He closed his eyes and exhaled, shut the door, gave a last wave to the little throng who’d come to see them off, and drove away to a tinny clattering. Someone had tied a string of cans to the back bumper. “Well, Mrs. O’Reilly,” he said, “alone at last,” and he leant over and kissed her cheek. “I have to say I did enjoy our reception,” he said. “I thought Angus did a superb job.”
“It was nice of our friends to send telegrams, and very generous of Bob,” Deirdre said. “I remember him from Dublin days. He’s sweet even if he does have an eye for the ladies.”
“He’s a very sound man,” Fingal said, “and I’m glad you got a chance to meet Cromie and Charlie before I was called up.”
“They’re both lovely men too,” Deirdre said, “but not as lovely as you.” She squeezed his thigh. “How far is it to the hotel?”
“About thirty-five miles. I’ve made dinner reservations for seven so we’ve lots of time.” He thrilled to her touch, and in his hurry to get to the inn trod down on the accelerator.
“Perhaps,” she said, “a little more slowly? It’s getting dark and the shades over our headlights and no street lights don’t help.”
He eased off, saw a lay-by ahead, and pulled over. “Won’t be long,” he said as he got out. “I’m getting rid of those cans.” He cut the string and with a surreptitious glance round, chucked the tins over the hedge. The “Just Married” sign went next.
He climbed back in. “Now,” he said, “we’re just an old married couple having a little break.” He leant across the car and took her in an enormous hug and kissed her long and hard. “And that’s the way it’s always going to be, even when we are long married. I love you, Deirdre, and I’ll never stop.” He put the car in gear. “Now to paraphrase Queen Victoria, it’s to the inn, James, and don’t spare the horses.” And her throaty chuckle was music to his ears.
“Tell me what the rest of the last telegram said, Fingal.” And she started to stroke his thigh.
Deirdre was no prude, and given the effects of her stroking, the punch line was entirely appropriate. “All right,” he said. “‘Brandy makes you randy and whiskey makes you frisky, but a stiff Johnnie Walker makes you pregnant.’”
And her peals of laughter rang so loudly as the car passed a village duck pond, that a couple of startled mallard took off in fright.
23
As the Smart Ship Grew
O’Reilly inhaled the mouth-watering vapours rising from a casserole simmering on the stovetop.
Kinky was standing with her back to him, untying her apron. It was well past her going home time, but Kinky Kincaid had never been a clock-watcher. She was talking to Arthur Guinness and Lady Macbeth, who lay stretched out in front of the stove. The white cat, presumably having decided to call a truce, was curled up in a ball against Arthur’s tummy, which naturally was on the side closest to the warmth. “This is my kitchen, so,” Kinky said, “not Bellevue Zoo in Belfast. It does be very kind of himself to bring you in, Arthur Guinness, out of the November cold and damp, but he’s been known to call you a great lummox and by all that’s holy, that’s what you are. A great big lump that’s always getting under my feet, so. Now I do be very fond of you, but I need to look in that casserole and you’re coming between me and my stove … again.”
O’Reilly had to clap a hand over his mouth to muffle his laughter. Hikers in Canada, he’d been told, were cautioned never to come between a mother bear and her cubs. Doing so to Kinky and her stove could produce much the same response.
Arthur, who presumably knew nothing of the ursine world, opened one eye, regarded Kinky, twitched his eyebrows—and went straight back to sleep.
Apron clutched in one hand, both hands on her hips, Kinky drew in a very deep breath. A storm was about to break.
“Kinky,” O’Reilly said, “Kinky, that smells wonderful.”
“What?” She flinched, turned, pursed her lips, and said, “Doctor O’Reilly, you do be very light on your feet for a big man, but you should not creep up on a body, so. You threw the fear of God into me.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I came to see Barry. I thought you’d have gone home by now. I didn’t mean to give you a shock.”
“I’d be very much obliged, sir, if you’d ask your dog to move.”
“Arthur. Here.”
Arthur didn’t so much get up as uncoil. He ambled over to sit, tail sweeping the floor, at O’Reilly’s feet. Lady Macbeth moved closer to the stove with a look that seemed to say, Mine now. As it normally is and rightly should be.
“Thank you,” Kinky said, leaned over, lifted the lid of the casserole, and sniffed. She gave its contents a good stir with a wooden spoon. She then pointed at a plate nearby as she turned down the heat under the stew pot. “Please have Kitty turn up the heat a bit and pop these suet dumplings in twenty minutes before you’d like to have your beef stew.” She replaced the lid, patted Arthur’s head, and said to the big Labrador, “And I did leave a good bit of the scrag end of the stewing steak for your tea…” She gave O’Reilly a dazzling smile, but said to Arthur, “Lummox.” Yet O’Reilly heard the deep affection that Kinky Kincaid had for all members of what, despite the fact that she was married now and living with her husband Archie, she regarded as her household. “Now, sir,” she said, “it’s not my place to be nosy, but is there news about Doctor Fitzpatrick?”
He nodded. “He’s in the Royal. My friend Mister Greer’s taking care of him. The man’ll need a clatter of tests before we know exactly what ails him.”
“I hope,” said Kinky, “it all turns out for the best, poor man.”
“Generous of you,” O’Reilly said. “We all want him to get better.”
She shrugged. Clearly for Kinky, the matter was closed.
“Get on home now with you, Kinky,” O’Reilly said. “We’ll see you tomorrow.”
“You will, sir, and enjoy your dinner. There’s leftover sticky toffee pudding in the fridge for dessert.” And with that she hung up her apron, put on her hat and, carrying her coat and handbag, headed for the hall and the front door.
As O’Reilly crossed the kitchen, Arthur meandered back to the stove, where he stood and looked at Lady Macbeth, who spat once. He clearly decided that discretion was the better part of valour and subsided where he was, big head on outstretched front legs.
O’Reilly knocked on what had for thirty years been Kinky Kincaid’s door. Her quarters off the kitchen were now Barry’s, and O’Reilly knew the young man was enjoying the extra space.
“Come in.”
O’Reilly stuck his head round the door. “Got a minute?”
Barry had his back to O’Reilly. “Just give me a tick. I’m at a tricky bit. Have a pew.”
“Don’t mind me. Take your time.” O’Reilly closed the door behind him. The curtains were drawn, but he could hear the rain of an early November gale pelting against the windows. Better old Arthur was in the house. He spared a thought for Kinky walking home in the downpour, but of course the natives, himself included, were pretty much inured to the Irish climate.
The overhead light made the room bright, a coal fire burned in the grate, and regardless of the weather outside, the room was cosy. Kinky’s sampler of the mediaeval Irish poem about a monk’s cat named Pangur Bán that she’d started in 1939 and worked on for a year hung above the mantel. She’d left it behind as a parting gift when she’d moved to her own place in April.
Barry was sitting at the table in a pool of light cast by an Anglepoise lamp.
O’Reilly went to an armchair beside the fire and perched on the arm so he could watch the young man at work. His face was screwed up, his eyes narrow. Clearly Barry was focussing all his energies on the task in hand. In front of him a modeller’s vise was clamped to the table’s edge. It had a flat base and two long, parallel jaws that firmly held the keel of a model boat. Barry had started working on it when he’d come back in January to assume his position as partner in the practice.
“Didn’t know you we
re a modeller,” O’Reilly had said when he’d visited Barry here some months ago and seen the vise holding the keel and a half-finished under hull made of individually applied pine planks.
“I started on balsa wood and paper aeroplanes,” Barry said. “My first was a de Havilland Chipmunk trainer. It flew very well, powered by a twisted elastic band. My last was a Spitfire. Much trickier to build.”
“Ah, the Spitfire. My mother and the marquis’s wife raised money to buy them during the war. Marvellous aeroplane,” O’Reilly said, remembering the snarl of Merlin engines when the nearby squadron flew low over Haslar hospital, the grace of their elliptical wings.
“That’s what Dad says too. But he knew I was keen on sailing, so when I was fourteen, he suggested I move up from planes to shipbuilding, so he and I built HMS Bounty to scale. She’s back at Dad and Mum’s place in Bangor. I didn’t get much chance when I was a student or houseman, but I’m enjoying getting back to it now.”
“Good for you,” O’Reilly had said. “It’s very important that you don’t become one track and let medicine rule your life. You’ve got to have outside interests too.”
“I have had,” said Barry, with an edge of sadness in his voice. “One married a surgeon. One found a more interesting bloke in Cambridge.”
Back then, O’Reilly had hoped the schoolmistress, Sue Nolan, might begin to fill that kind of interest for his young friend, and the hopes had borne fruit.
The rattle of a lump of coal falling more deeply into the grate distracted O’Reilly, who glanced at the fire then back to Barry and his work. The eighteenth-century, twenty-gun, three-masted frigate that Barry had told him was a replica of the real HMS Rattlesnake had come on apace since that conversation. Barry was spending even more time working on it since Sue had gone to Marseilles as part of a teacher exchange. The under hull was now covered in mahogany planks, each held in place by tiny brass nails. The upper strakes had been sanded and varnished and the lower hull and keel painted white. The upper works, fo’c’sle, gangways, main deck, and quarterdeck too were completed. The muzzles of ten black cannons on each side poked through the open gun ports.
O’Reilly watched as Barry manipulated two sets of surgical forceps using the same technique he would have to tie a knot when suturing. He finished lashing down the tiny longboat he had built plank by plank. It now sat firmly on chocks in the centre of the main deck.
“Got it,” Barry said, and straightened up. “Sorry to keep you waiting, Fingal, but I’ve just spent ten minutes working on that lashing.”
“Your patience amazes me, Barry,” O’Reilly said. “And such finicky work.”
“It’s fun,” Barry said, picking up a miniature oar in his forceps and manoeuvring it into the longboat. “And with Sue in France it keeps me away from bad company…”
O’Reilly could understand that a young man, full of vim and vigour, could be tempted when his fiancée was away for six months, particularly when he had a friend like Jack Mills, whose genetic makeup must have DNA strands from Don Juan, Casanova, and a Grecian satyr.
“And yes, I do mean Jack,” Barry said, and laughed.
“I didn’t say a word.” Fingal raised his hands, cocked his head.
“Jack jokes about how it’s the perfect time to play the field a bit, before Sue and I get married. That what the eye doesn’t see—”
“The heart doesn’t grieve over. I know.” Yet O’Reilly also knew that nothing would distract Barry. In all his time here, he had consistently shown he was a young man who believed that a promise was a promise.
“Anyhow, you have my attention now,” Barry said. “What’s up with Fitzpatrick?”
“I’m just back from running him up to the Royal. He’s in there now with an as-yet-undiagnosed neurological disorder. Probably high spinal. Fair play to the man; not only was he terrified about what his medical future would hold, he also had the worry about what would happen to his patients in his absence. Medically there’s nothing us GPs can do. That’s up to Charlie Greer and his staff.”
“And does your friend Mister Greer have any notion, Fingal?”
O’Reilly nodded. “He reckons something’s going on between the base of the skull and the fourth or fifth cervical vertebrae. They’ll be running tests tomorrow. Should have a better idea by the afternoon. I intend to go up to see Fitzpatrick later in the day. The poor divil has no family and I don’t think he’s got many friends.”
Barry shook his head. “He’s not the friendly type.”
“That’s partly why I’m going to go,” O’Reilly said. “And I’m curious to learn what’s wrong. Then, regardless of the diagnosis, hopeful or hopeless, we have to do our bit for him in the short term. He has patients out there who need care. I’ve promised Fitzpatrick that we’d cover his practice.”
“Least we can do,” Barry said at once. “And I’m sure we can count on Jenny.”
“Good for you.” Barry’s immediate response pleased O’Reilly. He’d known doctors who, when faced with an increased caseload, would complain and try to avoid the work. Barry Laverty didn’t merely work as a doctor, he was one from head to toe. “I’ll ask her first thing tomorrow. I’m sure we can work out the details and cope for a while anyway.”
“Anything you say, Fingal. I know you’ll organize things fair and square.” Barry lifted a miniature capstan, inspected it, and unscrewed the lid of a tube of glue. He held the capstan in his forceps and put a tiny drop of glue on its bottom, then placed the capstan gently down in the centre line of the foredeck. “One thing occurs to me about Fitzpatrick’s patients, though.”
“Let’s hear it.”
“What about getting their medical records?”
O’Reilly frowned. “I hadn’t thought of that. I’ll talk to Ronald about it tomorrow. I’m sure there’ll be a way.”
“I’ll leave it with you, but it would help to have them.” Barry made a fine adjustment to the capstan’s positioning.
“I think you’ve got that spot-on,” O’Reilly said.
Barry cocked his head to one side and inspected the now-installed capstan. “Pretty much.” He set down the forceps. “The extra work. It’ll put a bit of a crimp in my boatbuilding, but I’m not on any deadline to finish it.” He recapped the glue tube. He sighed. “I’ll be honest though, Fingal. If Sue was here and not in France, I’d not be so keen to do more medicine. I’d do it, but—”
“You’re missing her, aren’t you?”
Barry nodded. “A lot. Sue’s fun to be with and we love spending time together, but she also seems to understand that I have a demanding mistress—medicine—and doesn’t mind. She has interests of her own. But she also doesn’t let me make it all-consuming.”
Like it was for a certain rural GP until Kitty O’Hallorhan came back into his life, O’Reilly thought.
“What you said earlier this year about doctors needing other interests? I’d given up my sailing all the years I was at medical school. I’ve just been able to start again in the summers with Sue as part of the crew. It’s been wonderful. And I’m back to doing this.” He pointed at the ship. “I read, do crosswords, take Arthur out for walks, but they’re all pretty solitary pursuits. Sue makes me do new things, and with her they’re all exciting. You’d be amazed how interesting archaeology is, and how much Neolithic stuff there is all over Ireland. Just before she left, Sue and I visited the Norman motte at Holywood and Carrickfergus Castle over on the Antrim shore. It was built in 1177.”
O’Reilly laughed. “You’d be amazed how much I’ve learned about wines, oil painting, even a bit of cooking since Kitty and I got married. Before that, listening to my records, reading, and wildfowling … and you’re right, they are solitary.” Which is all I wanted after Deirdre. But, close as he and Barry were becoming, and even though he had explained a bit about his first marriage to Barry, O’Reilly did not want to dwell on that today.
“Three more months before she’s home,” Barry said. “It’ll seem like an eternity.”
Barry smiled. “At least,” he said, “I may be able to finish old Rattlesnake here.”
“How long before you start on the rigging? It must be a pretty fiddly job.”
Barry got off his chair. He went to a small desk, came back, and unfolded a large sheet of paper, which he laid on the tabletop. “Come and have a look at this. It’s the rigging plan.”
O’Reilly crossed the floor. The page showed the hull cut off at deck level. The masts, bowsprit, and the assorted yards, the horizontal poles from which the square sails would be set, were drawn in. From them and to them ran a veritable spider’s web of lines, blocks, and tackles. He laughed and said, “The rigging’s a lot more complicated than on my old Warspite, but it’s not as jumbled up as it looks, because, like everything else in the Royal Navy, they had a system. The fore and main masts each had three sections. The lowest that was set on the keel and came out through the deck was the mast. The next was the topmast, and the highest the t’gallant mast. Some supporting ropes ran fore and aft. The main stay went to the main mast, the main topmast stay to the second of the vertical poles, and the main t’gallant stay to the t’gallant mast.”
“I’m impressed,” Barry said. “Did you have to learn about square riggers in the war?”
“No.” O’Reilly shook his head. “No, we’d no time for learning useless arcana. I’ve loved C. S. Forester’s ‘Hornblower’ books about Nelson’s navy since I was a lad.”
“My dad has them too. They’re terrific,” Barry said. He glanced back at the plans. “It’s going to be a lot of work, rigging her, but there’s a shortcut.” He winked at O’Reilly. “All the standing rigging, the ropes that held the masts up, as opposed to the running rigging used to control the sails, is meant to be dyed black. It takes forever, but I have a source of great black thread of exactly the right size.”
An Irish Doctor in Love and at Sea Page 24