An Irish Country Village Read online

  Barry shrugged. “Apart from the Bishops, well enough. And thanks for letting me do the work.”

  O’Reilly rose. “It should have you persuaded that not all the locals think you’re Vlad the Impaler.”

  Barry laughed. “Who in God’s name was he?”

  “The inspiration for Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and him a good Dublin man.”

  “Vlad the Impaler?”

  “No, you goat, Stoker. The Vlad fellah. He was nearly as nasty a piece of work as Bertie Bishop. Mind you, fair play to Bertie, he hasn’t started skewering peasants on spikes . . . at least, not yet.”

  Barry shuddered. “Nice subject just before lunch.”

  “You’re right.” O’Reilly clapped Barry on the shoulder. “Come on. Lunch. I’m famished. And we’ll see what Kinky has in store for us for home visits this afternoon.”

  “We promised to call in on Mrs. McVeigh.”

  “We did indeed. Good on you for remembering.” O’Reilly strode to the door. “And I think if there’s not too many more calls to make, the pair of us should nip into the Duck on our way home.”

  “Why?” As if Barry didn’t know. Fingal Flahertie O’Reilly never needed an excuse to drop in for a quick pint.

  “Because . . . ,” said O’Reilly, tapping the pipe mouthpiece against his lower teeth, “because Helen said Willy’s worried that someone’s after his place and Buggerlugs Bertie Bishop said something about sorting things out about the Black Swan.”

  “Ah,” said Barry.

  “Indeed,” said O’Reilly. “I think ‘something is rotten in the state of Denmark.’ ”

  Before Barry could answer, “Hamlet,” O’Reilly had gone through to the hall, and Barry could hear him yelling, “Lunch, please, Kinky.”

  The Place Had an

  Ancient Permanence

  “Here you are now, Doctors.” Mrs. Kinkaid set a tureen in the centre of the table. She turned to leave. “I’ll be back in a shmall little minute with the bread and cheese, so.”

  O’Reilly lifted the lid, and a rising cloud of steam momentarily blocked Barry’s view of a rich red soup, a whorl of white cream and sprinkles of parsley on its surface.

  “Gimme your plate,” said O’Reilly. Then taking Barry’s plate, he ladled the soup. The ladle made a clinking sound against the dish’s bottom. “Here.” He passed it to Barry, who lifted a spoonful to his lips. This was none of the Heinz canned stuff. The flavour of tomatoes was subtly complimented by a hint of ham and a soupçon of celery.

  Kinky reappeared and placed a carving board bearing a loaf of wheaten bread, brown and nuggety, and a wedge of crumbly Cheshire cheese beside the tureen. She stood, arms folded, waiting. “Well?”

  Barry didn’t hesitate. “It’s wonderful, Kinky.” He glanced at O’Reilly, who seemed to be unimpressed. “Is it your own recipe?” Barry asked.

  “It is, so. There was a great hambone left over from the party for the making of the stock, and Hughey’s tomatoes have come on a treat. He gave me a wheen of them on Saturday.”

  “Hughey?” Barry had seen a Hughey recently. “The man with the riveters’ deafness? Married to a Doreen?”

  “The very fellah. Nice couple.”

  “Well, I’ll tell you, Kinky,” Barry said, carving a slice of wheaten bread for himself, “if there was an Olympic event for it, you could make soup for Ireland.” He saw her smile.

  He looked at O’Reilly, who was spooning soup into himself and taking great bites from a slice of bread, butter, and cheese, liberally scattering crumbs of Cheshire on the table. Barry expected him to have words of praise for Kinky, but O’Reilly said nothing. He didn’t look at all content.

  Mrs. Kincaid put a hand on her hip. “It’s not your usual big lunch, Doctor O’Reilly dear, but . . .”—she glanced at his stomach—“a little moderation in all things is good for a man, and you’re getting a belly on you like a poisoned pup.”

  O’Reilly sighed and said, “I suppose you’re right, Kinky.”

  “I am,” she said. “Now brush up those cheese crumbs, and don’t you get your tie in the soup.”

  Before O’Reilly could answer, a white shape leapt onto the tabletop and made a beeline for the butter dish.

  Mrs. Kinkaid stretched out one red hand, grabbed Lady Macbeth, tucked her under her arm like a rugby player carrying the ball, and tickled the cat under its chin. “Now, now, Your Ladyship. Keep your nose out of what doesn’t concern you. Lord, Jesus,” she said, “but she’s a terrible divil for anything from the dairy. I’ll take her away. Now you two enjoy your soup and bread and cheese.” The last remark was directed at O’Reilly, who meekly said, “I will.”

  “Thanks, Kinky,” Barry said, savouring the crunchiness of the crust of the bread, and smiling at how O’Reilly let his housekeeper mother him. The man needs a wife, Barry thought, but kept the idea very much to himself.

  “I’ve nothing for you for after your lunch. Nobody phoned so you can have the afternoon off,” she said. “A bit of quiet’ll do you both a power of good.”

  O’Reilly shook his head. “We’ve to go see Myrtle MacVeigh,” he said. “And it’s a grand day for a drive, so when we’re done there I think we’ll run on down to Bangor and see how Sonny’s getting along. We’ll be a bit late for supper.”

  “Oh?” said Barry.

  “Do you not remember? I want to drop in at the Duck.”

  Barry sat in the passenger seat. He was disappointed that Myrtle MacVeigh had not seemed to be very far along the road to recovery, although the burning when she urinated was gone and she’d been pleased about that. He’d had to agree with O’Reilly when he’d told Myrtle that Rome wasn’t built in a day, and she’d have to be patient and wait for the new antibiotics to take effect. So, Barry realized, would he.

  O’Reilly was driving at less than his usual frenetic pace because even he was cautious enough not to try to overtake the large private coach wending its way along the narrow back road to Bangor.

  “Bloody American tourists,” he grumbled. “Coming over here by the coach load to lil’ ol’ Ireland to find their roots, taking up half the bloody road and giving the local shopkeepers an excuse to jack up their prices.”

  There was some truth to what O’Reilly said. Ever since the fifties, as air travel became more accessible, increasing numbers of Americans had been coming to Ireland. No wonder. Half their eastern seaboard had been populated by the Irish. Barry knew only too well how masses of tenant farmers and their families, who’d been evicted during the Great Hunger, the potato famine of the 1840s, had fled on the coffin ships to a new life; what had started as a trickle had turned into a flood. Weren’t Seamus and Maureen Galvin heading off soon to join her brother in California? Four of Barry’s classmates had left for the States as soon as they had finished their houseman’s year. The job prospects and the money were much better there.

  Barry stared out the window at a field of ripening barley where the breeze sent ripples through the golden, bearded grain, making dull patches here and there. The bowed heads reflected less sunlight than their erect companions.

  A single wood pigeon swooped low over the crop before climbing to land on top of one of the massive elms that grew behind the drystone walls flanking the road. The boughs touched the trees opposite, roofing the thoroughfare and filtering light through to the tarmac in dappled golden ponds and silent, dark pools.

  Moss and jack-by-the-hedge clung to the chinks between the wall stones. Brambles, heavy with blackberries, thrust their thorny branches over the wall and scratched the car as it passed.

  The car moved from the wood into full sunshine. Barry wound down his window and inhaled a mixture of the scents of mown hay, fertilizer, and exhaust fumes from the coach ahead. He could hear its engine note, deeper than the Rover’s, along with the lowing of cattle from a nearby pasture, and the harsh voice of a cock pheasant in the wood now behind them.

  Fair play to the Americans, he thought, for wanting to see the place where their forebears had come
from. He knew he’d never have to make such a pilgrimage. Nothing would make him leave Ulster. Wasn’t it half the reason he’d taken the job in Ballybucklebo in the first place? And yet—what if Patricia won that scholarship?

  “Thank Christ for that.” O’Reilly changed down and screeched past the coach, which had pulled into a convenient lay-by. The sudden acceleration interrupted Barry’s thoughts, and bloody nearly broke his neck. He put a hand behind his head.

  The fields gave way to where the fringes of the town of Bangor began to encroach on the farmland. Rows of semidetached chalet bungalows, their red brick walls too new to have been weathered by the rains, stood in serried ranks where Barry remembered fields. He and a boyhood friend had spent a dreamy evening in one of the pastures waiting for a family of badgers to leave their sett.

  The new estates seemed to have been grafted uncomfortably onto the old Bangor he’d grown up in. But when O’Reilly was forced by the town traffic to slow down and the car wound its way past the old landmarks, Barry began to feel himself at home. Bangor Abbey, built on the sixth-century site of Saint Comgall’s Monastery, sent its narrow spire towards heaven at the corner of Upper Main Street. The Bank of Ireland building, built in 1934, still stood facing the junction between Hamilton Road and Lower Main Street, which ran down a hill past shops and three pubs to Quay Street. The dumpy McKee Clock, built of stolid sandstone blocks, stood where it always had, at the bottom of High Street, close to the three piers and the circular Customs House built in 1637 at the corner of Victoria Road.

  He felt a deep sense of belonging here and could understand why the Americans came. Nothing in their bustling, striving, brand-new country could ever attain the permanence of a place like Bangor—or Ballybucklebo. If they were seeking their roots, they’d find them, deep and firmly anchored.

  O’Reilly, fidgeting in his seat as the car crept along, finally turned into the drive of a large and graceful two-storey building. Barry recognized the dormer windows and high, tiled, catslide roofs, remembering when it had been an exclusive semidetached residence. A sign outside now read: Bangor Convalescent Home.

  “Come on,” said O’Reilly, getting out of the car.

  Barry followed, up a broad flight of steps, through glass doors, and into a narrow linoleum-floored hall. The light was poor, his ears were assailed by a Mantovani waltz blaring from overhead speakers, and his nose was assaulted by the smell of boiled cabbage as it wrestled with the stink of disinfectant—and lost the bout.

  O’Reilly stood in front of a semicircular desk. Behind it, a bored receptionist whose makeup, Barry thought, must have been applied with a bricklayer’s trowel, filed her nails while indulging in a conversation with a young man in a grubby white uniform. He was probably some kind of orderly. A Harlequin romance lay open, spine up, on the desk.

  “Ahem.” O’Reilly leant over the desk.

  The receptionist barely acknowledged his presence.

  “Ahem.” O’Reilly’s throat clearing reminded Barry of the sound of a hungry bull mastiff.

  The young woman turned her back.

  Barry noticed a small bell on top of the counter, the kind with a button on top of a metal half sphere. O’Reilly’s great fist smashed onto the button. The bell jangled so loudly Barry thought the members of the Bangor fire brigade would be sent rushing to their fire engine. He saw the orderly jump. Then the young woman turned slowly in her chair, looked at O’Reilly, and curled her lip. She pointed to a sign on the desktop. “Can youse not read? Visiting hours is over.”

  O’Reilly’s voice was low, sinister. “I can read.”

  “So? It’s after hours, so it is.” She started to turn away.

  “I can read the sign, and I can read your badge, Miss . . . Weir.” His nose tip was alabaster.

  “Aren’t you the clever one?” she said over her shoulder.

  “No.” O’Reilly stood four square, both fists on the desktop. “Not really.” His next words would have been audible on the foredeck of the old Warspite if they had been uttered on her bridge. “But I am Doctor O’Reilly. I am entitled to see any of my patients in this miserable apology for a nursing home at any hour, day or night . . .” Barry noticed a barometer hanging on a drab painted wall behind the reception desk and imagined it was recording a severe increase in atmospheric pressure. “And, I am quite willing to report to the matron what a miserable, impertinent, slatternly, idle apology for a human being you are, Miss Weir.”

  “Oh, Jesus,” she said, standing. “Who’s it you’d like to see, sir?”

  “Sonny Houston . . .”

  She started to flick through the pages of a ledger.

  “Although as I suspect that not having the least interest in the inmates is part of your job description, you’ll have some difficulty finding him.”

  The orderly interrupted. “He’s the old recovering heart failure and pneumonia in Two-C.”

  “No,” said O’Reilly, “he’s not a couple of diseases lying in a bed. He’s a real human being. He’s the grey-haired gentleman with the Ph.D. who lives in Ballybucklebo and is temporarily making use of your premises.” He turned to Barry. “Come on, Doctor Laverty.” He began to stride towards a staircase, then stopped and faced the desk, letting his gaze shift from the orderly to the receptionist. His words now honeyed, he said, “I can find my way. Far be it from me to interrupt your conversation.”

  Miss Weir’s face had gone paler than her makeup.

  Barry followed in O’Reilly’s wake, up a wooden-treaded staircase, along a corridor, and through the doorway of room 2C.

  Four beds, two to each side, separated by the narrowest of aisles filled the room. Screens surrounded one of the beds, and from behind them came a man’s reedy voice repeating a single word over and over: “Nurse.” There was an overpowering odour of faeces and stale urine. Elderly men occupied two of the other beds, one man wearing a cloth cap, the other flat out, his toothless mouth open wide, snoring as loudly as a ripsaw.

  Barry recognized Sonny in the near bed to the left. O’Reilly had already perched himself on its foot. “How are you, Sonny?” he asked.

  Barry saw the old man’s face split into a smile. “Thank you for coming, Doctor O’Reilly. I’m very well, thank you.”

  “Are you?” said O’Reilly, taking the man’s pulse.

  From where he stood, Barry was pleased to note that Sonny’s cheeks were no longer the slate blue colour they had been and the man’s breathing was easy, not at all the way it had been two weeks ago when O’Reilly had him rushed into the Royal.

  “And they’re treating you well?”

  “Nuuurse.” The thin voice came from behind the screens. The snores from the other bed intensified.

  Sonny glanced down. “I mustn’t complain.”

  “Mmm,” growled O’Reilly. “You’re too much of a gentleman to, aren’t you?”

  “Well, I—”

  “Nuuurse.”

  O’Reilly hauled a stethoscope from his jacket pocket. “Pull the screens, will you, Barry? Sonny, pull up your pyjamas.”

  Barry tugged the curtains along their overhead rails and slipped inside as O’Reilly listened to Sonny’s chest.

  “You’re sound as a bell,” O’Reilly said, pulling the stethoscope from his ears and helping Sonny adjust his jacket. “But you hate it here, don’t you?”

  “It could be better. It’s noisy at night—”

  Snoooore.

  “Nuuuurse.”

  “And in the daytime,” O’Reilly remarked, wrinkling his nose, “the place stinks, the grub’s rotten, you miss your dogs—”

  “Maggie comes to see me every day, and she’s looking after them—”

  “And you want to go home.”

  Barry watched as the old man nodded and his eyes glistened. He looked sadly at O’Reilly.

  “Right,” said O’Reilly, “we’ll see about that.”

  “Nuuurse.”

  He rose. “I’ll be back in a minute.” He ripped the curtain back. Barry watc
hed him depart and heard boots clattering down the stairs. He couldn’t make out the exact words coming from below, but he could have sworn the floor under his feet shuddered.

  Sonny swallowed, forced a weak smile, and said, “And how are you, Doctor Laverty?”

  “I’m fine, and I’ve some good news for you. Councillor Bishop’s started work on your roof.”

  “I’m glad.” He leant towards Barry. “I don’t suppose you’d know when it’ll be finished?”

  Barry was about to try to answer the question when O’Reilly, pursued by the orderly, came in.

  “Get in there, see what he needs, and don’t come out until you’ve fixed him up.”

  “Yes, sir.” The orderly went behind the screens as Barry imagined a terrified mouse might scuttle from a cat. The calling stopped.

  O’Reilly stood beside Sonny. “Right,” he said. “You need to be out of here.”

  “I could go back and live in my car.”

  “Don’t be daft. That’s why you got pneumonia in the first place.”

  “Perhaps Maggie could take you in,” Barry suggested.

  “Oh, no, sir.” Sonny shook his head. “We’re not married yet. Tongues would wag. You know what they’d be saying about us. It wouldn’t be proper.”

  “I do,” Barry said, remembering the looks of distrust on the faces of some of the patients who had heard about Major Fotheringam. “Indeed I do.”

  O’Reilly scratched his head. “You can’t go back to your house. It’s not ready. You’re right about not going to Maggie’s . . . but I’m buggered if I want you to stay here.” He paced into the narrow aisle. Then turning, he frowned and said. “Right. I’ll have a word with the staff, persuade them to take better care of you . . .”

  He’ll persuade them, Barry thought, much as Torquemada and the Spanish Inquisition persuaded heretics to recant.

  “Meanwhile I’ll think of something.”

  “I’d appreciate that, Doctor O’Reilly.” Sonny moved back on his pillows.

  “Now,” said O’Reilly, “you get a bit of rest. Doctor Laverty and I have to get back to Ballybucklebo. We’ve a bit of planning to do.”