An Irish Country Christmas

by Patrick Taylor

  “A wink is as good as a nod to a blind horse,” said the marquis, letting himself out. “We’ll say no more.”

  “Thanks for the tip-off, sir.” O’Reilly followed the marquis to the front door. “I’m not a big fan of sudden surprises, even if they are well meant.”

  “I do know that, Fingal. It’s why I told you.” And without waiting for an answer, he left.

  Kinky removed the ashtray and fixed O’Reilly with a glare. “This’ll be for after lunch, Doctor, sir. You’ll not be needing your pipe until then. You’d agree, Doctor Laverty?”

  “Oh, indeed, Kinky.” Barry, now clean-shaven and dressed, sat at his usual spot at the other end of the table.

  “You two ganging up on me?” O’Reilly asked, but then he nodded and smiled. He’d had a couple of pipefuls of his favourite Murray’s Erinmore Flake during the surgery. He could wait for another half hour or so. “What’s for lunch, Kinky?” His stomach gurgled.

  “I’ve a nice potato soup ready,” she said, “and when the pair of you has got that into you, there’s a bacon-and-egg pie to follow.” She walked to the door. “And you’ll get none of it if you don’t let me get back to my kitchen.”

  O’Reilly wanted to find out what Barry had been up to in the small hours. “I heard you coming back early this morning. Bad night?”

  Barry yawned. “You know Jeremy Dunne?”

  “Farmer,” O’Reilly said. “Forty acres mixed farm, beef cattle, and grain. His land marches with the Gillespies’ place to the west and the marquis’ estate to the east. Grown son lives with him. Jeremy’s a widower. Excitable type. He has trouble with a duodenal ulcer.”

  “He had real trouble with it this morning. It perforated. It wasn’t a difficult diagnosis once his son was able to tell me about the ulcer. The poor devil was in shock . . . severe abdominal pain and all the signs of peritonitis. All I could do was call an ambulance and get him up to the Royal P.D.Q. I phoned my mate Jack Mills when I got up today. Jack and your mate Cromie operated, closed the hole, and cleaned all the intestinal contents out of his belly. They expect he’ll be home for Christmas.”

  “Aye,” said O’Reilly, “he should be better in a week, that would be . . .”

  “The seventeenth,” Barry said. “Lots of time to spare.”

  “Right.” O’Reilly was pleased. He didn’t like to think of anybody being in hospital on the day, and he was pleased that Barry’s diagnosis had been correct. The boy was learning to keep a watchful eye on their customers, even if they were under a specialist’s care in hospital. “You did well, Barry.”

  Barry grinned. “Thanks, Fingal, but it was hardly a difficult diagnosis given the man’s history.”

  Barry was possessed of an inherent modesty. Some people might see it as a lack of confidence, but O’Reilly was sure he knew better. “You did well, son,” he said, “very well, and maybe with a bit of luck you’ll not be too busy this afternoon. Have you many calls to make?”

  “I’m going to pop in at Eileen Lindsay’s and see how Sammy and Maggie are getting on; then I’ll stick my nose in at Kieran’s, change his dressing. They only live a few doors away. It’ll save him a trip, and I think that’s about it for today, unless Kinky has more for me or some other calls come in later.” Barry toyed with his soupspoon. “How was the surgery?”

  O’Reilly stretched in his chair. “Pretty routine. And busy as hell. Not everybody’s scarpered up to the Kinnegar.”

  That news brought a smile to Barry’s face.

  O’Reilly continued. “Cissie was in. She’s not sure your penicillin is working fast enough.”

  Barry laughed. “Typical Cissie. What did you tell her?”

  O’Reilly was pleased to see the laugh. Four months ago Barry would have bridled because he would have felt insecure. The boy was learning. “I told her not to pay any heed to her cousin Aggie’s helpful advice.” He decided not to bother Barry by telling him where he thought the advice had come from. “She’ll be fine.”

  O’Reilly wrinkled his nose and detected the scent of onions and leeks mingled with potatoes wafting through the door. Old Arthur might be a good gun dog, but by God when it came to sniffing out grub, O’Reilly reckoned he himself had no match.

  Kinky came in carrying a steaming tureen, set it on the table, and handed O’Reilly a ladle. He started filling his own soup plate.

  “Any calls this morning, Kinky?” Barry passed his soup plate along the table.

  She stood beside O’Reilly, hands linked in front of her apron, clearly awaiting his verdict on the soup. “None from patients, Doctor Laverty,” she said, “but your young lady called when you were still asleep—”

  Barry half rose. “When I was asleep? I missed her? Bloody hell.” Barry saw Kinky purse her lips. “Sorry, Kinky.”

  “I’ve heard worse,” she said.

  Good old Kinky, O’Reilly thought, our unflappable Rock of Ages.

  “Miss Spence said she was rushing off somewhere, not to disturb you, and to tell you she’d call—”

  “When?”

  “First thing Saturday morning.”

  Barry subsided into his chair. He sighed. “Saturday?”

  “Come on, Barry,” O’Reilly said, handing along a full plate of soup and starting to fill his own. “It’ll be here in no time.”

  “I suppose.” Barry took his first mouthful of soup.

  “And there’ll be plenty for us to do in the meanwhile to keep your mind occupied.”

  “And that’s a good thing, sir,” Kinky said seriously. “The divil finds work for idle hands, so.”

  “Well, by God, Kinky, he’s not found much for yours. This soup is magnificent.” O’Reilly made a point of smacking his lips noisily and was gratified to see her smile.

  “Delicious,” said Barry, even though he still looked pretty crestfallen. The boy was missing his girl, and O’Reilly thought of some lines of A. E. Housman’s. “The heart out of the bosom . . . is sold for endless rue.”

  Kinky bobbed her head. “It’s my mother’s recipe, so.” She ladled the last of the soup into O’Reilly’s plate. “Now enjoy you that, sir, and I’ll go and get the bacon-and-egg pie.”

  O’Reilly finished his soup and looked out the window. The sky over the church steeple was that metallic blue that only comes on crisp, frosty days. He decided he needed to get some fresh air. He’d been cooped up too long, and Barry wasn’t going to be very busy this afternoon. “You know,” he said, looking straight at Barry, “Kinky’s right about the devil and idle hands so I’ve a notion.”

  “About what?”

  “I’d like to come with you on your visits this afternoon, then pop into the parish hall and see how the preparations for the pageant are coming on, give Arthur his run and—”

  “Pop into the Duck on our way home.” Barry laughed.

  “How did you know that?” O’Reilly didn’t really need an answer. He knew Barry was beginning to understand his habits, just as he was beginning to understand Barry’s.

  “And if you’ll be doing all that gallivanting about,” said Kinky, setting on the table a large bacon-and-egg pie, the pastry crust glazed and brown, “you’ll be needing your strength, Doctors dear, so eat up.”

  My Poor Fool Is Hanged

  It had been some time since Barry had been chauffeured by O’Reilly in his long-bonnetted Rover, but even blindfolded he’d know he was in the old car by its unique attar of pipe tobacco smoke and tincture of damp dog. Arthur was fast asleep in the back.

  O’Reilly, while driving through the village, had been stopped at the traffic light and had not been able to accelerate before the turn-off to the housing estate. He had been forced to keep his speed down to a reasonable thirty miles per hour. Barry was not one bit heartbroken that their progress had been stately this afternoon as opposed to O’Reilly’s usual motorized version of the Charge of the Light Brigade.

  They parked in Comber Gardens outside Eileen’s house.

  Maggie MacCorkle answered the doo
r. She smiled her toothless smile. “Hello there, Doctors dear. You’re better, Doctor O’Reilly, I see.”

  “Much better, thanks, Maggie.”

  “Come in. I’ve the wee lad teed up on the sofa in the front parlour. There’s a fire lit for him, so there is.”

  Barry noticed she was wearing a brown knitted toque with a sprig of holly stuck into the weave. Maggie wouldn’t be Maggie if she wasn’t wearing a hat with some floral adornment. He thought it looked like an unlit Christmas pudding. “How is he, Maggie?” he asked, as she closed the front door behind the two doctors.

  “Sammy?” She frowned. “He’s a bit better, I think. He ate up his lunch all right.” She frowned. “But he didn’t finish a piece of my plum cake.”

  Barry hid his smile. “What ails him does cut down the appetite. He’s probably a bit bored too.”

  “I’ve been keeping him amused, so I have, Doctor, but he’s still a wee bit peely-wally, if you know what I mean.”

  Barry did. It was an expression borrowed from the Scots that meant “under the weather.” “It’s to be expected,” he said. He followed Maggie along the hall and was himself followed by O’Reilly. After all, Sammy was Barry’s patient, and the medical niceties should be observed, with O’Reilly staying well in the background—unless his opinion was asked for.

  Maggie waited in the hall, as Barry knew she would. She wasn’t direct family, and convention excluded her from the examination even if she was acting in loco parentis.

  The front parlour was toasty warm, and coals burnt merrily in the grate. Barry surmised that as Eileen was now working again, the restrictions on lighting the fire had been removed. Sammy lay on a sofa underneath a tartan rug, his head supported on two pillows. He looked up from a comic book he was reading. “Hello, Doctor Laverty,” he said, before returning to the comics.

  “Is that the Beano?” Barry asked. “Does it still have Dennis the Menace and Lord Snooty in it?”

  “Aye,” said Sammy, showing a little more interest. “How do you know that?”

  “I used to get it every week when I was your age.”

  “Right enough?” From the look on the boy’s face, his doctor’s knowledge of comic-book characters had made an impression. He offered the comic to Barry and pointed at an open page. “This fellah Billy Whiz’s new this year.”

  Barry took the comic, smiled at the colourfully drawn character, and returned the thin magazine to its owner. “Thanks, Sammy. How are you today?”

  “Them bumps is different looking, so they are, and my knees and ankles are a bit better.”

  “No tummy pains?” Barry was pretty sure he already knew the answer, but he wanted to be certain. Patients with Henoch-Schönlein purpura could develop abdominal pain accompanied by passing blood in their faeces. The pain was usually violent, and in Sammy’s case it would have certainly forced his mother or Maggie to summon the doctor at once.

  “Nah.” He shook his head. “I’ve to be better for Christmas, so I have.”

  Barry sat on the side of the settee. “Can I take a wee gander at your rash?”

  “Aye, certainly.” He threw back the blanket and, remembering Barry’s last visit, pulled his pyjama pants down and rolled over onto his tummy. “I’m not like a seed potato no more.”

  Barry saw at once that the swelling of Sammy’s knees and ankles was subsiding and the raised urticarial blemishes, now flush with the skin, had taken on the classical purplish colour. “Pull up your pants, son,” he said. Barry glanced at O’Reilly, who was standing quietly beside them. “What do you reckon, Fingal?”

  “You’re spot on, Barry. That’s porphura all right.”

  “Pardon?”

  “It’s the Greek root for ‘purple.’ Purpura to you.”

  “I’m glad you agree.” And in truth Barry was. He’d been pretty confident in his diagnosis, but it was nice to have it confirmed by his senior colleague. He turned back to the child. “You’re on the mend, Sammy.”

  “Great.” He smiled shyly. “I think it’s Mrs. Houston is doing it.”

  Mrs. Houston? It took Barry a moment to remember that Maggie, who had been Miss MacCorkle when he’d come here, was now Mrs. Sonny Houston. Silly of him. He told Maggie to come in, and then he asked Sammy, “And how’s she doing that?”

  “Go on, Mrs. Houston,” Sammy urged, “show the doctors.”

  Barry saw Maggie blush. “I will not, so I won’t.”

  “Och, go on,” Sammy insisted.

  “Youse doctors don’t mind?”

  Barry, who hadn’t the faintest idea what they were talking about, shook his head. “Pay me no heed,” he said.

  O’Reilly shrugged and winked at Barry. Perhaps, Barry thought, O’Reilly had seen before whatever it was Maggie was going to do.

  “Wait ’til you see this, Doctor Laverty,” Sammy said, grinning widely.

  Maggie went and stood in the doorway, raised her hands, grasped the edge of the upper door frame, grunted mightily, and somehow managed to hoist her body through one hundred and eighty degrees.

  Barry stared, openmouthed. He heard Sammy clapping his hands and O’Reilly muttering, “Sweet mother of Jesus.”

  Maggie, now fully inverted, locked the heels of her shoes on the door frame and removed her hands so she hung by her heels alone. Her voluminous black skirt hung down over her head so she looked to Barry like a huge, oddly shaped bat, a bat wearing ankle-length white bloomers that must have been handed down from Maggie’s granny.

  “Maggie, come down out of that at once. You’ll kill yourself,” O’Reilly bellowed.

  Maggie executed a forward somersault, landed nimbly on her feet, bent her knees for a moment, and then stood as erectly as a dismounting gymnast.

  “Yay, Maggie,” an excited Sammy called. “That was cracker, so it was.”

  Barry shook his head and smiled.

  “Begod,” O’Reilly remarked, “will wonders never cease? Where in the name of the wee man did you learn to do that, Maggie?”

  She smoothed her skirt and said, a little breathlessly, “You mind at the wedding Sonny let it out I was a springboard diver when I was a girl?”

  “Yes,” Barry said, “I do.”

  “Well, our trainer was very progressive for his day. He made us do gymnastics to keep us supple. Would youse like to see me do the splits?”

  “I think,” said O’Reilly, “we’ve had enough excitement for one day.” He turned to Barry and winked slowly. “Doctor Laverty, do you think this could account for Maggie’s headaches?”

  Barry vividly remembered his first consultation with Maggie, when she had complained of headaches, headaches two inches above the crown of her head. Now he did his best to keep a straight face. “No question of it, Doctor O’Reilly.”

  “Away off and chase yourselves, Doctors,” Maggie said. “Doing that there never done me one pick of harm in my entire life.”

  Sammy chipped in eagerly, “And she’s going to teach me how to do it as soon as I’m better.”

  “Is she?” said Barry with a sigh, wondering how easy it would be to set a broken neck when Sammy fell, as he almost certainly would. “It’ll be something to look forward to. Anyway,” he said, as he stood up. “I think you’re on the mend, Sammy. You might even be better for Christmas Day.” He turned to Fingal. “What do you think, Doctor O’Reilly?”

  “You’ll be at the Rugby Club Christmas party, I’d bet on it, and you’ll see Santa there.”

  Sammy grinned a big grin. “Aye. And he’ll be coming here too. I fixed it. You remember I told you I would, Doctor Laverty?”

  Barry vaguely recollected that Sammy had proudly told him he and his brother and sister had a scheme to help out Santa this year. Probably now that Eileen was back at work, she was adding more to her Christmas savings. The tea caddy with the ten-shilling notes was still in its place on the mantel.

  He tousled Sammy’s hair. “Good lad,” he said, then turned to Maggie. “We’ll be off. We’ve to call with Kieran and Ethel.”<
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  “You run along, Doctors,” Maggie said, “but if you need me . . . I’ll be hanging around in here.” She threw back her head, opened her toothless mouth, and cackled. Her eyes screwed shut, her shoulders shook, and finally she managed to say, “Hanging around. Oh, dear. Boys-a-boys, that’s a good one, so it is. Wait ’til I tell Sonny. He’ll crack himself, so he will.”

  She was still chuckling as Barry followed O’Reilly out onto the street for the short walk to the O’Hagans’ house. They were almost there when they met Eileen Lindsay hurrying in the opposite direction.

  She stopped when she saw them. “Good afternoon,” she said. “Is Sammy all right?” Barry heard the concern in her voice.

  “Much better,” Barry said. “Much better.”

  “Thank God for that.”

  “You’re home early,” O’Reilly said.

  “Aye. The managers shut the mill down for the day to do some maintenance to the looms. I’ll not be sorry to get home early. Then Mrs. Houston can get home to her husband.” Barry had to strain to hear her mutter under her breath, “We should all be lucky enough to have one.” She raised her voice and continued, “She’s been a godsend, so she has. Thank you, Doctor Laverty. Thank you very much.”

  “You thank Maggie, not me,” Barry said, warmed inside even though the day was chilly. “Go on home now, Eileen.”

  He watched Eileen continue along the street at the same quick pace, a woman who always seemed to be short of time. It was an understandable condition for a single woman with three children, and Barry felt a pang of sympathy. “Come on, Fingal. Let’s get that last call made.”

  It only took a short while to reach the O’Hagans’ home, where Barry changed Kieran’s dressing. The old nail was beginning to separate and would soon fall off. Barry reassured Kieran and Ethel, asked Kieran to drop into the surgery early the next week, and then nodded to O’Reilly to indicate they should leave.

  They walked in companionable silence along the narrow street to where the Rover waited. Barry was looking forward to a leisurely drive to the parish hall, a walk on the dunes with Arthur, and then a pint at the Mucky Duck.