An Irish Country Family--An Irish Country Novel

by Patrick Taylor

  Barry hesitated. Felt his stomach roll and churn as if he’d just ridden a huge swell on a small boat. The thought of peering inside his wife with this scope suddenly seemed like some kind of voyeurism.

  “I understand. It is strange. But she’s doing fine. Just take a quick look.”

  Barry squared his shoulders, then bent and put his eye to the lens.

  “What do you see?”

  “The uterus in the midline. It looks like a pink, upside-down pear. Both ovaries, shiny, oyster-shell-coloured. Both Fallopian tubes and their fimbriated ends like little tentacles. And there’s blue dye in the pelvis.” He stepped back. That was enough.

  “Now I’ve used the probe to turn things over, push things out of my way. The findings are this. Normal uterus, healthy open tubes with no signs of scar tissue that might interfere with ovum pickup, and no evidence of endometriosis.”

  Barry had seen several cases of the condition where for unknown reasons the endometrium, the tissue that lined the uterus, had grown in islands on the peritoneum that lined the pelvis. It caused pelvic pain and infertility.

  Pat removed the probe and its cannula. Out came the scope. “Put her flat, please.”

  The table was returned to the horizontal.

  Pat held the trumpet valve open and pressed on Sue’s abdomen. “We like to get as much carbon dioxide as possible out. It has a nasty habit of combining with the peritoneal fluid and turning into carbonic acid. That’s not dangerous, but it can irritate the diaphragm, which shares its nerve supply with the shoulder tips. The patients often experience referred pain there.” He stopped pushing and removed the cannula. “Sutures, and you can start waking her up.”

  One stitch closed the secondary cannula puncture, two stitches closed the primary incision. “Thanks, everybody.” Pat nodded to Barry and headed for the door.

  Barry followed.

  In the changing room, Barry thanked his colleague, shed his operating room gear, and dressed. Pat did not. He had a full surgical list today. “She’ll be back on the ward soon, Barry. I’m sure you’d like to be there when she wakes up. I’ll send a full report to Graham. Can you take her stitches out in seven days?”

  “Yes.”

  “Save her a trip up here.”

  Barry noticed that Pat used the impersonal “she” and “her.” Typical surgeon. “I’ll do it, and thank you for letting me watch.” His smile was wry. “That way we don’t have to wait for ages to get the report.” He sighed. “But you didn’t find anything, did you?”

  Pat nodded. “No, I didn’t. I’m not a reproductive specialist like Graham, but, speaking as a gynaecologist, if all the other tests were normal?”

  “I’m afraid they were.”

  “Then you and Sue are going to have to face up to unexplained infertility, and that’s a tough one. On the other hand, if we had found damaged tubes, the pregnancy rate after surgery is only about twenty percent. We really don’t know what to do for endometriosis, and those were the main things we were looking for. With no obvious lesions, there’s probably a better statistical chance of pregnancy spontaneously happening.”

  “I know,” Barry said. “Believe me, I know, but statistics is for a group of people. For Sue it’s going to be all or nothing.” Barry remembered Sue in February in Paris reading about the first successful fertilization of a human egg in a petri dish. “Pat, you worked with Mister Patrick Steptoe and I suppose Professor Edwards. They’ve been trying in vitro fertilization. They’ve reported one success.”

  “I know. Mister Steptoe let me recover some eggs laparoscopically when I was there in Oldham. When a patient was ready to ovulate, Bob would come thundering up the one hundred and seventy-eight miles from Cambridge University. We’d take the patient to a theatre that had a small embryo laboratory attached. Mister Steptoe or I would do a laparoscopy. When an egg is ripe it will be in a fluid-filled cyst in the ovary called a follicle. We’d put a needle into the follicle and suck out the fluid. It was exciting when Bob would call from the little lab beside the theatre, ‘I’ve got an egg.’”

  “And now they have been successful in fertilizing one,” said Barry. “Do you think they’ll ever be able to get the embryos returned to the mother to implant in the uterus and go on to grow into a healthy baby?”

  Pat stroked his upper lip with the web of his hand and frowned. “Bob Edwards is an amazing enthusiast. If anybody can, he will. It could be tomorrow, but it would more likely be in five or ten years.” He sighed. “I know you want to do everything possible, but don’t pin your hopes on in vitro just yet. I do know how tough infertility can be when there are no answers. I’m sorry.”

  “No need to apologise. You did what you were asked. Thanks, Pat.” He held out his hand, which Pat shook. “Thanks again. I’ll trot off and see Sue when she gets back to the ward.” Barry let himself out. He had to prepare himself to break the news and try to help Sue with what was bound to be disappointed frustration and awful uncertainty.

  * * *

  Relatives were only allowed on the wards during visiting hours, but being a doctor had its advantages. Barry sat on the chair at the head of Sue’s bed, the curtains round which were closed. She’d been groggy when she’d been wheeled back in her bed from the recovery room. Barry had held her hand and now he was satisfied that the anaesthetic had worn off and she was awake. Her pupils were constricted because the anaesthetist would have given her 100 milligrams of pethidine for postoperative pain. “How are you feeling, love?”

  Sue grimaced. “Hello, Barry,” she said. “My throat’s a bit sore.”

  “That’s because the anaesthetist put a tube in it.”

  “I see. And I’ve an ache in my shoulders, and my belly button and right side low down are sore, but none of it’s too bad.”

  “And it’s all over.”

  “Thank goodness for that.” She looked deep into Barry’s eyes. “And what did you find?”

  Barry hesitated. “You’ve nothing wrong with your ovaries, Fallopian tubes, or uterus.” There was no easy way to tell her, but he could soften the blow. “Pat says that’s actually good news, because the kind of things we might have found are tricky to treat. I know this being in limbo is hard on you.” And, he thought, it’s hard on me watching you suffer. “We’ll get through. I know we will. I’ll be there to help you. I promise.”

  “Thank you, Barry.” It was a little voice made smaller by the tears that glistened in her eyes and began to spill over.

  “I love you, Sue,” he said, and took her in his arms, feeling her shake. Then the shaking stopped.

  “Barry, we need to talk.”

  “I’m not sure that now, when you’ve been given a strong narcotic, is the best time to try to work out what to do next.” He could remember her saying, the day her last period had started, “So, we’ll just have to bide, and I’ll try not to say any more about it until after it’s done.” They deliberately had not discussed a plan B. “They’ll discharge you tomorrow. Can you wait until then?” He moved back. Looked at her face.

  She pursed her lips, nodded. “I suppose so.”

  He kissed her forehead. “You should try to sleep now.”

  She lay back on her pillows. “I think I’d like to, but Barry, we do need to talk.”

  “Not now, pet. Wait until you’re fully awake. Please.”

  “No, Barry. Now. We need to talk about adoption. I don’t know how we’d even start. Who we’d talk to.”

  “Sue, love, this isn’t the time. You’re still groggy.” He’d been avoiding thinking deeply about adoption. He needed time to be certain of how he felt. This wasn’t like taking in Tigger, the stray kitten they’d found in the storm. “Let’s wait until we get you home.”

  “Well”—she yawned, blinked, rubbed her eyes—“maybe you’re right but, Barry, I’ve tried to be patient, but we’ve run out of options.”

  “Not really. It’s still not twenty-four months. Come on, Sue. Let’s get you over the anaesthetic, get you home. That’
ll be tomorrow. You’ve waited for months. Give it a few more hours.”

  “All right. I really am sleepy.” She closed her eyes.

  “I’ll wait until you’ve dropped off. I’ll have to go back to Ballybucklebo for a while, but I will come back and see you this evening.” He bent, dropped a gentle kiss on her closed eyelids, and sat. He hoped he’d handled that gently, given her time to come to terms a little, but the physician in him knew that the next step would be to consult with Graham, and that Sue and he soon must begin a serious conversation about how both of them felt about adoption. Her words now had left him in no doubt how she felt, and he knew she would want to get the discussion going even before their next consultation.

  Barry looked at her now relaxed face. Her worry wrinkles were gone, but so was her smile. She began to make little whiffling noises as she often did at home as sleep overtook her. He whispered, “Sleep well, my love. Sleep well,” rose softly, and tiptoed away to nurse his worries alone.

  18

  There’s No Place Like Home

  September 2, 1963

  Barry lay in one of the two bathtubs that served sixteen young men in single rooms, eight housemen, and eight medical students, in a simple wooden structure officially known as “The Huts.” The rest of the juniors, men and women, were housed in the hospital’s East Wing, which was also the location of their dining and common rooms. He could feel the warm water soothing his physical aches, speeding his cure. After three days of sponge baths, it was a luxury to lie back and soak. The deep internal ache from what he’d been sure was a death sentence could not so easily be salved. It had been like the sudden recoil of a tightly stretched rubber band against a thumb. The tension was gone but the sting remained. He knew he’d learned a valuable lesson about patients’ anxiety when facing uncertainty.

  A couple more minutes soaking, then he’d better get a move on. Mum would be showing up soon to take him home.

  A phone rang from across the corridor, then he heard the bang of a door closing, and footsteps receding on their way to the hospital. Someone had been called to duty.

  Barry got out, towelled himself dry, chucked on a dressing gown and slippers, grabbed his sponge bag, and headed for his room, whistling the Searchers hit, “Sweets for My Sweet,” off-key. He was still tired, but he’d consulted his texts and refreshed his memory on the details of mono before heading for the bath, and now knew that was to be expected. At least his temperature had returned to normal and his neck was less swollen.

  He let himself into his room and half filled a basin with hot water. The mirror’s silver backing was missing in places, so his reflected face had dark patches. Copper pipes ran up to the taps and from the plug hole down through the linoleum-covered floor. Barry shaved at speed, nicked himself, dabbed styptic pencil on the tiny wound, and flinched from the sting.

  He dressed in the clean clothes he’d laid out on the iron-framed hospital bed parked against the wall opposite the basin and beside a built-in plywood wardrobe. A wooden chair and table on which were set books and the medical texts he’d just been reading, his record player, and an easy chair with its stuffing peeping out completed the furnishings. And the Spartans thought they’d lived a simple life of hard work and sparse comforts? He smiled. Try being a houseman here in Mortuary Mansions, as it was usually known because the morgue was next door. Living with his folks would be like staying in the Grand Central Hotel.

  He fished a small suitcase out from under the bed. In went enough clothes for a week, his sponge bag, and his copy of The Sand Pebbles. He stared at the hefty book about a U.S. Navy gunboat on patrol in China just before the civil war there in 1926. He wondered if his father had read it and whether talking about the book might help the two break through the reserve they often seemed to feel in each other’s company. Commander Tom Laverty (RN retired) was typical of men of his generation. Barry had been five when he’d first met his father in 1945 and, according to his mother, had been “terrified of this strange man.”

  “Barry?” The door was opening.

  It opened fully, and Barry saw his mother, Carol Laverty, standing there, a small, neat-figured, auburn-haired woman of fifty-one who had given Barry his blue eyes. “I knocked, son. Did you not hear? Has the virus affected your hearing? We’ve been worried sick.”

  “Sorry, Mum. Just daydreaming. Come in, come in. Still a bit groggy, but I’ll live. It’s only glandular fever.” Boy, the relief in being able to say that. “I’ll be better in a few days.”

  “I should hope so. Now come on. The car’s outside. Let me get you home and coddle you. Am I allowed to hug you?”

  “Yes.”

  She did so, and looked him up and down. “Have you had lunch?” She cocked her head and said, “You’ve lost weight. You need feeding up.”

  * * *

  Barry dumped his suitcase on the single bed in his old bedroom on the first floor of the four-storey 1890 terrace house on Ballyholme’s Esplanade. He looked out his sash window over the creeper-covered walls round the back garden. Mum loved pottering about there, tending to her flowers and vegetable patch.

  The walls of his room were adorned with two triangular pennants, souvenirs of the times his dad had taken a much younger Barry out to visit HMS King George V, a fourteen-inch gun battleship, and HMS Illustrious, an aircraft carrier, when the huge ships were anchored in Belfast Lough near Bangor. Framed photos of his final-year classes at Bangor Grammar School and Campbell College kept company with his graduating class from Queen’s. Barry stood beside his pal Jack Mills in the last two.

  A framed copy of Kipling’s “If” hung above the bedhead. He knew the poem by heart. Dad had given it to Barry the night before he went off, a scared thirteen-year-old, to boarding school for the first time. “It’s a good code to live by,” Dad had said. Barry pursed his lips as he read the first line: “If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs.” He’d certainly lost his head last weekend. Dad would not have approved. He could be less than sympathetic on occasions.

  Barry glanced at the other wall. A chest-high bookshelf was stacked with old favourites like The Wind in the Willows, The Jungle Book, Treasure Island, The Gorilla Hunters, Kidnapped, and the five volumes of the original Horatio Hornblower series. Those books of his childhood sat beside several leather-bound volumes of his dad’s pre–World War I Boys Own Paper, the Empire-promoting monthly magazine. The magazines had helped shape his father’s late-Victorian attitudes and expectations embodied in Kipling’s poem, some of which Barry had not always been able to attain.

  On top of the bookshelf was his first model ship, a simple, three-masted square-rigger that Dad had helped him build and then put into an empty whiskey bottle. His split-cane fly rod, unused for the last six years, was propped in a corner beside his creel and net. He smiled. It was comforting to be back again, and yet he realized with a pang how much of his young self he had left behind here.

  He put his clothes away and trotted upstairs to the sitting room on the second floor, where he parked himself in an armchair. He’d pictured this view of Ballyholme Bay and beach from his hospital bed, drawing strength from its beauty and familiarity. The tide was out at slack ebb. Ranks of groynes, low, barnacle-encrusted walls, descended like a series of narrow steps at a thirty-degree angle from the high-water mark to the water’s edge. They were there to prevent erosion of the sand by the tides. Two green-painted diving boards with coir matting on their flat tops stood at the water’s edge. In the summer the beach was a popular place for swimming, although becoming less so as air travel and package holidays tempted more and more Ulster folk to Spain’s Costa Brava. Now, on a Monday in early September, there were few holidaymakers.

  He looked out to Ballyholme Bay to see a forest of masts close to the left-hand shore—the larger yachts of the Ballyholme and Royal Ulster yacht clubs. Across Belfast Lough, the hills of Antrim bulked large against an azure sky. And past the village of Whitehead to his right, away in the distance and blue in the hea
t haze, was the Mull of Galloway in Scotland.

  He heard Mum come in. “There you are,” she said. “I’ve brought your lunch.” She set a tray on a sideboard, went to a settee, lifted a tartan rug, and tucked it round his knees. “Can’t have you getting a chill.”

  “Thanks, Mum.”

  She put the tray on his lap. “It’s my own pea and ham soup. It’s nourishing, and it’s hot, so don’t burn yourself.” She tucked a napkin under his collar. “And I’ve made you an egg salad sandwich, your favourite, with a treat for dessert.”

  With fondness Barry thought, I’m still a little boy in her eyes. The wisps of steam from the soup bore its scents of ham, cloves, and onion upward.

  Mum sat on a chair opposite. His framed graduation portrait taken this July outside the redbrick façade of Queen’s University stood on a low table beside her. It was one of her most treasured possessions. She looked concerned. “So, you told me in the car you were on the mend. Are you sure?”

  Barry nodded. “I’m sure, Mum.” He thought they had discussed his illness enough on the drive here. He had deliberately refrained from mentioning how he was still coping with the quantum leap from the anguish of being convinced he was dying to the surge of relief after realising that he was not. As he started to eat his soup and sandwich he realised that, apart from Jack and perhaps Jan Peters, no one had any inkling of what he had put himself through. Dad was definitely one of the “stiff upper lip” fraternity, but Mum was someone in whom Barry had always been able to confide his worst fears. And he wanted to now.

  “All right, I promise I won’t ask again.” She smiled. “Now, son, finish your soup while it’s hot.”

  He did as he was told, then put down his spoon and sat back. “Mum,” he said, “you asked if I was sure if I was on the mend, and I certainly am from mononucleosis, but,” he hesitated, “I gave myself an awful scare.”