An Irish Doctor in Love and at Sea

  She smiled at him. “You’re sweet.” She held up a hand to forestall any more protestations of love and said, “Now, before I forget, Ma sends her love. She asked me to tell you that she and Bridgit are both very well and that Ma’s busy as a bee raising money for a second Spitfire. Apparently the RAF bent the last one.”

  Fingal laughed in spite of himself, feeling for the fighter pilots, the Brylcreem Boys, who had “bent” a large number of their aircraft—and themselves—defending the home island after the fall of France in June.

  “And Lars is collecting scrap aluminium. He came and saw me off in Belfast.” She opened her raincoat and pointed at a wilted purple flower in the buttonhole of her suit jacket. “He gave me this orchid.” She took a deep breath. “They’re both sorry, but travel restrictions—” She clearly was yawning now behind her hand. “—won’t let them come to our wedding. I don’t even know what day—”

  “Your tea, madam.” A heavyset woman wearing a floral pinafore over her dress set a tray on the table. “And your pint, sir.”

  “Thank you,” Fingal said, and his gratitude wasn’t only for the drinks. Deirdre had been stopped from asking about their wedding date. He would tell her about the uncertainty, but not yet. He became aware of a commotion outside and looked through the window. “Look at that,” he said, thankful for yet another distraction.

  Three columns of older men in civilian dress, each with a weapon sloped over his left shoulder, were marching in step into the courtyard. The weapons ranged from double-barrelled shotguns to pitchforks to scythes, and Fingal was certain he saw one flintlock, and, good God, a blunderbuss. A man in First World War uniform, his trousered calves wrapped in puttees, not modern gaiters, marched to one side. The three stripes of a sergeant were sewn on the upper sleeves of his khaki tunic and good conduct stripes adorned the lower. He gripped his pace stick under his arm.

  “Lef’ right, lef’ right. Companeeeeeee … Wait for it. On my order, company will halt—Halt.”

  “Golly,” Fingal said without looking at Deirdre, “the Home Guard out training.”

  The men halted, not with the precision of a Guards regiment, but pretty much together. Their sergeant marched to halfway down one side of the column. “Company will turn to the right. Riiiiight. Turn.”

  To a man they turned to face him.

  “Company will dismiss. Diiiiis—miss.”

  Fingal shook his head and smiled. He knew he shouldn’t laugh. Out there were brave old men, many probably survivors of the trenches, who had volunteered to be their country’s last line of defence if the Germans did invade. By the way that, to a man, they were heading to the pub’s door, he reckoned they had other things on their minds right now, and if he and Deirdre wanted to eat they’d better order. He looked at her, and bless her, she was leaning against the side of the booth, eyes closed, mouth open, breathing in small gasps and making a whiffling noise.

  He shook his head. Typical of both of them. He’d been so sure he knew what she wanted, what was best for her—a stop at a pub for a restorative cup of tea before she met Marjorie. Rubbish. In reality, he’d just wanted her to himself for a while. And Deirdre had been too much of a lady to disagree, always willing to put her needs after his. He loved her willingness, her selflessness—and at this moment despised his own selfishness. He should have known what someone who’d travelled here for thirty-six hours from Belfast needed. A bath and a few hours of sleep.

  He polished off his pint in two gulps, stood, bent, and kissed her forehead.

  She stirred. Her eyes opened. She blinked then said, “I’m sorry. I must have nodded off.” She sat up straighter. He knew her smile was forced and that she was probably worrying he hadn’t had his lunch. “We really must order.”

  “No,” he said. “You must finish your tea. I’ll settle up and then I’m taking you to Marge’s for a bath and a sleep. And we’re invited for dinner tonight.”

  She yawned and this time made no effort to cover her mouth. “You are a pet, Fingal,” she said. “So thoughtful. It’s why I love you so much.”

  And inside him his heart swelled and nearly burst out in a flood of happy tears. He cleared his throat and said as he headed for the bar, “I’ll be back in a jiffy, darling. Don’t go away.” Don’t ever go away.

  9

  To Remember What Is Past

  “I think,” said O’Reilly, craning to look to the top of an ornate Corinthian column, “your man Christopher Columbus there is facing the Americas, all right.” Pointing west, with his raised right arm extended toward the Mediterranean, stood the statue of a determined-looking fellow in fifteenth-century robes.

  Kitty was already consulting the guidebook and had shown only a passing interest in the popular Barcelona landmark. “It’s less than a mile to the Picasso Museum from here. We head along here, the Passeig de Colom,” she said, beginning to walk. “We’ll turn left onto the Via Laietana, right at the Carrer de la Princesa, and right onto the Carrer de Montcada.” She took his hand and squeezed it. “I’m really looking forward to seeing the paintings. I’ve always wanted to.”

  Her pronunciation sounded flawless to his ear. He wasn’t surprised. She’d worked at a small orphanage in Tenerife just before and in the early part of the war with only a fellow nurse her sole English-speaking colleague. But he could also hear nervousness in Kitty’s voice that hadn’t been there yesterday.

  “I remember seeing a print of Picasso’s Guernica before the war. Powerful, very powerful.” He was eager to keep her chatting. She’d been her usual self since they’d arrived, and for the first two days it had been a second honeymoon for them. But since rising this morning there’d been this brittleness to her. Still, they’d enjoyed stopping at a small tapas bar for a late lunch on La Rambla, Barcelona’s wide, pedestrian-only street.

  This excursion to the museum would be a good diversion before they met this woman, this Consuela Rivera y Navarro, née Garcia y Rivera, who was the closest thing Kitty had ever had to a child. “I will go wherever you lead me, love,” he said, taking off his sports jacket and tie, and opening the neck of his shirt. The midafternoon sun here in Barcelona was a damn sight hotter than it would be, if it were shining at all, in Ballybucklebo.

  This was what they had come to Barcelona to do—to meet the daughter of the man Kitty had loved and lost when she’d had to return to Ireland in 1941.

  “The original’s in the Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid,” she said, taking a deep breath and frowning.

  Damn it, the mere mention of Madrid, where Mañuel Garcia y Rivera had been born and had died four months ago, must have jogged a train of memories that she probably didn’t want to face just yet. There would be time enough for that when she met Consuela. Perhaps he could distract Kitty by asking her a question about the artist.

  “Pablo Picasso rolls off the tongue easily enough, but do you know his full name?”

  “As a matter of fact,” she said, “I do. It’s Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula—”

  “Whoa,” he said, laughing. “Enough.”

  “But there’s more, I just can’t remember them,” she said, her smile turning into laughter. “I think his parents were really hedging their bets naming him after all those relatives and saints.”

  He was relieved to see that his laughter had brought on hers. “And I thought Fingal Flahertie O’Reilly was a mouthful.”

  “Eeejit,” she said, “but thank you.” She squeezed his hand and her eyes smiled at him as if to say, I know what you’re trying to do, Fingal, and I’m grateful. “We’ll get through this—together.”

  He squeezed her hand in return and they made their first left turn, and although they were now walking away from the harbour, gulls wheeled overhead, mewing and screeching, relatives of the same birds that would have flown in the wakes of Columbus’s Niña, Pinta, and Santa Maria. The same species had been the feathered forebears of the scavengers that followed fishing boats off Ireland, and in the war, battleships off Alexandria on this sa
me Mediterranean Sea. The last thought brought up his own string of memories, and he paused to look out to sea before putting a protective arm around Kitty’s shoulders and continuing along the Via Laietana.

  * * *

  Three hours later they had made their way from the museum along a maze of narrow, cobbled lanes to a small waterside café, El Crajeco Loco, The Crazy Crab. The restaurant was on the ground floor in a row of four- and five-storey buildings with stucco fronts in pastel shades of blue and orange. Pink-framed bay windows alternated with wrought-iron-railinged balconies. Two women called to each other across a gap between first-floor balconies. O’Reilly wondered if they were speaking Catalan, but their high-pitched tones reminded him more of the bickering gulls.

  He found a table on the terrace under an awning, immediately behind a low railing with a view over a broad, palm-tree-lined path where people strolled. The promenade separated the restaurant from a marina. The shiny white yachts of the wealthy were crammed side by side, masts jostling for space and reaching skyward. Columbus’s Pillar was visible in the middle distance.

  A white-aproned waiter, black hair oiled and neatly parted, white towel over one arm, stood patiently beside their table.

  “Beer, Fingal?” Kitty asked.

  “Please.” Although the museum had been cool, the walk here had been in dappled sunlight through airless alleys and he was hot and not a little sweaty.

  “Una cerveza grande, una copa de vino blanco, y tres menús, por favor.”

  “Sí, señora.” The waiter left.

  “Once she gets here, I’ll let Consuela handle the Spanish,” said Kitty, “but for now mine’s good enough to get by.” She smiled at him. “I’m afraid I didn’t know how to say on your behalf, ‘My tongue’s hanging out for a jar, so it is,’ but I guessed by the look on your face it was how you were feeling.”

  “And you were right,” he said, and laughed.

  Kitty was sitting so she could watch pedestrians approach the café, and her eyes were intent on the passing parade.

  “Did you enjoy the exhibition?” He wanted to keep her talking, in part to ease his own discomfort. How was he going to feel meeting the daughter of a man Kitty had once loved so deeply?

  “Marvellous,” she said. “We’ve all got so captivated by his modern works we’ve forgotten what a superb traditional craftsman Picasso was in his early years.”

  “I really like his Man with Beret,” O’Reilly said, “and Ciència i Caritat with the doctor taking the sick woman’s pulse is exactly how I have imagined my nineteenth-century predecessors at work. But the Portrait of James Sabartés with Hat and Ruff?” He shrugged and held out his hands, palms up. “I’m no connoisseur but it looked to me like a picture of James Joyce after a very long night at Davy Byrnes pub.”

  “Philistine,” she said, but her smile was warm. “I think what Picasso was trying to capture—”

  The waiter appeared, setting a large, frosted glass of pale beer in front of O’Reilly and a glass of white wine for Kitty. “Los menús.” He handed O’Reilly three cardboard folders.

  “Muy agradecido. Muchas gracias,” Kitty said.

  “De nada.” He smiled and left.

  “Cheers,” O’Reilly said, raising his glass and drinking. The beer was chilled and pleasantly bitter. He set the menus on the table and opened one. “I’ll need help with these,” he said.

  But Kitty was rising and he automatically followed suit. A young woman stood outside the railings, smiling broadly and saying, “Buenos tardes, Tia Kitty. Bienvenidos a Barcelona.”

  “Tia Kitty.” Aunt Kitty. When she’d first told him what Consuela had called her as a little girl, O’Reilly had felt insecure and jealous. But now it seemed natural.

  “Consuela,” Kitty said, leaning over the balustrade and holding the young woman by both shoulders. “Consuela. Let me look at you.”

  O’Reilly looked too. She seemed younger than her thirty-two years. Long dark hair hung to the small of her back. Her face was tanned and her ebony eyes were slightly slanted above high cheekbones, full lips. A short-sleeved white blouse was tucked inside a narrow leather belt supporting a mid-thigh denim skirt. Very chic, he thought.

  “You’re beautiful,” Kitty said, “and you still have your father’s eyes…”

  He listened but heard no trace of regret in Kitty’s voice.

  “But then you always were a pretty child.”

  Consuela lowered her head then said, “Thank you, and you haven’t changed either from what I remember.” Her English, though accented, seemed fluent.

  “Rubbish,” Kitty said, and laughed. “Now come around and meet Fingal, my husband.”

  As Consuela walked to a gate in the railing, Kitty said to him, “Oh, Fingal, she is quite, quite lovely.” Now there was the slightest catch. “She was seven the last time I saw her, all spindly arms and legs. Hair in bunches. I used to brush it for her and sing to her.”

  And the longing he heard, was it for lost love, lost youth, or for the children of her own Kitty had never borne and never would?

  “Here,” Kitty said as O’Reilly pulled out a wicker chair. “Please have a seat.”

  All three sat.

  “This is Fingal. I told you about him in my letter,” Kitty said. “We’ve been married for more than a year, but we first knew each other not long before you were born.”

  “I’m very pleased to meet you, sir.”

  Consuela offered a hand, which O’Reilly took and turned, lowering his lips to within an inch of its back, in the European fashion. “Can we offer you a drink?” he asked.

  “Please. A glass of red wine.”

  O’Reilly gestured to the waiter and said, “Una copa de vino tinto, por favor.”

  Kitty’s eyes widened.

  Consuela’s left eyebrow rose. “You speak Spanish, Doctor O’Reilly?”

  He shook his head. “Divil the bit, but I memorised a few critical phrases like that, and like, ‘Dos cervezas grandes y dos más,’ in case of great thirst. And it’s Fingal, by the way.”

  “Fingal,” Kitty said, “you really are incorrigible.”

  Consuela laughed and said, “I think, Tia Kitty, I’m going to like your Fingal.”

  “I hope so,” said Kitty. “I’m really quite fond of him.”

  All three laughed.

  The ice certainly has been broken, and so far painlessly, O’Reilly thought.

  Then Kitty said, “Your letter back in July came as quite a shock. I was so sorry to hear about Mañ—your father.”

  Was she being sensitive to my or Consuela’s feelings by not using the man’s Christian name? he wondered.

  “Poor Papá. I miss him very much,” Consuela said. “It was hard, so hard, to watch. He was in hospital, on oxygen, his remaining lung couldn’t cope. There was nothing the doctors could do.”

  O’Reilly shivered despite the heat. He’d seen enough patients die of oxygen lack, slowly suffocating, gasping for breath, knowing they were dying. He remembered a young man called Kevin Doherty with congestive heart failure in Sir Patrick Dun’s Hospital in Dublin and glanced at Kitty. As a nurse she knew too. He watched her stretch out her hand, cover Consuela’s. It needed to be their moment.

  “I was his only blood family apart from a brother and some nephews and nieces in Argentina. My husband José was at home with our daughter Josélita.”

  “I remember your grandparents in Tenerife. They were kind to me,” Kitty said.

  “They’re both gone,” Consuela said. “I was with him at the end.” Her lustrous dark eyes fixed on Kitty’s grey ones. “Shall I tell you?”

  Kitty glanced at O’Reilly.

  He nodded at Consuela. Go ahead, but thank you for asking my permission, considering my feelings, guessing how I might feel if Kitty bursts into tears. He gripped his chair with one hand, and the other reached out briefly to touch Kitty’s waist, to let her know that he was there.

  “He was struggling to breathe. He managed to squeeze my hand, whisper
that he loved me.” She stared at the table. “He said, ‘Please write to Tia Kitty.’” She glanced at O’Reilly. “‘Tell her…’”

  She looked into his eyes and he nodded. “‘Tell her I still love her. I always have,’ and then he drifted off to sleep. He died in his sleep that night. I think his last moments were comfortable, he was glad to go.” Tears glistened on her cheeks.

  Kitty, whose own eyes were damp, leant across and hugged the young woman, stroked her hair and murmured, “It’s all right. It’s all right.”

  And O’Reilly leant forward in his chair, elbows on the tabletop now, fingers steepled, chin on fingers. He felt himself withdraw slightly, to leave space for the two women who, both in their own way, had loved a man. One had lost a father so recently and had a daughter’s grief. The other had lost the man she loved thirty years before and, because of a recent letter, had been forced to lose him for a second time. Yes, losing him again was the correct way to think of it, O’Reilly knew, because he was certain Kitty still held a corner of her heart for this man, and that there it would beat “Mañuel” forever, just as a corner of his still held the deep imprint of Deirdre. Was he jealous? Did he feel hurt, wounded? How could he? He knew Kitty loved him, but she had needed to hear what she had just been told. Did he hurt for Kitty and Consuela’s loss? How could he not?

  As the two women held each other, he waved the red-wine-bearing waiter away and gave them the personal privacy they needed to share the moment. And inside himself, deep inside, he hoped, no damn it, he knew that Lars had been right to advise this meeting and that Kitty, Tia Kitty, at last had laid her ghost to rest beside a gentle sea beneath a warm Catalonian sky.

  10

  What Is the Answer?

  “Nearly finished. Closing,” Surgeon Commander Fraser said as he started suturing the skin. “Ugly green brutes, gallbladders,” he muttered to no one in particular. “That one’s better out than in.”

  Fingal let his attention stray from the patient and his surgeon for a moment to look at the time. With only one more case to do, the list would certainly be finished early enough for him to keep his appointment with Surgeon Rear Admiral Creaser.