Home Is The Sailor

by Home Is the Sailor (epub)

  The barter system appealed to O’Reilly and wasn’t taxable, and as far as he was concerned what the eye didn’t see the heart didn’t grieve over. But until his debt was fully discharged, he did need hard currency too, and that would only come when he had full surgeries.

  Kinky had used her best endeavours to bolster his reputation. The kind words of Declan Finnegan had been comforting, but his French-speaking wife was hardly in a position to shout O’Reilly’s praises from the rooftops, at least in words comprehensible to the average villager. And he couldn’t advertise. The General Medical Council, the disciplinary body of his profession, regarded that as unethical and could take away his licence if he tried to.

  Bertie Bishop and Wowser Ward must have succeeded in blackening O’Reilly’s name, of that he had no doubt, none whatsoever. Did he regret having given Bishop a laxative that if compared to usually prescribed ones was the atomic bomb of purgatives? Not one bloody bit. It might have been foolhardy, but O’Reilly had consciously decided to accept the risk. Bullies were bullies and had to be checked.

  He rose, went to the sideboard, and poured himself a John Jameson. Sipping the Irish whiskey, he headed for the door, intending to go upstairs to the lounge and finish reading The Captain from Castille, one of last year’s bestsellers.

  The door opened and Kinky came in carrying a tray of polished silver. “Doctor O’Reilly,” she said, “you do have a face on you like a Lurgan spade, as I’ve heard the locals say—although it would mean nothing in County Cork, so.”

  He shrugged and exhaled.

  “Would you take it ill, sir, if your housekeeper was to ask you if everything is all right?”

  He hesitated. O’Reilly was not one to cry on other people’s shoulders, but tonight . . . “I’d not take it that way at all, Kinky,” he said, and in truth he’d welcome a friendly person to tell his troubles to. His closest friends, Doctors Charlie Greer and Donald Cromie, both surgeons, were up in Belfast. His best naval friend from Warspite days, Tom Laverty, was a career naval officer and was God knew where, still on active service. “Will you sit down?”

  She frowned. It wasn’t commonplace for servants to sit down with their employers.

  “Kinky,” he said, “if I’m going to talk to you like a friend I’m going to treat you like one.”

  She blushed and said, “That does be greatly appreciated, so.” She sat and put the tray on the table.

  “Another thing,” he said as he sat, “I got used to calling you Kinky when I was first here because that’s what Doctor Flanagan called you. Would you prefer to be Maureen, or Mrs. Kincaid?”

  “Lord bless you, sir, Kinky’s just grand. My late husband, Paudeen Kincaid, God rest him, gave it to me as a nickname because of how I used irons back then to curl my hair. It has a nice familiar sound, so. Kinky it is—but I appreciate your asking. It does be the act of a real gentleman. Now,” she smoothed her apron, “can I offer a guess why you are upset?”

  “Go right ahead.”

  “I knew from when you were here before the war that it wasn’t the money you worked for. You were simply happy at your work.”

  “I’ve wanted to be a doctor since I was thirteen.” O’Reilly shrugged. “Doctor Flanagan paid me well enough, I had my room here, and . . .” He grinned at her. “I had the best cook in all of Ireland feeding me.”

  “Go ’way out of that, sir,” but her grin was one of enormous pleasure, “and be serious now. You are worried because not enough people are coming to see you, isn’t that so?”

  He pursed his lips and nodded. “True.”

  “And there are one or two who I’ll not name who are blackguarding you round the village.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Huh,” she said, “there’s precious little goes on here I don’t know. Haven’t I been here nearly twenty years and isn’t everyone under that age one of Doctor Flanagan’s babies except for the ones delivered by yourself when first you were here?”

  “Of course.”

  “And don’t I know their mammies and daddies and grannies and grandpas?”

  O’Reilly realised what an important source of information Kinky would be. “I don’t suppose there is much goes on without you knowing.”

  “There is not. Now, would it help if I told you not to worry?”

  He shook his head. “It would be a kindness, but how would you know? Have you heard something?”

  “More seen.” She leant forward and said very quietly, “Now, sir, it does be said in the village that I am a wise woman.”

  “And are you?” O’Reilly felt the hairs on his forearms bristle.

  “From time to time I do find myself in a thin place.”

  “A what?”

  “The old Celts believed that for some people in some places or times the gap between this earth and the other world becomes very thin and things can pass between. That is called a thin place. It can give some people, like my ma, it can give them the gift.”

  “Are you telling me you’re fey, Kinky?”

  She stared at a spot near infinity off to the left of the cut-glass chandelier, her face became expressionless, her voice far away. “I was there last night, so.”

  The hackles rose on the back of his neck.

  “I saw you in church. I saw people amazed. I felt—” She closed and reopened her eyes. “I knew all was well.”

  O’Reilly shivered as if a goose had walked on his grave. What was she trying to tell him?

  “So, sir,” she said in her usual voice, “it would give me great pleasure if you’d come to morning service with me on Sunday. It would not hurt for the villagers to see that you are a Christian gentleman.”

  With the cross of Jesus going on before.

  O’Reilly bellowed out the last line of “Onward Christian Soldiers,” a cheerful hymn with which the congregation had filled the barrel-vaulted nave of First Ballybucklebo Presbyterian Church. Sunlight streamed through stained-glass windows. He inhaled the mustiness of two hundred years and the overpowering perfume of Old Spice aftershave coming from a man in the pew behind. Cissie Sloan, whom O’Reilly had seen for acne in 1938, finished with triumphal chords on the harmonium. She and her cousin Aggie Arbuthnot were two of Kinky’s friends.

  The service was progressing and so far none of the amazement Kinky had predicted had occurred.

  As O’Reilly sat, his foot nudged the doctor’s bag he had set on the floor when he had taken this pew. It had been a habit of both Doctor Corrigan and Doctor Flanagan to go nowhere without their bag. One never knew when an emergency might occur. He patted the left pocket of his jacket to make sure his stethoscope was there too.

  He paid attention to the service. Today Mister Wilson, the septuagenarian minister, was being assisted by a young cleric, a Mister Robinson who, Kinky had told O’Reilly, had recently received the call to be taking over the parish when the older man retired in August. This morning Mister Robinson was to preach the sermon.

  He ascended into a carved pulpit and began, “The text for today is from the Gospel According to Saint Mark, 12:31. ‘Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.’ ” He smiled down at Kinky. O’Reilly, who was sitting next to her, wondered if she’d persuaded Mister Robinson to use that text.

  He half-listened and gazed ahead. When they’d arrived this morning, he had simply followed Kinky to her usual place three rows from the front, a place where, Kinky had solemnly assured him on their way to church, that when in good fettle preaching fire and brimstone, Mister Robinson’s spits could be felt.

  Bertie Bishop must not mind the salivary showers. His place was in the very front pew immediately facing the pulpit. He was accompanied by a dumpy woman wearing a pink cloche hat, presumably Mrs. Bishop. There didn’t seem to be any little Bishops.

  O’Reilly unobtrusively half-turned and stole another look over the congregation. Here and there were people he recognised, either from his previous time in the village or because he’d noticed them in the Duck, or, and he reckoned he
could count them on one hand, because they’d recently been patients. There was Alfie Corry in a pew halfway down the nave adjacent to the aisle. The strapping unmarried farmer of, O’Reilly had to calculate—the man had been sixty-four in 1939 when he’d first consulted O’Reilly, so Mister Corry’d be seventy-one now. When O’Reilly and Kinky had arrived this morning to walk to their pew, Alfie’d greeted O’Reilly with a hushed “Nice til see you back, Doc.”

  At least somebody thought so.

  And there was no mistaking Mister and young Donal Donnelly’s carrotty hair. Archie Auchinleck sat farther down the nave beside an auburn-haired woman and a little boy of about Donal Donnelly’s age.

  O’Reilly’d not been surprised that the Finnegans weren’t here. Finnegan was a Catholic name and the odds of finding a Protestant bride in rural Normandy would be pretty long indeed.

  O’Reilly decided he’d better pay attention to the sermon.

  “And where else better to love our neighbours than a little place like our own dear Ballybucklebo?”

  Where else indeed, thought O’Reilly. Yet it is such a little place. Perhaps I should have found a practice in Belfast?

  “Sweet Jesus, what’s happened?” A woman’s startled voice behind O’Reilly had stopped the sermon.

  Another voice, “It’s Alfie Corry. He’s taken a wee turn. I’ll run til get the doctor.”

  That was enough for O’Reilly. He leapt to his feet. “Excuse me, excuse me,” he said, and forced his way along the pew and down the aisle. Fainted? The man had had a series of anginal attacks when he’d been here in 1939. O’Reilly shook his head.

  As he pushed forward a man’s voice said, “The doctor’s already here, you eejit. Bide where you’re at.”

  The crowd parted to let O’Reilly get at Alfie Corry, who must have pitched sideways out of the pew to land on his back in the aisle. His face was dusky, his eyes open, but glazed, with their pupils dilated, and he was not breathing. Almost certainly the man had just had a fatal coronary thrombosis.

  “Excuse me,” O’Reilly said to a heavyset woman who wore a hat with pheasant tail feathers and who was taking the victim’s pulse.

  “I’m a first-aider,” she said. “He’s no pulse, you know. Could you try Holger-Neilsen artificial respiration, sir.”

  “I’m sorry,” O’Reilly said, “that’s only for people who are nearly drowned. Now if you’d just—?”

  She needed no further bidding to move aside.

  He unbuttoned the man’s shirt and saw a farmer’s chest, chalky white save for a tanned vee at the throat and upper chest. It was not moving. If he was right and the man had had a heart attack, there were no means of resuscitating such a patient nor any wonder drug to inject. Despite the accelerated progress of medicine brought about by the war, doctors were still helpless when it came to lethal heart attacks, and O’Reilly stifled a curse of frustration.

  News of what had happened seemed to be spreading throughout the congregation by a series of loud whispers punctuated by, “Och, dears,” and a, “Dear love, Alfie. Sound man. Sound man, so he is.”

  O’Reilly fished out his stethoscope, put the earpieces in, and clapped the bell over the left chest.

  “Everybody wheest now,” the first-aid lady said. “The doctor’s trying til listen in, so he is.”

  Meanwhile, O’Reilly had felt in the angle of the jaw for the pulse of the carotid artery. There were no audible heart sounds and no pulse. O’Reilly fished out his pencil torch and shone it into each of the victim’s eyes. Neither pupil contracted nor, he bent his head to Alfie’s mouth, was there any evidence of breathing. Poor Alfie Corry, looking like a stunned mullet, was dead. Dead as mutton. And there was no treatment. None at all.

  O’Reilly blew out a long breath against pursed lips. It wasn’t as if he was a stranger to death—by disease, natural causes, and accident in peacetime, of the young, but mostly of the old. And death by fire, scalding, drowning, hypothermia, bullets, and explosives in wartime. Senseless, bloody senseless, and the victims so pathetically young. And while O’Reilly had tried to steel himself, had become inured by familiarity, there was always regret when a fellow human died in his hands, a sense of failure.

  He started to rise and heard a familiar voice saying, “I think poor oul Alfie’s gone, so I do.” Bertie Bishop, not to O’Reilly’s surprise, had forced his way to the front of the rubbernecking crowd. His wife stood just behind him. Bertie was a man who had to be at the centre of everything. He’d not have been satisfied at a wake if he wasn’t the corpse. “But then, you’d not expect O’Reilly to have saved him, would youse?”

  No one else in the congregation spoke. O’Reilly stiffened, and for a moment wondered, was the lack of response in his favour or against him? He took a deep breath, and like the navy he’d served in when attacked, prepared to defend himself with every weapon he possessed. But then an idea pushed into his mind. “Kinky, bring my bag,” he roared. “Your man’s gone.” And nothing, nothing O’Reilly could do could bring him back. And yet . . . He heard shuffling of feet as a passage was cleared for her.

  “Here, sir.” Kinky gave him the leather bag.

  “Requiescat in pace,” O’Reilly muttered, “and please forgive me for what I’m going to do.” He hoped his conscience would forgive him too, but the late Alfie might just perform a vital service for the living Fingal O’Reilly. He ripped open the bag, found a hypodermic syringe, filled it from a bottle of whatever was nearest to hand—the label said “sterile water”—plunged the needle into Alfie’s left breast over the heart, and injected one third of the contents of the syringe.

  The stethoscope was still in O’Reilly’s ears so he put the bell over Alfie’s chest. O’Reilly put an entirely forced look of awe on his face. “Praise be. He’s got a heartbeat.” No one could gainsay that.

  O’Reilly looked up at a sea of faces, many with hands over their mouths, all of the people with wide, staring eyes. He smiled, put the stethoscope back on the chest. “Och, no,” he said, letting his feigned anguish show. “No. He’s going again.” Another third of the syringe was injected like the first and the bell reapplied. O’Reilly took a long count before he whispered, loudly enough for the nearest of his audience to hear, “It’s beating again.”

  Even with the earpieces in place he heard a voice yell, “Somebody send for an ambulance.” That was no bad thing. Unless Alfie had recently been under a doctor’s care it was a statutory requirement that a postmortem examination had to be performed to establish the cause of death, so the departed would have to go to the hospital mortuary anyway.

  O’Reilly listened again, and knowing the effect his next utterance would have in here loudly said, “Damnation,” and injected the remaining sterile water. There was no need for any further explanation and by the loud “tch, tching” and “tut-tutting,” he could hear, even though his word was disapproved of, the message had got through.

  He waited and this time made a display of taking the wrist pulse and letting a tired smile play on his face. Once more, judging by the communal indrawing of breath, the message of another success had been clearly received.

  O’Reilly waited for what he considered to be a reasonable time, never letting go of Alfie’s wrist before frowning mightily, clapping the stethoscope back on the corpse’s chest, deepening his frown, and shining his torch into the nonresponding eyes. O’Reilly shook his head ponderously, stood slowly still shaking his head, before taking a very deep breath and saying, “I’m sorry. I did my best. I couldn’t save him.”

  Now what?

  “Och, dear,” and “God rest him,” and “At least he went easy” rose above the murmuring.

  “May I speak, your reverence?”

  O’Reilly recognised Kinky’s voice.

  “Certainly, Mrs. Kincaid.” Mister Robinson was now standing behind Bertie Bishop.

  She climbed up on a pew and was facing the crowd. “You said some powerful things, Reverend Robinson, about loving your neighbour. I think there’s
nobody here—” She glanced at Bertie Bishop. “—who would disagree.”

  There was a murmuring of agreement.

  “But I know some malicious things have been said about Doctor O’Reilly here. You heard one now about not expecting Doctor O’Reilly to have done any good, so.” She fixed Bertie Bishop with a stare O’Reilly thought would have done justice to Balor the one-eyed Fomorian, whose gaze could turn men to stone.

  O’Reilly saw Bishop’s wife give him a ferocious dig in the ribs.

  Kinky continued, “And you all know the saying about giving a dog a bad name. Now I mean no irreverence, your reverences, but we all know the story of how our Lord raised Lazarus from the dead.”

  There was a loud muttering of agreement.

  “And didn’t Doctor O’Reilly, who could have gone anywhere in the world such a good doctor is he, so.”

  O’Reilly did something he didn’t do often. He blushed.

  “Didn’t he choose to come back to us here?”

  More muttering.

  “And while Lazarus was brought back once, didn’t Doctor O’Reilly bring back poor old Alfie Corry three times?”

  O’Reilly heard a number of “Ayes,” and “Right enoughs.”

  “Not once, not once, but three times—three times? I think we do be very lucky and I think it’s about time when any of you need a doctor that you remember what you saw here this morning.” Kinky smiled at O’Reilly. “I’ll say no more, so,” she said, and clambered down.

  “Thank you, Kinky,” he mouthed and was going to say it aloud when a woman’s harsh voice rang out, “See you, Bertie Bishop? See you, you great glipe?”

  O’Reilly recognised Mrs. Bishop by her hat.

  “See you and your ‘That doctor what’s come back is only a quack?’ You were trying for til drive him away, so you were. You and that Wowser Ward. Pair of bollixes, so youse are.”