The Temporary Gentleman

by Sebastian Barry

  ‘Maggie, dear, come here, and give your father a kiss,’ I said, not expecting she would. But I thought I had to keep on saying the old things, the old things that didn’t get old the way some old things did.

  But she came around her mother and crossed the cold flags to me and gave me a kiss right enough.

  ‘You must answer my letters when you get a chance. Did you keep all the stamps?’

  Before I went away again, I brought Ursula over to the Mam’s house and deposited her there. I said she was to live there till I got home, or the war was over. My mother asked me nothing about the marks the switch had left on Ursula’s side. But she nodded sagely enough. I asked her had she heard anything of Eneas, and she said she had got a soldier’s postcard from France. Then I kissed her and Ursula and said I had to be away again.

  I marched back to Harbour House and asked Mai to do her best to pull herself together. I asked her to stop the drinking forthwith. She promised solemnly she would. I said she must apologise to Ursula, she must find some way to make amends. I could see she was very frightened, not by anything that was going to happen to her, but by what had happened. For myself, I could only wonder at her – was this a sort of evil borrowed from alcohol? I didn’t believe that in herself, in her heart and soul, she was a vicious woman. How is it that for some people drinking is a short-term loan on the spirit, but for others a heavy mortgage on the soul? How is it many a drinker becomes gay and light-hearted, but some so darkly morose and rescinded, filleted of every scrap of happiness, that they might beat their child in the snow? I couldn’t answer these questions then, and I can’t answer them now. I took the risk of embracing Mai, and told her that I loved her. She looked defeated by the news. It was with a heavy heart and a feeling of dread that I went off again about the business of the war.

  Chapter Twenty

  I shunted myself to England, as my orders bid me, and was assigned to a unit in bomb disposal. I didn’t know if I wanted to be in bomb disposal but at the same time didn’t know much about it either.

  I did a four-day course. Hitler had started to drop thousands of bombs on London, among which were many unexploded bombs. So we would be sent to defuse them. It’s a tricky thing to be learning your trade off a big, mean-looking yoke that could blow you to kingdom come.

  My sappers would dig to find it. Unexploded bombs had a habit of boring into the earth as far down as thirty feet. And they would veer about, depending on the ground, and end up not quite where you would expect. So my knowledge of geology came in handy. I would push down a long thin spike as the sappers dug, and hope finally to feel metal on metal. Then we could really scare ourselves, uncovering the sullen-looking thing, and checking it wasn’t ticking or lying on its fuze.

  Those were lovely boys, the sappers in my little unit. Pat Millane was a lad from the Aran islands.

  ‘I don’t tell them what I’m doing at home, sir,’ he said. ‘They think going off to war is a load of old billy goats’ balls.’

  Things like this he would say in Gaelic, privately to me, as it were. Magalraí pocaide is the Irish for billy goats’ balls.

  After my sappers dug out the hole, it was me on my own going down the ladder then and trying to get the fuze or fuzes out. Sometimes, in the boiling sweat of such occasions, I forgot about Mai. I forgot about everything, except the bomb I was sitting on. You used to sit on the bombs when you were drawing the fuze out, because in that way you wouldn’t know a thing about it if it went up.

  They had these fairly common jobs, (15)s they called them, that was the number the Germans would have marked on them. Their pilots had to know the numbers themselves, so the bombs could be armed properly before they dropped them. And later we began to find (17)s, which were tricky, because there was a booby trap under the main gaine, and when you had one of those coupled with a (50), which was motion-sensitive, well, at first people said nothing could be done then, only wait till the (50) deteriorated, or the bomb exploded, which was not always possible. Then the poor benighted BD men had to do their best, whatever was put in front of us, and the divil take the hindmost – which the divil was sometimes only too happy to do. When a man was blown up, you might only get a pound of flesh left of him, or a bit of an arm, or maybe a ruined cap – and that’s what went into the coffin, and they’d weigh the rest of it down with sandbags, so the relatives wouldn’t know. We knew all about that.

  So that’s why sometimes even Mai was driven from my thoughts. Then she would drift back in. I would wonder how Ursula and Maggie were getting on. Then we would be off again on some job, bumping through the streets of London in our BD truck.

  We all saw terrible things. We were at the ‘terrible things’ end of things. I defused bombs, fifty kilos, 250, five hundred, a thousand, and those huge bombs, the parachute mines, in the very different geologies of the East End or the West End, and Bloomsbury, and the Isle of Dogs – all points of the compass.

  Something shrank in us all the while, and something also grew in its place. It was thoughts of the possible future shrank. It was a sort of confidence in the nature of other people, the nature of the inhabitants of England mostly, that grew. BD men as time went on were appreciated. You got free drink in pubs when they saw the bomb insignia. Yellow and red, a little bomb on your shoulder, designed by Queen Mary herself.

  Because you couldn’t be thinking about the future. It was a cure for the present, any ills of the present. In a strange way it allowed me to survive my worries about Mai and the girls.

  As an officer I was called sir, but that was the only real difference between us. There was a chivalry in the fact that only an officer would defuse a bomb, the sappers standing back behind a wall, when the digging was done. Many had their arses blown out through their mouths. Temporary gentlemen indeed.

  I knew some BD officers who never told their wives what they did. I never told Mai about that particular tour of duty. She had enough on her plate.

  Eventually Hitler seemed to get tired of trying to exterminate the citizenry of Britain – the spectacular citizenry – and hauled everything round and pointed himself towards Russia.

  So I did a little stint in North Africa, not too far from where our ship had docked, years and years before, when me and Mai were just married.

  I was moving with my unit of engineers across a ragged district. I suppose it must have been very early ’42. We were destroying our own arms caches as quickly as we could, so that Rommel wouldn’t have the good of them when he came through. His army was likely not far off, so we were nervy and watchful.

  One evening we came to a few nondescript acres of desert. There was nothing marked on my map to say there had been an engagement here. But there were shattered creatures of metal that had once been British and German tanks, and here and there in fierce decay the bodies of fallen men, burned out of their vehicles and then killed, and infantry killed as they moved forward. I stood there, gazing at this aftermath of a nameless battle, now maybe a month or two old. I couldn’t tell if we had won or lost the encounter, and the attitudes of the dead seemed to say that that was of no importance. All were dead and their nationality was not now of this earth.

  I had climbed down off the transport to see if I could identify our soldiers, and my living soldiers were watching me from the covered truck, subdued and silent. Now I turned on my heel to go back to them.

  A lark, a single bird with her dowdy plumage, burst up from her cup of sand just in front of me and like a needle flashing in my mother’s hand of old made a long stitch between earth and heaven, with a joyousness that rent my heart.

  I was writing as often as I could to Maggie and Ursula. Maggie never answered or her letters were lost, but Ursula’s many letters followed me about. It was always news of her grandparents, humorous in nature. She especially loved Pappy. There was no talk of Mai.

  Anyway I was swung back their way on my next posting, which was a return to Ballycastle to be liaison officer to the Yanks coming in for training.

 
Of course Ballycastle was already part of the great empire of dancing in Ireland. But nothing quite prepared it for the black GIs. The soldiers aglow with energy, and the Ballycastle women on fire with enthusiasm, thrown into the air, sliding down backs, their skirts lifting and falling. Ordinary Irishmen could only stand by in resignation. They arranged themselves on Ballycastle Strand, dotting the little rocky coves. Kitted out in their greatcoats, they gazed with wonder at the local people getting into the arctic water. Far from causing scandal to the folk of Ballycastle, it was their white officers who were alarmed and affronted. Of course there was segregation at home but Ballycastle people didn’t care about that.

  ‘Captain,’ one of the American lieutenants implored me, ‘we got to do something about this.’

  As liaison officer I heard a good deal about it. Little booklets were given out. You’d see them thrown into the gutters like so many unwanted sand-dabs.

  ‘We got to do something, captain.’

  I thought we had a better chance of winning the bloody war with them coming into it.

  I was trying to plot a way to break the impasse for Mai. I talked to the army doctor about cures, because it was a big problem in the forces, and he was an expert in drying out and other matters.

  ‘I should see if I couldn’t get her into hospital for a while,’ he said. ‘Just the absence of drink would be very beneficial. She might start to see things in a clearer light.’

  On my next furlough, I was hopeful.

  Strangely enough, Mai was in hospital when I got back. But it was with illness, her lungs were stuck to her backbone with pleurisy, and I knew immediately she had not been taking care of herself. There wasn’t much surprise in that, but it was very upsetting. Mam had Maggie now as well as Ursula, getting the meals into them, and shunting them to school in the Ursuline convent.

  I asked Dr Snow about the drinking, whether he could get her dry now in the hospital, and he looked at me as if I were daft.

  ‘She is dry,’ he said. ‘You can do a lot of things in an Irish hospital, I am sure, but drinking’s not one of them, as far as I’m aware.’

  ‘Well, that’s good,’ I said.

  ‘She was a week in the house barely able to move, your daughter finally came to fetch me. We’re lucky she didn’t die,’ he said.

  ‘It’s bloody tricky,’ I said, ‘because I’m in the army, you know.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I know. Listen, Mr McNulty, since you raise the issue of her drinking, might I just make the observation that your own drinking is very considerable, and not a help to her, especially if you would like her to stop.’

  ‘Well, I only drink socially, to be sociable,’ I said, to my discredit. I think I must call that a lie. Dr Snow didn’t, though I suspected he would have liked to.

  ‘We had best leave her be for the moment,’ he said, ‘and try and get her better. Then we can think about the other thing.’

  ‘By all means,’ I said.

  ‘How long do you have for leave?’

  ‘I’m due back tomorrow night.’

  ‘They keep you busy in the army then,’ he said.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  I found myself catapulted over to Yorkshire to teach bomb disposal. I was drinking heavily, and I think my superior officers may have been relieved to be rid of me, though they didn’t quite say so. But the camp in Yorkshire was glad to see me, because on paper I was an expert. And indeed I was an expert.

  Pat Millane was up there too, as it happened. He was assigned to help me with the demonstrations. My students were gleaming young officers. We worked in a big old barn, out of the Yorkshire weather. The oak-beam roof was very beautiful, enough to warm an engineer’s heart. There was plenty of room to line up all the bombs, and all the fuzes and gear, and Pat had managed to nab a big boiler to show how to steam out explosive, and all the latest contraptions to remove a fuze mechanically were at hand.

  It was very strange to be working in perfect safety.

  There was a room annexed to the barn that was our mess, where you could get a pint or two between classes.

  The young officers were very eager. I can still see their faces peering at me as I instructed them.

  One day we were spending a long afternoon demonstrating the subtle guile of the parachute bomb. We had a hollow example of this nine-foot horror. The fuzes were a (17) and a (50), and we were demonstrating the usefulness of making the mine believe it was underwater. The bombs were first used as sea-mines, and they were primed to explode as they hit water, or failing that, to sink a number of feet and then to explode. But if it sank deeper, the fuze would shut itself down, and wait instead for a ship to pass overhead, when the mechanism would be prompted back to life. But these bombs began also to be dropped onto cities. So some clever man had devised the use of a rubber bladder off a bicycle horn, and a tube, and a bicycle pump, and the trick was to convince the fuze that it had dropped to a certain depth, so that it would shut off. Air was forced into the fuze to imitate water pressure. The trouble then was, the slightest knock would set its clock going again, and it had been discovered that the fuze would explode the mine after just seventeen seconds, which is no time at all, and this was what I was trying to teach my student officers.

  So we devised a little game, which was to try and hoodwink the fuze, officer by officer. We had the harmless mine hanging from the rafters by ropes to imitate the parachute, as these bombs often snagged on chimneys and the like, as they plummeted down through houses. My officers were fabulously alive to the task, and even though we knew in our hearts we were working in safety, nevertheless a tremendous tension built up, as one by one they attached the ridiculous-looking tube and pump and rubber blister, and listened for the sound of the clock stopping, and in ever more dreadful silence for the sound of it popping back into life. The first two men managed pretty well. The third brushed the mine just as he got it quiet, and he heard the little clock starting again. Then we fled, scattering to the four corners of the barn, just to see how far a soul could get in seventeen seconds, but also, in a queer way, half believing by now that the bomb really would explode.

  And then nothing of course, the seven of us standing at the fringes of the barn, in the strangest silence, until I started to laugh, and then the others laughed, the voices a bit higher than usual, just a touch of hysteria, and the man who had knocked his knee against the mine was shaking, shaking with silence, and then with laughter also, and all of us laughing then, like proper eejits, but living eejits.

  So I called a break in our efforts and deemed it a good time to have a drink in the mess and we could go back then and have another try. And I was feeling rather stupidly satisfied with myself, and as always thought I could tell this story to Mai at home, when I got there, and maybe it would be something to cheer her up, or maybe not, maybe not say anything, maybe that was always the best stratagem. I ordered two pints for myself, the other officers ordered just the one.

  Then the lads had downed their beer and it was time to return.

  We were stationed not far from an RAF camp and I heard in the distance an airplane returning to base. It was late afternoon but still daylight so I assumed the aircraft was on some routine run over its own territory. The young officers trooped back into the barn through the narrow wooden door, and I gripped the glass that held my second pint, intending to swallow it down as quickly as I could. I was even a bit relieved that they wouldn’t be there to see me, as in my heart of hearts I felt it was a little greedy, the greed of the hapless drinker. Which I was still able to disapprove of, with the curious double self of the drinker. The only witness now was the pleasant mess-man, Corporal Timmony. I was still half aware of the plane engine in the distance, or rather, nearer now, and in the same instant, Corporal Timmony looked at me, and I looked at him, and I suspect we had the same thought, the exact same thought, or rather question in our minds, but how ridiculous, broad daylight, only one in ten thousand German planes tried anything in daylight, but of course, Hull w
as not too far off, and all the factories of the Humber, maybe it was a lone run, maybe Herr Somebody had strayed from his route, the navigator fucking up over England, that was definitely not a friendly engine noise. And all this in no time at all, the time between grasping a glass and bringing it to my lips, carefully there to sip it, and the bartender’s quizzical look, and everything rushing through this moment like dirty floodwater, and then a much worse noise, a noise worrying to the marrow of my bones, the long, mournful, excited whistle of something falling, free falling, a noise curiously like a mob of people all gabbling, and then in a spliced fragment of a second, that selfsame noise piercing through wood, no doubt the glorious roof-beams, and then – myself eternally about to drink, the corporal eternally about to speak, forever more, never leaving there again, never breaching to the next moment – a violent concatenation, the brain-melting sound of explosives catching fire, catching bloom from the devious fuze, the devious gaine, the ferocious ZUS, and taking with a great vigorous hand the entire world in its grip, the barn, the ground, the sky as far as the heavens, and wrenching everything two feet this way, two feet that way, it felt like, but the main explosion not with us, not with the corporal and me, but with my young officers and my blessed sapper in the next room, and I knew in there would be the total ravishment of light, the following thunder more thunderous than mere thunder to be found in mere clouds, the cudgel of heat forced down into their throats, the foul forearm of heat, whose fingers would clutch at their lungs, trying to drag them out, and then the great, fiery monster of the blast, all infinite smoke and objects turned into blades and missiles, and one man, as was discovered later, thrown out through the burst barn, and cast forty feet over the neighbouring roof, and later found dead in the fringes of a field of corn, and others so caught in the exalted murderousness of the blast that not a shard of them, not an atom of them could ever be found again, and as this was happening, in its own lunatic sequence, I saw, through what eyes I knew not, because I did not know if I was blind or seeing, a creature of fire and flame ‘open’ the narrow wooden door, queerly, strangely, and as it were look in, and stand in the room for a moment, like a ghost, like a person itself, with what history who knew only it was a history of death, in clothes of red and orange, and then, having peeked in at us, with all its cohorts of violence now let into our room also, withdraw itself, as if sucked back to rejoin its fellow murderers in the barn, and then the entire world, from Patagonia (which I knew) to the utmost boundaries of Ultima Thule, from the world of fire to the world of ice, shrugged, shrugged mightily, easily, vastly, and I felt that dire hand scrabbling for my lungs, but clumsily, woundingly, and in some filthy vagary of the blast, saw the corporal smeared like red butter against the wall, and then into this utterly shattered, ended world entered again another version of silence, and then just a great fog of storming dust, raging about me, gently, gently, almost, and if ten minutes later I knew my officers were killed, and my sapper viciously killed, and the corporal vilely killed, before all that I stood there, the dust falling around me like a million curtains, as if nothing had changed and everything had changed, and I was the bewildered citizen of two possible worlds, and then the whole back wall of the mess room fell down, and weird light plunged in, like a liquid, and my ears roared now, roared like the biggest storm ever seen in Sligo Bay, and bizarrely, bizarrely, there appeared to me, still that foot from my face, now as if floating, unconnected, and so pristine, untouched, immaculate, not a drop spilled, not a feather taken out of it, solid and clean in my hand, the pint of waiting beer.