A Dublin Student Doctor (23 page)

Fingal sipped. “I don’t want to get hardened, but I don’t want to get so worked up either,” he said. “I know, I absolutely know everything possible was done. There’s no reason to blame myself.” Fingal had no trouble picturing the pointed scalpel cutting into Kevin’s swollen, waterlogged legs. He stood and paced across the room. “Maybe I was wrong not talking to my friends? Telling them my troubles.”

“You’d have found that difficult, Finn,” Lars said quietly.

Fingal turned to Lars and frowned.

“I’m no Sigmund Freud, no Carl Jung,” Lars said, “but you and I have the same father. Stiff upper lip and all that. Never tell a lie. Big boys don’t cry. Keep your troubles to yourself. We went to the same public boarding school. The ethos there was straight from
Tom Brown’s Schooldays
or
Stalky and Co.
Don’t tell tales, play up and play the game. Remember Kipling’s poem ‘If’? ‘If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs … And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise.’ And most of all never wear your heart on your sleeve and always keep your troubles to yourself.” He drank. “Despite all that indoctrination, Finn, you didn’t give in. And you’re still finding it hard to bury your humanity. If you can keep it up, you’ll make a bloody fine doctor. I just think, I
know,
you’re going to have to find a way to care a tiny bit less.”

Fingal held his glass in both hands and hunched forward, head lowered. He was at a loss for words.

“Mebbe,” Lars continued, “mebbe school would have worked, we might have become cold, insulated, and unhurtable, but for Ma. She taught us both to care,” Lars said levelly. “You know that as well as I do. You remember after Christmas dinner how she went to thank Cook personally? How much work she does raising money for charities, all the rallies she goes to to agitate for better housing for the poor? She’s forever doing things like that and giving folks their due. She practised what she preached about how every person mattered. How everyone is entitled to respect and I don’t mean deference or subservience, but treating everyone with common courtesy. She made us learn that.”

Fingal looked at his older brother with a new appreciation. “You’re right. And Ma’s bloody well right, too. People should count.”

Lars nodded. “So what are you going to do about how you feel before the next patient comes along? Start building a carapace or get to know them?”

Fingal swallowed a mouthful of whiskey. “First, I’m going to try to make myself believe, really believe, it wasn’t my fault we lost Kevin.”

“Good idea.”

“I’m not going to stop feeling sorry that he died—”

“It’s trite, brother, but the hurt will fade with time.”

Fingal nodded and inside he prayed it would for Lars too after Jean Neely. Fingal had every intention of marrying, one day. He’d hate to see his brother stay single, wither up. Fingal made a promise to himself. Even if he was laying himself open to more hurt, he was damned if he was going to stop caring, and yesterday’s flirtation with the idea of moving into a research career? It might suit Bob Beresford. Not Fingal. “I thought about giving up clinical medicine once I’d qualified. Going into research.”

“Father would be delighted.”

“I know, and I’d like to please Father, but, Lars—”

“Go on—”

“I’ve always wanted to be a people’s doctor.”

Lars laughed. “You won’t remember, but you told me that the first time I took you shooting. You were thirteen.”

“Honestly?”

Lars nodded and said, “I thought you’d grow out of it, like playing with Meccano sets, reading
The Boy’s Own Paper,
Boy Scouts.”

Fingal laughed. “Once in a while I think I’d still like to build a gantry or a steamboat from perforated metal strips and nuts and bolts, and I can still tie a bowline and a sheepshank. Came in handy at sea.” He finished his whiskey. “I’ve only wavered this once about being a doctor. I’ll not anymore. Thank you, big brother, for helping me see it is what I want.”

Lars smiled.

Fingal glanced out of the window. It was slack water in the Narrows, that moment at the turn of the tide when all turbulence ceases. The surface was glassy, the islands of wrack motionless. The phalaropes rose as one and flew away, a little dun cloud that jinked, turned, and vanished by blending with the gauze of the evening’s soft mist.

*   *   *

“Out,” Lars said. It was pitch-black when he parked in front of a farmhouse where Davy McMaster, an old friend of the O’Reilly brothers, lived, farmed, and operated a small public bar from what had been his living room. Fingal obeyed. He could barely see for a few yards, but he knew that a hundred yards up the road from Portaferry to the Six-Road-Ends, a stream chuckled under the Salt Water Brig, so called because on a rising tide the sea flowed upstream past the brig, the locals’ word for bridge. He inhaled the tang of decaying seaweed and the smell of turf smoke. Davy’s wife was an early riser.

Lars strode through a gate into a churchyard. Fingal tucked his gun into the crook of his arm and followed. He’d tramped through here as a boy when he and his brother had come down from Holywood or travelled together up from Dublin. Before Lars had moved to Portaferry the boys had stayed with Davy when they’d come up from Dublin to shoot. Their love of the lough was something else they shared. Fingal was sure that love had drawn Lars back to Portaferry.

Ma’s brother Hedley had introduced Lars to wildfowling when he was thirteen and he’d done the same for his brother when Fingal was old enough.

They passed three-hundred-year-old headstones and a moss-grown Celtic cross, a dark mass too old now to stand straight so taking support by leaning against the sky. The familiar landmark triggered a memory of Lars’s hand in his the first time they’d come here, and his brother’s voice reassuring him that nothing in the graveyard could hurt them. Fingal smiled. He’d not been so sure then that Lars was right.

His brother’s springer spaniel, Barney, quartered the paths between the graves.

Fingal climbed over a stile in the seawall. Ahead, a grassy stream bank was pitted with brackish pools. Clumps of ben weeds stood like tattered flags, their dried leaves rustling in the breeze. To his right the bank ended and the mud flats began. At full tide the water would flood up to the edges of the bank, and spring tides flowed over the grass.

A splash and hoarse craking ahead told Fingal that Barney had startled a teal from a pool.

Lars stepped off the bank and crossed the mud heading toward the mouth of the stream. The ribbed soles of his waders left water-filled impressions that glittered in the starlight. The shore gave off an earthy aroma, mingling with the air’s salty tang.

They stopped beside a large rock near where the stream flowed on to meet the waters of the ebbing tide. Not long to slack ebb and the dawn. They’d have three hours before the rising waters pushed them off this part of the shore. Fingal leaned his shotgun beside Lars’s weapon propped against the rock. “I’ll give you a hand,” he said, bending to gather armfuls of bladder wrack to construct a low semicircular rampart behind which he, Lars, and Barney would crouch to wait for the morning flight. The weed was cold and numbed his fingers.

The false dawn began to grey the eastern sky and send shy pinks to the belly of a narrow bank of low clouds. Fingal’s breath made vapour jets. Those parts round his eyes and lips that were not covered by a balaclava helmet felt the nip of the southerly breeze.

“That should do,” Lars said, stooping to spread an army surplus gas cape on the muddy floor so they could kneel, but stay dry. The camouflaged material was waterproof and mustard-gas-proof, a relic of the trenches. Fingal hoped others like it would remain unused, but under Adolf Hitler, Germany was rearming and Mussolini’s troops had sailed to be ready for the invasion of Abyssinia.

He moved his gun closer to hand and knelt beside where Lars crouched to the right of the hide. It wouldn’t be long until dawn and the birds began to fly. Getting here and building the hide had kept Fingal’s mind occupied. Now as he waited, his thoughts ranged freely. He’d meant what he’d said about persuading himself he could not have done any more for Kevin. Was he ready to accept that now? He thought so. Face it, Fingal, in truth all any doctor can do is their best.

And considering that, Fingal had to ask himself, what, for all his earnestness to Kitty in Neary’s pub, had he done for Sergeant Paddy Keogh? Bugger all. Perhaps he’d be better taking care of the living patients instead of berating himself over the dead. Fingal had had a notion to put Paddy, if he could read and write, in touch with the builder Willy Duggan. Kevin’s death had driven the idea out of Fingal’s mind. He’d try to remember once he got back to Dublin.

He looked inland over the Ards Peninsula where life was coming to a new day. The band of low cloud was changing from timid pink to screaming yellows and raucous scarlets. Under the cloud and above the hills, the sun’s upper limb, a convex sliver, peeped into the sky as if a sudden noise might make it jerk away. But then, gaining confidence, it swelled, grew, and blazed.

The day lightened. Rocks cast shadows over the glistening mud. Patches of sea wrack changed from charcoal to shiny brown. Dull hills to his left wrapped themselves in clothes of green spangled with yellow gorse flowers.

He knelt, lost in the solitude of dawn on the shore, a time and place where he could find solace, put his worries away, try to see things clearly.

Inland, a cow lowed and the crowing of a rooster nearly made him miss the whickering of pinions. Fingal crouched, swung to face the sound, and slipped off the safety catch.

“You take left,” Lars whispered.

Five mallard tore toward them. Fingal picked a drake, stood, lifted his gun to his shoulder, and covered the bird. The ducks flared, wings beating. Fingal swung, squeezed the trigger of the right barrel, felt the butt slam into his shoulder, and heard a double roar. Lars had fired at the same time. A split second was all that separated the “thumps” as two drakes hit the mud. Fingal smelt the acrid tang of burnt smokeless powder.

“Hi lost, Barney.”

The liver-and-white springer tore across the mud.

“Nice shot, Lars,” Fingal said, “and thanks again.”

“For bringing you here?”

“That’s part of it, but thanks for yesterday evening. For listening.” Fingal stretched out his chilled right hand and was warmed inside by the firmness of his brother’s icy handshake.

By the time the flooding waters nudged the wall of the sea wrack hide and forced them out, Fingal had shot another mallard and Lars had his first mallard and a brace of widgeon. They retraced their steps of the early morning, cased their guns, stripped off their muddy waders, and loaded the ducks in the car’s boot.

“We’ll get you to Belfast in plenty of time for the train. Hop in,” Lars said, putting Barney into the back. Lars cranked the starting handle until the engine fired. He joined Fingal, slowly closed the choke, and put the car in gear.

Fingal sat back in his seat as the car rose and fell over the humpback bridge where the stream flowed on as it must have done from time immemorial and would do long after the O’Reilly boys had put away their shotguns for the last time. They left the little estuary behind and his last view of it was of the pale lough waters drowning the silver mud flats.

“I can see, Lars,” Fingal said, “why this place has such a pull on you. I’d—”

The engine made a ferocious
bang,
followed by a grating screech. Smoke spurted from under the bonnet and the engine rasped and fell silent.

Fingal looked at Lars, who said, “Oops,” and brought the car to a halt.

They got out and Lars opened the bonnet.

Fingal could see where oil was dripping through a crack in the crankcase. Blue buggery. “Your crankcase is banjaxed and there’s probably a big end of one of the piston rods gone,” he said.

“I thought you once told me you didn’t know about engines.”

“I don’t,” Fingal said, “well, not much, but I had to learn a bit at sea. I reckon that’s a garage job. You’ll have to get a tow.”

“There’s a garage with a mechanic in Kircubbin. That’s not too far,” Lars said. “Davy McMaster’ll give me a tow with his tractor, but I don’t know about getting you to Belfast in time for your train.”

21

Too Late, Too Late

“Thanks a lot,” Fingal said as he climbed down from the trap.

“I hope you catch your bus, so I do,” the farmer said, clucked his tongue, and turned the pony into a lane halfway to Kircubbin. It was a start on the road to Belfast. There were still two hours before the twelve o’clock train and Fingal had only twenty miles to cover. No need to panic. Overhead a flock of green plover crying
pee-wit, pee-wit
tumbled across a gunmetal grey sky. Leafless blackthorn hedges flanked the road. Sheep in a nearby field huddled under the far hedge to shelter from a bitter wind blowing in from the lough. He heard rumbling and a lorry stacked with metal milk churns appeared round the bend. Fingal waved to the driver in his open cab.

“Could you give me a lift to Kircubbin?”

“Och, aye. Hop in,” the man said. “We’re no very fast, but we’re steady and I’m going ’til Greyabbey if that’s any good ’til youse. It’s about six miles, so it is.”

“Wonderful,” Fingal said as he climbed aboard.

Half an hour later, chilled to the marrow and having been passed by faster vehicles, Fingal wasn’t so sure it was wonderful, but he arrived in Greyabbey in time to catch a bus for Newtownards, where he waited two hours before boarding the Belfast coach. He’d missed the noon train, but there was time to get the three fifteen.

He’d be late for Kitty, but he’d be there and she’d understand. Since New Year’s Eve when he’d damn nearly told her he loved her, they’d managed four Saturdays out. Neither had talked about deeper feelings, but he knew they were there.

There was time to think about Kitty and any other subject that came to mind. The bloody vehicle had stopped not just at the marked stops, but for passengers who flagged it down along the way. At the Holywood Arches on the outskirts of Belfast, a collision between a motorcar and a tram kept the bus waiting for the police to finish and clear the road. By the time he got to the railway station the Dublin train was long gone and it was the last one until tomorrow.