An Irish Country Courtship

  “Gina,” Barry said. “Gina …”—he had to try hard to remember—“Luchi.” And Jack was right. Way back then, Barry’d thought his heart would never mend.

  “Then you started shooting for the moon.”

  “I what?”

  “You were fifteen. We got a new Mamselle.”

  Barry did remember the young, sloe-eyed, brunette Frenchwoman. The school employed a new one every year so the pupils could practice conversational French. “Come on, Jack. Every boy in that sex-starved boarding school had—”

  “Fantasies about her.” Jack pointed a finger at Barry. “You fell in love. Wrote her poems. You were still moping when we came back after the summer holidays. But she was gone—they each stayed for only a year.”

  Barry had to laugh at himself. “Well,” he said, “her replacement had a moustache.”

  Jack grinned. “And legs like a Mullingar heifer’s—beef to the ankle.” His grin faded. “We all had crushes as kids—but you, Laverty, you never stopped. It was always undying love.” He finished his beer. “After we started medical school there was one of the girls in our class, Hilda something-or-other.”

  “Cleary.”

  “Right. Then a couple in between we’ve both forgotten. Hang on.” He frowned. “Mandy … Mandy Baird, the unit clerk on Ward 22.”

  “Come on, Jack. I think I took her out twice. I wasn’t serious about her.”

  “The exception, my boy, that proves the rule. After her there was a certain green-eyed nurse in our houseman’s year—”

  “Who married a surgeon.”

  “That’s when you decided to devote your life one hundred percent to the celibate priesthood of medicine.”

  Barry grimaced. It was true. “Go on.”

  “I’m not going to say much about your most recent amour.”

  Barry felt a lump. “Thanks, Jack. I appreciate that.”

  “But I am going to observe, as your oldest friend, that after all your previous …”

  Barry knew Jack was hunting for the right word. What he’d said already was quite a mouthful for a man who usually hid his emotions behind foreign accents and a boisterous bonhomie.

  “… your previous liaisons, your recovery was slow and painful, but eventually it was complete. You may have been left with some scars, but you didn’t develop any antibodies.”

  “Antibodies?”

  “Aye. You didn’t become immune to women, despite what you might have thought at the time.”

  “You’re right,” Barry sighed. “Six months after the nurse I took a hell of a tumble for Patricia.”

  Jack waved to the waitress and made a scribbling action on the palm of his left hand. “So, me old son, I’m betting that it won’t be too long until you’ll be telling me you were wrong about—”

  “Patricia?” Barry frowned. “That’s pushing the friendship thing a bit far, Jack. Patricia was the real thing. Still is. I’ll never get over her.” He sat back in his chair and hunched his shoulders. Jack didn’t know what real love was. He was too interested in “a nice pair of pectoral fins and an alluring tail.” But he, Barry Laverty, knew about love. He looked over at his friend, who was still grinning at him.

  Barry frowned as a thought struck. Am I being just a tad supercilious claiming to be the only one of the pair of us who’s ever been in love? Is there just an outside chance that at the moment I’m enjoying feeling sorry for myself? Am I welcoming the extra sympathy from O’Reilly, Kinky, and the folks in the village? Is it possible that based on my past record, Jack is right?

  Jack, perhaps regretting coming close to the line, retreated into his usual self. Barry could have sworn John Wayne was sitting opposite when his friend drawled, “In that case, pardner, let’s settle up in this here saloon, saddle up, and mosey over to the Royal Victoria Corral.”

  “Jack, I—” Barry shook his head.

  “Listen up, pilgrim, back at my homestead you agreed we’d go. If yuh wanna, you kin sit when we get there and carry a torch fer the lil’ lady. Me? I sure figger I’m gonna enjoy the hoedown at the nurses home.”

  And despite his inner ache, Barry grinned, shook his head, and said, “Eejit, Mills. Buck eejit.”

  * * *

  Jack parked the Mini. The gale whistled between the two halves of the Clinical Sciences Building that sat on each side of the road running through the grounds of the Royal Victoria Hospital. They were joined by an umbilical cord in the form of an overhead, enclosed walkway. “Down here’s like the wind tunnel at Short Brothers aircraft factory,” Jack said.

  Barry had to agree. “Bugger,” he said, as his tweed cap blew off. He didn’t catch it until he was opposite the Royal Maternity Hospital, which stood behind the Royal Victoria.

  He picked his cap from the gutter, dusted it off, and waited. Jack was a friend, a man who could make Barry face up to himself. It was beginning to dawn on him that he had expected, and still did expect, to marry one day, and when he did, he was pretty sure he’d want the same kind of marriage as his folks. Dad worked. Mum ran the house. That’s the way it had been when they got married back in the thirties. Granted, more women were having careers since the war, but here in Ulster traditional ways died hard.

  And that kind of arrangement was a damn sight less complicated than having an ambitious engineer and a doctor under the same roof.

  Jack caught up with Barry. “You, Laverty, if you were able to run and carry a rugby football, could play on the wing for Ireland.” As Barry fell into step with his friend, Jack continued: “You took off there like a liltie. I thought you were going right up the front steps of the Royal Maternity.”

  “Not tonight,” Barry said. “I’m off duty.”

  “That was a great two months we spent there in ’62, learning obstetrics,” Jack said, “and chatting up the student midwives. There was a wee one from Magherafelt …” He let his voice drift off.

  “I left that side of the business up to you, Mills,” Barry said, “but I really enjoyed the training.”

  “Did you think any more about what we talked about last time you were up in town?”

  “Me specialising in obstetrics?”

  “Aye.”

  “A bit. Having to refer every interesting case has been getting to me. I sent one to your boss. I think she’s got an amoebic liver abscess.”

  “In Ballybucklebo? Crikey.” Jack slipped into The Goon Show’s Mr. Banerjee’s accent. “They are being things of great rarity in this green land I am tinking. In my country they are ten for a paisa.”

  “A what?”

  “A paisa, Sahib. There are being one hundred to each rupee. It is being a diagnostic coup of the first magnitude for the young man of healing, isn’t it?”

  “Not really,” Barry said, smiling at his friend’s perfect mimicry. “I’ve only been able to suspect what she has. But you and your boss have the tools and the training to make a definite diagnosis and start treatment. I’d find doing that satisfying.”

  “True.” Jack’s native speech had returned. “On the other hand, she’ll thank us—they all do—but she’ll not give us a bottle of whiskey for Christmas. I’ll bet you get lots from grateful customers. And I’ll bet it lets you feel satisfied in a different way.”

  As they turned into the lee of the multistorey nurses home, Barry remembered Donal and Julie Donnelly’s thank-you bottle and how gratifying it had felt to be the recipient. “I suppose,” he said, looking down at his feet as he climbed the steps to Bostock House.

  “Hi, Doctors. Nice to see yiz.”

  Barry looked up to see Joe, ex-prizefighter and now doorman and guardian of the nurses home, holding the glass door ajar. “Hi, Joe.”

  “Go on, on in,” Joe said. “There’s a wheen of your oul’ mates and a whole clatter of pretty nurses, you know.” Joe’s grin always looked faintly out of place on his battered face with its broken nose and heavily ridged eyebrows. “But just remember, it’s still like when yiz was students. Them wee girls is in my charge, so they
are. So you two behave yourselves. Savvy?”

  “Oh, I will,” said Jack. He winked at Barry.

  “Me too,” Barry said, but he meant it.

  25

  Dance ’til Stars Come Down from the Rafters

  “Behave myself?” Jack said, as he took off his coat and watched a young woman walk past, his head moving from side to side in time with the sway of her hips. “Och, sure, this fox is only going into the henhouse for a bit of warmth.”

  “Mills, you’re incorrigible,” Barry said, hanging his coat beside his friend’s. Then he followed Jack through the foyer and into the main hall, which for tonight was a ballroom.

  Couples thronged the dance floor. Single women sat on chairs along the left wall and partnerless men sat, stood, or lounged along the right. Smoke from cigarettes curled lazily upward and was thrown into bright contrast with the room’s dimness by flashes from a mirror-covered ball. It rotated slowly over the centre of the room and sent florin-sized silver discs of light racing each other through the smoke and across the floor.

  The Stanley Coppel Band, a jazz combo, played on a raised stage at the far end of the room. Barry recognised the number as “Skokiaan.” Their drummer, Barry Lowry, and their trumpeter and leader, Chris Blencoe, had, like Barry and Jack, attended Campbell College.

  “Speak of the devil,” Jack said. “I see Mandy Baird’s here.” He nodded toward a jiving young woman with shining black hair that fell in a cascade to her midback, then flew out behind her as she spun. “Wonder if she’s here on her own.”

  “You’ll see at the end of this set.” Barry watched Harry Sloan go by; he was holding Jane Duggan, the blonde nurse who had scribbled Peggy Duff’s phone number on a piece of paper. The same piece of paper on which he’d scrawled the Yacht Club’s number for Kinky.

  When the music stopped, couples stayed together on the floor or moved toward the foyer. Single people went back to their respective sides of the hall, women to the left, men to the right.

  “Mandy is on her own,” Jack said. “I’m off.”

  “Warmth in the henhouse, I suppose? Off you go,” Barry said. “I’ll sit this one out and study the talent.” In fact, he simply intended to sit. He wasn’t interested in dancing tonight.

  Barry shook his head and watched Jack stride across the floor and nip in front of a gangly lad with buckteeth who looked as if he’d been going to ask Mandy to dance. If the armed forces ever needed a missile that unerringly homed in on pretty girls, they’d use Jack Mills as a template. As Barry moved toward the men’s row of chairs, he became aware of a scent he recognised. Je Reviens. He’d been here the last time he’d noticed it. He felt a tap on his shoulder and turned.

  “Hello, Barry.” The young woman’s lips and dark eyes smiled at him. “How are you?”

  “Peggy.” Barry swallowed. “Peggy Duff. Nice to see you.” She wore her black hair as she had before, shoulder-length and curled in under her chin, contrasting smartly with her high-collared, white silk blouse.

  She shrugged. “I’m fine. Still single. I didn’t expect to see you here tonight.”

  He remembered that she’d been getting over a two-timing boyfriend.

  “So how are things with you, Barry? Has your girlfriend gone back to study at Cambridge and you’re off the leash again?”

  “She’s gone back,” he said, realising how flat his voice sounded.

  “Oh-oh,” she said. “Bad as that?”

  He nodded.

  “So you’re not just having a night out with the lads? Harry’s with Jane, I know, and I remember Jack …” She inclined her head to where Jack had Mandy on her feet. “I run into him on the wards now and then.” She smiled. “Handsome devil.”

  “He is.” And you’re a very pretty nurse, Barry thought. I’m surprised he hasn’t asked you out.

  “He asked me to dinner a few weeks ago,” she said.

  Barry smiled. “That’s my Jack.”

  “But I made an excuse.” She looked directly at Barry. “He’s a nice boy, but he’s not my type.”

  “He’s my best friend,” Barry said. He wondered if his comment had sounded as defensive to Peggy’s ears as it had to his own. He got his reply in her awkward laugh.

  “Well, you know what I mean. He’s a nice man, I’m sure, but he’s a bit … fast.”

  Barry nodded. “That’s Jack.”

  “So he’s dragged you here to force you to have fun? Jane did that for me. It does help. A bit. She keeps trying to mother me.”

  What had he said to Jack not an hour ago about wanting to have a girl who might mother him?

  “Friends can come in handy,” he said. He wondered if Jane had told Peggy about giving Barry her phone number. Probably not. If Peggy’d known and he hadn’t phoned, she was smart enough to understand he wasn’t interested and would not have approached him tonight.

  She reached and took his hand. “She found someone else?”

  He nodded.

  “I’m sorry, Barry. I truly am. I know how you feel.”

  As he always did when offered well-meant sympathy, Barry felt close to tears. He was relieved when a voice made tinny by the microphone announced, “Ladies and gentlemen, next a set of blues. ‘Saint Louis,’ ‘Saint James Infirmary,’ and ‘Beale Street.’” The music started slowly, sadly, a hoarse lament for a lost love.

  Barry would have preferred to be on his own, but convention left him no choice. “Would you care to dance?” He’d thought it would be difficult to ask a girl, would somehow be disloyal to Patricia, but since his conversation with Jack in the restaurant the words were not as hard to utter as he’d expected.

  At least it was a slow set. He’d be less likely to trample on Peggy’s feet. She was warm in his arms. Putting her lips close to his ear, she sang along in a pleasant soprano:

  I got the Saint Louis blues, just as blue as I can be …

  Jack and Mandy moved by. Jack winked at Barry, took his hand from the skirt over her buttock, and formed an “O” with his thumb and index finger.

  Barry was unsure if Jack meant he was already set up with Mandy, or that he approved of Barry’s choice. It didn’t matter. This Peggy was a nice friendly lass, even if she wasn’t Patricia. Her voice was pleasing, her breath gentle on his neck, and her slim waist fitted neatly into the crook of his arm. He held her more tightly and brought the warmth of her closer. She rested her head on his shoulder.

  There was a comfort to be had, and although she was the one being cradled, he felt like an infant, held and insulated from the gale raging outside and protected from the hurt in his heart. Barry sensed her lips brush his cheek, thistledown on an arid plain. He planted a chaste peck on her forehead and was pleased when she did nothing to indicate she wanted him to go any further.

  He might dance with her again later in a slow set, even buy her a drink as the night wore on if she’d not paired up with some other fellah, but that was as far as Barry wanted things to go tonight.

  They shuffled around the floor until the last chorus of “Beale Street Blues” soared and died. The nearness of this pretty girl in his arms had been comforting, but it also brought memories of his holding Patricia, and that hurt.

  Still together and holding hands, they drifted to the edge of the dance floor.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” Chris Blencoe called into the mike, “we’re going to take five; then we’ll be back with a fast set: ‘Tiger Rag,’ ‘Twelfth Street Rag,’ and ‘Cross Hands Boogie.’”

  “I think,” Barry said, not wanting to dance a fast set and also needing time alone, “I think I’ll be sitting them out. I can just about manage slow ones without stamping all over my partner’s toes.” She was still holding his hand, but before he was forced into being more blunt about being on his own for a while, a voice warbled in his ear:

  Why don’t you go where fashion sits?

  Barry had to smile. Then he said to Peggy, “Contrary to what you may think you just heard, this is not Fred Astaire, and he’s not putting
on the blooming Ritz. Peggy Duff, I think you know Jack Mills, and this is Mandy Baird.”

  Jack and Mandy nodded to Peggy, who nodded back.

  “I heard you, Laverty, saying you were going to sit out the next set. Great idea. Come on the four of us, and we’ll have a wee wet.” He grabbed Barry by the arm and started toward the door.

  Barry scowled at Jack, but had to follow. There was no getting out of it. He fell into step as they made their way, along with a small scrum of others heading in the same direction to a bar in a side room off the entrance foyer.

  “Grab that one, Barry,” Jack said, pointing to a circular table with an oilcloth covering, surrounded by four metal folding chairs. “You’re nearest.”

  Barry fussed about pulling out the girls’ chairs and getting them seated.

  “Right,” said Jack. “Peggy?”

  “Vodka and orange, please.”

  “You’ll be having a brandy, Mandy?”

  “Please.”

  Barry saw the look she gave Jack from under lowered eyelids.

  “Come on, Laverty. I’ll need a hand to carry four drinks.”

  Barry stood at Jack’s shoulder behind three other men who were waiting for their turn to order.

  “I was hoping for a bit of peace and quiet,” Barry said.

  “Not when you’re with your uncle Jack,” he said. “Pretty girl, Peggy,” Jack said. “I asked her to dinner once. No luck.” He shrugged and winked. “If you don’t ask, you’ll never succeed. Hope you’ve better luck with her than I had.”

  “Not tonight, Jack.”

  “Why not? Come on, Barry. She’s good-looking. Remember what I said in the Chinese place? Nice pectoral fins under that silk blouse. Bloody fine legs too.”

  Barry couldn’t help himself. He looked over at the table. The young women were both leaning forward in conversation. Peggy sat with her left side turned to Barry. Her blouse had opened slightly at the neck, and he could see the rounded top of her right breast. He glanced down. Like many of the women here she wore a flared skirt over layers of petticoats. She had crossed her legs, and Barry admired the curve of her calves made silky beneath black nylons. He sighed. “Another time, another place perhaps, but not tonight, Jack. I’m not ready. Not yet.”