An Irish Doctor in Peace and at War Page 6

“I shouldn’t be going on about it.” Henson knocked on a door in a bulkhead. He saluted. “I’ll be off then, sir.”

  Fingal returned the salute. “Thank you and good luck with your gunn—”

  The door was opened by a sick berth attendant to whom Fingal said, “Surgeon Lieutenant O’Reilly to see the principal medical officer.”

  A soft, very English voice from behind the SBA said, “Lieutenant O’Reilly? Surgeon Commander Wilcoxson. Do come in and let me show you the shop.”

  7

  Move from Hence to There

  “It is very good to have the pair of you back, Kinky, Archie,” O’Reilly said from his usual place at the head of the table. He sipped a nearly finished after-lunch tawny port. Seeing it was a Saturday and he was not on call he saw no reason not to have a tot. He’d have preferred Jameson, but Kitty in her usual tactful, but irresistible way had hinted some months ago that perhaps he should not be starting on the hard stuff until the evenings. He lifted his glass to her where she sat on his right talking to Barry and Archie, who faced each other at the dining room table. He was rewarded by her smile.

  Kinky sat on his left looking rested and a little tanned after three weeks away. “It did be a very pleasant drive home in Archie’s motorcar from Newcastle yesterday. We went over on the Strangford-to-Portaferry ferryboat and up along the coast by Ballywalter and Millisle and Groomsport, so.”

  “It is a pretty run,” he said. “On a good day you get a great view of the Copeland Islands.”

  “And it was a very good day, bye,” she said. “We had a lovely lunch in Donaghadee overlooking the harbour. But Doctor O’Reilly, sir, after you spending all that money on us at the Slieve Donard hotel, there was no need for this homecoming luncheon.” She lowered her voice. “And if you don’t mind me remarking, Kitty does be a very fine cook, if I do say so myself. There was a time I’m sorry to tell you that I misjudged the lady.”

  “That’s water under the bridge, and,” said O’Reilly, “I consider myself a very lucky man,” he lowered his voice, “because she’s nearly as good a cook as a certain Kinky Auchinleck.”

  “Go away with you, sir,” she said, but her grin was huge.

  “And having lunch here simply makes sense. Didn’t you go round your quarters like a bee on a hot brick the week before the wedding, tidying, organizing, cleaning, packing all the clothes and such you’d not need on your honeymoon, taking them round to Archie’s?”

  “I did.”

  “And didn’t we agree that you’d come here today and that we’d all help you pack up all the heavy things? So why would you not come here for lunch?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “Donal Donnelly’s coming round with a van so we can get them round to your new home.”

  “Thank you, Doctor. I’m grateful.” There was an impish quality to her smile. “Whatever would people have said, though, if I’d taken everything round there before the wedding and moved in with Archie? I’d never have been able to hold my head up. Thank you for letting all my things rest here, sir, but the sooner they are out the better now.” She turned to Barry. “Doctor Laverty, I will be back here first thing on Monday to give my old home—” She sighed. “—to give my old home a final dust and a polish and then you can move in.”

  “Thanks, Kinky,” he said. “It’ll be good to have more space and my own TV, but please don’t think I’m rushing you out.”

  “I’d think no such thing,” she said, “but it will be strange for me at first. I’ve lived here since 1928, that’s thirty-eight years.” She smiled at Archie. “And I know you’ll not be offended, dear, if I say I’ll miss it for a while no matter how grand it’s going to be being with you, bye.”

  “Why would I take the strunts, Kinky? There’s not a soul living who’d not miss their old place if and when they had to move,” Archie said. “And don’t forget, you’ll not be leaving completely. You’ll still be working here, anyroad.”

  “We couldn’t let you go entirely, Kinky,” Kitty said. “Fingal needs you during the week to answer the phone and the door. I couldn’t keep on nursing and do all the things you do here, and that includes those lunches you make for the doctors and some of those wonderful ready-to-heat dinners.” She chuckled. “Knowing how much grub means to you, Fingal, I’m surprised you gave Archie permission when he asked for your hand, Kinky.”

  Everyone laughed.

  “Thank you, Kitty.” Kinky cocked her head and beamed at Kitty. “I’m the luckiest woman in all of County Down and that’s no lie, so, to have friends like the O’Reillys and yourself, Doctor Laverty.”

  “Bless you, Kinky,” Barry said. “I’ll always be your friend.”

  O’Reilly simply smiled at her. Some things were a given as far as he was concerned and needed no comment. “And,” he said, finishing the last of his port, “if all of us friends are going to get you moved today, we need to start getting the job done. Here’s what I propose.” He looked straight at Kinky. “You’ll be skipper. Or if you prefer you can be ‘the hat,’ the foreman of the job. We need you to direct operations.”

  “I’ll do that, sir,” Kinky said.

  “Kitty? Packing of breakables? You’ve a softer touch than Barry or myself.”

  “I do have lots of newspaper and tissue paper for padding, so,” Kinky said.

  “Aye, aye, sir,” Kitty said, and threw a mock naval salute.

  “Doctor Laverty, Donal Donnelly when he arrives with the van, and I will be the muscle, humping boxes out to the vehicle. But I think,” he looked at Archie, “I think, Archie, you should go home and be ready to meet us there. It’s not that long since you had a very bad back and I’d not want you to put it out again lifting boxes.”

  “That’s considerate, sir. Is that all right with everybody?”

  “You run along, dear,” Kinky said.

  “If you’re sure I can’t help, I’ll be off, then. There’s still lots to do at the house,” Archie said.

  Kinky gave him a kiss and said, “I’ll see you soon, back at home, muirnín, and make sure the kettle’s on for I’m certain we’ll all need a cup of tea when we get there, bye. I’ll come in the moving van.”

  O’Reilly smiled to himself. It was the hallmark of all professional moving men that they seemed to run on a fuel of limitless cups of tea provided by the homeowners. “So,” he said, “lead the way, Mrs. Auchinleck.”

  * * *

  Kinky indeed took charge in her quarters. “Everything’s gone from the bedroom and I’ve washed the bed linen and made the bed for Doctor Laverty.”

  “Thanks, Kinky,” he said.

  “But all my pictures and ornaments have to go, and a couple of pieces of my own furniture like…” She pointed to a mahogany fire screen, embroidered with a galleon in full sail that she’d done herself in the late ’30s and early ’40s. It stood in front of the fire when not lit. “My books are in boxes already so, Doctors, if you’d not mind waiting for a shmall-little minute, I’d like to get Kitty started first then I’ll tell you what to do.”

  “Of course,” O’Reilly said.

  “And I’ll give you a hand, Kitty,” Kinky said, “but I’d like you to start with…” She pointed to two ornate brass candlesticks on the mantel and a glass, water-filled ball with a tiny village inside. “… the candlesticks. They were my own ma’s and she had them from her ma, and she from her ma before her. I do love them dearly, so.” She handed them to Kitty. “And Fidelma, my sister, gave me this”—she shook the glass ball and it looked as if the little village was in a snowstorm—“for my tenth birthday. It still delights me yet.” And she giggled like a little girl.

  O’Reilly swallowed. Hard. He’d given one just like it to Deirdre for Christmas 1940, and like Kinky she’d giggled in simple, unalloyed delight and clapped her hands. He glanced at Kitty and smiled when she said, “I’ll be very careful with them, Kinky, I promise.”

  “And I’ll pack this.” Kinky moved to a model in a whiskey bottle of a fully rigged Cutty Sark that sat on her sideboa
rd. “My first husband, Paudeen Kincaid, God rest you, Paudeen, and if you can see me now…”

  O’Reilly felt the hairs on his forearms rise.

  “… you’ll be happy to know I took your advice and have remarried. And your Cutty Sark is coming with me to my new home.” She lifted it. “It was two whole years in the crafting and Paudeen gave it to me as an engagement present.” She joined Kitty at the table, where they both bent to wrapping the treasures before putting them in boxes. “Gentlemen, could I ask you to take down those paintings first?”

  “Come on, Fingal,” Barry said. “We’ll start with this one.”

  “That does be of the home farmhouse in Beál na mBláth,” Kinky said. “Tiernan, who was here at the wedding, farms it now. He’s a powerful man for the road bowling to this day.”

  O’Reilly saw her eyes mist.

  “It’s beautiful, Kinky, a very well-rendered watercolour,” Kitty said.

  “And bloody heavy,” Barry muttered sotto voce.

  O’Reilly hoped that the remark had been hidden by the rustling noise of wrapping paper. They started removing the next one.

  “That’s Lios-na-gCon,” Kinky said. “The ring fort of the hound, near Clonakilty. I went to a dance on Lughnasadh there one August when I was sixteen.” She inhaled. “That night the moon was so low I thought I only had to reach out and I could touch it. Those two pictures—Ma sent them up to me for my new home here—did give me great comfort when first I came to work for Doctor Flanagan and was missing County Cork and my family, so.” She pointed to some faded sepia photos in frames. “Those ones are my family and that one is the County Cork camogie team. That’s me, the thin one on the left.” She shook her head. “Long, long ago now.” She smiled and said, “But those dried flowers in their circular frames, I did pick them fresh in the soft springs and warm summers here in Ballybucklebo and preserved them. I embroidered the samplers when the winter nights were bitter, and the gales howling through the village, but I was snug at my own hearthside here.”

  “What’s that one?” Barry asked. “I don’t have the Gaelic.”

  She smiled. “It’s called ‘Pangur Bán.’ It’s a poem written by an Irish monk in the ninth century to his white cat. I did it when Doctor O’Reilly got Lady Macbeth.” She took it down and offered it to O’Reilly. “I’d like for you and Kitty and her ladyship to have this as a memory of me here in this house.”

  O’Reilly glanced at Kitty, who was smiling and nodding. “Thank you, Kinky,” he said. “May I leave it on the wall right here where it’s been these past two years so there’ll always be a memento of Kinky Kincaid in what was her old home and Barry can see it too?”

  “I’d like that very much,” Barry said.

  “I do think,” she said, “that would be a very fitting thing, so.”

  Kitty leant over and kissed Kinky’s cheek. “Thank you so much, Kinky. For everything.”

  And for a moment no one spoke.

  Silently, O’Reilly returned the sampler to its original place, then said quietly, “Come on, Barry, let’s get the rest down and wrapped.”

  As each decoration was removed, the darkness of the paint behind contrasted starkly with the lighter sun-faded surrounding cream. When Barry took his first holiday O’Reilly would have the room repainted or perhaps papered—with a rose wallpaper. He liked roses on walls and Barry was a man of taste. Hadn’t he been most admiring of the flowers Donal Donnelly had painted in the waiting room after Kitty had repapered it? With the personal belongings gone and the signs of her pictures covered, it would be almost as if Kinky Auchinleck, once Kincaid, née O’Hanlon, had never been there. But for the presence of the sampler.

  In his mind, O’Reilly recalled the next-to-last verse of the poem:

  So in peace our task we ply,

  Pangur Bán, my cat, and I;

  In our arts we find our bliss,

  I have mine, and he has his.

  And, he thought, wasn’t that Kinky and me for all those years. I had my art and she had hers? He shook his head and smiled, carefully lifting her framed School Leaving Certificate from the wall. It was dated 1927. O’Reilly knew how fiercely proud she was of it. “You’ll have memories of this room all right, Kinky,” O’Reilly said.

  “And mostly good, so,” she gestured at the boxes waiting to be transported, “and I’m taking all those ones with me,” she smiled, “and starting three weeks ago I’m on the road to new memories, and Archie’s on that journey with me.”

  It was how O’Reilly had felt last April when Kitty had said “I do.” “Good for you, Kinky.”

  “And please remember, Kinky,” Kitty said, “you are welcome here always as our friend.” It was only then that O’Reilly saw the hint of a tear in his old friend’s eyes.

  There was a knock on the door.

  “Come in,” Kinky said.

  Donal Donnelly’s carroty mop and buck teeth popped in with the springiness of a jack-in-the-box going sideways.

  “Come in, Donal,” O’Reilly said. “I do appreciate your volunteering to help.”

  “Och sure, wouldn’t everybody in the village and townland walk on hot coals for our Kinky? Welcome home, Mrs. Auchinleck.”

  “Thank you, Donal,” she said.

  “It’s not a bit of bother, so it’s not, and hasn’t Mister Bishop loaned us a van, and all?”

  “He had to,” said O’Reilly. “Flo told him to, and you know how Flo can be.”

  “I do that,” said Donal. “She can be a right ould targe when it suits her.”

  “Mister Donnelly,” said Kinky sternly, hiding her smile behind a sheaf of wrapping paper. “I’ll have you know—”

  “And,” said Donal, “and she can have a heart of corn when her friends are in need. But our Flo can be the right taskmaster, make you no mistake.”

  “And so can I,” said O’Reilly with a mock scowl. “I want the three of us men to get all the boxes into the van and take them round to Archie’s.”

  “Archie and Kinky’s,” Kitty said.

  “So jump to it, Missstah Christyun,” said Barry in an uncanny impression of Charles Laughton’s Captain Bligh in Mutiny on the Bounty. It made O’Reilly laugh so much he nearly dropped the box of books he’d just picked up. He set it down. “Gentlemen,” he said. “I’m sure we can pull this job off smoothly if Doctor Laverty refrains from acting the lig. There’ll be more help unloading at the other end. Archie’s son Rory is coming down from Palace Barracks to give a hand.”

  “I promise. And it’ll be great to see Rory,” said Barry.

  “And,” said O’Reilly, “once the job is done, it will be my pleasure to treat the gentlemen of the moving crew, those who want to come, to the first pint of the evening in the Mucky Duck. I regret, ladies, that I am not responsible for Ulster’s archaic licensing laws, so you won’t be able to join us.”

  “That’s perfectly all right,” Kitty said. “I’ll not be coming in the van if that’s all right, Kinky? I have a date with a black Lab for a walk in the dunes on Ballybucklebo Beach.”

  “Grand, so. Arthur Guinness will be a happy dog and I’ll be settled and content in our new home with Archie.”

  “So, you run along and play with your friends, Fingal,” Kitty said, and gave him a wicked smile, “but don’t think that now Kinky has moved you can be late for your dinner.”

  8

  Brave New World

  “Come with me,” Surgeon Commander Wilcoxson said, heading for a curtain to the right.

  Fingal finished the salute he’d begun when his superior officer had appeared and followed him into what he assumed was the sick bay. Instead he found himself in a small alcove. Directly ahead, double doors led to what must be another room on the ship’s starboard side. The sick bay attendant had disappeared through a screen behind and to Fingal’s left.

  “He’s just gone into the sick bay proper,” Wilcoxson said. “I’ll show you round later.” He held open yet another curtain and stepped through. “In here’s the su
rgeon’s examining room. Doubles as my office.” He waited until Fingal had gone in, and followed. “Take a pew and the weight off your feet.” He sat at a kneehole table and indicated a simple seat, onto which Fingal subsided. Wilcoxson pointed at double doors in the far bulkhead. “Operating theatre’s in there and the isolation ward’s behind the doors on the other side of the screen we’ve just come through.”

  “I see.” He didn’t really, but no doubt it wouldn’t take him long to find his way around, at least in his own bailiwick if not throughout this floating behemoth.

  “We’re very well set up medically,” Wilcoxson said, stretching his legs out under the table. “Now tell me, is this your first time on a battleship, Doctor O’Reilly?”

  “Not quite, sir. I served on the old Tiger, battlecruiser. I’m ex-mercantile marine, Royal Navy Reserve. Navigating sub-lieutenant. Believe it or not I can actually use a sextant and sight reduction tables. Or I could.” He laughed.

  “Excellent. Excellent. And are you familiar with our ship at all?” said Wilcoxson.

  “Not really, although I was on Warspite once, in Gibraltar. Just for the afternoon in 1931, when the Atlantic Fleet had combined exercises with the Mediterranean Fleet. I was boxing. Light heavyweight championship.”

  “Who won?”

  Fingal hesitated before saying, “I did, sir,” and tugged at the lobe of his cauliflower ear.

  “Good for you.” Wilcoxson, a grey-haired man in, Fingal guessed, his early fifties, had a ruddy complexion and an aquiline nose that separated two brown eyes. Crow’s-feet etched their corners, which Fingal hoped bespoke a sense of humour. The dark circles underneath told of weariness. The principal medical officer wore a white shirt under a V-necked blue sweater with rank shoulder straps, no tie, and navy blue trousers. He smiled. “Nice to have a doctor with naval experience on board, and perhaps you could take a noon sight,” he frowned, “but you’ve forgotten some service etiquette. No need to salute me. I’m not wearing headdress so I can’t return the compliment.”

  “Sorry, sir. It’s been nine years so I am a bit rusty,” he said, “and my naval experience didn’t include anything medical. I certainly know nothing about treating war wounds.”