An Irish Country Village

by Patrick Taylor

  “How many in your class are going to sit the scholarship exam?”

  “Ten, and I’m the only—”

  “I know. Girl.”

  “Woman.”

  “Right. You’re the only woman. My God, girl, you should be proud of yourself for that alone.”

  “You mean that, don’t you?”

  “Of course I bloody well mean it. And . . . and . . .” They’d taught him in the same course never to try to comfort patients by telling them personal things about yourself, but Patricia wasn’t a patient. “You may not succeed . . .”

  “That’s what I’m scared of.” Her eyes were moist. She sniffed.

  “. . . but you’ll have to carry on. I’ve had to.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “It’s the lack of confidence I mentioned. Two weeks ago I muffed a diagnosis. The patient nearly died but the neurosurgeons fixed him; at least I thought they’d fixed him.”

  “But they hadn’t?”

  “I don’t know. I do know O’Reilly went to see him yesterday. The man was dead.”

  “Barry.” Her hand covered her mouth. “No.”

  He nodded. “I’m afraid he was.” He took her hand in his. “I’m going to have to face that, my first big failure, if I’m going to stay on working with O’Reilly.”

  “I didn’t know.”

  “Of course not. I hadn’t told you.” And I’d no intention of telling her, he thought, except it seemed the right thing to do if it could help her get over her funk. “I just didn’t want you to think you were the only one who could fail at something.”

  He felt her arms go round him as she held up her face to be kissed, and he hugged her and kissed her and then held her at arm’s length.

  “Thank you,” she said, “for telling me. It does help.” Her eyes glimmered, but he could see it was from the light not tears. “And it helps when you’re serious about important things.”

  “Yes, I can be,” he said quietly, looking into her face.

  “So can I, Barry,” she said softly. “So can I.”

  Barry knew they each had come within a whisper of saying, “I love you,” but he’d not rush her. He could hear O’Reilly’s voice; “Pianissimo, pianissimo.”

  “Look,” he said, “you have to be getting on with your studies, and I have to be running along.”

  “I suppose so,” she said. “I’m not sure I want you to go.”

  God knew he’d sell his soul to be able to stay. Perhaps he wasn’t being fair to her, but his own inner voice said, “Barry, this time it’s your turn to play a little hard to get.”

  “I don’t either,” he said, “but I want to be able to boast that my girl has won a civil engineering scholarship at Queens.”

  She made no demur at his calling her “my girl.” But she let his hand go, closed her eyes, and took a deep breath. “It’s not to Queens, Barry. It’s to Cambridge. Starting next term.”

  Some Enchanted Evening,

  You May See . . .

  O’Reilly was in the upstairs lounge, sitting in an armchair with his back to the door, booted feet propped up on a stuffed footstool, a large glass of what Barry knew would be John Jameson’s Irish whiskey clutched in his right paw. He was listening to the crashing chords coming from the Phillips Black Box gramophone.

  Barry half recognized the symphony that O’Reilly was conducting with his left hand. Lady Macbeth lay curled up on his lap, nose hidden under her tail tip.

  “Evening, Fingal,” Barry said to the back of O’Reilly’s head.

  “Pom-pom-pom-pom-pom-pom,” O’Reilly boomed, waving his hand in time with the beat with the enthusiasm of a drunken semaphore signaller.

  Barry moved round and stood in front of the chair. “Evening, Fingal.”

  O’Reilly held his index finger to his lips. “Tiddle-tiddle-pom.” O’Reilly’s left hand oscillated to each “da.” “Da-da-da-da-da-da-pom.” At the “pom,” his clenched fist bludgeoned the air.

  He grinned at Barry, who stood waiting until after a final “pom.” O’Reilly said, “Be a good lad and switch the thing off. I’m heavily encatted”—he indicated the sleeping kitten—“and I don’t want to disturb Her Ladyship.”

  Barry switched off the machine.

  “Grand stuff, old Ludwig van B,” O’Reilly said. “That’s his Fifth Symphony.”

  “I didn’t recognize your version of it.”

  “Philistine,” said O’Reilly. “Never mind. Help yourself to a sherry.” He finished his glass. “And top that up while you’re at it. A bird—”

  “I know . . . can’t fly on one wing.” Barry took the glass, went to the sideboard, refilled it from a decanter, and poured himself a small glass of Shooting Sherry.

  “Here.” He handed O’Reilly’s glass back and sat in the chair opposite him.

  “You’re home early,” O’Reilly said. “How’s your Patricia?”

  Barry sighed. “She’s fine but—”

  “But what?” O’Reilly bent forward without disturbing the cat. His shaggy eyebrows moved closer. “But what?”

  Barry hesitated. “She rattled me a bit.”

  “How?” The eyebrows drew closer until it looked to Barry as if a single hairy-bear caterpillar were crawling across O’Reilly’s forehead.

  “She’s trying to win a scholarship to Cambridge.” It was, he knew, something in which he should take great pride, but if she won it, she’d be there in England—and he’d be here.

  “Is that a fact? Good for her.” O’Reilly’s frown disappeared, and he raised his glass. “More power to her wheel.”

  Barry sipped his sherry. “I’m not so sure,” he said, wondering if he should leave O’Reilly and try to find an assistantship in Cambridgeshire or apply for a specialist training position in Addenbrooke’s teaching hospital.

  “Why ever not?”

  Barry’s head drooped. “She’d be going next term.” He looked up into O’Reilly’s face. “I’ll miss her, Fingal.” He’d more than miss her. He was terrified that he would lose her.

  “I know how you feel,” O’Reilly said. He stood, decanting a complaining Lady Macbeth to the carpet, and walked over to stare out of the bay window. “I’d to leave a girl once.”

  Barry said nothing. Mrs. Kincaid had sworn him to secrecy when she’d confided in him about O’Reilly’s loss during the war.

  “A lot of the men in the services did.” O’Reilly’s voice was low.

  “My dad was away for five years,” Barry said. “But I was too young to know.”

  O’Reilly kept his back turned. “He came back to your mum, didn’t he?”

  “Yes.” Barry’d been five when a strange, gruff-voiced, bearded man in a naval uniform had burst through the front door of the house on Victoria Road in Bangor. He would never forget his mother’s excitement.

  O’Reilly said softly, “There was nobody here for me.”

  Was there a catch in the big man’s voice? If there was, Barry could understand. Kinky had explained how the love of O’Reilly’s life, a young nurse, had been killed by a bomb when the Luftwaffe raided Belfast in 1941.

  “I’ll mebbe tell you about it one day.” O’Reilly turned to face Barry and said, very deliberately, “I know you’ve been having second thoughts about staying here.”

  “Well . . .”

  “And now you’re wondering about looking for a post in Cambridge?”

  How the hell did O’Reilly know he was? Dear God, they’d only known each other for a month, but O’Reilly seemed able to peer directly into Barry’s mind.

  O’Reilly walked back from the window and stood in front of Barry’s chair. “I’d not be the one to stand in your way.”

  “That’s very generous of you, Fingal. I’ve seen how much help you need with the practice.”

  O’Reilly laughed. “Not at all,” he said. “I know you’re in love with the girl . . .”

  Barry felt himself blush. Those were the kind of sentiments Ulstermen kept to themselves, and ye
t O’Reilly hadn’t hesitated to come right out with it. “Well, I—”

  “Did you ever see South Pacific?”

  “Yes.”

  O’Reilly sang gently in a deep baritone. “ ‘Once you have found her, never let her go.’ Take my advice on that, son.”

  “Thanks, Fingal.”

  “Of course,” said O’Reilly, “you’re the one who’ll have to decide.”

  “Decide what?” Barry heard the double ring of the telephone in the hall downstairs.

  O’Reilly raised one eyebrow. “If you’re going from or going to.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Yesterday you talked about leaving because you felt you weren’t going to succeed here. That would be going from. Tonight you have a notion to follow the girl you love. That would be going to.”

  Damnation. O’Reilly was absolutely right. And when he looked in his heart, Barry couldn’t decide which would be the most important reason. “If you put it that way . . .”

  “I do, Barry,” O’Reilly said, “because it’s the truth of the matter.”

  “I’d need to think on that.” Barry knew he was playing for time. He heard the door opening.

  “Do, because if you go from you’ll always wonder if you could have made it here.”

  “I know.”

  “But then if you don’t go to, you could end up regretting it for the rest of your life.” O’Reilly looked back at the window and seemed to find something interesting in the middle distance.

  Someone coughed in the doorway.

  Barry turned to see Kinky, dressed in her best coat and hat and clutching a pair of gloves. She held a handbag in her other hand. “I don’t want to interrupt,” she said, “but I’m on the way to my Women’s Union meeting. That was Ethel O’Hagan on the phone, so.”

  O’Reilly turned to face her. “The usual?”

  “Aye. It’s her Kierán again. He’s blocked.”

  Barry heard the Cork lilt. Ulsterfolks would have called the man Kieran. Kinky pronounced it “Keer-awn.”

  “I told her one of the doctors would be round.”

  “Right,” said O’Reilly. “You trot on, Kinky. Enjoy your meeting. We’ll see to it.”

  “Thank you, sir.” She left.

  “Bloody waiting lists,” O’Reilly growled. “Kieran O’Hagan’s been needing a prostatectomy for nine months.”

  “It’s not malignant?” Barry knew that cancer cases were not kept waiting long.

  O’Reilly shook his head. “Benign hypertrophy. I’ve told his wife what simple things to do if he gets retention. They musn’t have worked, and the daft bugger won’t do as he’s told to try to prevent it. He likes his pint too much. His bladder fills up and he can’t piss.”

  “It’s not Friday.”

  “Friday?”

  “When I was working in casualty in the Royal Victoria, Friday night was catheter night. The old boys would go to the pub, sink a few pints, and end up with urinary retention.”

  “So you’re a dab hand with a catheter?”

  “I’ve done my share.”

  “Good,” said O’Reilly, bending over his shelves of records. “Kieran’s eighty-six, and Ethel’s eighty-one. They live in the housing estate in Number 17 Comber Gardens, next door to the Finnegans.”

  “Declan Finnegan? The man with Parkinson’s disease who has a French wife?”

  “You remember them?”

  “Of course.” Barry felt a tinge of pride in remembering the patient’s name and not just the disease.

  “Good.” O’Reilly stood straight, holding a long-playing record. “There’s a sterile catheter pack in the drawer of the instrument trolley. It’s labeled, so help yourself.”

  “You mean you want me to go . . . You’re not coming?”

  “Lord Jasus.” O’Reilly lifted the Beethoven from the turntable and put another record in its place. “He’s a big man is Kieran O’Hagan, but his willy’s not so big it’ll take the pair of us to pop a thin rubber tube through it.”

  “Right,” said Barry, pleased to have been distracted from their earlier discussion and more pleased to be sent out on his own. He was going to say more, but O’Reilly was staring out the window again.

  “I’m off,” Barry said, setting his half-finished sherry on the sideboard. He ran downstairs, pausing only in the surgery to collect the sterile pack.

  Coming from upstairs he heard the first bars of Mozart’s Requiem, sad, ponderous, and solemn, and he wondered if O’Reilly had selected a piece to reflect his mood. The loss of the girl he was daft about had indeed hit the big man sore. It must have cost him to refer to it, even obliquely, and to say he might tell Barry the story one day.

  Barry went out through the front door and round the house to the back lane where Brunhilde his elderly Volkswagen was parked. Arthur Guinness barked once from his kennel as Barry approached. Fooled you this time, dog, Barry thought as he drove away.

  The sun had gone and was painting the few clouds with pastel pinks. The first star was up above the village, a silver sequin on a velvet sky. Barry stopped at the traffic light just in time to see Seamus Galvin, one arm round Donal Donnelly’s shoulder, heading through the doors of the Mucky Duck.

  The light changed and Barry drove to the housing estate. He had no difficulty finding Comber Gardens and Number 17. He parked, grabbed the pack, and walked to the O’Hagans’ front door.

  He noticed how the sandstone of the single front step was spotless. On any morning of the week, all the women would be out with buckets of hot, soapy water and stiff brushes, down on their hands and knees, scrubbing away at the steps like the crew of a man-of-war holystoning the deck. But unlike sailors, who were bound to strict silence, the women would be jabbering away like a flock of jackdaws, gossiping, arguing, and weaving more tightly the fabric of their corner of Ballybucklebo.

  Barry knocked on the door and waited until it was opened by a diminutive woman wearing a calico pinafore and pink, fluffy carpet slippers. She was tiny, wizened. Her hands were gnarled, blue-veined, and discoloured with liver spots.

  “Mrs. O’Hagan?”

  “It is.”

  “I’m Doctor Laverty.”

  “Could himself not come?” she asked in a thin, raspy voice.

  Here we go again. “I’m sorry,” Barry said, knowing what O’Reilly would say, “but he’s been called out to another emergency.”

  “You’ll have to do,” she said. “Come on in.”

  He followed her into a thinly carpeted hall and up a narrow staircase.

  “Kieran’s in here.” She pushed open a narrow door to a tiny room. A medicine cabinet with a cracked mirror hung from a wall whose paper had peeled away to reveal the cheap, pink plaster behind it. The room smelled of mildew.

  According to O’Reilly, the housing estate had been built by Councillor Bishop, who had cut as many corners as possible to increase his profit. Bastard. He made money while these folks had to live in damp, jerry-built slums.

  Both taps were running into a chipped, enamelled washbasin. A man, who must have been at least six foot six, sat hunched on the seat of a porcelain toilet beside a tiny, half-filled, cast-iron, claw-foot bathtub. He wore only a striped shirt. He was completely bald, and his face, creased as dried chamois leather, was screwed up. His breath came in short puffs.

  “This here’s Doctor Laverty, Kieran,” Mrs. O’Hagan said. “He’s come to fix you, so he has.”

  “Just . . . get . . . a . . . move . . . on,” Mr. O’Hagan begged through clenched teeth.

  Barry could see the swelling above the man’s wiry, grey pubic hairs. The skin of his belly hung in thin folds. “Can we get you along to the bedroom, Mr. O’Hagan?” It would be impossible to have him lie on the floor here.

  “Aye . . . just . . . hurry.” He rose unsteadily and put an arm round Barry’s shoulder. “You’ll . . . have . . . to oxtercog me.”

  Barry knew that in Ulster oxter was the armpit, and cog meant to carry.

 
“Right.” For a man of such height O’Hagan was remarkably light. “Which way, Mrs. O’Hagan?”

  “First door on the right. Do you need a hand?”

  “I’ll manage up here,” Barry said, “but can you go get a big bowl or a bucket and some towels?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Barry heard her leave. Clutching his pack in one hand, he manoeuvered the tall man to the bathroom door and along a narrow landing. Behind him, over Mr. O’Hagan’s grunts, Barry could hear the taps still splashing water in the sink.

  The bedroom door was open. He groped for a light switch, found it, and switched on a bare, overhead bulb. A brass bed was crammed against one wall. He set the pack on a dresser next to a framed sepia tint of a young couple in wedding clothes. As he helped the patient onto the bed, Barry wondered how long the O’Hagans had been married.

  “Won’t be long now,” Barry said.

  “Thank Christ for that.” Mr. O’Hagan held his lower belly with both hands.

  Mrs. O’Hagan came in carrying two threadbare towels and a large porcelain basin. “Here y’are.”

  Barry took both towels. “Can you lift your backside?” As soon as there was clearance under the man’s buttocks, he spread the towels on the counterpane beneath. “Right. Now can you put your legs apart?

  “Basin, please.” He set the receptacle in the space at the top of the patient’s thighs; then he took the pack from the dresser, set it on the bed, and opened the outer wrapping. “I’ll just go and wash my hands.” When he returned from the bathroom, he dried his hands on a sterile towel and slipped on a pair of rubber gloves. Presoaked antiseptic swabs were loaded in sponge forceps. Barry cleansed the tip and shaft of Mr. O’Hagan’s penis, dropped the forceps on the towel on the bed, and wrapped the organ in a second sterile towel.

  Mr. O’Hagan had started to whistle through his clenched teeth. It was an old hymn, “Nearer, My God, to Thee.”

  A red, India-rubber catheter was coiled neatly around a small sterilized tube of K-Y Jelly. Barry unscrewed the cap, lubricated the tip of the catheter, and grasped it in his right hand. He lifted the penis with his left. “This may hurt a bit,” he said, as he began to thread the slightly angled, rigid tip of the catheter through the urinary meatus at the tip of the penis.