Home Is the Sailor Read online

  He passed elms and sycamores growing in hedgerows. The great gaunt trees were leafless, reaching with bony fingers for a cold blue sky from which an occasional snowflake drifted. Black-faced ewes heavy with winter fleeces huddled in the corners of little fields bordered in drystone walls or blackthorn hedges while the lambs, seemingly oblivious to the cold, ran and bounced, full of the joys of spring. Lord, even if real spring was still some weeks away it was good to be back home in Ulster. There had been times in the last six years when it had seemed to him that, like the crew of the Flying Dutchman, he and his shipmates were doomed eternally to sail their great gallant ship through endless growling seas. But he was home. At last. He roared out,

  And it’s home boys home, home I’d like to be

  Home for a while in the old counteree

  Where the oak and the ash and the bonny rowan tree

  Are all growin’ greener in the old counteree.

  And in all of Ireland, his own old counteree, here on the shores of Strangford Lough, was the place he loved the best.

  Overhead a skein of metallically honking Greylag geese drifted down a gentle wind heading for the islands of the lough that lay to his right. The peace washed round him and if he did hear gunfire, it would only be the report of a wildfowler’s shotgun. A far cry from the islands of the Mediterranean Sea where he’d spent tumultuous parts of 1940, ’41, and ’43, or those of Puget Sound in Washington State where his old ship had gone because a German bomb had blown a great hole in her during the Battle of Crete. After being patched up as best the dockyard could in Alexandria Harbour she had passed through the Suez Canal for her long trip for extensive repairs and modifications in Bremerton Navy Yard and replacement of her worn-out main armament.

  O’Reilly had mixed memories, some sad, some grateful, of Bremerton and the kindness of the Americans.

  He sighed. He’d needed kindness, wounded as he’d been, still was, by the death of his wife, Deirdre, in the Belfast Blitz in April 1941. He must try to put it all behind him. Start a new life back here in Ulster. But it hurt. It hurt sore.

  “Damnation.” He stamped on the brake pedal. A rusty Massey Ferguson tractor was trundling toward him coming the other way. The horse trailer behind took up more than its share of the road and O’Reilly had to pull onto the verge. As soon as he was past he sank his foot and tore off, hardly noticing the lone cyclist who on the Rover’s approach hurled himself and his bike into the ditch.

  He turned on the car radio, fiddled with the dial, and found a BBC man’s Oxbridge voice saying, “And finally in sports news; on Thursday in Paris the International Olympics Committee announced that the 1948 Games will be held in London.” More fiddling before O’Reilly found the classical music he was looking for. He recognised Mozart’s Magic Flute and let the cheerful sounds soothe him. He was able to manage a smile by the time he’d turned into the short drive up to Lars’s home. O’Reilly’d been singing along with Papageno’s “Der vogelfänger bin ich ja” and accompanying the performer’s reed flute with a series of rising “tiddle-iddle-eyes—” and falling “pom-poms.” He noticed a big Armstrong Siddeley near the house. Lars had warned Fingal of Ma’s taste in motorcars. He parked to the final “pom-pom,” got out, and crunched across the gravel to the front door where Lars and Ma stood smiling at him.

  “Fingal, welcome home, son,” Ma said, letting herself be engulfed in his hug. “Thank God you’re safe.”

  “And sound,” he said. “You’re looking well.” And she was, in her short tweed jacket and knee-length skirt.

  “I do my best,” she said, “but I’m afraid these wartime austerity fashions leave a certain amount to be desired.” She laughed. “I think us ladies complaining about clothes rationing hardly compares with what our troops had to face.”

  He picked her up and spun her round. “God, it’s good to see you, Ma.”

  “Put me down, Fingal.” Her laughter filled the hall.

  “I’m home, Ma. And it’ll be a long time before I leave again.” He set her down.

  “Home is the sailor, home from the sea,” Lars said.

  “And the hunter home from the hill. ‘Requiem.’ Robert Louis Stevenson,” O’Reilly said, and shook Lars’s hand. “And how are you, big brother?”

  “I’m grand, Finn, and very glad to see you. Come in.”

  He followed them into the hall. Something giving off a tantalising aroma was cooking somewhere. A large liver and white springer spaniel rushed up to greet him.

  “Sit, Barney,” Lars said, and the dog obeyed.

  “Old Barney’s still going strong,” Fingal said, noticing grey in the dog’s muzzle. “Remember when we used to go wildfowling with him? He was a great retriever.”

  “Still is,” Lars said.

  “Let me look at you again,” Ma said. She frowned. “You’ve got older, Fingal,” she said, “but you’re still my handsome young son.”

  “It’s been nearly six years and I think you need specs, Ma,” he said, “but thank you.” He was expecting to be ushered into Lars’s spacious sitting room overlooking the narrows where the ripping tides had given the lough its Viking name, Strangfjorthr, the turbulent fjord.

  Ma said, “That’s a goose you can smell roasting.” She glanced at her watch. “It’ll be ready in about an hour. I’ve things to do in the kitchen. I know how long you’ve been gone, Fingal. There’s so much to talk about, but why don’t you boys give Barney a walk, go down to the Portaferrry Arms, and have a pint before lunch?”

  “You sure, Ma?” Fingal said.

  “Of course I am. I’ve waited this long, I can wait a bit longer. We can blether away to our hearts’ content over lunch and in the afternoon. I’ve a feeling it might snow more heavily later so go on and enjoy yourselves before it does.”

  “Let me get my coat,” Lars said.

  “Do you know,” said Fingal, “I don’t think this place’s changed one bit.” He was striding beside his brother up the face of a low, rounded hill. Gorse bushes grew, spiny green and dotted with chrome-yellow flowers. Their almond scent was carried on the salty air. He sniffed. There was a more pungent aroma too. “You got a badger round here, Lars?”

  Lars pointed to a burrow under a bank where brown bracken drooped. “Old Brock has his set in there. He’ll be sleeping now. Leave it, Barney. Don’t want him getting into a fight with the beast. ”

  The dog, who had made a beeline for the burrow, now turned aside and began investigating the whins. Two rabbits bolted, ears back, scuts white and bobbing. Barney had been trained to know he was not allowed to chase flushed game. He sat abruptly and watched them go.

  Overhead, small jackdaws and larger rooks that had flocked together cawed and flapped their way inland. A constant twittering was coming from a leafless blackthorn hedge and Fingal saw a flock of brightly coloured goldfinches take wing and whirl away across the field.

  He strode alongside his brother across the little fields. When Lars asked a question, Fingal was, like most ex-service men, reticent about the details of his war. He was warmed by Lars’s concern for Fingal’s loss of Deirdre. Lars himself, bachelor solicitor and unable to volunteer because of flat feet, had lived out his war quietly here, keeping an eye on Ma, who’d been terribly busy raising money for the Spitfire Fund and working for a charity for unmarried mothers. No. Lars hadn’t married. His disappointment over a judge’s daughter in Dublin seemed to have put him off the fair sex for life, yet he appeared content to Fingal. Something to think about, because Fingal himself had no intention of becoming romantically involved. Certainly not for a while yet.

  He followed Lars and Barney over a stile and onto the shore. A little past the tide’s edge a heron, blue-grey, gangly legged, and with a pigtail of feathers hanging down behind, darted its head into the water and pulled it back, a silver fish wriggling in the bird’s long beak. Across the narrow waters a vee of small geese with grey bellies, narrow white collars, and black heads flew up the lough.

  “Atlantic brent geese
,” Lars said. “All the way from Greenland and Spitzbergen to winter here. Probably heading up to the Quoile River.”

  “You always did know your birds, Lars,” Fingal said.

  “To shoot them. But you know, Finn, I’m beginning to think they need our protection. I haven’t been out more than a couple of times this season. I’m thinking of joining the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds.”

  “Not until after next season, please,” Fingal said. “You’d better be ready to go out once or twice with me. Unless you count my ship chucking everything she had from fifteen-inch shells to 0.5-inch machine-gun bullets at the enemy, I’ve not had a shot,” he laughed, “for nearly seven years. I’d enjoy a day or two out with you for old times’ sake, and,” he said more softly, “it would make a nice change if no one’s shooting back.”

  “I suppose it was pretty grim,” Lars said.

  Fingal took a deep breath. “It had its moments—but it’s over, and I’m home, and I’m home to stay.”

  “I’d certainly say you’re glad to be back,” Lars said, picking up a stick and throwing it for Barney to retrieve.

  “I am that.” Fingal frowned. “And happy to be.”

  “Happy to be back, yes, but I’d say you don’t sound completely happy, Finn. What’s up?”

  Fingal shook his head and waited for Lars to take the stick and throw it again. “Thank you for handling the conveyance of old Doctor Flanagan’s practice, Lars.”

  “It was my pleasure, Finn.”

  “I’m excited about the practice . . .” He hesitated then said, “But I’m a bit worried. I haven’t started work yet, but I just hope the old boy’s patients come back. I’ll see on Monday morning if anyone shows up.”

  “I suppose all folks starting a small business have the same worry. I know I did. We put our shingle up and pray they come.” He clapped Fingal on the shoulder. “You’ll be fine, Finn. I know you will because you’re an excellent doctor, but don’t be surprised if it’s slow at the beginning.”

  “Thanks.” Fingal warmed inside to his brother’s touch and reassurance, but outside the snow Ma had warned them about had started and the air was as cold as a witch’s tit. And tucked in a corner of his inner glow was a chilly worry that Lars might be wrong and the practice wouldn’t grow. Forget it for today, he told himself. “It’s getting bloody bitter,” Fingal said. “Come on, big brother, call Barney in and we’ll take Ma’s advice and head for the Arms—but I’m buying you a hot half-un. It’s too bloody cold for a pint.”

  3

  Is of His Own Opinion Still

  O’Reilly looked at his watch. Ten o’clock on Monday morning and still no patients. He sat in the swivel chair in the surgery, rolling the top of his father’s old desk up and down. It had been delivered on Saturday afternoon. Kinky, as he’d requested, had supervised the moving men in their placing of his few pieces of furniture and leaving packing cases of books in the upstairs lounge.

  O’Reilly had spent Sunday afternoon arranging his volumes on the shelves there, wondering how he’d managed to accumulate so many, but then reading was amongst his foremost pleasures. He’d stood for minutes enjoying the sweeping views past the lopsided steeple of the Presbyterian church with its churchyard full of ancient tombstones and sombre snow-dusted yew trees. Looking farther over the roofs of the village to where gulls wheeled and swooped over the sand dunes, his gaze had taken in the calm, washed-out blue of Belfast Lough and in the dim distance the soft darker blue hills of Antrim rolling down to Carrickfergus and its brooding Norman castle. Only a single coalboat shoved her way steadily to the Central Coal Pier in Bangor Harbour, reminding him of a line in John Masefield’s poem “Cargoes”: “Dirty British coaster with a salt-streaked smoke stack.” No yachts yet, but in the summer he knew the sailors would be out in force.

  Later he’d asked Kinky to give him a hand hanging a photograph on the landing wall outside the lounge.

  “And that does be your big ship, sir?” she’d asked when they’d finished.

  “That’s her,” he said. “HMS Warspite. ‘The Grand Old Lady.’ ” He adjusted the frame to be sure the picture was hanging straight. “The photo was taken when she was anchored in Grand Harbour, Valetta, in Malta.”

  Kinky leant forward to see better. “She does look a very powerful vessel, so.”

  “She was, Kinky, she and her four sister Queen Elizabeth class of battleships.” He pointed to the eight fifteen-inch rifles, two each in X and Y turrets aft and two each in A and B turrets for’ard. “You see those big guns above the foredeck?”

  “I do.”

  “The dispensary and sick bay where the medical staff worked were two decks below the most for’ard gun barrels. It was like the clap of doom when they were fired over our heads. Their shells weighed 1,950 pounds each, that’s not far off one ton, and she could hurl them for fourteen miles.”

  “From here to Millisle down the Ards Peninsula, bye,” Kinky said, and took her duster to the frame. “I can believe those guns would have made ferocious bangs, so. I’ve seen newsreel of battleships firing at France on D-Day,” she looked him in the eye, “but the war does be over and you can settle down now and enjoy the nice peace and quiet of Ballybucklebo, so.”

  Peace and quiet? True enough, but things were a bit too quiet this morning. It wasn’t that he wanted people to be sick, but he needed to work. O’Reilly drummed his fingers on the desktop.

  That old piece held memories for O’Reilly of a much younger Fingal who all his life had wanted to study medicine. Father had been sitting at this desk in his study when Fingal had defied him back in ’27, telling him, “I’m not doing nuclear physics.” That stubbornness had led him into the merchant marine and the Royal Naval Reserve before he’d finally gone to Trinity College in Dublin to fulfil his dream. And it was that stint in the reserve had led to his call-up when war had broken out, a war that, as Kinky had remarked, was now over. And the Lord be praised. But now what he needed were patients in his surgery so he could get back to the kind of doctoring he loved.

  He rose and for the umpteenth time walked back to the room that had originally been the scullery, but which Doctor Flanagan had used as his waiting room. Not for the first time O’Reilly scowled at the dismal, shiny, green-painted walls. He’d already decided to paper them with something more cheerful. Roses, he thought, roses would do very well.

  The place was as deserted as a Protestant church on a weekday. He bent and lifted a tattered Reader’s Digest from a heap of earlier editions, several Women’s Own magazines, and some issues of a kiddies’ comic book, The Dandy Comic. He smiled at the drawings of Korky the Cat on their front pages. As he was scanning the index of the Digest, the outside door opened and a young woman came in holding the hand of a little girl clutching a well-worn teddy bear. His first real patients. He didn’t count Bertie Bishop. “Good morning,” a smiling O’Reilly said. “I’m Doctor O’Reilly.”

  “I’m Kathy Dunleavy, Willie Dunleavy’s wife.”

  “Are you related to Charles Dunleavy who owns the Black Swan?”

  “He was my da-in-law. He’s gone three years, God rest him. I married his son Willie five years back. He runs the pub now, so he does.”

  “Good Lord, the last time I saw your husband he was a bachelor kicking a ball around with his mates and looking for divilment.” O’Reilly shook his head. “Anyway, what can I do for you?”

  “I’m worried about wee Mary here.”

  “Let’s see what we can do about that.” O’Reilly led Mrs. Dunleavy and the child to the surgery and sat in his chair while she took one of the wooden ones and lifted Mary onto her lap.

  “So, what seems to be the trouble with Mary?”

  “The poor wee button’s off her feed for the last couple of days, says she can’t swallow right, and I think she’s got a fever.”

  “Mmmh,” said O’Reilly, already formulating his possible diagnoses. “Anything else?”

  “No, sir.”

  “No convu
lsions, vomiting, diarrhoea? No pains anywhere? No earache? No sore throat?”

  “No, sir.”

  At this time of the year he was probably dealing with acute tonsillitis, which could be a recurrent disease. “Has she ever had anything like this before?”

  Mrs. Dunleavy shook her head.

  He went and hunkered down in front of the girl so his eyes were at the same level as hers. “Hello, Mary.”

  She pulled the teddy bear closer and looked at him from big blue eyes, which he noticed were dull.

  “Cat got your tongue?” He smiled and said to the bear, “And how old is your mistress?”

  “He can’t talk, thilly,” she said. “I’m four.”

  “Are you now?” said O’Reilly. “You are a big girl.”

  That produced a little smile.

  “Can I put my hand on your neck, please?”

  She glanced at her mother, who nodded. “Yeth.”

  O’Reilly quickly examined her neck. He noted a few enlarged lymph nodes and her skin was warm. It was always tricky taking wee ones’ temperatures so he’d settle for that inexact observation. The findings so far were in keeping with his thoughts. A couple more observations would confirm them. “Could you open wide and stick out your tongue?”

  “Yeth.” She did.

  O’Reilly produced a pencil torch and shone it into her mouth. Small children always gagged if you tried to use a tongue depressor and he was confident he’d be able to find what he was looking for without one. “Say ‘aaah.’ ”

  He saw at once that the very back of the oral cavity, the fauces, were red and inflamed and that both tonsils were scarlet and swollen. There was no evidence of membrane formation so he could stop worrying about diphtheria or a rare condition called Vincent’s angina, also known as trench mouth. “Thank you, Mary,” he said. “You can close your mouth.”

  She did.