An Irish Doctor in Peace and at War Read online

  “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?”

  “I do, Fingal,” she said.

  “And you know he’s going to give me a raise next January?”

  “I do, Fingal,” she repeated, quietly.

  “Then, will you marry me?” And bugger the stupid man and his Irish terrier emerging from the glen.

  “I will, Fingal,” she said, levelly. No screams of delight. No simpering. No histrionics. Deirdre Mawhinney wasn’t that kind of girl when it came to serious matters. “Yes, I will, Fingal. Gladly.” She held out her hand. “Please put it on for me.”

  He did, feeling the warmth of her hand and, glory be, it fit.

  He heard her deep indrawing of breath over the susurration of wavelets on the shingle and the piping cries of a small flock of oystercatchers flying along the tide line, skimming the washed-up brown sea wrack that in its dying gave the sea air its salty tang.

  “It’s beautiful,” she whispered. “Thank you, darling.” She kissed the little stone and looked into his eyes. He saw hers sparkle and fill until a single tear, bright as the gem on her finger, trickled down her cheek. “I’m so happy,” she said.

  And Fingal Flahertie O’Reilly, champion boxer, international rugby football player, tough as old boots, looked at this petite soft woman—and felt his own tears start and his heart swell.

  3

  In Holy Wedlock

  No teams of wild horses had appeared and O’Reilly, Kitty, and Barry Laverty sat in the second pew of the bride’s side of the peacefully flower-bedecked little church. Today, Tuesday, the 26th of April, was the occasion of the nuptials of O’Reilly’s housekeeper of twenty years, the long-widowed Mrs. Maureen “Kinky” Kincaid née O’Hanlon, to the widower milkman Mister Archie Auchinleck.

  “I now pronounce you man and wife,” said Mister Robinson, with that lightness of voice common to all clergymen who are coming to the end of a wedding ceremony that has gone off without any calamities. No one had, for example, pulled a stunt like one a month ago. When a local lad had repeated, “With my worldly goods I thee endow,” someone yelled, “There goes his bicycle and that’s all she’s getting, for your man hasn’t a pot to piss in.” The story had gone round the village in record time.

  But today’s ceremony had contained no such outburst. “What God hath joined together let no man put asunder. You may kiss the bride.” Kinky, her silver chignon shining in the sunlight filtering through a window high in the nave, beamed at Archie Auchinleck. He, resplendent in a rented morning suit, his hair shiny with Brilliantine and precisely parted in the centre, bent, lifted the veil from his new bride’s face, and planted a resounding smacker.

  Sergeant Rory Auchinleck, who was best man, had love in his ey
es as he watched his father and Kinky embrace. Archie himself had been a colour sergeant in the same regiment and was so proud of his son’s recent promotion. And Flo Bishop, the matron of honour, wearing a hat large enough to shelter half the wedding party should it come on to rain as they left the church, was grinning broadly and making little subdued clapping motions with her gloved hands. She jigged from foot to foot as if the tiles of the floor were red-hot.

  Although no one would dare interrupt a Presbyterian service with anything as irreverent as cheers or real applause, a subtle murmuring of approval filled the air. It might be a cliché, thought O’Reilly, but the bride did look radiant. The pale green silk of her outfit glowed, her agate eyes sparkled, and her cheek-dimpling smile was vast. O’Reilly today, at Kinky and Archie’s request, had given the bride away and he had had, he thought, almost as much pleasure from doing so as it clearly had given Archie Auchinleck to take Kinky as his lawful wedded wife. O’Reilly stole a glance at Kitty, his own bride of ten months, and was rewarded with a saucy wink. Their marriage had been the keynote event of the year 1965 in Ballybucklebo.

  Mister Robinson was in the middle of preaching what he had promised O’Reilly would be a very short homily. “… And now these three remain: faith, hope, and love. And the greatest of these is love.”

  The greatest of these is love. The words echoed through the old stone church and O’Reilly took Kitty’s hand and looked at her again while she looked back. In her eyes was the love that had begun more than thirty years ago. Bless you, girl. When you came back into my life in 1964 you helped me move on. Until then it had become a complacent round of work and village life and he could still not believe that he, a confirmed widower of twenty years, could once again have found happiness with a woman. He knew that Archie and Kinky had contentment too. He grinned. And now that their ceremony was nearly done, O’Reilly could, like the “ranks of Tuscany” in Macaulay’s epic poem Horatius, “scarce forbear to cheer.” Well done, Kinky Kincaid. More power to your wheel. He knew that the entire congregation shared his sentiments, so important was she in the life of the village.

  He glanced around. The church was ablaze with the harmoniously arranged flowers which the competing groups—after yesterday’s nudge from O’Reilly—had happily arranged. White wood anemones, bluebells in profusion from the bluebell wood near Sonny and Maggie Houston’s home, yellow celandine, pale blue forget-me-nots and violets, and yellow coltsfoot—all the April-blooming wildflowers were Maggie Houston and her group’s contributions. Flo Bishop and her ladies were responsible for the red roses that O’Reilly discovered had been bought from a florist’s in Belfast. There was no such facility in Ballybucklebo.

  A half turn to the left let him survey Kinky’s family members sitting in front. Her two married sisters, Sinead and Fidelma, and their husbands Malachy and Eamon and their tribes, as well as her bachelor brother Tiernan, had all come up from County Cork, a drive of more than three hundred miles. Given the state of the Irish roads, this was no small undertaking. They all had the rosy cheeks of Irish farming families. He overheard Sinead, who Kinky had, in a moment of weakness this past week, admitted could be a touch bossy, whispering to Fidelma. “Your Eamon will do no such thing. It’s Malachy’s turn to—”

  O’Reilly thought it charitable to look away and he missed Sinead’s pronouncement. To the right, Fingal saw Archie’s eighty-seven-year-old mother, who’d come from Greenisland on the other side of Belfast Lough. There was an elder brother, Neill from Liverpool, whom no one in Ballybucklebo had even been aware existed. He was a shorter, older version of Archie and ran a public house, an occupation not necessarily smiled upon by the more devout Ulster Presbyterians.

  In the body of the kirk, the villagers were out in force. Donal and Julie Donnelly and their ten-month-old daughter Victoria Margaret, known as Tori, sat behind O’Reilly. She let go with a roar of “Da-da, mu-mu, ga-ga-ga, ba-ba-ba,” followed by a piercing shriek that echoed from the barrelled vaults above. Julie cuddled her daughter, who subsided into a series of giggles followed by a happy but emphatic, “Goo-goo.” Mister Robinson gave the Donnelly family his “suffer the little children” look and gamely carried on.

  Aggie Arbuthnot was sitting beside Helen Hewitt, who would be taking the second part of her first-year medical school exams in June. And behind them, Sonny Houston sat straight and tall, back as rigid as the monolithic Stone of Destiny in County Meath. Beside him Maggie Houston smiled from under a straw boater with primroses in the hatband. Somehow she’d made the toes of her black Wellington boots shiny for the big day.

  The Browns were here, Lenny and Connie and their son Colin. O’Reilly had heard that Colin had threatened to mitch school if he was not permitted to attend the wedding, and the Browns, easygoing parents that they were, knew well enough that when Colin’s mind was made up even mules looked tractable. The boy kept footering in the pocket of his school blazer. O’Reilly frowned and, looking more closely, saw a pointed nose, whiffling whiskers, and darting black eyes before the head disappeared back under the flap. The child was mad about animals and was always acquiring new pets.

  “Kitty,” he whispered, “I think Colin Brown’s brought a mouse in his pocket.”

  “I hope he keeps the crayture there,” she whispered back, chuckled, then said, “but you never can tell with Colin. I’ll keep my fingers crossed.”

  O’Reilly accepted a friendly nod and smile from Lord John MacNeill, Twenty-seventh Marquis of Ballybucklebo, and smiled back. His lordship and his sister Myrna sat in the third row. It was a singular mark of his regard for Kinky that a peer of the realm would accept an invitation from a housekeeper, but then as O’Reilly well knew, John MacNeill was a perfect gentleman who could “walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch.” Rudyard Kipling would have approved.

  Councillor Bertie Bishop sat near the front as befitted his station both as councillor and as husband of the matron of honour.

  “If you will follow me?” Mister Robinson was heading toward the vestry for the registry signing, pursued by the bride and groom, best man, and the matron of honour.

  Cissie Sloan fired up the ancient harmonium. The sounds of Debussy’s “Clair de Lune” filled the little church, but in a version that owed more to the great Canadian jazz pianist Oscar Peterson than to Vladimir Horowitz. O’Reilly found his foot tapping.

  “Cissie’s getting into her stride, rightly,” O’Reilly’s immediate neighbour announced, sotto voce.

  O’Reilly turned to the speaker, Doctor Barry Laverty, glad of the young man’s company after a six-month absence. “I think Mister Robinson’s got a lot less restrictive about wedding music since he let Kitty walk down the aisle to the theme from The Big Country.”

  “Trust you, Fingal,” Barry said. “You’d liven up a requiem mass if you thought you could get away with it.”

  “I’ve never been enthusiastic about gloom and despondency. I like things to be cheerful.” O’Reilly chuckled. “Pity your Sue couldn’t come to the service.” He thought of the copper-haired young teacher who had, with remarkable ease, filled the void in Barry’s life left by a certain Patricia Spence.

  Kitty leant over. “It’s a school day, silly.”

  “I see that didn’t stop Colin Brown. Then again, he’s not on the payroll,” Barry said with a smile. “But Sue will be at the Crawfordsburn Inn for the reception.”

  “Grand,” said O’Reilly. “And seeing nuptials are in the air, if you don’t mind me asking, you said before Christmas last year you were saving your pennies and hoped to—”

  “Pop the question?” Barry sighed. “I—I’ve been busy. I know that sounds feeble, but it’s true.”

  “It does. Just don’t leave it too long, son,” O’Reilly said, and glanced at Kitty.

  “Fingal’s right, Barry,” she said, a little furrow appearing between her finely shaped eyebrows. “Don’t leave it too long.”

  “I won’t,” Barry said.

  The Debussy stopped and the bridal
party reappeared. The harmonium wheezed in anticipation as Cissie prepared to play the recessional, but then the instrument emitted a series of banshee-like howls and discords. Cissie was standing on her seat yelling, “A mouse. I saw a mouse.”

  O’Reilly looked to where Colin Brown had been sitting. The lad had vanished.

  “It’s all right, Julie.” Donal’s voice rang out as his wife, clutching Tori, leapt up onto the pew.

  “Mice? Where? Where?” A woman’s voice. “That’s desperate. I’m scared skinny of mice, so I am.”

  “If he’s a church mouse he’ll be poor.” Was that Gerry Shanks’s voice?

  A groan. “Away off and feel your head. That one has whiskers, Gerry.”

  “So has that bloody—sorry, Your Reverence—mouse. There he goes.”

  O’Reilly had difficulty keeping a straight face as the rodent’s progress was marked by people squealing and leaping up on pews. Judging by the direction of those standing, the animal was heading straight for the wedding party.

  With the fluid grace of a ballerina reaching for her toes en pointe, Kinky bent and stretched out her arm. When she stood up she cradled a white mouse in her right hand. “The poor wee mite’s all atremble, so.” And he wondered, was it chance that had led it her way or had the little animal somehow known that no one in trouble would ever be turned away by Kinky Kincaid—no, Auchinleck now.

  Kinky said, “Don’t be afeared, a cuishle. Wheest now.”

  “Translation, please, Fingal,” said Barry.