An Irish Country Village

by Patrick Taylor

  “I had to give up French at school to concentrate on science so I could get into medical school.”

  “I think it is better you did, because you understand about Declan. Doctor O’Reilly said you have news?”

  He nodded. “I was trying to say that yesterday I went up to the Royal and saw the best nerve specialist in Ireland. Professor Greer.”

  “And what did he say, please?”

  Barry glanced at O’Reilly and saw how he had one eyebrow raised. “He couldn’t make any promises . . .”

  O’Reilly nodded. Once.

  “But he’ll see Declan tomorrow. At six o’clock. I’ve arranged for the ambulance to come and collect you both to take you up to town.”

  “So quick? Ce n’est pas possible.”

  “It is, when the professor’s a friend of Doctor O’Reilly.”

  Barry heard a torrent of incomprehensible French. By her tone and inflection Mrs. Finnegan was thanking O’Reilly profusely. O’Reilly cleared his throat, and Barry was convinced that if O’Reilly’s complexion wasn’t already florid, there would be a hint of a blush on the man’s cheeks. “Now, now,” he said. “Doctor Laverty did all the work.”

  She turned to Barry and lowered her head. “Thank you, Doctor. Thank you very much.”

  “Mrs. Finnegan, I told you, Professor Greer didn’t make any promises.”

  “Je comprends, but we will be trying.” He saw her eyes shining, but she rubbed them with the back of one hand and stood erectly, shoulders back. “Now it is in the hands of le bon Dieu.”

  “It is,” said O’Reilly, “but the good Lord will be getting a little help from Professor Greer.”

  Mrs. Finnegan managed a tiny smile. “Vous êtes un homme très mauvais, Docteur O’Reilly.”

  “Och, sure, wicked’s not the half of it, and we promise you, don’t we, Doctor Laverty? If anyone can help Declan, it’s the Professor.”

  “It is,” said Barry, “and they told me you should take Mr. Finnegan’s pyjamas and sponge bag. He may have to stay in for a day or two.”

  “D’accord.”

  Barry watched the emotions warring on Mrs. Finnegan’s face: anxiety, sadness that she and her husband would have to be parted, relief that if he were admitted she’d have some respite from constantly nursing him.

  O’Reilly laid a big hand on her shoulder. “And don’t you go blaming yourself, Mélanie, because you’re feeling relieved that you may not have to look after Declan for a day or two. A break’ll do you a power of good. You’ve nothing to feel guilty about.”

  How had O’Reilly known she’d be feeling guilty as well as relieved? Barry hadn’t considered that aspect.

  “I’ll try not to,” she said.

  “Good,” said O’Reilly. “Professor Greer will give us a call to tell us what he thinks, and one of us’ll pop round to explain it to you.”

  “Merci.”

  “Now Doctor Laverty and I have to be going.” His face cracked into a grin. “You said I was mauvais?”

  She nodded.

  “You’re right. Wicked it is.” He spoke directly to Barry. “And there’s no rest for the wicked, is there, Doctor Laverty?”

  Barry sat in the passenger’s seat as O’Reilly hurled the Rover along the Bangor-to-Belfast road. He wound open the window so the fumes of O’Reilly’s pipe could escape.

  Barry thought about the visits they had completed in the housing estate. Both had been straightforward.

  One, a wheezing little boy, was known to O’Reilly. When Kinky had mentioned his name, O’Reilly knew that the mother was well enough used to her son’s asthma to know when to ask for the doctor to rush round straightaway to deal with a serious attack. And more importantly, she knew when not to panic.

  Barry had taken a quick history and listened to the child’s chest. Then he pulled his stethoscope from his ears. He could not have improved on the treatment regime his senior colleague had arranged. Once Barry had given the lad an injection of 1:1000 adrenaline, the wheezing as he inhaled had eased. By the time O’Reilly had explained to the mother that the tablets of isoprenaline sulphate, which she had been told to administer when an attack started, were not to be swallowed but put under the child’s tongue, the patient was out in the street kicking a soccer ball with his friends.

  The other visit had been what O’Reilly called a comfort call. As soon as Barry had met the octagenarian grandmother, he’d realised she was beyond medical help. The old soul was happily living in a world of her own. Convinced she was back at her convent school, she insisted on calling O’Reilly “Father,” and wouldn’t let them leave until Fingal had made the sign of the cross and chanted a benediction.

  Her daughter, Bridget, a woman in her sixties, had thanked him, but she had adamantly refused any suggestion that it might be time for Granny to be admitted to a long-term care unit. “Family’s family,” she’d stated.

  O’Reilly had nodded and told her that she should feel free to call anytime.

  “Sometimes,” he’d explained to Barry as they’d driven away, “it’s all we can do. Simply be available when they need us.”

  “She should be in a home, Fingal.”

  “Aye, indeed, but you heard her daughter, and as long as Bridget’s prepared to go on taking care of her mother, the least we can do is pop in when she asks us to. I like to think it helps a little.” It wasn’t the sentiments that had impressed Barry. It was the way O’Reilly accepted his obligations without the least suggestion that it was other than perfectly natural for him to do so.

  Just as natural as was O’Reilly’s ignoring yet another cyclist and slamming the big car around a sharp curve with two wheels on the grass verge.

  “Right,” said O’Reilly, slowing down. “Here we are.” He parked outside the red-brick, single-storey gate lodge of the marquis’ estate.

  Barry stepped onto the gravel. The high ornate wrought-iron gates were open, and at the head of a long drive he could see the Georgian portico of the Big House. A half-timbered shooting brake was parked outside the lodge. He assumed it would belong to the groundskeeper.

  O’Reilly hammered on the door. “Anybody home?”

  To Barry’s surprise the door was opened by the marquis himself. “Ah, O’Reilly and young Laverty.” Dark brown eyes smiled from under a thatch of ill-trimmed iron-grey hair. “You’ve come to see Sonny?”

  “Aye,” said O’Reilly. “How is he, sir?”

  “Come in and see for yourselves.”

  Barry followed the two men along a short, parquet-floored hall, where the heads of two stuffed and mounted roe deer gazed balefully down from an oak-panelled wall. He went in through an open doorway into a small, tidy sitting room. Mullioned windows gave a view past huge elms to a manicured sweep of lawn where several evergreens had been shaped and tonsured by the topiarist’s art.

  Sonny, dressed in a woollen cardigan over a white shirt, and neatly creased black pants that fell to a pair of tartan carpet slippers, had been sitting on an overstuffed armchair but was in the act of rising to greet O’Reilly. A brass-topped table, the metal intricately filigreed in the Indian style, stood in front of the chair. The chessboard on the table bore the irregularly placed chessmen of a game in progress. “Doctor O’Reilly,” Sonny said. “What a pleasant surprise.”

  “Should I leave you alone with your patient, Doctors?” the marquis enquired.

  “Not at all,” said O’Reilly. “And sit you down, Sonny.” He moved beside Sonny’s chair, and as soon as the old man was seated he took his pulse.

  From where he stood beside the marquis, Barry could see that Sonny’s eyes were bright and he had no difficulty breathing, although there was a hint of grey above his cheekbones. That wasn’t surprising. Even before he’d been taken seriously ill, the man had suffered from a minor degree of chronic heart failure but O’Reilly had it well controlled with digitalis and a diuretic.

  “Your ticker’s going away like a well-tuned steam engine, Sonny,” O’Reilly said, releasing his wrist
. “Do you still have the heart pills we gave you?”

  “Yes, Doctor.”

  “Keep on taking them. You’ve a big day coming on Saturday.” He turned to the marquis. “Will you be arranging for Sonny to get to the church, sir?”

  The marquis smiled. “I’m the best man. I’ll run him there in the Rolls.”

  Sonny coughed, but Barry’s concern that the noise might be a symptom vanished when he realized Sonny was only trying to attract O’Reilly’s attention. “Could I ask you for a favour, Doctor O’Reilly?”

  “Fire away.”

  “Maggie’s too shy to ask you herself.”

  Barry had some difficulty imagining that Maggie MacCorkle could be shy.

  “Her da’s dead a long time and she wants everything done properly. She wanted me to ask you . . . would you walk her up the aisle and give her away?”

  “Me?” O’Reilly’s grin was vast. “I’d be delighted.” He glanced sideways at Barry, who heard the wicked edge to his senior colleague’s voice when he asked, “Would she like Doctor Laverty here to be her page boy?”

  Sonny, and the marquis joined O’Reilly’s laughter. Barry felt a smile start and realized that laughing at himself wasn’t such a bad thing. “I will . . . if that’s what she wants.”

  “Good lad,” said O’Reilly.

  Sonny shook his head. “That won’t be necessary, sir, but thank you for offering.”

  “I think,” said the marquis, “all this talk of weddings calls for a glass of sherry.” He moved to a sideboard. “Please be seated, gentlemen.”

  “I don’t suppose you’d have a drop of John Jameson’s, Your Lordship?” O’Reilly asked, moving the table and the chess set aside and lowering himself onto a small sofa.

  “Naturally, Fingal, and . . . I suppose it’s all right for Sonny to have something?”

  “Indeed,” said O’Reilly, accepting his glass but refusing the marquis’ offer of water.

  Barry sat beside O’Reilly and took his sherry.

  The marquis remained standing. “To the happy couple.” He raised his drink.

  “That’s a grand drop,” said O’Reilly, swallowing half the whiskey in the glass. “Better than the stuff Willy pours at the Duck.”

  As Barry sipped he heard the marquis say, “The Duck? I’ve been hearing rumours about the Black Swan. Something about a takeover bid by that man Bishop.”

  O’Reilly nodded. “The lease runs out soon, and Bertie Bishop is the landlord. He’s refusing to renew and wants to turn the ould Duck into a tourist trap. Rip out the old stuff and stick in tons of chrome and plastic.”

  “Good Lord. That’s horrible.” Barry saw the marquis frown. “Can’t we stop him?”

  “I’ve tried,” O’Reilly said, “but the man has a skin as thick as a rhinoceros. He’ll not listen to reason. He owns the property the Duck’s built on. The only thing that would stop Bertie Bishop would be some hurdle he can’t jump.”

  For a second Barry had a picture of a jockey, sans horse, vanishing over the first jump at the Ballybucklebo races—and O’Reilly’s horse soaring over a fence—the wrong fence. He heard Sonny cough again.

  “Excuse me, Your Lordship . . .”

  “Yes, Sonny?”

  “You remember, sir, we were discussing Norman land titles in Ireland?”

  “I do indeed.”

  Sonny nodded. “If I recall correctly, you told me that when John de Courcy conquered Ulster for Henry the Second in eleven seventy-seven, one of his knights, your ancestor, was granted all the rights to the townland of Ballybucklebo.”

  “True. But we’ve had to sell off a great deal. It costs rather a lot to keep the estate running. That’s how the land the Duck was built on was lost ninety-nine years ago.” He frowned. “I’d have to consult the family papers, but I’ve no doubt what Doctor O’Reilly says is true. Somehow Bishop’s been able to buy the title from the descendants of the original purchasers. He can do what he likes when it comes to renewing or not renewing Willy Dunleavy’s lease.”

  Barry saw O’Reilly fiddling with one of the chess pieces. “Mrs. Kincaid says Mrs. Bishop told her that Bertie’s keeping mum about something to do with a stream.”

  “Is he, by Jove?” The marquis began to smile. “A stream?”

  Sonny stood, almost spilling his sherry. “I’ll bet your family didn’t sell the salmon rights, sir.”

  Barry listened attentively. Salmon rights?

  “Indeed not. That would have been unthinkable.”

  “And I know,” said Sonny, “because I found out about it when I was looking into the history of the village, that a small branch of the Bucklebo River had to be roofed over in a culvert because it flowed, indeed still flows, under the crossroads and . . .”

  “Under the Duck? Hah.” O’Reilly sank the rest of his whiskey in one swallow. “Ha, bloody ha.” He was grinning. “And the fish still use it to come inland and spawn?”

  “Oh, yes,” said Sonny.

  “I’m sorry,” Barry said, “but I don’t understand.”

  “It means, Doctor Laverty,” the marquis said levelly, “that when my forebears sold the property, the property Bishop now owns, the deed would carry a codicil that no structural alterations could be made to any buildings there if they might interfere with the salmon run. At least not without our family’s permission. The Normans were very particular about fishing rights.”

  “So Councillor Bishop can’t go ahead with his plans for the Duck unless you allow him to, Your Lordship?”

  “I’m sure gutting the place would qualify as structural alterations.” The marquis frowned. “I suppose he could get his lawyer to challenge me on that point, but it would be tied up in the courts for years.”

  Barry shuddered. He didn’t like to be reminded of lawyers.

  “Would you fight him, Your Lordship?” O’Reilly asked.

  “Bishop? He’s a horrid man. Of course I’d like to fight him, but the legal costs would be enormous.”

  Barry saw O’Reilly bend to the chessboard, examine the pieces, and glance back at the marquis. “But legally, legally, if he tries to bugger about with the old Duck, you could threaten to stop him?” O’Reilly moved a white castle. “And if he insists on going to court . . .”—he moved a black bishop to counter the castle—“Bishop’s astute enough to work out for himself how much it would cost him to fight. He’d be crippled financially.”

  “You’re right. All I need to do is threaten to go to court.” The marquis’ grin was almost as broad as O’Reilly’s, who lifted a white knight and knocked the black bishop off the board.

  “And that, I think is checkmate,” said O’Reilly, pointing at the black king.

  “I do believe you’re right, Fingal,” the marquis said. “Here,” he said, stretching out his hand, “your glass is empty. Let me refill it.”

  O’Reilly shook his head. “No, thank you, sir. Doctor Laverty and I have to drop in at the Duck on our way home . . . have a word with Willy . . . and I’d not be surprised if he’ll want us to have a wee half-un to help him celebrate. And then . . .” He looked straight at Barry. “And then the pair of us will have to be getting on home. We’ve a few phone calls to make.”

  The World Turned Upside Down

  The Duck’s batwing doors creaked shut behind Barry. He had to wait until his eyes became accustomed to the dim light. There was none of the usual hum of conversation. The place sounded deserted. He saw two figures standing at the bar: Archie Auchinleck and a tall, suntanned young man in a khaki uniform with a corporal’s double stripes on the sleeves. Barry guessed the soldier was Archie’s son.

  “Evening, Doctors,” Willy said from behind the bar. “What’ll it . . . ?”

  “Whiskey,” O’Reilly called. “And Barry?”

  “Sherry, please.” He’d already had one with Sonny and the marquis.

  “Good lad. Never mix the grape and the grain. Go and have a seat.”

  Barry went to the nearest table and waited as O’Reilly strode
to the bar, turned sideways, and leant on one elbow. “Evening, Archie. Evening, Rory. Home on leave? Nice to see you.”

  “I got home last night. It’s great to be back, Doc,” Rory said. He smiled and lifted his straight pint glass of Guinness. “You can’t get a drop like this in Cyprus.”

  “Nor in the whole bloody Med. At least you couldn’t when I was there,” said O’Reilly. “How long are you home for?”

  “Two weeks, sir.”

  “Make sure your son makes the most of it,” O’Reilly said to Archie. “Willy, give young Rory and his da a pint on me.”

  “Thanks a lot, Doctor O’Reilly,” Archie said.

  O’Reilly ignored the thanks. “How’s the back, Archie?”

  Barry saw the milkman’s face split into a great smile. “Right as rain. Them pills was cracker, so they were.”

  “Good,” said O’Reilly, with a glance at Barry. “And I’m sure it doesn’t hurt to have your young fellah home for a while either.”

  He’s at it again, Barry thought. The man’s never really off duty. Not even in the pub.

  O’Reilly clapped the soldier on the back. “Have you no mufti, Rory? I would’ve thought you’d want to get out of uniform and into civvies.”

  “I will, sir, but . . .” Barry saw the look of affection pass between son and father. “Da asked me to wear it tonight. I think he wants to show me off, like.”

  “Just right,” said O’Reilly. “I’d be proud of you too. Pity there’s only me and Doctor Laverty and Willy to see.” O’Reilly turned back to the bar. “Jesus, Willy, are you distilling that whiskey?”

  “Sorry, Doctor.” Two glasses were set on the bar. O’Reilly paid and took his change. “Business still slack, Willy?”

  “It picked up a wee bit in the last day or so,” Willy said, “and come nine o’clock the place’ll be bustin’. The Rooftop Rangers Regiment’ll be in, so it will.”

  “Who?”

  Willy smiled. “That’s what I call all the lads from the Highlanders who go straight to Sonny’s after work. They don’t even go home for their supper. Donal Donnelly has them hard at it, and not just the bandsmen. Just about every able-bodied man in the village wanted to help when the word got out. And the womenfolk take them out loads of tea and pieces so they can eat on the job.”