An Irish Country Love Story

by Patrick Taylor

  Barry had hoped he could give Sue more assurance by using his professional status to find out more details. But knowing hospital procedures, he was none too sanguine. With his last few coins for the pay phone he called the hospital and got no more information than “He’s comfortable.” A request to talk to a junior colleague on duty had been denied.

  By then Sue was up to high doh and there was nothing practical he could do to comfort her. Neither slept much that night.

  They left the plane at Aldergrove at last and he’d hustled her to his car and driven for half an hour along the A26 to the Cushendall Road in Ballymena and the hospital. O’Reilly would have approved of Barry’s utter disregard for the speed limit. Sue was breaking her heart and the sooner he could get her to the ward and get some concrete information, the better.

  They stopped at a desk labelled INFORMATION, where a receptionist sat behind a low glass partition. The mousey-haired, tired-looking woman lifted her eyes from a copy of Film Review. “Yes?”

  “We’d like to see Mister Nolan. I’m Doctor Laverty and this is Miss Nolan, his daughter. We’ve just flown in from Marseille.”

  The receptionist consulted a list. “He was admitted yesterday. Heart attack. He’s on the men’s medical ward…”

  Sue sighed a deep sigh of relief and he squeezed her hand. So her dad was still alive. Coronary patients could die rapidly after the initial event. Not knowing the details and not wanting to scare her he’d been pretty circumspect in his explanations to her on the way here.

  The woman pointed to her right. “Down that there corridor for a wee ways, then first on your left.” She hesitated. “It’s only immediate family or the patient’s own doctor outside visiting hours, sir.”

  “I’m engaged to Miss Nolan.”

  “That’s different, so it is.”

  “Thank you,” Barry said. “Come on, Sue. It’s not far.” Having done a year’s obstetric training here he knew his way around the place. He turned to his left and started to walk quickly.

  “Oh, Barry, I-I hope…” Sue said. She didn’t finish the sentence as he navigated her around a porter in a brown grocer’s coat pushing a tea trolley and two uniformed nurses heading the other way. She stopped suddenly, almost causing a collision behind her.

  “What is it, Sue?”

  Tears glistened in her eyes. “Mum and Dad mustn’t know that we were together in Marseille,” she whispered. “I know they’re very fond of you, but…”

  He tugged her gently toward the wall, out of the stream of human traffic. “As far as they’ll know, you called me from Heathrow and I picked you up at the airport. All right?”

  She nodded and he squeezed her hand gently. They continued down the hall.

  Barry recognised a sign above a pair of varnished double doors. MEDICAL WARD. “In here.” The Waveney was a general hospital and didn’t have wards specialising in cardiology like the Royal.

  Barry immediately saw a uniformed junior sister sitting with her back to him and went straight up to her. “Good morning, Sister. I’m Doctor Laverty and this is Miss Nolan.”

  Sister rose and turned. She inclined her head and smiled. “Hello, Doctor Laverty. I was a staff nurse in the Royal in ’62.”

  He noticed the oval silver and green Royal Victoria Hospital badge on her apron shoulder strap. Nurses traditionally continued to wear the emblem of the hospital where they had trained.

  “I’ll be damned. Sister Bette Robinson.”

  “What brings you here?” said the nurse.

  “My father,” Sue said, looking out to the twenty-four-bed ward, eyes scanning, searching. “He-he was admitted yesterday.”

  “Yes, of course. With a coronary. He’s doing well, Miss Nolan. Your mother’s with him. I’ll take you to them.” The wooden-floored ward was well lit by tall windows. Men lay in iron-framed beds, each with a set of earphones hung beside the bedhead so the patient could listen to the radio. Others sat in dressing gowns and pyjamas on plain wooden chairs. Nurses and ward orderlies bustled about their duties. There were bunches of daffodils in vases on two tables in the centre of the ward.

  “Here,” Sister Robinson said, stopping where curtains hanging from an overhead rail had been closed around a bed halfway down the ward. She pulled one curtain back. “Go on in.”

  “Go ahead, Sue,” Barry said. He followed her through the curtains, then closed them behind him. Sue was hugging her mother, who had risen from a plain wooden chair.

  “Mummy, oh, Mummy,” Sue said, “I’m so sorry.” A tear glistened, then slid down her cheek.

  “There, there,” Mrs. Nolan said, rummaging in her handbag and giving Sue a hanky as she must have done a thousand times when her girl was little. “We’re sure your dad’s going to get better. There he is, you see. Large as life.”

  Sue sniffed, managing a weak smile as she walked to the head of the bed. “Daddy.” Sue bent over and kissed his forehead. “Oh, Daddy. I’m so sorry you’re sick.” Her voice quavered.

  “Hello, Barry,” Mrs. Nolan said. “Thank you for picking Sue up at the airport.”

  He inclined his head. “Glad I could help. I’m sorry for your troubles.”

  Mrs. Nolan returned to her chair.

  Selbert Nolan was a big man. His normally ruddy farmer’s cheeks were pallid, but at least there was no cyanosis, so no heart failure. His cheeks had deep lines gnawed in them by his years exposed to the bitter Ulster winds. The green plastic tubes of oxygen spectacles disappeared into each nostril and the flow of the gas made a soft hissing. His breathing was slow and regular. A glass bottle on a gallows above the bed dripped what Barry assumed to be a saline/heparin mixture through a red rubber tube into an arm vein. Anticoagulants were given to prevent more clots forming.

  He had managed a weak grin when he saw his daughter. “Aye. It’s no’ much fun, but I think I’ll be all right.” The man’s voice was weak, slurred, and his pupils were tiny.

  Morphine, which constricted the pupils, a quarter grain every six hours for pain control, was part of the treatment.

  A cable, which Barry knew carried wires from electrodes called “leads” attached to Selbert’s arms, legs, and chest, ran to a yellow box on a shelf above and behind the patient’s bedhead. A monitor in front of the box gave a continuous display of cardiac electrical activity. To Barry’s relief the spacing of spikes in the tracings was perfectly regular.

  Sue sat on the left side of the bed and smiled up at Barry from her chair. The frown lines that had been almost constantly on her forehead had fled. Then she turned back to her father, and the love Barry had heard yesterday when she’d called him a very patient man was deep in her green eyes. “Barry’s been wonderful,” she said.

  He smiled inside, the relief on behalf of this girl he loved so dearly filling his chest. Now Sue had actually seen her father, he knew some of the uncertainty about a loved one’s condition had been removed. And it was the uncertainty that was always hardest to bear. Soon he would excuse himself and have a word with Sister Bette Robinson, one professional to another, about his father-in-law-to-be.

  “You must be tired, Mum,” Sue said. “You’ve been here all night.”

  Mrs. Nolan shook her head. “Och well,” she said, “it could hae been worse. I had a few naps and this morning, one of Dad’s nice doctors, I think he’s called a registrar, I didnae get his name”—her Antrim accent, sibilant and full of old Scots usage, was very obvious—“he and I had a wee word earlier the day. He explained that we’re no’ out of the woods yet, but it’s the first twenty-four hours that’re critical and we’re nearly there, hey.”

  “I’m no cardiologist, but that’s what I’ve been taught,” Barry said. “If you’ll excuse me, I’ll go and have a word with his nurse. See if I can learn any more.”

  “Go ahead, Barry,” Sue said. “I’ll stay here. Keep my folks company.”

  Barry let himself out through the curtains.

  Bette Robinson was alone and hunched over a broad wooden desk, mak
ing notes. He smiled to himself when he realized her posture hadn’t improved since he’d worked with her at the Royal. “I suppose you’d like to hear about Mister SN? I’ve pulled his chart. I know you want to explain things to the family. I still remember we all thought you were a bit odd at the RVH spending all that time trying to tell patients information they probably couldn’t understand anyway.”

  Barry shrugged. “Actually you’d be surprised how much the average patient does take in, but we have time in general practice. I know how busy hospital doctors are. I want to set the Nolans’ minds at rest as best I can.”

  “Fair enough. Have a pew.”

  Barry perched on the wooden chair.

  “Let’s see, farmer, aged fifty-four. Married. Two children … We admitted Mister Nolan yesterday at noon and made a working clinical diagnosis of myocardial infarction with no arrhythmias. This was confirmed with electrocardiographic findings and the usual enzyme tests.” She opened the chart and showed him a long strip of narrow pinkish graph paper where a central black-inked line was interrupted at regular intervals by upward and downward spikes.

  Barry smiled. “Tell me what it means,” he said. “I always had trouble reading those things and we don’t do them in general practice.”

  “The heart muscle is damaged at the back of the heart.”

  “I see. And you treated him with—?”

  “Morphine for pain relief. He’s getting an IV infusion of heparin ten thousand units every six hours. We’ll start him on an oral anticoagulant, dicoumarol, in a couple of days. Complete bed rest, naturally. Assuming no complications.”

  Barry mentally listed heart failure, arrhythmias, thrombo-embolism, and rupture of the heart, any of which could be fatal. Much as he believed in honesty with patients and their families, he’d keep those to himself for a while.

  “He’ll need that for about four weeks before we let him home, then he’ll be able to get up a bit more every day and back to work in three months. He’ll need weekly follow-up here as long as he’s on the anticoagulants. Long-term outlook?” She shrugged.

  “Thanks, Bette,” he said. Much of what she’d told him he’d been pretty sure he already knew, but it was good to have it confirmed by a senior nurse who dealt with these cases day and daily. It seemed that for the present it was likely that Mister Nolan would recover, but no one could foretell what his future might hold.

  Barry would explain to Sue and her mum when they all got home, but for now he thought it tactful to give the family privacy. And he was curious about Bette Robinson, whom he had last seen walking out for a short spell with Jack Mills back in ’62. “How are you, Bette? When did you come to the Waveney?” She’d not been on the staff in ’65.

  “Grand,” she said. “I married Jim Montgomery last July. Do you remember him? He was a year behind you and Jack Mills, and he came here in ’64 as a houseman. Now he’s a surgical registrar. The move to the Waveney got me a promotion to sister too.”

  “I do remember him. And good for you, Bette. On both counts.”

  “And you, Barry?”

  “I’m a GP in Ballybucklebo. Working with Fingal O’Reilly and—”

  “Doctor Fingal Flahertie O’Reilly,” Bette said with satisfaction. “Irish rugby international—Jack Mills thought the world of him—and we knew at the Royal he was one of the last of the breed of old-style GPs. Well done, Barry. I’ll bet he’s a great teacher for you.”

  “He is. I’m loving the work. And then last year I got engaged to Sue Nolan.”

  “She seems like a lovely girl.”

  “She is, and I’d better get back to her and her family. Thanks for the gen.”

  “Anytime. Just ring me and I’ll clue in the other sisters about who you are so you’ll be kept up to date with progress if I’m off duty.”

  “Thanks, Bette.”

  Once inside the screens, he saw that Selbert Nolan had drifted off. Sue was sitting staring at her father. Mrs. Nolan was knitting, her needles clicking, not quite in rhythm with the constant passage of the intermittent upticks in the green lines on the cardiac monitor.

  “Hello again, Barry,” Mrs. Nolan whispered.

  He nodded.

  Sue turned and smiled at him.

  “Now that your father’s resting, Sue, why don’t you and Barry go home. He’s doing as well as can be expected and I can keep him company. You’ve had a very long journey, and you must be tired. It’s only a few miles back to the farm.”

  “Are you sure you don’t want us to stay, Mum?”

  “I’ll be fine, pet, and I’ll phone if there’s any change. There’s a phone booth in the corridor. Go on, the pair of you. Barry, take Sue home, let her get a bath and a rest, and I’m sure she can make you a good Ulster fry for your lunch, hey. If I didn’t know better, I’d think neither of you had had a decent night’s sleep or a scrap of decent food since Sue got the news in Marseille yesterday. But, ah, that’s love for you. Thanks again, Barry, for picking up our wee girl from the airport.”

  Barry scratched his whiskers and looked at Mrs. Nolan. She had returned to her knitting and did not have the look of a woman harbouring a secret. Barry smiled. A bath and shave sounded very good. And if Mrs. Nolan was happy to let them go, why not. Their staying would serve no practical purpose. After nearly a whole day of airport and aeroplane food, a fry sounded even better. He knew Sue’s cooking of old.

  “I’ve our motorcar,” Mrs. Nolan said, “so I’ll come on later once he’s woken up and we’ve had a wee word together. It’s Friday. Perhaps you can get the weekend off and stay with us for a few days, Barry. Although I’m worried about Selbert, we do need to talk about the wedding plans too. I’m no’ sure March the twenty-eighth is a starter anymore.”

  29

  And Talk of Many Things

  Barry looked around the big farmhouse kitchen with its red-tiled floor and whitewashed walls of rough plaster that were splashed with afternoon sunlight. A plain Welsh dresser stood against one wall, blue willow-pattern china plates arranged in rows on its shelves, a black cast-iron Aga range bulked against another.

  “I grew up in this house,” said Sue, holding a teacup in both hands. “I can’t remember a day that Dad and Mum weren’t here.” She sighed. “It seems so empty today. Lonely.”

  She rose from the kitchen table, looked at him, and pursed her lips. “I’m so glad you’re here, Barry. I didn’t mean—”

  “I know what you meant. Of course I do. You’re still very worried about your dad. It takes more than a hot bath, a good meal, and a nap to get over a shock like that.”

  Sue looked as if she might come over to him, but then seemed to change her mind and instead put her cup on his plate and started gathering up dishes.

  “It’s more than twenty-four hours now since his heart attack,” Barry said, “so the time of maximum danger is over. I’d be very hopeful of his recovery now.” He used his most professional voice, as if Sue was simply the daughter of a patient. Barry had known for years the therapeutic value of a completely professional opinion. To add more weight as he spoke, he did not smile. He kept a niggling concern to himself. Hopeful in the short term, he thought, but fifty-four was young for a first heart attack. Time would tell.

  Sue nodded and said, “Thank you. That is good to know…”

  He saw her lips start to say, “Doctor.” Good. He was sure she was reassured.

  Moving to her side, he folded her into a gentle hug. “Your mum will be home later, and your dad should be discharged reasonably soon. And if it helps, I’m here.”

  “I know.” She nodded. “And it does help. A lot.” She took his hand and started to walk to the door. “But I’d really like to get a breath of fresh air. We seem to have been cooped up in planes and cars and”—she shuddered—“hospitals forever.”

  Barry understood. He unlatched the door. “Where to?”

  “Let’s go down to the river. It’s always peaceful there.”

  They crossed the dry mud farmyard where b
rown hens pecked among scatterings of straw. A white rooster with scarlet comb and wattles was perched on a fencepost lording it over his harem by crowing loudly. At the far side was a row of thatched, single-storey outbuildings with green-painted doors. A faint smell of cow clap came from what must be a byre, and beyond were small fields, either pastureland lying fallow awaiting the spring ploughing or brown with stubble where a crop had been harvested last autumn.

  “We’re a mixed farm: poultry, barley, pasture for a couple of horses, and a small dairy herd. Twenty Friesians.” She stopped and bent to pick up a heavy work glove. She tutted. “Dad’s always dropping them. Careless man. Just be a tick.”

  Barry waited until she’d trotted over to one of the sheds and come back empty-handed.

  “I was telling you about our farm. It’s a family business, passed on from father to eldest son. My brother, Michael, and I pitched in from when we were each about six. That’s when Mum taught me to gather up the eggs every day. I’ve been hooking up cows to milking machines since I was ten.”

  They passed a corrugated iron shed with open double doors. Barry could see a red Massey-Ferguson tractor inside. Assorted farm implements, none of which he recognised, hung from the walls. The upper half-door of a smaller building was open, the lower shut. A frantic barking began from within.

  Sue shook her head. “Poor Max.” Barry knew the Nolans had been charged with the unenviable task of looking after Sue’s unruly springer spaniel while she was away. “I love him dearly, but I simply never got the hang of training him. You’d think I’d be better at it, seeing as I’m a teacher.” Barry watched as Sue shook her head and the ghost of a sweet smile brushed her lips. He loved that she could smile at herself, even today. “You stay, Max. We’ll go for a walk soon,” she said. “He’ll be fine. Fred Alexander, the neighbour who’s looking after the animals, fed him when he milked the cows. And Max and I had a lovely nap together this morning.”

  Sue and Max had napped on her old single bed while Barry had bunked out on the Nolans’ sofa. As Barry had dropped off to sleep he had envied Max.