An Irish Country Practice Read online

  “It started in medical school and it’s not something I’ve wanted to advertise, but I am proud to say I was able to delve into my interest in things Japanese, found some aspects of Buddhism a great comfort, and with their help overcame my silliness.” He coughed. “Having said that, I have allowed myself a wager. I too have picked Foinavon.” He laughed a dry, cackling noise. “Long odds always did appeal.”

  “More power to your wheel, Ronald,” O’Reilly said, “but you’ll be out of luck today. It’s Honey End. Just you watch.” Then his gaze went back to the screen. The camera showed the horses behind the start line. Jockeys clad in the racing silks of their owners, hard-peaked hats, jodhpurs, and English riding boots jostled for position at the start line. The course was open. There were none of the fancy starting gates favoured by the Americans. A flag was hoisted on a raised platform at the start.

  “They’re under starter’s orders,” O’Sullevan said. Horses and riders settled. The flag flashed down and forty-four horses bounded forward. O’Sullevan yelled, “They’re off,” then adopted the horse-racing commentator’s breathless cadences and inflexions. “Aaaand it’s Rondettos in the lead by a nose. Rondettos. Kirtle Lad’s next aaaand, I think, yes, yes, it’s Leedsy, Leedsy close behind in third. There’s a group two lengths back and Honey End the favourite—”

  “Go on, you boy-you,” O’Reilly yelled.

  “There’s quite a bunch farther back,” O’Sullevan said, “as they come to the first fence, aaaand bringing up the rear is Foinavon.”

  O’Reilly stole a glance at Kinky, who was sitting, hands in lap, with a tiny smile on her face.

  “Oh dear,” continued O’Sullevan. “Popham Down’s been hampered at the first.”

  O’Reilly had seen another horse obstructing the now-fallen animal.

  “Aaaand Popham Down’s jockey, Macer Gifford, has been unseated. He’s all right, walking away, but the horse is back up and continuing to run with the pack.”

  O’Reilly became oblivious to those around him as the horses soared over jumps and charged along the straight from fence to fence, sod flying from their pounding hooves. In his mind he could hear the thunder of hooves, the great beasts snorting. He imagined he could smell their sweat. Across from the racetrack tall terrace houses behind the track seemed to flash away in the opposite direction.

  At each fence, some horses refused or pulled up. Others fell, threw their jockeys, or were brought down in collision with another animal. Riderless horses charged on with the rest. Some, no longer burdened by a rider, were right at the front.

  “The field is thinning, but Honey End is still going strong,” said O’Sullevan.

  O’Reilly winked at Kitty.

  “As are Kirtle Lad and—”

  “Go on, boy,” Sue called, bouncing in her seat.

  Barry grinned.

  “Several riderless horses are up with the front runners, Red Alligator, Greek Scholar, Aussie. Poor old Foinavon is manfully trying but is well back.”

  O’Reilly stole another look at Kinky. He hated to see her being disappointed, but she was expressionless. Had she, perhaps, used her gift of the sight? He couldn’t believe it. Not Kinky.

  In what seemed like no time, the cameras had switched to Becher’s Brook for the second time and Michael O’Hehir’s Dublin twang took over the commentary. “Of a field of forty-four, twenty-eight competitors have safely cleared Becher’s and are heading for fence twenty-three. The riderless Popham Down leads the field from near the left-hand boundary.”

  “What?” O’Reilly yelled. He leaned forward and stared at the screen. “Holy thundering Mother of God.” Something was going horribly wrong. The leading riderless horse had turned to its right just before the twenty-third jump and had run directly across the bows of the rest. Horses reared, stopped dead. Some were running the wrong way. Honey End’s jockey, Josh Gifford, had been unseated in the fray but was hanging on to the reins, frantically trying to remount. “Bloody hell. Get on your horse, you great bollix,” O’Reilly yelled. “It’s my twenty quid at stake.”

  As calmly as if he were commentating on the usually sedate Oxford versus Cambridge Boat Race, O’Hehir said, “Rutherfords has been hampered, and so has Castle Falls; Rondetto has fallen, Princeful has fallen, Norther has fallen, Kirtle Lad has fallen.”

  “Damnation,” said Barry.

  “The Fossa has fallen. There’s a right pileup. Leedsy has climbed over the fence and left his jockey there. And now, with all this mayhem, Foinavon has gone off on his own. He’s about fifty lengths in front of everything else.”

  O’Reilly had watched it all in wonder. Foinavon had been so far behind, his jockey had been able to avoid the melée at jump twenty-three and find a way clear in which to jump. The black gelding was now well on its way to Canal Turn. And still not another single horse had cleared twenty-three. Riderless mounts milled about. Unhorsed jockeys ran along the track.

  “Come on. Come on,” O’Reilly growled. Josh Gifford, Honey End’s jockey, had now remounted, and yes, yes, Honey End had cleared the fence and was in furious pursuit of Foinavon. “Oh, for a horse with wings,” O’Reilly said, hoping that Honey End could be able to catch Foinavon before the finish, but fearing he might soon be feeling an ache in his wallet.

  “Shakespeare, Cymbelline, Act two,” Barry said, “Imogen.” He grinned at O’Reilly. “At least your horse is likely to finish. Might win yet. Mine’s a dead duck.”

  “Thanks, Barry,” O’Reilly said, looking at Kinky. Her features were composed and he would have expected no less. Kinky Auchinleck was too much of a lady to gloat.

  “That was tough luck, Barry,” Nonie said.

  Barry shrugged. “My dad always said, ‘Never lend or bet more than you can afford to lose, son.’”

  “And that, I think,” said O’Hehir from the television, “is the last horse that’s going to clear twenty-three. And now back to Peter O’Sullevan at the finish.”

  “Thank you, Michael. Aaand it’s Foinavon just clearing the Chair, the final jump. I don’t know how his jockey has done it, but somehow the gelding has found the reserves for a final burst of speed, because he is being pressed by Honey End, who is catching up, but still lags by about fifteen lengths.”

  “Come on, Foinavon—” yelled Sue, then stopped and turned to O’Reilly. “For Kinky and Ronald.”

  O’Reilly glanced from Kinky, who had a gentle smile on her face, to Ronald, who was leaning so far forward that he almost touched the screen.

  The room broke into a chant of “Go on Foinavon” that ended only when O’Sullevan said, “Aaand it’s Foinavon, Foinavon, at one hundred to one crossing the finish line to win this year’s Grand National, Honey End second at fifteen to two, and Red Alligator in third place at thirty to one…” Everyone in the room clapped.

  O’Reilly rose now, ignoring the post-race festivities on the screen. “Well done, Kinky. That’s a tidy sum you’ve won. Congratulations.” Indeed it was. Four hundred pounds was probably close to a year’s wages for Archie. He drank to her. “And to you, Nonie. And to you, Ronald. But if you don’t mind a bit of free medical advice from one friend to another, if you’ve had trouble with gambling before, don’t go back to it.”

  For a moment Ronald seemed not to hear O’Reilly, then blurted, “I’ll not. I promise, Fingal.” He swallowed and his voice had a dreamy tone. “But it was fun. Great fun.”

  Kitty crossed to bend and give Kinky a hug. “We are delighted for you and Archie.”

  “Thank you, Kitty. But there’s something I want to say.” She stood, her voice low and very serious. For someone who had just won four hundred pounds, she looked sad, not jubilant.

  She used the gift and now she’s ashamed, O’Reilly thought.

  “You all know, except saving your presences, Doctors Nolan and Fitzpatrick, that I do be fey…”

  “Good gracious,” Fitzpatrick said. “Well, I never.”

  Nonie’s hand flew to her mouth.

  “I got the gift
from my ma. I have told Doctor O’Reilly it is never to be used for personal gain. I want to reassure you all that it was not. I told no one else the winner, even though the horse’s name came to me a month ago. It saddened me to know my doctors, except Doctor Stevenson, were going to lose money and I do be pleased for Doctor Fitzpatrick. I ask for your trust because this time I did look ahead again. Now, the gift’s not a telescope. I don’t see everything and when I do I usually only see things in blurs, but just this morning I saw something very specific, that in this village there was going to be a desperate need for about four hundred pounds, so I said to Archie when I told him, ‘I know we weren’t going to bet because I saw the winner, but now I think we should.’”

  “And I agreed,” Archie said.

  “Archie and I will take back our stake money, but not a penny more. The rest will be kept in the bank until I find out who needs the money badly. Now, if it please you all, Archie did place our bet at Ladbroke’s in Belfast. When the need comes for the money to be spent, we do not want it known that it came from our wager, or indeed from us.”

  “That’s very gracious of you, Kinky,” Kitty said.

  “Thank you, Kitty. Now I wondered about coming today, but,” she looked around the small semicircle, “Archie and I think of you all as our family here at Number One Main,” she giggled, “and you, Doctor Fitzpatrick, as a close cousin…”

  “I’m flattered,” he said.

  “But it does be said if more than one knows a secret it is no longer a secret.” She allowed herself a little smile. “In our case, Archie and I count as one, so.”

  Archie nodded in agreement.

  “Thank you for telling us, Kinky,” O’Reilly said. “I’m sure I can speak for everyone here. You have our complete trust. Always have.”

  There was a general murmuring of assent.

  “Thank you all,” Kinky said, “and I’m sorry for your losing, Doctor Laverty. And your loss, Doctor O’Reilly, sir, would have been less if you did bet both ways, so.”

  O’Reilly shook his shaggy head and harumphed before saying, “’Fraid not.” He was about to ask, as a good host, if anyone wanted another drink, but the insistent double ringing of the telephone extension in the lounge interrupted.

  “That’s probably for me,” said Barry. “Maybe a dejected patient who lost more money than you, Fingal.” With a swift kiss to the top of Sue’s copper-haired head, he left.

  “No rest for the wicked,” O’Reilly said, sipping his drink and thinking, not for the first time, how pleasant life had become since he had first taken young Barry Laverty as an assistant in 1964, then as a partner in ’66. O’Reilly glanced at Kitty. Now if only he could get her to slow down too. He’d been working on that for several months but with little progress.

  Barry stuck his head round the door. “Mrs. Galvin’s a bit off colour. Doesn’t sound too serious. And here’s Saturday’s post.” Barry dropped an envelope into O’Reilly’s lap. Stamped on the outside was the coat of arms of Queen’s University, beneath it the words “Department of General Practice.” He shoved it into an inside pocket of his sports jacket. It could wait.

  “You mean Seamus Galvin’s mum? That buck eejit of a carpenter who took his family to California three years ago?” O’Reilly asked.

  “That’s her,” Barry said. “See you all soon.” He vanished.

  Fingal O’Reilly lifted his glass to his departing friend and colleague, then rose and switched off the telly. It had been a great start to the afternoon. Close friends enjoying the race, Nonie and Ronald making a bob or two. And he was delighted to know Kinky and Archie had made a killing for a mysterious good cause. O’Reilly would have given all his winnings—if he had won—to find out what Kinky and Archie’s “good cause” was, but fully understood that he must bide until she was good and ready to tell him.

  2

  Cries and Falls into a Cough

  Barry smiled to himself as he steered Brunhilde, his lime green Volkswagen Beetle, onto the Bangor to Belfast Road. When first he’d come to Ballybucklebo, he’d been impressed by how Fingal O’Reilly seemed to have an encyclopaedic knowledge of all his patients. Three years later, it pleased Barry to recall that Mrs. Anne Galvin was fifty-seven, mother of two grown sons, a heavy smoker, and played the uileann pipes. He’d seen her last year when she’d complained of not being able to read the Mills & Boon romances she loved so much. It had taken only a few moments of an eye examination to satisfy himself she had neither cataracts, damage to the lenses, nor glaucoma. He’d sent her to an optician for spectacles. He smiled again. It seemed he was developing his own encyclopaedia of patients. It meant he knew them as people, not anonymous cases.

  The traffic light was red. A Massey-Ferguson MF35 tractor led the line of traffic coming the other way, its engine burbling and blue exhaust fumes staining the air outside the Mucky Duck.

  He wondered what might be wrong with Anne. Her husband, George, known to everyone as “Guffer,” had sounded worried. She’d had a cough for four days and it was getting so bad, he’d said, she sometimes couldn’t stop. It was one such fit of coughing that had got him on the phone ten minutes ago. Probably bronchitis—it was much commoner in smokers—but things like pneumonia would have to be excluded too. Not much to go on, and although it was not a bells-clanging, sirens-screaming emergency, Fingal O’Reilly was not a “take two aspirins and come in to the surgery on Monday” kind of doctor and neither was Barry. He’d take a history, examine Anne before determining the severity of whatever was wrong, and with a bit of luck prescribe a treatment that wouldn’t require hospital admission.

  The light changed, the traffic moved on, and Barry had a flash of memory about the first time he’d seen Anne’s son, Seamus Galvin. It was 1964, and Barry had applied for the position of assistant to one Doctor Fingal Flahertie O’Reilly. He’d driven in this very car down to Ballybucklebo from Belfast for the interview. He’d rung the bell at the surgery door, the door had immediately opened, and he’d been confronted by a huge man carrying a smaller one by the collar of his jacket and the seat of his moleskin trousers. The ogre had hurled the smaller man into a rosebush outside the door and pitched a shoe and sock at him, yelling, “The next time, Seamus Galvin, you dirty bugger … The next time you come here after hours, on my day off, and want me to look at your ankle, wash your bloody feet.”

  Seamus Galvin, carpenter by trade, had been the notorious manufacturer of a flock of wooden rocking ducks that the hapless entrepreneur had hoped would be his ticket to financial success. Barry was sure he’d faithfully remembered the tirade word for word. He shook his head and turned left to climb the hill to the council housing estate of low-rent homes.

  He’d almost turned tail and run that afternoon, but he hadn’t, thank goodness. He was still here in Ballybucklebo, and Fingal Flahertie O’Reilly, on closer acquaintance, had turned out to be much less of an ogre than he first appeared. But Seamus Galvin and his young family had left the village for the sunny climes, citrus trees, and swimming pools of Palm Desert, California, hoping for a more prosperous life. O’Reilly got a card from them every Christmas.

  Barry took the first narrow street on the right. Most of the houses in the village, some more than two hundred years old, had grown up higgledy-piggledy along old cowpaths or bordering the main street. The housing estate, in sharp contrast, had been laid out with that peculiar geometric soulessness much loved by postwar town planners. Streets crossed each other at exactly ninety degrees. Rows of identical narrow terrace houses marched in ranks. No front gardens. No flowers. No shrubs. No trees. Tiny cement-paved backyards were separated by high, moss-covered, redbrick walls. In the winter months, the place was wrapped in a noisome miasma from the dozens of coal fires that were the only heat source of each damp home. In summer, most of the streets and yards were in permanent shadow from the Ballybucklebo Hills to the south. Places like this were ideal breeding grounds for bronchitis, pneumonias, rheumatic fever, and until the widespread introduction of the
BCG vaccine after the Second World War, tuberculosis.

  He parked at the kerb and got out. Seamus and Mary had lived in one of these two-up, two-down, outside-privy, jerry-built terrace houses. The Galvin seniors’ own two-storey home was much the same, its façade of grey stucco peeling like a bad sunburn. Blistered brown paint adorned the sash-window frames and front door. But the windowpanes sparkled, the sandstone doorstep had been scrubbed, and the brass letterbox flap shone. Clearly Mrs. Galvin was house-proud. He knocked on the door.

  Guffer Galvin, a short man, bald as a billiard ball, grey eyes with laugh lines at their corners, answered. “How’s about ye, Doc. Thanks for coming so quick. Sorry til drag yiz out on a Saturday. Come on on in.”

  Barry followed into a linoleum-floored hall. He smelled floor polish and stale cigarette smoke.

  “The missus isn’t feeling at herself so I’ve her upstairs in our bed. First on the right. I’ll wait in the parlour, so I will.”

  “Thanks, Mister Galvin.” Barry headed up the narrow stairs where a frayed tartan stair carpet was held in place by polished brass carpet rods. The door on the right was open. He knocked on it and said, “Mrs. Galvin? It’s Doctor Laverty.” He could hear her wheezing.

  “Come in, sir,” she said. Barry was reminded of the harsh song of a corncrake. Her voice wasn’t the soft contralto he remembered from their first meeting. “Thanks for coming.”

  He went into a tiny room where chintz curtains were drawn back so he could see across to rooftops, some with broken slates. Spindly TV aerials sprouted from the side chimneys.

  “You’ll have til sit on the bed,” she said. “It’s a bit cramped in here.”

  Barry did. “How are you?” he asked. She lay propped up on pillows and wore a pink bed jacket over a red flannel nightie, a book open at her side. Her pale grey-blond hair was curled and rolled in a style fashionable in the 1940s, giving her the look of an aging, bespectacled Bette Davis. Her National Health Service wire-rimmed granny glasses covered pale blue eyes. Her cheeks were flushed and she was sweating, but not profusely, her breathing rate steady, not increased as it would be with pneumonia. He took her wrist.