A Dublin Student Doctor (49 page)

You oily bastard.

“One last question, Mister Fitzpatrick, before we let you go, and you have done extremely well—”

I hope, Fingal thought, you’ll enjoy polishing your medal. Will you sleep with it pinned to your pyjamas?

“You did examine the patient thoroughly, didn’t you? It is very important.”

“Naturally, sir.”

“You didn’t just focus on the obvious thyroid disorder?”

“No, sir. Apart from it and the facial scar the patient is absolutely healthy. Absolutely. I am positive.”

Fingal leant over closer to the screens. He’d seen the man six months ago and didn’t want to miss what he hoped was coming next.

“Will you please turn down the bedclothes?”

Fingal held his breath and heard a rustling from next door followed by a sharp indrawing of breath and a muttered, “Oh my God.”

“So if the patient is, I believe you said, ‘absolutely healthy,’ how do you account for the fact that his left leg has been amputated below the knee? He got the obvious facial scar then too. I’m sure if you’d not neglected to take the history of how he got it, you would have been alerted to his other war wounds. After a Somme battle in ’16, I believe.”

“Leuze Wood, September fifth, Royal Dublin Fusiliers, sir,” Mister Gourley said.

Fitzpatrick, I could feel sorry even for you.

“Mister Fitzpatrick, I must conclude that in your desire to amaze us with your erudition about the thyroid you neglected to take a comprehensive history of his other conditions or examine the man thoroughly. Ambition, wanting to shine is natural. Trying to bluff is not, particularly when you get caught out in,” he coughed, “a terminal inexactitude.”

“I’m very sorry, sir.”

Fingal could imagine Fitzpatrick bowing his head and wringing his hands. It was impossible to know exactly how the man must be feeling having just, euphemistically or not, been called a liar, but Fingal cringed for him.

“You should be. Now, Doctor Lyndon, do you have any more questions?”

“None.”

“In that case you may go, young man.”

Fingal heard the screens being pulled back, hurried footsteps growing fainter.

One voice said, “Pity about that chap,” and the second voice said, “I don’t think we’ll have that kind of trouble with the next candidate, O’Reilly. He made Sister swap cases because he’d seen the thyroid in outpatients and didn’t want an unfair advantage.”

“Admirable. And if he hadn’t, Fitzpatrick would have had a different case to examine and we might not have found out about him.”

“Ah,” said the second voice, “the Lord moves in a mysterious way. Now let’s go and find out what O’Reilly has for us. He had to turn down a trial for Ireland last year, you know.”

48

If You Can Meet with Success and Failure

“No thanks, Bob,” Fingal shouted. “One pint’s enough for me until after the results.” The four friends were in Davy Byrnes and could barely hear each other over the other loud voices. Nearly every student who had taken Finals, along with two or three supporters for some of them, were crammed into the pub. Tobacco clouds blued the air. The smell of Guinness was overpowering.

A clock above the bar said five o’clock. At this precise moment the dean would be calling the examiners’ meeting to order. Fingal shivered. He could imagine how an accused felon must feel as the “twelve good men and true” headed for the jury room to reach their verdict.

He’d arrived at Byrnes at four thirty after his last oral exam to find that Bob, Charlie, and Cromie had been there for an hour. As promised, Diarmud had set aside a corner table for four of his favoured regulars. Just as well, because it was standing room only and Cromie was swaying in his chair. “Don’t give Cromie any more,” Fingal said into Bob’s ear as he headed for the bar.

“Tapeworms,” Cromie said, “bloody tapeworms. How do you treat tapeworms? Last question on my medical oral. I’m as sunk as the
Lusitania
.” He swallowed a mouthful of stout. “Who the hell would bother to read about tapeworms? Nasty bloody parasites. And where’s Virginia? She said she’d be here at quarter to five. Jesus, how do you treat bloody tapeworms?” Cromie shook his head.

Extract of male fern, Fingal thought, eight millilitres by mouth or, because it tastes so foul, fifteen millilitres given by duodenal tube. But he refrained from telling his friend.

Fingal’s own concern was whether his answers in the oral about the diagnosis of diabetes had been good enough. The oral counted for sixteen percent of the marks in medicine. He tried to comfort himself that the clinical part of the exam—and he was sure he’d been all right with the case of mitral stenosis—counted for fifty percent.

All around him faces were creased in forced gaiety, worry lines round every eye. A man with a pint in one hand gnawed on a fingernail of the other.

Snatches heard above the tumult.

“Don’t worry, Alfie. You’ll be fine.”

“I’m scuppered, so to hell with it, give me two gins. Both for me.”

Fingal glanced at the door. No sign of Virginia or Kitty. Maybe she’d changed her mind and wasn’t coming. He stuck his pipe in his mouth but couldn’t be bothered to light it. He didn’t want a drink, or a smoke. He wanted the waiting to be over.

Bob came back with a whiskey for himself and a pint for Charlie. “The condemned man had a hearty last jar,” he said.
“Sláinte.”

“Cheers.” Charlie lifted his new pint and sipped. “I dunno,” he said, “but it tastes bitter today.”

“Mine doesn’t,” Cromie said, “because you didn’t get me one.”

“Later, Cromie,” Bob said. “After the results. Diarmud has a magnum of champagne on ice for us.”

“People who don’t know about bloody tapeworms don’t get to drink champagne,” Cromie said.

“Pity,” said Bob, “it’s a Dom Pérignon and probably the last I’ll be able to afford if I’ve passed. Auntie’s two hundred quid a year goes by the board once I stop being, and I quote, ‘a student of medicine.’”

Fingal frowned. “Bob, exactly what does the bequest say?”

“‘As long as he remains a student of medicine,’ and damn you three. You’ve got me nearly as worried as you. I want to qualify and when I do, it’s”—He sang off-key—“Lost and gone forever…”

Cromie and Charlie, heads together like a couple of music hall song-and-dance men, added in close harmony, “Dreadful sorry, Clementine.”

Fingal paused and looked at the clock. “I can’t sit here any longer.” He finished his pint and stood. “Come on, drink up.”

“But Virginia’s not here,” Cromie moaned.

“She’ll know where to find you. Come on, you bowsey.” He helped Cromie to his feet.

“I am not a drunkard,” Cromie said primly. He swayed, righted himself like a yacht coming out of a stiff blow, and blinked. “I enjoy a jar or two, I just don’t seem to have much of a—” He staggered and flopped onto a chair. “—head for alcohol.”

Cromie did know his limit and it wasn’t much, thought Fingal, but he would let his hair down on special occasions like New Year’s Eve or, Lord help us, if he’s passed the exam tonight.

Bob and Charlie stood and put empty glasses on the table. “God,” said Bob, “all we need is some subaltern blowing a whistle.”

“What are you on about, Beresford?” Charlie asked.

“I’m old enough to remember Pathé newsreels of troops in the trenches going over the top. There was always some poor lieutenant with a whistle. I know how the squaddies must have felt. Waiting, waiting, then H-hour and, ‘Sweet Jesus, this is it.’”

Soldiers like Paddy Keogh with his amputated arm, and Fitzpatrick’s medical exam case, Oliver Gourey, with his missing leg. “I hear you, Bob,” Fingal said, “but we don’t have to cross no-man’s-land, just walk along Duke and Dawson Streets to Trinity. And try to keep our spirits up.” Fingal hoped the news would not be, for any of them, as brutal as a storm of enemy fire.

*   *   *

Fingal stood in the quadrangle with his friends, part of an expectant crowd in a semicircle in front of a doorway under a mackerel sky. His old shipmates believed those soft clouds foretold a shift in the weather. There certainly was going to be change in a lot of young peoples’ lives tonight.

He scanned the faces, familiar after five years of classes together. Fitzpatrick was over at the far side, looking, as Fingal had once heard a depressed patient described, like a constipated greyhound. Hilda was in the front row.

The sounds of conversation were overpowered by the rumbling of traffic on College Street, but Fingal heard running feet, saw two women approaching.

“I’m sorry we’re late, Cromie,” Virginia Treanor said. She was panting. “We missed a tram, looked for you in the pub, and had to run to get here.”

“Hello, Fingal,” Kitty said. “We came to bring you four lads luck.”

Not, “I came to bring you luck, Fingal.” “Hello, Kitty,” he said, “that was very—”

He got no further because there was a swell of gasps and mutterings of, “He’s here.”

From a door had appeared, resplendent in his dark red robe with its scarlet facing and matching hood, the professor of bacteriology and preventive medicine and recently appointed Dean of the School of Physic of Trinity College Dublin, Joseph Warwick Bigger. His nose was large for his square face and he wore round-rimmed spectacles. He was a man of medium height and towering academic reputation. He carried a scroll.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” he barely had to raise his voice, “after due deliberation the board of examiners for the Finals Part Two examinations for June 1936 has instructed me to publish the following list of successful and unsuccessful candidates.” He held the opened scroll at eye level and adjusted his spectacles.

Fingal closed his eyes.

“Aherne P. F., pass. Beresford R. St. J., pass.”

It was customary not to applaud, but Fingal opened his eyes and gave his friend a massive thumbs-up. Bob Beresford, the man who had been a “chronic” for seven years before he buckled down, looked as stunned as a cow looking over a whitewashed wall.

“Brady J. H., fail.”

There was a communal indrawing of breath. Fingal shook his head. Poor Jim Brady from Carrickaboy, County Cavan, was this year’s “How the hell did
he
fail?” unlucky one. Or one of this year’s unlucky ones. The list had a long way to go and the
O
s came so very late.

“Cromie D., pass with distinction in orthopaedic surgery—”

Fingal heard Virginia’s delighted cry, saw her giving Cromie a massive hug.

“Fitzpatrick R. H., pass. Graham W., fail—”

Pass for Fitzpatrick, but no medal. The dean would have specified as he had with Cromie’s distinction. Fingal could feel relief for Ronald Hercules’s pass and take satisfaction knowing that the man had been deprived, no, had disqualified himself from medal consideration. “Poetic justice, with her lifted scale.” Fingal frowned. He’d have to ask Father who had written that.

Charlie turned and grinned at Fingal, who returned the smile.

The dean read on and Fingal nodded with each “pass,” and flinched with every “fail.”

“Manwell H. A., pass—with gold medal in medicine.”

There was loud applause, tradition bedamned. Everyone liked Hilda and obviously rejoiced in her success. Fingal looked at her, a good-natured short woman wearing what must be a special dress for the occasion and an out-of-date cloche hat. She was blushing, grinning, accepting handshakes and pats on the back, and probably oblivious to the tears coursing down her cheeks.

Well done, Hilda. There’s the answer to Fitzpatrick’s haughty, “I don’t mind working with a woman,” on their first day at Sir Patrick Dun’s, Fingal thought, then paid closer attention. There were two
N
s, the Nolan twins who both passed, Billy O’Donahue, who didn’t, and finally,

“O’Reilly F. F.—”

In cases of lockjaw, every muscle in the patient’s body contracted. Fingal’s were so tense he could barely breathe.

“Pass. O’Rourke—”

Pass. Mother of God. Pass. Fingal swayed, clutched his hands together. Pass. He exhaled. Round him were no shapes, only blurred colours, one running into another like the tones of a Paul Klee painting. He felt hands thumping his back, heard the slurred voice of Cromie saying, “Welcome to, to the medical profession, Doctor Fingal Flahertie O’Reilly—you oul’ bollix,” then sensed a gentle musk and a familiar voice saying, “Congratulations, Fingal.”

His world righted itself. The dean had vanished, the crowd was breaking up.

“I believe,” Cromie said, “Doctor Beresford, that you have in a certain nearby emporium of drink and strong liquors a magnum of icèd bubbles awaiting your good self and Doctors Greer, Cromie, and O’Reilly.”

“You are off your face, Doctor Cromie, but come on, everybody,” Bob said, and led the way.

Cromie, who, as Bob had noted, was not altogether sober, put his arm round Virginia’s waist. Charlie flanked Cromie, in case petite Virginia wasn’t strong enough to support her boyfriend if he teetered.

“Would you like to come too, Kitty? We’re going to Davy Byrnes.” She’d let her hair grow and no longer had those ridiculous waves. More like the old Kitty. For the first time he noticed silver streaks in the ebony. They complemented the amber flecks in her grey eyes.

“Yes, please.” She moved beside him, her perfume stronger and filling his senses. “I’m very proud of you,” she said. “How does it feel?”

“I’m numb right now. It’s like—like—” Fingal groped for words. “They said in the war that some wounded soldiers didn’t feel the pain for hours. I think it’s going to take a while to sink in,” he said, starting to walk. He wanted to reach for her hand, but he hadn’t earned the right to hold it. Not yet. He wanted to ask what had happened to the proposal of marriage, tell her how happy he was to see her, sound her out, see if she’d give him another chance, but perhaps she was feeling reticent too? He glanced at her face, tried to gauge her mood, but her quiet smile told him nothing.

“Fingal, this is your evening, yours and the boys’. Let’s enjoy it.”

And shelve serious discussion until later. That’s what you’re saying, Kitty, isn’t it? But at least she’s not closing any doors. He didn’t want to leave matters completely unspoken. “All right,” he said, and moved closer to her, “but we do have things to talk about.”