The Copper Beech (17 page)

In Shancarrig they only knew him as Dr Blake for about six weeks. Then they all started to call him Dr Jims. It had to do with Maisie, of course. Maisie who couldn’t pronounce any name properly, not even one as ordinary as James. She had been asked to call Dr James to the telephone and in front of the whole waiting room she had said that Dr Jims was wanted. Somehow, the name had stuck. James Blake was too young a man to be given a full title, not while the great Dr Nolan held sway in Shancarrig.

Jims Blake got very accustomed to people asking for the real doctor when they came to The Terrace, and if a call came in the night which Dr Jims answered, the gravest doubts were expressed. He learned to say that he was only holding the fort for the real doctor, and Dr Nolan would be along at a more convenient hour to give his approval.

But it was a good partnership – the wise old man who knew all the secrets of Shancarrig and the thin eager young man, son of a small farmer out the country. The old man who drank more brandy at night than was good for him and the young man who stayed up late reading the journals and reports … they lived together peaceably. They had Maisie doting on both of them and resenting the fact that people kept getting sick and needing to disturb the two men in her life, the great Dr Nolan and poor young Dr Jims.

Dr Nolan was always saying that Jims Blake should find a wife for himself and Maisie was always saying that there was plenty of time.

Matters came to a head in 1940 when Dr Nolan was seventy and Dr Jims was thirty. It had been a busy time. There was a baby to be delivered in almost every house around them. A little girl Leonora up at The Glen, a first daughter to the Ryans at the hotel, another Dunne to the cottages, a son for the wife of wild Ted Barton, another Brennan to add to Paudie’s brood.

Dr Jims would come back tired to the big house in The Terrace – the tall house, one of a line facing the hotel. It formed the centre of the town in a triangle with the row of shops. The bus stopped nearby and the movement of Shancarrig could be charted from any of the windows. Dr Jims’ work took him to the far outlying districts as well, but the centre of life remained this small area around the place where he lived.

Even though it was comfortable there were ways in which it was not a real life. Dr Nolan was able to put it into words. ‘I’m not going to let you make the same mistake as I did,’ the old man said. ‘A doctor needs a wife, really and truly. I had my chances and my choices in the old days, like you do now. But I was both too set and too easy in my ways. I didn’t want to disrupt everything by bringing a woman in. I didn’t really need a woman, I thought.’

‘And you didn’t either,’ Dr Jims encouraged him. ‘Didn’t you have a full life … where was there room for a wife? I’ve seen too many doctors’ wives neglected, left out … maybe the medical profession should take a vow of celibacy, like the clerics. It might be something we could bring up at the Irish Medical Association.’

‘Don’t make a jeer out of it, Jims. I’m serious.’

‘So am I. How could I marry? Where would I get the
stake for a house? I still send a bit home to the farm. You know that. I have to be averting my eyes for a bit, in case I think I might want a wife.’

‘And who are you averting them from?’ The old man drank his brandy, looking deep into the glass and not at his partner.

‘Not anybody in particular.’

‘But Frances Fitzgerald, maybe?’

‘Ah, come on out of that. What could I offer Frances Fitzgerald?’

But Jims Blake knew that the old man had seen through him. He most desperately wanted to advance things with Frances, to go further than the games of tennis with other people present, the card evenings at The Glen or in Ryan’s Hotel.

He’d hoped it hadn’t been as transparent to other people.

Yet again Dr Nolan seemed to read his mind.

‘Nobody would know but myself,’ he said reassuringly. ‘And you could offer her half a house here.’

‘It’s your house.’

‘I won’t be here for ever. It’s taking more of this stuff to ease the pain in my gut.’ He raised his brandy glass to show what he was referring to.

‘The pain in your gut would be less if you had less of that stuff.’

‘So you say, with the arrogance of youth … We’ll get the top two floors done up for you. The Dunnes can come in on Monday and lean on their picks and shovels and we’ll see what they can do. Frances will want her own kitchen … she won’t want Maisie traipsing around after her.’

‘Charles, I can’t … we don’t even know if Frances is interested …’

‘We do,’ said Dr Nolan.

Jims Blake didn’t even wait to let that sink in.

‘But I can’t afford …’ he began.

Charles Nolan’s face winced with pain and anger. ‘Stop being such a defeatist, such a sniveller … I can’t this, I can’t that … Is that how you made yourself a doctor …?’

His face was red now proving his point.

‘Listen here to me, Jims Blake, why do you think I took you on here? Think about it. It wasn’t for your great moneyed connections and class. No. I took you on because you were a fighter, and a dogged little fellow. I liked your thin white face and your determination. I liked the way you forced them to let you study, and took jobs to make up the extra money that they couldn’t give you. That’s what people need in a doctor – someone who won’t quit.’

‘I could pay you so much a month for it, I suppose. I could take on more of the work.’

‘Boy, aren’t you doing almost all the work already. I’m only giving you what’s fair …’

And it was settled like that. Dr Jims was to have the upstairs part of the house. Everyone said it was very sensible. After all, Dr Nolan wasn’t getting any younger. Wasn’t it sensible that a bedroom be built for him on the ground floor?

Maisie sniffed a bit, especially since it became known that Dr Jims was now courting Miss Fitzgerald.

The Dunne brothers were in regularly, wondering should the kitchen be facing the front or the back of the house. It might be good to have it looking out on the town. There was a nice view of Shancarrig from upstairs in The Terrace. But then, traditionally a kitchen was at the back. They puzzled at it.

Before they came to any solution their work was rendered unnecessary. Dr Charles Nolan died of the liver complaint he had been ignoring for some years, and he willed his house to his partner Dr Blake.

Before he died he spoke of it to Jims. ‘You’re a good lad. You’ll keep it all going fine here, if only you’d learn to …’

‘You’ve got years yet. Stop making a farewell speech,’ Jims Blake said to the dying man.

‘What I was
going
to say, if only you’d learn that there are people, myself included, who are quite glad to be coming to the end of their lives, who don’t
want
to be told that there are years of pain and confusion ahead of them …’

Jims held his partner’s hand – it was a simple gesture of solidarity where no words would have worked.

‘That’s more like it,’ said Dr Nolan. ‘Now, will you promise me to have a family and a real life for yourself? Don’t be forced to leave this place to some whippersnapper of a junior partner, like I am!’

‘You can’t leave it all to me …’ He was aghast.

‘I was hoping to leave it to Frances as well. Tell me you’ve made some move in that direction …’

‘Yes. We were hoping to marry …’ His voice choked, realising that his benefactor wouldn’t now be at the wedding.

‘That’s good, very good. I’m tired now. Get me into hospital tomorrow, Jims. I don’t want to die in the house where she’s coming as a bride.’

‘It’s your house. Die wherever you want to,’ Jims blazed at him.

The old man smiled. ‘I like to hear you talk that way. And where I would like to die is the hospital. Tell that young Father Gunn to come up there to me, not to be
upsetting Maisie by coming here. And move that brandy bottle back to my reach.’

It didn’t take Shancarrig long to recognise Dr Jims as the real doctor. Everything had changed. There was no old Dr Nolan any more to know their secrets so they told them to Dr Jims instead. He was a married man now, of course, and his wife a very gentle person – one of the Fitzgeralds who owned a big milling business.

It had been a good match – that’s what outsiders thought. But they only knew the surface. They didn’t know about passion and love and understanding. Frances, with her gentle solemn face transformed so often with a quick smile that lit up her whole being, was a wife that he never dreamed possible.

She would creep up behind him and lock her arms around his neck. She would feed him pieces of food from her plate when Maisie wasn’t looking. When he was called out at night Frances sometimes left a note on his pillow saying, ‘Wake me up. I want to welcome you home properly.’ In every way she made him grow in confidence. Jims Blake walked with a lighter step and a smile in his eyes.

The fact that Dr Nolan had left him the house made Dr Jims even more respected in the community. If the old doctor had thought so much of him then this must be a good man. Sometimes Jims Blake felt unworthy of all the respect he got in Shancarrig.

When he visited his dour family on their small bleak farm and saw the lifestyle that he would have been condemned to had he not fought so hard to study medicine, he felt guilty. He was saddened that they had so little, and even the money he gave them was stored under a mattress,
not used to buy his mother and father a better standard of life.

He had tried to explain this guilt to Frances but she calmed him down. He had done everything he could for the family. Surely that was as much as anyone was expected to do – he couldn’t do any more.

Frances said that
they
were a family now she and Jims and the baby they were expecting. There was no tie that bound them to the bleak family of Blakes in the small wet farm, or the distant, undemonstrative Fitzgeralds wrapped up in their business affairs. They were a little unit in themselves.

And so it was for a while.

Jims often thought that the spirit of old Dr Nolan would have been pleased to hear the way that Number Three The Terrace rang with laughter. First Eileen was born, then Sheila. No son and heir yet, but as people said, God would send the boy in his own good time.

There were many attempts for the boy – all ending in miscarriage.

Frances Blake was a frail woman – the efforts to hold a child to full term were taking a great toll on her health.

Several times Jims asked himself what would the old doctor have advised if he had been involved in a family where this had been the situation. He could almost hear Dr Nolan’s voice.

‘This is a thing you could work out between the pair of you … Now the good God up in heaven doesn’t have a book of rules saying you must do this or that, and so many times … The good God expects us to use our intelligence …’

And he might go on to explain some of the most elemental details of times of high fertility and low fertility,
suggesting the latter as the wiser time to indulge in what he called the business of marriage.

But always he would urge the couple to talk to each other.

Jims Blake somehow found it hard to talk to his own wife.

The problem was all the greater because he loved her so much. He desired her
and
he wanted to protect her. A combination of that was hard to rationalise. He had worked out her ovulation as carefully as he could, they had tried to make love at the times she was least likely to conceive. He had held her face in his hands and assured her that his two little girls were plenty, they didn’t need to try for a son. Let them live their lives without putting her to any additional strain, without placing her health in danger.

Sometimes she looked sad, he didn’t know if it was because she feared that he didn’t desire her as much as he once had. Perhaps it was because she really did yearn to give him a son. He found it impossible to believe that two people who loved each other so much could still have areas of misunderstanding. And yet, whenever he approached her she seemed so receptive and willing that he had to believe this was what she wanted too.

When Frances became pregnant again in 1946 the girls Eileen and Sheila were five and four – two cherubs sitting in their Viyella nightdresses and red flannel dressing gowns while he read them stories. This time he hoped for a son to join them.

In the coldest winter that Ireland had ever known Frances Blake gave birth to her son. And in the house with log fires burning in every room, with a midwife from the hospital in the big town in attendance, as well as her husband who had, even at the age of thirty-seven, delivered thousands of children into the world … she died.

They had never even discussed what to call the baby. They hadn’t dared to hope it would live, nor had they dared to hope it would be a boy.

Father Gunn, arriving at the house to the news of the birth and death, inquired if the child was sickly, and whether there should be an emergency baptism.

‘I think the child is healthy enough.’ Jims Blake’s voice was empty.

‘Well, we’ll leave it for a while then. It’ll bring some cheer to the household to have a baptism.’ Father Gunn was optimistic. He tried to see some light at the end of the seemingly endless dark tunnels of this particular winter. He had been burying far more than he baptized.

‘Maybe you could get it over with, Father.’ The young doctor looked white and strained.

‘Not now, Jims. Wait a bit. Give the lad a start, find godparents for him. Think of a name. He has a life to live, Frances would want that for him.’

‘He mightn’t live, let’s do it now.’

Something about the face of Jims Blake made Father Gunn know that this was not so. But he couldn’t close the doors of heaven to a little soul.

He still had his stole on.

‘Bill Hayes is downstairs, he could be the godfather. What about a godmother?’

‘Maisie will stand for him …’

‘But later, the boy might like to …’

‘It doesn’t matter what the boy might like later on. Will we do it or will we not?’

Father Gunn said the words of baptism while pouring the holy water on the head of Declan Blake. He had asked was there to be any other name – people usually had two.