An Irish Country Christmas (5 page)

The Cobbler’s Children Are the Worst Shod

Somebody opened the front door, and Barry felt the draught in the dining room. Boots clumped in the hall and then paused. O’Reilly would be hanging up his overcoat. Barry was curious about what had taken the man out into this gale and wondered what would be considered a decent interval before asking. O’Reilly’s main preoccupation, quite naturally, would be his stomach. The dining room door flew open, and the big man, blowing on his fingers, stamped in. O’Reilly, Barry thought, never so much entered a room as took it with all the enthusiasm of a storming party assaulting a breach in a castle wall. O’Reilly slammed the door behind him.

“Good evening, Fingal,” Barry said. He noticed the snowflakes in O’Reilly’s hair. As O’Reilly clumped past to dump his bulk into his usual chair, he grumbled, “There’s bugger all good about it. It’s cold as a witch’s tit, and snowing again out there to beat Banagher. I damn nearly didn’t make it back from the Holywood Arches.” He coughed, a dry hacking sound, pulled a steaming tureen to him, and ladled stew and a lonely suet dumpling onto his plate. “Decent of you to leave me
one
of Kinky’s dumplings,” he remarked, with his mouth already full.

“I thought you might appreciate it. They were
very
good.” It was childish, Barry knew, but he remembered a night not so long ago when he’d been out on a case and had come home famished to discover that O’Reilly had polished off a whole roast duck. Barry had, after all, left the senior man a dumpling.

Barry heard the door open and half turned to see Mrs. Kincaid,
carrying a dish. She had a soft look on her face. “I heard that, Doctor Laverty. I am glad you enjoyed them, so.” She moved to the head of the table and lifted the lid of the tureen. “There’s only a shmall, little bit of the stew left, but enough to wet these with the gravy.” And so saying, she lifted the dish in one beefy hand and put more dumplings into the tureen.

“You, Kinky, are a miracle worker,” said O’Reilly, grabbing the tureen and dumping the entire contents onto his plate. He hacked again.

“And you, Doctor O’Reilly, sir . . .”—she glanced at his ample waistline—“need to go a bit easier on the starches but, och, it is a dirty night out and a body needs a good inside lining.”

“Indeed, Kinky. Indeed.” O’Reilly impaled the last dumpling on his fork and used it to mop up the remainder of the gravy. “Your stew would give a man the inside lining that beats the cold.” He stifled another cough.

Barry saw Kinky’s eyes narrow as she bent to peer more closely at O’Reilly’s ordinarily florid face. “Is it a chill you have, Doctor dear?” she asked.

“Me? Not at all . . . a bit of a dumpling went down the wrong way.”

She sniffed, as she herself would say, with enough force to suck a small cat up a chimney. “It sounds like a chill to me.”

O’Reilly’s laugh ended in another dry hack. “Mrs. Kinky Kincaid, when I come into your kitchen and advise you on the baking of a ham, you can start the doctoring. Is that fair?”

She pursed her lips and shook her head at him, turned, and started to leave, saying, “I expect you two gentlemen would like some coffee and a slice of cherry cake?”

“Kinky,” said Barry, “you are a mind reader.”

“Well, trot on upstairs the pair of you, and I’ll bring something up to the lounge. There’s a fire lit and it’s cosier.” She hesitated at the door. “It’ll be better for that chest of yours, Doctor O’Reilly, so.”

“My chest’s fine, Kinky.” Barry heard the edge of finality creeping into O’Reilly’s voice and was surprised when Kinky said, “It’s not my place to say, I know, but I’ve heard it remarked that doctors who doctor
themselves have
amadáns
for patients.” She left before O’Reilly could answer.

Barry, who had no Gaelic, asked, “What’s an ‘omadawn,’ Fingal?”

“An idiot,” said O’Reilly. “If anybody else called me that, I’d . . .”

Barry shuddered.

“Sure,” O’Reilly said, rising, “it’s only her way of showing she’s concerned. And I’m right as rain.” He walked past Barry. “Come on up the stairs and I’ll tell you about the case I’m just back from.”

Kinky was right. It was cosy in the upstairs lounge. The curtains over the windows were drawn to keep the heat in and the night out. One curtain fluttered each time a strong gust hit the house, and the old window sashes weren’t completely airtight, but the warmth from a coal fire burning in the grate kept the winter chill at bay.

Lady Macbeth, O’Reilly’s white cat, had preempted the space on the rug directly in front of the grill of the grate. She was what O’Reilly called “inside out.” Her pink nose was tucked into her belly, her tail curled over the top of her head, and in this posture she had somehow managed to manoeuver herself so that she lay on her back.

Arthur Guinness, O’Reilly’s black Labrador, lay flopped at the edge of the rug, his big square head on his paws. He looked dolefully from Lady Macbeth to O’Reilly, as if to say, “That
thing
is in
my
place.”

O’Reilly bent and scratched the big dog’s head. Arthur’s tail flopped from side to side. “I let him come into the house when the weather’s really nasty, but he’s meant to stay in the kitchen. Aren’t you, sir?”

“Arf,” said Arthur, giving not the slightest indication he was going to move.

O’Reilly parked himself in one of the big armchairs.

Barry took the other. He leant back and stretched his legs out in front. God, but it was comfortable. As curious as he was about O’Reilly’s patient, if he wasn’t careful, Barry could easily fall asleep. His head nodded onto his chest, and his eyelids drooped.

He heard the scraping of a match on sandpaper and smelled the sharp aroma of O’Reilly’s pipe tobacco. His half-doze was shattered by O’Reilly’s paroxysm of coughing. Barry sat bolt upright and stared at his older colleague. O’Reilly bent forward in his chair, arms crossed in front of his stomach, eyes so tightly shut that Barry could see tiny trickles of water being squeezed from their corners.

The outburst scared Lady Macbeth, and Barry was distracted by the white blur of her fleeing from the room and almost colliding with Kinky, who was coming in. He saw Kinky’s eyes widen as she shoved her tray onto the sideboard. She pointed at O’Reilly and, eyes fixed on Barry’s, jerked her head in O’Reilly’s direction. He nodded and rose, intending to go to his senior colleague and perhaps examine him.

O’Reilly straightened up, wiped the back of his hand across his eyes, took a deep breath, blew it out, and said, “Boys-a-boys, maybe those English experts are right.” He stared at his weakly smoking briar, still grasped in his left hand, “This tobacco isn’t all that good for you. Particularly when a fellah’s been out on a night like this, lugging a great heavy man around and straining his own lungs.”

O’Reilly’s remark about tobacco not being good for you was something of an understatement, Barry thought, as he peered into O’Reilly’s face, hoping the big man had not noticed his sudden frown of concern. Seven years ago the British Medical Research Council had come down heavily in favour of the cause-and-effect relationship between cigarette smoking and lung cancer. He’d taken the warning seriously enough to have quit a year ago. But the same scientists didn’t seem unduly concerned about pipe tobacco, so there was probably nothing sinister happening to O’Reilly. Barry’s frown vanished.

His speculation was cut short by O’Reilly coughing loudly once more. He took another deep breath and stared up at Barry and across to Mrs. Kincaid. “Jesus,” he said, “by the faces on the pair of you, you’d think you’d both seen Lazarus rising from the dead. Would you sit down, Barry?”

Barry said levelly, “Fingal, you had the next bloody thing to an asthmatic seizure a minute ago. We were worried about you.”

O’Reilly cleared his throat. “Nothing to worry about. Sit down.”

“We
were
worried—”

“Well, you can stop worrying. Right now. I told you, I must have inflamed the tubes a bit hauling in great lungfuls of cold air when I was half carrying Liam Gillespie to my car. I’m fit as a fiddle. I’ll be over this in no time.” O’Reilly’s cheeks were more florid than usual, but his nose tip was alabaster.

Barry realized it was useless to argue. He sat.

“Now,” said O’Reilly, dumping his pipe in the ashtray and rubbing his hands together, “is that the coffee and your cherry cake, Kinky?”

“Aye, so.”

“Then let’s be at them. Will you pour, Kinky?”

Barry heard Mrs. Kincaid sniff for the second time that night, and to his surprise he heard O’Reilly add an uncharacteristic “Please?”

“I will,” she said, starting to pour. “And will I maybe get a kettle warmed to fix a bit of friar’s balsam for you to inhale?”

O’Reilly seemed to consider the offer, then said, “All right, but just bring up the boiling water and the brown bottle.”

Barry was surprised to see the big man cave in so readily to Kinky’s suggestion. It would be something to see, O’Reilly sitting at the table with a jug of boiling water and aromatic herbs, towel over his head like a primitive oxygen tent, inhaling the reputedly beneficial fumes.

“Right,” said Mrs. Kincaid, bringing her tray with two cups of coffee and a plate with slabs of her cherry cake over to the coffee table. “I’ll go and see to it.” She left the room.

Barry lifted his coffee cup.

O’Reilly grabbed a slab of cherry cake, took a large bite, and coughed. “Bejesus,” he said. “I’ve a powerful tickle, so I have.” He winked. “But it’s not Kinky’s balsam that’ll be the cure of it.” He eyed the decanter on the sideboard, and Barry thought of the hot whiskey he’d had himself not so very long ago. You couldn’t make a hot Irish without boiling water.

Arthur had stirred himself and now sat directly in front of O’Reilly, head tilted, black eyes fixed on every move of the hand that held the cherry cake, twin strings of saliva hanging from the corners of his mouth.

“You should never feed a gun dog people food,” O’Reilly said quite seriously, as he shoved the last piece of his cake into Arthur’s mouth. “Now,” he said, “if my little bit of a hirstle is of no further interest, I suppose you’d like to hear about who I went to see?”

“Yes, I would. I didn’t know we’d patients as far away as the Holy-wood Arches.”

“We don’t. I went to see the Gillespies. They farm up in the Hills. When I saw Liam, I was pretty sure he had a ruptured spleen so I arranged for an ambulance—”

“To meet you at the Holywood Arches, and you ran him up there in your car.” O’Reilly’s habit of transporting his patients no longer came as a shock to Barry; indeed he himself occasionally ran someone to the hospital if the urgency was great enough. Back in August he’d driven today’s bride, Julie, to the Royal when she’d been miscarrying.

“Bloody good thing I did too,” O’Reilly said. “Liam was flat as a pancake when I got him there, but the ambulance was waiting and we were able to get him aboard and a blood transfusion started. His blood pressure came up after we’d got a couple of pints into him.”

“And he’ll have his spleen out tonight?”

“I would imagine—” Whatever he was about to imagine was interrupted by a crash.

Barry jumped at the sudden sound and tried to understand what had happened. Lady Macbeth must have crept back into the room, jumped onto the tray to try to get at the milk jug, and tipped the whole shebang over. The tray had fallen from the coffee table, and the milk jug lay overturned on the carpet. Lady Macbeth, howling like a banshee, tail fluffed like an electrocuted lavatory brush, was halfway up a window curtain and heading north to the pelmet. Arthur Guinness, without a by-your-leave, was finishing the last slice of cherry cake.

“Jesus,” said O’Reilly, shooing Arthur away. “It’s like feeding time at Whipsnade bloody Zoo.” He turned and stared at Lady Macbeth, where she now sat on the pelmet above the curtains, washing her paws. “And you, madam, can stay there. You clawed me the last time I had to get you down.”

Barry, bending to recover the tray and its contents and then setting
them on the table again, remembered the incident. He was making a mental note that he too was not going to volunteer to rescue O’Reilly’s cat when O’Reilly hacked loudly and said, as if the carnage of a moment ago simply had not happened, “Aye. Liam would have his spleen out tonight, I’m sure, and with a bit of luck he’ll be home and up and doing in time for Christmas.” He coughed and spluttered again, hauled a hanky from a trouser pocket, and dabbed his eyes.