29

Dr. MacQueen returned to his empty apartment, switched on a reading lamp over his favourite chair, and hung his overcoat in a closet. He went to the small kitchen, ran some water, and plugged in an electric kettle. He felt a mixture of relief and loneliness that his son Patrick was no longer present. He had just completed his house calls, and it was nearly midnight. He was due at surgery in the morning but knew that he wouldn’t sleep yet. He poured the boiling water over a tea bag, into a large mug to wash a Nembutal sleeping capsule down his throat.

The difficulties of raising a family and coping with the mundanities of life outside of his profession had always bewildered him. He had been a brilliant scholar but had few aptitudes for coping with other people’s eccentricities. His happiest years had been spent in the army.

Not surprisingly, the devastation he had seen in Halifax following the explosion in 1917 had affected him more than anything he had witnessed in Europe. He had been unprepared for it when he stepped off the troopship nearly a year after it had happened. His duties had included the escorting of thousands of Chinese labourers from Halifax to Vancouver for trans-shipment back to the Orient.

He had met the vivacious, dark-haired emergency nurse at a party, and had laid quiet siege to her heart. The west had captured his imagination, and he took his socially ambitious bride to the limitless horizons of rural Alberta. There he was attached to a field ambulance unit with the cavalry brigade of a rapidly diminishing Canadian army. They had two sons, witnessed the discovery of oil in Turner Valley, and then the advent of the Depression followed by the drought. In 1931 they returned to Halifax—and then to Bermuda.

There was no lack of servants in Bermuda, but the social life was demanding, and a new daughter shunted the boys onto an emotional siding. They were sent to an English school, which completely disoriented them. They found their bearings just in time to be sent to a Canadian school to complete the wreckage. Then the little girl’s illness and death, and the separation of their parents, sealed the turmoil into the two wounded shells. Both boys rocketed into the war with relief.

Neither of the parents had much comprehension of their youngest son’s motivations or inner turmoil. The death of their daughter had been so unusually traumatic that a world at war had almost seemed anticlimactic. The doctor had simply packed a few belongings and left. His wife sought solace first from her favourite sister in New York and then returned to Bermuda, presumably determined to save something from the wreckage. The colony was deserted by everyone except the residents in the fall of 1939, then it filled up with rich refugees from the sterling area who were escaping the bombs of the Luftwaffe.

Dr. MacQueen’s head nodded over his book and he woke with a start. He rose wearily and turned on the bedside radio to catch the midnight news. He washed, donned pyjamas, and then returned to the kitchen for another mug of tea.

The announcer stated that the German High Seas Fleet had broken through the British blockade and was loose in the north Atlantic. The doctor lit a cigarette, unplugged the kettle, and drenched another teabag. He didn’t listen to the rest of the broadcast, but rubbed his eyes and shuffled back to his bedroom. He switched the radio off and got into bed.

He had not told Patrick of the possibilities of a commission in the Royal Canadian Navy. He now wondered if the boy might be destined for watery adventures before he even got into the navy. He had thought it best not to get him excited, nor to face confrontations, which he hated. The lad will return, he thought, or the war will be over or he will go his own way. It had never occurred to him that the trip itself might pose a danger. He did not worry, but he was always interested in the unfolding of fate. He had seen death in too many forms to be surprised that it knows no age—especially in dramatic times like these.

He switched off the light and turned onto his side. His mind drifted back in time to France, and the long line of soldiers moving up to the rumbling front. It was growing dark, and they were slowly trudging along a rutted road. Someone was singing.

It’s a long way to Tipperary,
it’s a long way to go.
It’s a long way to Tipperary,
to the sweetest gal I know.

Why had he survived all of those chaps, and was it right that he had done so? The doctor’s sadness stretched up the rutted road into the darkness, punctuated by gaunt and ghostly trees against the flickering horizon, where all sanity ended. “It’s a long way to go…”

The doctor slept.