The Wily O'Reilly: Irish Country Stories (Irish Country Books)

by Taylor, Patrick

  I should tell you that about once a month, if we’d had an easy afternoon making house calls, Doctor O. would drop by to see how Maggie was getting on. The vitamin pills that he’d told her to swallow ten minutes before the start of the headaches two inches above the top of her head had cured that particular problem.

  She rarely needed medical attention. It was simply a mark of the man. He actually cared about his patients, although to have suggested such a thing to his face would have produced a rumble like Vesuvius on an off day and a pallid hue to his nose tip that would have made Greenland’s icy mountains look like ebony.

  We arrived at her cottage and left the car. O’Reilly knocked on the door. Maggie answered, smiled, and asked us in.

  “How are you, Maggie?” he inquired.

  “Grand, Doctor.”

  “And how’s Montgomery?”

  I knew from previous visits that he was referring to Maggie’s ginger tomcat. She’d named the animal “General Montgomery” in deference to Sir Bernard Law of the same name, victor of El Alamein, the man who Churchill described as being “In defeat—indefatigable; in victory—insufferable.”

  The pussy in question appeared from behind a sofa. He rubbed against O’Reilly’s leg. Doctor O. bent and tickled the animal’s head.

  “He’s pleased to see you, Doctor O’Reilly.”

  Maggie’s Montgomery looked as though he’d also taken part in the desert triumph of British arms and had been as badly used by the Afrika Korps as a Sherman tank after a debate with one of the Wehrmacht’s anti-tank 88s. His left ear was a fragment of cartilage and his right eye scarred and shut. Some contenders who’d had encounters with Joe Louis had similar miens.

  “He’s looking well, Maggie,” O’Reilly said.

  I confess I’ve never been able to find any particular enthusiasm for moggies, particularly—my finger ached—at that moment, but O’Reilly doted on them and his rambling old house was a regular Doctor Barnardo’s for waifs and strays of the feline persuasion.

  “I wanted to ask you about that,” O’Reilly said.

  “What, Doctor?”

  “I’ve a new kitten.”

  Indeed he had. A cross between a Siamese and a rabid tiger. If anything moved in the house, like an unsuspecting finger, the kitten would pounce. The damn animal had nailed me this morning and cost me so much blood I suspected I was suffering from anaemia.

  “It claws the furniture,” Doctor O’Reilly said.

  I felt somewhat resentful to be considered part of the furniture. (This was before the days when heads of committees were called “chairs.”) I also had a clear image of O’Reilly’s sofa leaking kapok stuffing stained with my gore.

  “Ah sure that’s no problem, Doctor.” Maggie smiled. “Montgomery had the same habit. Hang on.” She trotted off and returned carrying a strange device. “Get him one of these scratching posts.”

  It was a cylinder of wood, five inches in diameter, two feet tall, swathed in a strip of old carpet and mounted on a square plywood base.

  O’Reilly stared at the device. “That thing worked for Montgomery?”

  I looked around. General Montgomery cowered under the table, one paw over his tattered ear. He made a whining noise that clearly belied his warlike appellation. His good eye was fixed on the post.

  “Indeed it did, Doctor. The first time he clawed my chair I got this post, didn’t I, Montgomery?”

  Montgomery’s whining went up two octaves.

  “And you put it by the chair and the wee pussy clawed it instead of the chair?” O’Reilly was clearly impressed by the simplicity of the solution.

  Maggie chortled. “Not at all, Doctor.” She looked at the cat and waved the post in his direction. “I belted him on the head with it.”

  Montgomery fled. And my finger felt much better.

  APRIL 1998

  O’Reilly at the Helm

  Things that go bump in the daytime

  “Like the back of my hand,” O’Reilly remarked as he sat comfortably on the weather side of his sloop, tiller held loosely. “Been sailing these seas for years.”

  I was tempted to remark that Captain John Smith had made many crossings of the Atlantic before he had a close encounter of the lethal kind with a large lump of solidified water. His tiny navigational oversight did little for the hull of the RMS Titanic or for the reputation of the Belfast shipbuilders who’d constructed the ocean-going leviathan. I comforted myself with the thoughts that O’Reilly’s vessel was a tad smaller than the great liner and that icebergs were passing rare in Strangford Lough. Nevertheless I did offer him the chart.

  “Don’t be daft,” he said. “I don’t need that thing.”

  I stowed the results of years of painstaking depth sounding by the survey crews of Her Majesty’s cartographers and let myself be lulled by the day.

  I confess that as usual I’d agreed with reluctance to crew for the twentieth century’s answer to that old Irish seaman, Saint Brendan the Navigator. If you remember, Saint B. had nipped out for a day’s boating in a craft constructed of tarred cowhides, taken a wrong turn at St. Kilda, and but for fortuitously running into Newfoundland might have beaten Marco Polo to China by nipping round the back way.

  It did seem that my reluctance had been ill-founded. It was a perfect afternoon. The sun shone from an azure sky. A ten-knot breeze filled O’Reilly’s sails and pushed the boat along at a steady five knots. The multitude of islands that dotted the lough were like green jewels in a porcelain sea. God was in his heaven, all was right with the world, O’Reilly was at the helm and, as he’d recently remarked, he knew these seas like the back of his hand. I hoped.

  “Warm,” he said, inclining his head toward the companionway.

  A wink is as good as a nod to a visually challenged equine.

  “Beer?” I asked.

  “Um,” he said.

  “Aye aye, Skipper.” Nautical, I thought, very nautical. I rose and surveyed the lough. Open water for miles. Not a hazard to navigation in sight—except—I noticed a tower close on the lee bow. It was just visible round the corner of the headsail. I’d seen pictures of the seventh wonder of the ancient world, Ptolemy’s lighthouse at Alexandria. The local construction in question seemed to be of roughly similar dimensions. It stood out in splendid isolation miles from any other indication of shallows. “Fingal, there seems to be a marker ahead.”

  “’Course there bloody well is. It’s the light on Danger Reef.”

  “Sorry.” I’d forgotten that he knew these waters like the dorsal surface of his paw.

  “It’s warm!” he growled.

  I knew that when O’Reilly had his mind set on liquid refreshment, those who kept him from his heart’s desire ashore could become the recipients of a tongue-lashing. Afloat, keelhauling would probably be the order of the day. The lighthouse seemed to be drawing nearer. It cast a long dark shadow over the surface. Still, he knew these waters … but you already know that.

  I slipped below, opened the icebox, and was deafened by a crash like the opening salvo at the away game on the Somme in 1916. I was still travelling at five knots. Apparently the boat wasn’t.

  After I’d disentangled myself from the forward berth and looked with some amazement at the bruise that was rapidly growing on my left shin, I noticed that our gentle heel to starboard had become alarmingly acute. For reasons that I cannot quite explain, a line or two from a poem I’d had to learn at school came into my head:

  The vessel strikes with a shivering shock.

  Oh, heavens, ’tis the Inchcape rock.

  I struggled up the companionway. O’Reilly must have learned the same ode, which, as I recollect, continued:

  Sir Ralph the Rover tore his hair

  And cursed himself in his despair.

  Doctor O. was giving a pretty fair Sir Ralph impersonation: “#**@**#ing Danger Reef.”

  We were hard aground, and O’Reilly’s pride, like my shin, was badly bruised. I thought it might be impolitic to inquire whether
some local magnetic anomaly had jinxed his retro-manual aid to navigation, and instead sought for words of comfort. Off our bow the lighthouse towered.

  “I see,” I ventured. “The lighthouse blocked your view of the shoals.”

  Concern for younger and more sensitive readers prohibits me from printing his reply.

  MAY 1998

  O’Reilly Strikes Back

  It was worth the wait

  I was back home in the North of Ireland a few summers ago, and I paid a visit to my old mentor, Doctor Fingal Flahertie O’Reilly. I rang the brass front-door bell of his home-cum-surgery. You’ll remember that the very first time I’d depressed that particular bell push the door had flown open and a giant of a man had hurled a small supplicant into a rosebush and roared, “Next time you want me to look at your ankle, wash your bloody feet.”

  This time I reflexively stepped back. I had no wish to be thumped by a human projectile. You may think I was overreacting. Lightning, it’s said, never strikes twice. I wasn’t worried about lightning. Those of you who study proverbs, saws, adages, and assorted folk wisdom won’t have encountered the gem “O’Reilly never strikes twice.” That’s because he does. Bear with me and I’ll explain.

  The door opened.

  “Good God,” he said. “You?”

  “Me,” I replied. I wasn’t going to claim to be the benevolent deity.

  “Good God.”

  “I’m not exactly.”

  “You’re not exactly what?”

  “God.”

  “Taylor, I was well aware of what you were not when you worked with me.” He looked me up and down with a gaze as piercing as an oversensitive metal detector in a Canadian airport. “I see no reason to alter that opinion.”

  Nor had O’Reilly changed. Tweed sports jacket that fitted his massive frame only where it touched, pipe ashes on his badly knotted tie, florid cheeks, and, heavens be praised, not a trace of pallor in the tip of his boxer’s bent proboscis.

  “Don’t stand there with both legs the same length,” he rumbled. “Come in.” He grasped my hand and exerted the kind of pressure that will ultimately cause the San Andreas Fault to let go. I felt a personal tectonic shift of metacarpals and comforted myself with the thought that now my right hand was two inches wide and more than a foot long there could be no doubt that my future as a gynaecologist was assured.

  “How are you, Fingal?”

  He grunted and made his way into the dining room.

  I followed.

  “What time is it?” he asked.

  “Eleven.”

  “Not in Moscow.”

  “Moscow?”

  “Moscow.”

  Perhaps I’d misjudged him. Perhaps he had changed. Perhaps he was starting to dote.

  “Why Moscow, Fingal?”

  “Because, you idiot, I never take a drop until the sun’s over the yardarm.”

  “I didn’t know Moscow had yardarms.”

  By the look in his eyes, if chez O’Reilly had been so equipped I’d have been dangling from it. “It hasn’t but it’s after noon there. No reason why we shouldn’t have a tot here. Sherry?” He handed me a cut-glass version of a fire bucket. “Better,” he said, demolishing half his own whiskey in one swallow and lowering his frame onto a chair. “Have a pew.”

  I obeyed.

  “Now,” he said. “Tell me what you’ve been up to.”

  I was happy to ramble on about my life in what I thought of as Canada and he kept dismissing as “the colonies.” We must have chatted for twenty minutes before I was able to inquire about his doings. For the first time in all the years I’d known O’Reilly I saw a genuine sadness in his eyes.

  He sighed. “I’m retired. Have been for two years.”

  To think of medicine without O’Reilly was difficult. The thought of O’Reilly without his practising medicine verged on the incomprehensible.

  “Good God,” I said.

  “Not exactly.”

  “Not exactly what?”

  “God,” he said, and chuckled.

  He’d not lost his sense of humour. I found myself laughing with him.

  “So what are you up to?”

  He leaned back in his chair, cocked his head on one side, and said, “I’m a student.”

  “Good God!”

  “Don’t start.”

  “Sorry. It just slipped out. What are you studying?” I’d forgotten that he was a self-taught classical scholar.

  There was a pride in his voice when he said, “I’m finishing my second year. Doing a BA in classical literature.”

  I was impressed. “I don’t suppose there are many retired doctors in your faculty?”

  O’Reilly guffawed. “You’re wrong. Remember Sir Gervaise Grant?”

  I had to delve back, but it came to me. Sir Gervaise had, years ago, called O’Reilly “an underqualified country quack.” With the connivance of the dean, an old rugby-playing friend, O’Reilly had spoiled the senior gynaecologist’s week by arranging for him to receive a pathology report in which appeared the line, “The specimen of ureter submitted showed no sign of abnormality.”

  “I do indeed. I had a half-notion you weren’t too fond of Sir Gervaise.”

  “Stuck-up bugger. I got him with the path report.” O’Reilly gazed happily into the middle distance. “He’s retired and reading classics too. In his first year.”

  “Good … gracious.”

  “Mmm,” said O’Reilly, sipping at his Jameson’s. “I hadn’t forgotten what he called me but I don’t have to worry about that now.”

  “Because you’re both retired?”

  O’Reilly shook his head and said with deep sincerity, “You remember what a class-conscious snob he was?”

  I nodded.

  “I’ve put him in his box.”

  “How?”

  “He came up to me all sweetness and light on the first day of term this year. ‘Splendid to see you, O’Reilly,’ says he. I gave him a cold look. ‘Go away,’ says I. ‘Second-year students never—never—never speak to mere freshmen.’”

  Lightning may only strike twice. In top form O’Reilly could strike and go on striking with all the venom of a rattlesnake with grand mal.

  “Good God,” I said.

  “No,” said O’Reilly, “but I outrank Sir Gervaise.”

  JUNE 1998

  A Word to the Wise

  O’Reilly waits for a bus

  You may remember that Doctor Fingal Flahertie O’Reilly’s method of practising medicine was a trifle unorthodox. But I’m indulging in understatement. Doctor O’Reilly’s approach to life, the world, and the entire cosmos was unorthodox—and there was nothing trifling about him. He didn’t suffer fools gladly and detested being bested in any verbal joust. He rarely was.

  When affronted by a lesser mortal, and that definition as far as he was concerned encompassed the rest of the human race, he could use his words with the force of one of King Arthur’s boiler-plate-encased knights. I’m sure you’ve seen them on the cinema screen, happily delivering caresses with a spiked cannonball on a chain to the helmeted dome of an opponent.

  One of O’Reilly’s ripostes was less of a rapier thrust than the spoken equivalent of being hit with a mace and trampled by a war-horse simultaneously. The fundamental difference between Good King A.’s round-table mob and O’Reilly was that the former lived by a chivalrous code of honour while O’Reilly belonged to the head-butt, knee-him-in-the-groin, pull-his-lungs-out-through-his-nose school of combat.

  He had to. The citizens of Northern Ireland, and particularly the denizens of Belfast, are no mean contestants when it comes to a bit of the old jocular thrust and parry. The “Good Book” says, “The gentle word turneth away the blow.” Judging by the number of victims of grievous bodily harm I used to encounter in the ER on Saturday nights after chucking-out time from the pubs, either the Belfast men hadn’t appreciated the scriptures or were a bit short in the “gentle word” department.

  I ask that you t
ry to recall this information while I illustrate how O’Reilly could with one carefully chosen sentence demolish a self-styled humorist who tried to raise a giggle at O’Reilly’s expense.

  For reasons that are lost to me I found myself in the Belfast city centre in the company of O’Reilly. We seemed to have walked for miles. He was slightly in the lead and for that I was grateful. I’m small and dislike being jostled by passersby. O’Reilly’s progress, in a beeline, parted the throng with all the efficiency of Moses at the Red Sea. Of course both the well-known old Israelite and O’Reilly were highly motivated. Moses had Pharaoh’s seventh cavalry hot on his heels. O’Reilly wanted a drink.

  “Get a move on, Taylor.”

  I hurried to keep up.

  “Not far now.” O’Reilly stopped at a bus stop. A queue of would-be passengers stood waiting to be granted admission to the red omnibus parked at the curb. “We’ll take the bus back to where I left the car.”

  I had mixed feelings. Relief that we wouldn’t have to walk back mixed with some minor concerns—the kind of vague worries experienced by the mayor of Hiroshima when he heard the Enola Gay was on its way—about being driven home by a somewhat befuddled O’Reilly.

  “Now?” I said, hope springing eternal that he might forgo his libation.

  “No, you idiot. After we’ve had a tot.”

  “Oh,” I said, bowing to the inevitable. “When does the bus go?”

  “No idea. I’ll ask.” With that he strode to the head of the queue. Line jumping was frowned upon in Belfast. O’Reilly ignored the insubordinate chorus of muttering that arose from the line jumpees, who began to form a scrum around the jumper.

  “My good man,” he roared at the blue-uniformed bus conductor, “how long is the next bus?”

  O’Reilly’s syntax left a certain amount to be desired. I knew he wished to inquire, “How long will it be until the departure of the next public-transport vehicle?”

  So, clearly, did the bus conductor, but he’d been given an opportunity that none of his ilk could ignore: an unpopular line jumper, a potentially appreciative crowd, and an ambiguous question. He grasped the metal pole that ran from the floor to the ceiling of the bus’s rear platform, swung slightly outward, grinned, looked out over the waiting mob, and said, scorn dripping from his lips like oil from a cracked crankcase, “Fifty-two feet. Same as this one.”