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

by Taylor, Patrick

  * * *

  “Do you know,” said Fingal, “I don’t think this place’s changed one bit.” He was striding beside his brother up the face of a low, rounded hill. Gorse bushes grew, spiny green and dotted with chrome-yellow flowers. Their almond scent was carried on the salty air. He sniffed. There was a more pungent aroma too. “You got a badger round here, Lars?”

  Lars pointed to a burrow under a bank where brown bracken drooped. “Old Brock has his set in there. He’ll be sleeping now. Leave it, Barney. Don’t want him getting into a fight with the beast.”

  The dog, who had made a beeline for the burrow, now turned aside and began investigating the whins. Two rabbits bolted, ears back, scuts white and bobbing. Barney had been trained to know he was not allowed to chase flushed game. He sat abruptly and watched them go.

  Overhead, small jackdaws and larger rooks that had flocked together cawed and flapped their way inland. A constant twittering was coming from a leafless blackthorn hedge and Fingal saw a flock of brightly coloured goldfinches take wing and whirl away across the field.

  He strode alongside his brother across the little fields. When Lars asked a question, Fingal was, like most ex-service men, reticent about the details of his war. He was warmed by Lars’s concern for Fingal’s loss of Deirdre. Lars himself, bachelor solicitor and unable to volunteer because of flat feet, had lived out his war quietly here, keeping an eye on Ma, who’d been terribly busy raising money for the Spitfire Fund and working for a charity for unmarried mothers. No. Lars hadn’t married. His disappointment over a judge’s daughter in Dublin seemed to have put him off the fair sex for life, yet he appeared content to Fingal. Something to think about, because Fingal himself had no intention of becoming romantically involved. Certainly not for a while yet.

  He followed Lars and Barney over a stile and onto the shore. A little past the tide’s edge a heron, blue-grey, gangly legged, and with a pigtail of feathers hanging down behind, darted its head into the water and pulled it back, a silver fish wriggling in the bird’s long beak. Across the narrow waters a vee of small geese with grey bellies, narrow white collars, and black heads flew up the lough.

  “Atlantic brent geese,” Lars said. “All the way from Greenland and Spitzbergen to winter here. Probably heading up to the Quoile River.”

  “You always did know your birds, Lars,” Fingal said.

  “To shoot them. But you know, Finn, I’m beginning to think they need our protection. I haven’t been out more than a couple of times this season. I’m thinking of joining the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds.”

  “Not until after next season, please,” Fingal said. “You’d better be ready to go out once or twice with me. Unless you count my ship chucking everything she had from fifteen-inch shells to 0.5-inch machine-gun bullets at the enemy, I’ve not had a shot,” he laughed, “for nearly seven years. I’d enjoy a day or two out with you for old times’ sake, and,” he said more softly, “it would make a nice change if no one’s shooting back.”

  “I suppose it was pretty grim,” Lars said.

  Fingal took a deep breath. “It had its moments—but it’s over, and I’m home, and I’m home to stay.”

  “I’d certainly say you’re glad to be back,” Lars said, picking up a stick and throwing it for Barney to retrieve.

  “I am that.” Fingal frowned. “And happy to be.”

  “Happy to be back, yes, but I’d say you don’t sound completely happy, Finn. What’s up?”

  Fingal shook his head and waited for Lars to take the stick and throw it again. “Thank you for handling the conveyance of old Doctor Flanagan’s practice, Lars.”

  “It was my pleasure, Finn.”

  “I’m excited about the practice…” He hesitated then said, “But I’m a bit worried. I haven’t started work yet, but I just hope the old boy’s patients come back. I’ll see on Monday morning if anyone shows up.”

  “I suppose all folks starting a small business have the same worry. I know I did. We put our shingle up and pray they come.” He clapped Fingal on the shoulder. “You’ll be fine, Finn. I know you will because you’re an excellent doctor, but don’t be surprised if it’s slow at the beginning.”

  “Thanks.” Fingal warmed inside to his brother’s touch and reassurance, but outside the snow Ma had warned them about had started and the air was as cold as a witch’s tit. And tucked in a corner of his inner glow was a chilly worry that Lars might be wrong and the practice wouldn’t grow. Forget it for today, he told himself. “It’s getting bloody bitter,” Fingal said. “Come on, big brother, call Barney in and we’ll take Ma’s advice and head for the Arms—but I’m buying you a hot half-un. It’s too bloody cold for a pint.”

  3

  Is of His Own Opinion Still

  O’Reilly looked at his watch. Ten o’clock on Monday morning and still no patients. He sat in the swivel chair in the surgery, rolling the top of his father’s old desk up and down. It had been delivered on Saturday afternoon. Kinky, as he’d requested, had supervised the moving men in their placing of his few pieces of furniture and leaving packing cases of books in the upstairs lounge.

  O’Reilly had spent Sunday afternoon arranging his volumes on the shelves there, wondering how he’d managed to accumulate so many, but then reading was amongst his foremost pleasures. He’d stood for minutes enjoying the sweeping views past the lopsided steeple of the Presbyterian church with its churchyard full of ancient tombstones and sombre snow-dusted yew trees. Looking farther over the roofs of the village to where gulls wheeled and swooped over the sand dunes, his gaze had taken in the calm, washed-out blue of Belfast Lough and in the dim distance the soft darker blue hills of Antrim rolling down to Carrickfergus and its brooding Norman castle. Only a single coalboat shoved her way steadily to the Central Coal Pier in Bangor Harbour, reminding him of a line in John Masefield’s poem “Cargoes”: “Dirty British coaster with a salt-streaked smoke stack.” No yachts yet, but in the summer he knew the sailors would be out in force.

  Later he’d asked Kinky to give him a hand hanging a photograph on the landing wall outside the lounge.

  “And that does be your big ship, sir?” she’d asked when they’d finished.

  “That’s her,” he said. “HMS Warspite. ‘The Grand Old Lady.’” He adjusted the frame to be sure the picture was hanging straight. “The photo was taken when she was anchored in Grand Harbour, Valetta, in Malta.”

  Kinky leant forward to see better. “She does look a very powerful vessel, so.”

  “She was, Kinky, she and her four sister Queen Elizabeth class of battleships.” He pointed to the eight fifteen-inch rifles, two each in X and Y turrets aft and two each in A and B turrets for’ard. “You see those big guns above the foredeck?”

  “I do.”

  “The dispensary and sick bay where the medical staff worked were two decks below the most for’ard gun barrels. It was like the clap of doom when they were fired over our heads. Their shells weighed 1,950 pounds each, that’s not far off one ton, and she could hurl them for fourteen miles.”

  “From here to Millisle down the Ards Peninsula, bye,” Kinky said, and took her duster to the frame. “I can believe those guns would have made ferocious bangs, so. I’ve seen newsreel of battleships firing at France on D-Day,” she looked him in the eye, “but the war does be over and you can settle down now and enjoy the nice peace and quiet of Ballybucklebo, so.”

  Peace and quiet? True enough, but things were a bit too quiet this morning. It wasn’t that he wanted people to be sick, but he needed to work. O’Reilly drummed his fingers on the desktop.

  That old piece held memories for O’Reilly of a much younger Fingal who all his life had wanted to study medicine. Father had been sitting at this desk in his study when Fingal had defied him back in ’27, telling him, “I’m not doing nuclear physics.” That stubbornness had led him into the merchant marine and the Royal Naval Reserve before he’d finally gone to Trinity College in Dublin to fulfil his dream. An
d that stint in the reserve had led to his call-up when war had broken out, a war that, as Kinky had remarked, was now over. And the Lord be praised. But now what he needed were patients in his surgery so he could get back to the kind of doctoring he loved.

  He rose and for the umpteenth time walked back to the room that had originally been the scullery, but which Doctor Flanagan had used as his waiting room. Not for the first time O’Reilly scowled at the dismal, shiny, green-painted walls. He’d already decided to paper them with something more cheerful. Roses, he thought, roses would do very well.

  The place was as deserted as a Protestant church on a weekday. He bent and lifted a tattered Reader’s Digest from a heap of earlier editions, several Women’s Own magazines, and some issues of a kiddies’ comic book, The Dandy Comic. He smiled at the drawings of Korky the Cat on their front pages. As he was scanning the index of the Digest, the outside door opened and a young woman came in holding the hand of a little girl clutching a well-worn teddy bear. His first real patients. He didn’t count Bertie Bishop. “Good morning,” a smiling O’Reilly said. “I’m Doctor O’Reilly.”

  “I’m Kathy Dunleavy, Willie Dunleavy’s wife.”

  “Are you related to Charles Dunleavy who owns the Black Swan?”

  “He was my da-in-law. He’s gone three years, God rest him. I married his son Willie five years back. He runs the pub now, so he does.”

  “Good Lord, the last time I saw your husband he was a bachelor kicking a ball around with his mates and looking for divilment.” O’Reilly shook his head. “Anyway, what can I do for you?”

  “I’m worried about wee Mary here.”

  “Let’s see what we can do about that.” O’Reilly led Mrs. Dunleavy and the child to the surgery and sat in his chair while she took one of the wooden ones and lifted Mary onto her lap.

  “So, what seems to be the trouble with Mary?”

  “The poor wee button’s off her feed for the last couple of days, says she can’t swallow right, and I think she’s got a fever.”

  “Mmmh,” said O’Reilly, already formulating his possible diagnoses. “Anything else?”

  “No, sir.”

  “No convulsions, vomiting, diarrhoea? No pains anywhere? No earache? No sore throat?”

  “No, sir.”

  At this time of the year he was probably dealing with acute tonsillitis, which could be a recurrent disease. “Has she ever had anything like this before?”

  Mrs. Dunleavy shook her head.

  He went and hunkered down in front of the girl so his eyes were at the same level as hers. “Hello, Mary.”

  She pulled the teddy bear closer and looked at him from big blue eyes, which he noticed were dull.

  “Cat got your tongue?” He smiled and said to the bear, “And how old is your mistress?”

  “He can’t talk, thilly,” she said. “I’m four.”

  “Are you now?” said O’Reilly. “You are a big girl.”

  That produced a little smile.

  “Can I put my hand on your neck, please?”

  She glanced at her mother, who nodded. “Yeth.”

  O’Reilly quickly examined her neck. He noted a few enlarged lymph nodes and her skin was warm. It was always tricky taking wee ones’ temperatures so he’d settle for that inexact observation. The findings so far were in keeping with his thoughts. A couple more observations would confirm them. “Could you open wide and stick out your tongue?”

  “Yeth.” She did.

  O’Reilly produced a pencil torch and shone it into her mouth. Small children always gagged if you tried to use a tongue depressor and he was confident he’d be able to find what he was looking for without one. “Say ‘aaah.’”

  He saw at once that the very back of the oral cavity, the fauces, were red and inflamed and that both tonsils were scarlet and swollen. There was no evidence of membrane formation so he could stop worrying about diphtheria or a rare condition called Vincent’s angina, also known as trench mouth. “Thank you, Mary,” he said. “You can close your mouth.”

  She did.

  He patted the teddy on the head and returned to his chair.

  “You’ve got tonsillitis, Mary,” he said, but directed his remarks to her mother. “We’ll have you better in three or four days.”

  “What do we treat it with, Doctor?” Mrs. Dunleavy asked. “My granny in Coalisland in County Tyrone uses a stocking filled with hot salt wrapped round the neck.”

  “Some folks here in County Down use hot potatoes instead of salt,” O’Reilly said, “but do you think you could teach Mary to gargle?”

  “Aye, certainly.”

  “Good, because I want you to get some aspirin. You’ll not need a scrip. Break a tablet in half and crush one half up in warm water and have her gargle and then swallow the gargle. Do that every eight hours. Keep her in bed until I’ve seen her again and give her lots to drink. That should see her right in no time. If you are worried send for me.” It was a great comfort to know that if simple measures failed he could always fall back on sulphas. Although penicillin had been available to the armed forces, it was not yet in use in civilian practice. The few doses he’d had on Warspite late in the war, like all the doses that had been stockpiled before D-Day, had all been produced in America from fungus taken from a mouldy canteloupe from Peoria, Illinois. “I’ll pop in and see her in a day or two.” And again in three weeks because there was always the risk of rheumatic fever or kidney disease developing if the infecting organism was a haemolytic streptococcus, but he’d not mention that.

  “Thank you very much, sir. Say thank you, Mary.”

  “Fank oo.”

  As Kinky had instructed, he made a quick note in the ledger so she could send out the bill. Mary rose. “And Willy says the next time you’re in the Duck the first pint’s on him, so it is.”

  “I’ll look forward to that.” He followed them from the surgery and showed them out through the front door. The snow of Saturday had vanished. Whistling a few bars of Vaughn Monroe’s latest hit, “Let It Snow,” he walked back to the waiting room. His smile widened when he saw a middle-aged man wearing a bowler hat sitting on one of the chairs. “I’m Doctor O’Reilly,” he said, “will you come with me?”

  By the time they’d reached the surgery, the man, who was now setting his bowler hat on the second patient’s chair, had aleady told O’Reilly his name. “I was given Hubert, but everybody calls me ‘Wowser,’ so they do. Wowser Ward. I’m connected with the Ward family, a bunch of highheejins. Lived in Bangor Castle. They gave thirty-seven acres to Bangor for a park, Ward Park, and one of their daughters married Lord Clanmorris from the west of Ireland in 1878, so she did. Me? I’m forty-eight, I’m the foreman for Bishop’s Builders, and I was a patient of Doctor Flanagan. I never seen you before the war because I thought you was too young, you know.” He sighed. “But now? I heard you’d given Mister Bishop lip last Friday, but beggars can’t be choosers, so they can’t.”

  How flattering, O’Reilly thought, and grinned. He’d take no offence. A patient was a patient. After a short rummage in the desk drawer, he found the man’s old record card. “And you live on Station Road. Number 12.”

  “Bingo,” he said, “and if you look at my card you’ll see what ailed me then and what ails me again, but worser now, you know. That’s why I’ve come. I want it fixed the day. Right now if you can, sir. The bloody thing aches and aches all day unless I’m lying down.” He unbuckled his belt.

  O’Reilly put on his half-moons and read, Tuesday, 11/Aug/42. Cold right groin abscess unchanged. Advised bed rest. May need lancing. He whipped off his spectacles, whistled, and felt the hackles of his neck rising. Back in 1939, Doctor Flanagan had been puzzled by a rare local condition he called a cold groin abscess. Two of the cases he’d lanced in his surgery he explained to O’Reilly had either, “Wind or shite in them and both patients died. It was most puzzling.”

  Not to the then-young O’Reilly. His senior colleague had been incising ruptures—inguinal
hernias. No wonder he’d released bowel contents. Often such bulgings of the peritoneum through a weakness in the lower abdominal wall did contain small bowel. And after Doctor Flanagan’s ham-fisted efforts, two of his victims must have succumbed to peritonitis following contamination.

  “So you think you’ve a groin abscess?” O’Reilly said.

  “Think? I’m bloody well sure. Doctor Flanagan knew his stuff, so he did.” Wowser Ward was unbuttoning his fly.

  The old doctor had certainly been convinced of his own infallability and had managed to persuade his patients of the same. Such was often the case with that generation of physicians. O’Reilly’s attempt in ’39 to suggest to Doctor Flanagan that these were hernias and not abscesses had been met with scorn and anger. And back then, death after surgery was, if not accepted, at least understood by the laity.

  Now, with no real local reputation, O’Reilly was going to have to try to contradict the late and omniscient Doctor Flanagan for the sake of the patient. “All right, Mister Ward. Stand up and lower your pants.”

  The man did.

  Even from where he sat O’Reilly could see a bulging in the fold between the belly and thigh on the right. “Cough,” he said.

  “Cough? It’s my groin, not my chest’s the trouble.”

  “Please?”

  The man did, and O’Reilly had no difficulty observing a visible impulse under the skin. A hernia, no doubt, and one that should be repaired surgically. A third-year student could have made the diagnosis without any further examination. Its exact nature would need to be delineated by a surgeon but it was beyond the powers of a GP to fix. O’Reilly coughed and said, “I think I must tell you, Mister Ward, I believe medicine has moved on since Doctor Flanagan’s day.”

  “How?” There was acid in the one word.

  This was going to take diplomacy and tact, but if the Ard Rí himself—the High King of all Ireland—appeared and thought he could order O’Reilly to incise an inguinal hernia here in the surgery, his Royal Highness would have another thought coming. “Mister Ward, I believe that what you have is called a hernia and—”