An Irish Country Doctor (10 page)

Barry scuttled after O'Reilly and sheltered in the porch until a bleary-eyed Mrs. Fotheringham, hair in disarray, dressing gown dark from scattered damp patches, opened the door. "Thank goodness you've come," she said, holding the back of her forearm to her brow in a gesture that reminded Barry of the hyperemoting Norma Desmond in the old movie Sunset Boulevard. He wondered if Mrs. Fotheringham was going to swoon. "Do come in. Take off your coats." He took off his drenched raincoat, hung it with O'Reilly's on a clothes stand in the hall, and followed the two upstairs.

Major Fotheringham sat up against his pillows, black circles under his bloodshot eyes. "Doctor O'Reilly," he croaked, "it's been a hellish night. Hellish."

"Oh, dear," said O'Reilly in his most solicitous voice. "Well, let's see how the test went. Come and take a look at this, Doctor Laverty."

Barry stood beside O'Reilly at the dressing table. Neatly arranged as a rank of the guards lay fourteen soggy dipsticks. There was a faint aroma of ammonia. Not a single stick had changed colour. "Oh-oh," said O'Reilly, "oh-oh."

Barry was baffled. No colour change meant that nothing untoward had appeared in the patient's urine.

"What's wrong with him, Doctor O'Reilly?" Mrs. Fotheringham begged.

"Can I stop the test now?" The pleading tone that Barry heard in Major Fotheringham's voice would have softened Pharaoh's hard heart.

"Certainly," said O'Reilly, "and you are to be commended, Mrs. Fotheringham, on your meticulous devotion to duty." 

She simpered, "Thank you, Doctor. But what's wrong with him?" 

"Ah," said O'Reilly, "you remember I told you last night I was pretty sure that I knew?"

"Yes."

"Well, now I'm certain, and I'm sure Doctor Laverty here would agree with me completely."

You old bugger, Barry thought. Couldn't resist having a little go at me, could you? But he decided to play along. "Absolutely," he said, looking solemn.

"What's wrong with you, my dear Major Fotheringham?" O'Reilly took a three count. "I'm very much afraid it's nothing. Absolutely nothing. Nothing at all."

Barry saw Mrs. Fotheringham's jaw drop. "Nothing?" she whispered. "Nothing?"

"Well," O'Reilly allowed, "he might be a bit waterlogged, but other than that? Not a thing."

Barry had great difficulty controlling a laugh. O'Reilly pointed to the soggy sticks. "You can keep the test sticks, and of course, if you think you need me, anytime, anytime at all, day or night, don't hesitate to call."

"Yes," said the weary Mrs. Fotheringham.

"Fine," said O'Reilly, "and now we'd better be running along. We've more calls to make."

That was news to Barry. Kinky had said there were none, but by now there was little that Doctor Fingal Flahertie O'Reilly could do that would come as a surprise.

Cats on a Cold Tile Roof

"I thought that was the only call we had to make." Barry slammed the car door. 

"Just a couple more," said O'Reilly as he reversed out of the driveway. "I don't think," he said, with a huge grin, "that the major or his lady will call us out again for a while. Do you?" 

"I doubt it." In spite of himself Barry chuckled. "Mind you, it's not the sort of medicine I was taught, but it seems to work." He had a mental image of six backsides being injected through their clothes. 

"Like a charm, my boy." O'Reilly fished in one pocket for his pipe. "D'you see, there's more ways of killing a cat than drowning it in cream. When I started out, I thought that every patient would behave like a civilized human being, that they'd all treat their doctor with respect. Twenty years ago I'd have read the Fotheringhams the riot act for wasting my time." Barry glanced down. His own thoughts exactly. "Didn't take me long to find out that consideration for other people can be one of the lesser attributes of some members of the species Homo sapiens."

"I've noticed."

"And yelling at them does no good."

'It seemed to work with Seamus Galvin."

O'Reilly laughed. "Seamus? You couldn't get an idea into that one's thick head with a two-pound hammer. He's one of a kind." He lit his briar, filling the car with pungent smoke. "For most of the other bolshie ones, the trick is to treat their medical complaints to the very best of your ability, but you don't have to dance attendance on them all, and you can make your point like the serpent in Genesis." 

" 'Now the serpent was more subtle than any beast'?" 

"Exactly. Something they didn't teach you at medical school." O'Reilly braked at the traffic light. The car rocked as a gust of wind screeched up the road that led to the seafront. "What got you into medicine anyway?" he asked.

Barry hesitated. That decision had been a personal one, and he was always reticent about giving the real reasons. He tried to deflect the question. "When I left school, my dad said I was too dim to read physics or chemistry, would never make a living with an arts degree, wasn't a Catholic--so the priesthood was out--and I didn't look like a soldier. So, there was nothing left for me but medicine." 

O'Reilly guffawed. "Sounds like the sort of thing Tom Laverty would say." He turned and looked into Barry's eyes. "But there was more to it than that, wasn't there?"

"The light's changed, Doctor O'Reilly."

"Right." The Rover charged across the intersection, tires shrieking as O'Reilly hauled the big car into a right turn. He steadied on course. "You still haven't answered me." 

"Well, I-" 

"Don't like talking about it, but you'd a half-notion you'd like to help people. Do something useful--"

"How the hell did you know that--?"

"Didn't make many friends at school, so you hoped if you went into medicine people would like you. . . ."

Barry's mind went back to his boarding-school days. He'd had no close friends apart from Jack Mills. Barry had been a good scholar, and as a result he was shunned by the in-crowd of his closed-in little world. His four years had been lonely. 

"Thought so," said O'Reilly. "Well, most of the customers aren't going to love you. They'll say thank-you if you get it right, and treat you like dirt if you don't--and you will make mistakes, never doubt that."

Barry wondered how the big man sitting beside him could have understood so completely.

"A few will have no consideration for the fact that you're on call twenty-four hours a day, and some like Councillor Bishop are bloody rude and totally demanding. That man Bishop? There's enough acid in his veins to recharge the batteries of a submarine." O'Reilly shoved his pipe back into his jacket pocket. "You simply don't let the Bishops get on your wick. And there's a good side too. When you do get a diagnosis right, make a difference in somebody's life, find you do fit into the local scheme of things, it is all worth it." 

"You really think so?"

"I know so, boy. I bloody well know so." O'Reilly clamped his hands onto the steering wheel. "You just have to keep pounding away."

Barry hesitated, then asked, "What made you pick medicine?" 

"Huh," O'Reilly grunted, "your friend Galvin once ran an electric sander over his hand just to find out what it felt like. Do you know what he said when I asked him why?"

Barry shook his head.

"He said, 'Seemed like a good idea at the time.'" O'Reilly shook with laughter and used the back of one hand to wipe the condensation from the inside of the windscreen. "I think," he said, "the rain's going to clear up."

Barry realized that O'Reilly's flippancy was as much his personal camouflage as was the dazzle paint on the hull of his old ship in the pictures that hung on his landing walls. Barry decided to let the matter drop and stared out through the car window.

The Rover ran along the shore of the lough where a grassy verge dotted with sea pinks was all that separated the road from jagged rocks, black in the driving rain. Obsidian-green combers pounded against the shore, breaking and hurling spume across the roadway. What had O'Reilly said? You just have to keep pounding away. Barry smiled. The car slowed, and O'Reilly parked it with two wheels on the grass. "Come on." Barry climbed out and saw a cottage with grey walls, slate roof, mullioned windows, and boxes full of bright pansies on the sills. The cottage sat squarely beside the road. A short stretch of coarse grass ran down to the shore from behind the cottage. O'Reilly stood and knocked on the front door. Barry joined him and immediately recognized the woman who opened the door. Maggie MacCorkle was not wearing her hat with the geraniums, but was still swathed in layers of cardigans and her long rusty skirt. "Come on in out of thon, Doctor," she said. "It would founder you out there, so it would."

She closed the door behind them. A single oil lamp on a small oak table lighted the tiny, low-ceilinged room. Barry saw dishes stacked to dry in a plate rack beside an enamel sink, a small gas stove, and a row of wall-hung cupboards. Two easy chairs flanked a fireplace where coals glowed brightly. On one chair a huge ginger cat lay curled in a ball. Its tail covered its nose, but Barry could see that one ear was missing and the animal's left eye was scarred shut. "Would you take a cup of tea in your hand, Doctor?" 

"No thanks, Maggie. We just popped in for a minute," O'Reilly said. "How's the headaches?"

Barry noticed that as O'Reilly spoke, his gaze darted round the room.

"I couldn't have done better at Lourdes," she said, crossing herself. "It's a miracle, so it is. Them wee pills--"

"Good," said O'Reilly, glancing at Barry.

"Away to hell out of there, General." Maggie pushed the protesting cat out of its chair. "Sit down by the fire, Doctor." O'Reilly sat. 

"How is the General, Maggie?" He fondled the cat's head. "Up to his usual tricks?"

"That one," Maggie's wrinkled face split into a toothless grin, "that one would sow dissension in a deserted house." She turned to Barry. "Have a seat."

He shook his head, but out of curiosity asked, "Why do you call your cat the General, Miss MacCorkle?"

She chuckled. "That's his pet name. His full name is General Sir Bernard Law Montgomery; isn't it, you wee divil?" The cat turned its good eye to the sound of her voice. "He's just like the man he's named for. He's an Ulsterman, and he loves a good fight, don't you?" The General made a deep growling noise, laid his only ear back along the side of his head, and glowered at Barry.

"He understands everything I say, you know," Maggie said. Barry was not sure he liked the way the cat was glaring at him. He took one step back.

"Don't you worry your head about him," she said. "You're not big enough for him to go after."

O'Reilly rose. "We'll have to be getting on, Maggie." He crossed the room. "Now remember"--O'Reilly paused as he opened the door--"if you're out of sorts, come and see me."

"I will," she said, "and thanks for popping by."

"No trouble," said O'Reilly, "we were on our way to see Sonny." 

"Sonny?" Maggie cackled. "Poor ould Sonny. He's not too well pleased with me."

"Oh?" said O'Reilly.

"Aye. His spaniel came round here yesterday, but the General saw to that dog, didn't you, General?"

It seemed to Barry that at the word "dog," the cat's growl deepened. He arched his back and spat.

Maggie held the door. "Sonny'll tell you all about it, but pay no heed to him. He's only an ould goat anyway."

"I didn't know that Miss MacCorkle had asked you to call," Barry said, as he shut the car door.

"She didn't," said O'Reilly, driving off. "On slow days I try to visit one or two of the ones that I worry about."

"You were looking for something back there. What was it?" 

"Little things. Dishes washed, no half-filled saucepans on the stove, clean floors." O'Reilly turned onto a narrow road. "Maggie's a bit different, but she's independent, and I need to know that she's looking after herself. If she starts to neglect the place, we may have to think about some kind of home care for her." O'Reilly's voice softened. "I'd not like to think of Maggie in a home, so if I can keep an eye on her . . ."

"That's very decent of you."

"Not a bit," said O'Reilly tersely. "There's more to this job than runny noses and hypochondriacs who drag you out of your bed in the middle of the bloody night."

"I see."

"You will," said O'Reilly, "at our next stop."

"Sonny?"

"Sonny. Now there's a story and a half." O'Reilly braked. Barry could see a tractor crossing the road. It was quieter in the car now. In keeping with O'Reilly's earlier prediction, the rain had stopped, and the summer sun was making steam rise in soft tendrils from the road's wet surface. The car moved on.

"I'll tell you about Sonny after we've been there," said O'Reilly. "But if you think Maggie's a bit odd . . ."--he pulled to the side of the road--"what do you make of this?"

"Good Lord."

The opposite verge was cluttered with old cars, television sets, a rusting combine harvester, and folding plastic chairs. Electrical cables drooped from the branches of a larch tree and led to a television set and a glass-fronted spin dryer. Barry could see bundles of clothes inside, whirling and dancing. The yellow-covered extension cords ran from a roofless house that stood back from the road. The roof beams were weather-stained and half caved in. Ivy straggled up the walls and over the windowpanes.