An Irish Country Love Story

by Patrick Taylor

  “Not until Doctor Millar gives me the go-ahead to drive.”

  “And that could take a couple of months.”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “I’d not mind,” Barry said. “Now that Doctor Fitzpatrick’s joined the rota, it’ll still only be one in three. Although my trip—”

  “You’ll still get your trip to Marseille, Barry. I’m sure Ronald and I can cope for a while.” O’Reilly saw the look of relief on the young man’s face. “I suggest, Nonie, that you continue to run your well-women clinics and take some extra surgeries. Barry and I will handle emergencies and home visits. All right with you, Barry?”

  “Fine by me, although that’s easy for me to say seeing as I’ll be away for a week,” Barry said.

  O’Reilly thought he saw Nonie’s eyes glisten. She sniffed and said, “I believe you are both being very generous.”

  “Rubbish,” said O’Reilly. “You’re ill. It could be Barry or me and we’d have to work out a way to carry on.”

  “I’m still very grateful,” she said, “and I’ll have to ask your indulgence on something else too.”

  “Oh?” said O’Reilly.

  “I’ve to stop smoking. I may be a bit tetchy for a few days. It’s killing me.”

  “Good for you,” Barry said. “You’ll be all the better for it in the long run.”

  “You two are wonderful,” she said.

  O’Reilly had to laugh. Before he himself could harrumph, Barry had beaten him to it. “Right,” he said. “I’ll have a word with Fitzpatrick and we’ll see how we get on.” He looked at his watch. “All this blethering won’t get the baby a new coat today. Nonie, upstairs. If we get an emergency while Barry’s making home visits, you can take over the surgery and I’ll see to the case.”

  “Thank you both,” she said. “I’ll do that and while I am upstairs…” She smiled, and it was a wicked little smile. “I’ll try not to fall asleep.”

  * * *

  “So, Julie, everything seems pretty normal. Blood pressure’s up a tad, but nothing to worry about.” It was no worse, according to Barry’s reading in the antenatal record. “Your blood work has all come back and is satisfactory. Keep on taking the iron and folic acid, drink lots of milk, plenty of fresh vegetables. Hard this time of year, I know. But do your best.”

  “Yes, sir.” Julie adjusted the waist of her tweed skirt and slipped down off the examining couch. “I-I felt the wee one move last week,” she said, smoothing down the fabric. “I never felt Tori until I was five months gone. Is that normal?”

  “Twenty weeks is the usual for first pregnancies, but women who have been pregnant before can feel what we call ‘quickening’ any time after sixteen weeks. You’re eighteen weeks now, so it’s what we would have expected.”

  “Great,” she said. “Donal’s been going round like a bee on a hot brick getting a new crib in Tori’s room ready for this one. Do you know Tori’s one year and seven months now? Gets intil everything. Wants for til do everything herself. If I hear ‘I do it’ once more…” She shook her head and laughed. “She’ll be all grown up before we know it.”

  “Enjoy her,” O’Reilly said, feeling a pang for his never-born child who’d died in 1941 and would have been twenty-six now. A year younger than Barry. At least now, since Christmas when he’d finally laid that ghost, he was comfortable acknowledging his loss.

  “He’s hung one of them mobiles over the new crib,” Julie said. “All soccer players.” She slipped into her raincoat and used her right hand to flick her long blond hair in a shining cascade over the coat’s collar. She smiled. “He’s bound and determined to believe that I’m having a wee boy.”

  “You might be, but we’ll have to wait and see.”

  “Fair enough, sir.” She picked up her shopping basket from where she’d left it on a chair and said, “I’ll be trotting on. I’ve til nip off til the butcher’s. Get some nice lamb’s liver and rashers for Donal’s tea.”

  She buttoned her coat. “Come back in a month?”

  “That’s right, and you know to get hold of one of us if you’re worried about anything.” He walked her to the door. “Off you go, Julie.”

  She went out the front door and he walked back to the waiting room, pausing only to glance at the shut door to the dining room before heading on. Tonight, February the sixth, at seven o’clock, the borough council would be meeting to discuss the fate of Number One Main Street and, by God, he and Kitty would be there.

  O’Reilly stuck his head round the waiting room door, as ever admiring the mural of floribunda roses that Donal Donnelly had painted. Only one patient was left, an older man wearing a duncher, Dexter raincoat, collarless shirt, moleskin trousers, and scuffed boots. He looked up when O’Reilly entered. Even from the doorway, O’Reilly could hear the man’s chest wheezing. It was that time of year when the cold and damp exacerbated chest conditions.

  The man coughed and said in a hoarse voice, “How’s about ye, Doc?”

  “I think, Willie John Andrews,” O’Reilly said, “the question should be how are you?”

  “Not so hot, sir.” He wheezed. “I doubt but I have a wee touch of the brownkitees.”

  O’Reilly smiled. “Just listening to you I’d be inclined to agree. There’s a lot of bronchitis about right now. Come on to the surgery. I need to take a look at you.”

  As they walked along the hall together, O’Reilly asked, “Still working at Mackie’s Foundry?”

  “Aye. Man and boy forty-nine years. Pay’s good, but it’s a desperate smoky place. There’s a brave wheen of the lads with the chronic brownkitees and a thing the doctors at the Royal call, em … Och, bollix, I’ve forgot.”

  “Emphysema?”

  “That’s the fellah. Anyroad, hospital’s just down the road from Mackie’s, and if our folks is sick they go til casualty there when they come off shift.” They paused at the surgery door. “My lungs’s been grand until now,” Willie John Andrews said. “I never smoked a fag in my puff and I was playing Gaelic football until you mind I broke my left arm five years ago?”

  “I remember it very well,” O’Reilly said. “Wasn’t I at the clubhouse at a meeting when you did it, and didn’t I splint it for you before you went to hospital to get it set?” He laughed. “You were fit to be tied. Swore once you were better, you’d give the Galwayman who broke it, and I quote, ‘A bloody good dig in the gub.’”

  He ushered Willie John into the surgery.

  “Didn’t get the chance,” he said. “Seemed like a good time to be giving it up. Not gettin’ any younger, Doc.” Willie John Andrews coughed, a wet, hacking noise.

  “I hear you. Now, Willie,” O’Reilly said, “let me give you a hand.” He helped the man take off his raincoat and clamber up on the examining couch. “I haven’t seen you for a while. Not since you had to have your appendix out last year.” And that, apart from the usual childhood diseases, was the extent of the man’s previous medical history. “So, tell me about this chest of yours.”

  “I took a wee head cold last week, and now I’ve a terrible hirstle in my thrapple. I was up half the night hacking and bringing up phlegm and it’s dead sore behind my breastbone, so it is.”

  O’Reilly smiled at how expressions that had originated in Scotland were firmly entrenched in Ulsterspeak. And wasn’t “hirstle” practically onomatopoeic for the wheezing the man made as he breathed? O’Reilly noted that his skin was hot and sweaty, but not burning up. His lips were pink, not the blue associated with cyanosis. His pulse and respiratory rates were both rapid, but not galloping. Although he was having some difficulty breathing, his nostrils did not flare nor did the great strap muscles in his neck stand out. “Hoist up your shirt.”

  Willie John complied. His skin was flushed and his chest moving rapidly in and out but there was no in-drawing of the muscles between the ribs. All the negative findings suggested that he was unlikely to have pneumonia.

  O’Reilly laid the inner edge of his palm on Willie John’s back.
“Say ‘ninety-nine.’”

  “Why ninety-nine, Doc? Why not seventy-four or a hundred and eight?”

  “And you went to which medical school? I’m the bleeding doctor. Now, say ‘ninety-nine.’”

  “Sorry, Doc. Ninety-nine.”

  O’Reilly felt a vibration, tactile fremitus, an indication of fluid in the airways. He laid his left hand flat on the lower chest at the back and, using the first two fingers of his right hand, percussed. The sound was resonant, so there was no fluid in or consolidation of the lung bases. “Take as deep a breath as you can, please.” O’Reilly listened with his stethoscope. There were rhonchi, coarse rattling sounds, all over the chest. More evidence of fluid in the airways. He removed the earpieces. “You hardly needed me, Willie John. You were spot on. You have got acute bronchitis. How did you come here?”

  “On my bike.”

  “Can you get home on it?” If not, O’Reilly would load man and bike into the Rover.

  “Aye. If I take her easy. It’s a grand day out there.”

  “Good,” said O’Reilly, “because I want you home in bed. You’ll need to go to the chemist’s first. Get your shirt tucked in. I’ll write you a scrip.” Hospital beds were scarce at this time of the year and while there was always a risk that acute bronchitis could be complicated by pneumonia, it was expected of conscientious GPs to look after as many people at home as possible. He sat at his desk and wrote a prescription for linctus codeine, a cough depressant, four millilitres to be taken three times daily, and elixir diphenhydramine, four millilitres to be taken at bedtime as an aid to sleeping.

  “Now mind what I said. It’s bed for you as soon as you get home. Here’s your scrip.” O’Reilly explained how the medication should be taken. “And I’ve asked the chemist to give you some friar’s balsam. You know how to use it?”

  “Aye, certainly. My ould granny swore by it. It’s been around forever.”

  “Actually since about 1760. A Doctor Ward invented it. Inhale three times a day, light diet, lots of warm fluids.”

  “Right, sir.” He put on his coat and sighed. “My sister’s been at me since I came down with the cold. Made me promise to come to see you this morning. She’s coming this afternoon to stay for a wee while. Look after me. She’s a good woman, but she fusses.” His voice cracked. “I’ve had no one since the missus ran off with that English git twelve years ago.”

  O’Reilly remembered. It had been the talk of Ballybucklebo, and Willie John had been a hard man to comfort. O’Reilly said, and meant it in more ways than one, “You need fussing over, Willie John. One of us will pop round tomorrow and fuss a bit—if that’s okay.” O’Reilly smiled at the man.

  “Oh, aye, Doctor. That’s your job.”

  O’Reilly walked Willie John to the front door. “Safe home.” He closed the front door. All part of a day’s work, but tonight at the council meeting wouldn’t be routine, that was for sure. He scowled.

  Apart from the interruption of the war years, O’Reilly had been seeing patients in this house since he’d joined old Doctor Flanagan in 1938. Old friends like Willie John Andrews; new ones like Julie Donnelly, who had come to Ballybucklebo as a maid of all work for the Bishops only a few years ago. This place had had a doctor in it since 1894, the year Robert Louis Stevenson had died. If O’Reilly had his way, it would still have in the person of Barry Laverty long after O’Reilly was gone.

  This was his home. Bedamned if he was going to be pushed out by some bloody road-widening scheme. Something John MacNeill had said surfaced from somewhere in the depths of O’Reilly’s mind. The lease to the land under his house had been granted by the MacNeills at about the same time they’d done the same for the Mucky Duck—and that lease had strings attached about remodelling. I wonder, he thought. I just wonder. Lunch could wait until he’d phoned John MacNeill.

  24

  As If I Was a Public Meeting

  Ballybucklebo’s town hall was a plain building with a grey slate roof, set back from the main Bangor to Belfast Road. When O’Reilly and Kitty arrived at five to seven, at least fifty people were standing in the main hall, surrounded by the sober sepia-tint photos of earlier, unsmiling councillors. Every face in the parquet-floored hall looked familiar, but there was one man with whom O’Reilly very much wanted a word. He grabbed Kitty’s hand and made his way across the hall, mouthing greetings as they passed. “Evening, Mister Robinson.”

  “Good evening, Doctor, Mrs. O’Reilly.” Two of the bottom buttons of the man’s waistcoat were undone to accommodate the swell of his ample belly. His fair hair had been inexpertly trimmed and was a ragged curtain round his head. O’Reilly knew that Mrs. Robinson was the minister’s barber. “I do hope council can be persuaded to choose the southern option.”

  “So do we,” said Kitty, “and let’s hope they make that decision soon. We’d like to get a start on repairs and feel we have a future at Number One.”

  “I hope you and I don’t have to disagree, Your Reverence, but if they do decide to straighten, they’ll have to put one of us out.” O’Reilly sighed. “I’m told trying to move you is going to meet with some pretty stiff obstacles.”

  “It will, I fear, Doctor. We do have friends in some pretty high places.” Mister Robinson took a brief glance up and then lowered his head.

  “I understand, but it’s just possible you may be able to help me.”

  “Oh? I’ll certainly try, but in fairness I’ll not do anything to weaken the church’s position.”

  “We’d not expect otherwise,” Kitty said.

  “You know my house was originally a Presbyterian manse.”

  “It was. It was. The Flanagans—the grandfather, Michael, and his son, Ethan, both ministers—lived in it. When Ethan died, his successor, my predecessor, was a bachelor. He needed something smaller, so the church sold the house to Doctor Flanagan, Ethan’s elder boy, and built the present manse that Mrs. Robinson and I and our family now occupy.”

  “Number One was and still is leasehold,” O’Reilly said. “I need to know the terms of the original lease. Would you happen to have a copy in the church records?”

  Mister Robinson frowned. “I honestly don’t know.”

  “Could you look?”

  “Certainly. May I ask why?”

  “The lease was originally held by the MacNeill family. I spoke with his lordship at lunchtime. He’s looking into it too, but I want to pursue every possible avenue in case there are any restrictions on use of the land.”

  “I’ll take a look as soon as the meeting’s over.”

  “Thank you. Now,” said O’Reilly, “we’d better take our seats. Here comes council.” He took Kitty’s hand and led her to the front row. “There’s Willie Dunleavy. I wonder what he’d prefer? The Duck’s on Main Street too. And there’s Donal Donnelly. He’s probably just here to rubberneck. And there’s Kinky and Archie.”

  Donal waved and O’Reilly waved back as he and Kitty took their seats. A long committee table dotted with notepads, pencils, and glasses of water was set on a raised dais. Members of council were climbing up short flights of stairs at each side to sit behind the table.

  And there was that bastard Doran. He was an unpleasant-looking fellow, a short man with a sallow complexion, oiled black hair parted in the centre, narrow dark eyes, and a mouth that seemed to be set permanently at twenty past eight. O’Reilly ground his teeth. That little dog-beater, and by God, even if striking the man had turned him into an implacable enemy who might cost O’Reilly and Kitty Number One, if he had it all to do over again, even knowing that, O’Reilly’d paste the bollix twice as hard.

  The councillors were seated. Robert Baxter, the chairman, sat in the centre, a tall man with thinning grey hair swept across a shining area of bald scalp. To his right was a man in a three-piece charcoal pinstripe suit. They were flanked on the far side by the eight other council members, six men and two women, all seated facing the spectators in the body of the council chamber. The scene on the dais, although short
of numbers, put O’Reilly in mind of Da Vinci’s mural The Last Supper. He certainly hoped he and Kitty would not be having their last supper at Number One Main any time soon.

  “Look,” said Kitty, “there’s the marquis and Bertie Bishop.”

  The two men sat side by side to the chairman’s left. Lord John MacNeill looked sad and shook his head in O’Reilly’s direction.

  Oh-oh, O’Reilly thought. That means he’s had no luck finding that damn lease. Still, he could pretty well count on votes from Bertie and John MacNeill. “And there’s Alice Moloney. She was elected in December to fill a vacancy. I’m not sure how she’d vote.” He certainly knew how that gurrier Doran was planning to vote. O’Reilly glanced his way and saw him scowling directly at Kitty and him.

  The look was as piercing as the flame of a cutting torch and O’Reilly had to fight to keep his face impassive. He would not give the bloody man the satisfaction of acknowledging his animus and his obvious desire for revenge. O’Reilly said, “The rest of the folks are from the other townlands and villages that make up the borough of Ballybucklebo. They’ve all been patients at one time or another, but I’ve no idea how they’ll jump.”

  The chairman rose and banged his gavel until there was silence. “My lord, ladies, and gentlemen. Welcome to this extraordinary meeting of Ballybucklebo Borough Council in the county of Down, which has been called as an advisory body at the request of the Northern Ireland Minister of Transport to enquire into—” He settled a pair of wire-rimmed spectacles on the bridge of a thin nose and read from a sheet of paper. “—the establishment of a safe carriageway between Belfast and Bangor either by straightening the road at a particularly dangerous corner or bypassing the village to the south.” He droned on about terms of reference, statutory regulations, keeping of minutes—the kind of red tape that gave O’Reilly simultaneous heartburn, a headache, and an almost uncontrollable urge to head for the Duck.

  “… After a vote tonight, the report of the borough council will be submitted to the ministry where, of course, the final decision will be taken, although they usually accept an advisory committee’s recommendation. Now, to commence the proceedings, may I introduce Mister Ignatius Murtagh, who holds a master’s of civil engineering and who is the Down County surveyor and is here to provide impartial technical advice. Mister Murtagh, please stand.”