Fingal O'Reilly, Irish Doctor

  O’Reilly slowed, made the left turn onto the Rubane Road, accelerated, and said, “Fair play to you. Bloody marvellous idea. Now hang on, it’s only about another mile.” He climbed a gradual slope. The Ards peninsula, from the Irish ard meaning high ground, was about three miles across and stretched from the Irish Sea to Strangford Lough. The airfield was at the top of the plateau and had been an RAF satellite of the main aerodrome at Ballyhalbert on the east coast. After the Battle of Britain it had housed 504 Squadron’s Hurricane fighters before becoming a Naval Fleet Air Arm Station called HMS Corncrake II.

  “Here we are,” he said, turning left onto an access road. Up ahead he could see many vehicles parked in a field. “We’ll nip in there,” he said, and tried to, but the way was closed by a five-bar gate manned by a large man wearing a duncher, brown grocer’s coat, and a leather satchel slung over one shoulder. O’Reilly spoke through the open window. “Yes?”

  The man tugged at his duncher and said, “Two adults, two quid and ten bob for the parking, sir, so it is.”

  “King’s bloody ransom,” O’Reilly said, fishing out three notes. “Here.”

  The man stuffed the money into his satchel, opened the gate and, as O’Reilly passed, pointed to the end of a row of cars. “Put you her fornenst thon blue Ford Consul. Reverse in. It’ll be easier for til get out after, like.”

  The car bounced over the ruts.

  “That’s one of the new E-Type Jaguars,” Kitty said, pointing to a low-slung, long-nosed, British-racing-green painted sports car. Large glass-covered headlights were recessed into each wing, and the driver and passenger accommodation was well to the rear under a curved hard top.

  “Is it? Racy-looking yoke,” O’Reilly said, “very sporty, and by all that’s holy, the fellah getting out of it is my brother, Lars.” O’Reilly stopped, stuck two fingers in his mouth, and let go a whistle that would have done the locomotive of the Belfast to Dublin Enterprise train proud.

  Lars turned, saw the Rover, and waved.

  “Be with you in a minute,” O’Reilly yelled, moved on, and parked. “Come on,” he said, opening Kitty’s door.

  The turf underfoot was springy, and he took her hand and led her to where Lars Porsena O’Reilly stood beside his motorcar.

  “Kitty. Finn. Great to see you. You’re both looking well.”

  “Thank you.” Kitty inclined her head.

  O’Reilly admired her raven hair with its silver tips tucked in under a silk headscarf. “You look fit and well yourself, brother,” O’Reilly said. “New chariot?”

  Lars grinned. “My little extravagance. I bought her secondhand from a client.” He stroked the bonnet gently and said, “She’s a late ’64 Series I, four point two litre, six cylinder, XK6 engine—”

  “Lars.” Fingal held his hands in supplication. “Have mercy. I know you’re daft about cars. I still remember your side-valve Morris Cowley back in ’35. But I’m not sure Kitty needs all the specifications.”

  “Oh,” said Kitty in her most innocent voice, “I have to say I prefer the two-door coupés to the convertibles, Lars. Good choice.” She whistled. “Those four-point-two litre engines are quite a step up from the original 1961 production models.”

  O’Reilly’s jaw dropped once, then a notch farther when she said, “Enzio Ferrari called the E-Type ‘the most beautiful car ever made,’ you know, Fingal.” She turned to Lars. “You will take me for a spin in her, won’t you, Lars?”

  “My pleasure,” Lars said. “A beautiful car for a beautiful woman.”

  O’Reilly shook his head, harrumphed, and fixed his brother with his best Balor glare. Dear God, the woman never ceased to amaze him. He fished out his briar, lit up, and took Kitty’s hand. “Come on,” he said, “to the dogs.”

  * * *

  “How’s about ye, Doctor O’Reilly?” Lenny Brown asked. “Say hello nicely to Doctor and Mrs. O’Reilly, Colin.”

  Colin was dressed for the important occasion in uniform blazer with the crest of MacNeill Memorial Primary on the breast pocket, and short grey pants above woollen stockings, one of which was crumpled round his ankle. He snatched off his school cap, grinned, and said, “Nice til see youse, sir, and Mrs. O’Reilly.”

  He and his father stood beside a nondescript-looking builder’s van. O’Reilly noticed that there were no windows in the rear compartment.

  “Hello, Colin,” Kitty said. “Your foot’s all better, is it?”

  “Dead on,” said Colin. “Healed up in no time flat.” He pulled a face. “I’ve for til go back til school on Monday with all the other kids,” then he smiled, “but I’ll be in Miss Nolan’s class again. She’s a wee cracker, so she is.” Ten going on eighteen, O’Reilly thought, but knew Sue Nolan would have no difficulty managing the little scamp. He wondered for a moment if Barry would be popping up to Ballybucklebo to see her. Might be a chance for that trip to the Duck the young man had suggested over dinner in Ballymena last month, see if he was still liking specialising. O’Reilly realised he’d let his mind wander and was forgetting his manners. “And this is my brother, Mister Lars O’Reilly from Portaferry,” he said.

  “Pleased til meet you, sir,” Lenny said. “Grand day for the races, so it is.”

  “It is that,” Lars said.

  O’Reilly looked round. From this elevation he could see the coast, the dark waters of the Irish Sea, and in the distance the shores of Scotland’s Mull of Galloway. Not a cloud in the sky. Not to the east. He turned west. The dark cloud he’d noticed on the drive up was still hanging over Strangford, and if anything, seemed bigger. It would probably blow over, although there was still the small matter of Archie’s weather-forecasting arthritic thumb. “The first race will be starting in about fifteen minutes,” he said. “We want to get a good place at the finish, so if you’ll excuse us?”

  “Trot youse on, sir,” Lenny said, and moved closer to O’Reilly. He lowered his voice. “Donal’s in the van, so he is with, ahem, Buttercup.”

  “Buttercup? Nice name,” O’Reilly said, knowing very well it was Bluebird in the van. He was aching to see the dog but knew he must be patient.

  “What race will Buttercup be in?” Kitty asked.

  “The second,” Colin said. “My daddy’ll take her til the start over thonder.” He pointed across the flat ground to a narrow area of concrete. It must have been the perimeter track for taxiing to and from the dispersal hardstands during the war. He could imagine the airfield shuddering to the roar of the Hurricanes’ Merlin engines, a sound O’Reilly knew from experience that once heard was never forgotten. The track ran in an oval shape round the outer border. A set of starting stalls were set up across the far limb.

  “A fellah’ll drive a car to pull the fake hare round the track til the finish.” He pointed to a spot directly across from the start. A line drawn between start and finish would have made the racecourse look like a large concreted U. O’Reilly guessed it was about five hundred yards, twenty-five less than the distance at an official track. “And,” O’Reilly could see the little lad’s chest swell, “that’s when I’ll get ahold of Buttercup, she’s well used til me, and I’ll put on her leash and take her til the stewards, so I will. They always take a good gander at the winning dogs, so they do.” He winked. For the second time, O’Reilly could have sworn it was a younger Donal winking. “They need til make sure there’s been no hanky-panky, like.”

  “Indeed,” said O’Reilly, struggling to hide his grin.

  “How can you be sure she will win?” Lars, who was not in on the plot, asked with a frown.

  Colin said, “No harm til you, sir, but a policeman wouldn’t ask you that.”

  O’Reilly laughed. “In other words, ‘Mind your own business’—sir.”

  “Oh,” said Lars. “I see. It would appear our young friend is well versed in the power of positive thinking.”

  “I need to see to Buttercup for a wee minute,” Colin said. “Mebbe I’ll see youse all before the finish of the second. I have to come here
for til be ready til collect her.” He fixed Lars with what O’Reilly could only describe as a pitying smile and said, “That’ll be after she’s come first, you know.”

  20

  So White! O So Soft.

  “It’s nearly twelve, Doctor O’Reilly.” Phelim Corrigan stuck his head round the surgery door. His parting was running fore and aft today, but some of the strands of his toupee, which Fingal had long ago assumed was horsehair, were sticking up like the prickles of a hedgehog.

  “Nearly finished, Doctor Corrigan,” Fingal said. It was Saturday, September 12, and he and Charlie had been in post for nearly nine weeks. Enormously enjoyable weeks professionally, and this was Fingal’s weekend on call. “These are my last patients. I’m just starting with them.” He smiled at a woman of twenty who stood at the examining couch where a nine-month-old baby wearing nothing but a clean vest and a nappy lay. She’d brought him in wrapped in her shawl. “Be with you and Jack in a sec, Dympna,” then he turned back to Phelim. “Shouldn’t be more than ten minutes.”

  “I’ll take over from ye then. I’ll be upstairs. Give me a call when ye go.” The door was closed. Fingal got off the stool and as he crossed the floor thought how very decent it was of Phelim to agree to work from noon until tomorrow morning so Charlie and Fingal could play rugby together.

  “Sorry about that,” he said as he stopped at the couch and gave Dympna Dempsey a smile. “Let’s start at the beginning about young Jack here? I don’t suppose you’re any relation to—”

  “We are, sir. Jack Dempsey the boxer is me oul’ one Casey’s dad’s second cousin.” Dympna was a strong-featured woman who had obviously washed and brushed her long glossy chestnut hair before putting it up in a bun. She was wearing what was probably her best blouse and long skirt for the visit. She smiled. “We never seen him, mind you. The family moved to America. But do you remember him, sir? They called him the ‘Manassa Mauler.’ He was world heavyweight champion from 1919 ’til 1926.”

  “You’re related to Jack Dempsey? He was my hero when I started to box. Took the title from Jess Willard in 1919. Lost it to Gene Tunney.”

  “If you don’t mind my asking, sir, is that why your nose is a bit out of kilter?”

  “Guilty as charged.” O’Reilly guffawed and his laughter made baby Jack start mewling. She picked him up and rocked him, crooning, “Wheest, wheest, wee one.”

  “Sorry, Jack,” said O’Reilly. “And what seems to be the trouble with young Jack?”

  “Well, sir, he’s been getting awful gurny lately.”

  As if to confirm her statement, baby Jack’s little noises moved up in volume to hoarse crying interrupted by sniffs and an occasional yell.

  “Probably just teething,” Fingal said, hoping he was going to be able to reassure the young mother.

  She frowned. “He’s nine months and my granny says he should have his front ones by now.” She held him to Fingal. Jack screeched and as Fingal peered into the open mouth, Dympna said, “See? Toothless as a feckin’ oyster.”

  Fingal frowned. By nine months the lower central incisors and the upper central and upper lateral incisors and even the lower lateral incisors should have, in correct medical terminology, erupted.

  “And I could wash his nappies in the sweat coming off his poor wee head.”

  That wasn’t simple teething. Jack’s mother had lost a tooth, often a sign of poor diet. “Where do you live?”

  “Back Lane off High Street,” she said.

  Probably subsisted on the usual appalling diet, and hardly ever saw the sun. A diagnostic idea was beginning to germinate, and her address had made him wonder about something else. As Fingal began to examine the baby’s head, he said, “Do you by any chance know a fellah called John-Joe Finnegan?”

  “The cooper? Got hit by a tram? Him and my Casey both have plots at Dolphin’s Barn for growing spuds and a few veggies…”

  At least, Fingal thought, they’d be getting iron from the greens.

  “Casey looked after John-Joe’s plot while he was in Sir Patrick Dun’s.”

  “I saw him in hospital about a month ago. John-Joe told me someone was taking care of his allotment. That was your husband? Small world,” Fingal said as his fingers noted how hot and sweaty the baby’s scalp was. He gently pressed against the parietal bones situated in front of and above the ear. Fingal felt them sink and when he suddenly let go, he noticed how they snapped back into place as a ping-pong ball might if he’d handled it in the same way. That was called craniotabes and happened because the bones were unduly soft. If he was right about the diagnosis he was refining, craniotabes usually appeared in the eighth or ninth month of life of those afflicted. One or two more signs and he’d be sure. “Could you take off his vest, Dympna?”

  She did, to the accompaniment of much crying.

  “When did he start to sit up?”

  “Couple of months ago.” She frowned. “But he doesn’t crawl about much.”

  Babies should sit at six months, be crawling by nine, but if their back became sore from sitting, they’d find the most comfortable position and not budge. Another clue. Fingal inspected the ribs, easily visible under the pale skin of the skinny chest. Everyone from the tenements was pallid from lack of sunshine. It wasn’t diagnostic, but the paleness was another hint. A series of rounded bumps ran in an arc from below each nipple to near the tip of the tenth rib halfway to the child’s back. He was looking at a rachitic rosary, knobs caused by a fault in the way new bone was laid down. He’d first seen a picture of it in a most useful little textbook, Hutchinson’s Clinical Methods, originally published in 1897. Treatments might have changed since then and more diseases could be recognised, but the signs and symptoms of many, and how to elicit and recognise them, were still useful today. “Get him dressed, Dympna, and come and sit down while I give you a note and a scrip’. I’ll tell you what’s wrong in a sec. And don’t worry.” He crossed the floor, climbed up onto the high stool, and started writing. With a bit of luck, Mister Corcoran, the apothecary, who usually worked until noon every Saturday, would still be in his room.

  Dympna, with an unhappy Jack wrapped in the fold of her shawl, sat and looked at Fingal expectantly.

  “I’m glad you brought him in when you did, Dympna—”

  “Is it bad?” Her eyes were wide, her voice high-pitched. She snuggled Jack to her.

  “Not yet.”

  “It’s not—it’s not…” She glanced around and lowered her voice to a bare whisper. “It’s not consumption?”

  “Certainly not.”

  “Thank the Lord Jasus.” She crossed herself.

  Tuberculosis was rampant and so feared in the tenements that even its name was only uttered in a whisper, and women would swear blind that their husbands were in “The Joy,” the Mountjoy Gaol, rather than admit he was in the Pigeon House sanitarium at Ringsend, staffed by nuns and often the last stop for what were described as “terminal sufferers.”

  “He’s got rickets, and you’ve caught it early before it gets any worse.”

  “Rickets? It gives people melodeon legs and funny-shaped heads, doesn’t it?”

  “It does,” Fingal said, knowing that when fully opened, the bottom of the bellows of a button accordion, a melodeon, was markedly curved, making it an apt description of bowed legs. “And sometimes they get what we call kyphoscoliosis, but that’s a fancy name for a hunched back.”

  “Like your man Quasimodo in that there film about the one in Notre Dame in Paris? I seen it at the Carlton Cinema on O’Connell Street, but it’s gettin’ knocked down and a new one built.” She looked down at a now-sleeping Jack and dropped a light kiss on his forehead. “What can I do, Doctor?” She smiled. “Mrs. Costello, she lives across our street, boils the backbones of skate fish and uses the water to rub on her kiddies’ legs to keep them straight.”

  “I think we can do better than that,” Fingal said, knowing that that home cure was utterly useless, but recognising that it didn’t help to criticise. ??
?Rickets,” he said, “is caused because the bones need calcium. We get most of that from dairy products.”

  “Milk and cheese?” Her lip curled. “About as plentiful as feathers on a feckin’ frog where I live.”

  “I know,” O’Reilly said, “and we need vitamin D to help us absorb the calcium. The sun helps us make the stuff in our bodies.”

  “Sun? In the Coombe? The houses is so close together you’d get more feckin’ light down a coal mine.”

  He sighed. “I know that too. And I’m sure you’ll not be eating salmon and trout much either, nor egg yolks, and they all have lots of calcium too.”

  “Salmon’s for the toffs who can afford to catch dem or spend a week’s wages for the likes of me at the fishmongers.”

  He thought guiltily of the poached salmon sandwiches he’d left uneaten the day Doctor Davidson had operated on the now fully recovered Jane Carson.

  “We do eat fish on feckin’ Fridays, the church says we have til, but it’s mostly herrin’s or salt cod.”

  Neither provided the necessary nutrient. “Ah, but,” he said, “there’s more ways of killing a cat than drowning it in cream.” He handed her a prescription, a form, and a letter. “That’s for cod liver oil. It’s stuffed with vitamin D and has vitamin A too. All you need to do is give wee Jack three teaspoonfuls every day. And I’ve put some calcium tablets there too, and if you could manage to buy some condensed milk? Not all Jack’s bony changes that have already begun will go away, but it will prevent any more happening.”

  “Wonderful, sir. And we could stretch to a few cans of Carnation every month.” She smiled. “Do you know the poem about Carnation, Doctor?”

  “No.”

  “Carnation Milk is the best in the land,” she started in a singsong voice,