An Irish Doctor in Peace and at War (2 page)

O'Reilly cut her off too. He wanted no more petrol poured on the flames. “Whoa,” he said, “whoa, calm down and pay attention, the lot of you.” It wouldn't hurt to throw his weight around just a little bit at the beginning. Take control. “Now listen. I think I know Kinky Kincaid better than anyone in the village and townland. Wouldn't you all agree?”

Subdued murmuring of assent.

“Good. And just so we're all clear, can we agree again that we love Kinky?”

Flo scowled at Maggie, who scowled right back.

“Ladies?” O'Reilly put an edge of steel in his voice. “Are we all agreed?”

“I am,” Cissie Sloan said. “I mind the day she first come til the village, so I do. No harm til you, Doctor dear, but it was way before your time, sir. It was a Wednesday—no, I tell a lie it was a Friday, and she—”

First defection on Flo's side, O'Reilly thought, but let's not have Cissie ramble on too much.

“Houl your wheest, Cissie Sloan,” Jeannie Jingles said, but with a smile. “We all remember her coming and it doesn't matter a jot or tittle exactly when. What Doctor O'Reilly says is true. There's not a woman in the whole townland more widely respected.”

A breakaway from solidarity with Maggie. “And what,” said O'Reilly, “if the respected Kinky was a fly on the wall here today. What do you reckon she'd be thinking about all these silly selfish schoolgirl shenanigans?”

He waited, quite prepared to re-ask the question, but Cissie had started the rent in the fabric of Flo's group.

“I think,” said Aggie Arbuthnot, tearing it further, “she'd be sad to see her friends falling out over nothing, and,” her voice cracked, “I'd not want for Kinky to be unhappy about nothing on her wedding day.” She sighed. “It would be a right shame if she was, so it would.”

“You're dead on, Aggie.” Jeannie Jingles spoke for the opposition. “You just said a mouthful.” She smiled.

“I'll give you my twopenny's worth,” said Alice Moloney. “I don't agree, and please let's not anybody get upset about that, but Kinky's a very sensible woman. I don't think she'd be sad at all. I think she'd be laughing like a drain at the lot of us going at it like a bull in a china shop—and all because we want the very best for her. We're all daft.” She turned to O'Reilly. “We're like a bunch of kiddies. Thank you, Doctor, for helping us to see that.”

O'Reilly inclined his head.

“Buck eejits,” said Maggie very quietly, “the whole lot of us, and I'm sorry to have been so thran, so I am.”

A lovely Ulster word for “bloody-minded,” O'Reilly thought.

Mister Robinson, who for the duration of the recent discussion had wisely, O'Reilly thought, until now distanced himself from taking part, said, “‘Blessèd are the peacemakers,' Matthew five and nine.”

“May I make a suggestion?” O'Reilly said.

Maggie and Flo's “Please do, sir” was as one.

“Kinky's a country girl from County Cork. She's loved wildflowers all her life. I'm sure she'd be delighted to have them at her wedding.” From the tail of his eye he saw Maggie's grin start, so quickly added, “But Flo has a point too. I remember well the night Archie asked me for Kinky's hand and the beautiful red roses he brought with the ring that evening. I think they'd add a really romantic touch.” Flo's smile kept Maggie's company. He waited.

“So why,” said Maggie, “don't we do both? If that's all right with you, Flo?”

“Aye,” said Flo, “it is, Maggie, dear. We should have thought of that before, so we should.” She turned to Mister Robinson. “I'm sorry about all the fuss over nothing, sir.”

“It's perfectly all right, now you've kissed and made up,” he said.

“And,” said Maggie, “once we're done, I think the six of us and,” she hesitated then said, “Mister Robinson and Doctor O'Reilly if they'd like, should all go home to my house for a wee cup of tea in our hands and,” her toothless grin was enormous, “none of youse'll go hungry. I just baked two plum cakes today, so I did.”

“That would be lovely,” Flo said, “wouldn't it, ladies?”

The other four women nodded in agreement.

O'Reilly caught the minister's eye. He'd seen the same glazed look on the face of a rabbit cornered by a fox. Clearly Mister Robinson had experienced Maggie's stewed tea and cement-like fruitcake before and was searching desperately for an excuse so he could decline. O'Reilly himself had no such hesitation. “I'd love to come, Maggie. I haven't seen your cat, General Sir Bernard Law Montgomery, nor Sonny's dogs for ages, but you'll understand a doctor's day is not his own?” She and the others would at least think they did, and any doctor could claim being needed by the calls of his profession. “But nothing, not a team of wild horses, will keep me from the wedding tomorrow.”

2

If You Have Tears, Prepare to Shed Them Now

Fingal O'Reilly patted the pocket of his sports jacket for the dozenth time that day. The little velvet-covered, dome-lidded box was still there. He looked over at the petite, fair-haired woman beside him. He and Deirdre Mawhinney had been keeping company for two years, since the summer of 1937 when he'd been working as a trainee obstetrician in Dublin's Rotunda Maternity Hospital and she'd been a student midwife.

He reached out his hand, she clasped it, and together they strolled toward the seafront along the winding mossy path of Strickland's Glen, the secluded little valley that lay off the road between the seaside towns of Bangor and Ballybucklebo. He was planning to produce the box at just the right moment today, but when was that right moment going to be?

He'd never thought he'd get over his first love, Kitty O'Hallorhan, but as the months had passed, Deirdre, the lively twenty-two-year-old from Clough Mills, County Antrim, had surprised him. And so had the depth of his feelings for her.

She continued to surprise him and it was one of the things he loved about her. He'd collected her this morning from the nurses' home of the Ulster Hospital in Belfast's Mount Pottinger Road. His secondhand 1928 Hillman 14 had rattled and banged, but it had got them safely to the Crawfordsburn Inn for a lunch of roast beef and Yorkshire pudding followed by sherry trifle. The chilled bottle of white Burgundy that Fingal hoped might give him the extra bit of Dutch courage had put them in a relaxed mood after a hectic week. He knew he was going to need it once he'd got her to a secluded, romantic spot.

He skipped for a couple of steps and heard her contralto chuckle. He inhaled the almond perfume of whins mixed with the piney smells of the Douglas firs that towered overhead. It was Saturday, the first of July, and gloriously warm, so hot he would have taken off his sports jacket if he'd been inclined to free his hand from Deirdre's firm grasp. But he wasn't.

“It was a lovely lunch, Fingal, thank you,” she said, “and it's a beautiful afternoon. Look at the way the sunbeams are coming through the trees.”

Deirdre's ability to take a childlike pleasure in the simplest things, sometimes even clapping her hands with unrestrained joy at a new song, or a scene she'd never seen before, delighted O'Reilly.

“Aren't they—aren't they—like fairies' lights?” she said, gazing up.

If there were such things as fairies, the Little People, he could not imagine a more perfect home than Strickland's Glen. By God, but he was happy to be here. Happy to be walking this ivy-tangled lane with this woman. Happy to be working in Ballybucklebo. And overjoyed that now Deirdre was a qualified midwife she'd left the Rotunda and taken a post in Belfast in April this year to be near him. Political changes in Southern Ireland had made his prospects in Dublin bleak, and he'd had to come north last year. He loved her very much and, hard as it was for him to believe, she loved him.

He glanced up to follow her gaze. Rays of bright light danced as a light breeze sent the branches swaying and trembling. He was close to trembling himself as he looked round. Nobody. They had just come round a sharp corner and the path turned left round laurels about twenty yards ahead. This was the perfect place, a private dell sheltered by the laurels. Now, he told himself, get on with it, you eejit. She won't say no. Dear God, don't let her say no. He stopped, forcing her to do so too. He looked down into a pair of smiling blue eyes separated by a tip-tilted snub nose. Her eyes were wide and inquiring under the fringe of her fashionable hairdo, its fair back and sides in reverse rolls tucked into diamond-mesh netting studded with tiny jet beads.

“Deirdre,” he said, “I want to ask you—”

“Come back here.” A man wearing dungarees and a duncher was racing after a young Irish terrier. Now, where the hell had they come from? Fingal's grip on the box slackened and it fell into the bottom of the pocket. The tan puppy had the square muzzle, beetling eyebrows, and goatee beard of its breed and was in sore want of training. It bounded over to Fingal and put two outsized paws up on his clean flannels.

“Get down, you buck eejit,” the stranger said, tugging at the beast's collar. He touched the peak of his duncher. “Sorry about that, sir. He's only young, so he is. He just run off, like.”

Fingal forced a smile. “Don't worry about it.” Bloody dog. The moment was ruined. He started walking, all the while groping for the little box in his pocket.

Deirdre, soft-hearted as ever, bent and patted the puppy's head, and it waggled its stiff tail so hard its backside swung from side to side. She looked up at the owner. “What's his name?”

O'Reilly, who had stopped, immediately thought, Who gives a damn, but seeing Deirdre's gentle enthusiasm he could only smile.

“O'Reilly,” the man said solemnly.

The dog wagged even more ferociously at hearing his name.

O'
what
? Fingal thought. It can't be.

Deirdre's laughter tinkled through the glen and she clapped her hands. Then, controlling her features, she said, “That's a lovely name.”

“Thank you, miss.” The man touched his cap's peak. “Come on, O'Reilly.” Together they left, the terrier frisking and frolicking.

Deirdre trotted over to O'Reilly, chuckled, took his hand, and said, “Come on, O'Reilly,” and immediately burst into peals of laughter.

And although O'Reilly could not control his own mirth, inside he hated to have lost the moment.

Deirdre seemed to have got her giggles under control. “What was it you wanted to ask me, Fingal?” she said, cocking her head, still smiling.

He couldn't ask now. Not now, with the man and his pup still in view and two blasted schoolboys, Bangor Grammar lads judging by their yellow-and-royal-blue-ringed school caps, charging up the path. One chased the other, pointing his right hand with the thumb cocked up and the first two fingers extended and yelling, “Dar, dar. Got ye. You're dead, Al Capone, so you are.”

“I saw it in the paper,” said Fingal to cover his confusion. “About Al Capone. D-did you know that he's going to be released from Alcatraz in a few months?”

“You, missed me, G-man,” shouted the other boy. “You can't shoot for toffee.” He stopped, held both arms as if firing a Tommy gun, made a rat-tat-tatting noise, then ran on.

“No,” she said, rolling her eyes at the boy and laughing. “I didn't. And what's that got to do with the price of corn anyway?”

“Nothing,” he said, and now that the hound of the Baskervilles and public enemy number one were round the far corner and no one else was in sight he quickly kissed her and said, “I love you, Deirdre. I really do.”

“And I love you too, Fingal Flahertie O'Reilly, you great, shy, tongue-tied bear. I know what you were going to say.” She pursed her lips, cocked her head to one side again and, raising one eyebrow, stretched up and kissed him hard. Then she hitched up her grey mid-calf-length skirt and, looking down at her shoes, said, “I've got my walking shoes on today, Fingal, so if you can't beat me to the shore, I'll tell you what it was.” She took off like a fawn.

Fingal chased her. He might not be able to catch her—after all, she'd played hockey for Ulster, and he knew she was fleet of foot.

Two girls … both beautiful, one a gazelle.

You got that right, Willy Butler Yeats, Fingal thought, as his brown boots pounded on the springy moss underfoot. He grinned. At fourteen stone he was more like—he struggled for an analogy—more like a Canadian moose, built for endurance, not for speed. Beside him, the stream that since the last ice age had receded and gradually eroded the valley gurgled and chuckled. They ran out from under the trees, Deirdre ahead of him, and crossed the short stretch of coarse marram grass hillocks that lay between the glen and the shingly shore. Deirdre stood grinning, her skirt already returned to its proper length. She was patting her hair back into place and her breathing was slow and regular, but there was an attractive flush on her cheeks.

Behind her, yachts made valiant endeavours to race across the waters of Belfast Lough on what was probably the only day of the year when they were so smooth they could reflect in mirror image the hulls and flapping snowy sails. On the far shore, even the usually brooding Carrickfergus Castle seemed to be a lighter shade of grey and much less menacing, and above the blue of the Antrim Hills melded gently as their colours softened into the cerulean of the sky.

“All right,” he said. “You win.” For a moment the place was deserted, so he picked her up and kissed her before setting her back on her feet.

“I love you, Fingal,” she said, “and I know you were going to—”

He laid a finger across her warm lips, fished out the little box, and flipped open the lid to reveal a simple gold band with a small solitaire diamond. “Deirdre, I love you. I always will.” He still couldn't quite come to the point and instead said, “You know old Doctor Flanagan's offered me a partnership?”