A Dublin Student Doctor

  “Thank you, Annie,” Fingal said. “Lars?”

  “Fingal? What’s the ‘Doctor’ Lars business about?”

  “Sister’s letting me use the ward phone—”

  “I understand.”

  Lars wouldn’t want to waste time on explanations. Calls were charged by the minute and Fingal was being granted a privilege. “I’ve a bit of bother.” Fingal hesitated, but if he couldn’t tell Lars, who could he confide in? Not his friends, who knew he’d been warned about getting involved with patients. Not Ma. He was far too old to run to Mummy with a grazed knee, and not Father. Certainly not Father. Kitty? She’d understand, but he couldn’t see her until Saturday night. Lars was different. Lars would listen. “We lost a patient yesterday. One I’d grown fond of. It has me a lot more rattled than I expected. I didn’t sleep much last night. I’d like your advice. I’d like to come up to Portaferry.”

  “Right now? I’ll drive down and get you, Finn.”

  “Not tonight, Lars. I appreciate it. I can manage until Friday, but thanks for being worried.”

  “You’re sure you’re all right?”

  “Not altogether, but I will manage. I’ll be in Belfast at three off the last Dublin train. We can have a good blether, shoot the dawn flight at the stream at Lisbane on Saturday, and then if you don’t mind running me up to Belfast, the train’s at twelve and gets in here at four so I’ll be back in time to—” He glanced at Sister Daly, who was studiously minding her own business. “—go out on Saturday night, and be on duty on Sunday.”

  “I’ll be there.”

  In more ways than one, Fingal thought, and blessed his brother. “Friday it is, and thanks, Lars.” He put the phone down. “I hope I wasn’t on too long.”

  “Och, sure there’s times we all need family, Mister O’Reilly,” Sister said. “Dun’s finances can stand one phone call to the North.”

  * * *

  Lars was waiting at Central Station and drove Fingal the thirty miles from Belfast to Portaferry. Fingal didn’t want to talk about his troubles until they were at Lars’s home. Instead as the car swung onto the Newtownards Road he said, “I hesitate to ask, but it’s been a couple of months since Christmas. Have you heard anything at all from Jean Neely?”

  Fingal heard how flat his brother’s voice sounded. “No. It’s over, Finn. I try not to think about it too much.”

  Fingal wasn’t sure how he’d feel if Kitty were to say good-bye. Deeply hurt certainly, but he hadn’t got to the stage of proposing. Not like his brother. “I imagine it still stings. You must miss her,” Fingal said.

  “I do, Finn.” Lars swung into a tight bend. “Very much. I only went out with a few girls when I was a student and you were away.” He grinned. “Five years at an all-boys’ boarding school may get you through puberty, but it hardly prepares you for encounters with the opposite sex.”

  “True,” Fingal said. It had taken his seagoing years and lessons in the school of life to let him become more comfortable with women.

  “Most of the girls in Portaferry are farmers’ daughters, fishermen’s lassies, shop assistants. Nice girls, but Fingal, we’ve nothing in common, nothing to talk about, and you’ve no idea how tongues wag in such a wee place, particularly as the single women have only one goal. Marriage. I wasn’t sure I was ready for domesticity until I met Jean. I knew from the first night she was different. She was so easy to talk to. She made me laugh.”

  Hadn’t he felt that way about Kitty since their first date? She was certainly easy to talk to and they did laugh a lot. Like the way Lars described Jean, but he wasn’t opening up completely. And that was his privilege. But Fingal knew that if his brother had proposed marriage, his feelings for Jean went beyond fun and laughter. Far beyond.

  “Jean was worth driving down to see as often as I could. I felt I’d known her all my life. And, Finn—” Lars’s voice dropped to a whisper. “She was wonderful to hold. To kiss. I wanted a lot more.” Fingal saw his brother’s face in profile and his cheeks were red.

  “I know what you mean.” Fingal thought of the walk back from the fish-and-chip shop after he’d taken Kitty to Neary’s, her body warm in his arms at the New Year’s Eve Ball.

  “And you know that means marriage.”

  “I do.” It was what had been drummed into young men. No intimate relations out of wedlock. The horrors of venereal disease, he thought of the case of incurable syphilis, the utter disgrace of getting a girl pregnant. Ah, but the girl in Bali in 1928 and the one in Penang in ’29. Somerset Maugham had been right in his portraits of the East.

  “It’s not to be,” Lars said. “And don’t tell me there are more fish in the sea.”

  “I won’t.” But there are, Fingal thought, and wondered again if his brother, twenty-nine years old now, was on the road to bachelorhood.

  They lapsed into silence for the rest of the journey.

  “I’ll help you with that,” Lars said once he’d parked at his shoreside home, a grey, pebbledashed, two-storey pile overlooking Strangford Lough and the demesne of the eighteenth-century stately home Castle Ward on the far shore. He picked up Fingal’s suitcase. “You bring your gun.”

  They left the baggage in the hall and went into the lounge. Fingal sat back in an armchair and stared across the lough’s narrow mouth to the ferry dock in Strangford town on the other shore. He looked beyond to where the Mourne Mountains, dusk dark against a robin’s egg–blue sky, stood as ramparts against the salty waters of the Irish Sea.

  “Here.” Lars handed Fingal a Jameson. “We’ll have to manage on our own for the next couple of days. I’ve given Myrtle, my housekeeper, a few days off.”

  “Sláinte.” Fingal watched phalaropes, long-billed, dun-coloured birds, dancing on stiltlike legs over wrack caught in a tide rip. Eddies and whirlpools formed and spun away only to form again. “The Narrows certainly boil when the tide’s running,” he said, and looked straight at Lars sitting in an armchair opposite. “I’ve been in a bit of turmoil myself, Lars.” Fingal pursed his lips, frowned. “I didn’t think losing a man called Kevin Doherty would get to me.” Through the window he could see that the evening was closing in. Fingal looked down into his whiskey, back to Lars. “I didn’t think it was going to hit me as sorely, but I can’t stop thinking about him.”

  “It’s your first?” Lars asked.

  “Yes, he was.” Fingal refused to think of Kevin Doherty as “it.” “Other patients have died since we started, but he was the first one I’d got to know. He was a young man, your age. He should have had his life ahead of him. It’s so bloody unfair.”

  Lars nodded. “And you’re feeling John Donne-ish, ‘No man is an island’?”

  Fingal forced a smile. “I remember Father reading that to us, his tone when he said, ‘Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind. And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.’” He shook his head. “Donne had a point.”

  “Finn, I’m sure you’ve been told this, but not all patients get better.”

  “The first time Kevin was admitted, we nearly lost him.” Fingal sipped his drink. “Geoff Pilkington, the house physician, tried to warn me then. He said, ‘Don’t take it personally if he goes. We can’t save them all so don’t let yourself get involved.’”

  “Do you think that was good advice?”

  “It’s perfectly sound. You can’t help notice how experienced specialists have become remote from their cases. I told another student, a woman called Hilda, that I thought there was an unwritten agenda to make us do procedures on folks, over and over, until we become inured, toughened. I used to shake before I took a blood sample. Now?” Fingal shrugged. “Wee buns.”

  “Perhaps there’s a point to professional distance. My barrister colleagues say they have to keep at arm’s length from their clients so if a case is lost in court there’s no need to take it personally.”

  Fingal sipped. “I don’t want to get hardened, but I don’t want to get so wo
rked up either,” he said. “I know, I absolutely know everything possible was done. There’s no reason to blame myself.” Fingal had no trouble picturing the pointed scalpel cutting into Kevin’s swollen, waterlogged legs. He stood and paced across the room. “Maybe I was wrong not talking to my friends? Telling them my troubles.”

  “You’d have found that difficult, Finn,” Lars said quietly.

  Fingal turned to Lars and frowned.

  “I’m no Sigmund Freud, no Carl Jung,” Lars said, “but you and I have the same father. Stiff upper lip and all that. Never tell a lie. Big boys don’t cry. Keep your troubles to yourself. We went to the same public boarding school. The ethos there was straight from Tom Brown’s Schooldays or Stalky and Co. Don’t tell tales, play up and play the game. Remember Kipling’s poem ‘If’? ‘If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs … And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise.’ And most of all never wear your heart on your sleeve and always keep your troubles to yourself.” He drank. “Despite all that indoctrination, Finn, you didn’t give in. And you’re still finding it hard to bury your humanity. If you can keep it up, you’ll make a bloody fine doctor. I just think, I know, you’re going to have to find a way to care a tiny bit less.”

  Fingal held his glass in both hands and hunched forward, head lowered. He was at a loss for words.

  “Mebbe,” Lars continued, “mebbe school would have worked, we might have become cold, insulated, and unhurtable, but for Ma. She taught us both to care,” Lars said levelly. “You know that as well as I do. You remember after Christmas dinner how she went to thank Cook personally? How much work she does raising money for charities, all the rallies she goes to to agitate for better housing for the poor? She’s forever doing things like that and giving folks their due. She practised what she preached about how every person mattered. How everyone is entitled to respect and I don’t mean deference or subservience, but treating everyone with common courtesy. She made us learn that.”

  Fingal looked at his older brother with a new appreciation. “You’re right. And Ma’s bloody well right, too. People should count.”

  Lars nodded. “So what are you going to do about how you feel before the next patient comes along? Start building a carapace or get to know them?”

  Fingal swallowed a mouthful of whiskey. “First, I’m going to try to make myself believe, really believe, it wasn’t my fault we lost Kevin.”

  “Good idea.”

  “I’m not going to stop feeling sorry that he died—”

  “It’s trite, brother, but the hurt will fade with time.”

  Fingal nodded and inside he prayed it would for Lars too after Jean Neely. Fingal had every intention of marrying, one day. He’d hate to see his brother stay single, wither up. Fingal made a promise to himself. Even if he was laying himself open to more hurt, he was damned if he was going to stop caring, and yesterday’s flirtation with the idea of moving into a research career? It might suit Bob Beresford. Not Fingal. “I thought about giving up clinical medicine once I’d qualified. Going into research.”

  “Father would be delighted.”

  “I know, and I’d like to please Father, but, Lars—”

  “Go on—”

  “I’ve always wanted to be a people’s doctor.”

  Lars laughed. “You won’t remember, but you told me that the first time I took you shooting. You were thirteen.”

  “Honestly?”

  Lars nodded and said, “I thought you’d grow out of it, like playing with Meccano sets, reading The Boy’s Own Paper, Boy Scouts.”

  Fingal laughed. “Once in a while I think I’d still like to build a gantry or a steamboat from perforated metal strips and nuts and bolts, and I can still tie a bowline and a sheepshank. Came in handy at sea.” He finished his whiskey. “I’ve only wavered this once about being a doctor. I’ll not anymore. Thank you, big brother, for helping me see it is what I want.”

  Lars smiled.

  Fingal glanced out of the window. It was slack water in the Narrows, that moment at the turn of the tide when all turbulence ceases. The surface was glassy, the islands of wrack motionless. The phalaropes rose as one and flew away, a little dun cloud that jinked, turned, and vanished by blending with the gauze of the evening’s soft mist.

  * * *

  “Out,” Lars said. It was pitch-black when he parked in front of a farmhouse where Davy McMaster, an old friend of the O’Reilly brothers, lived, farmed, and operated a small public bar from what had been his living room. Fingal obeyed. He could barely see for a few yards, but he knew that a hundred yards up the road from Portaferry to the Six-Road-Ends, a stream chuckled under the Salt Water Brig, so called because on a rising tide the sea flowed upstream past the brig, the locals’ word for bridge. He inhaled the tang of decaying seaweed and the smell of turf smoke. Davy’s wife was an early riser.

  Lars strode through a gate into a churchyard. Fingal tucked his gun into the crook of his arm and followed. He’d tramped through here as a boy when he and his brother had come down from Holywood or travelled together up from Dublin. Before Lars had moved to Portaferry the boys had stayed with Davy when they’d come up from Dublin to shoot. Their love of the lough was something else they shared. Fingal was sure that love had drawn Lars back to Portaferry.

  Ma’s brother Hedley had introduced Lars to wildfowling when he was thirteen and he’d done the same for his brother when Fingal was old enough.

  They passed three-hundred-year-old headstones and a moss-grown Celtic cross, a dark mass too old now to stand straight so taking support by leaning against the sky. The familiar landmark triggered a memory of Lars’s hand in his the first time they’d come here, and his brother’s voice reassuring him that nothing in the graveyard could hurt them. Fingal smiled. He’d not been so sure then that Lars was right.

  His brother’s springer spaniel, Barney, quartered the paths between the graves.

  Fingal climbed over a stile in the seawall. Ahead, a grassy stream bank was pitted with brackish pools. Clumps of ben weeds stood like tattered flags, their dried leaves rustling in the breeze. To his right the bank ended and the mud flats began. At full tide the water would flood up to the edges of the bank, and spring tides flowed over the grass.

  A splash and hoarse craking ahead told Fingal that Barney had startled a teal from a pool.

  Lars stepped off the bank and crossed the mud heading toward the mouth of the stream. The ribbed soles of his waders left water-filled impressions that glittered in the starlight. The shore gave off an earthy aroma, mingling with the air’s salty tang.

  They stopped beside a large rock near where the stream flowed on to meet the waters of the ebbing tide. Not long to slack ebb and the dawn. They’d have three hours before the rising waters pushed them off this part of the shore. Fingal leaned his shotgun beside Lars’s weapon propped against the rock. “I’ll give you a hand,” he said, bending to gather armfuls of bladder wrack to construct a low semicircular rampart behind which he, Lars, and Barney would crouch to wait for the morning flight. The weed was cold and numbed his fingers.

  The false dawn began to grey the eastern sky and send shy pinks to the belly of a narrow bank of low clouds. Fingal’s breath made vapour jets. Those parts round his eyes and lips that were not covered by a balaclava helmet felt the nip of the southerly breeze.

  “That should do,” Lars said, stooping to spread an army surplus gas cape on the muddy floor so they could kneel, but stay dry. The camouflaged material was waterproof and mustard-gas-proof, a relic of the trenches. Fingal hoped others like it would remain unused, but under Adolf Hitler, Germany was rearming and Mussolini’s troops had sailed to be ready for the invasion of Abyssinia.

  He moved his gun closer to hand and knelt beside where Lars crouched to the right of the hide. It wouldn’t be long until dawn and the birds began to fly. Getting here and building the hide had kept Fingal’s mind occupied. Now as he waited, his thoughts ranged freely. He’d meant what he’d said a
bout persuading himself he could not have done any more for Kevin. Was he ready to accept that now? He thought so. Face it, Fingal, in truth all any doctor can do is their best.

  And considering that, Fingal had to ask himself, what, for all his earnestness to Kitty in Neary’s pub, had he done for Sergeant Paddy Keogh? Bugger all. Perhaps he’d be better taking care of the living patients instead of berating himself over the dead. Fingal had had a notion to put Paddy, if he could read and write, in touch with the builder Willy Duggan. Kevin’s death had driven the idea out of Fingal’s mind. He’d try to remember once he got back to Dublin.

  He looked inland over the Ards Peninsula where life was coming to a new day. The band of low cloud was changing from timid pink to screaming yellows and raucous scarlets. Under the cloud and above the hills, the sun’s upper limb, a convex sliver, peeped into the sky as if a sudden noise might make it jerk away. But then, gaining confidence, it swelled, grew, and blazed.

  The day lightened. Rocks cast shadows over the glistening mud. Patches of sea wrack changed from charcoal to shiny brown. Dull hills to his left wrapped themselves in clothes of green spangled with yellow gorse flowers.

  He knelt, lost in the solitude of dawn on the shore, a time and place where he could find solace, put his worries away, try to see things clearly.

  Inland, a cow lowed and the crowing of a rooster nearly made him miss the whickering of pinions. Fingal crouched, swung to face the sound, and slipped off the safety catch.

  “You take left,” Lars whispered.

  Five mallard tore toward them. Fingal picked a drake, stood, lifted his gun to his shoulder, and covered the bird. The ducks flared, wings beating. Fingal swung, squeezed the trigger of the right barrel, felt the butt slam into his shoulder, and heard a double roar. Lars had fired at the same time. A split second was all that separated the “thumps” as two drakes hit the mud. Fingal smelt the acrid tang of burnt smokeless powder.

  “Hi lost, Barney.”

  The liver-and-white springer tore across the mud.

  “Nice shot, Lars,” Fingal said, “and thanks again.”