An Irish Country Courtship

  The queue moved on when a short man, wearing a blazer with the crest of Methodist College on the breast pocket, left the bar carrying two drinks.

  “I despair, Barry, but all right if that’s how you feel.” Jack shook his head. “You can lead a horse to water—”

  “And if you’re buying, Mills, you can make this one drink. I’ll have a small Jameson.” Barry remembered what Fingal had said about men who were disappointed in love crawling into the bottle. Not Barry Laverty. “A small one.”

  “You’ll have to wait until that bloke ahead gets his. Slow service tonight. Still …”—he waved over at Mandy—“I’m in no rush. Mandy’ll wait for me.” Jack pursed his lips. “I need a favour, Barry.”

  “Sure.”

  “Can you get yourself home?”

  “To Ballybucklebo?”

  “No, you eejit. To my place.”

  “Why?”

  “We’ve only my car—”

  The man ahead moved away from the bar.

  As Jack quickly placed his order, Barry understood why Jack had asked. “And you’ve already told Mandy you’ll run her home.”

  Jack grinned. “She lives out the Antrim Road way at the other end of town.”

  “I know. I took her out too, remember? Sure I’ll get myself home. As long as you give me the key.” And, he thought, if I need one, I now have the excuse of not having any transport if Peggy wants me to see her home.

  “Good man ma da.” Jack paid and picked up his and Mandy’s drinks. He waited for Barry to grab the other two. As they moved aside and walked back to the table, Jack winked at Barry. “You’ll know who said it, Barry, and he was right: ‘Candy is dandy, but liquor is quicker.’” He set the glass on the table in front of Mandy. “Here you are, my dear.”

  “Ogden Nash,” Barry said. He gave Peggy her vodka and orange, and sat beside her.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  Barry was content to sit quietly, sipping his whiskey, occasionally contributing to the conversation, and being amused, as he always was, while his friend went into his act to impress both girls.

  Barry enjoyed the company of the two pretty young women, enjoyed the craic. Half an hour passed, half an hour after which he suddenly realised he’d not thought about Patricia. Not until Peggy said something about the Belfast Opera Company and Barry remembered having eaten lasagne and being enthralled by the melding of two soprano voices in “Viens, Mallika,” the “Flower Duet” from Lakmé. That was the night Patricia’d told him she wanted to be an engineer and hadn’t time to fall in love. A smarter man than he would have listened and—Barry looked down to where Jack was surreptitiously caressing Mandy’s thigh through her scarlet pencil skirt—moved on.

  Damn it. There were more fish in the sea. Jack was right, but not for a while, and—he looked over to a young woman who was finishing her vodka and orange—not Peggy Duff. Not tonight anyway.

  “Anyone for another?” Barry asked. It was after all his shout. Jack had bought the first round, and girls weren’t expected to buy their own drinks. Jack and Mandy said yes. Peggy demurred.

  As Barry went up to the bar to order, he decided he’d stay for this drink, take Peggy for a slow spin around the floor. Then he’d make his excuses and get a bus back to Camden Street.

  26

  Ill News Hath Wings

  Barry could hear O’Reilly yelling from the landing. “That you, Barry? Keep your coat on. I need to have a word with you, but I’m going out to make a call. I want you to come with me.”

  Barry, having driven back from Jack’s flat on a pouring Sunday afternoon, had no plans other than to curl up with Trader to the Stars, Poul Anderson’s latest. Barry had found that science fiction could distract him, but if O’Reilly wanted to talk, it was fine. The novel would keep.

  O’Reilly clattered downstairs. “Just on my way to Maggie’s. I was going to go earlier, but I’ve been busy today.”

  “Anything exciting?”

  “Not today. Yesterday there was. We can talk about it in the car.”

  “Is Maggie sick? Sonny?” Barry would have been surprised if Maggie Houston, née MacCorkle, was ill. She was a tough old biddy and, as Kinky might say, “wouldn’t tear in the plucking,” but Sonny had a history of chronic heart failure, which was controlled by drugs.

  “No. They’re both fine. I need to ask them for a favour.” O’Reilly headed for the front door. “The Rover’s out in front. With all that rain the back garden’s like the Slough of Despond.” He glanced down at Barry’s pants and grinned. “Kinky won’t mind if you don’t get them covered in glaur.”

  O’Reilly pulled away from the kerb. “I’m going to ask the Houstons if they can do a bit of pet-sitting.”

  “Oh.” So O’Reilly as usual was keeping the machinery that ran the village oiled—as if looking after the sick wasn’t enough. Barry stared through the rain-streaked windscreen and tried to see if the moving blur immediately ahead was a cyclist. He was relieved, and surprised, when Fingal slowed and swerved to give the sodden pedaller room. Perhaps, Barry thought, after his senior colleague’s own recent trip into a ditch, a certain old dog had been taught a new trick.

  “There’s no easy way to tell you this, Barry,” O’Reilly said.

  “Tell me what? About pet-sitting?”

  O’Reilly shook his head. “The pet-sitting’s only part of it. You were right about Alice Moloney.”

  “Alice?” Barry frowned. “I was right? How do you know?”

  “Her abscess ruptured into her right lung yesterday evening.” O’Reilly’s voice was flat. “I wanted you to know as soon as you came home from town. I know you’re going to take it hard, but it’s not your fault the thing burst.”

  “My God.” Barry sat hard back into his seat, grasped the dashboard. “Did it …?” Please don’t say she’s dead. “Did it kill her?”

  “No,” O’Reilly said, “but she’s pretty sick. I sent her up to the Royal. They operated straightaway. The surgeon phoned me when he’d finished. It took him three hours to clean out the abscess cavity, cobble up her liver, and close the hole in her diaphragm.”

  “But she’s going to be all right? Isn’t she?”

  O’Reilly pulled over at the verge beside the front gate to the Houstons’ house. He leant over and put a hand on Barry’s shoulder. “Too early to say. She’s getting a lot of morphine. She has drains in her belly, her chest. She’s had a blood transfusion and she’s still on a drip. Nasogastric tube in her stomach. Chloroquine as an antiamoebic drug, antibiotics to prevent any superimposed bacterial infection. It’ll be a rough few days, but she should pull through.”

  “But if she doesn’t, it’s my—”

  “Fault? The hell it is.” O’Reilly pounded his fist on the steering wheel. “I’ve already told you that it’s not. It wasn’t your doing that she was put on a waiting list. I reckon it was close to bloody genius you making the diagnosis in the first place.”

  “Eventually,” Barry said. His voice was flat. “I saw her at the Bishops’ party. I thought she looked pretty rotten. I didn’t follow up for nearly a month.” And I know why, he thought.

  “She can’t have been feeling too bad all that time, or she’d have come to see us. Wouldn’t she?”

  “I don’t know,” Barry said. “She’s like a lot of country patients. She’d put up with a lot.”

  “Barry, stop blaming yourself. Come on. We’ve to see Maggie and Sonny.” He got out and switched on a torch.

  Barry followed into the darkness and the rain. The wet paved path reflected the torch’s beam. He walked behind O’Reilly to the house. Dear Lord, not another disaster? Poor Alice. And even though he was trying not to be self-pitying, he couldn’t help but think, poor Barry too. Was he going to be doomed to a future of medical calamities simply because he didn’t, in rural practice, have the tools and training to do his job properly? Was working here really going to be worth the candle?

  Barry waited. Even before O’Reilly pushed the bell,
Sonny’s five dogs began barking.

  Above the yapping Sonny’s voice could be heard through the closed door. “Into the kitchen. Now. Now, dogs.” The noise faded, and light from the hall spilled onto the path. Sonny Houston, silver hair shining, stood ramrod stiff and offered his hand to O’Reilly. “Doctor O’Reilly, Doctor Laverty, please come in. Let me take your coats. Sorry about the dogs, but I hadn’t the heart to put them out in their caravan on a night like this.”

  As he followed Fingal, Barry was still fretting about his tardiness in seeing Alice Moloney and his inability to treat her. He looked around as he took off his coat.

  The last time he’d been to this house, on the morning of Sonny and Maggie’s wedding day, the hall walls had been bare and freshly painted. Now they were decorated with photographs of the ancient city of Petra, carved out of a canyon in the Jordanian desert around 300 B.C. Sonny was an authority on the Nabataean civilization and had spent years on the archaeological site in the late 1940s.

  Between a picture rail and the ceiling hung an oar, its blade blue-painted and adorned with gilt. Sonny Houston in his youth had been a Cambridge University rowing blue. Only those so honoured, or who had represented their college, were awarded an oar once it had been suitably decorated with their crew’s names. Barry knew from O’Reilly that Sonny Houston, a man who used to live in an old motorcar, held a Ph.D. from Cambridge.

  That university bedevilled Barry. Two weeks ago when he’d been walking to a sweetshop to make a phone call, he’d found himself thinking of Patricia with her new man in a punt on the River Cam. The subject of that call—Kevin Kearney—had been discharged home four days ago, well recovered from his croup.

  Now Barry was here visiting an old Ulster couple, and there on the wall was yet another reminder of the place that had taken her.

  He heard Sonny saying, “Please come into the living room,” as he ushered them into a big room on the right side of the hall. “It’s the doctors, pet,” he said and moved to stand near Maggie’s wingbacked armchair beside the fireplace.

  Maggie, wrinkled as a prune and toothless as an oyster, grinned, set aside her knitting, and shooed her one-eared cat, General Sir Bernard Law Montgomery, off her lap.

  “Doctors dear, come on, on in out of that there dirty night.” She leant forward, picked up a poker, and stirred the glowing turf into a blaze. “Come on up to the fire. Get yourselves warm. Would you like a cup of tea in your hand? A slice of cake?”

  Barry relished the homely smell of the burning turf, but he had previous experience with Maggie’s tea, so stewed you could stand the spoon in it. And her fruitcake was heavy enough to ballast a yacht. He was relieved to hear O’Reilly say, “We don’t have time for tea. Sorry, Maggie. We just popped in for a minute to ask you both for a favour.”

  She cocked her head to one side. “Another kiddie needs a sitter? Like Eileen Lindsay’s wee Sammy before Christmas?”

  “Not this time,” O’Reilly said. “It’s a cat and a budgerigar.”

  Barry immediately recognised whose animals they were. The first time he’d visited Alice Moloney for her anaemia, he’d met the spherical cat and had a run-in with the bird. His words spilled out: “Alice’s budgerigar bit me once.” Feeling responsible for Alice’s present condition gnawed at him now.

  O’Reilly ignored Barry’s remark and said to Maggie, “Alice … Alice Moloney’s had to go to hospital—”

  “Och, dear,” Maggie said. “I’m main sorry ’til hear that, so I am. Is she going to be all right?”

  “We hope so, Maggie,” O’Reilly said.

  Bloody right we do, Barry thought, while noting Maggie’s lack of curiosity about what specifically ailed Alice. Here in the country the details of a patient’s illness were nobody’s business until the sufferer chose to reveal them.

  “What can we do to help?” Sonny asked.

  “If it wouldn’t be too much trouble, could you pop round every day and see to her animals? There are instructions and pet food in a cupboard under the sink.”

  “A cat and a budgie did you say, Doctor?” Sonny asked.

  “Aye,” said O’Reilly.

  “We’d be delighted, wouldn’t we, Maggie?”

  “Aye, certainly. Sure don’t we look after the General and this ould goat’s five dogs?” She reached up and squeezed Sonny’s hand. “Your man Noah could have used our help on his ark, so he could’ve.” She chuckled and pointed a bony finger at Sonny. “My ould fellah was a dab hand at the digging in the desert for them bits of pottery. He could’ve taken care of dunging out the elephants—never mind cleaning a wee budgie bird’s cage and a pussycat’s litterbox.”

  Despite her teasing, Barry saw the adoring look that passed between Maggie and Sonny. Both in their sixties and daft about each other. He breathed in deeply, then exhaled. Their road to romance had been riddled with potholes, but love, abetted by O’Reilly, had conquered all. He knew he shouldn’t envy them, but he did.

  “That would be marvellous,” O’Reilly said. “If you pop in at Number 1, Kinky’ll have the keys to the dress shop and Alice’s flat.”

  “Never you worry your head, Doctor dear,” Maggie said. “We’ll see to it.”

  “We will,” said Sonny.

  Maggie went on. “Now that’s all settled, are you sure you’ll not have a wee cup, like?”

  “Positive,” O’Reilly said. “Time we were off.”

  Sonny accompanied them to the hall, gave each man his coat, and said, “It’ll be our pleasure to help.”

  O’Reilly shook his hand. “Thanks, Sonny. It’ll take a load off Alice’s mind, I know. Her sister will be visiting her at the hospital. I’ll make sure she tells Alice that the animals are being well looked after.”

  Barry buttoned his coat. He could sense the satisfaction—no, pleasure—in O’Reilly’s voice. He was doing what he must always have been cut out to do. Sorting out yet one more difficulty as he cared for the whole village. Everything he’d told Barry in the last seven months, and the number of problems Barry’d seen and indeed helped O’Reilly to solve, attested to the big man’s need to be completely involved with the lives of his patients and apparently deriving complete satisfaction from being so.

  “Come on, Barry. Home.” O’Reilly headed down the path.

  “Night, Sonny,” Barry said. He followed into the teeth of the gale.

  As O’Reilly drove, he didn’t seem to want to talk. He didn’t even light his pipe. It suited Barry fine. He sat staring ahead, listening to the rhythmic sweeping of the windscreen wipers, feeling the jolting as the big car bounced along the uneven road.

  Barry was still feeling envious of the strength of the feelings between Sonny and Maggie, a love that had persisted for years despite their being apart. He was envious too of the big man driving this huge old car. Would he, Barry, regardless of what career he chose, ever be as content as Doctor Fingal Flahertie O’Reilly? Was Barry Laverty’s mounting dissatisfaction with rural practice perhaps a reflection of his own lack of contentment with how he’d bungled his affair with Patricia Spence and were his thoughts about specialisation motivated by a hope that if he did he might win her back?

  His reverie was interrupted when O’Reilly parked outside Number 1. “Come on,” he said, “let’s see what Kinky has for us tonight.”

  27

  Shorten and Lessen the Birth Pangs

  O’Reilly let Barry in and swiftly followed. Fingal inhaled. He knew that aroma instantly. Kinky was making beef stew for dinner, and it would be studded with suet dumplings. He started unbuttoning his coat, smiling happily at the thought of her dumplings, but before he had time to take it off, Kinky appeared in the hall.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, “but your dinner’s going to have to wait. I’ve just had the district midwife on the phone. She wants you to come at once. Hester Patton’s in labour and far on, so.”

  “She’s what?” O’Reilly said. “She’s what?” He felt his nose tip blanching. “She’s bloody well meant to be in
hospital.” It wasn’t annoyance about being kept from his grub that had him tried. The farmer’s wife, pregnant for the second time, was expecting twins. Three weeks ago he’d arranged for her to be admitted, in her thirty-second week. That was customary with multiple pregnancies. Admission for bed rest was meant to try to prevent premature labour. And if it did start, at least the patient was in hospital, the best place for delivery to occur. The actual delivery was often tricky, and preemie babies needed specialist nursing. Now Hester was in labour, five weeks early—and at home. Blast. Both Hester and the babies were in danger.

  “Miss Hagerty said Hester took her own discharge yesterday. She was bored and missing her family so she signed the papers and took herself off by the hand, so.”

  “Silly woman,” O’Reilly said, shaking his head, “but it happens. Come on, Barry. We’ll need to get a move on. I’ll get the midwifery bags.”

  O’Reilly went into the surgery and reappeared clutching a heavy bag in each hand.

  “Give me one of those, Fingal.”

  “I’ll keep your dinner warm,” Kinky said and closed the door.

  They marched along the front path. The rain had stopped and the winds of the dying gale were pushing the clouds away.

  O’Reilly opened the car’s boot and waited for Barry to chuck his bag in before putting in the second.

  O’Reilly started the engine and took off, muttering, “Out the Bangor-Belfast Road toward Maggie’s old cottage, next right after that.” He willed the car to go faster.

  “I hope,” said Barry, “Miss Hagerty’s sent for the flying squad.”

  “She’s bound to have. GPs shouldn’t be trying to cope with premature twins in the patient’s home.” The pregnancy was only thirty-five weeks advanced. The babies would be small. The first one could slip out past a cervix that was not fully dilated. Either or both might be coming buttocks first. And after the babies were born, Hester might not expel the placentas or could haemorrhage. The potential for complications was enormous.