An Irish Country Courtship

  “I will, Mrs. Kincaid,” Kitty said.

  The mutual lack of Christian names was not lost on O’Reilly. They were still sniffing round each other and time was wasting. “Come on, Kitty … Ballybucklebo House. The car’s out at the front.”

  “Have a good day—the pair of you,” Kinky said, as they left.

  “I think,” he said, as he closed the front door, “your bringing the tray, your apology—”

  “And your going on about her cooking—”

  “Have started a thaw. But we’re not there yet. We’ll keep up the good work. She’s daft about hats—”

  “I’ll get her one in Belfast.”

  O’Reilly thought about that. Recently Barry and he had given Kinky a new hat. “On second thought,” he said, “I’ve noticed her handbag’s getting a bit worn.” He opened the passenger door of the Rover to be greeted by a series of delighted yips from the back. “Settle down, Lummox.” As Kitty got in, he said, “Alice Moloney knows what Kinky really likes, but she’ll not be open until Monday.”

  “I’ll be back in town. Would you pick one, Fingal?”

  “I will. I’ll buy one before the next time you come down,” he said. Then he put the big car in gear and roared off along the Bangor-to-Belfast Road.

  16

  Hυρηκα (Eureka): I Have Found It

  “I’m sure, Doctor Laverty, you’ll enjoy this.” Kinky replaced Barry’s cereal bowl with a steaming plate. He’d come down for breakfast after O’Reilly and Kitty had left.

  A delicate aroma of smoked haddock teased his nose. “Thanks, Kinky.”

  “Don’t let it get cold now.”

  “I’ll not.” He tasted hard-boiled egg, rice, and a spice he could not identify. Their flavours and texture perfectly complemented those of the flaked fish.

  “Will I pour your coffee?”

  “Please.”

  “I hope himself and Miss Kitty are enjoying themselves,” Kinky said, as she filled his cup. “They’ve a brave morning for it.” She inclined her head to the window.

  Barry looked over as a small cloud rolled back, and like customers at a New Year’s Day sale, sunbeams jostled into the room.

  “Fine day, indeed,” he said. The sun was well risen, and the day looked set fair. He lifted another forkful, but stopped before he put it into his mouth. “This is delicious, Kinky. What is it?”

  She smiled. “It’s only a shmall little thing. Kedgeree. Scottish troops took the recipe to India with them more than a hundred years ago. My da met Indian sodgers in the Great War, had some with them, and got one to write it out for Ma so she could try it in Cork. She showed me how to make it, so.” Her look was far away. “We used to get a lot of fish from a little harbour called Ring, near Clonakilty.”

  “Scotland to Ballybucklebo by way of India, France, and Beal na Bláth, County Cork. Small world,” Barry said and finished the forkful.

  “It was not shmall when I was a girl,” she said. “Anyone who’d been twenty miles from home was looked on like a world traveller. I’d a brother Art went to Philadelphia with his wife. We never expected to see them again in this life, so.”

  “Did you?”

  “Och, indeed. Didn’t he and Emer and all of theirs come home in 1960?” She chuckled. “And him, a man of sixty-two, wearing mustard-coloured pants, a checked jacket, and a porkpie hat. He’d a Yankee accent you could cut with a knife layered on top of his natural Cork speech. The way he said, ‘aend,’ down his nose when he meant ‘and’ set a body’s teeth on edge.”

  Barry smiled, then frowned. “Kinky,” he said, “all this talk of India and people going away and bringing things back has put me in mind of a promise I made yesterday and haven’t kept.” Since he received Patricia’s letter, all thoughts of looking at his textbooks and asking Fingal’s advice had fled. Had Alice Moloney brought something back with her from the subcontinent? Some odd disease? He’d told her he’d try to work out what was wrong with her, but so far he’d neglected to do so. That he’d said he would had simply slipped his mind. He’d been too wrapped up in trying to decide if he should reply to the letter, and if he did, what would he say?

  Kinky cocked her head to one side. “That’s not like you, Doctor Laverty, sir, not at all, at all, but I suppose”—she sighed—“I suppose you’ve had a lot on your mind since Saint Stephen’s Day.”

  Barry stopped in midswallow but managed to get the fish down. He stared at his plate. “Aye,” he said quietly. “I have. A lot.” And all Kinky’s talk about people not straying far from home? That was him. He’d thought he’d be happy settling here in a village. He’d failed to meet Patricia’s expectations. If he’d told her he’d come and study at Addenbrooke’s in Cambridge, that once he’d qualified as a specialist he’d be willing to look for work somewhere exciting, would that have made a difference? You did nothing wrong, she’d written. But perhaps he had. Perhaps he’d not tried everything. Dad’s philosophy was always, If you want something really badly, it’s up to you to work hard enough to get it. Barry hadn’t worked hard enough.

  He looked up. “Sorry, Kinky,” he said. “I was woolgathering.”

  “Aye, so,” she said. “I wish I could see the way ahead for you,” she said softly, “but for some reason—”

  “It’s all right, Kinky. I understand.” Barry was determined to finish the kedgeree and took more from the serving dish. “When I was a schoolboy, that American actress Doris Day had a big hit with a song called ‘Que Sera, Sera.’”

  “I remember it well, and I’ve often wondered would that ‘kay’ be a pier in America? Like Derry Quay in the song ‘Star of the County Down’?”

  “No.” Barry stifled a smile. He’d not want to hurt Kinky’s feelings by making her feel uneducated. “It means, What will be, will be.” He polished off the last mouthful. “And I suppose it will.” But I wish it had turned out differently. I wish everything would come all right again. And somehow, somehow he must be to blame.

  “’Tis a wonderful thing, you knowing words in those foreign languages,” she said. “With your head so stuffed with the learning, it’s no wonder you forget the odd promise.”

  Barry looked at her face. Her expression was forgiving. It was a neat excuse, but it wasn’t the truth. He’d better concentrate on his patients. His heartbreak must not compromise their care. “Thanks for reminding me, Kinky.” Barry picked up his coffee. He had no qualms about breaching patient confidentiality with Kinky. “I’m worried about Alice Moloney.”

  “I’m not surprised,” Kinky said. “When I saw her at the Bishops’, there was not as much on her as would dust a candlestick, so.”

  “And she’s a very funny colour.”

  “I noticed that. Even with a bit of rouge on her cheeks, I thought she looked pale. Did you ever see fuller’s earth, sir?”

  Barry sipped his coffee and shook his head.

  “It’s a special clay. You use it to get the lanolin out of cloth spun and woven from sheep’s wool. Funny, pasty grey–looking stuff. I remember a neighbour-friend of mine in Cork, a fellah called Connor MacTaggart, using it. Poor Alice’s face would have matched it.”

  Barry scratched his head. He’d no idea about treating wool, but somewhere, somewhere he’d seen that description of a patient’s earth-coloured face. It was a sign of some obscure tropical ailment. What the divil was it? “You’re a genius, Kinky,” he said. “I think you’ve given me the clue I need.” He finished his coffee. “I’m off to look at a textbook.”

  “Go on then with you, sir. I’ve a béarnaise sauce to make.”

  As Barry climbed the stairs he could hear her singing happily.

  The future’s not ours to see …

  Considering Kinky was fey, it wasn’t what he’d hoped for from her. But she’d made it clear that this time she couldn’t tell what lay in store for him. He wanted her to promise him that Patricia would have second thoughts, drop whoever he was—the man in England—and come back to Belfast to finish her studies and be ne
ar Barry again. But Kinky hadn’t seen that, and so Barry deduced that Kinky couldn’t see it because it wasn’t going to happen. Ever. Because he, Barry Laverty, village GP, could never hope to be able to provide the sophistication a girl like Patricia Spence would need.

  He trudged up the final flight of stairs.

  When he reached his attic bedroom, he put the coffee on his bedside table and pulled down A Short Textbook of Medicine from the bookshelf. Barry flipped to the index. Tropical diseases, 452–465. Fourteen pages. In Ireland there wasn’t much call for knowledge about such conditions. He scanned the print, trying to match at least some of Alice’s symptoms with the descriptions in the book.

  Malaria, trypanosomiasis or sleeping sickness, leprosy, cholera, plague, yaws, bilharzia, and typhus didn’t fit the bill. Neither did acute amoebic dysentery, but as he read on, the description of “chronic bowel infestation with the causative parasite” piqued his interest. Alice had said there had been acute cases in Indian soldiers near where she’d lived, so she might have been exposed to the protozoan Entamoeba histolytica, the microscopic animal that brought on the disease. She was tired, irritable, losing weight, and flatulent. That all matched, but she hadn’t complained of recurrent bouts of diarrhoea or tummy pain.

  He sat on the bed and read on. Diagnosis? According to the text, the parasite itself could be identified from a sample examined under a microscope. But here was the rub. It could be done “only by an expert.” Looking directly into the lower bowel with a sigmoidoscope might be of value. He tutted. How many rural GPs could use this hollow tube illuminated by a small bulb to peer into the colon?

  Turning the page, he read that the organism could affect the liver, but the patient usually had a fever and abdominal pain. The liver was tender and enlarged. That certainly wasn’t Alice’s situation. Her liver had been perfectly normal when he’d examined her.

  In the next short section, Amoebic Abscess in the Liver, he found an intriguing sentence: “Such an abscess may develop many months or years after the original infection.” Alice said she’d had Delhi belly on a number of occasions. Could she have been misdiagnosed? “It may be clinically silent until a late stage.” Interesting, but that was all the information he could glean.

  He replaced the book on the shelf and took down A Short Practice of Surgery—all 1,389 pages of it. He well recalled Jack Mills’s remark when they’d bought their copies in third year. “Blimey, mate, if this is short, Lord preserve us from the long version. We’ll never get this lot read.” Fortunately, a fourth-year man had tipped them off to a much more concise work, Lecture Notes on General Surgery, which had given them enough knowledge to satisfy the examiners. He was glad now he’d kept the larger tome too.

  By the time he’d devoured the chapter, he’d learnt that although liver abscesses more frequently attacked men, women could also be afflicted. On rare occasions, the disease had been diagnosed more than thirty years after someone’s return from the tropics. Alice had come back to Ulster from India in the late forties. She could be harbouring a latent abscess.

  The early symptoms were—Barry swallowed—anaemia. He’d been treating Alice for iron-deficiency anaemia. Could he have been wrong in assuming its cause was simple dietary lack because she was a vegetarian? He read on. In addition, the patients lost weight—Alice certainly had—and they had earthy complexions. Earthy. That was almost exactly as Kinky had described Miss Moloney. It was beginning to look to Barry as if he had been wrong about the cause of her anaemia, but he was now on the trail of her real disease.

  His pride took some comfort when he read that making the diagnosis was tricky. An X-ray might help, not by identifying the abscess, but by showing that the lung on the affected side had been displaced upward. The liver enlargement caused by the abscess could bulge toward the chest cavity rather than down into the abdomen.

  In many cases, the final answer could only be found by inserting a needle into the liver and sucking out the typical pus. That was not going to be done at Number 1, Main, either.

  The biggest risk was that the abscess could rupture, but according to the author of the text, healed lesions could be found during an autopsy when there was an entirely different cause of death. So rupture wasn’t inevitable.

  Barry put the book on his bed and picked up his coffee cup. Damn. He’d been so engrossed he’d let it go cold. He’d see if there was any left in the pot.

  On his way downstairs he made up his mind about what to do with his newfound information. He was going to ignore the immediate temptation to rush round to see Alice Moloney. If he was right and she did harbour an abscess, she must have had it for nearly twenty years. She wasn’t in any immediate danger. She wasn’t in pain. Today was Saturday, so he couldn’t arrange for her to be seen by a specialist until next week. He’d only worry her more by raising the question.

  He’d ask O’Reilly who was the best surgeon to refer Alice to. First thing Monday he’d make the necessary arrangements for her to be seen at the Royal Victoria; then he’d nip around and let her know what he was thinking and what he’d arranged.

  He headed for the kitchen. “Any coffee left, Kinky?”

  “I’ll make you another pot,” she said.

  “Instant’ll be fine.”

  “Not in my house, Doctor Laverty.”

  “Sorry, Kinky.” He should have known better.

  She lifted down a bag of coffee beans and the grinder. “And what,” she asked, “will you be doing today—that is, if no one calls?”

  “I’ll do my crossword this morning. Lunch … read … watch the Irish-Scottish rugby game on BBC.”

  She tutted. “It’s a such a lovely day for you to be stuck inside.”

  “I’m on call.”

  “Why don’t you go and see a friend? As long as you give me your phone number, I’ll take the calls and send for you if it’s urgent.”

  “Doctor Mills is working this weekend and Harry Sloan’s gone to Portrush. I phoned him last night.”

  “And there’s nobody here you’d call a friend? You’re like Himself. Like all doctors, I suppose.”

  “How, Kinky?”

  “You can’t be close friends with your patients. You might know their secrets, but you can never tell them yours. You have to keep a bit of a distance.”

  “That’s true.” He had no friends here save Fingal and Kinky. Jack had always been close. Harry Sloan was a good head, and Patricia, she’d been his friend. He could talk to her about anything. She always tried to understand. He missed her kisses, but dear Lord, he missed walking with her, holding her hand, and chatting with her about anything from the death of Ian Fleming last August to laughingly trying, as she called it, to unravel the secrets of the universe. But he had had other friends before medicine became all-consuming. Kinky was right.

  “You’d not mind holding the fort?” he asked.

  She shook her head. “And sure, Doctor Laverty dear, why would I? Have I not held it for nearly forty years for Himself and Doctor Flanagan who had the practice before?”

  “You’re a marvel, Mrs. Kinky Kincaid.” He rummaged in his inside pocket and pulled out a diary. “I’m going to go down to the Yacht Club after lunch. I was a keen sailor once. I had a fourteen-foot dinghy called Tarka, but I had to sell her in my final year as a student so I’d the cash to buy the Volkswagen.” He flipped through the diary. “I’ll give you the club’s phone number.” Barry reached into another pocket and found a loose sheet of paper—with Peggy Duff’s phone number on it. He stared at it for a moment, then decided he wasn’t going to phone her.

  “And sure isn’t it only twenty minutes in your motorcar if I need you?” Kinky said.

  “It is.” Barry scratched out Peggy’s number and scribbled the number of the Yacht Club. He handed the page to Kinky.

  “There’ll be plenty of my old sailing friends in. Nice day like today, they’ll be getting a head start on their boats’ spring refits.”

  “Aye, so,” she said quietly, “there
always does come a time when things can benefit from a fresh start, Doctor Laverty.” She poured him a fresh cup. “Now,” she said, “take that upstairs and do your puzzle.”

  “Thank you, Kinky,” he said, knowing full well he was not just thanking her for the coffee.

  Barry headed upstairs and went into the lounge to find Lady Macbeth standing on her back legs, back arched, forelimbs extended, claws raking the curtains.

  In a fair imitation of O’Reilly, he yelled, “Get away to hell out of that.”

  She looked at him balefully and pulled her right paw free, but she clearly had her left one stuck. “Eeeeeow.” She struggled, twisting from side to side.

  “Hang on.” He set his coffee on a table and went and unhooked her claws. “Sometimes, Your Ladyship,” he said, “it takes somebody else to get you unstuck.”

  And as he went back to drink his coffee, he silently thanked Kinky for her concerned advice. He realised he’d been able, for the moment, to stop feeling sorry for himself, and he was actually looking forward to spending the rest of the day at the Yacht Club.

  He wondered how O’Reilly and Kitty were getting on with theirs.

  17

  How Blessed Is He Who Leads a Country Life

  Gravel crunched under the Rover’s tyres as O’Reilly swung in through the wrought-iron gates of Ballybucklebo House. The paint was chipped, and rust patches marred the black enamel finish. He slowed on the long curved drive.

  “Slowing down, Fingal? That’s not like you.”

  “Peacocks and peahens wander all over the grounds. The marquis takes a very dim view of anyone who runs one down.”

  From the backseat came a series of yelps and the thumping of a heavy tail on the upholstery.

  “You know where you are, don’t you, Arthur?”

  “Aaarghow.” Heavy panting. “Aaargh.”

  “Eejit,” O’Reilly said, reaching over to lay a large hand lightly on the dog’s head, then returning to the steering wheel to swing the car past the Virginia creeper–covered gable-end of the mansion and under a high archway of Mourne granite blocks. The Big House was to the left, stables and outbuildings to the right across a cobbled courtyard. An identical archway pierced the opposite wall.