An Irish Doctor in Love and at Sea (15 page)

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Three hours later they had made their way from the museum along a maze of narrow, cobbled lanes to a small waterside café, El Crajeco Loco, The Crazy Crab. The restaurant was on the ground floor in a row of four- and five-storey buildings with stucco fronts in pastel shades of blue and orange. Pink-framed bay windows alternated with wrought-iron-railinged balconies. Two women called to each other across a gap between first-floor balconies. O'Reilly wondered if they were speaking Catalan, but their high-pitched tones reminded him more of the bickering gulls.

He found a table on the terrace under an awning, immediately behind a low railing with a view over a broad, palm-tree-lined path where people strolled. The promenade separated the restaurant from a marina. The shiny white yachts of the wealthy were crammed side by side, masts jostling for space and reaching skyward. Columbus's Pillar was visible in the middle distance.

A white-aproned waiter, black hair oiled and neatly parted, white towel over one arm, stood patiently beside their table.

“Beer, Fingal?” Kitty asked.

“Please.” Although the museum had been cool, the walk here had been in dappled sunlight through airless alleys and he was hot and not a little sweaty.

“Una cerveza grande, una copa de vino blanco, y tres menús, por favor.”

“Sí, señora.”
The waiter left.

“Once she gets here, I'll let Consuela handle the Spanish,” said Kitty, “but for now mine's good enough to get by.” She smiled at him. “I'm afraid I didn't know how to say on your behalf, ‘My tongue's hanging out for a jar, so it is,' but I guessed by the look on your face it was how you were feeling.”

“And you were right,” he said, and laughed.

Kitty was sitting so she could watch pedestrians approach the café, and her eyes were intent on the passing parade.

“Did you enjoy the exhibition?” He wanted to keep her talking, in part to ease his own discomfort. How was he going to feel meeting the daughter of a man Kitty had once loved so deeply?

“Marvellous,” she said. “We've all got so captivated by his modern works we've forgotten what a superb traditional craftsman Picasso was in his early years.”

“I really like his
Man with Beret
,” O'Reilly said, “and
Ciència i Caritat
with the doctor taking the sick woman's pulse is exactly how I have imagined my nineteenth-century predecessors at work. But the
Portrait of James Sabartés with Hat and Ruff
?” He shrugged and held out his hands, palms up. “I'm no connoisseur but it looked to me like a picture of James Joyce after a very long night at Davy Byrnes pub.”

“Philistine,” she said, but her smile was warm. “I think what Picasso was trying to capture—”

The waiter appeared, setting a large, frosted glass of pale beer in front of O'Reilly and a glass of white wine for Kitty.
“Los menús
.
”
He handed O'Reilly three cardboard folders.

“Muy agradecido. Muchas gracias,”
Kitty said.

“De nada.”
He smiled and left.

“Cheers,” O'Reilly said, raising his glass and drinking. The beer was chilled and pleasantly bitter. He set the menus on the table and opened one. “I'll need help with these,” he said.

But Kitty was rising and he automatically followed suit. A young woman stood outside the railings, smiling broadly and saying,
“Buenos tardes, Tia Kitty. Bienvenidos a Barcelona.”

“Tia Kitty.” Aunt Kitty. When she'd first told him what Consuela had called her as a little girl, O'Reilly had felt insecure and jealous. But now it seemed natural.

“Consuela,” Kitty said, leaning over the balustrade and holding the young woman by both shoulders. “Consuela. Let me look at you.”

O'Reilly looked too. She seemed younger than her thirty-two years. Long dark hair hung to the small of her back. Her face was tanned and her ebony eyes were slightly slanted above high cheekbones, full lips. A short-sleeved white blouse was tucked inside a narrow leather belt supporting a mid-thigh denim skirt. Very chic, he thought.

“You're beautiful,” Kitty said, “and you still have your father's eyes…”

He listened but heard no trace of regret in Kitty's voice.

“But then you always were a pretty child.”

Consuela lowered her head then said, “Thank you, and you haven't changed either from what I remember.” Her English, though accented, seemed fluent.

“Rubbish,” Kitty said, and laughed. “Now come around and meet Fingal, my husband.”

As Consuela walked to a gate in the railing, Kitty said to him, “Oh, Fingal, she is quite, quite lovely.” Now there was the slightest catch. “She was seven the last time I saw her, all spindly arms and legs. Hair in bunches. I used to brush it for her and sing to her.”

And the longing he heard, was it for lost love, lost youth, or for the children of her own Kitty had never borne and never would?

“Here,” Kitty said as O'Reilly pulled out a wicker chair. “Please have a seat.”

All three sat.

“This is Fingal. I told you about him in my letter,” Kitty said. “We've been married for more than a year, but we first knew each other not long before you were born.”

“I'm very pleased to meet you, sir.”

Consuela offered a hand, which O'Reilly took and turned, lowering his lips to within an inch of its back, in the European fashion. “Can we offer you a drink?” he asked.

“Please. A glass of red wine.”

O'Reilly gestured to the waiter and said,
“Una copa de vino tinto, por favor.”

Kitty's eyes widened.

Consuela's left eyebrow rose. “You speak Spanish, Doctor O'Reilly?”

He shook his head. “Divil the bit, but I memorised a few critical phrases like that, and like,
‘Dos cervezas grandes y dos más,'
in case of great thirst. And it's Fingal, by the way.”

“Fingal,” Kitty said, “you really are incorrigible.”

Consuela laughed and said, “I think, Tia Kitty, I'm going to like your Fingal.”

“I hope so,” said Kitty. “I'm really quite fond of him.”

All three laughed.

The ice certainly has been broken, and so far painlessly, O'Reilly thought.

Then Kitty said, “Your letter back in July came as quite a shock. I was so sorry to hear about Mañ—your father.”

Was she being sensitive to my or Consuela's feelings by not using the man's Christian name? he wondered.

“Poor Papá. I miss him very much,” Consuela said. “It was hard, so hard, to watch. He was in hospital, on oxygen, his remaining lung couldn't cope. There was nothing the doctors could do.”

O'Reilly shivered despite the heat. He'd seen enough patients die of oxygen lack, slowly suffocating, gasping for breath, knowing they were dying. He remembered a young man called Kevin Doherty with congestive heart failure in Sir Patrick Dun's Hospital in Dublin and glanced at Kitty. As a nurse she knew too. He watched her stretch out her hand, cover Consuela's. It needed to be their moment.

“I was his only blood family apart from a brother and some nephews and nieces in Argentina. My husband José was at home with our daughter Josélita.”

“I remember your grandparents in Tenerife. They were kind to me,” Kitty said.

“They're both gone,” Consuela said. “I was with him at the end.” Her lustrous dark eyes fixed on Kitty's grey ones. “Shall I tell you?”

Kitty glanced at O'Reilly.

He nodded at Consuela. Go ahead, but thank you for asking my permission, considering my feelings, guessing how I might feel if Kitty bursts into tears. He gripped his chair with one hand, and the other reached out briefly to touch Kitty's waist, to let her know that he was there.

“He was struggling to breathe. He managed to squeeze my hand, whisper that he loved me.” She stared at the table. “He said, ‘Please write to Tia Kitty.'” She glanced at O'Reilly. “‘Tell her…'”

She looked into his eyes and he nodded. “‘Tell her I still love her. I always have,' and then he drifted off to sleep. He died in his sleep that night. I think his last moments were comfortable, he was glad to go.” Tears glistened on her cheeks.

Kitty, whose own eyes were damp, leant across and hugged the young woman, stroked her hair and murmured, “It's all right. It's all right.”

And O'Reilly leant forward in his chair, elbows on the tabletop now, fingers steepled, chin on fingers. He felt himself withdraw slightly, to leave space for the two women who, both in their own way, had loved a man. One had lost a father so recently and had a daughter's grief. The other had lost the man she loved thirty years before and, because of a recent letter, had been forced to lose him for a second time. Yes, losing him again was the correct way to think of it, O'Reilly knew, because he was certain Kitty still held a corner of her heart for this man, and that there it would beat “Mañuel” forever, just as a corner of his still held the deep imprint of Deirdre. Was he jealous? Did he feel hurt, wounded? How could he? He knew Kitty loved him, but she had needed to hear what she had just been told. Did he hurt for Kitty and Consuela's loss? How could he not?

As the two women held each other, he waved the red-wine-bearing waiter away and gave them the personal privacy they needed to share the moment. And inside himself, deep inside, he hoped, no damn it, he knew that Lars had been right to advise this meeting and that Kitty, Tia Kitty, at last had laid her ghost to rest beside a gentle sea beneath a warm Catalonian sky.

 

10

What Is the Answer?

“Nearly finished. Closing,” Surgeon Commander Fraser said as he started suturing the skin. “Ugly green brutes, gallbladders,” he muttered to no one in particular. “That one's better out than in.”

Fingal let his attention stray from the patient and his surgeon for a moment to look at the time. With only one more case to do, the list would certainly be finished early enough for him to keep his appointment with Surgeon Rear Admiral Creaser.

“Right,” said Angus Mahaddie, who was sitting beside Fingal. “I held your hand all day yesterday and for today's first two cases. I've shown you how to give intravenous pentothal, insert an endotracheal tube, and connect it to the Boyle's machine. I've pointed out the valves to operate, gasses to use, and how to tell if the anaesthetic is too shallow or too deep. I've hung back, not said a word to you about how you've been managing this case. Let me see you wake him up without my help, and if you manage that smoothly you'll, in RAF parlance, have ‘gone solo,' and be well on your way to becoming a useful anaesthetist.”

Fingal swallowed, but admitted to himself that with the Scotsman's careful guidance he was feeling more comfortable and more confident when he administered an anaesthetic. He was proud of his achievement. He looked at his gear. Clamped to the sides of a trolley were cylinders for oxygen and the anaesthetic gases, all of which he could now identify and turn on and off and regulate their rate of delivery to the patient. Pipes from the cylinders led through flow meters and through a device for vaporising and mixing the gasses. Next a mechanical bellows delivered the nitrous oxide, oxygen, and ether mixture through one of a pair of black corrugated rubber hoses connected to a Magill tube in the patient's trachea. The other hose removed carbon dioxide and the gasses as the patient exhaled.

He reduced the flow of nitrous oxide and ether and gradually opened more widely the one supplying oxygen so the level of anaesthesia would be less deep before he actually woke the patient up. In very short order the man began to move as he should—much to Fingal's relief.

“Christ,” said the surgeon, “keep him still. I haven't finished suturing yet, O'Reilly, and when you do bring him round, I don't want him coughing and ripping out my stitches because of your ham-fisted anaesthetic.”

Fingal inhaled through his nose but, saying nothing, reopened the gas valves. The patient lay still. There was no thank you. Already Fingal had decided that the acerbic surgeon commander was the antithesis of the helpful and good-humoured Angus Mahaddie.

A few minutes later, “Now I'm finished,” the surgeon commander said. “Do try to get him awake quickly, O'Reilly. We don't have all day before the next patient.” Fraser turned from the table and ripped off his rubber gloves. “Come on, Sister,” he yelled at the circulating nurse. “Stop daydreaming. Get my gown off.” He started dictating his operative notes to a clearly nervous young VAD clerk. “… external oblique fascia. Are you sure you can spell that, girl?”

The masked QARNNS sister who had been handling the instruments caught Fingal's eye and raised her own to the heavens as if to say, bloody prima donna surgeons. In 1937 in the Rotunda Hospital the look of two shining eyes above a surgical mask had led him to ask a certain midwife, Deirdre Mawhinney, for a date. He smiled at the memory of those eyes.

Angus said quietly, “You're doing fine, laddie. Now what should you do?”

“Shut off the gasses and ventilate lungs with carbon dioxide and oxygen.” Fingal spun the knurled wheels. “And give 5cc of coramine intravenously, sir, and get him extubated.” Fingal gave the injection.

As the patient's eyelids fluttered, Fingal withdrew the endotracheal tube and held a rubber mask over the man's nose and mouth.

“Well done, and now—”

Outside, the air raid sirens howled into rising and falling life, giving advance warning of incoming bombers somewhere in their vicinity. The police sounded the sirens for one minute when a red alert was given, meaning the planes were twelve minutes away. Thank God for radar and the system of plotting the tracks of enemy aircraft. It gave the defending air force and the potential victims of the bombing enough time to react. The racket did not mean Gosport would be the target, but precautions would already be under way, because the hospital would have been informed by telephone on the yellow alert—planes twenty-two minutes away. That would be eighty-eight miles for a squadron cruising at 240 miles per hour.