An Irish Country Christmas

by Patrick Taylor

  “Take these.” Doctor Fitzpatrick tossed his gloves into his hat and handed them to Barry like a condescending master to his valet. Barry set them on the table of the hall clothes stand. The stranger unbuttoned his coat and was slipping the sleeves down his arms when Barry spotted Mrs. Kincaid heading down the hall from her kitchen. She took in the scene before her and halted at the foot of the stairs, arms folded across her bosom, chins thrust out, agate eyes flashing.

  “My coat.” Doctor Fitzpatrick handed Barry his raincoat.

  Barry hung the garment on a hook on the stand above the man’s hat and gloves.

  “You must be Laverty,” Doctor Fitzpatrick remarked.

  “Yes,” Barry said levelly. “I am Doctor Laverty.”

  The man’s gaze swept over Barry from head to toe. His thin lip curled. “You look to me as if you should still be at school.” He sniffed. “I’m not here to waste my time with minions. I’ve come to see the principal of the practice. Where is O’Reilly?”

  Barry’s eyes narrowed. He kept his voice level as he said, “Doctor O’Reilly is a bit under the weather today. He’s upstairs.” Barry glanced above his head. “He’s not receiving visitors.”

  He heard a strange, dry, braying noise and realized that the man was laughing. “From what I hear, I suppose you mean he’s hungover.”

  “I do not.” Barry’s hands, which had been hanging loosely at his sides, curled into fists. He hesitated before continuing, but he decided that as the man in front of him was medically qualified, it would not be breaching a confidence. “My senior colleague has tracheobronchitis.”

  “Smoker too?”

  “Yes. Doctor O’Reilly smokes a pipe.”

  “Filthy habit. Bronchitis, is it? Serves him right.”

  “Now listen—”

  But Doctor Fitzpatrick was already striding to the foot of the staircase, head turned back as he remarked over his shoulder, “I’m not a visitor. I am a medical man with every right to visit a sick colleague.”

  “Is that a fact, sir?” Barry heard the tone in Kinky’s voice. It was the same kind of understated growl that Lady Macbeth would give—seconds before she sank her fangs into the nearest piece of yielding flesh. He saw the man’s head turn. He slammed to a halt and took two steps backward. To Barry it seemed as if Fitzpatrick, who had been proceeding like a square-rigger under full sail, had run up on the reef of Kinky Kincaid, where she still stood at the foot of the staircase, arms folded, feet apart, legs braced to withstand any shock.

  Fitzpatrick shuddered, as would the masts and yards of the grounded vessel, collected himself, and then demanded, “And who might you be?”

  “I,” said Kinky very civilly, “am Mrs. Kincaid, housekeeper to Doctor Fingal Flahertie O’Reilly.”

  Barry thought of how O’Reilly had described Kinky when he had first introduced her: his Cerberus, the three-headed dog who guarded the entrance to Hades. Except Kinky was such an effective guard she probably merited a fourth head.

  Yet her effectiveness seemed to be lost on Doctor Fitzpatrick. As a grounded ship might try to force its way over an obstruction and might succeed with soft, yielding coral, he bore on. “Well, Mrs Kincaid, I am here to visit my colleague. If you would kindly show me the way . . .”

  “I’ll not, sir.” Barry saw Kinky’s shoulders rise. The good ship Fitzpatrick had hit granite, and jagged rocks at that. “When you phoned this morning, I told you himself was not receiving.”

  “Rubbish. I’m a medical man.”

  “That’s as may be. Doctor O’Reilly told me he wasn’t up to having visitors today.”

  As if to give emphasis to her words Barry heard a hoarse voice from upstairs call, “What in the hell’s going on down there, Kinky?”

  Before she could answer, Barry saw Doctor Fitzpatrick tilt his head back and look up to the landing. He took one step and said, “My good woman, step aside.” He was beginning to raise his voice.

  Barry’s fists unclenched. He started to grin. He had to admire Doctor Fitzpatrick’s persistence, but the man clearly had not got the measure of Kinky Kincaid. This was shaping up as the classic irresistible force meets the immovable object—and Barry knew exactly where he’d put his money. He saw Kinky’s eyes narrow to the merest of slits.

  “Your good woman, is it? I am not one of your chattels, sir. My virtue, with all due respect, is none of your business, sir, and I will not step aside, so. Himself is ill. Himself needs his rest. Himself will not be disturbed by the likes of you, sir.”

  “I don’t think you know who I am.” The man’s Adam’s apple bobbed furiously. His voice grew louder.

  Kinky chuckled but didn’t budge an inch. “Don’t know, is it? Don’t know who you are, is it, sir?”

  “That’s right, my good woman. I am Doctor Fitzpatrick. Doctor, d’ye hear? I’ll not be spoken to like that by a mere servant. Let me by.” He was shouting.

  “Aye, so. I hear well enough.” Kinky’s voice remained calm, measured. “Mere, is it? Your good woman, is it? Doctor, is it? And here I thought you doctors were all meant to have very good memories.”

  “What on earth are you going on about?”

  “Aye so. Sure it’s only one wag of a wagtail’s tail since I told you I am not your woman, good or otherwise. And I told you Doctor O’Reilly’s not to be disturbed. Maybe you’ve forgotten that too, so I’ll not step aside.” She took such a deep breath that, as her bosom swelled, her crossed arms rose like a lift ascending from the depths of a coal mine. “Ah, sure,” she said, “it’ll be the poor memory you have indeed, so.” She moved forward, grabbed him by the elbow, and steered him back along the hall. She stopped at the clothes stand, handed Doctor Fitzpatrick his hat and gloves, and helped him into his raincoat. She looked at Barry and jerked her head to the door, which Barry instantly opened. A cold blast swept into the hall, its force only slightly blocked by Doctor Fitzpatrick’s body as Kinky pushed him out onto the step. “And it’ll be the same poor memory that led you to ask me if I know who you are. Sure only a fellow with a very poor memory could forget who he is. I’d wonder if you are really a doctor at all?”

  And with that she shut the door and turned to Barry. Kinky took a very deep breath, expelling it in a long sighing exhalation. Rather than show pleasure in her victory, however, it seemed to Barry that she actually deflated. She shook her head. “I hope himself upstairs won’t be cross with me.”

  “Why on earth should he be, Kinky?”

  “I wasn’t altogether polite to that gentleman, and he is a doctor, so. If he goes away cross, he might try to take it out on Doctor O’Reilly.”

  Barry heard real concern in her voice and hastened to reassure her. “I think, Kinky, that Doctor O’Reilly, once he’s better, will be able to look after himself, and because he can’t right now, and you did, he’ll be proud of you. I certainly am.”

  “Honest to God, sir?” She managed a small smile.

  Barry nodded.

  “Well, I don’t normally rear up on my hind legs, but that new doctor wanted to go up there”—she tossed her head upward—“and disturb himself.”

  “And we couldn’t be having that, could we?”

  “No, sir.” She hesitated, then asked, “And you don’t think Doctor Fitzpatrick could harm our practice, do you?”

  Barry heard the possessive “our” and understood how protective Kinky felt. If things ever came to a fight, he’d not want to be trapped facing Mrs Kinky Kincaid on the one flank and Doctor Fingal Flahertie O’Reilly on the other. He laughed, in part because having just met the lugubrious Doctor Fitzpatrick, Barry had great difficulty believing the man could be much competition. But mostly he was laughing at the way Kinky had dealt with the obnoxious fellow. “I’d not worry about that,” he said, keeping to himself the tiny nagging thought that Fitzpatrick was competition. “You did very well, Kinky. I mean it.”

  “Och, it was only a shmall little thing, so.” She wiped her hands on her apron and smiled at Barry, but her smile fled as
a hoarse, stentorian voice from upstairs yelled, “What’s all the shouting about down there, and when the hell am I going to get my lunch?”

  I’m Sickly but Sassy

  Those raised voices from below had roused O’Reilly, and he forced himself to sit straighter in his armchair. While he’d been napping, Kinky had lit the lounge fire and covered him with a blanket. He rubbed a hand under his chin and along the front of his neck. His throat hadn’t been made any better by shouting down to ask what was going on, but damn it all, he’d wanted to know. Not that anyone had bothered to answer him. He imagined his bellow had simply sent Kinky scurrying to the kitchen and caused Barry to smile and confirm his suspicions that his employer was an ill-tempered old curmudgeon.

  O’Reilly felt an uncomfortable burning with each in-drawing of breath, but in his opinion he wasn’t any worse than he had been earlier, and perhaps his nap had even brought about a little improvement.

  Now he was hungry and he was curious, and he was irritated and not just in his throat. Kinky had promised chicken soup for lunch, and it was past lunchtime. Presumably she’d been held up by whoever had been down in the hall yelling at her, and that delay made his curiosity more intense, and in no small part was the cause of his irritation.

  Still, it took a certain talent to remain irritated when you had a little white cat purring on your lap. Lady Macbeth was curled up on top of his stomach, and he could feel the pleasant warmth of her through the blanket. He smiled down at her, stroked her, then looked up when Barry came in.

  “How are you, Fingal?” he asked, as he moved across the room and stood beside the chair.

  “I’ve been worse.” O’Reilly felt the back of Barry’s cool hand pause on his forehead, then drop to hold his wrist.

  “You don’t feel as if you’ve a fever, and your pulse is normal.”

  “So the odds are I’ll live and you won’t inherit the practice just yet?” O’Reilly growled, as he felt a cough rise again in his throat.

  Barry laughed, clearly unabashed by O’Reilly’s tone, took the armchair opposite, and said, “They’ll have to shoot you, Fingal, and even then you’d not lie down.”

  O’Reilly recognized that he was being unfair venting his spleen on Barry. He softened. “I heard a bit of argy-bargy down there. What was it all about?”

  “You were going to have a visitor. He tried to insist on coming up here. He wanted to surge past Kinky with all sails set full and by, but he ran onto a reef.”

  “A reef?”

  “Kinky.”

  O’Reilly chuckled and said, “Nice analogy, Barry. The RMS Titanic tried to insist on forcing her way through an iceberg, and she came to a sticky end too.”

  “Fifteenth of April. Nineteen twelve. She was built here in Belfast. The marine architect was Thomas Andrews, a Comber man.”

  The boy knew his history, O’Reilly thought, as he wriggled to make himself more comfortable. He felt a needling in his left thigh as Lady Macbeth registered her disapproval. He idly petted her head and asked Barry, “So if Kinky was the reef, who ran afoul of her?”

  “A Doctor Fitzpatrick.”

  “Fitzpatrick?” O’Reilly abruptly stopped stroking the cat. “The fellah who took over from Doctor Bowman in the Kinnegar?”

  Barry nodded.

  “The one that phoned this morning and wanted to see me, and she told him, ‘Not today.’ ”

  “Right.”

  “But he came anyway.” O’Reilly frowned. That was simply ill-mannered, and he disapproved of bad manners—at least in others. “He’s got the quare brass neck on him.”

  He watched as Barry smiled, presumably at the Ulsterism, which meant someone with arrogant persistence. It seemed to fit the scene he’d heard playing out downstairs.

  “Aye, and an Adam’s apple like the blade tip of a ploughshare.”

  That certainly sounded familiar. He had a half-notion he knew the man. “And did he wear a gold pince-nez and a wingtip collar?”

  Barry nodded. “And he had a hooter that would have made Julius Caesar’s nose look snub.”

  “Begod,” said O’Reilly, remembering sharing a dissection station with four other students, a formalin-reeking cadaver, and Fitzpatrick. There’d been more craic to be had from the stiff. “He was a classmate of mine at Trinity.”

  “Oh?”

  “Aye, Ronald Hercules Fitzpatrick. Why in the hell his parents called him that is beyond me.” Actually, O’Reilly thought, if he is the man I remember, they might have done better to strangle him at birth.

  “Hercules?” Barry shook his head. “He hardly suits that moniker.”

  O’Reilly grunted. “But he suits his Fitz. He really suits it.”

  Barry frowned. “I’m not sure I understand.”

  “Way in the past, the Irish gave their newborn boys surnames derived from the first names of relatives. Back then, if my grandpa had been Reilly, I would certainly have been O’Reilly, grandson of Reilly. My father was Connan, God rest him.” For a moment O’Reilly fondly remembered the big Dublin professor in classics at Trinity College who had died of leukaemia three weeks after he’d proudly watched his son graduate from the medical faculty of his own university. “If they’d decided to call me for him, I’d have been MacConnan, Connan’s son. But of course the old ways changed, and the Irish took on the English way of the son simply assuming the father’s surname. It made keeping records easier. We’ve been O’Reillys since one of our lot was killed with Brian Boru at the Battle of Clontarf against the Danes in 1014.”

  “That explains O and Mac. What about Fitz?” Barry asked.

  Before O’Reilly could answer, Kinky came in and set a tray on the sideboard. He sniffed, and despite his stuffy nose he felt his mouth start to water at the aroma of Kinky’s chicken soup.

  “It’s chicken soup and wheaten bread and butter,” she said.

  Grub at last. Great. He sat up and dislodged Lady Macbeth.

  “Fitz, is it?” she remarked, handing him a bowl and a spoon. “That won’t need any salt,” she said.

  O’Reilly ignored her and drank a spoonful. The soup was hot, rich, and felt like healing balm on his scratchy throat. He took another spoonful and nodded at Kinky. She was right. It didn’t need salt. It tasted just right.

  She handed Barry his bowl and spoon.

  “Go on, Kinky,” he said, “explain Fitz, please.”

  “Fitz,” she said, “is Norman. It means ‘son of,’ a very special kind of son.” She glanced at O’Reilly. “Very special.”

  O’Reilly saw the twinkle in her agate eyes and kept a straight face. He knew she was leading Barry down the garden path to set him up for her punch line.

  “A special kind of son?”

  “Yes, Doctor Laverty. Special . . . a bastard son.”

  “Bastard son. Honestly?” Barry laughed and choked on a mouthful of soup. “Honestly?”

  Before O’Reilly or Kinky could answer, O’Reilly heard the doorbell ring.

  “I’ll see who it is,” Kinky said, “and unless they’re bleeding to death, I’ll ask them to wait until you gentlemen have finished.” She left.

  “And that’s why you said he suited his name, Fingal?”

  “It is. He was a gobshite of the first magnitude then, and I doubt very much if he’s changed.”

  “So does that mean you don’t think he’ll be much competition?”

  O’Reilly shook his head. Barry was so transparent, so worried about his future here. Should he reassure him or be completely honest? “Did you ever hear of a fellah called Rasputin?”

  “The Siberian monk?”

  “Aye. He claimed to be able to use hypnosis to cure Tsar Nicholas’s son of haemophilia.”

  “But that’s a load of rubbish.”

  “I know that and you know that, but the tsarina and a lot of her court believed him because they wanted to believe him. He’d quite the following for a while.”

  “And you think Fitzpatrick might be able to do the same here?” O’Reil
ly could see how Barry was frowning, how he’d stopped eating his soup.

  “He might, for a while.” O’Reilly knew that he himself harboured a small concern, but as senior man it was his job to keep it to himself and keep Barry’s spirits up. “But old Rasputin ended up poisoned, stabbed, and chucked into the Neva River.”

  “So you’re saying we should just sit tight?” Barry said. “See what happens?”

  “Do you have a better idea?”

  “Not unless you want me to stab him and chuck him in the Bucklebo River.” Barry was smiling.

  “Good lad.” One thing about Laverty, his sense of humour never deserted him for long. “I reckon—” O’Reilly couldn’t finish the sentence. A harsh, barking cough overcame him.

  Kinky came in, followed by the Marquis of Ballybucklebo, a tall man in his mid-sixties with unruly iron-grey hair and a neatly clipped military moustache. He wore a tweed Norfolk jacket over an open-necked shirt, where a silk cravat in the colours of the Irish Guards took the place of a neatly knotted tie. “Good day, Fingal. I hope I’m not intruding.”

  Barry set his soup aside and stood.

  “Please be seated, Doctor Laverty,” the marquis said. “And both of you, please, finish your lunch.”

  “I know we decided, sir, no visitors,” Kinky said, “but after his honour had hung up his coat below, and we’d had a bit of a chat, and His Lordship promised he’d only stay for a toty, wee minute and not tire you out . . . well, I relented, so.” She fixed the peer of the realm, whose rank O’Reilly knew lay between that of a duke and an earl, with a momentarily stony look, wagged a plump finger, and said, “Remember, you promised.” Then her face softened, and she said almost to herself, “Perhaps I was a bit harsh on that other gentleman.”

  How couldn’t you love a woman like Kinky? O’Reilly thought, seeing her confusion over whether or not she had done the right thing. She had a heart of corn. “Nonsense, Kinky,” he said. “You were right on both occasions.” He was gratified to see her smile.