"Course we will," O'Reilly said. "I'll have to be. Christmas is only three weeks away. We could be busy in the surgery for the first two weeks; the customers'll want to get their aches and pains sorted out before Christmas week. It's flu and sniffles and coughs and colds season. It could take the pair of us to manage the practice." He coughed and frowned.

"I could cope by myself for a few days, you know." Barry rather relished the thought of even more independence.

"I don't doubt it for one minute, son, but it's not just the practice. The whole village goes daft."

"Oh?"

"What with Rugby Club parties, the kiddies' Christmas pageant, His Lordship's open house . . . dear G.o.d, even the Bishops have a do on Boxing Day . . ."

"Councillor Bertie Bishop has a party?" Barry's eyebrows and the tone of his voice shot up. Bertie Bishop was the meanest man in all of the Six Counties.

"I think," said O'Reilly, "he must watch A Christmas Carol with Alastair Sim on the telly every year. What happens to Scrooge probably bothers him for a day or two, so he tries to act like a Christian gentleman. He's like most people. His Christmas spirit soon fades. It usually lasts until about Twelfth Night; then he reverts to his usual great gobs.h.i.te self."

"I'll be d.a.m.ned."

"I don't want to miss out on the fun, and I don't want you to miss out on it either, but I'm going to be b.u.g.g.e.r all use until this clears up." O'Reilly strangled a small hack. "But that won't take long."

"Fingal, I told you. I can manage."

"Well, that's a mercy that one of you two gentlemen can." Barry turned to see Kinky coming into the room. She carried a folded towel over one forearm the way a waiter would in a cla.s.sy restaurant. She set a large tray on the sideboard. He could see a steaming kettle, an a.s.sortment of bowls, and a bottle of brown fluid. "I suppose you've a notion that spilled milk tidies itself up?" She glowered at the damp stain on the carpet.

"Sorry, Kinky," Barry said.

"Men." But she had a grin on her face. "All right," she said, "we'll get you seen to first, sir." She lifted a small bowl off the tray, set it on the sideboard, and carried the rest over to a larger table in the bay of one of the windows. "Will you please come here, Doctor O'Reilly?" She busied herself spooning the brown, glutinous liquid into the bowl and then pouring boiling water over it. The room filled with dark, pungent fumes that made Barry's eyes water. "Now, Doctor O'Reilly, dear, sit you here . . ." She indicated a chair beside the table.

O'Reilly rose, wandered over, and sat.

"Put your head over the bowl . . ."

Barry could see how the rising steam enveloped O'Reilly's bent head.

"And get in under this." She took the towel off her arm and draped the material over his head. Tendrils of the vapors escaped around the edges of the towel. He looked, Barry thought, like an Arabian sheik in a London pea souper. "Now," she said, "that'll loosen your chest, so. Mind you, my granny would have given you an infusion of carrageen and nasturtium seeds to drink with it."

O'Reilly muttered something that Barry missed, but Kinky must have heard. "All right, all right," she said. "Don't I know what you are after? And haven't I brought the makings? You'll get your hot whiskey. It'll be just right for you to have one after you've been in there for fifteen minutes." She wagged a finger at the crouched O'Reilly. "And not one minute less, do you hear, Doctor dear?"

Barry heard a m.u.f.fled "yes, Kinky" coming from under the towel.

"Now," she said, taking her tray back to the sideboard, "Doctor Laverty, do you have it in you to make himself a wee hot half?"

"I do."

"I'd be grateful if you would, sir, while I trot downstairs to get the things to clean up the stain on the carpet." She tutted. "How you managed to spill it-"

"Kinky, would you look up?" Barry pointed to the pelmet where Lady Macbeth was now scenting the air, her pink nose whiffling as the balsam's fumes drifted in her direction. "There's the culprit."

Kinky's round face broke into an enormous grin. "Och, well then, she's forgiven." She called directly up to Lady Macbeth, "For you're nothing but a wee dote, so. Y'are, y'are." And with that she left.

Barry rose and busied himself making a hot Irish for Fingal. He decided against having another drink himself. He really was getting sleepy. He spooned sugar into a mug.

"Barry?" O'Reilly's voice was m.u.f.fled by the towel.

"Yes, Fingal?"

"About you managing on your own?"

"Yes." Barry added a measure of John Jameson's from the decanter on the sideboard.

"See if you think we're maybe a tad less busy than we used to be."

Barry hesitated as he was about to squeeze some lemon juice into the mug. "Do you think we are? I'm not sure. I haven't really thought about it."

"I just wondered," O'Reilly said. "I hear we may have a bit of compet.i.tion."

"Oh?"

"Aye. Some new doctor's moved into the Kinnegar since Doctor Bowman retired in September."

"And you think he might be pinching some of our patients?"

"Not if I'm on my feet he won't."

Barry stiffened. "Do you not think the patients will stay for me too?" The lemon juice dripped into the whiskey. Christ, Barry thought, I sound as bitter as the b.l.o.o.d.y juice. "Forget I said that, Fingal. I understand what you're saying. Of course the customers are more used to you. They b.l.o.o.d.y well ought to be after twenty-odd years." He threw a couple of cloves into the mug. "Anyway," he said, pouring in the almost boiling water from the kettle, "we will have you on your feet in no time. And I will be able to manage on my own for a few days. And Fingal? I'm on call tonight." A gust buffeted against the windows. "You're not going out again in that lot."

"Thanks, Barry."

"I'm glad you agree." Barry was just about to carry the whiskey to O'Reilly when Kinky reappeared. "I believe," she said, "it was to be a full fifteen minutes before we gave that to himself?"

Barry replaced the mug on the tray and glanced at his watch. "Sorry, Kinky."

She was marching to the place where the milk had stained the carpet when Barry heard a plaintive mew drifting from above. He and Kinky both looked up to see Lady Macbeth huddled at the furthest end of the pelmet, clearly trying to escape the ever-increasing miasma of balsam fumes. "The poor wee craytur." Mrs. Kincaid moved under the pelmet and stood close to O'Reilly. "Come on now, jump you down and Kinky'll catch you. She will, so."

Lady Macbeth crouched, hunched, sprang-and missed Kinky completely, but the towel over O'Reilly's head served as a safety net. The scene unfolded before Barry's eyes like a slow-motion film loop. Lady Macbeth hitting the fabric and disappearing into its folds. The towel being pulled from O'Reilly's head, allowing Barry to watch as his senior partner was bent forward by the combined weight of cat and towel until his nose was forced into the bowl of balsam. The film loop had a soundtrack: a cat's eldritch screech, a doctor's ba.s.so roar. O'Reilly rose to his feet, hand clutching his nose. Arthur trotted over, head thrown back, yodeling, tail going ninety to the dozen. Mrs. Kincaid clapped one hand over her opened mouth, and Barry Laverty, bent double with laughter, had to turn his back on the entire a.s.sembly.

Oh dear, oh dear. He tried to collect himself. In such a household as this, where the unexpected was the norm, how could he possibly worry about O'Reilly's cough, the new doctor in compet.i.tion, or the fact that he was all alone right now to run the practice. And even if he wasn't called out tonight, he'd be on his own in the surgery tomorrow. He would continue to be alone until O'Reilly, who he could see standing and using the towel to dry his nose, was figuratively as well as literally back on his feet again.

The Daily Round, the Common Task.

O'Reilly was definitely not on his feet yet. Forty minutes earlier when Barry had walked softly past the big man's bedroom door, he'd heard distinct rumbling snores, noises akin to the purring of a pride of lions he seen in a TV doc.u.mentary by Armand and Michaela Denis. Now he was finishing his breakfast alone.

"You've time for another cup of tea. It's Twinings, so." Mrs. Kincaid fussed with the teapot, pouring the tea through a silver strainer into Barry's cup. "Here's the milk."

Barry knew better than to refuse. "Thanks, Kinky."

"Now get that into you like a good lad, and I'll trot upstairs in a minute and see how himself is doing."

Barry saw the twinkle in her agate eyes and the deepening of smile lines at their corners. Someone in Kinky's ancestry, he thought, must have been a close relative of Florence Nightingale. Nothing seemed to make her happier than ministering unto her charges.

He added milk to his tea as Kinky cleared his breakfast dishes and left. Barry yawned and sipped. Thank the Lord there'd been no emergencies after they'd gone to bed last night. Barry hadn't minded taking call for O'Reilly, but he'd needed his night's sleep. The weather probably explained why no one had summoned him last night. If they thought the roads were blocked, they'd not want to drag him out unless it was an absolute emergency. And perhaps, the thought nagged, if they lived closer to the Kinnegar they might be giving the new doctor a try.

Between laughing at the mayhem caused by Lady Macbeth and plummeting into a deep and dreamless sleep there had been little time for worry, but the appearance of the compet.i.tion O'Reilly had mentioned did have to be taken seriously. Barry was no health economist, but the question remained. Were there enough patients in the territory of Ballybucklebo and the Kinnegar to sustain three busy doctors who were paid an annual fee by the Ministry of Health for every patient who belonged to their practices? Old Doctor Bowman had been no threat, and his practice list had been small. He'd been semiretired. But a new man? Och, well, Barry thought, "Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof." And Saint Luke should have known. He was a physician.

Barry swallowed more tea. He looked through the window at six-inch-deep ridges of snow on the wall of the churchyard opposite. In Ulster snow was rare, and a fall like last night's, which would be brushed aside as irrelevant by a North American prairie dweller, could paralyse rural Ireland.

It had stopped falling sometime through the night, and this morning the sky was bright, eggsh.e.l.l blue. The sun was already making water drip from icicles hanging from the eaves of the Presbyterian church opposite O'Reilly's house. One of the icy stalact.i.tes caught and refracted the sun's rays, and Barry smiled to see the frozen water sparkle on one side and release a tiny perfect rainbow of colour on the other.

Shiny black slates peeped wetly through the snow that clung to the roof. As he watched, a snow floe slithered off the north side of the tilted steeple.

The boughs of old yews in the churchyard were bent, and from their white and dark green branches drops and drips pattered to the ground, digging small pits in the otherwise even carpet. Like a scene from a Christmas card, a single robin redbreast perched on a lower branch, its scarlet feathers in cheerful contrast to its wintry surroundings.

Barry wondered why so many Christmas card publishers favoured scenes with a d.i.c.kensian flavour. Probably because when d.i.c.kens had been writing A Christmas Carol and Currier and Ives were producing their famous prints, all of Europe had been in the grip of what meteorologists refer to as the Little Ice Age. Lord alone knew the last time the Thames had frozen over in modern times, but it certainly had back then.

Barry glanced at his watch. He would be five minutes early, but with Doctor O'Reilly hors de combat, today was going to be the first time he would run the practice alone. And he wanted to get started. Barry rose, wiped his lips on his napkin, crumpled the Belfast linen square on the tabletop, and went into the hall.

The door opposite lay open to what had been the downstairs lounge when Number 1 Main Street had been a private house. He knew that had O'Reilly been a specialist, the facility would be referred to as his "consulting rooms," and had he been an American it would be his "office." In Irish general practice, the time-hallowed term for the place was "the surgery," and it was in the surgery he would be spending the morning dealing with the kind of patient O'Reilly often called the "worried well." Few if any would have serious ailments, but all would be concerned enough to have taken the trouble to come here.

He walked to the waiting room and opened the door a crack. Even though he had been here for five months, the G.o.d-awful roses on the wallpaper still had the power to make him wince. He could picture Oscar Wilde, for whom Barry's senior partner Fingal Flahertie had been named, uttering his famous last words: "Either that wallpaper goes, or I do."

He'd once heard of an incautious senior consultant at the Royal Victoria Hospital in Belfast paraphrase the lines during a spat with the hospital's senior nursing officer, the matron. "Either you go or I do." Matron was still there.

Barry opened the door fully.

"Morning, Doctor Laverty," several voices said. It was a muted greeting. Only about a dozen of the wooden chairs were occupied. Was it simply because the roads were bad and anyone with a relatively trivial complaint was waiting until the weather improved before coming in? Or was it that . . . ? b.u.g.g.e.r it, he told himself. Stop worrying about the new doctor and get on with your job.

"Right, who's first?" he asked, wondering if one day somebody might think to introduce an appointments system.

An angular, middle-aged woman rose. She was wearing a stylishly cut navy blue raincoat, the lines of which were not exactly complimented by her ma.s.sive rubber galoshes. Her pepper-and-salt hair was pulled back into a severe bun. Her hatchet face wore a scowl that Barry thought might have been st.i.tched on by a plastic surgeon bearing a grudge. She did not use the customary "Me, Doctor," but merely glared at the other occupants as if daring them to challenge her priority.

"Miss Moloney," he said. "How nice to see you." You hypocrite, Laverty, he thought. "Please come this way."

Miss Moloney was the proprietress of the Ballybucklebo Boutique, the local ladies dress shop. No one had seen her in the village since she'd had an unfortunate run-in with Helen Hewitt, the redhead who had been Julie MacAteer's bridesmaid. Back in August, Miss Moloney had aquired new stock to be sold to the ladies of the village for a wedding-Sonny and Maggie's wedding. She'd not bargained for her shop a.s.sistant Helen, whom she had been persecuting mercilessly. The day before the big sale Helen had removed every single hat from its box, lined them up on the floor-and stamped every one of them flat.

Helen had quit, and the eczema that had been plaguing her for months had cleared up. Miss Moloney, rather than face the derision of the villagers, had made a diplomatic and prolonged visit to her sister, who lived in the village of Millisle on the Belfast Lough side of the Ards Peninsula. Now, Barry thought, she's come back.

He followed her into the familiar, thinly carpeted room with its examining couch, folding screens, and instrument cabinet along one green-painted wall. At least the Snellen eye-testing chart above a wall-mounted sphygmomanometer no longer hung crookedly. He'd straightened it a couple of months ago. If O'Reilly had noticed, he hadn't commented.

Above the old rolltop desk, Barry's year-old 1963 diploma from Queen's University, Belfast, signed by Sir Tyrone Guthrie, its script clean and fresh, kept company with O'Reilly's 1936 degree from Trinity College, Dublin.

"Please have a seat." He indicated one of the hard wooden chairs.

Miss Moloney sat on the edge of the chair, back erect, hands primly clasped in her lap. Barry moved past her to take the swivel chair on casters. "Welcome back," he said. "How was Millisle?"

She sniffed. "Cold, damp, windy, and desolate."

"Well, it is winter, you know."

"How astute of you to notice, Doctor."

He cleared his throat. It would seem that the milk of human kindness was still curdled in Miss Moloney. The sooner he got this conversation on a professional level, the better. "So what seems to be the trouble?"

"I'm very tired."

"I see. And anything else?"

She shook her head.

Not a lot to go on. Tiredness could simply be a reflection of not enough sleep, or overwork, unlikely in her case, or it could be a clue to almost any disorder in the entire medical textbook. Barry sat back. He steepled his fingers, just as he'd seen O'Reilly do a thousand times, and looked at her face.

She was extraordinarily pale. "Hmm," he said to himself, as he leant forward and took her hand in his. It felt cold and clammy. He held it palm down and looked at her neatly trimmed fingernails. They were a most peculiar shape. Each was concave, like the bowl of a shallow teaspoon; the technical term for this was koilonychia, and it was usually a.s.sociated with iron-deficiency anaemia. Interesting.

"Just look into the distance, please." He used one thumb beneath each of her eyes to pull the lower lids down. The membrane that lined them, the conjunctiva, was transparent and allowed for inspection of the fine blood vessels beneath. There should be a healthy red colour, but in Miss Moloney's case Barry saw a very pallid area. He now was sure she was anaemic. Simple laboratory tests would confirm it.

He sat back. "I'm pretty sure, Miss Moloney, that you are suffering from thin blood."

"Oh, dear. Is that bad?" Her narrow eyebrows arched upward. Her lower lip trembled.

The truth was that indeed it could be, if, for example, the anaemia was a reflection of blood loss. Some of its causes could be very serious, although in women the most common cause was heavy periods. "How old are you, Miss Moloney?"

She bridled. He knew that in some circles it was considered impolite for a gentleman to ask a lady her age, but heavens above, he was her doctor. "Miss Moloney?"

"Fifty-one."

"I see. Thank you." He pursed his lips. Time enough at the next visit to ask if she had experienced "the change of life." He swivelled to the desk, made a note on her record, filled in a laboratory requisition form, and then spun back to face her. "Now, Miss Moloney. I don't think you need worry about this," he said, because he, her doctor, was quite able to be concerned for her. "The first thing we have to do is make sure that you are anaemic."

"But you said you were sure." She frowned and tightened her thin lips.

"Pretty sure, but I need to be absolutely certain, so I'd like you to go the lab at Bangor Hospital and have some blood tests." He handed her the pink form.

"All right."

"And I'll see you next week to give you the results." And if you are anaemic, I'll decide how to investigate you for any possible underlying cause, he thought, but he kept a gentle smile on his face. He stood to indicate the consultation was over.

Miss Moloney rose and followed him to the door.

"I'll see you next week," he said, as she let herself out through the front door. With any luck, he thought, as he walked back to the waiting room, she'll have a simple iron-deficiency anaemia due to poor dietary intake. He really didn't want to have any very ill patients, particularly not at this season.

Barry opened the waiting room door. "Next, please."

"Me, sir." He knew Cissie Sloan, the very large woman who spoke and rose to her feet. She wore a headscarf over pink, plastic hair curlers, and a gabardine raincoat that Barry thought had probably been built by Omar the tentmaker.

"Good morning, Cissie." Barry stood aside to let her precede him along the hall to the surgery. "Go on in," he said. "Have a pew."

Cissie Sloan sat heavily on one of two plain wooden chairs facing the desk. Barry took the swivel chair on casters in front of the desk. "How are you, Cissie?" he asked, knowing that the question was an invitation for the opening of her verbal floodgates.