An Irish Country Doctor Read online

  “And what the hell do you want, standing there, both legs the same length and a face on you like a Lurgan spade?”

  Barry swung to face his interrogator.

  “Doctor O’Reilly?”

  “No. The archangel bloody Gabriel. Can you not read the plate?” He pointed at the wall.

  “I’m Laverty.”

  “Laverty? Well, bugger off. I’m not buying any.”

  Barry was tempted to take the advice but he held his ground. “I’m Doctor Laverty. I answered your advertisement in the British Medical Journal. I was to have an interview about the assistant’s position.” I will not let this bully intimidate me, he thought.

  “That Laverty. Jesus, man, why on earth didn’t you say so?” O’Reilly offered a hand the size of a soup plate. His handshake would have done justice to one of those machines that reduce motorcars to the size of suitcases.

  Barry felt his knuckles grind together, but he refused to flinch as he met Doctor O’Reilly’s gaze. He was staring into a pair of deep-set brown eyes hidden under bushy eyebrows. He noted the deep laugh lines around the eyes and saw that the pallor had left O’Reilly’s nose, a large bent proboscis with a definite list to port. It now had assumed the plum colour of its surrounding cheeks.

  The pressure on Barry’s hand eased.

  “Come in, Laverty.” O’Reilly stepped aside and waited for Barry to precede him into a thinly carpeted hall. “Door on your left.”

  Barry, still wondering about Galvin’s ejection, went into the room with the drawn curtains. An open rolltop desk stood against one green wall. Piles of prescription pads, papers, and what looked like patients’ records lay in splendid disarray on the desktop. Above, O’Reilly’s framed diploma dangled from a rusty nail. Barry stole a quick peep. “Trinity College, Dublin, 1936.” In front of the desk were a swivel chair and a plain wooden chair.

  “Have a pew.” O’Reilly lowered his bulk into the swivel seat.

  Barry sat, settled his bag on his lap, and glanced round. An examining table and a set of folding screens jostled with an instrument cabinet against another wall. A dusty sphygmomanometer was fixed to the wall. Above the blood-pressure machine an eye-testing chart hung askew.

  Doctor O’Reilly pushed a pair of half-moon spectacles onto his bent nose and peered at Barry. “So you want to be my assistant?”

  Barry had thought so, but after the ejection of Seamus Galvin he wasn’t so sure.

  “Well, I—”

  “Course you do,” said O’Reilly, pulling a briar from his jacket pocket and holding a lighted match over the bowl. “Golden opportunity for a young man.”

  Barry noticed that he kept sliding forward on his seat. Try as he might, he had to brace his feet firmly on the carpet and keep shoving his backside upwards.

  O’Reilly wagged his index finger. “Practising here in Ballybucklebo. Most satisfying thing in the world. You’ll love it. Might even be a partnership in it for you. Course you’ll have to do as I tell you for a while until you get to know the ropes.”

  Barry hitched himself back up his seat and made a quick decision. He might work here if he were offered the job, but he sensed—no, he knew—that if he didn’t establish his independence immediately, Doctor O’Reilly would walk all over him.

  “Does that mean I’ll have to hurl patients into the rosebushes?”

  “What?” A hint of pallor returned to the big man’s nose. Was that a sign of temper? Barry wondered.

  “I said, ‘Does that mean—’“

  “I heard you the first time, boy. Now listen, have you any experience with country patients?”

  “Not ex—”

  “Thought not,” said O’Reilly, emitting a puff of tobacco smoke like the blast from the funnels of RMS Queen Mary when she blew her boilers. “You’ll have a lot to learn.”

  Barry felt a cramp in his left calf. He shoved himself back up his seat. “I know, but I don’t think a physician should chuck patients—”

  “Rubbish,” said O’Reilly, rising. “You saw me pitch Galvin into the roses. Lesson number one. Never, never, never”—with each “never” he poked at Barry with the stem of his pipe—“never let the customers get the upper hand. If you do, they’ll run you ragged.”

  “Don’t you think dumping a man bodily into your garden is a little—?”

  “I used to … until I met Seamus Galvin. If you take the job and get to know that skiver as well as I do …” O’Reilly shook his head.

  Barry stood and massaged the back of his leg. He was going to carry on the debate about Galvin, but O’Reilly began to laugh in great throaty rumbles.

  “Leg stiff?”

  “Yes. Something’s wrong with this chair.”

  O’Reilly’s chuckles grew deeper. “No, there’s not. I fixed it.”

  “Fixed it?”

  “Oh, aye. Some of the weary, walking wounded in Ballybucklebo seem to think when they get in here to see me it’s my job to listen to their lamentations ‘til the cows come home. A country general practitioner, a single-handed country GP, doesn’t have that sort of time.” He pushed his spectacles further up his nose. “That’s why I advertised for an assistant. There’s too much bloody work in this place.” O’Reilly had stopped laughing. His brown-eyed gaze was fixed on Barry’s eyes as he said softly, “Take the job, boy. I need the help.”

  Barry hesitated. Did he really want to work for this big, coarse man who sat there with a briar stuck in his wide mouth? Barry saw O’Reilly’s florid cheeks, the cauliflower ears that must have been acquired in the boxing ring, and a shock of black hair like a badly stooked hayrick, and he decided to play for time. “What have you done to this chair?”

  O’Reilly’s face broke into a grin that Barry thought could only be described as demonic. “I fixed it. I sawed an inch off the front legs.”

  “You what?”

  “I sawed an inch off the front legs. Not very comfortable, is it?”

  “No,” said Barry, pushing himself back up the seat.

  “Don’t want to stay long, do you?”

  Barry thought, I’m not sure I want to stay here at all.

  “Neither do the customers. They come in and go out like a fiddler’s elbow.”

  How could a responsible physician ever take a proper history if his practice ran like a human conveyor belt? Barry asked himself. He rose. “I’m not sure I do want to work here.…”

  O’Reilly’s laugh boomed through the room. “Don’t take yourself so seriously, son.”

  Barry felt the flush begin under his collar. “Doctor O’Reilly, I—”

  “Laverty, there are some really sick people here who do need us, you know.” O’Reilly was no longer laughing.

  Barry heard the “us” and was surprised to find that it pleased him.

  “I need help.”

  “Well, I—”

  “Great,” said O’Reilly, putting another match to his pipe, rising, and marching to the door. “Come on, you’ve seen the surgery…. Why our American cousins insist on calling it the office is beyond me …. I’ll show you the rest of the shop.”

  “But I—”

  “Leave your bag there. You’ll need it tomorrow.” With that, O’Reilly vanished into the hall, leaving Barry little choice but to park his bag and follow. Immediately opposite he could see into the dining room, but O’Reilly charged along the hall, past a staircase with an ornate mahogany balustrade. Then he stopped and flung a door wide open. Barry hurried to catch up.

  “Waiting room.”

  Barry saw a large room, wallpapered with god-awful roses. More wooden chairs were arranged around the walls. A single table in the centre of the room was covered with old magazines.

  O’Reilly pointed to a door in the far wall. “Patients let themselves in here; we come down from the surgery, take whoever’s next back with us, deal with them, and show them out the front door.”

  “On their feet, I hope.” Barry watched O’Reilly’s nose. No pallor.

  The big man c
huckled. “You’re no dozer, are you, Laverty?”

  Barry kept his counsel as O’Reilly continued. “It’s a good system … stops the buggers swapping symptoms, or demanding the same medicine as the last customer. Right…” He swung round and headed for the staircase. “Come on.”

  Barry followed, up a flight of stairs to a broad landing. Framed photographs of a warship hung on the walls.

  “Sitting room’s in there.” O’Reilly indicated a pair of panelled doors.

  Barry nodded but looked more closely at the battleship. “Excuse me, Doctor O’Reilly, is that HMS Warspite?”

  O’Reilly’s foot paused on the first step of the next flight.

  “How’d you know that?”

  “My dad served in her.”

  “Holy thundering Mother of Jesus. Laverty? Are you … are you Tom Laverty’s boy?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll be damned.”

  So, thought Barry, will I. His father, who rarely talked about his wartime experiences, had from time to time alluded to a certain Surgeon Commander O’Reilly who had been welterweight boxing champion of the Mediterranean Fleet—that would account for O’Reilly’s cauliflower ears and bent nose. In his dad’s opinion, O’Reilly had been the finest medical officer afloat. This man?

  “I’ll be damned. Laverty’s boy.” O’Reilly held out his hand. His handshake was firm, not crushing. “You’re the man for the job. Thirty-five pounds a week, every other Saturday off, room and board all in.”

  “Thirty-five pounds?”

  “I’ll show you your room.”

  “What’ll it be?” O’Reilly stood at a sideboard that bore cut-glass decanters and ranks of glasses.

  “Small sherry, please.” Barry sat in a big armchair. O’Reilly’s upstairs sitting room was comfortably furnished. Three Milliken watercolours of game birds adorned the wall over a wide fireplace. Two walls were hidden by floor-to-ceiling bookcases. From Barry’s quick appraisal of the titles—from Plato’s Republic, Caesar’s De Bello Gallica, Winnie-the-Pooh and its Latin translation Winnie Ille Pu, to the collected works of W. Somerset Maugham, Graham Greene, John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway, and Leslie Charteris’s The Saint books—O’Reilly’s reading tastes were wide ranging.

  His record collection, stacked haphazardly beside a Philips Black Box gramophone, was equally eclectic. Beethoven’s symphonies on 33 1/3 rpm LPs were jumbled in with old 78s by Bix Beiderbecke and Jelly Roll Morton, along with the Beatles’ most recent LP.

  “Here you are.” O’Reilly handed Barry a glass, sat heavily in another armchair, and propped his stoutly booted feet on a coffee table. Then he lifted his own glass, which Barry thought could have done service as a fire bucket if it hadn’t been filled to the brim with Irish whiskey. “I don’t go much for sherry myself,” O’Reilly announced, “but each to his own.”

  “I’d have thought it was a bit early for whiskey.”

  “Early?” said O’Reilly, taking a gulp. “It’s never too early for a decent drop.”

  My God, Barry thought, looking more closely at O’Reilly’s ruddy cheeks; don’t tell me he’s a raging drouth.

  O’Reilly, clearly oblivious to Barry’s scrutiny, nodded to the picture window. “Would you look at that?”

  Barry looked past the moss-grown, lopsided steeple of a church across the road from O’Reilly’s house, down over the rooftops of the terrace cottages of Ballybucklebo’s main street, and out over the sand dunes of the foreshore to where Belfast Lough, cobalt and white-capped, separated County Down from the distant Antrim Hills, hazy against a sky as blue as cornflowers.

  “Jesus,” said O’Reilly, “you couldn’t beat that with both sticks of a Lambeg drum.”

  “It’s lovely, Doctor O’Reilly.”

  “Fingal, my boy. Fingal. For Oscar.” O’Reilly’s smile was avuncular.

  “Oscar, er, Fingal?”

  “No. Not Oscar Fingal. Wilde.”

  “Oscar Fingal Wilde, Fingal?” Barry knew he was getting lost. He saw a hint of pallor developing on O’Reilly’s nose.

  “Oscar … Fingal … O’Flahertie … Wills … Wilde.”

  Barry stifled the impulse to remark that if you put an air to that you could sing it.

  “You look confused, son.”

  Confused, baffled, bewildered, utterly at sea.

  The pallor faded. “I was named for him. For Oscar Wilde.”

  “Oh.”

  “Aye,” said O’Reilly. “My father was a classical scholar, and if you think I got a mouthful, you should meet my brother, Lars Porsena O’Reilly.”

  “Good Lord. Macaulay?”

  “The very fellah. Lays of Ancient Rome.” O’Reilly took a deep drink. “Us country GPs aren’t all utterly unlettered.”

  Barry felt a blush start. His first impressions of the big man sitting opposite might not have been entirely accurate. Lowering his head, he sipped his sherry.

  “So, Laverty,” O’Reilly said, clearly ignoring Barry’s discomfort. “What’s it to be? Do you want the job?”

  Before Barry could answer, a bell jangled from somewhere below.

  “Bugger,” said O’Reilly, “another customer. Come on.” He rose. Barry followed.

  O’Reilly opened the front door. Seamus Galvin stood on the doorstep. In each hand he carried a live lobster. “Good evening. Doctor sir,” he said, thrusting the beasts at O’Reilly. “I’ve washed me foot, so I have.”

  Barry thought of a grubby Eliza Doolittle saying to Professor Higgins, “I washed me ’ands and face before I come.”

  “Have you, by God?” said O’Reilly sternly, passing the squirming creatures to Barry. “Come in and I’ll take a look at your hind leg.”

  “Thank you, Doctor sir, thank you very much.” Galvin hesitated. “And who’s this young gentleman?” he asked.

  Barry was so busy avoiding the crustaceans’ clattering claws he nearly missed O’Reilly’s reply. “This is Doctor Laverty. He’s my new assistant. I’ll be showing him the ropes tomorrow.”

  Morning Has Broken

  Barry woke to the jangling of his alarm clock. His attic room had just enough space for a bed, a night table, and a wardrobe. Last night he’d unpacked, put his few clothes away, and propped his fishing rod in one corner near a dormer window.

  He rose, drew back the curtains, and looked out over what must be O’Reilly’s back garden. Then he picked up his toilet kit from the bedside table and headed for the bathroom. As he shaved, he thought about the events of last night. O’Reilly had strapped Seamus Galvin’s ankle, put the lobsters in the kitchen sink, taken Barry back up to the sitting room, and poured more drinks. He’d explained that for the first month they’d work together so Barry could get to know the patients, the running of the practice, and the geography of Ballybucklebo and the surrounding countryside.

  Somehow the evening had slipped by, and despite O’Reilly’s steady intake of Old Bushmills Irish whiskey the man might as well have been drinking water. He had given no sign of any ill effects. After two sherries Barry had noticed a certain laxity in his knees and a gentle cotton-woolly feeling in his head, and he had been grateful to be shown to his quarters on the third floor and wished a very good night.

  He rinsed his razor and looked in the mirror. Just a tad of red in the whites of his eyes. Had the sherry affected his judgement so much? Certainly he had no recollection of actually agreeing to take the job, but it seemed that once O’Reilly made up his mind, lesser mortals had no choice but to go along. Well, in for a penny…. He dried his face, went back to his garret, and dressed. Best pants, best shoes, clean shirt …

  “Move yourself, Laverty. We haven’t got all day,” O’Reilly roared up the stairwell.

  Barry ignored the command. This was a medical practice, not the navy, and the sooner Doctor Fingal Flahertie O’Reilly, lately surgeon commander, recognized that Barry was not there to be ordered about like some able-bodied seaman, the better. He knotted his Queen’s University tie, slipped on a sports jacket
, and headed for the stairs.

  “Eat up however little much is in it, Doctor Laverty dear.”

  Barry looked up from his plate of Ulster mixed grill—bacon, sausages, black pudding, fried eggs, tomatoes, lamb chop, and slices of fried soda bread—into the happy face of Mrs. Kincaid. He saw silver hair done up in a chignon, black eyes like polished jets set between roseate cheeks. A mouth smiled above her three chins.

  “I’ll do my best.”

  “Good lad. You’ll be having this for breakfast a lot,” she said, setting a plate in front of O’Reilly. “Himself here is a grand man for the pan, so.”

  Barry heard the soft Cork lilt of her voice, with the habit Cork folk had of adding “so” at the end of a sentence.

  “Go on with you, Kinky.” O’Reilly lifted his knife and fork and dug in with obvious gusto.

  Mrs. Kincaid left.

  O'Reilly muttered something through a mouthful of black pudding.

  "I beg your pardon?"

  O'Reilly swallowed. "I forgot to warn you about Kinky. She's a powerful woman. Been with me for years."

  "Oh?"

  "Housekeeper, cook, and Cerberus."

  "She guards the gates of Hades?"

  "Like the three-headed dog himself. The customers have to get up very early in the morning to put one past Kinky. You'll see. Now get stuck into your grub. We've to be in the surgery in fifteen minutes." Barry ate.

  Mrs. Kincaid reappeared. "Tea, Doctor?"

  "Thank you."

  She poured from a Belleek teapot and nimbly moved her fourteen stone to where O'Reilly sat mopping up the last of an egg with a slice of fried bread. She poured his tea and gave him a sheet of paper. "That's your afternoon calls for today, Doctor," she said. "Maggie wanted you to drop round, but I told her to come into the surgery."

  "Maggie MacCorkle?" O'Reilly sighed and dabbed at an egg stain on his tie. "All right. Thanks, Kinky."

  "Better she comes here than you drive ten miles to her cottage." Mrs. Kincaid cocked her head and studied the mess on O'Reilly's tie. "And take off the grubby thing, and I'll wash it for you, so." To Barry's surprise, O'Reilly meekly undid the knot and handed the tie to Mrs. Kincaid, who sniffed, turned, and left, remarking, "And don't forget to put on a clean one."