“It is, Mister Osbaldiston. The licensing laws are very strict. Very strict.” He held out his now-empty glass. “I’ve just the time for the one more.”
“Time, gentlemen,” called Arthur as he started to build the policeman’s pint.
At precisely 9:55 the door flew open and O’Reilly, pursued by Arthur Guinness, entered. His cheeks were a slate grey, his nose a screaming red. He blew on his hands, rubbed the palms vigorously together, and blew on them again.
“Jasus, it’s cold as a witch’s tit out there,” he remarked to the bar in general, and, “Hot Irish. Double,” to Arthur Osbaldiston in particular.
The constable turned and glared first at O’Reilly then at Arthur Guinness. I suspected the episode when Arthur had mistaken the man for a burglar and had bitten him still rankled.
“Last shout’s been called. It’s nearly ten o’clock, Doctor.”
O’Reilly looked at the clock, then back to the officer. I may have been the only one in the place to notice the change in the colour of O’Reilly’s nose tip, but he hid his anger well.
“True, officer, true,” he said, “and I know you’re just doing your job.”
The constable hurried to finish his pint within the five minutes drinking-up time permitted by the law. “True, sir.”
“But,” said O’Reilly, “if I could prove you’re wrong about the time could I buy you a pint and have a wee warmer myself?”
Every eye was on the peeler. The silence was such that the dropping of a single pin might have resulted in a bang of sufficient magnitude to rupture eardrums.
“Well…”
“Walking stick, Arthur,” said O’Reilly in his best quarterdeck voice.
The stick was produced.
O’Reilly stepped over to the clock, pushed open the glass front with the stick’s rubber-tipped ferrule, and with great concentration used the thing to turn the minute hand back. It was now, local Mucky Duck time, 8:58.
“But,” spluttered the constable, “you can’t just do that.”
“You’re right,” said O’Reilly, “I can’t, but Her Majesty’s government can.” He glared round the room. “Today is the third Saturday of October, and what happens tonight?”
To give him credit, Donal Donnelly saw it first. “Jasus, Doctor. The clocks go back.”
“They do,” said O’Reilly.
The constable began, “But not until two…”
“Drinks have been poured, officer. One for you and, Arthur, a hot double John Jameson for me.”
The constable laughed. “All right, Doctor. I’ll allow that you’re not breaking the law—only bending it.”
“Right,” said O’Reilly, lifting his steaming glass. “Cheers.”
JUNE 1999
The Last Laugh
Mrs. Bishop’s will
“We’d better be off,” said O’Reilly.
The temptation to suggest that he’d been going off for quite some time was firmly resisted. It was after all a solemn occasion, and in deference to the solemnity O’Reilly, as was the local expression, had cleaned up well. He wore black shoes that gleamed like the Koh-i-Noor diamond and pinstriped trousers with creases that would have cut tungsten-strengthened steel. His rusty black jacket covered an immaculately starched white shirt. His tie, as befitted the occasion, was black—except where a stubborn egg stain marred its ebony sheen. The entire ensemble was topped—literally—by a top hat made of velvety beaver pelt.
Funerals were taken seriously in Ballybucklebo.
“Sad day,” said O’Reilly. “The place will miss Mrs. Bishop.”
“True,” I said, shifting uncomfortably in my best dark suit. The waistband of my seldom-worn trousers had shrunk since I’d encountered Mrs. Kincaid’s cooking. “Mrs. Bishop was a decent woman. We will miss her.”
“Not as much as Councillor Bishop.” O’Reilly let one eyelid droop in a slow-motion wink that would have done justice to a voyeur at a strip club. “I was the witness to her will. I’d to deal with one of her bequests yesterday. And I’d to tell her husband.”
“Oh?” When O’Reilly grinned the way he grinned then, I knew there was more to tell.
“I’ll tell you after the service,” he said. “Come on or we’ll be late.” He was unusually quiet as he piloted the long-nosed Rover out to the main Belfast road. Mrs. Bishop was to be cremated and the crematorium was in the big city. I contented myself watching the hedgerows rush by and the occasional cyclist take to the ditch. I tried to puzzle out what he could mean by, “Not as much as Councillor Bishop.”
You may remember he was a man who would wrestle a bear for a farthing. Several years ago he’d arranged for a harmless old eccentric, Sunny, to be put in a home so that Bishop could acquire Sunny’s land. O’Reilly had resorted to some absolutely ethical blackmail then. He’d suggested to the good Councillor, with all the subtlety of the blow of a battering ram on a castle gate, that unless Sunny was returned to his land and his dogs forthwith, Mrs. Bishop might have to find out about why their maid had left so abruptly for England. In those days being single and pregnant was not regarded enthusiastically in rural Ireland.
Neither was divorce.
I recalled that by means other than O’Reilly, Mrs. Bishop had found out about her husband’s little peccadillo. (It’s an awful example of authorial intrusion but I can’t resist the temptation to remark that no, Viagra would not have helped the man.) Matters in the Bishop household had attained the state of diplomatic relations that existed between England and Denmark when Admiral Nelson won the battle of Copenhagen—armed neutrality. This must have had some effect on the late Mrs. B.’s will—but what? Given that the pair of them shared a house only to avoid the shame of divorce proceedings I would have thought that Bishop might have felt a certain relief when his wife joined the choir invisible. Why would he miss her?
“Come on, Fingal,” I paused as he screeched past a cow that had somehow wandered onto the road, “what was the bequest?”
“Later, my boy.” He grunted, shifted down, and accelerated over one of those little hills in the roads of Ireland which, if taken at the right speed, have the same effect on the motorcar as did the launching ramps of V1 flying bombs in the second numbered unpleasantness. Touchdown came with a ferocious crash.
My teeth were still chattering when he parked the Rover in the lot at the crematorium.
* * *
It was, as funerals go, a pleasant one. A couple of hymns, prayers for the departed. The Reverend McWheezle gave the eulogy—and for once kept his words short and to the point.
O’Reilly, as befitted his station, and I, as O’Reilly’s minion, had been given pews at the front of the chapel. It was from this vantage point that I was able to observe Mister Bishop’s reactions to the proceedings. The portly gentleman seemed to have his emotions reasonably well under control. Occasionally a tear—which even then I regarded as the essence of hypocrisy—leaked from one pallid eye when he glanced at the bier where his late wife’s coffin lay.
The organ began to play “Nearer my God to Thee,” and by whatever mechanical miracles make these things happen, the coffin sank slowly from view. The gears of the device were almost soundless, the organ music subdued, but the air was rent with the keening coming from Councillor Bishop. The man was as grief-stricken as Orpheus when he discovered that Eurydice had fallen off the perch. I stole a glance at O’Reilly. His features were composed, his hands folded primly before him, and his eyes held that sparkle that I only saw when God was definitely in his Heaven and all was very right with O’Reilly’s world.
“Fingal,” I whispered, “tell me.”
He bent his head and said, sotto voce, “She had the money in the family. Inherited it from her people.” O’Reilly nodded toward the hapless Bishop. “Her last bequest—and I had the pleasure of telling him last night—was that all her—hang on—”
Bishop’s wailing had reached epic proportions. I looked at one of the glass chandeliers to satisfy myself it had not shatter
ed. I had a last glimpse as the coffin vanished and the lid of the bier slid back into place.
I heard O’Reilly try to stifle a snigger “—that all her money was to be put into ten-pound notes and used to line her coffin.”
I wondered how I was going to explain my unseemly guffaws to the rest of the mourners. My struggling to compose myself wasn’t helped by O’Reilly’s next suggestion: “Maybe Bishop could put the ashes in an egg timer—after all, time is money.”
Author’s note: A friend who read this manuscript before it was submitted has pointed out that the money-in-the-coffin ploy was used in a Frank Sinatra and the Rat Pack movie, Ocean’s Eleven. Unfortunately Ol’ Blue Eyes himself has shuffled off this mortal coil—otherwise he’d be hearing from me on the subject of plagiarism.
JULY 1999
Easy Come, Easy Go
O’Reilly triumphs again
“Would you fancy a day at Loughbrickland?”
O’Reilly wandered into the surgery just as Maggie left. I barely heard his question, thinking as I was about Maggie MacCorkle’s sore back that had failed to respond to everything I’d tried. I’d even used his vitamin-pill trick, telling her to take the placebo exactly seventeen minutes before the pain started. O’Reilly had cured the aches above her head that way. Why were my ministrations not working?
“Have you gone deaf?” he asked.
“What?”
“You have—either deaf or stupid. I just offered you one of the best days out you’ll ever have.” He fired up his briar. “Of course if you don’t want to go to the races maybe Lord Fitzgurgle would enjoy the trip.”
“Sorry, Fingal. I was thinking about Maggie.”
“Oh? Headaches or backaches?”
“Back.”
“What have you tried?”
I sighed. “Everything.”
He laughed, a deep throaty rumbling noise, the sort of sound you might hear when one tectonic plate shifts over its neighbour. “No, you haven’t.”
I sniffed. “I bloody well have.” My professional pride had been stung by my failure.
I should have seen the glint in his eye, heeded the warning signals. It’s said that a leaden hue to the sky, humid air that’s almost drinkable, and an oily calm on a breathless sea is a sure harbinger of a tropical hurricane. That glint in O’Reilly’s baby-blues was as accurate a predictor of squalls. I ignored it when he said, “Bet you I can fix her.”
“Don’t be daft. I’ve done everything.”
His eyebrows knitted and he said, slowly and deliberately, “I believe I remarked, ‘Bet you.’ Would you like to chance five pounds?”
That stopped me. Five pounds was a lot of money. I hesitated.
“What’s that business about ‘money’ and ‘mouth’?” he asked.
“All right, Fingal. You’re on.”
He grinned like an open drainpipe as he shook my hand. “We’ll see her together the day after tomorrow.”
“Why not tomorrow?”
“Because,” he said, shaking his head, “tomorrow you and me are going to Loughbrickland.”
And, on the morrow, go we did. Loughbrickland is the site of one of those peculiarly Irish events, point-to-point horse racing. The English aristocracy may turn out in their ducal splendour in the paddock at Royal Ascot or Epsom Downs. Tame affairs. The horses there are true thoroughbreds that run round a level track. An Irish point-to-point is a cross between Ben Hur’s endeavours in the Circus Maximus, without the chariots, of course, and a ride on the “Sky Demon” roller coaster. The horses and jockeys thunder round a course that’s interrupted at intervals by hedges, gates, ditches, and sometimes combinations of hedges and ditches. At least they try to. Most horses finish but a goodly number of riders part company with their mounts before journey’s end. The spectators aren’t usually drawn from the ranks of those whose names appear in Burke’s Peerage, but the craic, as they say in Ireland, is powerful.
Tis there you’ll see the fiddlers and the pipers all competing,
The nimble footed dancers and they trippin’ on the daisies,
And others crying cigars and lights and bills for all the races,
With the colours of the jockeys and the price and horses’ ages.
That stanza from a song called “The Galway Races” puts the point-to-point in a nutshell—particularly the bit about the horses’ prices. At one end of the track the bookmakers, who in Ireland rejoice in the title of “Turf Accountant,” set up their stands, cry the odds, and happily take the punters’ money.
We’d parked the old Rover in an adjacent field.
“Come on,” said O’Reilly, as eager to get down to the track as any one of the horses awaiting the start of the first race.
I trotted along in his wake, trying not to step in too many cow-claps or twist an ankle in one of the ruts in the ground. I was breathing heavily as he shouldered his way through the crowd of farmers and townsfolk, stopping at last in front of a stand that bore the slogan “Honest Bobby Greer.”
“Is it yourself, Doctor dear?” enquired a florid-faced gentleman standing on a raised platform beneath the sign. This, I assumed, was Trustworthy Robert. He wore a yellow-checked waistcoat beneath a Donegal tweed jacket, moleskin trousers, and a bowler hat tipped forward over his brow. He clearly knew O’Reilly of old and, judging by the huge smile on Greer’s face, had lightened O’Reilly’s wallet more than once in the past.
“Good day, Bobby,” said O’Reilly. He handed over a ten-shilling note. “Finnegan’s Fancy both ways in the first.” I watched as he accepted a ticket.
“Are you not having a flutter, Pat?” he inquired. I shook my head. I’d let him put his ten bob on a horse in the hopes that it would finish in the first three. I’d be quite happy to follow its progress vicariously. Besides, there was the small matter of tomorrow’s wager.
“Come on then,” he called over his shoulder as he forced his way to the fence near the finish line. I followed.
“They’re off!” cried the starter. The faint pounding of hooves grew louder. The ground trembled. The punters yelled encouragement. The mass of equine bodies hurtled past. No wonder, I thought, caught up by the moment, no wonder Liza Doolittle encouraged the horse she’d backed to “Move your bleeding arse.”
“Bugger,” said O’Reilly, tearing up his ticket. “Come on.”
Off we went back to Honest Bobby. Ten shillings changed hands. Next race. Steaming horses, crouching jockeys, turf clods flying from hooves.
“Bugger,” said O’Reilly, tearing up his ticket.
He said that word seven times all told.
The eighth and final race would start in ten minutes. Off we went back to a now happily grinning Bobby Greer.
“So what’s your fancy, Doctor dear?”
“I’ve got you now,” said O’Reilly. I saw a five-pound note. “That on Butcher’s Boy to win.” He took the ticket.
I hadn’t placed a bet all day but the name of a filly took my eye: Strangford Sally. The current love of my life was a young woman from Strangford and, yes, you’ve guessed her name. The odds were twenty to one, but I thought there might be an omen so I risked five shillings.
As we walked back to our places at the finish, O’Reilly said, “I’ve got Greer on this one. Donal Donnelly’s father owns Butcher’s Boy. He’s never been out before. I’ve seen him jump.” He rubbed his hands. “That horse loves hedges like Orpheus loved Eurydice. Just goes at the nearest one as if his legs were springs.”
“They’re off!” I waited, fingers crossed, peering up the track, wondering what the commotion was near the start. A horse with its jockey clinging on to its neck had left the track and was charging up a hill like Lord Cardigan’s mount at Balaclava. I was so intrigued I nearly missed the finish and that would have been a shame.
I was feeling rather smug the next morning as I sat in the surgery beside a chastened O’Reilly. Strangford Sally had come in at twenty to one, which made me five pounds better off. Butcher’s Boy had lived up to e
xpectations and had, like winged Pegasus, soared over the nearest hedge. Unfortunately, it had been the one marking the boundary of the track. As O’Reilly had remarked yesterday, “At the rate the bloody thing was going up that hill it’s probably in County Antrim by now.” Only one tiny matter remained to be resolved.
“Come in, Maggie,” said O’Reilly as she hobbled in. “It’s the back again?”
“Yes, Doctor.”
“Let’s have a look.”
I watched as O’Reilly palpated her sides. He didn’t even ask her to take off her dress. He bent and whispered something to her. She nodded and moved behind the screens. I heard the rustling of material. Maggie reappeared, smiling to beat the band. Her limp had gone.
“Thank you, Doctor O’Reilly,” she said. “Oh, that’s better.”
“Go on with you now, Maggie,” he said.
She left. He turned to me. “I believe you owe me a fiver.”
I fished in my pocket for yesterday’s winnings. “What did you do?”
He chuckled. “Her corset stays were too tight. I told her to loosen them.”
I handed him the bank note. Easy come, easy go.
(no column in august 1999)
SEPTEMBER 1999
Lateral Thinking
Or should that be vertical?
“I wonder what it is about my family?” muttered Doctor Fingal Flahertie O’Reilly, sipping his whiskey as he sat comfortably ensconced in the armchair in the upstairs sitting room of his home.
I had a pretty fair idea of some of the peculiarities of the clan O’Reilly, but as my sage old father had often remarked, “Some questions are better not answered.” I sat in my armchair, peered through the big bay window, and feigned interest in a fishing boat drifting on the rippled waters of Belfast Lough.
“Sometimes they can be a bit odd,” he said.
As two left feet, I thought, but left the thought unsaid.
“Do you remember Lars Porsena?” he asked.