An Irish Country Practice Read online

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  To Carolyn Bateman to celebrate twenty years of publishing together, with my heartfelt thanks and admiration

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I would like to thank a large number of people, some of whom have worked with me from the beginning and without whose unstinting help and encouragement I could not have written this series. They are:

  In North America

  Simon Hally, Carolyn Bateman, Tom Doherty, Paul Stevens, Kristin Sevick, Irene Gallo, Gregory Manchess, Patty Garcia, Alexis Saarela, and Chistina MacDonald, all of whom have contributed enormously to the literary and technical aspects of bringing the work from rough draft to bookshelf.

  Natalia Aponte and Victoria Lea, my literary agents.

  Don Kalancha, Joe Maier, and Michael Tadman, who keep me right in contractual matters.

  In the United Kingdom and Ireland

  Jessica and Rosie Buchman, my foreign rights agents.

  The librarians of the Royal College of Physicians of Ireland, the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland, and The Rotunda Hospital and her staff.

  For this work only

  My friends and colleagues who contributed special expertise in the writing of this work are highlighted in the author’s note.

  To you all, Doctor Fingal Flahertie O’Reilly MB, DSC, and I tender our most heartfelt gratitude and thanks.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  It doesn’t seem like a year since I was adding an author’s note to the final draft of book eleven, An Irish Country Love Story, but it is, almost to the day. And now it’s that time again because An Irish Country Practice is ready to go to the publisher and some explanation is required of events between these covers.

  I wish to thank those who helped get my facts right, name the real people who play supporting roles, and finally pay tribute to a remarkable man, a classmate, who has allowed me to base one character on his young life.

  The work opens with the televised running of the Grand National horse race in 1967. I have tried to reproduce some of the commentators’ words verbatim as taken from archival film.

  In this novel, technical accuracy could not have been achieved without a great deal of help freely given.

  On matters non-medical, I was greatly assisted by Sergeant Mike Bradshaw, late of the Royal Ulster Constabulary, who advised me on the correct arrest procedure by an officer of that force and about the workings of the magistrate’s court in Northern Ireland in the late 1960s.

  Unfortunately, enquiries to the two Ulster law faculties were not answered, so if some of the other legal matters described here are inaccurate in any way, the fault is mine despite extensive perusal of the relevant acts of Parliament by my wife. Dorothy was a senior civil servant in the Northern Ireland legislative branch.

  I must thank many in health care. Dana Doheny of that part of the Porphyria Consortium at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City who put me in touch with Dr. Manisha Balwani, also at Mount Sinai, who explained the subtleties of that condition. Drs. Fred Alexander and Jimmy Sloan, contemporaries at Queen’s University Belfast, fine pathologists and friends, corrected my misconceptions about oat cell lung cancer. Dr. Tom Baskett, retired professor of obstetrics and gynaecology, a classmate and my friend of longest standing, along with his wife, Yvette, who had been a nursing sister at Belfast’s Royal Victoria Hospital, reminded a failing memory about the physical layout of the wards of that institution.

  For the purposes of the story, I have altered by three years the timing of the opening of the university’s Department of General Practice at Queen’s, but I have been aided in understanding its initial workings by Dr. Lewis Miller, a classmate and friend and one of the first graduates of that programme and later one of its faculty. More details were added by Professor Margaret Cupples, currently of the department. Thank you both and forgive me, Lewis, for stealing your name for a central actor in this work.

  As an aside, there are a lot of characters in twelve novels. It helps me to remember them if I give them names of people I have known. I was at school with a Guffer, and a Dapper Frew, who you will meet on these pages. Nicknames were nearly universal back then. I was known as “Spud,” a moniker usually reserved for Murphys. Guffer and Dapper here are fictional, and with one exception that will be described later I do not use my friends in their entirety as characters. There is only one thing worse than using a friend in a novel—and that is not using a friend. I think Oscar Wilde might have said that.

  There are on these pages real people who did exist. Joe Togneri taught me how to sail. He was a remarkable man who bore his kyphoscoliosis (humped back) with courage and dignity. John Crosslé of Holywood designed and built the famous Crosslé Special Formula Ford racing car. The Duffy Family Circus is still in operation.

  The following were senior consultants when I was a student. They are of course used fictionally, but they all taught me a very great deal. Dr. Teddy MacIlrath, radiology; Mister John Bingham, thoracic surgery; Dr. John Millar, neurology; John Henry Biggart, later Sir John, dean of the faculty. I did not know Professor George Irwin, the first head of the Department of General Practice, who was appointed after I had emigrated. The details of their distinguished careers can all be found in The Royal Victoria Hospital Belfast: A History 1797–1997 by Professor Richard Clark, who was also one of my seniors and who gives an anaesthetic in chapter 31.

  The rest of the characters inhabiting these pages are figments of my imagination, except Dr. Connor Nelson. His real name is Colin Nelson but, to avoid confusion with Colin Brown, I changed the name. Colin Nelson and I were in the class that started in 1958 at Queen’s. He was a reserved young man, older than the rest of us, and with a pronounced limp, the result of childhood poliomyelitis. We graduated together in 1964. I specialised in gynaecology, he in ophthalmology. We both immigrated to Canada, but to different sides of the country and, apart from meeting at occasional class reunions in Belfast, I am sorry to say lost touch until last year when I discovered that, like me, he had retired from practice and was living a short drive and ferry ride from us.

  He was immediately invited over, and while he was here he asked shyly if I would mind reading something he had written? The upshot was that I was privileged to be shown his autobiography, written for him and his family. I was humbled by his struggle to become a doctor. I have told his story in this work with his full permission and as a tribute to his courage.

  And that’s it. Dr. Fingal O’Reilly and I tender our most sincere gratitude to all who helped. I trust the real people will forgive us and hope Colin, as I hope you the reader, will enjoy these pages.

  PATRICK TAYLOR


  Saltspring Island

  British Columbia

  Canada

  June 2016

  1

  Pulling in One’s Horse as He Is Leaping

  Fingal Flahertie O’Reilly, Doctor Fingal Flahertie O’Reilly, took the stairs two at a time, a tin of Erinmore Flake in one hand, and went straight into the upstairs lounge at Number One Main to pour himself a Jameson. As he unscrewed the cap from the bottle, the extension phone rang. “I’m home from the tobacconist, Kitty,” he yelled in his best quarterdeck voice. “I’ll answer it.”

  “All right, but hurry, Fingal, the race is about to begin,” came her voice from the television room as O’Reilly answered the phone.

  “Finn?”

  “Lars. You’re back.”

  “Yes, Myrna and I got home from Villefranche last Saturday. We had a wonderful time. Sorry I haven’t called sooner but it’s been—excuse me—” O’Reilly heard a mighty sneeze through the phone line. “Sorry about that. A touch of hay fever.”

  “Hay fever in April?” O’Reilly laughed.

  “It’s been bedlam around here, with … with … work mostly. Look, I know it’s short notice, but I wonder, can you and Kitty pop down to Portaferry tomorrow for lunch? There’s something I need to discuss with you both and I’d rather not do it over the phone.”

  “Nothing serious, I hope.” Was the usually reticent Lars, Fingal’s elder brother, having trouble with his romance with Lady Myrna Ferguson, the Marquis of Ballybucklebo’s widowed sister? She and Lars had been in his summer house in France for a fortnight.

  “No, no, nothing serious. We’re both fine. It’s just … I’ll explain tomorrow. Can you come?”

  “I’ll ask Kitty,” O’Reilly said, “phone you back. The Grand National’s about to run and I’ve a houseful of guests. But I’m pretty sure we’re free.”

  “Fine.” The phone went dead. O’Reilly shook his head, replaced the receiver, and returned to the sideboard to finish pouring his drink. Grasping his glass, he went down to a lower landing where a photograph of his old battleship, HMS Warspite, hung on one wall and went into the room. “I’m back,” he announced to the little group seated in a semicircle around the Phillips black-and-white and plunked himself down between Kitty and Barry Laverty. “Who was on the phone?” she asked.

  “Lars. He’s home. They had a wonderful time and he’d like us down for lunch tomorrow.”

  “Lovely. I can’t wait to hear all about it,” she said.

  “Great,” O’Reilly said. “I’ll let him know after the race.” He peered at the screen and then at his watch. “Should be starting soon.” And when it’s over, he thought, with a twenty-pound bet to win on the favourite, Honey End, at odds of fifteen to two, my return should be 170 pounds. More than enough for the new record player he coveted. Sure the sound was good from his old Pye Black Box. But ever since he’d heard Mozart’s Symphony No. 39 in E-flat major on one of the new long-playing recordings at Solly Lipsitz’s Belfast music shop, O’Reilly had wanted to own a stereo player. They were not cheap, but he was going to get one courtesy of Honey End.

  He grinned and rubbed his hands. All the touts and tipsters were extolling the virtues of the animal. It seemed like such a sure thing, he hadn’t even bothered investing another twenty quid in case the horse only placed.

  On-screen was the ever-suave Peter O’Sullevan, a BBC commentator born in Kerry but raised in England. “Welcome on this Saturday, April the eighth, 1967, to Aintree Racecourse and the one hundred and twenty-first running, here on Merseyside just outside Liverpool, of the famous Grand National steeplechase, a race of four miles, two furlongs, and seventy-four yards. In all, the horses must clear thirty obstacles before racing for the finish line. Quite the test of endurance for horse and jockey.”

  “It is that.” O’Reilly sipped his Jameson and surveyed his friends. O’Reilly’s housekeeper, Kinky Auchinleck, sat next to her second husband, Archie, at the left end of the semicircle. O’Reilly knew how much she enjoyed watching horse racing, and particularly the annual running of the National. He’d invited the Auchinlecks round. “So, Kinky,” he said, beaming at her, “are you two having a flutter?”

  “We are, so.” Her dark eyes looked serious as she patted her silver chignon and stroked O’Reilly’s white cat, Lady Macbeth, who was curled up on Kinky’s lap. “There’s a nice little black Irish gelding called Foinavon. We have four pounds on the animal to win at a hundred to one.” Her County Cork brogue was as soft and melodious as when she had left her home in Ring thirty-eight years ago to come north. She sipped an orange squash.

  Archie, a usually reserved man, smiled and nodded, holding a glass of Harp lager in both hands.

  O’Reilly made a mental note to find some pretence to add the money she surely was going to lose to her next pay packet. It was a lot of money for a milkman and his wife. O’Reilly’d not miss it from the profit he was going to make. “And you, Nonie?”

  Doctor Nonie Stevenson, the practice’s new assistant, sat beside Archie. She’d been on call and busy last night, not rising from her attic bedroom until noon. She’d cooked herself a late breakfast and happily accepted an invitation to stay and watch the race. She had no plans, she’d told him, until that evening, when she and her new boyfriend were going to see The Sand Pebbles at Belfast’s Hippodrome. She held her favourite tipple, what she called a “Cuba Libre.” O’Reilly himself had little time for the fashionable rum and Coke mixes or Babychams favoured by modern young women, but he was a considerate host and kept his sideboard well stocked.

  She grinned at him. “Four bob each way on Red Alligator at thirty to one.”

  “Last of the big spenders, Nonie?” Barry asked, and laughed.

  She smiled at him. “Trying to save a bit for my mum’s fiftieth birthday present. I’ll be happy to collect at those odds if my horse comes first, second, or even third … It’ll help, but I can afford to lose four shillings if it doesn’t.”

  “Fair play to you, Nonie,” O’Reilly said. Her mum’s fiftieth? Damn it all, he’d be fifty-seven in October. Where had the years gone? He shook his head. “I’m sorry you’re only going to place. Nothing can beat Honey End.” He sipped his whiskey and glanced at Kitty.

  Kitty O’Reilly née O’Hallorhan sat between Nonie and O’Reilly. Her eyes, a soft grey flecked with amber, shone when she said, “Fingal’s got twenty quid on the favourite. I haven’t made up my mind where I’d like him to take me for a holiday yet, but it’ll be somewhere warm and sunny.”

  O’Reilly spluttered on his whiskey. A few drops got into the back of his nose and his sneeze must have been heard in Carrickfergus on the far shore of Belfast Lough.

  Lady Macbeth let out a yowl like a banshee with her arm caught in a combine harvester and, tail fluffed up, fled from the room. He hauled out a red-spotted hanky and honked into it before saying, “Will it, by God? I actually had some thoughts about replacing my record player, but I’m sure we can agree on a good use for my winnings.”

  He saw Kinky’s almost imperceptible shake of her head. He knew the Corkwoman was fey, but she always said her ma had told her the gift was never to be used for personal gain, and Kinky had never done so. Mind you, she had a brother-in-law, Malachy Aherne, whose last name in Irish, Echtigerna, meant “lord of the horses,” and she always swore she’d learnt from him how to pick winners. Could she be right today? Nah. Honey End was a sure thing. He’d done his research about the race. “Honey End’s a stallion out of Fair Donation by Honeyway and they’ve pedigrees going back to the 1880s. Her jockey, Josh Gifford, has been National Hunt champion twice already and he’s only twenty-six. I wish your horse good luck, Kinky, but I think mine’s going to give yours a run for your money.”

  “I know what you’re thinking, Doctor dear, that three jockeys turned down the chance to ride Foinavon and that the owner, Mister Cyril Watkins, has so little faith in his own horse he’s not even at the course today, so. But isn’t it just the fun of watching the race and cheer
ing on your horse?”

  “It is indeed, Kinky. Best of luck.”

  She smiled and turned back to the television, where Peter O’Sullevan was saying, “And now over to Michael O’Hehir. He and his camera crew will be covering the track between Becher’s Brook and Valentine’s. Michael?”

  O’Hehir, a Dublin man with a thick brogue, said, “Thank you, Peter. Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to Aintree and the famous, or should I say infamous, Becher’s Brook, named for Captain Becher, who fell here during the first-ever Grand National in 1839 and took shelter in the water from the other horses.”

  Behind him the camera panned across an eight-foot-wide brook with the fence set three feet back from the water.

  “This is a particularly difficult jump because the landing area is three feet lower than the takeoff.”

  Sue Nolan, Barry Laverty’s fiancée, sat to Barry’s right, cradling a small sherry. “More horses have fallen at that fence than any other two put together. I love horses, you all know that, and I’m no protester, but I wish the racecourse owners would make that jump simpler.”

  “It had better not make my pick, Kirtle Lad, go down,” Barry said. “I’ve a pound on the horse, and if it wins you and I are going for a slap-up dinner at the Culloden, Sue.”

  “Yum,” she said, and winked at him as he took a sip of his white lemonade. He was on call today and ready to leave if the phone rang.

  “What about you, Ronald?” said O’Reilly. Doctor Ronald Hercules Fitzpatrick, a classmate from medical school in the ’30s, was a GP in the Kinnegar and now a member of the combined on-call rota. He was nursing a shandy. His prominent Adam’s apple bobbed as he spoke. “I don’t usually bet,” he said, and blushed. “At one time in my younger days, I managed to run up a considerable debt on horses and dogs.”

  O’Reilly sat back in his chair. “You, Ronald? A gambling man? I had no idea.”