A Dublin Student Doctor (22 page)

“You’re a soft-hearted man, Fingal O’Reilly, for all your bluff and your acting the lig with your friends,” Hilda said. “Us girls heard about the skeleton in her undies last year and who dressed her. The fearsome four.”

“Och, that was just a bit of fun. We all took life lightly,” said Fingal. “It’s getting serious now. Maybe I was soft when I started, but doing all the things to people we’ve had to since we came to the hospital, I think it’s built in as part of the training. Not just learning the techniques, but having to do them over and over. You learn, but it hardens you too. I think it’s meant to.”

She gave him a knowing look. “I’m not convinced it’s working with you, Fingal O’Reilly. Now hang on,” she said. “Your gloves are bloody. Let me open the door.”

Fingal went in, crossed to the sink, stripped off his gloves, and washed his hands. He knew there was truth to what he’d said, but Hilda was right too and he hoped, no, he resolved that he would not let himself become too hard. Ever.

“We should send for the Catholic chaplain,” Geoff said.

Fingal rounded on the houseman. “For the last rites? Extreme unction? You’ve given up, haven’t you? Damn it, I haven’t. Not yet.”

Geoff shrugged, but said, “I don’t think KD’s going to make it and he is a Catholic. It is the proper thing to do.”

Fingal lowered his head. “You’re right,” he said. “Of course you are.” He dried his hands and turned only to see the staff nurse standing there, the glint of tears in her eyes.

“Come quick,” she said. “I think he’s got ventricular fibrillation.”

“Christ.” Irregular contractions of the ventricles would stop the heart. Fingal barged through the door and pounded down the ward, pursued by Geoff and Hilda. He tore one of the screens from its rail as he ripped it back. The oxygen tent was open.

Kevin lay limply, tilted to one side on his pillow. His jaw hung open, there was no rise and fall of his chest, and his eyes stared. To Fingal they looked exactly as had those long-ago shark’s eyes.

He grabbed for Kevin’s wrist. The skin was clammy. There was no movement in the radial artery at the base of the thumb. Fingal lowered his head and put it immediately in front of Kevin’s mouth, but there was no gentle current of air moving back and forth.

Fingal stood. “I think he’s gone.” He felt the lump in his throat, but swallowed it. Damn. Damn. “Can we try the Silvester or Holger-Neilson methods of artificial respiration? I learnt them in the navy.” He knew how high-pitched his voice must sound.

Geoff shook his head. “They’re for drowning victims. If the heart has stopped nothing can restart it.” He shone a pencil torch into each of Kevin’s eyes in turn. “No reaction,” he said. He put his stethoscope on the patient’s chest, listened, and shook his head. “Too late for the priest now,” he said. “This’ll have to do even if I don’t have oil sanctified by the bishop and I’m neither Catholic nor ordained, but I’ve seen it often enough.” He made the sign of the cross over Kevin Doherty’s forehead and intoned slowly, “To this through his most tender mercy may the Lord pardon thee whatever sins thou hast committed.
Ego te absolvo.
”

And Fingal O’Reilly, his hands trembling, his own heart bruised, said, “Amen.
Requiescat in pace,
Kevin Doherty.” He leant over and closed Kevin’s eyelids. “Thank you, Doctor Pilkington,” Fingal said. “I’ll remember those words. At least we can tell the family he didn’t die unshriven, even if it’s not entirely true. It’ll comfort them. And I may need to do it myself in the future.”

Geoff Pilkington put a hand on Fingal’s arm. “I know you’re upset,” he said, “but if you can think of the relatives and your future patients, you’re going to be all right, Fingal O’Reilly.”

Fingal himself was not so sure. All the training seemed pointless. By the time he was finished he would have spent five years learning masses of facts, trying to believe he was a learnèd man, but for what reason? Patients still died all the time. Yes, perhaps it was better that he understood the mechanism of the sickness that had killed Kevin Doherty. His forebears, from the Greeks right up to the doctors of the eighteenth century, would have attributed the condition to an incorrect balance of the four “bodily humours.” His immediate seniors had given up leeching, cupping, and bleeding, so less harm was inflicted in the name of healing. But at the heels of the hunt, Kevin Doherty had died because medicine had virtually no truly effective cures. Arsenic and mercury for syphilis? It was little better than witchcraft.

“I hope you’re right, Geoff,” Fingal said, “I really do,” and wondered if Father could be right? Could a career in basic medical research benefit thousands? Was wanting to see the effects of your efforts in a small community and reap the satisfaction as your reward a high form of selfishness?

Fingal O’Reilly left Saint Patrick’s Ward and stumbled past the Grand Staircase, out into the daylight. He paused, took in lungsful of fresh air, barely noticing clouds scudding across the sky, raindrops on his cheeks. He looked into his heart and asked, “Are you really cut out for treating patients, Fingal O’Reilly? Are you?”

20

The Feathered Race with Pinions Skims the Air

“Excuse me, Sister Daly?” Fingal hoped she’d be sympathetic. “Would it be possible for me to make an outside phone call?” He knew personal calls were forbidden, but this once Fingal needed someone. He wasn’t going to be able to cope alone.

She looked up. “Who to, bye?”

That informal “bye” was promising. Sister usually called him “Mister.” “My brother in the North.”

She smiled. “I’ll not ask what about, but if you don’t tell, I won’t.” She nodded at the receiver. “Lift the phone and ask the exchange to put you through.” She winked. “Whatever your brother works at, call him ‘Doctor.’ That way it sounds like business. One medical man to another.”

Fingal lifted the receiver, identified himself to the operator, and gave Doctor Lars O’Reilly’s number, “Portaferry, 57.”

Fingal heard Annie, one of the operators, say, “I’ve a call for yiz from Mister O’Reilly in Dublin. Would yiz two be related, sir, seeing youse is an O’Reilly too?”

Pause.

“Dere’s a t’ing now. A doctor and a goin’-to-be doctor in one family. Lord be praised.”

Fingal surmised that Lars had understood and had gone along with the deception.

Despite his sadness over Kevin Doherty, Fingal couldn’t help smile. Was there a more inquisitive breed than telephonists?

“Here yiz are, Mister O’Reilly, sir.”

“Thank you, Annie,” Fingal said. “Lars?”

“Fingal? What’s the ‘Doctor’ Lars business about?”

“Sister’s letting me use the ward phone—”

“I understand.”

Lars wouldn’t want to waste time on explanations. Calls were charged by the minute and Fingal was being granted a privilege. “I’ve a bit of bother.” Fingal hesitated, but if he couldn’t tell Lars, who could he confide in? Not his friends, who knew he’d been warned about getting involved with patients. Not Ma. He was far too old to run to Mummy with a grazed knee, and not Father. Certainly not Father. Kitty? She’d understand, but he couldn’t see her until Saturday night. Lars was different. Lars would listen. “We lost a patient yesterday. One I’d grown fond of. It has me a lot more rattled than I expected. I didn’t sleep much last night. I’d like your advice. I’d like to come up to Portaferry.”

“Right now? I’ll drive down and get you, Finn.”

“Not tonight, Lars. I appreciate it. I can manage until Friday, but thanks for being worried.”

“You’re sure you’re all right?”

“Not altogether, but I will manage. I’ll be in Belfast at three off the last Dublin train. We can have a good blether, shoot the dawn flight at the stream at Lisbane on Saturday, and then if you don’t mind running me up to Belfast, the train’s at twelve and gets in here at four so I’ll be back in time to—” He glanced at Sister Daly, who was studiously minding her own business. “—go out on Saturday night, and be on duty on Sunday.”

“I’ll be there.”

In more ways than one, Fingal thought, and blessed his brother. “Friday it is, and thanks, Lars.” He put the phone down. “I hope I wasn’t on too long.”

“Och, sure there’s times we all need family, Mister O’Reilly,” Sister said. “Dun’s finances can stand one phone call to the North.”

*   *   *

Lars was waiting at Central Station and drove Fingal the thirty miles from Belfast to Portaferry. Fingal didn’t want to talk about his troubles until they were at Lars’s home. Instead as the car swung onto the Newtownards Road he said, “I hesitate to ask, but it’s been a couple of months since Christmas. Have you heard anything at all from Jean Neely?”

Fingal heard how flat his brother’s voice sounded. “No. It’s over, Finn. I try not to think about it too much.”

Fingal wasn’t sure how he’d feel if Kitty were to say good-bye. Deeply hurt certainly, but he hadn’t got to the stage of proposing. Not like his brother. “I imagine it still stings. You must miss her,” Fingal said.

“I do, Finn.” Lars swung into a tight bend. “Very much. I only went out with a few girls when I was a student and you were away.” He grinned. “Five years at an all-boys’ boarding school may get you through puberty, but it hardly prepares you for encounters with the opposite sex.”

“True,” Fingal said. It had taken his seagoing years and lessons in the school of life to let him become more comfortable with women.

“Most of the girls in Portaferry are farmers’ daughters, fishermen’s lassies, shop assistants. Nice girls, but Fingal, we’ve nothing in common, nothing to talk about, and you’ve no idea how tongues wag in such a wee place, particularly as the single women have only one goal. Marriage. I wasn’t sure I was ready for domesticity until I met Jean. I knew from the first night she was different. She was so easy to talk to. She made me laugh.”

Hadn’t he felt that way about Kitty since their first date? She was certainly easy to talk to and they did laugh a lot. Like the way Lars described Jean, but he wasn’t opening up completely. And that was his privilege. But Fingal knew that if his brother had proposed marriage, his feelings for Jean went beyond fun and laughter. Far beyond.

“Jean was worth driving down to see as often as I could. I felt I’d known her all my life. And, Finn—” Lars’s voice dropped to a whisper. “She was wonderful to hold. To kiss. I wanted a lot more.” Fingal saw his brother’s face in profile and his cheeks were red.

“I know what you mean.” Fingal thought of the walk back from the fish-and-chip shop after he’d taken Kitty to Neary’s, her body warm in his arms at the New Year’s Eve Ball.

“And you know that means marriage.”

“I do.” It was what had been drummed into young men. No intimate relations out of wedlock. The horrors of venereal disease, he thought of the case of incurable syphilis, the utter disgrace of getting a girl pregnant. Ah, but the girl in Bali in 1928 and the one in Penang in ’29. Somerset Maugham had been right in his portraits of the East.

“It’s not to be,” Lars said. “And don’t tell me there are more fish in the sea.”

“I won’t.” But there are, Fingal thought, and wondered again if his brother, twenty-nine years old now, was on the road to bachelorhood.

They lapsed into silence for the rest of the journey.

“I’ll help you with that,” Lars said once he’d parked at his shoreside home, a grey, pebbledashed, two-storey pile overlooking Strangford Lough and the demesne of the eighteenth-century stately home Castle Ward on the far shore. He picked up Fingal’s suitcase. “You bring your gun.”

They left the baggage in the hall and went into the lounge. Fingal sat back in an armchair and stared across the lough’s narrow mouth to the ferry dock in Strangford town on the other shore. He looked beyond to where the Mourne Mountains, dusk dark against a robin’s egg–blue sky, stood as ramparts against the salty waters of the Irish Sea.

“Here.” Lars handed Fingal a Jameson. “We’ll have to manage on our own for the next couple of days. I’ve given Myrtle, my housekeeper, a few days off.”

“Sláinte.”
Fingal watched phalaropes, long-billed, dun-coloured birds, dancing on stiltlike legs over wrack caught in a tide rip. Eddies and whirlpools formed and spun away only to form again. “The Narrows certainly boil when the tide’s running,” he said, and looked straight at Lars sitting in an armchair opposite. “I’ve been in a bit of turmoil myself, Lars.” Fingal pursed his lips, frowned. “I didn’t think losing a man called Kevin Doherty would get to me.” Through the window he could see that the evening was closing in. Fingal looked down into his whiskey, back to Lars. “I didn’t think it was going to hit me as sorely, but I can’t stop thinking about him.”

“It’s your first?” Lars asked.

“Yes, he was.” Fingal refused to think of Kevin Doherty as “it.” “Other patients have died since we started, but he was the first one I’d got to know. He was a young man, your age. He should have had his life ahead of him. It’s so bloody unfair.”

Lars nodded. “And you’re feeling John Donne-ish, ‘No man is an island’?”

Fingal forced a smile. “I remember Father reading that to us, his tone when he said, ‘Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind. And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.’” He shook his head. “Donne had a point.”

“Finn, I’m sure you’ve been told this, but not all patients get better.”

“The first time Kevin was admitted, we nearly lost him.” Fingal sipped his drink. “Geoff Pilkington, the house physician, tried to warn me then. He said, ‘Don’t take it personally if he goes. We can’t save them all so don’t let yourself get involved.’”

“Do you think that was good advice?”

“It’s perfectly sound. You can’t help notice how experienced specialists have become remote from their cases. I told another student, a woman called Hilda, that I thought there was an unwritten agenda to make us do procedures on folks, over and over, until we become inured, toughened. I used to shake before I took a blood sample. Now?” Fingal shrugged. “Wee buns.”

“Perhaps there’s a point to professional distance. My barrister colleagues say they have to keep at arm’s length from their clients so if a case is lost in court there’s no need to take it personally.”