An Irish Country Christmas

by Patrick Taylor

  The sight of Maggie, coatless in the frigid air, running down the street toward them, didn’t make sense at first. She was waving her arms and yelling, “Doctors! Doctors! Come quick! For God’s sake, come quick.”

  Her cries could only mean one thing. Sammy. The Henoch-Schönlein purpura must be showing its sinister side. Barry broke into a run with O’Reilly hard on his heels. Damn. The little fellow had looked so well only half an hour ago. If he was bleeding into his gut, he’d need a subcutaneous injection of adrenaline and oral antihistamines while an ambulance was summoned to take him to the Children’s Hospital. “Is Sammy okay? Is he in pain?” he yelled, as he came up on Maggie. She now stood bent double with her hands on her knees.

  “No . . . no,” she gasped and hauled in a deep breath. “It’s not Sammy. It’s Eileen.”

  There’s No Smoke without Fire

  Barry charged in through the open front door, vaguely aware of O’Reilly following. The scene before him seemed to be frozen in time. Eileen stood beside the fire half turned, so he saw her in profile. Her head drooped. Tears streaked her cheeks. She held a ten-shilling note in one hand; the other clutched the Princess Elizabeth tea caddy. Its lid hung open, and Barry could see that it was empty.

  Sammy was sitting up on his sofa. His arms were wrapped around his bent knees, and he stared wide-eyed at the caddy held in his mother’s hand. His comic lay on the floor along with the tartan rug.

  At least Eileen wasn’t lying on the floor with the comic and the rug, Barry thought with a great sense of relief.

  O’Reilly arrived. “What’s up?” he asked.

  “Dunno yet,” Barry said.

  Eileen moved nearer to Barry and handed him the caddy. “It’s gone,” she said, her voice tiny and cracking. “All of it. I was going to put this ten bob in, but look . . .”

  Barry wished he could miraculously make the money reappear.

  “Fifteen pounds. All I could save since last Christmas.”

  He earned thirty-five pounds a week, and that wasn’t a lot of money. Barry looked at Eileen, saw how her shoulders shook, noticed that one of her nylons was laddered again, and knew that she neglected her own little luxuries to put money aside to buy her children something, and not a very big something, on Christmas Day. He felt a lump in his throat. No wonder she’d told her children that Santa was hard up this year.

  Where the hell could the money have gone? Was there any way to get it back? Something must be done to help her. But what? Before Barry could decide, O’Reilly took charge.

  He moved past Barry, put a fatherly arm round Eileen’s shoulder. “When was the last time you saw the money, Eileen?”

  She sniffled and rubbed her eyes with the heel of her hand. “This morning after I’d lit the fire for Sammy and brought him down here.” She forced a little smile in Sammy’s direction. “He gets terrible bored in his bedroom, so he does.”

  “So,” O’Reilly said, “the money went missing since then.”

  “Yes, Doctor. It must’ve.”

  “So who’s been in the room since you lit the fire—other than Sammy and Maggie?” His bushy eyebrows met almost in the middle of his forehead.

  Despite the seriousness of the situation, Barry had to hide a smile as he pictured Fingal Flahertie O’Reilly as Sherlock Holmes, deerstalker cap on his head, meerschaum pipe in his mouth. That of course would cast Barry in the role of Doctor Watson.

  Eileen sobbed, and O’Reilly produced a large handkerchief and gave it to her. “Take your time,” he said.

  Eileen blew her nose and returned the hanky. “Sammy, and Mary and Willy. They were by themselves for a wee while after I’d gone to work. His brother and sister mind Sammy until Mrs. Houston gets here; then they go to school.”

  Something stirred in Barry’s memory. What had Sammy said about having a notion for helping Santa out of financial difficulty?

  “And I got here at half past eight.” Maggie, still out of breath, was standing in the doorway. “And I’ve been here since.”

  “And there were no visitors?” O’Reilly asked.

  “No,” she said.

  “No tradesmen came to call?”

  “Nobody,” Maggie said, “except yourself and Doctor Laverty.”

  “And Sammy’s been in the room all the time?”

  “Aye.” She scratched her cheek. “No,” she said, “I tell a lie. He’d to go for a pee.”

  “Hmmm,” O’Reilly’s eyebrows met. “Hmmm.”

  His dilemma was obvious to Barry. If no one had come to the house, the only possible suspects were Eileen’s children and now Maggie, who had been alone in the room while her charge was in the bathroom.

  Getting to the truth of the matter was going to take a great deal of tact. Barry opened his coat. With four adults, a child, and a coal fire, the little parlour was getting stuffy.

  O’Reilly took his arm from Eileen’s shoulder, turned, and looked at Sammy.

  The child looked back.

  “Now, Sammy,” O’Reilly asked very quietly, “did you or Mary or Willy steal Mammy’s money?”

  Tact, Barry knew, was not O’Reilly’s strong suit.

  Sammy jerked back. “Steal? No. We never did, so we didn’t.”

  And that “never did, so we didn’t” was the most emphatic denial in the Ulster vocabulary. Barry waited to see if O’Reilly would accept the child’s word, or ask again, or challenge Maggie. Just for the moment, the big man seemed to be lost for words.

  There was a rattling noise, and Barry looked around in time to see the coals settling in the grate. The fire. What was it about the fire? Barry glanced at Sammy, who was looking from the tin in his mother’s hand to the fireplace and back to the caddy. Barry remembered. Eileen had not been going to light the fire until it was time for the kiddies to send their letters to Santa. Sammy couldn’t have. Could he? Christ. Barry saw something in the boy’s eyes and was suddenly certain he knew exactly what had happened. And if he was right—he glanced at Eileen—it was going to be very difficult to help her. The lad couldn’t have, could he? Barry felt a chill in his stomach.

  “Doctor O’Reilly,” Barry asked, “could I ask Sammy a question?”

  “Go right ahead.”

  Barry hesitated. He didn’t want to give Sammy the impression that the grown-ups were ganging up on him. Barry smiled, then said, “Sammy, I know you didn’t steal the money.”

  “See?” Sammy looked at O’Reilly.

  Barry glanced over his shoulder at Maggie. From the way she was frowning, she had worked out for herself that she was now the prime suspect. “And I know you didn’t, Maggie.” She nodded to him.

  Barry moved across the room, picked up a poker, got down on his hunkers, stirred the fire, and then looked Sammy right in the eye. “But you wanted to help Santa out, didn’t you?”

  Sammy looked up at his mother and at the caddy in her hand. “Aye,” he said in a very small voice, “and I wanted to help my mammy.” He looked down and fidgeted with the material of his pyjama jacket. “You mind my mammy said Santa was a bit hard up this year and when we sent our letters to him up the chimney we weren’t to ask for too much?”

  “I do, Sammy.”

  “She was awful unhappy about it, so she was.” Sammy’s voice started to crack. “Me and Mary and Willy, we thought if Santa had a bit more money, Mammy would cheer up . . . and I was going to tell Mammy today what we done, but I never got the chance.” He started to cry. “She opened the caddy and she stared in, then took on something fierce, and . . . and . . .”—his sobs strangled his words—“and I think we’ve done a bad thing, so we have.”

  “So, Sammy, the three of you sent the money up the chimney to Santa?”

  Eileen’s hand flew to her open mouth.

  “Yes,” Sammy managed to say. Then, as if having made a clean breast of things had in part restored his spirits, he continued, “So now Santa’ll have pots and pots of money, won’t he, Doctor?”

  But Eileen won’t, Barry thought.
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br />   “Won’t he, Doctor?” Sammy started to cry again.

  Eileen went to him, wrapped her arms around him, and said. “It’s all right, Sammy. It’s all right. Don’t cry. It’s all right.”

  O’Reilly put a hand on her shoulder and said, “And it will be all right, Eileen. Don’t you worry about the money. It will all work out, you’ll see.” He fixed Barry with a stare.

  “Yes, Fingal,” Barry said. He knew full well that he hadn’t the faintest idea what O’Reilly was talking about, but the man had spoken with such authority that if he had told Barry to levitate as far as the ceiling, Barry would have replied, “Yes, Fingal.” And then he would have risen accordingly.

  “Honest, Doctor O’Reilly? Honest to God?” Eileen smiled at O’Reilly through her tears.

  “Honest to God, Eileen,” he said.

  Barry inwardly shuddered. There was no more binding Ulster promise.

  “That’s grand then, so it is,” Maggie chipped in. “I’m very glad it’s all sorted out. Do you know, I think we all need a nice wee cup of tea, and I’ve a few slices of my plum cake out in the kitchen.”

  Before Barry could speak, O’Reilly said, “You make it for Eileen and yourself, Maggie. Doctor Laverty and I have another call to make.”

  Neither man spoke until the Rover was halfway up one of the back-roads into the Ballybucklebo Hills above the village. “Fingal,” Barry finally said, “you told Eileen not to worry, so I presume you have a plan?”

  O’Reilly hurled the Rover round a bend. Its inside wheels jolted over the verge until he straightened out the car’s progress, slowed, turned into the entrance to a field, and braked viciously. “Open the gate.”

  Barry did as he was told and waited for O’Reilly to drive through. Then he followed on foot and closed the gate. They were standing in a field that had been left fallow and that lay as its own patch in the wider quilt of little fields. Some were in pasture, with small flocks of cotton-wool sheep or suede-brown cattle. Others were freshly ploughed, and their black loam furrows waited for the spring sowing of barley or oats or wheat. In the spring, the crops would sprout and dress the land in fine green muslin. In the late summer, there would be fields of gold, where soft winds made the grain ripples as the evening breeze ruffles a calm sea. He paused, thinking of the slow turning of the farmers’ seasons, pleased that already he had had his first summer and autumn and was now in his first winter here.

  It wouldn’t be much longer until the partnership he was now sure he wanted was in reach. Perhaps he wasn’t dealing with the challenging cases he’d seen in the teaching hospital, but being involved in the life of the village, and not just the locals’ medical problems, had its compensations. The whole episode just past was another example of how a GP like O’Reilly could make a difference in people’s lives, and Barry had no doubt that O’Reilly would have a solution to Eileen’s worries. Working here was what appealed to him all right, unless that wretched Fitzpatrick . . .

  Barry left the thought unfinished and started to walk to where O’Reilly had parked, about twenty yards away. The field, like all Ulster fields, was small and irregular in its borders of drystone walls, the grey stones flecked with brown lichen. Even in midafternoon, the grass was rimed with a sugar icing of frost.

  In the middle of the grass rose a hummock, crowned by a single blackthorn tree and surrounded by blooming gorse bushes. Barry knew it was a fairy hill; when the field was under cultivation, no plough would touch the hillock for fear that the little people who lived there might curdle the cows’ milk or blight the crop.

  He inhaled a mixture of the almond scent of the yellow whin flowers and the pungency of cow clap. A herd had been pastured here recently. A hazy wisp of smoke, which rose from the next little valley, hung in the still air. He could smell the burning wood. Someone who had been cutting back a hedge and cleaning out a ditch must have been disposing of the cuttings.

  Barry saw O’Reilly leave his side of the car and open the back door for Arthur Guinness. The big dog piled out, sniffing the air, his tail wagging. He headed off at a gallop, only to be called back by O’Reilly’s “Here, sir. Come.”

  To Barry’s surprise the usually unruly beast obeyed at once.

  “Come on, Barry,” O’Reilly yelled, as started to walk toward the fairy ring. “Heel, you.” And the big dog stayed at O’Reilly’s side, his muzzle not one inch in front of his master’s leg.

  Barry ran to catch up, his breath puffing in the still air. He wanted to know how O’Reilly planned to help Eileen Lindsay restore her fortunes.

  From overhead came a plaintive pee-wit, pee-wit. Looking up, he saw a flock of green plover, their head crests obvious, against an eggshell blue sky, flapping their langorous way home with the peculiar wing beat that gave them their Ulster name, lapwing.

  O’Reilly and Arthur had reached the edge of the fairy ring. O’Reilly stood legs astraddle and commanded, “Sit.”

  Arthur obeyed, his nose twitching, scenting, questing. He made little excited mutterings somewhere in his throat, and his tail swept from side to side, clearing a pie-wedge shape of clear grass in the frost.

  Barry caught up with them. “Fingal,” he said, “I asked you what your plan for Eileen was.”

  O’Reilly frowned, seemed not to have heard the question. “Those whins are full of rabbits. Watch this.” He pointed to the gorse bushes. “Hi lost, Arthur,” he said quietly.

  The big dog took off, nose to the ground. He quartered back and forth, and Barry knew he was attempting to cut across a scent trail. Arthur stopped dead, spun, and took a straight line to the edge of the bushes. Then he stopped and looked back at O’Reilly.

  “Push ’em out, boy. Push ’em out.”

  The bushes crackled and swayed as Arthur thrust his way in beneath, belly close to the ground. He disappeared, and for a few moments all Barry could hear was a crashing in the undergrowth; then the crashing was replaced by a hurried rustling. Three rabbits, brown-and-beige furred, ears flattened to the backs of their heads, tore from the cover and bolted across the field.

  O’Reilly grinned. “If I’d had my shotgun, we’d be having rabbit pie tomorrow night.”

  Barry felt a moment of sympathy for the rabbits but realized that he’d not have objected, not one bit, to tucking into one of Kinky’s game pies. He stared at the bushes, expecting Arthur to appear, but instead he heard a renewed crashing heading deep into the thicket. He rubbed his hands. They were getting chilly. So was the tip of his nose. He’d like to go back to the car and head off to the warmth of the Parish Hall as O’Reilly had suggested at lunchtime. And he’d like an answer to the question that was still niggling at him. “Fingal, about Eileen’s money. How are we going to get it back for her?”

  O’Reilly shrugged. “To tell you the truth, Barry, just at the moment I haven’t the foggiest notion.”

  “But you sounded so sure back at the house and—”

  With the suddenness of the explosion of a landmine underfoot, the whins rustled, and a staccato clattering of stubby wings was accompanied by a hoarse cry of kek, kek, kek. A cock pheasant hurled himself into the sky above the bushes, his emerald head iridescent in the sun, his long striped tail feathers streaming behind as he clawed for height. Barry flinched, then collected himself.

  O’Reilly yelled, “Come in, Arthur!” Then he turned to Barry. “Did you see that big fellah?”

  “Hard to miss him.”

  “It’s unusual for a pheasant to be so far from the marquis’ estate,” O’Reilly remarked, “but once in a while the unexpected happens.”

  Arthur reappeared, and O’Reilly called him to heel. “Come on, Barry. Let’s head on to the Duck. We’ll look in on the pageant some other day.” He started back toward the car, and Barry followed, wondering if the exertion and the cold had tired his usually indefatigable older colleague. “You feeling all right?”

  “Couldn’t be better,” he said, but he shivered. “I just fancy a pint. I haven’t had one since Monday.”
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br />   It would kill the big man to admit to any weakness, Barry thought. “Fair enough and . . . Fingal?”

  “What?”

  “You really don’t have a plan for Eileen, do you?”

  “Not a clue, but remember the pheasant. The unexpected has a habit of happening.”

  “So you are going to reassure everybody and simply hope that something turns up?”

  “No.” O’Reilly opened the car’s back door and waited for Arthur to jump in. “I leave those nonspecific upturning aspirations to Mr. Micawber.”

  “Dickens.”

  “I know that. David Copperfield.” He slammed the rear door. “No, I said I’d think of something, and I bloody well will.” He opened the driver’s door. “But I’ll think a damn sight better with a pint in my hand. So trot off and open the gate like a good lad.”

  And Barry, vaguely reassured, did just that.

  Matters of Fact . . . Are Very Stubborn Things

  The weather had held until Saturday, and when Barry came down for breakfast, sunlight was dancing in the facets of the cut-glass decanters on the sideboard and bouncing from the silver-domed cover of a chafing dish. The aroma of fresh coffee was being overpowered by the smell of poached kippers.

  O’Reilly, sitting at the head of the table, waved his fish fork in the general direction of the dresser. “Morning, Barry. Help yourself. I’ve left you a brace.” He shoved in a mouthful and added, “Not like certain dumplings I could allude to.”

  “Morning, Fingal.” Barry yawned, ignoring the jibe coming from the man who not so very long ago had consumed a whole roast duck meant for both of them. He opened the chafing dish and stepped back to let a cloud of fish-scented steam dissipate.

  He was pleased that Fingal was on call today. Yesterday had been hectic after lunch. He’d dropped in on Sammy and Maggie, and he’d visited Jeannie Jingles and arranged follow-up visits for her Eddie who, his pneumonia on the mend, had been discharged that day from Sick Kids. Then he made three other home visits.