The Temporary Gentleman

by Barry, Sebastian

  The rains that had drenched the land and then withdrawn may have initially sent every growing thing into a frenzy, but now the heavy new growth was drooping. The land burned mightily in its accustomed furnace. The people we passed moved slowly in the heat, always turning their faces to view us, sometimes nodding a greeting like an Irish country person. My happiness had now acquired an extra dimension. I am not sure I have ever felt so at ease in the world, apart from the counterfeit ease offered by alcohol. If the tortured ruts and potholes of the road had allowed such nonchalance, I would gladly have waved gaily to every soul we passed.

  After some hours of driving I stopped the motorbike, switched places and let Tom take the handlebars. He laughed and gripped them, and we hurtled away, he driving at twice the speed I had dared, oftentimes taking the route of the dry ridge of clay that the rains had created on the lower side of the road, and he had no hesitation in uttering whoops and cries when we came within a hair’s breadth of a tumble, the back wheel sliding one way and the other, his large feet skiing along the ground, and then his laughter as he gained control again, and off we shot. It struck me then that he himself maybe expected nothing from the journey, nothing except these accidental pleasures of danger and daredevilry.

  Soon we reached the first river station and we abandoned the Indian to the care of the ferryman there. Tom spoke to him in Ewe, no doubt telling him we would be back in due course for the machine. Everyone was at their ease, and Tom joked agreeably with the ferryman and his pretty daughters. Then we hoiked ourselves into the bare, unpainted vessel, of some ancient vintage, not a native craft as such but something rescued from the detritus of empire many decades back, and painstakingly kept caulked and fit for the river. We sat back on the wooden bench, and let the banks, with their fiery green, flow past. Two men in their fifties, dare I say two friends, or is that absurd of me and wrong? Two men laughing at nothing as nothing passed, and peering into quick-passing villages, and waving nonchalantly to women, girls and boys busy with what looked to me like nothing also on the riverbank. The bank would open for only seconds, showing these pastoral African scenes, and then be done with them, forget them, as the boat’s rough engine chundered on, belching out black fumes from an oily hole just under the rudder.

  Then we made a change of boat, in consideration of the fact that we had to head up a tributary of the river. Now we were seated on a much smaller craft, rough-hewn, but still along European lines. In my mind I imagined us taking ever smaller and smaller boats for smaller and smaller rivers, until we ended up in a hollowed-out canoe. As night came to the forest around us, and I began to worry about mosquitoes, the daytime sounds of monkeys and God knew what birds gave way to the different, more subtle, and now and then more raucous, open-hearted cries of night hunters, bird and beast. We were bedded down by our boatman in the narrow cabin, so that Tom and I lay side by side like a knight and his wife on a tomb, and slept, the very smoothness of the river granting me a beautiful sleep. When I woke the same unaccustomed feeling was in me, was it almost a euphoria of some kind, a signal of clear happiness again, again I thought, like the heart and body of a child, of the child I was myself in my father’s house in Sligo. As if the day, the desirable day, was in front of me without fear or danger. We washed our faces in the passing stream, and the boatman, who must have sat up all night nursing his engine, gave us some fruit for breakfast that he may well have gathered as we went, I didn’t know. And then we reached the halting spot on the river that would apparently have a track leading out of it, according to Tom, and after a walk of a few hours, bring us to Titikope.

  Tom made his arrangements with the boatman, whether in Ewe or not I couldn’t say exactly, though it sounded like a third language unknown to me, or Ewe in a new version or accent, the way the Irish language changes its sound, from Ulster, to Leinster, to Munster, to Connaught. He threw the saddlebag from the motorbike over his shoulder, with our few spare garments and other items, not least something in a small box he had purchased for his wife Miriam, he didn’t say what. And we set off along the track, just wide enough for two walkers abreast, as if it were one clear line of argument made between the chaotic disputes of tree-roots and underwood.

  ‘Not too far now, major,’ he said, as we stopped in a clearing to rest about two hours up the track.

  Then it happened. One moment he was scouting about for something, looking under branches, scuffing at the ground with his feet, I didn’t know what he was looking for, when he stopped very still, and put his two hands to the sides of his neck, held them there in that strange position, squeezed up his eyes, let out a great groan of misery and pain, a sound that contained in it I am sure the pain of his whole existence in summary, stayed there immobile for a full thirty seconds, bent at the knees, stumbled forward, knelt a moment on his left knee like a person about to be knighted, his dusty hat falling off, and then down further he moved, so that I thought he was going to stop there, with his face six inches from the dirt, still the hands holding his neck, but him now gasping, as if breath was not available, was not coming, and with a terrified glance at me, a questioning, horrible glance, like a murdered man, he fell the full way, and his face struck the earth, with its inch of leafy dust, and he stayed there, the hands fallen now at his sides, the palms queerly twisted and upwards, as if he had folded himself in some way, as if he was about to complete some complicated task that required a low crouch, that called for it, a physical task, like the millions he had completed efficiently in his life, the loving of his wife, the digging in the army, the killing of the Japanese, the endless shunting about for work, hand to mouth, year to year, his grace and his bloody niceness, all stilled.

  ‘Tom Quaye, Tom Quaye,’ I cried, ‘my friend! What is the matter?’

  I looked about in surprise and fear. Had he been shot, silently, by someone? A stroke, a heart attack? Like someone felled in a battle, as if life itself were a battle, or a conglomeration of battles, and it had all added up to a blow, invisible, in its own time, keeping its own counsel till the last, a killing blow.

  I was sure he was dead. I searched for his pulse, suddenly aware of the return of the noises in the glade, as if even the animals had held their breath a moment, but couldn’t feel it. Then I went on up the track to find the village. I didn’t know what else to do. I cantered along in my sticky clothes, and stumbled in desperation towards a huddled group of mud houses. As it happened, the only person there who spoke English was his wife, Miriam. I tried to explain who I was and what I was doing there and about the terrible thing that had happened to Tom. Her eyes widened with shock and surprise. She called some helpers to her and she and a little group of villagers came back down the track with me. And there was Tom still, crouched like a Mussulman praying to Mecca.

  Miriam seemed to hold back. She stopped and her companions stopped. I pointed out Tom to her, as if suddenly afraid she couldn’t see him. I was worried I had not properly prepared her for this strange shock. Her husband, her husband, but what did I really know of her attitude to Tom? Maybe he had treated her cruelly, maybe he was a fantasist, I didn’t know. Then she stepped from the shadow of the trees and came to my side and put a hand on my sleeve, gripping the loose cotton. And we went forward to Tom.

  She knelt at his side and touched his head. Suddenly, even though I had known for certain he was dead, he lifted it, just as she touched him, and looked at her. He looked at her. She showed absolutely no surprise. He said something in Ewe and she answered.

  They put together a rough bier and he was carried back into Titikope. I thought of what Tom had said about when he tried to come back from the war, that no matter what dust the witch doctor sprinkled on him at the edge of the village, Miriam had insisted he was dead. And that it followed a certain logic that he could never have entered his village, and resumed his life with his wife and children, unless he could show himself passing from death to life, in the plain evidence of their eyes.

  They celebrated the return of Tom Quaye. Into t
he small hours we drank the palm wine. Next day I left Tom there in Titikope and made the long journey back on the Indian alone.

  *

  It is morning, my last morning in this house. Last night I drove into Osu district one last time and asked the taxi company that has a tiny office there to come out at ten to bring me to the airport with my cases -– the ‘aerodrome’ as the dispatcher called it. He said he would be sure and send someone.

  ‘Akbe,’ I said, ‘akbe. Thank you.’

  All night I slept and had no dreams. I have put the Indian in Tom’s shack and sent a letter to him that he can come and get it when he is fully well. I lugged the old steamer trunk out the back and left it, Kipling and Francis Thompson and the rest can stay, I’m tired of lugging them about. I scrubbed and cleaned the little house from stem to stern, so that Mr Oko would not think badly of me.

  I suppose this is the last thing I will write in this minute-book. I’ll stuff it in my valise now and burn it next chance I get. I’ll go back to Ireland and tend as best I can to things. Somehow the last lesson of Tom Quaye is that everything is possible. A person may die and live again.

  Unlike Tom though, I cannot really go home. Mai was my village and my country. Perhaps I may be a kind of exile everywhere, since I have lost her – until I see her again. Maybe then we will have a better chance of peace, and freedom.

  I hear the taxi now, turning down into Oiswe Street. It’s coming.

  *

  Note by Peter Oko, assistant officer, UN, Accra

  The tragic abduction, disappearance, and presumed death of Mr John (Jack) Charles McNulty, formerly of the UN, and ex-major of the Royal Engineers, is noted and regretted. It is recommended that this document be NOT sent back to his relatives in Ireland with his other effects due to the confidential nature of some passages. It is therefore recommended that it be kept with his file here at the UN offices. The investigation into the circumstances of his disappearance is being currently undertaken by Inspector Louis Tomelty, trusted member of the Ghana Police Force, Head Office, Accra, to whom all inquiries may be directed hereafter.

  Signed: Peter Agymah Oko, PhD (Oxon.)

  Acknowledgements

  I consulted many immeasurably helpful and inspiring books for the writing of this novel, among them:

  That Neutral Island by Clair Wills, Faber and Faber

  UXB Malta by S. A. M. Hudson, The History Press

  Palestine Unveiled by Douglas V. Duff, Blackie

  Fighting for Britain: African Soldiers in the Second World War, by David Killingray, James Currey

  Sligo, The Irish Revolution, 1912–23, by Michael Farry, Four Courts Press

  Colonial Postscript, Diary of a District Officer, 1935–56, by John Morley, Radcliffe Press

  Nightmare Convoy, by Paul Lund and Harry Ludlum, Foulsham

  Geology of the Karakoram and Hindu Kush, edited by Susumu Matsushita and Kazuo Huzita, Kyoto University

  And other material, notably an essay:

  The Political Meaning of Highlife Songs in Ghana, by Sjaak van der Geest and Nimrod K. Asante-Darko, South African Studies Review, Vol 25, No. 1.

  The lyrics on page 57 are found in this essay, an English translation by Mr Asante-Darko of the original song in Twi, ‘Nsuo beta a, mframa di kan’, by the great Highlife artist E. K. Nyame.

  The lyrics on page 22 from ‘Ghana Freedom Highlife’ by E. T. Mensah © RetroAfric, are courtesy of RetroAfric Music Publishing

  About the author

  Sebastian Barry was born in Dublin in 1955. His novels and plays have won, among other awards, the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Prize, the Costa Book of the Year award, the Irish Book Awards Best Novel, the Independent Booksellers Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. He also had two consecutive novels, A Long Long Way (2005) and The Secret Scripture (2008), shortlisted for the MAN Booker Prize. He lives in Wicklow with his wife and three children.

  By the same author

  fiction

  The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty

  Annie Dunne

  A Long Long Way

  The Secret Scripture

  On Canaan’s Side

  plays

  Boss Grady’s Boys

  Prayers of Sherkin

  White Woman Street

  The Only True History of Lizzie Finn

  The Steward of Christendom

  Our Lady of Sligo

  Hinterland

  Fred and Jane

  Whistling Psyche

  The Pride of Parnell Street

  Dallas Sweetman

  Tales of Ballycumber

  Andersen’s English

  poetry

  The Water-Colourist

  Fanny Hawke Goes to the Mainland Forever

  Copyright

  First published in 2014

  by Faber & Faber Ltd

  Bloomsbury House

  74–77 Great Russell Street

  London WC1B 3DA

  This ebook edition first published in 2014

  All rights reserved

  © Sebastian Barry, 2014

  Cover design by Faber & Faber Ltd

  The right of Sebastian Barry to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly

  ISBN 978–0–571–27698–1