An Irish Country Village Read online

  It was a beautiful day, he thought, so why not get out and enjoy it? He hadn’t had time for a walk in weeks, and the exercise would do him good.

  He stuck his head into the dining room. “I’m nipping out for a while, Fingal.”

  “You’re what?”

  “Nipping out. You said . . . you said yesterday I could have today off.”

  “Jesus. Half an hour ago you said you knew you’d have to satisfy me that you were worth taking on as a partner. The practice isn’t a Butlins Holiday Camp.”

  Barry muttered to himself, “The way you’re going on today, O’Reilly, it’s sounding more like a forced labour camp.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing.” Barry took a deep breath. “Do you not want me to go?”

  He saw O’Reilly shake his head. “It’s all right. I didn’t mean to spoil your day off. I was just thinking about Archie Auchinleck.”

  “With the sore back?”

  “That’s what he says.”

  Barry stepped through the doorway, interested in spite of himself. “Do you think he’s swinging the lead?”

  O’Reilly shook his big head. “Not Archie. He’s not missed a day on his milk round for God knows how many years.”

  “Then what is it?”

  “His boy.” O’Reilly looked up from the plate. “He’s only got the one, and he joined the British army.”

  Barry remembered seeing something on television about some British troops with a United Nations peacekeeping force. “He’s not in Cyprus, is he?”

  O’Reilly nodded. “ ’Fraid so. And the Turks or the Greeks or some other silly buggers have been shooting at them. Poor old Archie’s worried sick.” O’Reilly rose. “I shouldn’t have yelled at him. There’s not a bloody thing us doctors can do until his boy gets back home. It’s frustrating as hell.”

  And, Barry thought, you get angry when you get frustrated, don’t you, Fingal?

  “Go on with you then. Make the most of your time. Pity it’s a Sunday.”

  “Why?”

  “Any other day you could get a haircut.”

  “But I don’t need one.”

  “You will soon. I’ll be working you so hard from now on you’re not going to have time.”

  Barry saw the laugh lines deepen at the corners of O’Reilly’s eyes and knew it was a hollow threat, although if the patients kept coming the way they had in the last month there would be plenty of work to do—and he was looking forward to it. “Sure when it’s down over my collar you can tell the customers I’m trying to get a job with the Beatles.”

  O’Reilly laughed. “Look, if you’re going to do a job, do it right. Really let it go. You can try to join the Rolling Stones. I saw them on the news. They looked like a bunch of perambulating haystacks.”

  “I’ve never heard of them.”

  “I think you’re going to,” said O’Reilly. “They make an interesting sound.”

  Barry watched as O’Reilly peeled an orange and somehow managed to keep the rind intact in one long, continuous spiral. “I’ll take your word for it.”

  “Do, and you can take my word for something else.” O’Reilly grinned. “I promised you today off, so away off and enjoy yourself.”

  “Thanks, Fingal.”

  Barry let himself out through the front door and started to walk along Ballybucklebo’s Main Street. Across the road he could see the doors to the Presbyterian church standing open, the black-robed minister on the steps welcoming his flock.

  The August sun had climbed over the crest of the Ballybucklebo Hills and shone down from the sky, blue as a robin’s egg. The listing steeple of the church opposite cast an asymmetrical shadow over the yew trees and headstones in the little churchyard.

  Barry watched people hurrying along Main Street towards the church, men in black suits, women in summer frocks and hats and white gloves, children neat and clean. As he remembered from being taken to church every Sunday in Bangor as a boy, they were going for their weekly dose of hellfire and brimstone. The Presbyterians could be stern. John Calvin and John Knox and that lot. They didn’t put up with any nonsense.

  Barry recognized some of the worshipers. Julie MacAteer with her long blonde hair swinging under a little straw hat, the young woman from Rasharkin, County Antrim, who’d moved here recently. She smiled at him. “Morning, Doctor.”

  “Morning, Julie.”

  Maggie MacCorkle, who’d first presented with a complaint of headaches—two inches above the crown of her head—wore an outlandish hat. Barry had to stare because every day she put different flowers in the hatband. Two maroon antirrhinums today. “Morning, Doctor Laverty.”

  “Morning, Maggie. And how are you today?”

  “I’ve a toty-wee headache,” she said, motioning to a spot exactly two inches above her head. “But it’s nothing for you to worry about, Doctor.”

  “And Sonny?” he said, making a mental note not to ask patients how they were on his day off. Sonny was in the Bangor convalescent home recovering from pneumonia.

  Maggie grinned her toothless grin. “The old goat’s on the mend now, thanks, Doctor. I’ll be getting him home any day.” Both in their sixties, Sonny and Maggie were to be married soon.

  “I’m pleased to hear it. Give him my regards when you see him again.”

  “I will.”

  “And say hello to the General.” General Sir Bernard Law Montgomery, Maggie’s one-eyed, tattered-eared cat who, being an Ulsterman like his famous military namesake, enjoyed a good scrap and bore the scars to prove it.

  Barry smiled. Knowing these people, not just their names or their diseases but about their lives, and having them greet him as a friend warmed him as much as the morning sun.

  He was in no hurry as he strolled on, listening to the sounds of the village.

  Blackbirds were singing in the churchyard yews. A song thrush’s treble voice, repeating each note twice, soared above the lower registers. Pairs of collared doves perched on the telephone wires and cooed their love. The birds’ songs had to compete with the faint pealing of church bells coming from the steeple of the Catholic chapel at the other end of Main Street.

  Barry saw a couple approaching. The man, black-suited and bowler-hatted, was short and rotund. He stamped along, accompanied by an equally dumpy woman wearing a floral dress. He was scowling, and she was clearly out of breath trying to keep up with his hurried pace. “For Christ sake, Flo, get a move on.”

  Councillor and Mrs. Florence Bishop, the wealthiest couple in Ballybucklebo. Barry hadn’t met Mrs. Bishop before, but as he knew from his dealings with the councillor, Bishop was the most grasping, conniving weasel in the Six Counties.

  “Morning, Councillor. Morning, Mrs. Bishop.”

  Barry was rewarded with a weak smile and a “Morning, Doctor” from the missus and a growl from the councillor. Well, he thought, O’Reilly was right. Not all your patients are going to love you, and Councillor Bertie Bishop had good reasons for disliking his medical advisors. Until last week he might have thought he was the craftiest man in the village. He wasn’t the first and he certainly wouldn’t be the last man to underestimate how wily O’Reilly could be.

  Barry turned the corner and passed between whitewashed rows of single-storey cottages on either side of Main Street. Some were thatched, some had slate roofs, and the little buildings, one attached to the other, jostled together like a group of neighbours lining the thoroughfare to await a parade.

  He reached the central crossroads in the middle of the village where the permanent maypole, painted in red, white, and blue spirals, leant companionably beside Ballybucklebo’s only traffic light. A horse and cart on rubber-tired wheels waited patiently for the green light. The roan mare’s eyes were well protected from the glare by a pair of leather blinkers and a straw hat with holes cut for her ears. She nibbled from a feedbag, lifted her tail, and dropped a pile of horse apples to steam on the tarmac.

  “Morning, Doctor Laverty,” said the driver, a man Barry did n
ot recognize. “Grand day.”

  “Indeed it is,” said Barry, pleased to be recognized by a stranger. “Indeed it is.”

  He crossed the street. The breeze that bore the scent of salty seaweed from Belfast Lough made the hanging sign of the nearby public house, the Black Swan, known to the locals as the Mucky Duck, sway. Its hinges creaked rustily.

  As he walked under the single-arch railway bridge, he heard the Bangor-bound train rattling overhead, smelled the diesel fumes. He’d ridden that train daily from his home to Queens University in Belfast when he was a student. He’d met Patricia Spence on it, purely by chance, when he made a trip up to Belfast a month earlier. He had reason to regard the thing with affection, just like the locals who said it was mentioned in the book of Genesis. They used the very same verse O’Reilly had quoted that morning: “And God made . . . every thing that creepeth.”

  The train was slow, right enough, but didn’t that fit in with the pace of life in a place like Ballybucklebo? Rural, sleepy, and at peace with itself? A village that seemed divorced from the internecine hatred that flowed under the surface of much of the rest of Ulster.

  Barry started to climb a low dune that separated Shore Road from the foreshore. He knew that in the winter when the great northeaster-lies raged it was only the dunes that kept the waters of the lough from tearing at the houses behind.

  He picked up a pebble and chucked it across a narrow beach into the water.

  Of course, he didn’t need to worry about sectarian strife here. O’Reilly had assured Barry of that and as proof had offered evidence. Seamus Galvin, a Catholic, was the pipe major of the Ballybucklebo Highlanders pipe band. Barry had seen the band in the recent Twelfth of July Orange parade, and neither Seamus nor the Orange lodges had seemed to object. The local Catholic priest and the Presbyterian minister played golf together every Monday. Barry wondered if other golfers could feel the spits of the minister some distance up the fairways.

  The image made him laugh to himself, made him grateful that O’Reilly was giving him the opportunity to settle here where the Orange and the Green simply didn’t seem to matter.

  He lengthened his stride and followed the crest of the dunes, sorry that Patricia wasn’t with him to stroll among the marram grasses and clumps of sand seawort. He decided he’d walk for an hour, then head back to O’Reilly’s for lunch. No, he corrected himself. He’d have to start thinking of the greystone house at Number 1 Main Street as his house too. In a year, “Dr. Barry Laverty, M.B., B.Ch., B.A.O., Physician and Surgeon” would, he hoped, be inscribed on another brass plaque beside the front door.

  “Grand day,” the stranger on the cart had said. Barry danced a little jig. By God, it was. This was his home. He felt completely at home here in rural Ballybucklebo, much more so than he had ever done during his student days in bustling Belfast. He was going to hear from Patricia soon, and most important, Barry had decided the direction his career should take.

  He heard a mewling overhead, stopped, and looked up to see gulls soaring down the wind, wings rigidly outstretched. Now that he was committed to an assistantship, he looked forward to stretching his own professional wings. O’Reilly was bound to see that and give Barry more independence because . . . because in just one year he was going to be a full partner here in Ballybucklebo.

  Perhaps, he thought, half an hour more would be enough before he headed back, because he was really looking forward to his lunch and the prospect of a lazy afternoon. Unless, of course, as was often the way here, something unexpected cropped up.

  The Unkindest Cut of All

  Barry sat in O’Reilly’s upstairs lounge, his feet up on a footstool and another of Kinky’s fine meals in his stomach. He’d almost finished the Sunday Times cryptic crossword. He wondered when O’Reilly would be back. The pair of them had almost collided as Barry came in through the front door and O’Reilly rushed out, muttering about “bad pennies turning up again” and cursing the bad pennies because visiting them was going to make him late for his second meal of the day.

  Ah, Barry thought, the joys of rural practice—and the pleasure for once of not having to respond to an emergency, particularly if it involved one of O’Reilly’s problem patients. Barry wondered briefly who it could be, then turned his attention back to his puzzle.

  He frowned at the clue for twelve across: “Ran amok in prison causing great loss of life (7).” His concentration was not being helped by the attentions of Lady Macbeth, O’Reilly’s pure white cat, who, perched in Barry’s lap, kept dabbing with one paw at the end of his pencil.

  Barry stared at the grid. By solving some of the down clues, he now had three letters, C–N–E, but he’d be damned if he could understand what the poser of the puzzle was after. That was the trouble with the things: somehow you had to get inside the mind of whoever had set them. It was like trying to do the same with Doctor Fingal Flahertie O’Reilly.

  “Ran amok in prison . . . ? Ran . . . ?”

  The front doorbell rang. Barry heard Kinky answer the door, and from downstairs came the sounds of her voice and a child’s sobs. Barry shoved a complaining cat to the floor, rose, and headed downstairs.

  Kinky met him in the hall. “It’s little Colin Brown and his mammy. The wee muirnin—that’s darlin’ to you, Doctor dear—the wee dote’s cut his hand, so. Mrs. Brown says she’s stopped the bleeding, so I’ve put them in the surgery to wait for himself to come back. I told them you were on your day off.”

  The unexpected had happened. “I’ll see to them,” he said, knowing that was precisely what O’Reilly would have done, and headed for the surgery at a trot.

  Mrs. Brown, wearing her Sunday hat and coat, knelt in front of O’Reilly’s old rolltop desk, trying to comfort her six-year-old son. Barry recognized the little boy, Colin. Yesterday he’d been happily playing in O’Reilly’s garden, howling with laughter. Today his howls were accompanied by tears, and runnels of snot from both nostrils. His right hand was wrapped in a bloodstained tea towel.

  Barry knelt beside the mother. “What happened?”

  “I’m not sure,” she said. “I think he was playing with one of Derek’s tools. The poor wee lad came running in from the toolshed bleeding all over the place, so I wrapped his hand,” she nodded at the tea towel, “and brung him right here, so I did.”

  “All right,” said Barry, turning to the boy, “can I have a look-see, Colin?”

  The little boy hunched his shoulders, cocked his head to one side, and held his wounded hand close to his chest. “No.” He sniffled and glanced up at his mother. “My mammy says you don’t have to. My mammy says—”

  “Maybe Mammy could help?” Barry waited.

  Mrs. Brown moved closer. “Come on, Colin. The nice doctor’s going to make it better, so he is. He’s not going to hurt you.”

  Barry wished her last remark could be true, but judging by the amount of blood on the towel the cut was deep and was going to need stitches. He was always torn when working with children, hated the fact they couldn’t understand why he was hurting them.

  Colin wiped his upper lip with the sleeve of his shirt and then held his hand to his mother. Seeing the trust in the child’s eyes cut into Barry as deeply as the tool must have sliced into the little hand. “It’s sore,” Colin whimpered.

  Mrs. Brown made gentle shushing noises and slowly unwrapped the tea towel. “Go on,” she said, “show it to the nice doctor man.”

  Colin held his hand palm up to Barry. He could see little but blood. “I think,” Barry said, “I’ll have to give it a clean.” He stood and moved across the room to stand beside the examining couch where it was tucked against the green-painted wall. “I’m going to ask your mammy to bring you over here. Okay, Colin?”

  Barry waited until Mrs. Brown had led the lad over and lifted him onto the couch. At least, Barry thought, the poor wee fellow has stopped crying. He pushed an instrument trolley beside the table. A presterilized pack lay to one side of the green-towelled top. “Can you put your hand on
there, Colin?” He waited until the boy stretched out his arm. “Good boy.”

  Barry opened the outer wrapping of the pack. Inside, a sterile hand towel and a pair of rubber gloves lay beside a roll of instruments and two shining steel gallipots. He lifted a bottle of saline from the trolley’s lower shelf, unscrewed the cap, and poured some into one metal cup. Dettol next. The fluid splashed into the second gallipot. He was going to have to wash the wound with the disinfectant but shuddered to think of how the solution would sting and burn—unless . . . yes. It might work.

  “I’m just going to wash my hands,” he said, moving to the sink and turning on the taps. As he scrubbed he could sense the boy’s eyes boring into his back.

  Barry heard footsteps behind and turned to see O’Reilly standing watching. The man looked flushed and frown lines creased his forehead, but he gave Barry a reassuring nod. “I just got back. You carry on.”

  Barry turned back to finish scrubbing. He was disappointed to have O’Reilly here, supervising as if Barry were still a student. Still, he was going to need some assistance. If nothing else, Barry’s being here, working, should show O’Reilly that despite his crack earlier, young Doctor Laverty was well aware that he wasn’t at one of Billy Butlins Holiday Camps.

  Barry returned to the trolley, dried his hands, and slipped on the rubber gloves. “Now,” he said, unwrapping the pack and removing balls of cotton wool and a pair of forceps, “let’s get this cleaned.” He grasped the cotton wool in the forceps, soaked it in the saline solution, and gently sponged the palm of the boy’s hand. It was going to need stitches. The wound, two inches long, ran diagonally across the palm from the web between the thumb and first finger towards the boy’s wrist.

  Barry turned to O’Reilly. “I need a hand.” Barry made a rapid motion with his right wrist, showing O’Reilly in dumb play the action that would be needed to place a suture.