An Irish Doctor in Peace and at War

by Patrick Taylor

  “I do. I’ve made a reservation.”

  O’Reilly nodded. “Good. Then, no, nothing now.”

  Lars sat. “How are you, Finn? You’ve something on your mind, you told me. Or were you out on a call last night too? You look like you didn’t get too much sleep.”

  “I didn’t. But not because of a patient,” O’Reilly said.

  “And you said it’s something about Kitty? She’s not ill, is she?”

  “Nothing like that. It’s—it’s difficult to explain.”

  Lars leant forward, folded his right arm across his chest, and cupped his chin with his left hand. “Fire away.”

  “You remember in the ’30s. Kitty and I were an item, then we weren’t, then we patched things up for a while until my work got in the way again and then—” O’Reilly stopped, not sure how to continue.

  “And she went to Tenerife. I do remember. I thought when you met Deirdre you were quite over Kitty. I certainly didn’t expect the pair of you to get wed so late in life, but I’m delighted for you.”

  O’Reilly detected a faint tinge of sadness in his bachelor brother’s voice. “Me too, but…” O’Reilly stood, walked to the window, and stared out at the little car ferry heading out from the Strangford shore on its way to Portaferry, battling the strong currents of an ebb tide at its peak. “Och, Lars, there’s no point ploughing the same furrow twice. Deirdre’s gone. I’m married to Kitty now, I love her dearly”—he’d tell no one else save Lars and her his deepest feelings—“but last evening she told me something that’s got me all at sixes and sevens.” He paused.

  A stronger-than-usual wave hit the little ferry and for moments she was shoved completely off course.

  “Go on, Finn,” Lars said in a soft voice that had O’Reilly imagining his solicitor brother comforting a recent widow as they discussed the probate of her late husband’s will. “Come and sit down.”

  O’Reilly did, still watching the little vessel from the corner of his eye.

  “I know it’s difficult for you, Finn. Usually it’s the other way round, you sorting out problems for your patients, but I am your brother.”

  O’Reilly nodded. He took a deep breath. “When I came home last night, I found her in tears. She’d got a letter from Spain. She told me that when she’d been nursing in Tenerife she’d had an affair with a Spaniard.” O’Reilly couldn’t bring himself to name the man. “He died six weeks ago. Learning of it must have brought back a flood of memories for her. And for me … I’ve always had far too vivid an imagination…” It took no effort to see himself in Narvik in 1940, four decks down on Warspite, hatches battened down, and under German fire. His mind had run rampant picturing the compartment flooding, thinking he could even smell the oily water. Right up to today he could recall how, when the action was over and Richard Wilcoxson had let his medical staff go on deck for a breath of fresh air, Fingal had felt waves of the blessed relief from his own claustrophobia brought on entirely by letting himself picture too clearly what might go wrong.

  “When she told me some general details I should have accepted them simply as cold fact, her confession as if to a priest, me in this case, her need to get it off her chest. I’m well used to handling unpleasant facts without embellishing them on behalf of my patients, but when it came to myself? My bloody mind went beserk. I had all kinds of scenes in my head.” He half snorted a laugh. “Scenes in glorious, bloody Technicolor, moving pictures of them walking in the moonlight in a fishing village called Los Abrigos, drinking wine, laughing together, him calling her ‘mi corazon,’ kissing her. Lars, don’t ask me to tell you exactly how I pictured them making love … Just don’t.” He inhaled.

  “I can guess,” Lars said. “Not pleasant for you. Not pleasant at all.”

  “And here’s the thing.” O’Reilly scratched one ear. “I’ve no right to be jealous, but…” He looked into Lars’s dark eyes. “Damn it all, I am. Very jealous.”

  Lars nodded. “I think,” he said, “that’s perfectly natural. I’m sure I’d have felt exactly the same had I been in your shoes, Finn.”

  “Honestly?”

  “Mmmm,” Lars said, looking down to the floor. “You know, Finn, I still think about the judge’s daughter in Dublin. Jean Neely. I can still remember how it felt when she turned down my proposal of marriage on a Christmas Eve. Married some other bloke.”

  O’Reilly frowned. “I could tell you were hurting back then. I tried to help. I’m sorry if I wasn’t much use.”

  “I was. Hurting sore, but you tried, Finn. You tried your damnedest. That’s what brothers are for. That’s why I’m trying to understand and help you today.”

  “And you are. Just by listening you are. Letting me spill it all out.” Then a small smile started. “You know,” he said, “it is a comfort, Lars.” O’Reilly noticed that the ferry was much closer to the Portaferry side now and seemed to be coming back on course. “Thank you.” He pursed his lips. “There is one other thing.”

  “Go on.”

  “It was the man’s daughter who wrote to Kitty. She’s a woman in her thirties now. Her name is Consuela.” He paused.

  Lars frowned. “I hesitate to ask, but are you worried that—”

  “Kitty might be the mother?”

  Lars inclined his head.

  “No. Kitty went there in late ’36, started seeing the fellah a year later. At that time his little girl was two going on three.”

  “That’s all right then.” Lars smiled. “I think, brother,” he said, “once you’ve confronted the green-eyed monster for a while longer, you’ll see you’ve nothing to worry about.”

  “Except this Consuela wants to meet Kitty.” He hesitated. “I’m convinced the woman’s not Kitty’s child, she would have told me, but I’m not sure what upsets seeing Consuela might cause for Kitty … and for me. I’m not sure I want to know.” There, it was out.

  Lars pursed his lips, nodded, folded both arms. “I’ll bet you know as much about the law as I do about medicine.”

  “Me? The law?” O’Reilly smiled. “Probably a damn sight less.”

  “We have a thing called ‘disclosure.’ It insists that the parties to a dispute—in my kinds of cases that usually involves wills, property, or the occasional divorce—”

  O’Reilly frowned. He wasn’t sure what Lars was driving at.

  “All it means is that, for example, in a divorce suit both parties must honestly put before the court all their assets. Hold nothing back so there are no nasty surprises.”

  O’Reilly rose again. “And you think it would be better to meet this woman, and find out, than spend forever speculating?”

  “Not for me to say.” Lars shook his head and said, “That’s got to be your decision, Finn, yours and Kitty’s, but haven’t you always told me the thing patients have the most difficulty dealing with is uncertainty? That they’d prefer to know their diagnosis even if the outlook’s grim rather than be left in limbo?”

  “Yes.” O’Reilly smiled. “Yes, of course. Why the hell couldn’t I work that out for myself? I’m not a stupid man.”

  “No, you’re not,” said Lars, “But jealousy is—” He stopped. “Jealousy is difficult. I remember reading one of Lawrence Durrell’s books about ten years ago. I can’t remember which one…”

  “One of the books in his Alexandria Quartet perhaps? I was bloody well based there.” And bloody nearly went off the rails there too, he thought, when I was engaged to Deirdre. If there are any guilty parties, I’m the closest to filling that bill.

  “I think it was one of them. Anyway, it was pretty avant garde stuff, not my cup of tea, really. But something stuck with me, something one of the characters said: ‘It’s not love that’s blind, it’s jealousy.’ It made sense to me. Jealousy makes us blind. It’s made you blind and I’ve just tried to help you to take off the blinkers, that’s all. The least I can do for my little brother.”

  O’Reilly rocked gently on his heels, wondering how his bachelor brother, a village solicitor w
ho spent his days expediting wills and conveyances, had gotten so damned wise. Finally he said, “By God, Lars, you’ve said a mouthful. And by God, you’re right. Thank you.”

  “Och,” said Lars, rising, “I’m sure you’d’ve worked it out for yourself in time.” He glanced at his watch. “Shall we take a quick walk along the shore to give us an appetite, then have our lunch?”

  “I’ll bring Arthur,” O’Reilly said. “He’s in the car.” The mention of the shore made O’Reilly glance out of the window. The ferry had made safe harbour and was discharging its cars. He turned back to his brother. “Thank you, Lars. Thank you. I’ll tell Kitty what you’ve helped me to see when she gets home tonight and if she agrees then we’ll just have to decide whether we want a guest or whether we’d like a holiday on the Costa Brava or somewhere else in Spain.”

  “And now you have to decide to get a move on. I don’t want to be late for our luncheon reservation. Mrs. Maguire takes a very dim view of tardiness,” Lars said with a laugh.

  As O’Reilly caught up with his brother, he squeezed the man’s upper arm. “Thanks for listening, advising,” O’Reilly said. “It’s good to be here, Lars. And a pint, roast beef, Yorkshire puddings, carrots and roast potatoes will certainly hit the spot.” For the first time in almost a day, O’Reilly felt hungry. He passed Ma’s turbulent skyscape and was struck by how different it looked. With that ray of sunshine coming in through the window, the painting didn’t look so forebodingly ominous as it had when he’d arrived.

  34

  Tread in the Bus on My Toes

  O’Reilly looked up from where he sat at his rolltop desk in the surgery. The sounds of hoovering had stopped and Kinky was greeting someone at the front door of Number One. He was dealing with yet another idiotic request from the ministry for more paperwork. Ever since the introduction of the National Health Service, these benighted forms had seemed to breed like rabbits—and at least he could take his shotgun to those. He peered over the half-moon spectacles perched on the bridge of his nose. “Come in.”

  “Doctor O’Reilly, sir, I do have Willie Dunleavy and Alan Hewitt here and I think it would be a good idea if yourself would take a look at Willie, so.”

  “Bring him in, please.” Barry was doing home visits this afternoon, and once O’Reilly had finished filling out these damned forms, he and Kitty, who had a half day and was upstairs, were meant to be heading to Bangor to talk to the town’s travel agent about package tours to Barcelona. Kitty wanted to visit the Picasso Museum and the Joan Miró Foundation there. But when Kinky thought a patient needed to be seen at once—they needed to be seen at once.

  Kinky pushed the door wide to reveal Alan Hewitt supporting Willie Dunleavy as the man hopped in on his left foot.

  “Hang on.” O’Reilly stood and moved the T-bar under the examining couch so its top end was tilted at forty-five degrees to the horizontal. “I’ll help you put Willie on the couch, Alan,” he said.

  Between them they gently manoeuvred Willie, who promptly yelled, “Go easy, you clumsy buggers.” His head lolled back against the top of the couch. “Ah, God, be careful. Jasus, Alan, but you’re a ham-fisted bastard.”

  For a second O’Reilly was tempted to order Willie to mind his manners. He never had managed to tolerate rude patients. He usually found a way to follow the motto of his old boss: never let a patient get the upper hand. But until he knew what ailed the normally jovial publican, he would say nothing except, “Would you like Alan to leave us alone?”

  “Not at all. I don’t mind if you stay, Alan.”

  Alan Hewitt nodded.

  “Right,” said O’Reilly. “So what seems to be the trouble?” He took Willie’s wrist to check his pulse and noted that the skin was hot and clammy, the heartbeat rapid.

  “I was doing a wee job in the cellar of the Duck, and Mary come down. Says she til me, she says, ‘Alan, could you come up and see what’s wrong with my daddy? He’s howling his head off and he’s madder than a wet hen, and he’s just bit the head off a customer.’ Right enough when I got upstairs I didn’t know what had got in til you, Willie. You gave me a right ould tousling too.”

  “You’d be just as cross if you’d a stoon in your big toe like the one I got a couple of hours after one of them buck eejits from Guinness ran a delivery trolley over my foot.”

  Pain coming on some time after trauma rather than immediately, extreme emotional irritability, fever. Already things were starting to add up. “Have you had the pain before?” O’Reilly asked.

  Willie shook his head. “If I had, Doctor, you’d’ve been the first til know. It’s ferocious, so it is.”

  “And do you feel anything else wrong?” O’Reilly said.

  Willie shook his head. “The feckin’ pain’s enough, so it is.” He was visibly sweating.

  “Mary had til stay,” Alan said, “and look after the customers. I thought I’d better bring him here. It’s no distance.”

  “Maybe not for you. I had til hirple like a man on a bloody pogo stick.” Willie took a deep breath and moaned.

  O’Reilly waited until the moaning stopped, then said, “Could I take a gander?”

  “You go dead easy taking off my shoe and sock,” Willie said.

  “I will,” said O’Reilly, “but first I want you to take off your jacket and roll up your sleeves.”

  “What? Are you daft? It’s my feckin’ toe, you eejit. Can you not tell my toe from my elbow?”

  “I think the usual expression to describe an eejit is someone who can’t tell his arse from his elbow,” said O’Reilly mildly, and Alan Hewitt let out a sharp laugh.

  “Bloody lovely,” said Willie, scowling at his friend. “You’d laugh at a man in pain. Right bloody Job’s comforter you are, Alan Hewitt.”

  “Sorry, Willie, I—”

  “Give me a hand, will you, Alan?”

  “Aye, certainly, Doctor.”

  Between them they managed to take off Willie’s Donegal tweed sports jacket and roll up his shirt sleeves. “Sit you down on one of the chairs, Alan,” O’Reilly said, then began to examine Willie’s forearms, soon finding what he was looking for, a shiny, painless lump the size of a broad bean over the point of the left elbow, and two similar lesions on the tendons of Willie’s right forearm. A quick examination of his ears, nose, and eyelids did not find any similar lumps, the term for which was a tophus. But they were not always present in those other sites. Ignoring Willie’s grumbling, O’Reilly said, “I’m going to take a look at your toes now, Willie.”

  “About bloody well time,” Willie said, and as O’Reilly began to unlace the man’s left shoe said, “For God’s sake it’s my other big toe. The other one.”

  “I know,” said O’Reilly, setting the shoe aside and peeling off the sock, “but doctors always examine both sides to make a comparison.”

  There was nothing out of the ordinary to be found. “Now,” he said, “I’ll be as gentle as I can,” and unlaced the right brogue. He opened the shoe as widely as possible. “Give me a hand, Alan.” O’Reilly showed Alan how to hold the leg up, then slowly started to take off the shoe. Willie whimpered, but in short order off had come shoe and sock. “Hang on,” O’Reilly said, pulled a pillow from under the couch, set it under Willie’s heel and said, “Put his foot on that, please, Alan.”

  The joint between big toe and foot, the first metatarso-phalangeal joint, was swollen, red, shiny, hot to touch, and no doubt would be exquisitely tender if O’Reilly squeezed or moved it. “I can tell you what I think’s wrong, Willie.”

  “Thank God for that,” Willie said. “What is it?”

  “I’m almost certain it’s gout.”

  “Away off and feel your head. Gout? That’s what lords of the manor like the marquis get drinking port every night and eating all them rich foods like lobster and pheasant under glass. Not ordinary folks like me.”

  “Not only do ordinary folks get it, one of the things it does is make the victim extremely irritable, and you know, Willie, you’
ve hardly been the spirit of sweetness and light since you got here.”

  Willie hung his head. “I’m sorry, Doc, but it stings like blue buggery.”

  “I do know, so never worry about being grumpy,” said O’Reilly, “and you give Willie a fool’s pardon too, Alan. He can’t help being bad-tempered just at the moment. His toe’ll feel like a red-hot poker.”

  “Aye,” said Willie, “it does, and in July too, when there’s no one ordering mulled wine, so there’s not.”

  Every publican knew that wine was mulled by plunging a red-hot poker into a flagon of spiced wine, and O’Reilly realised that Willie was trying to make a joke. “That’s the spirit, Willie. Now I’ve one more wee thing to do, so just bear with me, and you go away and sit down again, Alan.”

  O’Reilly went to the instrument cabinet, took out a wrapped, presterilized hypodermic syringe, put it with a bowl of Savlon and some swabs on a trolley, and scrubbed his hands. He pushed the trolley over to Willie. “Be a good lad, Alan,” O’Reilly said. “Push the screen over and give us a bit of privacy.”

  Alan did.

  “Right,” said O’Reilly. “This will only sting for a sec.”

  Willie didn’t even flinch as O’Reilly took a sample from the tophus on the left elbow.

  “I’ll be back in a tick,” he said, and trotted over to an ancient brass-barrelled microscope. He made a glass slide from a smear of the material in the syringe, put the slide on the stage, peered through the eyepiece, fiddled with the focussing wheel, and with a moment’s feeling of satisfaction found what he was looking for. The needle-shaped crystals of sodium biurate seen in samples from gouty tophi were clearly visible.

  He went back to Willie. “That confirms it, Willie. You do have gout.”

  “I’ll be damned. You saw it on that there microscope?” said Willie.

  “I did.”

  “And am I going to have to sit in a Bath chair with tons of bandages round my hoof like one of them Colonel Blimps in the cartoons?”

  “Only for a wee while,” said O’Reilly. “And you’ll not be in a wheelchair. You’ll be in bed for about a week.” He sat at his desk, pushed the hated administrative forms aside, grabbed a prescription pad, and began to scribble. “I’m going to give you colchicine tablets, point five milligrams, and you’re to take one every two hours for a maximum of sixteen doses or until you start to get the runs.”