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Beth found herself unable to stop thinking about Dr McMara.

He had come on three successive days to check her shoulder.

She was certain the last two visits were not necessary.

She could move her arm perfectly, and it just felt bruised, something that only time would cure.

But she wanted to see him, and she was sure he felt the same.

Casually she asked Kathleen about him when she came in to do the laundry. ‘He’s a kind man,’ Beth said. ‘My doctor in London was so grumpy and disinterested. What’s his wife like?’

‘A beauty,’ Kathleen replied, feeding some sheets into the mangle with one hand and turning the handle with the other.

‘She was a fashion model. But with three wee ones, a big house and having to take messages from the doctor’s patients and the like, she has such a busy life I doubt she ever thinks about what she used to do. ’

That wasn’t what Beth had hoped to hear. First she hoped he was unmarried. And if he had to be, an ugly shrew of a woman would’ve been ideal. ‘How fascinating,’ she said. ‘I imagine with a past like that she’d find it hard to settle in the country. Is she still glamorous?’

‘Oh yes, still a head-turner, but very capable. I helped her out a bit when wee Ilsa was born, but she recovered very quickly and didn’t need me anymore. She’s one of those who doesn’t like people prying into her life.’

‘It wouldn’t occur to me that someone helping me would pry.’ That wasn’t true. Beth hid anything she thought would tell Kathleen something about her past. ‘You’d need to have big secrets to worry about such things.’

Kathleen bent over to pick up the wicker laundry basket full of damp washing to take it upstairs. Beth moved to help. ‘Let me take a handle, that’s too heavy for you alone,’ she said, catching hold of it. The washing was going to be hung in the guest bedroom as it was raining.

‘You’re a good person, Beth, but don’t be too trusting thinking folk won’t pry,’ Kathleen said with a chuckle as they made their way up the stairs with the laundry.

‘Just don’t let Bridie Collins in here. She’d ferret out everything from a stain on your petticoat to sending coded messages to the Germans in a blink of an eye, so she would.

And she’d pass it on as quick as look at you. ’

Beth laughed. ‘I’m not likely to invite her in again, I didn’t like her.’

‘No one does, but we put up with her,’ Kathleen said as they went into the guest bedroom and put the basket down.

‘She was crossed in love. Her very own sister snatched her sweetheart and they ran off to England together. She’s never got over it.

If her sister dared to come back here, she’d skin her alive. ’

Beth grinned. She loved stories like that, especially when she didn’t like the person they were about. She pulled the big wooden clothes horse from under the bed and stood it up in a Z shape.

‘So tell me more about the doctor,’ she asked as she put some underwear on the bottom rungs. ‘He seems so charming. Is he really or is that window dressing?’

Kathleen gave her a sharp look as if suspecting her, and shook out a pillowcase.

‘He’s a good man, too good some would say, as he gets no life of his own. It will be a sad day for us all if he goes back to Dublin where he could make far more money.’

Beth sensed she’d gone as far as possible without alerting the older woman to her reasons for asking so much.

They had nearly finished hanging up the washing when she heard the whistle on the kettle downstairs.

‘Time for elevenses,’ she said, and, picking up the empty basket, went down, Kathleen following her. She made the tea and put the pot on the table. Kathleen got cups and saucers out of the cupboard, and fetched the milk from the pantry.

‘So, tell me more about you,’ Beth said as they sat down. ‘You always ask about how I am. I don’t even know if you have children.’

Kathleen smiled. ‘To be sure I do. Two girls and a boy. But they are over in England now. Both the girls are nurses, we breed them here.’ She laughed as she said that, and Beth knew that was because every hospital in England had a quota of Irish nurses.

‘My boy is an apprentice engineer in a shipyard in Newcastle. He’s only got one more year, and I hope he’ll come back home then.

All the shipyards here and in Belfast need his skills, but I pray he doesn’t get caught in a bombing raid.

Shipyards are targets for the Germans. Luckily one of my girls is in Cheltenham, the other in Wrexham.

I think they’ll be safe. But I still worry. ’

‘I’m sure you do,’ Beth said. ‘And miss them too. Have you always lived in Dunmore?’

‘I have,’ Kathleen said, and poured Beth’s tea for her; she always remembered Beth liked it weak.

‘I had big plans of going to England as a girl, but I met Pat, and that was that. We got married when I was eighteen. We lived with his folk for a few years, they had a small farm by Waterford. Pat is a carpenter, but he also helped on the farm. But then my mammy died, and Daddy soon after, so we came back here. Pat’s folk died a few years later too.

Pat still keeps a few cows and pigs at the farm, and uses the sheds as his workshop. ’

‘No one living in the farmhouse?’

Kathleen sighed deeply. ‘No, it’s empty and getting very damp.

It’s something we argue a lot about. He thinks if he does it up, we could go and live there.

But I like it here with a view of the sea, and I don’t want to be trudging through mud and cowpats.

I think he should do it up, but to rent it out in summer.

He could fence off the little front garden so the animals don’t get in there, and folk like being on a farm for a holiday, and it’s easy to get to a beach or into Waterford or Cork. ’

‘That sounds sensible to me,’ Beth said.

Kathleen gave a dry, humourless laugh. ‘Irishmen don’t do sensible! And it’s nostalgia too, as it’s the place he was born.’

They chatted for some time. Beth was very glad of some company. She had a feeling Kathleen’s marriage was shaky. She never said anything to that end, but odd little cryptic remarks told a different story.

‘You know, Beth, before you fall in love with an Irishman and marry him,’ Kathleen said, returning to her favourite theme, ‘Irishwomen having no rights, a man can beat his wife like a dog and he’ll never get charged with assault.

Between the police, government and the Church, they have everything sewn up to keep women subservient.

Just last week, Eileen, a girl in the village, was found to be pregnant.

The poor girl is only fifteen, but her parents called Father Fermagh and he packed her off to the nuns in Tuam, near Galway. ’

‘She’ll be better looked after there,’ Beth said.

‘Not so! You can’t imagine what those places are like, Beth.

It’s as bad as prison. The only time she’ll see her baby is to breastfeed it.

Then if the baby survives it will be off to an orphanage, and Eileen will be sent to an industrial school.

They are hell come to earth– beatings, half-starved, not to mention being interfered with. ’

Beth couldn’t bring herself to ask who would interfere with the young girls– was it boys, the priests or even the nuns? ‘Why shouldn’t the baby survive?’ she asked instead, thinking this was safer ground.

‘Babies don’t survive with no care or mothering.

They say a third of those born die before six weeks.

I tell you, Beth, those places are hell, and the nuns cruel devils.

I was educated by them, so I know. But I really fear for poor Eileen, she’s a bit slow, and needs her mammy.

Some boy took advantage of her and he’ll be bragging about what he did to her and no one will punish him.

Last year a girl in Waterford came back from the nuns, baby gone, they didn’t even let her see it for a moment.

She was thin, weak and deeply troubled. The nuns claim to arrange adoptions, but many think they sell the babies to rich Americans. ’

‘Heavens!’ Beth exclaimed. She was uncomfortable hearing all this and she couldn’t believe it was true. She had no doubt that Kathleen believed it, but it was so awful it sounded like a story, being embellished further with everyone it was told to. ‘That’s truly awful,’ she said.

Glancing out of the window she saw the rain had stopped. ‘I think I must go out for a walk and clear my head.’

She put her walking shoes on and her coat.

‘Mind you keep your ears pinned back for tinkers,’ Kathleen called out as she opened the door. ‘Don’t want you being knocked into any more ditches.’

It was good to get out of the house, not just because of the distressing story of the unmarried mother, but because Kathleen had just put tea towels in a pan on the stove and the smell of it always reminded Beth of the Bradleys’.

They’d had a gas copper to do the washing in, and every Monday morning the smell was the same as she had to grate carbolic soap into the hot water and whisk it with the copper stick.

It was an awful job, hauling out boiling hot, heavy sheets and towels and getting them into the sink to rinse them.

But the smell of the tea towels today almost made her blab out about the Bradleys.

Fortunately, she stopped herself just in time.