Home Is the Sailor

by Patrick Taylor

  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’s 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 surgey 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—”

  “Why? Hernia? Amn’t I a man? If it should be called anything, it should be a hisnia, and it’s not nothing like that anyroad. It’s a groin abscess and I want it fixed, Doctor.” He shook his head. “You call sitting there and getting a fellah to cough is an examination? Jasus, a horse trader would look more carefully at a horse, so he would.”

  “Mister Ward, I really want to get a second opinion from a specialist at the Royal Victoria Hospital.” Two of O’Reilly’s friends from Trinity, Charlie Greer and Donald Cromie, were surgeons there.

  “Aye. Well. You can want. I’ve no time til be buggering about in Belfast, and them specialists cost a brave wheen of money, so they do. Why will you not do it here for me?”

  “I’m sorry,” said O’Reilly, realising that he was going to be sending away a dissatisfied customer. Better that than a dead one; although, oddly enough, if he acceded to the patient’s request and that gloomy outcome occurred he was more likely to be forgiven by the locals than if he turned the man down. Never mind. The patient’s health came first. “I wish you could under—”

  The man and the colour in his cheeks both rose. He pulled up his pants and began to close his fly.

  O’Reilly flinched.

  “I understand that you’re useless til me, Doctor.”

  “Lancing your hernia might kill you,” O’Reilly said.

  “Away off and feel your head.” He buckled his belt, grabbed his bowler, headed for and opened the door. “Hernia, my aunt Fanny Jane. If you won’t fix it, I’ll just thole it, so I will, but just you wait till I put out the word you never even examined me properly, never mind put me right.” Country patients had great faith in the powers of the examination—and of the X-ray. “I’m paying you nothing, neither. You don’t know your arse from your elbow.” He buckled his belt and slammed the door behind him as he left.

  O’Reilly fished out and lit his pipe. He needed a minute to think. He’d been consulted three tim
es and had only sent one customer away satisfied, and although Kathy Dunleavy was a nice young woman she’d hardly be rushing round telling the world how wonderful the newly returned doctor was. What he’d done for her Mary was routine. What would Bishop and Ward be saying and to whom? That neither had paid was not his real concern. The damage they might be doing to his reputation—he blew out a cloud of smoke—hardly bore thinking about.

  Setting his pipe in an ashtray he walked back to the waiting room. Empty. No patients. Patience, he told himself and smiled. The words had the same Latin root, patiens, which meant “waiting” or “suffering,” and both described what he was doing right now. He could only hope that by waiting a bit longer his worry, which in fairness could hardly be called suffering, would be over and his surgeries full. He brightened, remembering Kathy Dunleavy’s parting remark. Maybe before supper he’d pop into the Black Swan, or Mucky Duck as the locals called their pub.

  4

  And Everything in Its Place

  The tips of O’Reilly’s ears tingled after his short walk from Number One, past the maypole, and across the Main Street to its junction with Station Road, the corner site of the Black Swan Pub. In the icy, darkening evening, the snow that had stopped falling on Saturday had returned. The flakes were large and damp and barely lay on the pavement.

  He heard the sounds of laughter and chatter even before he pushed through the pub’s doors. Once inside he felt as if he’d walked into a wall of warmth coming from a blazing turf fire and a web of tobacco smoke from pipes and cigarettes. As he brushed flakes from and then unbuttoned his coat he waited for his eyes to become accustomed to the dim lighting.

  The single, narrow room had not changed since his last visit almost seven years ago. There was still sawdust on the plank floor, still the low black ceiling beams, and a few tables and occupied chairs in front of a long bar counter. Bottles of spirits on shelves behind the bar kept company with two barrels of the product of Mister Arthur Guinness and Sons, Saint James’s Gate, Dublin, lying on their sides. Each had a brass spigot for drawing off the stout hammered into its bung hole near the bottom of the lower rim. A spile to regulate the release of carbon dioxide had been driven into the middle of each barrel at the top of its upper circumference.

  O’Reilly’s ears were assailed by a loud hum of men’s conversation. Women were not permitted in public bars in Ulster, and the Duck boasted neither a snug nor a lounge bar where women could go—if escorted. Dogs, however, were allowed in, and O’Reilly noticed a border collie under one table, a lurcher—a collie greyhound cross much favoured by poachers for its intelligence and speed in pursuit of game—under another. Its owner had bright carrotty hair. Maybe, O’Reilly thought, one day he’d get himself a Labrador—but not until the practice was busier.

  The rising and falling tides of noise stopped as if a sluice gate had been closed, and he was aware of every eye being fixed on him. “A very good evening to this house,” he said, but he might as well have been talking to a room full of deaf men for all the response he got. He’d seen Western films where a stranger comes to the town saloon and is ignored. It was often the setup for a fight scene—in Westerns and in the slums of Dublin where ruggy-ups, bare-knuckle fights, were commonplace, but not in a quiet little place like Ballybucklebo.

  There was space at this end of the bar so he moved there, smiled at a big man in an army greatcoat and duncher—probably recently demobbed like O’Reilly—and took his place leaning on the bar top and putting one foot up on a brass rail beneath. He looked more closely at his companion. “You’re Declan Finnegan,” O’Reilly said. “I set a broken arm for you in ’39. You were going to join the Tank Regiment when I left here for the navy.”

  The general level of conversation had risen to its previous levels.

  “That’s right, Doctor O’Reilly.” Declan smiled. “And my arm mended rightly. You done a great job. And I was a tanker. I fought in Sicily and I drove a Cromwell tank in Normandy, so I did, but I was demobbed in late ’45 and come home, you know. I heard you were coming back. It’s good to have you here, sir, so it is. I wonder,” he hesitated, “I wonder if I could ask you a wee doctoring favour, sir?”

  O’Reilly hesitated. He generally refused such requests on social occasions and had no intention of letting his pub become an annex to his surgery. After all, he was on his own time here, but for just this once said, “Fire away.” He’d get an opportunity sooner or later to make his position on pub consultations clear.

  “What’ll it be, Doctor O’Reilly?” a voice said from behind the bar counter.

  O’Reilly turned to see the barman. Willie Dunleavy had packed on the beef since his soccer-playing days. He’d be about thirty. He wore a flowery waistcoat and his shirt sleeves were held up by satin-covered elastic garters.

  “I mind my da, God rest him, who used to own this place, saying you were fond of your pint when you worked here before the war.” He held out his hand. “Welcome back, sir, and thanks for seeing our wee Mary.”

  O’Reilly shook hands. “Thank you. I was sorry to hear about your father.”

  Willie shrugged. “Aye,” he said. “Thon cancer’s not nice, but . . . och . . .” He took a deep breath. “And will it be a pint, sir?”

  “Please.”

  “You’re on,” said Willie, went to the two barrels, and started to pour.

  O’Reilly turned back to Declan Finnegan. “You were going to ask a favour, Declan?”

  “I wonder, maybe someday soon, if I could bring the missus til see you? We think she’s pregnant.”

  “Of course, of course. Send her round about nine tomorrow.”

  “Fair enough.”

  “Fine.”

  Declan hesitated. “I’ll come too,” he said. “Melanie doesn’t speak much English yet. She’s learning, but—”

  “Melanie? She’s French?”

  Declan nodded. “Aye. I met her in 1944, near Mont Pinçon. She’d volunteered to help the army doctors. I’d been wounded, only a toty wee scratch, like. I was back on my feet in time to rejoin my squadron and fight at Falaise and go the whole way to the Rhine River, but I never forgot Melanie Devereux, so I didn’t. Her and me got married last May, after the war in Europe was over.”

  “Good for you both. More power to your wheels. And the French won’t be a problem. Moi, je parle un tres petit peu.”

  “Merveilleux,” Declan said. “Moi aussi.”

  “And that’s enough of the oul parley-voo from you, Declan Finnegan, so it is,” Willie said with a grin. “Here’s your pint, Doctor O’Reilly, sir, and like Kathy said, it’s on the house. A wee welcome home. I hope you’ll take a brave wheen more in here over the years.”

  “I’m beginning to think I will,” O’Reilly said, hoping this and his easy conversation with Declan were more small steps to his gradual reacceptance in the village and townland. He lifted his pint, said, “Sláinte,” and took a hefty pull. “Mother’s milk,” he said, grinned, and fished out his pipe.

  The Murray’s Erinmore Flake tobacco was going well when it was time for his second pint and the one he bought for Declan Finnegan.

  “I mind you was quare nor keen on the rugby football, sir,” Declan was saying. “You should have a wee word with my younger brother, Fergus. He plays for the Ballybucklebo Bonnaughts’ Junior Fifteen.”

  “So you’ve got the club going again?” Most athletic pursuits had been interrupted by the war.

  “Och aye. The marquis of Ballybucklebo’s their patron. He’s played for Ireland, you know.”

  O’Reilly felt a draught as someone opened the door, half-turned, and saw Bertie Bishop followed by Wowser Ward, of all people.

  O’Reilly ignored them and said to Declan, “I did know about his Lordship’s caps.” O’Reilly had three of his own for representing his country, but it would be boastful to say so. Joining the club would increase the circle of his acquaintances—and possible patients—and put him back in touch with a game he loved. “I will join, Declan. How’d
I get ahold of your brother?”

  “He’s no phone in his house. He’s a jockey. Rides for the marquis. I’ll tell him to come and see you, sir.”

  “Thank you.”

  O’Reilly glanced over. A table that he’d noticed upon arriving had been occupied by three obviously working-class men in dunchers and with mufflers wrapped round their necks, one man smoking a clay pipe. They now vacated their places in favour of the great Panjandrum and his friend. O’Reilly had a quick mental image of Mister Bertie Bishop saying, “I’m a very important man round here, so I am.”

  “’Scuse me.” A tall, narrow-faced patron pushed past O’Reilly to get to the bar and call an order. “Pint and a packet of crisps, please, Willie.”

  “Right, Archie.”

  O’Reilly had to think. Archie. Archie. Got it. “Hello, Mister Auchinleck,” he said. The man shared a surname with a famous British general of Ulster stock who’d taken over command of the British Army in the Middle East after Warspite had left for Bremerton.

  “Doctor O’Reilly. It’s yourself. I hardly noticed you there. It’s a bit dim in here. I heard you was coming back, so I did. Mrs. Kincaid’s been putting the word around. If me or the missus or our wee lad get sick we’ll come and see you, so we will.”

  Good for you, Kinky, O’Reilly thought. “The surgery’s open every morning at nine o’clock,” he said. He felt a tugging at his sleeve, turned, and saw Bishop. “Yes, Mister Bishop.”

  “I’ve not time for til come til your surgery. Bend you your head so I can whisper.”

  O’Reilly stooped to the shorter man, who said what he had to say.

  No. Bloody well no. Declan’s polite request had been one thing, this demand another entirely. This was a perfect opportunity to establish that unless someone was bleeding to death or having a heart attack, Doctor O’Reilly was off duty inside the Duck. “Certainly, Mister Bishop,” he bellowed in his quarterdeck voice, which could be heard above a howling Atlantic gale. He paused. The falling of a pin would have been as noisy as the eruption of Krakatoa, so silent had the Duck become. “Just slip off your trousers and climb up on the counter so I can examine you.” The falling of a single downy feather would probably have registered on the Richter scale. Silence hung until a clearly furious, puce-faced Bishop yelled, “My trousers? Here? Have you taken a fit of the headstaggers? Do you not know it’s a feckin’ pub!”