Doctor

Basil Fawlty ended up beating his car with a tree branch after doing B&B for years, and I am very near that point after six months of dealing with customers. Among the many requests I’ve had since opening en suite rooms in my house in Ireland I can now add: ‘I would like a throw.’ An American lady and her husband checked into our largest double room with a king-sized bed, marble bathroom and spectacular view, and she came straight back out, down the stairs calling my name urgently – so urgently I thought she must have found a dead rat in the bed – and pronounced: ‘Ah. Now. Do you have a throw?’ The lady explained that she wanted to take a nap, but she didn’t want to go under the duvet. Basil Fawlty would have said: ‘Oh a throw! Yes, why not! A throw!

My American guest kept telling me he was going to call an Uber and I could not persuade him that no Uber was going to appear in the wilds of West Cork. I assured him that the only taxi service I knew of was the local funeral director. ‘What? Will I have to go in a hearse?’ said the chap from Philadelphia, laughing. I agreed it was quirky, but the funeral director really was the only taxi. ‘I’ll take you dead or alive’ is his unofficial slogan. The American laughed and laughed and texted his sons back in Philly to tell them the joke. It’s no joke, I thought, as I dialled the funeral home. The old boy answered after about 15 rings and asked me what I wanted in an accent so thick I could barely make out what he was saying.

The US marine left his long johns down the back of an armchair and the next guest complained that she had found ‘a pair of knickers’. I ran upstairs after she told me this, she and her male companion standing in the big Georgian doorway about to leave. I found grey thermals, of the kind you might wear under hiking trousers, completely hidden, dropped down the back of this bedroom armchair and camouflaged against the taupe coloured carpet. I cursed myself for not moving the chair, which I normally do, and bolted back down the main staircase to tell the guest it really wasn’t knickers, but their car was already making its way around the fountain. Off it went down the driveway as I stood there shouting: ‘It’s not knickers!’ Darn it, I thought.

The funeral director down the lane is also the local taxi service, which partly explains why I see him drive past our back gate so often. According to my neighbours, he has been known to joke ‘I’ll take you dead or alive’, and although he has not gone so far as to have this written on the side of his car, his approach does stand as testament to the Irish having a wonderfully earthy sense of humour. The BB claimed that the funeral director eyed him, or rather sized him, as if to assess his dimensions The builder boyfriend met this funeral cabbie, or taxi mortician, when he went to the wake of the elderly man who sold us our house.

Pushing through a crowded hospital corridor behind my father, I heard a voice calling me. Then a nurse grabbed me and threw her arms around me. She had heard my father’s name and recognised me, her old school friend from St Joseph’s. As we walked and talked, she told me, ‘We all read your articles’ and I thought: ‘Oh dear I’m about to be exposed as an anti-vaxxer in the middle of A&E while my father’s having a heart attack.’ But she was smiling, pleased to see me. In fact, she was beaming as she said, ‘I remember Alma!’ referring to my maternal grandmother. People would come in for a shampoo and set and book in again for the cabaret I haven’t heard someone talk about my nan for many years but she was a well-known character in my small home town.

The greater the enervation, it is said, the greater the appreciation of a work of art. There was no place in Mme Benoit’s energetic life for art, if the austere interior of her huge consulting room was anything to go by. Human dynamos don’t need pretty pictures to look at. On a tiled floor the size of a tennis court were metal shelving racks filled with cartons of various sizes and loose piles of documents. The decorative theme of her workspace could be described as ‘warehouse’. The only nod to domesticity was a sink in one corner. This was my second visit to Mme Benoit in as many years to describe symptoms of a suspected urine infection. And once before that I had sat at her desk and told her that life had lost its savour and I felt cast among the flints.