were smoke winding around me.
Between the sixth and eleventh days.
(That was one black-suited doctor to another.)
Oh, yes?
Typically, with this flu. If they’re going to go, that’s when.
By go, he meant die, I realised. I thought of Groyne and all his colourful euphemisms for it.
I could have got any doctor to sign the newborn’s certificate, but I kept asking after Dr. Lynn until a junior nurse directed me to the top floor of the hospital, a room at the very end of a corridor. I heard soft music coming from behind the door, but it was already dying away by the time I knocked.
A small, shabby box room. Dr. Lynn looked up from the table she was using as a desk. Nurse Power.
I found I was shy of mentioning the police. Instead I chanced asking, Did I interrupt you…singing, Doctor?
A half laugh. The gramophone. I like to restore my spirits with a little Wagner when I’m catching up on paperwork.
I couldn’t see a gramophone.
She pointed it out, on a chair behind her. It’s a hornless model, or, rather, the horn is hidden within, behind slats. Much easier on the eye.
So that was the wooden case I’d seen her lugging in yesterday morning. Oh, I just came to say that Mary O’Rahilly delivered her baby in Walcher’s position without surgical intervention.
Good work!
Dr. Lynn put her hand out for the birth certificate. I gave it to her, and she signed it. Do you need me to come down and suture the mother? Give the infant the once-over?
No, no, they’re both doing very well.
She gave me back the document and said, I’ll tell the office to phone the husband with the news. Is there anything else?
I hovered uneasily. I wonder…should I have thought to try Walcher’s much earlier? Might it have shortened her labour and kept her from going into shock?
Dr. Lynn shrugged. Not necessarily, if she wasn’t ready. At any rate, let’s not waste time on ruminations and regrets in the middle of a pandemic.
I blinked and nodded.
I noticed a brown smudge on her collar; I wondered if she knew it was there. There was that opulent fur coat slung over the back of the chair that held her gramophone. Also a folded hospital blanket and a pillow on the floor behind the desk; was the philanthropist locum kipping here like some tramp?
Dr. Lynn followed my gaze. Her voice was jocular: I can’t get home much under the current circumstances.
The influenza, you mean?
That and the police.
Then she must have heard they’d barged into the hospital looking for her. Did she know I’d put them off the scent for now? It felt too awkward to ask.
Dr. Lynn said, When I have to go out, these days, I take cabs instead of riding my tricycle.
That image made my mouth turn up at the corners.
I’ve been trying to pass for an officer’s widow in a coat borrowed from a comrade who’s married to a count, she added with a derisory gesture at the fur. I affect to be a little lame in my left leg.
Now a yelp of laughter escaped me. The whole situation reminded me of a slapstick sequence in a picture.
Then I sobered and said, May I ask…is it true? Not your leg.
Is what true?
Was Dr. Lynn going to make me spell it out—what she was wanted for?
She shook her head and said, Not this time. All we Sinn Féiners were doing last spring was protesting against the plan to extend conscription to Ireland. This so-called German plot was a fiction to justify the police banging us up, with the result that almost all my comrades have been held without charge in British prisons since.
I wondered if that could really have happened, that the gunrunning conspiracy was trumped up. Dr. Lynn hadn’t denied her part in the Rising of ’16, after all, so if she claimed innocence on this occasion, I was inclined to believe her.
Something else occurred to me. If she was in hiding at the moment, lying low at her flu clinic or seeing private patients, why on earth had she agreed to fill in at this big hospital, where we were all strangers to her and many of the staff, like Groyne, would be happy to see her dragged off in handcuffs? Except that…surely even Groyne would have to admit how much we needed competent doctors.
I said suddenly, I fobbed them off this afternoon. The peelers who came looking for you, I mean.
Did you, now? Well, thanks.
She held her hand out,