The Temporary Gentleman

by Barry, Sebastian

  *

  Suspecting that Tom Quaye would be a better historian than myself of my lapse from grace, I have been trying to draw him out about our night in Osu, but he is a very difficult man to get to talk when he has no desire to. He listens, staring me straight in the eye, but then he just turns his head and goes about some other business.

  Today he put a new element in one of the Tilley lamps, then for some reason, though I tried to dissuade him, he hauled out my old cavalry boots from the cupboard, one of the few remaining things of my army uniform, which I brought out with me this time thinking they would be handy as mosquito boots. But even in the dozen years since the war ended, I find my calves have increased in girth to such a degree that I cannot accommodate the boots on them. I can get them on but cannot get myself out of them again, as if my legs were corks in wine bottles and nary a corkscrew handy. Then Tom Quaye is pulling at them, with me being dragged slowly across the floor, chair and all, till, poof! the leg gives up and surrenders the wretched boot. So they live a dark and dusty life in the cupboard now. But Tom Quaye has a thing about polishing them, and this afternoon he carried them forth into the light and rather angrily I thought lashed on the polish, and then worked away mightily with a cloth to give them a barrack-room shine. But all wasted work really.

  And all the while this was going on, it was myself trying to draw him out about Osu. There were little snatches and sparking illuminations and ill-remembered moments of it that were still bothering me. I tried first to winkle a way in by talking about his beloved Highlife music, which only launched him into a panegyric about E. T. Mensah, the man who wrote ‘Freedom Highlife’, part of Tom’s ‘under his breath’ repertoire. Tom, no more than myself, doesn’t like to hit nails on the head, seemingly, he likes to come at things sideways, or rather, move away from them sideways. But this is the way of the world. A direct question in the company of men is in most contexts a sort of insult, something you learn young in Sligo bars.

  He had got from a woman he called his ‘Aunty-aunty’ some sort of concoction in a little twist of paper, and, having put the boots back in the cupboard, this he then tipped out on a saucer, mixed it with water, using a tiny salt spoon that I never use for salt, a survivor of a little vanished hoard of such things from my in-laws, and then, really without asking me, undid my white shirt, laid my chest and belly bare, and still talking about Highlife and its byways and main roads, without much in the way of interruption, he proceeded to dab a little button of this stuff on each mosquito bite, which he well knew were causing me tremendous itchiness. My belly in particular was a dreepy constellation of disintegrating red stars. He let this all dry and then he put on my shirt for me again, as if I were suddenly armless myself, and did up the buttons, and, just before he left now for the day, gave what amounted as far as I could see to a bow in my direction, which wordless gesture flummoxed me.

  ‘Thank you, Tom,’ I said. ‘Jesus, there’s great cooling in that stuff, right enough. How much does Aunty-aunty need for it?’

  ‘I will give her sixpence, with your permission, major.’

  ‘You certainly will,’ I said, and fetched out the coins from my trousers. ‘Oh, there’s an old one,’ I said, glancing as I always do at the dates of the coins, an old habit. It was a worn, deep-brown penny from 1860, with the head of a youngish Victoria on it. Tom Quaye smiled, but he didn’t bother looking at it.

  Then he was readying to go off, and not for the first time I felt a little tug of regret. I like having him about. When you live as if you were Robinson Crusoe on his island, everything starts to get gathered into what you have left to you – and what I have at the moment is the friendship of this man, whom of course I pay to come in and do the damn chores. It’s not exactly an empire of family and friends. But, remarkably enough, it does me for the moment.

  So off he went, singing as is his wont. The door closed on his song, and the mosquito screen rattled against it ineptly like a small child’s idea of drumming:

  Before it starts raining

  The wind will blow

  I warned you but you did not listen

  *

  Mr Kirwan banned me from the house. There was an unfortunate incident in Sligo town, as he was wending his way home one day from his insurance selling. It was just the worst bit of luck. I suppose he was heading up to the station to retrieve himself from the mean folk of Sligo. It was a bleak, dark evening in December and I had spent the day with pals in Hardigan’s Bar. I do remember him vaguely, standing above me in Wine Street, with that same absent stare, and his top hat incongruous against the scudding clouds. I was heeled up like a cart against the wall of the bank building. I couldn’t have spoken to him if he had asked me a question, but he didn’t bother himself with that. I remember the roar of the Garvoge in the near distance, because it had rained mercilessly for three days and the old river was in flood.

  The next morning, before heading up to the university, I discussed the whole matter with my mother.

  ‘Holy Crimea,’ she said, for once in no manner optimistic, ‘that’s not good.’

  Then she gave me a sermon about temperance as well she might. Eneas, while still in Ireland before his exile, had been not much of a drinker, but Tom, still a youngster really, and working hard at the cinema and with his father in the band, already drank a deal. Old Tom she laboured to regulate like you might a faulty pump. Whisky was the McNulty drink. I associate it now with those wild blanked-out skies between Strandhill and town, waking up in inclement ditches, then seeking far and wide in the throbbing misery of morning my motorcar, like it was a lost heifer, abandoned somewhere in the muddle and the chaos.

  Mr Kirwan pleaded with Mai, he beseeched her, she said, he went down on his knees to her, imploring, imploring. Calling to heaven to help him make her understand the peril she was in. It wasn’t the buveur of Sligo he called me now, which might have been misinterpreted as vaguely affectionate. He told her that any association with me would be disastrous for her, that I would surely drag her down to the same level in time, and so on, and so on.

  But she was telling me this with a strange little laughter running through it. It amused her. We were sitting in the little cafe at the edge of Strandhill beach. I had run her down to Sligo in the Austin and we were going to go to the dance later in the Plaza. The bay there, so primitive and wide, as if desolate and unknown to mankind, with not a house in view, showed us its army upon army of white horses, their white-plumed heads rearing and tumbling on the fierce beaten colours of the water, strange blues and blacks, as if blue and black could be fire, and thrown from these wild acres, the heaven-ascending spray. And myself and Mai sitting at a little table, in a little tin room, our eyes drawn out to the ruckus of the bay as we talked. By deep contrast, the strange calm in her.

  ‘He thinks I am at Queenie Moran’s house today,’ she said. ‘We will just have to be as clever as Aquinas.’

  Chapter Seven

  Nevertheless when Mai graduated she kept her promise to herself and went to England to teach. She said it would just be for a year. In her Russian coat with the fur collar, her yellow gloves, and the neat cases with her name in gold upon them beside her, her father’s gift, she stood in the station looking momentarily woebegone. She stepped in close to me and, lifting a yellow-gloved hand, touched my cheek.

  ‘Take care, Jack,’ she said, which sounded both like an endearment and a warning.

  ‘Take care, you, Mai, please.’

  And she gave me one of her good kisses.

  Then she was alone in the carriage, the frame of the window giving me the sense of an oil painting, a genre picture to assail the heart. Then she blew me a kiss, and nodded her lovely head. The waterfall of her black hair, the hat like a boat trying to weather it, her dark eyes in the dark carriage, not so much absent as deep, deep as a well, with the water a far coin below of brightness and blackness. Looking, looking at me, as the train drew out. Was that a flash of doubt across her features, just for a moment? I was shiv
ering.

  What was I going to do without her, what was I going to do without her?

  *

  This village of Tom’s, called Titikope, somewhere up the Volta river, is both the centre of his world but also the very thing he has lost. I am sure it enjoys its own reality. But it also exists in Tom’s inner mind. Though he himself is an element of that imaginative place that has been excluded, he carries it at the heart of himself.

  Now I know that his wife’s name is Miriam, and that he has a son and daughter. His children are more or less grown, as I calculate it, because they were born before the war.

  And it is the war, still, that is Tom’s difficulty. Not only in the matter of savings and pensions, but the very effect of going to the war in the first place.

  Everything that he says about his war experiences circles back to the fact that he is no longer wanted in his home place by his wife. So that when the dog of his story seems to stray away and meander about, no, it is just an illusion, because in fact it always doubles back to Miriam. He talks about prostitutes and killing, but not because he seems to feel such things are what has caused his dilemma. And they are not, at all. It is something much more mysterious. The largeness of the difference between how he thinks about the world and how I think about it is actually what makes him interesting to me. His guilt is not the usual guilt of a European man like me.

  When he first left his village to join the Gold Coast Regiment he had no idea he would be away for three or four years, without any leave. His local chieftain came to the village one evening and, speaking passionately about the English king, and the danger to the Gold Coast from the French in Sierra Leone, moved him to leave his wife and young children and join up, even though he was not particularly young. He told his wife he would be back by the end of the rainy season, or failing that, soon after. Of course he had no idea when he would be back, he knew nothing about that, he knew nothing about the world, he had actually never seen a town before, let alone a place like Accra.

  Anyway, before he quite knew what was happening, he and his new comrades were bumped across Africa to Kenya, where they were put in a camp outside Nairobi. Here they sweltered for nine months. Tom took a prostitute to cook for him and share his bed. There was immense rivalry for these women. There were pitched battles on the outskirts of the camp, where men laid into each other with ferocity. White soldiers were involved too, fellas from South Africa and Rhodesia.

  Then they were transported through Arabia and India to Burma, where Tom learned to hate the Japanese and give them no quarter. They killed every prisoner they took.

  After the war he was a year waiting to be demobbed, stuck in Burma. The war was long over when he got back to the Gold Coast, and his people, hearing no news of him, had presumed he was dead, and had already held their ceremony of mourning. This meant, he said, that he was in fact dead, or at least, a walking ghost. So when he came to the outskirts of his village, and people cast their eyes on him and wailed in wonder and horror, he was sprinkled with sacred dust by the witch doctor, to try to return him to the living.

  But Miriam, his wife, had also believed him dead. She didn’t think the witch doctor sprinkling him with dust changed anything. In her great fear of the dead she wanted nothing to do with him and asked him to go away again, which, in his grief and confusion, he did.

  He returned to Accra and poked about for work. He joined the protest march with his fellow ex-soldiers. He was arrested as an agitator and tortured. It was Mr Oko, as a liaison officer with the UN, that got him out of prison.

  Hearing all this, I understood better his relative silence in the first months knowing him. Why would he say any of this to a strange whiteman, when it was better just to get on with the bit of work and keep his history to himself?

  *

  Summer brought Mai home. She had written regular and passionate letters to me from the English school. Now she sent me a postcard to meet her at Rosses Point that Sunday. Her great friend Queenie Moran was now working as a district nurse in Sligo, and Mai was able to tell her father she was going down to see her.

  I motored out to the Rosses, through a delinquent sequence of sunlight and rain-clouds, and parked on the little headland where the long flight of steps goes down to the strand. The last cars were turning on the sandy clifftop and the walkers heading homeward. The early dark began to take possession of everything. I knew the motor bus didn’t come out as far as this, but would be depositing Mai further back along the road, and I got out of the car and waited for her. I was veritably trembling.

  But she didn’t seem to be coming. I hadn’t seen her now for a long time and maybe at Christmas I had had the sense that she wasn’t making much of an effort to see me. Maybe the whole thing was over and maybe it was better so. And what was it anyhow, but a mismatch between two people from different worlds? That was a small part of my response, right enough. But the greater part of me was caught now in a tidal surge somewhere between longing and anguish. The salt wind scoured my face, and although the rain held off, you could smell it, and almost see it, walking across the wide acres of the sea below. I felt abandoned. Then suddenly she was there.

  ‘Mai,’ I said.

  ‘Jack,’ she said. ‘It’s bloody cold out here. What were we thinking of?’

  ‘I’ve missed you, Mai, so much,’ I said, wondering would I hazard a kiss, or a touch of my hand on her cheek? But she stood there, as if stalled, out of reach somehow, in her fur-collared coat, her hair neatened back and hidden by her hat. She always knew the thing that would suit her. Then she leaned in after all and kissed me, and stood back again. The joy of it, I had to shake my head to get rid of the dizziness she had created. She stood there now, smiling, at her ease. I took the opportunity just to look at her. The face, the eyes I had longed to see again. What is it that starts to bind one soul to another? It is so often like holding an opinion that all the world seeks to refute. But she seemed to me proud, beautiful, and honest. As I stood there in my polished shoes, and my own youth, and regarded her, I knew that I loved her.

  We were halfway across the great strand, walking arm in arm, when the deluge struck. She loosened her grip on my arm, and we went careering across the sand, hand in hand, the rain itself as if getting over-excited, leaping at us, and then Mai against my expectation bursting out into laughter, wonderful laughter fulfilling all the adjectives of laughter, pealing, wild laughter, and I knew that it was a genuine delight to her, to be running like that, our leather shoes being ruined by the seawater and the rain, just a kingdom of wetness, till we reached the place she must have been heading for, a cave in the far cliff, which we now threw ourselves into, not a big cave at all, low but enough for me to stand in, with a long sucked-out section where the sea had forced its way in and out, in and out for a million years, beginning long before such creatures as ourselves were on the earth. There, suddenly, she took a hold of me, she just fetched me to her, as if the movement were a peremptory word of some kind, and God knows if we were dressed or naked, I couldn’t say, only lunatics would take off their clothes in an Irish summer, the memory itself is the colour of the new darkness and the old rain, we are blanked out there, but she is kissing me, I can lay claim to be the dependable recorder of that, the very historian, and I am kissing her, and the back of my drenched head is lifting, and I am as happy as man ever was, in the whole history of the world, to be present there, to have reached that moment, of being with her, to be the object of her hunger.

  Her father was old for a father and in the way of things he died.

  There was a big cortège leaving Grattan House, himself in the horse-drawn hearse. They only had to bring him a few yards to the church. Every now and then, as the priest spoke about him, Mai let out a sort of primeval cry. I put my arm around her in the pew and felt the furnace of grief in her.

  Her mother was quiet, as if grief had sewn her mouth with a cruel stitch. I was sitting between Mai and her brother Jack, because there was no one to stop me now, and I felt
an odd sense of disgrace in being there, though no one among the living said anything untoward.

  While her father lived, the only times I was in the house of late were when he was out, and her mother would let me in, either not being of the same mind as her husband on the subject of the buveur of Sligo, or not wanting to go against her daughter.

  But in the deep winter following, her good mother withered in the empty house, and also died, and the mason chiselled out under her husband’s inscription the accustomed words, And of his wife, Mary.

  After this second funeral, in the parlour, and after the mourners had gone home, and only her brother Jack remained, sitting in a chair at the top of the landing with his long legs stretched on the window-sill, out of earshot, gazing at the grey expanse of the sea, dark and mildewed, like one of those great mirrors whose silver backing is failing, not much inclined, as was usual for him, to speak, I sat alone with Mai. She was weakened and vulnerable. She looked like a wealthy person from whom everything, lands, houses, money, has been snatched away in a financial cataclysm, sitting there humbly and quietly, her white hands holding her black gloves, her face down, looking at those hands and gloves, as if they might hold the clue to the next thing she should do. I felt oddly like a doctor, and knew instinctively that she was going to trust in my diagnosis. Just for a moment I thought I should show her the mercy of silence, and say nothing. That could have been the loving thing to do. This was a simplified Mai. She was without question the child of those two vanished people, the absolute child, and I do not know if she had the wherewithal in the upshot to be anything else.

  ‘He really was a fine old gentleman,’ I said. She raised her face to me when I said it, as if weighing secret things up in a hidden scales. There was a long pause.

  ‘You are gentleman enough, in your own way,’ she said, not quite trying to flatter me, and maybe even believing it in that moment. Then she let her gaze fall again, as if the conversation was over.