘I have to go now, Dr Dermot,’ I said in a voice that I knew sounded choked.
He smiled his superior and hugely irritating smile. ‘Well, sure you do,’ he said raising his glass at me. ‘Sure you do.’
I walked across the square shaking. Zloty came with me to keep me company or to give me courage – I didn’t know which. I had never felt so hostile to a man before. Not ever. So that meant that I had never felt so strongly about a woman either. But I had no idea whether she felt anything remotely similar. Calm, gentle, ladylike Hannah, maybe she thought of me just as a pleasant acquaintance.
What a poor specimen of a man I must be. No idea whether this woman liked me, even a little bit.
I found myself walking straight towards the elegant ivy-covered house where she lived alone. Her grandparents would have lived in that house when my poor grandpa was packing his few belongings and leaving the wretched hovel that would now be a tiny part of the Danny O’Neill Health Centre.
She was surprised to see me. I had never called unannounced before. But she welcomed me in and poured me a glass of wine. She looked pleased rather than annoyed to see me. So that was good.
‘I was wondering, Hannah …’ I began.
‘What were you wondering now?’ She held her head on one side.
I’m just hopeless at this sort of thing. There are men who just know what to say, who have words at will. But then Hannah wasn’t used to such men, I mean, she had fancied that poisonous doctor. I must just be honest, straightforward.
‘I was wondering if you would ever see a future with a person like me.’ I said it straight out.
‘Someone like you, Chester – or you?’ She was teasing me now.
‘Me, Hannah,’ I said simply.
She walked away from me in her elegant drawing room. ‘I’m much too old for you
,’ she said sadly.
‘You’re two and a half years older than me,’ I said.
She smiled as if I were a toddler who had made an endearing remark.
‘Ah yes, but before you were born I was waddling around here taking notice.’
‘Maybe you were waiting for me to come and join you?’ I said hopefully.
‘Well, if I was waiting for you, Chester, then I waited a long time,’ she said.
And then I knew it was going to be all right. And the rage I had for Dr Dermot died down in me. What had I to be enraged about?
If it hadn’t been for him I might never have crossed the street and spoken aloud to Hannah, I might have let it slip away as other possible relationships had slipped away in the past.
‘Will I have to go and live in America?’ she asked.
‘No, I’d prefer to live here. I’d like to see the Centre up and running, I want to know if the big road around Rossmore ever gets built, if the well to St Ann is taken down. I’m fascinated by this place now, and to live here with you would be … well, it would be better than I ever dreamed.’
She seemed very pleased.
‘But I hope you’ll come over and meet my family,’ I said.
‘They’ll be horrified with me,’ she said, nervously patting her hair.
‘They’ll love you and my mom will be so pleased. She said that maybe I’d find a colleen over here,’ I admitted.
‘Oh, a bit of an ageing colleen,’ she said.
‘Please, Hannah …’ I began and she went to draw the curtains of her big bay window that looked out on the square.
Before she closed them I saw Dr Dermot coming out of the hotel. He paused and looked at Hannah’s house and then turned and went back to his own lonely place. He had only a short working life ahead of him. Once the Danny O’Neill Health Centre opened in Doon, there would be little demand for Dr Dermot’s old-fashioned, blundering medicine. And now he had lost the woman who might have made his last years bearable.
