An Irish Country Practice Read online

  “Allow me,” said Ronald.

  “Certainly, King Croesus,” Barry said.

  As Ronald paid, O’Reilly said, “King of Lydia, from 595 BC until his defeat by the Persian Cyrus the Great in 546. Reputedly issued the first gold coins.”

  “Lord,” said Ronald, “not only could Cissie replace the BBC news. The Encyclopaedia Britannica would get a run for its money from Fingal Flahertie O’Reilly.”

  O’Reilly bowed his head and raised his glass to Ronald.

  Ronald lifted his glass in turn. “Cheers,” he said, and swallowed a third at one go.

  “Here. Go easy,” O’Reilly said with a smile. “You’re not used to it. Keep up at that rate and you’ll be flying.” A sea change had come over this usually dry, reserved man. O’Reilly had seen this kind of thing before. Middle-aged men suddenly behaving like teenagers.

  “I’ll be good,” Ronald said, and sank another third.

  O’Reilly shook his head. He didn’t want to intrude, but later he’d have a word with Barry. O’Reilly would speak to Kitty too. A gentle eye would be kept on Ronald Hercules Fitzpatrick. Just in case he did start to slip. Just in case.

  9

  A Little Sleep, a Little Slumber

  “Honestly I still can’t find anything physically wrong,” Barry said from behind the rolltop desk in the surgery as Eileen Lindsay finished buttoning up her blouse. “It’s too bad the simple things I suggested two months ago and the chloral hydrate I gave you last month aren’t working. I think we’ll need to try something a bit stronger.”

  “Please do, sir,” she said. “My oul’ brain just keeps going round and round half the night.” She sighed. “Working full time shifting in the linen mill. Rearing Sammy, and Mary, and Willie all on my own.”

  Barry smiled when he remembered how the little divils had tried to help out an impoverished Santa Claus at Christmas a few years ago.

  “At least Willie’s going on twelve now and he can mind his wee brother and sister after school till I get home.” She sighed. “But then there’s the shopping, the housework, cooking. I’m running around like a bee on a hot brick and I don’t seem til be able til get over, or if I do, I wake up a couple of hours later.”

  “I know it’s difficult for you, Eileen.” And he truly felt for her. It must be no fun being a single mother.

  “I know that, sir, and I know you’re doing your best.” She managed a small smile. “And I have tried all the things you suggested. I don’t smoke—never did, even though most of the girls at the mill do. I don’t take a drink before bedtime except the warm milk you told me til try. I go to the bathroom before I get intil bed.” She took one of the patients’ chairs and held her handbag in both hands on her lap. “I think that chloral stuff did help a wee bit at first, but now?” She shook her head and looked down. “Honest to God, I’d kill til get through the whole night, so I would.”

  Her brown hair was neatly cut, she wore little makeup, and would have been an attractive young woman but for the dark bags under her bloodshot blue eyes. Barry knew life had not been easy for Eileen. Her husband had left her four years ago. The local poulterer, Johnny Jordan, who had walked out with her before her marriage, had tried and failed to rekindle the old flame two years ago. Barry was glad there was more that he could offer her; more potent sleeping pills like the barbiturates or perhaps one of the benzodiazepines like Librium, introduced in 1960, or the newer Valium? “I’ll write you a scrip for some capsules.” He turned back to the desk and started to fill in a prescription for Nembutal 0.1 gram, a quickly metabolised barbiturate that should not leave her feeling drowsy the next day.

  Someone was knocking on the surgery door.

  “Come in.”

  Kinky appeared. “I do not wish to interfere, Eileen, but we do have an emergency in the waiting room, so. If you could see to Eileen quickly, sir? I’ll fetch the patient.”

  “Right.” Barry handed Eileen the prescription.

  “Thank you, sir,” Eileen said as she rose and hustled to the door. Barry called after her, “Take one capsule half an hour before bedtime. Come and see me in a month if they’re not helping.” He turned to see Kinky accompanying Maggie Houston and her husband, Sonny, supporting a tearful woman whom Barry vaguely recognised. “Come in,” he said. “Sonny, can you help the patient up on the couch? Maggie, have a pew. Kinky, thank you very much.” She left and closed the door.

  Sonny helped the woman up. The head of the table was inclined so she could lie with her torso at forty-five degrees. He joined Maggie on the other patient’s chair.

  Barry approached the small woman with tousled auburn hair. Her left eye was pale blue, but her right eye was closed and blackened. Hester Doran. He’d last seen her in February at a borough council meeting. She was the wife of one of the councillors, Hubert Doran. The horrid man had voted against O’Reilly’s best interests, but had been defeated, got his comeuppance. Before she’d left the meeting she’d approached O’Reilly and asked to be taken back as one of his patients. “Hello, Mrs. Doran,” Barry said. “I’m sorry for your troubles. Let’s see what we can do to make you more comfy.”

  She was supporting her left wrist with her right hand.

  “Can you tell me what happened?”

  She sobbed and gulped in deep lungfuls of air. She wouldn’t meet his gaze.

  Barry frowned. “Sonny? Maggie? Can either of you help?”

  “Aye,” Sonny said. “We were having our elevenses when the dogs started carrying on. There was a ring at the door, and when I answered it, Hester was there. We’re neighbours, you know.”

  A shuddering sob came from the couch.

  Barry didn’t let himself be distracted. He wanted to get as much information as quickly as possible.

  “She was in floods, poor craytur. Maggie helped me get her calmed down. Hester said she’d been up wee stepladders in the kitchen, had hit her face on an open cupboard door, fallen off the ladder, and had stuck out her arm to break her fall.”

  That explained the black eye. The rest of the history was highly suggestive of a Colles fracture of the wrist, named for the Dublin doctor Abraham Colles, who had first described it in 1814. No wonder she was in tears. Broken bones hurt like the blazes.

  “She said she heard the bone snap,” Maggie said with a shudder.

  “We put her in my motor and brought her straight here. She said her husband, Hubert, was out. Maggie and me’ll go and see him after you’ve sorted things out.”

  “Thanks, Sonny,” Barry said. “That’s most helpful.” He moved closer to the examining couch.

  Hester looked up at him. Her good eye held pleading. She sniffled and said, “It hurts,” and there was pain in her voice.

  “I know,” he said, “and I need you to be brave, Hester, and help me.”

  She nodded weakly.

  “Sonny’s told me you had a fall.”

  She nodded again.

  “And did you hit your head on the floor?”

  She shook her head.

  “What day is it?”

  “Friday, April the fourteenth,” she whispered.

  “Where are you?”

  “Doctor O’Reilly’s surgery.”

  “Thank you.” Good. She was not disorientated in time and place so it was unlikely that she had sustained a concussion. Until the bruising round the eye went down it would be impossible to assess any damage to the bones of the face, but she would have to go to hospital. If the surgeons were concerned, they could arrange a facial X-ray. For the moment Barry would concentrate on the wrist.

  He could see a bony protuberance under the skin one inch above where the wrist joined the hand, on the thumb side. That was the end of the ulna, the biggest of the two forearm bones, and it had been displaced sideways from its fellow, the radius. Hester’s wrist, if looked at from the side, had the contours of a dinner fork if the forearm were the handle and the hand the tines. “I’m afraid you’ve got a bust wrist, Hester,” he said. “I’m going to send you to t
he Royal.”

  She hiccupped, took a deep breath. “It’s all my fault,” she said.

  “You fell, that’s all. Anyone could take a tumble.”

  Barry shook his head. “Hester, I’m going to give you a jag and then splint the wrist.” Even when splinted, any jolting in the ambulance might rub the displaced bone ends together and the pain would be awful. “Maggie, could you nip through to the kitchen? Ask Kinky to call the ambulance?”

  “Yes, sir.” As she left he noticed a yellow primrose keeping a bluebell company in her hatband.

  It took moments to prepare a quarter grain of morphine and inject it into Hester’s right deltoid, the big muscle that sits atop the shoulder. “I’ll need your help in a minute, Sonny.” Barry rummaged in a drawer where O’Reilly kept splints and bandages, finding what was needed. Barry glanced at his watch. Another five minutes for the narcotic to work. “You’re going to start feeling drowsy, Hester,” he said. “They’ll have you fixed in no time at the Royal. Set the bones. Put on a cast. Keep you in overnight, and Mister Doran will be able to take you home in the morning.”

  She shook her head. Ulsterfolk were superstitious and it was widely believed that being discharged on a Saturday was unlucky and often led to early re-admission.

  “Now, Sonny,” Barry said, “I need a hand. Hester, I’m going to splint your wrist now that the painkiller has taken effect. Mister Houston is going to support it. Don’t be scared.”

  Barry showed Sonny how to hold Hester’s fingers so she could remove her other hand without disturbing the broken wrist. It took a very short time for Barry to apply a wooden splint and bandage it firmly in place. He quietly blessed his dad for having Barry join the Sea Scouts as a lad. Making slings was not taught at medical school, but Barry’s scoutmaster would have been proud of his student’s efforts with a triangular bandage. “There,” he said. “Just have to wait for the ambulance now. I’m going to put you in our dining room because the waiting room’s still half full. Sonny, could you and Maggie keep Hester company until it gets here?”

  “Our pleasure,” Sonny said. “If you’ll help me get Hester over there, sir, then I’ll get Maggie.”

  “Of course.”

  Together they helped Hester, now groggy from the morphine, into the other room. She muttered a slurred, “Thank you.”

  “Not be long,” Sonny said and, true to his word, he and Maggie soon returned.

  Barry headed for the kitchen to speak to Kinky, pausing to peek into the waiting room. Not as busy as he had anticipated. The less urgent cases would have gone home to come back next week in the hope they’d not have to wait too long. “Kinky,” he said, “please let me know when the ambulance gets here. I need to tell the crew that Hester’s had morphine.”

  “I will, sir.” She tutted and shook her head. “Poor Hester was a patient here for a brave while before her husband and himself, Doctor O’Reilly, had their big falling-out. She was a desperate one for having the accidents. She told me once she’s been accident-prone ever since she was a little girl, falling off slides, skinning her knees.” She tutted. “Enough of my blethering. Run along now, sir, and see to the sick and suffering. There do be potted herrings for lunch.”

  10

  Ere His Race Be Run

  The big Rover purred along the Kirkubbin to Portaferry Road.

  “Five more minutes to the Rubane Road, Kitty, and then another five to Kirkistown racetrack. You remember we came down here last year to watch Donal Donnelly race his greyhound, Bluebird?”

  “And it bucketed with rain? I remember all right.” Kitty laughed. “I’ll bet Donal Donnelly does too—no pun intended. It’s good to know not all of the man’s ploys work out quite the way he plans.”

  O’Reilly grinned remembering Donal’s face streaming with rain and rife with frustration. It had not been one of Donal’s finer moments. “Brother Lars was there too, that day, and I’ll bet he and Myrna are at the racetrack long before us today,” he said. “My big brother’s car mad. Always has been. He told me that the first race starts at one thirty and there’ll be four races. We’ll be there in plenty of time.”

  “I wonder how things are going between them,” said Kitty, turning toward the view of Strangford Lough to their right.

  “Lars said they were fine, remember? While we were having lunch at the Portaferry Arms. The day we collected Kenny.”

  “I’m looking forward to seeing them both again,” Kitty said, “and I’ve never been to a car race. Should be fun. I certainly enjoyed going for a spin in your brother’s E-Type Jaguar back then.”

  O’Reilly grinned. Kitty had thrown him for a loop when she started holding forth on engine capacities of various models of the famous sports car. “I’d never known you were an automobile enthusiast. Even now I’m finding hidden depth in you, my love.”

  “And I you. And long may it continue.”

  A contented O’Reilly glanced past her to look over to the lough. The tide was going out over the acres of mudflats and its shining surface was barely ruffled, so any breeze must be gentle. In the early-afternoon hazy distance, the Mourne Mountains bulked midnight-hued against a light blue sky, and the sun’s golden path stretched from Strangford Town on the far shore to sparkle on the nearby pools left by the receding tide. A mixed flock of emerald-headed mallard and buff-pated widgeon paddled along in the shallows, birds dabbling, heads down, paddles churning, backsides in the air. Glaucous gulls wheeled above, soaring and screeching like a party of arguing fishwives.

  Strangford Lough today was living up to its Irish name, Loch Cuan, “the peaceful lough,” but in the winter he knew it well when the southerly gales tore the waters to a vicious, spume-laden chop. Then it was the Vikings’ Strangfjorthr, “the turbulent lough.” “Begod,” he said half to himself, “I do love this bit of Ireland. I was thirteen when our uncle Hedley started bringing Lars and me here to teach us to be wildfowlers.” He shook his head. “That was in 1921, the year the Ulster parliament opened at Stormont and a truce was declared in the war between Britain and De Valera’s Irish Republicans. Professor O’Reilly, God rest him, had insisted his sons take an interest in current affairs.”

  “In 1921? Eleven years before we met at Sir Patrick Dun’s Hospital. That was much more important than Irish politics,” Kitty said, and squeezed his thigh.

  “I should have married you back then.” He shook his head. “Where the hell did the years go?” As he indicated left and braked for the turn, his right knee complained by sending a stabbing pain down his shin. He reflexively sucked in his breath.

  “You all right?” Kitty asked.

  “Old age and decrepitude,” he said, and laughed. “Ancient rugby battle scar acting up again. Did it playing against Old Belvedere in ’36. You’ve got to expect the odd twinge.”

  “Poor old bear,” she said, and there was sympathy in her voice. “Still, if you stay on the perch as long as Konrad Adenauer, and I for one hope you do, you’ve a wheen of years left. He died last Tuesday. There was an article on him today in the Belfast Newsletter. He was ninety-one.”

  “Sorry to hear that he’s gone,” said O’Reilly, and he was. He’d admired how the German chancellor had dragged his country up from the Nazi depths after the war. “But with respect to me and my imminent descent into senility, in the immortal words of Groucho Marx, ‘A man’s only as old as the woman he feels.’”

  “Eejit.”

  Kitty was still chuckling when O’Reilly pulled off the road and onto a lane leading to a field full of parked cars. He stopped beside a man in a grocer’s coat and wound down the window. “I know,” he said. “I was here before. Two pound ten. Highway bloody robbery.” But he paid up and parked not far from Lars’s red E-type. The old aerodrome’s paint-peeling control tower, reminder that what was now a racetrack had been a Hurricane fighter station during the war, stood behind the parking lot. O’Reilly got out and trotted round to open Kitty’s door and help her out of the car. She was looking particularly smart in br
own brogues, slim hunter green pants, a cream wool sweater, and black blazer. As always, his heart expanded with pleasure when she tucked her arm under his. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s go and look for big brother. I’ll bet you he’s at the start/finish chatting with some of the drivers.”

  Arm in arm, they walked over the turf, following others in the crowd of spectators to the mile-and-a-half circuit. The area for spectators was separated from the track by hay bales and oil barrels full of cement. An ancient red fire engine carrying galvanised buckets, and a Saint John’s ambulance were parked on the grass in the middle of the track. Farther on past the back straight in a gorse-spotted field outside the old aerodrome, cows went about their business untroubled by the sound of highly tuned engines being run up, tested, and fine-tuned again. Overall hung the stink of high-octane exhaust fumes.

  “There they are,” O’Reilly said, pointing. He quickened his pace.

  On the track before the start line, fifteen strange-looking cars were lined up three abreast in five ranks. They were all low-slung one-seaters with their wheels not under the chassis like ordinary motorcars, but rather sticking out to the sides. Each was truncated and low at the back with an inverted U steel roll bar behind an open cockpit and had an oval air intake that fronted a long snout in place of the usual radiator grille.

  Lars and Myrna stood beside one with the number “6” painted on the bonnet, chatting to a man in oil-stained overalls. Lars raised his voice over the grumbling of engines. “Finn, Kitty, great to see you.”

  “And you and Myrna,” Kitty said. “Your fortnight away did you good, because fit and well you’re both looking.”

  “It was very pleasant,” Myrna said, “and it’s good to be back.” She lowered her voice. “But I’m here under protest. I really don’t like these things. Too noisy and smelly.”

  O’Reilly and Kitty exchanged glances.

  Lars, apparently not hearing her comment, turned to the mechanic and said, “Doctor and Mrs. O’Reilly, I’d like you to meet a good friend of mine, Mister John Crosslé from Holywood.”