The Temporary Gentleman

by Sebastian Barry

  Chapter Twenty-six

  At last the rains have stopped and although the mosquitoes are now in a ferment of happiness and hang about everywhere after dark like a crowd of cornerboys in Sligo, in particular in great clouds outside my mosquito net, the land is indisputably refreshed and with the soaked earth and the return of unmolested sunlight every green thing is reaching skywards and the leaves of the multitudinous palms are plumping out and widening at an absurd pace. Tom is instantly lightened by it all, as if the rain-clouds had had their origin in his own head. He has spent the whole day spring-cleaning, although there isn’t really any spring here technically, banging the brush about the wooden floors, and singing through his repertoire of Ewe and English songs. He has also shaved, and has sprung from some protective place a new set of white clothes, trousers and shirt, and now he looks by some way smarter than me. Now I have reiterated to him my plan to drive him upcountry to see his wife. He hadn’t said a word about it since I first mentioned it, and I thought possibly he had forgotten. But he beamed at me immediately, stood back on his heels, stood forward on the balls of his feet, and ceremoniously and wordlessly gripped and shook my hand.

  I have a sense of myself returning home now. Now I can begin to imagine it, and, with the valuable currency of imagining it in my head, I will think soon about going. Packing up, and setting off. It makes me sad somehow to write this. I have an old steamer trunk I can throw a lot of things into, and I can send that home by ship. But I won’t I think make the long sea voyage this time myself, I’ll get a flight down to Lagos from the new airport, and see about a good flight to Europe from there. Everything is possible now that never was possible. When I think of that bus down through the Sahara. Although I will be sorry to go, the thought of travel as always fills me with strange hope. It will be a journey towards my daughters, and Maggie’s two children, whom I have not yet seen, and maybe even Ursula now has a child, she seemed to hint as much nervously in her last letter. I will go and do my best, and these are the words of a man who has done his worst so often in the past. I will be a grandfather with sweets and toys, and a father, with what wise words I can muster, and not only that, first a long catalogue of apologies. I will apologise to them, I will ask them what I must do to prove my credentials, my bona fides as a father and a man. If there is a penitential time, I will live through it, penitently. I am humbled by my account of my own doings but it is to a great degree the history of a bad man. How we are to become good, to become better, must be my study and my science, to use all my skill whatsoever I possess to build bridges at last of some coherence and solidity between myself and them, if they even still wish for such a thing. I know from every word she says that Ursula at least feels that she had me to some perhaps small effect in her corner, and I take the risk of believing that she loves me. I certainly love her. And although Maggie is buried much deeper, encased in a sarcophagus of distrust and accusation, I must sit in that fire too, and see what is left when it has burned away whatever it must burn away. I know in my own private heart I love her, I revere her, as my first-born, as my vigorous child, as my daughter. Surely, surely, with my heart set on doing these things, I will be able to do them. I ask God to help me.

  In the short term I will write to Mr Oko, and thank him. I will try to be gracious in departure, if nothing else. I would give the keys to Tom for him, if there were any keys, which there are not. The day that house keys are needed in Accra will be a dark day.

  Now come swirling through my mind other tricky things, the current darknesses as one might call them, that prick me awake in the night, worry at me like internal mosquitoes, and only tiredness and the solace of the African moon in the window allows me to fall back down slowly into the merciful well of sleep. Maggie’s husband for one thing, a man I suspect does not like me very much. Thinks of me in a humorous, superior way, and judges me deficient. With his odd green suit the colour of a billiard table, and his burning red beard, and his poetry writing, and his tumultuous drunkenness – well, I can’t upbraid him for that. But nevertheless, one wishes something different for one’s daughter, all told. Something nicer. His father is a fine person, though I met him only the once, a painter from Cork city, who I am told was out in 1916, but I should imagine has lived a quiet and sober life since then. I liked him enormously, and was very encouraged, but unfortunately I don’t believe the son is made from the same stuff. And now there are the two babies, about whom I have the greatest curiosity, but don’t know exactly what to do with that curiosity. Maggie has taken her tone from him, and gives me a rough ride whenever I see her – but maybe this is also the long legacy of her childhood. Otherwise she is shining out on the Dublin stage, and is considered a signal young talent. I just hope this husband of hers will not devour it, and her into the bargain. A man who can do no wrong in his own eyes is a dangerous creature. A man who feels no guilt is a dangerous creature. Mai, whom I have often thought of as a tigress, had guilt to beat the band. Better for her if she had felt nothing of that, but she did.

  *

  The little nurse, working away in the background whenever I visited, she knew a thing or two. Her purpose she told me was to make sure Mai had what she termed softly ‘a good death’. It seemed a lovely phrase. I had the sense Mai talked to her a great deal, told her many things. But if she did, it was all in confidence, and the nurse never breathed a word to me.

  I brought Maggie and Ursula in when the message came that Mai might be failing.

  Maggie sat on one of those hard metal chairs beside the bed, and Ursula stood the other side, in the darkened room. Mai stretched out a hand to Maggie, and Maggie took it, and was so full of tears she couldn’t speak. Then Mai turned to Ursula.

  ‘Come here to me, Ursula,’ she said, and Ursula, not with much idea how, but willing to make the attempt, stepped closer to the high bed, and leaned herself over to Mai, propped on her big white pillows. But it was clear Mai wanted her closer than that, and so Ursula awkwardly laid her breast along the coverlet, bent in a right angle, and Mai lifted her weary right arm and laid it against Ursula’s cheek, and stroked it, and said:

  ‘Ah sure, yes.’

  Things she was not able to do living she seemed able to do dying.

  After a little the two young women were brought out of the room by the nurse. I heard her talking to them quietly in that quiet language of nurses, out in the corridor. And then it was just me and Mai.

  ‘Jack,’ she said, ‘has it all been no good? All a disaster?’

  ‘Jesus, no,’ I said.

  Such are the embers of things spoken when the great conflagration of life is nearly over. Her voice was so faint I had to lean in to hear. Her breath was a little foul from her sickness and she smelled of bitter medicines. I can’t say that I cared.

  ‘You did look so handsome in your white uniform,’ said the faint voice, ‘in the photograph from the Straits Settlements,’ she said, in the same whisper, as if that white uniform, from thirty-five years ago, explained everything.

  ‘Well,’ I said.

  ‘Jack,’ she said. ‘It’s so strange to be sober, day in, day out. I have too much bloody time to think. There are so many terrible things, terrible things. Why, Jack, why a life like that?’

  ‘I don’t know, Mai.’

  ‘Do you think it is all so grievous I will never get to heaven?’

  ‘I am sure you will get to heaven.’

  ‘If that could just be true, and I could see my father once again. Just once and then they can drag me down to hell for all I care.’

  ‘They’ll drag you down to hell over my dead body,’ I said.

  She paused, and laughter rose from her sore body.

  ‘Jack, Jack,’ she said. ‘I wanted to say something to the children. I wanted to make it better somehow. But then I didn’t seem to have the words. I love you, Jack, I love them, I do, I really do. Useless, useless. The things we were given, and I threw them back in the face of God. Why, why? I am so sorry. Tell them I am sorry, won’
t you, Jack, when I am gone?’

  The last phrase, ‘when I am gone’, uttered in a fearful whisper.

  ‘I’m sorry too, Mai,’ I said. ‘No, we didn’t do things as good as you’d like. But I will never not love you, never.’

  ‘Nor I you,’ she said, in an even smaller whisper, because she was near the last. ‘Please pray for me.’

  If I could calibrate these words to describe the nature of that whisper, so thin, so final, so like the spider’s thread. And the surging waters of strange pride and love that rose in me as she spoke, the sister in the corner of the room, having come back in without me noticing, doing something with a candle, preparing for her last moments. It is not always possible I am sure for the soldiers of a marriage, the warriors, the defeated and the survivors in the one breath, to reach the final words that will maybe one day allow a modicum of solace. That the day will come when something that was said finally hits home, as if it were a tiny arrow let loose high into the aether, only dropping down many years later.

  Then she was unconscious for many hours, breathing with some hardship. Then she breathed in one last time and then the engine of her breathing stopped. The nurse lit the candle, and opened the window, so that Mai’s soul, she said, could fly up to heaven. Then she blew the candle out.

  *

  When I write these things down, good Lord, it hits me then. The arrow goes straight through my heart. I look up from the page and am surprised to find myself in Accra.

  It used to be all just a fog of thought, an intimation. There is a lot to be said for this writing things down. The fog gets pushed away, and the truth or some semblance of it stands stark and naked, not always a comfortable matter, no. But that was the task in hand, I suppose, to try my utmost to throw a makeshift bridge towards the future, even though the ironwork and the cables fade away to nothing in the distant air.

  I often think of that moment in the North African desert when the lark flew up. Viewing the bodies of my fellow soldiers, the heart breaking deep within the chest, and the eyes of the living soldiers in the back of the truck, just watching. The eyes of the men so fearful, perhaps rightly fearful for themselves, but also so anxious for justice, for explanation, for reason. But what reason is there for the general nature of things? I cannot say that I know.

  Did the lark rising up mean anything in the upshot? When I began to fill this old minute-book, I don’t suppose I really thought it did. Or I suppose I thought it did in a sort of vague ‘poetic’ way. I took it to mean something. But what did I take it to mean? I didn’t know. Does wonder have any dominion over facts, in the end? I still don’t know, I still don’t know.

  Oh but maybe I do know, maybe I do. That love rises like the lark even from the field of death.

  She had such gifts, as well she knew, for the piano, for teaching, for fashion, even for the tennis court. Gifts that were put in the great jars of alcohol and suffocated, mummified. A formaldehyde poured round them. So that in the end of her story she might only have been a specimen, whose living attributes could not be made manifest. But our greatest trouble and our saving grace is that we have a soul. Time may seem like a great flood dragging with it all the debris of the past and catching you at last running through your own fields. Where there was once a great fire may seem only an ember now in the palm of your hand. But that ember is the soul and nothing on earth can rescind it.

  I miss her face, its beauty, and its beauty lost.

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  At the funeral Queenie Moran came up to me quietly and said I had been the death of Mai Kirwan and that Mr Kirwan had been right to call me a scoundrel all those years ago. I couldn’t find an answer. She said she felt she would be untrue to the memory of her friend if she didn’t speak. Her words perhaps fell wide of the mark when she spoke them but now they reach me with their proper force.

  When I contemplate the stations of her cross it is impossible to disagree with Queenie. Her unhappiness over having the babies I didn’t understand, even though Mam tried to tell me. The loss of Grattan House was my doing. I responded to the death of Colin by moving further away, and then enlisting as soon as possible when war broke out. And when she plainly needed me the most, I returned to the war. And throughout everything, from the beginning, I was drinking, showing her what drinking was.

  What was I supposed to do with myself? The day after the funeral, when I woke in the morning and went to the bathroom, I found that all the hair on the crown of my head had fallen out.

  I tried to say proper things to Ursula and Maggie, but felt encumbered by silence, and that the distance between me and every other living soul was an immensity.

  I couldn’t be consoled myself because grief was like a putty stuffed into me. Tom tried to help me, even Ursula tried, but I was no good for anything or anyone.

  Ursula certainly made an impact on old insular Dublin, walking along the streets with the grandson of the Olowu of Owu himself. It was a while since Dublin had had all the US servicemen, down for R & R during the war years – an invasion indeed. But even from this I was detached and though Tom asked me ‘what was going on there?’ I only nodded my head vaguely. ‘He’s a very nice fellow,’ I said, ‘he’ll be good for Ursula.’ ‘And were you over for the wedding, Jack?’ he said, amazed. ‘I was not, Tom, because they were married quietly in Liverpool. Pappy was over though.’ ‘Pappy was over? No one tells me anything,’ he said, as if almost regretting his own absence.

  I was speaking words, but I was not really present. I was numb, hollowed out, the true sorrow and weeping came later, here in Accra, under the care of Tom Quaye, in the privacy of this small house.

  I felt returned to the provisional man I had been the very hour before seeing Mai for the first time.

  I went back to Sligo to see if I could find some peace and sanity there. My father and mother took me in gladly.

  One day I went in to talk to her in her little parlour. Beside her chair were scrapbooks, maybe six of them, filled with random handbills, scraps of pictures, items from the Sligo Champion about the successes of Maggie as a child at the Sligo feis, whatever had caught her fancy in a long life of pasting and selecting, though it was not the original parlour of old, but a little room in the new, or not so new now, bungalow.

  The glue, the brush and those scrapbooks seemed to me an occupation almost like the weaving of baskets by the lunatics at the asylum where she once worked. In addition each chair-back had an embroidered antimacassar, to protect against the hair-oil of Pappy, myself and Tom, and you couldn’t sit down in the room without dislodging one of these, and her short arm would reach out, as if not in contact with any actual thought of hers, and set it straight behind you or under you.

  So one day, mired in my own confusion, I came into the room, for no other reason than to get out of the little bedroom where I had been lurking, enduring the first days of being a widower. My mother was sitting there in her tight black dress, the sides somewhat worn and maybe even a little unwashed, and the knees shiny from where she had rubbed her hands while cooking the stewed mutton the night before. Indeed that odour of mutton hung about the house.

  My mother was just sitting there. The room was the back end of the sitting room chopped off by a plaster wall, achieving an accidental repetition of the old parlour in John Street. So for a moment, in the clockless misery of grief, it was possible to imagine that it was only a brief while since I had gone into that vanished room to ask her how in the name of God I was to woo a great beauty like Mai Kirwan.

  But, and there was a certain medicine in this for me, in that it distracted me, my mother was crying. Tears were stealing their way down her face, making rivulets through the face-powder, like those mysterious scribbles on the moon.

  ‘Well, Mam,’ I said, ‘what is the matter?’

  I thought she might be thinking of any number of things, her vanished son Eneas, who had not been seen in Sligo for about ten years, the continuing vexation that her blameless husband was to her, still so ha
le and hearty that he rode his big black bicycle all about Sligo and environs, and in his retirement had reverted to being purely a player of jigs and reels on his piccolo and his flute, the cello banished to a stooping position in the pantry – or a dozen other things that might have stymied her in her chair.

  ‘Nothing,’ she said.

  ‘Well, Mam, it can hardly be nothing.’

  ‘I am fine, Jack, I am fine.’ She spoke with her usual patience and kindness, but then her head went down, and another thimble-worth of tears started down her cheeks.

  ‘I think, Mam, you can tell me what it is.’

  ‘Well,’ she said, ‘well, it’s the Old Matter. The Old Matter.’

  Well, I knew what the Old Matter was, and no mistake.

  ‘What brings this on now, Mam?’

  ‘Do you know,’ she said. ‘I do believe it is the death of Mai, if you will forgive me saying so. There she is, a young woman, fifty-one years old, her whole life lived, and yet here am I still, in this chair, in this house, in this town, and not knowing still a thing about myself, who I am or where I come from, or who my people were, or anything.’

  And now the tears seemed to rise into her very throat, flooding up, from her very stomach, because she could barely speak.

  ‘Mam, tell me everything you know, everything you remember, and let us just put our heads together on it, and see what we can do.’