“Oh?”
“Yep. Jack Mills pinches surgical silk sutures for me.”
“Does he, by God?”
Barry nodded.
“Young Laverty,” O’Reilly said, “I think you’ve been in too close contact with Donal Donnelly.”
The two men laughed, then O’Reilly said, “I just heard Kitty come in. Why don’t you finish up whatever you need to do to your ship then join us for a predinner drink? We can tell her how we’re going to help Fitzpatrick and his patients so she can brief him tomorrow when she goes to work. That’ll maybe take a bit of a load off the poor man’s mind before he goes for all the delights,” O’Reilly shuddered, “of lumbar punctures and myelograms.”
24
By the Oak Trees’ Mossy Moot
“Penny for the Guy, guv?” Two scruffy kids, both in short flannel pants, grey shirts, and raggedy V-neck pullovers, were dragging a two-wheeled handcart containing a straw-stuffed effigy of a man with a thin moustache, vandyke beard on his painted face, and a pointed black hat. The boys stopped Fingal and Deirdre as they strolled hand in hand along the single-lane High Street of Lyndhurst in the centre of the New Forest. The houses on each side were of different heights, most with second storeys fronted with white stucco and black half-timbering in the Tudor style. Fingal could picture a gunpowder plotter feeling quite at home here if the cars were replaced by horses.
“Where are you two from?” Fingal asked. “Guv,” short for governor, was London slang.
“Me and my brother Fred’s from Wapping near London Docks. We’re wot’s called ‘vacuees.’ Been here since September.”
Thousands of children had been evacuated from the bigger cities to the countryside to protect them from air raids, and given the pasting the London Docks had taken, a bloody good thing, too.
“We always had a big party on Guy Fawkes Night back home…” the bigger boy sounded sad, “and I didn’t want Fred to miss it too like he’s missing Mum and Dad, so penny for the guy, guv.”
“You’ll have to sing for it,” O’Reilly said with a grin, “and tell us who Guy Fawkes was.”
“Ready, Fred?” They chanted rather than sang, their high voices in unison,
Remember, remember the fifth of November, gunpowder treason and plot
We see no reason why gunpowder treason should ever be forgot.
Deirdre laughed and clapped her hands. “Well done, boys. Now, do what you’ve been asked, tell us who Guy Fawkes was. We’re from Ireland and we don’t have Guy Fawkes Night there.”
The taller said, “Righty-o, missus. In 1605, a bunch of men plotted to kill King James the First. One was called Guido Fawkes. They hid gunpowder under the House of Lords in London to blow the king up. But their plot got found out and…” He bared his clenched teeth, widened his eyes, and scrunched his shoulders, before saying in a quavery voice, “The plotters was hung, drawn, and quartered.” The boy stopped to draw in a breath, clearly relishing the grisly fate of the men. “Ever since, us English have celebrated the saving of King James by having bonfires and letting off fireworks on Guy Fawkes Night, the fifth of November.”
“But we can’t let off any fireworks or have any bonfires,” said his brother, “’cos of the bleeding blackout. Bloody Hitler…”
“But me and my brother reckoned we could still try to collect a few bob today just like before the war to help remember, like, and remember Wapping—” He broke into a wide grin. “And we’ve got some sweetie coupons.”
“Good for you,” Fingal said. “Here. Here’s sixpence.” He handed Fred, the smaller boy, the little silver coin.
“Oooh. Thanks, guv,” the taller one said, and tugged his forelock. “Come on, Fred.” And off they trotted down the street, dragging their cart behind them.
Fingal and Deirdre continued at their leisurely pace toward their hotel, the New Forest Inn on Emery Down. After a simple lunch at the White Rabbit on Romsey Road, they’d strolled along the High Street, passing the imposing, redbrick Saint Michael and All Angels Church, high on a mound overlooking the village, its towering spire of silvery slate glinting in the sun.
“Kids,” Deirdre said, and laughed. “Shall we have lots, Fingal?”
He chuckled. “Many as you like,” he said. “I’ve always fancied being a daddy, Mrs. O’Reilly.” He lowered his head to be nearer her ear and added, “And it’s lots of fun trying. Shall we try again when we get back to our room? It’s only about half a mile to go.” And he wrapped himself in the glow of their honeymoon, now five days old. Fingal O’Reilly had never been more content, more happy, more hopelessly in love in all his thirty-two years.
Deirdre looked up into his eyes and said sternly, “You, Surgeon Lieutenant-Commander O’Reilly, are a typical sailor man if all reports about them are true. You’re turning into a satyr, or if you prefer Ulsterese, a randy old goat. What you need is a bit of exercise to work down your lunch.”
“Aaaaaw,” he said, turning his lips down to twenty to four. Could the girl who had blinded him with her responsiveness, her sometimes furious, sometimes languorous, always loving, lovemaking be tiring? Or was she teasing him?
“And calm your ardour too. Do you remember the day in September last year when you proposed to me?”
“At Strickland’s Glen, and we met a man with a dog called O’Reilly.”
“And I raced you to the beach and you gave me this ring.” She pointed at the little solitaire.
Where was this leading? “Yes.”
“I’ll race you to our hotel. If you win…” her voice became husky, “I’m sure we’ll both need to go and lie down.” She ran the tip of her tongue over her lips, raised one eyebrow, and squeezed his hand. “But if I win, I want you to take me for a walk into the forest proper.” With that, she let go of his hand and took off along the Bournemouth Road, her pleated skirt flying, one hand clutching her hat.
Fingal was so startled he’d let her get a good ten yards’ lead before he put his head down, imagined he had a rugby ball under his arm and that the New Forest Inn was the opponent’s goal line, and made for it at top speed.
To no avail. She was waiting for him, legs apart, arms akimbo, face aglow, barely panting.
He stopped beside her, unable to speak, gasping for breath. The air was burning in his chest, sweat running down his brow. It might be November, but it was one of those bright, crisp days under an English heaven where there was still lingering warmth in the sun and the sky was eggshell blue. The inn sat behind a low redbrick wall, and a signpost stood on the corner of two country lanes running beside the building. Or it would have been a signpost if all direction pointers hadn’t been removed so as to stymie an invading army. Even here, deep in a peaceful forest, the bloody war kept trying to intrude. But he was damned if he was going to let it.
“All right,” he managed to gasp, “you win. Where to?”
“I love you, Fingal,” she said softly. “I’m sure a lot of men who were worked up the way you were a couple of minutes ago would have taken the strunts if their wives said no and would have hustled her inside right now to work their wicked will.”
He shook his head and laughed at her solemnity. “Not my way of doing things,” he said.
“I know. You didn’t get cross. All you did was say, ‘You win. Where to?’ Thank you for that, darling. Do you know,” she said, “for tuppence I’d drag you upstairs myself, you big, gentle gentleman.”
Fingal, momentarily tempted to offer her the two pennies, simply kissed her and said, “I couldn’t be anything else with you, my darling girl. And it’s because there’s so much about you to love. ‘How do I love thee? Let me count the ways. I love thee to the depth and breadth and height my soul can reach.’ Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote that, and I can’t say it any better. Now,” he took her hand, “you wanted to go for a walk in the forest, so come with me.” And he made for the footpath at the corner of the inn.
* * *
They lay side by side on the grassy bank of a shallow str
eam that flowed tinkling and murmuring from a stand of leafless oak trees to their right. Their branches almost reached the far bank. The brook continued across a sizable clearing before disappearing into another coppice of recently planted fir trees. What little breeze there was whispered through the trees on the far bank of the stream. Deirdre lay on her back, her head propped on Fingal’s jacket. He lay on his side, his head supported by his bent arm.
A small drift of black pigs with a broad white stripe at the shoulder wandered in and out of the oak grove to the right, probing with their snouts and noisily crunching acorns.
“Golly, look at them, Fingal. Look at those great floppy ears. Do you think they’ve escaped from a farm?”
“Don’t think so. Apparently,” Fingal said, pointing at the animals, “local people have what are called ‘commoners’ rights,’ at least so mine host at the inn told me. They’re allowed to let their pigs out into the forest from September to November to forage for beech mast and acorns.”
“The same way the locals’re allowed to graze their ponies,” said Deirdre, watching the swine closely.
Fingal had been forced to stop the Austin Ruby several times so Deirdre could take pictures of the shaggy little New Forest ponies, for which the area was famous. “The rights were granted hundreds of years ago.”
“It’s a pretty ancient place, isn’t it?” Deirdre said.
“I had a quick look at a guidebook Marge lent me when she suggested coming here. Apparently there are about two hundred and fifty round barrows, Neolithic burial mounds, all over the place, so it’s been inhabited for three thousand years or so. William the Conqueror made it a royal deer preserve back in 1079 so he and his court could hunt, and it appears in the Domesday Book as Nova Foresta. The only other thing I remember is that there was a great storm in 1703 and four thousand oak trees were destroyed.”
“Imagine all these beautiful oaks crashing down. Dreadful.” She shuddered. “Did they ever teach you at school about the Major Oak in Sherwood Forest? They reckon it’s eight hundred to a thousand years old. Makes you feel a bit impermanent, doesn’t it?” Deirdre said. “I mean what’s a life span of seventy years or so compared to that?”
“True,” said Fingal, and kissed her gently, “but I don’t think an oak tree’s ever been kissed.”
She laughed. “Hold on. I’m trying to say something important here. Be serious for just a minute, can’t you?”
“Lying beside the most beautiful woman in the New Forest it’ll be difficult, but I’ll try. You really do want to say something, don’t you, pet?”
She nodded. “We are so … so transient,” she said, “and when we go there’s nothing left behind. I asked you back in Lyndhurst ‘Shall we have kids?’ I was half joking then, but I’m not now. Well? Shall we? You and I’ve never discussed having children.” She paused.
“True,” he said, banishing any suggestion of levity from his voice. “I assumed it was one of the reasons two people got married, to have a family, but you’re right, we’ve never actually talked about it.”
“I’d really like to have your children,” she said. “Our children, but is it fair?”
“Fair?”
“In the middle of a war with all the horrid bombings? You’ve heard the BBC with me every morning since we came here. London’s still being hit night after night as if it’ll never stop, although the bombers didn’t come on the third. But it was only a brief pause. Those two little lads and their Guy. Missing home. Missing their mummy and daddy.”
For a moment Fingal paused. He stared into her eyes. If it were peacetime, he’d not have hesitated for one second before answering her question about starting a family with an instant, “Of course.” But she did have a point. “Darling, we are living in dangerous times. I’ll not beat about the bush. You’ll be going back to Ulster in January. I’ll be going back to my ship.” He hesitated before saying, “It is possible that I might not come back.”
She sat up, wrapping her arms round her knees and staring across the stream. “That’s what I’m afraid of,” she said.
He sat up beside her, putting his arm round her. She leant her head on his shoulder. “Please come back to me, Fingal,” she said. “Please.”
What to say? “Of course” would be trite and clearly a promise over which he had no control. Death was an occupational hazard of a sailor on active service. And Deirdre was far too clever to be fobbed off with platitudes. “I’ll do my best,” he said. “I’ll do my very best. I promise.”
“Thank you,” she said, and kissed him as might a sister.
He held her tightly until the shaking that was a part of her silent crying had stopped and she’d sat up straight again to continue gazing out over the stream.
“I’m sorry to be so silly,” she said.
“You’re not silly,” he said, and stared at his knees. “You’re worried and rightly so. And you asked a very sensible question. Would it be fair to have kids just now?”
“Shhhhh.” She said, “Look, Fingal, and move very slowly. Look over there. Straight ahead.”
He slowly raised his head. Coming through the oaks and down to the stream, presumably to drink, were two deer. The rutting season had ended in October. He and Deirdre were downwind of the animals, which seemed unaware of the presence of the two humans. The buck, his dark brown coat in contrast to that of his lighter, brown-spotted doe, was about three feet at the shoulder and sported a fine set of antlers, the blades of which were flat. “Fallow deer,” Fingal whispered. “The doe’s probably pregnant.”
Deirdre neither spoke nor moved.
The buck, constantly turning his head from side to side, nostrils flaring to detect the slightest scent, walked a little ahead of his doe. She trod level with his shoulder until together they stood at the stream’s edge. The buck waited on guard until the doe had lowered her head, only raising it when she had drunk her fill, then he drank. Together they turned and in a moment were swallowed up by the trees as if the deer had never truly existed.
Deirdre sat very still for several moments then turned to him. “Fingal,” she said, eyes glistening, “they were so beautiful,” and she was saying it not with her lips but with her soul.
And Fingal O’Reilly, still conscious of how protective the buck had been of his mate, was overwhelmed by the need to shelter his gentle, doelike Deirdre. He held her head to his chest, smoothing her hair, and finally said, “I love you, Deirdre O’Reilly. I’ll do anything in my power to protect you, and while it might not be fair to the child, yes, I do believe we should try to start a family before I go back to sea.”
“Let’s,” she said. “I agree. Let’s try, my love.”
“If we succeed,” he said, “you’ll have a little Fingal or a little Deirdre to look after while I’m away.” And, he left the thought unspoken, a little of me if, heaven help us, I don’t come back.
25
The Doctor’s Dilemma
“… and the floods forecast yesterday for Florence have become a reality,” said the BBC announcer on O’Reilly’s car radio. “The River Arno has burst its banks, causing what is believed to be the worst inundation since 1557. Many people are reported to have been killed and many ancient masterpieces and millions of rare books destroyed. The city itself has been cut in two. We will bring you a further report at six o’clock.”
“Poor buggers,” he muttered as he parked the Rover in the car park at the back of the Royal Victoria Hospital. Barry’s amusing reference to Robert Benchley’s famous telegram now seemed insensitive in the face of the death and destruction.
A different radio announcer’s voice said in jocular tones: “Aaaaall rightee, and to kick off this afternoon’s programme, here’s ‘Feelin’ Groovy,’ or if you prefer, ‘The 59th Street Bridge Song’ by Simon and Garfunkel.” Ordinarily O’Reilly, who liked their music, would have waited to listen for a few moments, but he found the instant switching from a calamity affecting thousands of Italians to lighthearted fluff incongruous, and swi
tched off.
He hurried through driving sheets of rain. Leafless trees were being thrashed by the relentless downpour, and even the chain-link fencing that surrounded the tennis courts by the morgue was rocking on its posts. He soon reached the hospital’s main corridor and strode past twenty wards on his way to 21.
The corridor was its usual bustling self. Nurses, both staff and student, identifiable by their different headdresses, rubbed shoulders with porters, floor cleaners and their electric polishers, visitors, medical students in their short white “bum-freezer” coats, and junior doctors in long ones. A volunteer heading for the wards pushed a book trolley from the hospital’s lending library. For a moment, O’Reilly recalled an SBA shoving the clinking trolley for beer rounds on the wards of Haslar hospital back in 1940.
The corridor smells today were no different than they had been back then: floor polish, disinfectant, tobacco smoke, damp overcoats. At least here in 1966 there were no lingering stinks of a recent air raid, although he well knew that Belfast and Bangor had been attacked during the war. He put that thought away.
“Fingal,” a familiar voice said. “What brings you here?”
He stopped. “Cromie,” he said to his old friend. “Good to see you. I’m going to see Charlie. Ronald Fitzpatrick has developed some nasty neurological disease. He’s on 21. The tests should be finished by now and Charlie should have a diagnosis established. I’m hoping a decision has been taken about what treatment’s going to be needed.”
“Fitzpatrick? Poor divil. Wish I could help, but it doesn’t sound like he needs an orthopaedic surgeon,” Cromie said, starting to walk down the hall. “I never could warm to the man, but please do give him my best wishes for a speedy recovery.”
“Of course.” O’Reilly kept up.
“I’d pop in now with you and wish him well myself but young Mills—he’s turning out very well, by the way—has started on a Pott’s fracture. Open reduction can be tricky, so I want to scrub with him.”
“Off you go. Any chance of you and Button coming down for a bite? I know Kitty’d love to see you both.”