1
Great Art O’ Letter Writing
Doctor Fingal Flahertie O’Reilly tried to stifle a distinctly satisfied burp as he finished the last trace of his housekeeper’s sherry trifle. “Sorry, Kitty,” he said to his wife of nearly six months.
“You are forgiven.” She smiled at him, and the sparkle in her grey-flecked-with-amber eyes, as always, made him tingle. Had done so ever since he’d met her as a student nurse in Sir Patrick Dun’s Hospital in Dublin in 1934. They’d parted in 1936, he to pursue his, to him, all-important career, she to Tenerife in the Canary Islands to care for orphans of the Spanish Civil War.
Until last summer, he hadn’t seen her since, but he’d carried an ember for the student nurse from Tallaght, Dublin, all his life. Even during his short marriage in 1940. That ember had woken and burst into flame when he, a widower for twenty-four years, had discovered she was working in Belfast’s Royal Victoria Hospital as a senior nursing sister in the neurosurgical operating theatre.
Kitty leant to one side, stretched her right arm down, and straightened up holding something tied with a red ribbon. “Seeing Christmas Day will be here soon, I’ve brought you an early present.”
“What are they?” he said, eying what he now saw was a bundle of envelopes.
“I’m still unpacking a few boxes from my Belfast flat and this morning I found these and thought you might enjoy reading them today.”
“Why today?”
She smiled. “Because it’s special. Our first Christmas as man and wife.” She blew him a kiss.
The door to the dining room opened and Mrs. Kincaid, or “Kinky,” as she was known, his housekeeper of nineteen years, entered carrying a tray with a steaming pot of coffee and an open box of Rowntree’s After Eight dark chocolate mint cremes.
“Kinky, you have excelled yourself,” O’Reilly said. “Prawn cocktail, roast leg of lamb with mint sauce, potatoes roasted in goose fat, broad beans, and carrots? You are a culinary genius.”
She chuckled, making her silver chignon and three chins shake. “Sure, wasn’t it only a shmall-little thing, so,” she said in her offhand way, but he could tell she was pleased with the praise. “I see you’ve eaten up however little much was in it.”
Her Cork accent was gentle on O’Reilly’s ear.
“It’s nothing less than you deserve, Doctor, and you, Mrs. O’Reilly. You work very hard the pair of you, helping other people, day in, day out. You deserve good food when you come home, so. Now, here does be your coffee and After Eights.” She set the tray on the table, unloaded its contents, and cleared away the dirty plates. “I know you’re expecting the marquis in a few minutes, so when he arrives, I’ll take him up to the lounge and bring the coffee and mints up once you’re all settled.” She fixed O’Reilly with a steely gaze. “Do not, sir. Do not eat all of them.”
O’Reilly cringed just a little at his housekeeper’s no-nonsense tone. “I promise.” Those citizens of Ballybucklebo who knew their middle-aged medical advisor as gruff and taciturn would have been amazed by his humility. But she’d always had that effect on him whenever she admonished him. He’d met Kinky here in this very house in 1938, just before he’d gone off to the war, and had returned here to buy the practice in 1946.
The housekeeper left, closing the door behind her. As she went, a sudden gust hurled rain against the room’s bow window making a noise like a badly uncoordinated kettle drummer.
“Glad we’re in here tonight,” O’Reilly said. “Heaven help the sailors. That’s a powerful wind.” He shook his head, offered Kitty a mint chocolate, and helped himself to two wrapped in their open-ended paper envelopes. “Speaking of power, as her fellow Cork folk would say, ‘That Maureen “Kinky” Kincaid is a powerful woman, so.’” He bit into a bittersweet mint. Perfection. “I’d have been lost without her these nineteen years. Back then for her sake I’d hoped she might remarry, but for my own, I don’t know what I’d have done without her. Now with you here, love, I’m not a domestically useless old bachelor anymore, and when she told us she was getting married again, I couldn’t have been more delighted. I suppose I’m selfish, but I’m very glad she stayed on with me for as long as she did.”
“You? Selfish, old bear?” Kitty finished her mint. “I know you too well. It’s all part of the—put that third mint down, Fingal.”
He set it back in the box.
“Do you remember that 1950s song, ‘The Great Pretender’?”
“Yes. The Platters wasn’t it, 1955?”
She nodded. “That’s you in a nutshell. Stiff upper lip. Terrified of letting your feelings show.”
“Well. I, that is. I mean…” But it was true. He often felt things deeply inside but had great difficulty saying the words aloud.
“Rubbish.” She smiled to show there was no anger in her, picked up her early gift, and handed it to him. “And I’ve got proof of your feelings in writing. Have a read of some of these.”
He accepted the bundle and recognised his own straggling scrawl on the top envelope: Miss Kitty O’Hallorhan, 10A, Wellington Park, Belfast. His breath caught. She’d kept the letters he’d written to her after they’d met again in August 1964. Too scared of being rejected face-to-face, he’d taken to expressing his true feelings in letters. He inhaled deeply.
“You kept them, even after we were married?”
She blew him a kiss. “Of course, I did. Some of them are very sweet, Fingal. You were and still are a very romantic man, and I love you.”
He rose, leaving the bundle on the table and intending to give her a kiss, but the front doorbell rang.
“That’ll be the marquis. Let’s greet him.” Kitty rose and as they left the room, she sang out. “We’re answering the door, Kinky.”
Lord John MacNeill stood on the step of Number One Main, Ballybucklebo, his camelhair coat sodden, his trilby hat dripping with rain, looking very much like a man in need of a friend. He and O’Reilly had got to know each other years ago through their shared interest in the game of rugby and the Ballybucklebo Bonnaughts Sports Club.
“Come in out of that, John. I’m sure the geese are flying backward.”
“Thanks, Fingal.” John MacNeill came in from the howling gale and shut the door behind him. “Hello, Kitty.”
“Hello, John. My goodness, you look wet through.”
Kinky, who had always had a soft spot for the marquis, had come to the door anyway. Now she curtseyed, and said, “Let me take your hat and coat, sir. The wires must be shaking out there, so.”
“It is a dirty night.” He handed her his sopping coat and hat, revealing a head of neatly brushed iron-grey hair.
“I’ll take these through to my kitchen,” she said, “and put them to dry in front of the range then I’ll bring up the coffee.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Kincaid. That is very kind.”
She made another curtsey and left.
“Come up to the fire, John,” O’Reilly said. “You must be foundered.”
“Mmm.” He rubbed his hands together. “Trifle nippy. Please lead on.”
As they crossed the first landing, the marquis nodded to the photograph of O’Reilly’s old battleship, HMS Warspite. “Saw the Times yesterday. Historical piece. I didn’t know, but seems they finished scrapping her in 1957.”
“She ran aground ten years before in Prussia Cove, Cornwall, on her way to the breaker’s yard.” O’Reilly laughed. “The grand old lady always did have a mind of her own.” He and Kitty stood aside to let John MacNeill precede them into the cosy upstairs lounge where the curtains were closed over the bay windows and a coal fire burned in the grate. There, presumably under some kind of truce, O’Reilly’s white cat Lady Macbeth lay curled up beside his black Labrador, Arthur Guinness.
Copyright © 2021 by Ballybucklebo Stories Corp.
