“I’m not so sure,” she said. “A lot of the men are wearing blue shirts and dark ties.”
“Maybe supporters of some club?”
“I don’t think so, Fingal. They could be Blueshirts.” She sounded concerned and was frowning deeply. “I wonder what they’re up to? Maybe there’s to be a meeting of some sort?”
“No idea.” He’d known of the organisation formed from men who’d fought on the Irish government’s side in the 1921–22 Civil War. They’d called themselves the Army Comrades Association and in imitation of Hitler’s Brownshirts and Mussolini’s Blackshirts had chosen to wear the colour blue. They gave the Roman salute and flirted with Fascism, but they were mostly anti-Communist and pro–Catholic Church. “They pretty well folded up in 1933,” he said. “I think they amalgamated with some other small groups and formed Fine Gael, one of the new political parties.” And that was enough about that. The last thing he wanted today was to become involved in anything political. He agreed wholeheartedly with Phelim Corrigan’s opinion of politicians. A curse on all their houses. “Do you know,” he said, itching to tell her about something that had been at the forefront of his mind for days, “I saw something astounding last week that could have come straight out of a Victorian novel. Much more interesting than a bunch of eejits in pretty shirts.”
“What?”
“You’re a nurse. You’ve seen diptheria.”
“Yes. Bad cases in kids are horrid. Poor wee mites.” She tightened her grip and stopped him from swinging their hands. “Gasping for breath. Scared skinny.”
“Phelim says we’re seeing a lot less because we’ve had a vaccine since the early ’20s.”
“And that’s a very good thing,” she said.
“But kids do still get infected. Some mothers refuse to have them immunised. We saw one last Tuesday. Sick as a dog. You know how in bad cases a membrane forms over the larynx and upper trachea and blocks the airway?”
“I’ve only seen it once.”
“Me too, and it reminded me of that scene in Tom Brown’s Schooldays where the headmaster saved the life of a boy who was badly afflicted, but at risk of his own.”
She stopped walking, forcing him to stop. “How?”
They stood like a small rock as the tide of pedestrians swept by.
Fingal smiled to himself. He’d certainly got her interested and clearly willing to drop the subject of political rallies.
“The mother brought the wee boy to the surgery. I made a diagnosis, gave him antitoxin just the way they’d taught me, but he couldn’t breathe, he was cyanosed and getting bluer. I didn’t know what to do.” He’d been terrified. “The next step was a tracheotomy, but I’ve never done one.”
“It must have been awful for you too,” she said. “I know how helpless nurses and doctors can feel. What did you do?”
“I got Phelim from next door. I’ve never seen anything like it. He didn’t hesitate. He had me hold the kiddy tightly, grabbed a thin metal tube, put it into the boy’s mouth, God knows how far into the throat one end went, and then he started to suck on the other end.”
“Dear God,” she said, her eyes wide. “Suck?”
“It was a repeat of the novel’s scene. After a minute or two he pulled out the tube and there was a sheet of grey membrane hanging off its end.” Fingal recalled the moment with absolute clarity. “And the wee lad was hauling in great whoops of breath and the blue colour was leaving his cheeks.”
“That is astounding,” Kitty said.
Fingal nodded. “Phelim Corrigan, in my opinion, saved that boy’s life at no small risk of infecting himself. But the incubation period’s two to four days so he’s out of the woods now.”
“And you admire what Phelim did, don’t you, Fingal?” she said quietly.
He nodded. “Phelim’s the kind of doctor I want to be. Always, always puts his patients first.”
“I wonder,” she said, and he detected a wistful note in her voice, “if that’s why he never married?”
“I’ve no idea,” he said, and to bring a smile to her face, added, “and once the kiddy was clearly going to be all right, do you know what he did?”
“No.”
“He gave the mother a bollicking for not having had the child vaccinated, and to make his point—and he’s very good at pretending to be angry—he ripped off his toupee and hurled it across the room. He’s bald as a coot. I nearly ruptured myself trying not to laugh.” And to Fingal’s delight the thought must have hit Kitty’s funny bone. She dissolved into helpless laughter. When she’d pulled herself together, she finally managed to say, “I love the way you make me laugh—and I love you, Fingal O’Reilly.” Not waiting for a response, she started walking, bringing Fingal along with her.
As they continued up Fitzwilliam Place East he rattled on about the other interesting cases he’d seen since they’d last been together two weekends ago. Juggling his on-call schedule, her often unpredictable off-duty times, and catching up on sleep, often took a bit of doing. Ma needed to be kept company too, although she seemed to be brightening. She was talking about selling the house on Lansdowne Road and moving to Portaferry to be near Lars.
As Fingal and Kitty neared Merrion Square, she pointed ahead. “Hang on a minute please, Fingal. I’m sure we’ve plenty of time and I do want to see what’s going on over there.”
“It sure as hell is something.” As they passed the east side of Merrion Square Park, it was clear to Fingal where the crowd was going. The lawns were filling up. In the mid-’30s, Dublin was frequently the scene of political rallies with parties forming, dissolving, reuniting in different configurations. Not his cup of tea. He’d been too busy studying for years and now was fully occupied and enjoying working.
Fingal and Kitty arrived at the crossroads where Merrion Square South continues as Mount Street Upper. For a moment he spared a thought for Jane Carson in her big house there. She’d had her surgery nearly three weeks ago, had made a remarkable recovery, and only two days earlier, he and Phelim had stopped taking it in turns to make daily visits. One of them would call in in a week or so. Fingal had discovered that he and her husband, Robin, shared an interest in rugby football. Decent chap, Robin. He and Fingal had taken sherry together in the drawing room.
He was distracted by a roar of cheering and deafening applause coming from the throng gathering in the park. More political haranguing was about to start, not something that appealed, but Kitty was tugging at his hand. “Fingal, please. I want to hear.”
He glanced at his watch. “All right,” he said. “We can afford ten minutes.” In truth he would find it nearly impossible to deny her anything. “But I think we should move along to the north side of the square. We’ll be able to hear better there, and it’s closer to Bob’s flat. Look.” He pointed to a raised platform against the hedge halfway along the park’s north boundary. On each side of the dais, loudspeakers were mounted on poles, and a lectern stood in the middle facing into the park. From one pole flew a blue flag with a red Saint Andrew’s Cross.
“Good Lord,” said Kitty. “That’s the old flag of the Army Comrades Association. They are Blueshirts. I was right.”
Fingal and Kitty turned left and walked along with the park to their left, the four-storey redbrick terraces behind low wrought-iron railings to their right. Judging by the number of drawn curtains, most of the wealthy Merrion Square folks were not interested in the doings across the road. A few faces peered out of open windows.
“We’re nearly at Bob’s place,” Fingal said, and stopped, “but you know if we go further and turn left again we’ll be on the same street where Arthur Wellesley, the Duke of Wellington, was born. May the first, 1769. Dublin is steeped in history to her marrow.”
“And we’re seeing history over there.” Kitty pointed at the park. “It’s filled with Blueshirts. William Butler Yeats lived on Merrion Square too, you know, and he wrote marching songs for them. He thought they were true Irish patriots.”
“I like h
is poems.
Two girls in silk kimonos.
Both beautiful, one a gazelle.
You’re my gazelle.”
“Fingal. Thank you.” Her smile was radiant, but very quickly she turned back to look at the park.
Fingal could see the official party mounting the dais. A Tannoy loudspeaker buzzed and whistled, then a man wearing a blue shirt, dark tie, and dark beret stepped forward and stood at attention before a microphone. He tapped it with his finger, making loud clicks.
Silence fell.
“Good afternoon,” he said, his words amplified and tinny. “My name is Patrick Belton, I come from County Longford, I fought with Michael Collins, God rest his soul, and I’ve been in prison for my beliefs in a free Ireland.”
The crowd applauded, whistled.
“Although never a Blueshirt myself, I wear their uniform today in admiration of what they stood for and in sympathy with their cause, which I believe will become our cause.” He gave a Roman salute by raising his right arm stiffly at forty-five degrees from his shoulder, and was instantly imitated by all the blue-shirted men in the audience.
Fingal flinched, so loud was the cheering, and he shuddered. He’d seen Pathé newsreels of Nazis and Italian Fascisti. And to see the same salute, here in Ireland? Appalling. Fingal remembered a scrap of conversation he’d overheard in Davy Byrnes pub a few weeks ago. “Blueshirts? Fellah called Eoin O’Duffy used to be in charge. Strutting round giving each other straight-arm salutes. Maybe O’Duffy’ll come back and lead dem to Spain to fight if dere is a war.” Was that what this was about?
When the noise faded, Belton continued. “Before getting on with the business of this meeting, I call on Father Eamon O’Sullivan to bless us and our deliberations.” He stood aside and a robed cleric in cassock, stole, and biretta stood before the microphone, raised his right arm above his head, fist closed and the index and middle finger extended.
The crowd knelt.
Fingal, out of respect, bowed his head while Father O’Sullivan intoned a blessing and finished, “In nomine Patris, Filii, et Spiritus Sancti … Amen.” His Latin was not improved by his thick Kerry accent.
He was answered by a chorus of amens and stepped aside to be replaced by Belton. “My friends,” he said, his voice reverberating from the speakers, “as you all know, a civil war has been raging in Spain since the seventeenth of July.”
The crowd communally drew in its breath. So, Fingal was right. This was about the war in Spain. It was hard not to know about it. It was never out of the headlines.
“Come on, Kitty,” said Fingal. “It’s none of our business.”
The Tannoy continued distorting Belton’s speech, which quavered as he spoke about massacres of clerics in Spain by troops of anti-Catholic government forces.
Fingal tugged at Kitty’s hand. “Come on,” he repeated. “I’ve had enough.” He started to walk. “I want no more discussions of war on such a lovely afternoon.”
“I agree, but…” She had to step aside to avoid a boy in a brown uniform riding a bicycle with a full wicker basket slung on the handlebars. A metal plate on the frame announced, Beirne’s Butchers. Fine meats and poultry. We deliver. Fingal knew the lad’s wage for delivering choice cuts of meat to the big houses on Merrion Square was five shillings a week.
He waited for Kitty outside Bob’s door.
She held up a hand. “Fingal, before you ring the doorbell—”
“What?” He knew he sounded curt, but he was hoping she’d leave matters alone now. The prospect of a day at the races with his old friend Bob Beresford and Kitty was far more enticing than an afternoon spent trying to solve the world’s problems.
“No,” she said. “I’m going to say what I have to, Fingal.”
He sighed. “Go ahead.” This was an entirely new side of her and not one he was sure he liked.
“I don’t care about the politics in Spain. I worry about something else. You were upset by one boy with diptheria, rejoiced that Doctor Corrigan was able to save his life.”
“True.”
She pursed her lips. “The city of Badajoz fell to the Nationalists last Friday. They rounded up hundreds of defenders and locked them in, of all places, the bull ring. By reports coming out of Spain, they were machine-gunned, bayoneted. We don’t know how many were killed.” There was a catch in her voice, a glistening at the corner of her eyes. “I can’t help wondering … how many children have been left without parents. I keep thinking about them, about the orphans, about who looks after them?”
The Tannoy intruded, “—we must support the Spanish government forces because they are our Spanish Catholic brothers and sisters against the forces of evil. We will form a committee to be called the Irish Christian Front. Who is with me?”
“Shut up,” he muttered.
“Fingal.” Kitty took a pace back.
He shook his head. “No, Kitty, not you. I understand how you’re feeling. I do. It’s the loudspeaker. I just don’t want to hear any more. Not today.” He hadn’t a clue what to do to comfort her. It pained him to see the woman with whom he’d fallen in love concerned so fiercely with a matter over which neither of them had the slightest control.
“They’re going to need nurses—”
“What?” Fingal’s eyes widened. “Kitty, you don’t mean—”
“No,” she said. “No, I’m not going to volunteer. Don’t worry, but…” She sighed. “All those children. God have mercy.”
A cloud must have crossed the sun because a shadow fell over Merrion Square, and when Fingal, seeking refuge from the blaring loudspeakers, the mindless cheering of the mob—and from Kitty’s sadness that he couldn’t take away—pushed the bell of Bob’s flat, it wasn’t with his customary cheerful jab.
19
Like a Dog He Hunts in Dreams
“I liked Jenny’s craic about us going to the dogs today, Fingal,” Kitty said, and chuckled. “That girl’s sense of humour can be very dry.” She settled farther back into the passenger seat. “Donal Donnelly and young Colin Brown and an ‘unofficial’ greyhound? Quite the combination.”
“She’s a good head, Jenny. And Donal? You’d never know the minute with that one. Unpredictable as a feather in a hurricane.”
O’Reilly’d had to slow down to get through the town of Kircubbin, which was often busy on a Saturday. But he was intent on making up time on the last few miles to the disused military airfield at Kirkistown where the unofficial greyhound racing was to be held. “I’m dying to see what Donal’s up to this time with that dog with no name.”
“No name? I thought the dog’s name was Bluebird. We saw her the day we went to visit the new baby, didn’t we?”
“We did and it was, but not today. You see, Donal is—”
“Don’t—” said Kitty, raising her hand. “Don’t tell me. I don’t want to know.” She rolled her eyes at O’Reilly and chuckled. “I have a feeling the less I know the less I will have to conceal, and I’ve never been a good liar. You’d think I should be as used to Donal Donnelly’s antics by now as you. Remember when he was a patient on my ward in April? Three days after surgery and he was running card schools and trying to make book on the time the tea trolley would arrive. He bribed the tea lady, you know, to come at two thirty-seven on the button, not her usual three o’clock.”
“So that’s how he was sure he was going to win. I’ll be damned.” O’Reilly chuckled, changed down, and took a sharp right-handed bend. The tyres screeched. He raced the car up the face of a small hill, one of the many drumlins that studded County Down, crested the rise, and for a brief moment became airborne before touching down with a shuddering of the suspension.
He felt her hand on his arm. “Fingal. Slow down. I nearly lost my lunch.”
“Sorry, love.” He eased his foot on the accelerator and let ten miles an hour bleed away.
“Thank you.”
They settled into a companionable silence. He glanced up. Overhead, a low cloud, darker than the grey cu
mulus behind it, had rolled in from the west. A ragged vee of geese, too large to be Brent so probably very early winter migrant Greylags down from their breeding grounds in Spitzbergen, were flying from his left to right. He knew they would be crossing nearby Strangford Lough and heading for one of her many grassy islands strewn carelessly like green confetti on a ruffled blue gown. A series of harsh ho-onks drifted in on the light westerly coming through his open window. “Greylag,” he said, their cries confirming his suspicions.
“That’s nice,” she said, “but please concentrate on driving.”
O’Reilly smiled. Kitty was a decent driver herself. He’d noted this on the few occasions when he’d been driven by her in her tiny Mini. But she was a little too cautious for his tastes.
He looked ahead. The narrow road was empty, not a vehicle in sight. Beneath the stubby blackthorn hedges, fuchsia bushes, and dry stone walls, the grass of the verges looked tired after a long summer. They were studded with yellow tansy and purple common mallow. The lowing of a herd of Friesans in a pasture was punctuated by two sharp bangs. He glanced right and saw the skein of geese flare and with frantic wingbeats claw for altitude. Not a bird fell so the wildfowler had missed with both barrels. O’Reilly smiled. He enjoyed wildfowling but was always happy for the ones that got away. “The season’s been open since last Wednesday, September the first. I’ll maybe get a day out with Arthur soon.” The big dog had been left at home today. Jenny loved walking him and the beast had taken an immediate liking to her. No need to risk him getting embroiled in a fight with one of the highly strung racing dogs when he was in good hands at home.
“How about the Saturday after next when Jenny’s on call again? It’s time I looked for some outlets up here for my paintings. There’s a group that was founded eight years ago by a Gladys MacCabe, the Ulster Society of Women Artists. They’re having an exhibition. I’d like to go, perhaps join so I can get a venue to exhibit here in the north. I’d still sell my work through Dublin, but USWA could be a good entré.”