The Temporary Gentleman

by Sebastian Barry

  But Mai was excited by the colonial life, all in all. Our station was tiny, remote, but neatly composed. She liked me in my white uniforms, she liked the mud-walled bungalow with its big rooms, she liked the order of things, what she called the Britishness, and the deference shown to her by everyone. She put her old politics aside, and looked about her, in a widened and interested way. She read books about the tribes of the Gold Coast, the languages, the jewellery and furniture, the chieftains, and the witch doctors.

  She burned with presence, just as the country burned with its incessant heat. She was young, and she didn’t betray the gift of her youth. She seemed to know damn well the privilege of it, and luxuriated in it.

  In the evenings, as if Africa were an extended Omard, she played the piano for us, the Ketchums, the Reynolds, and myself. One evening she played a tremendous piece of Chopin, sight unseen. Mai’s face was fiercely concentrated, her eyes seemingly boring into the sheet music, until you might have feared small black marks would appear there and burst into flames. The women listened with their habitual wonder to this Irishwoman whose gifts seemed so abundant. Jack and Billy, benignly leaning against the club bar, seemed also to be touched by Mai’s playing, she hitting the keys at the end in a terrific chord, making Mrs Reynolds and Mrs Ketchum jump in their wicker seats.

  ‘That was just so marvellous, dear Mrs McNulty,’ Mrs Ketchum said.

  Then Mai suggested I sing ‘Roses of Picardy’, the song she had now often heard me singing while I shaved.

  ‘Well, I will if you want me to, Mai. But I can’t compete with your playing.’

  ‘Go on, Jack,’ she said, ‘to please me.’

  ‘Of course I will sing to please you,’ I said.

  ‘I should think so,’ said Jack Reynolds, drily.

  And the roses will die in the summertime,

  And our paths may be far apart,

  But there’s one rose that dies not in Picardy,

  ’Tis the rose that I keep in my heart.

  ‘Jolly well done, Jack, jolly well done,’ Billy Ketchum said, tearfully, at the end, a man after all who had come through the Picardy in question.

  Chapter Eleven

  Mai ordered a rake of books about obstetrics and set about establishing a little clinic at the station, not for the likes of us, but the native wives and children. There was a high incidence of puerperal fever among newborn babies and Mai began to teach the mothers about the importance of scrupulous cleanliness. These were in no way savage people, and they listened to her, with our houseboy Tom Nobody translating for her.

  Tom Nobody, I had nearly forgotten him. The first Tom, before Tom Quaye. When he had been told at school to take an English name he had chosen Nobody because he liked the sound of the word. Mai and Tom mutually approved of each other. She was anxious that he be well dressed, and she had two white suits made up for him, and supplied him with a proper cork hat. As a matter of fact she didn’t contribute to those continuous and desultory conversations about the natives. Mrs Ketchum and Mrs Reynolds would routinely boil over with scorn for the African, and for Africa. Billy Ketchum might start to complain about ‘the stench in the villages’. Then Mai was silent, mysterious, with her Sphinx-like smile.

  If there were no savage tribes to subdue, she certainly subdued Thomas, Lord Goodworth, the governor in Accra – Goody to his friends. He found the funds for her. It was unpaid work, and unofficial, apart from his good offices. She had, it turned out, dollops and dashes of medical knowledge from her brother Jack, and every month Dr Booth made his way up from Accra with supplies and held his surgery and she dreamed of getting Queenie Moran out to be the nurse in the small wooden building, though that never came to pass. In that way she earned herself the legend of something of a miracle worker, and the death rate fell to nearly nothing. Mrs Ketchum marvelled at the fact that the heat did not seem to trouble Mai in the least. She went about the burning compound without umbrella or hat, and was quite content to be so tanned she might have passed for an Arab woman. One morning early I awoke, and turned to look at her in the bed. The sheet had been kicked away in the darkness, and now her long white body lay there, with the darkened face, and the arms brown to the elbows. Her body innocent and eternal, like in an old painting.

  By then, married for three years, I sometimes worried that she might be growing tired of me. You have to worry about something. But it was a worry that waxed and waned. As district officer I was often away on tour, and then I could imagine all sorts of things, worrying myself as I lay uncomfortably on my camp bed, but when I was at home I realised afresh that life in the colonies suited her. Nothing so confining, you might think, as to be one of only three white women for a thousand miles, in the great, weather-afflicted, unwalkable spaces of West Africa. But no, she liked that. There was sometimes a sense of ‘inspection’ from her. We would sit in the evenings in the bungalow on our cane chairs, and if I was reading Tennyson or Kipling, drinking whisky slowly, the moths burning themselves to death on the Tilley lamps, she was sometimes simply watching me, and it was not always a completely comfortable feeling. She said little enough in that mood, but now and then after a long silence she might make a comment, as if in answer to a companion I couldn’t see or hear. Oftentimes she took me by surprise, commenting on some aspect of things that had never occurred to me.

  ‘Do you know,’ she said once, ‘in a hundred years, the Africans might be in charge of us. I hope they’ll forgive us.’

  ‘What do you mean, Mai?’ I said.

  ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘we’ve got used to having the power of life and death over people. Do you know Billy Ketchum hanged a man here last year? Oh, yes,’ she said, ‘that sort of thing tends to see-saw back and forth.’

  ‘No, Mai, I don’t think so. No.’

  ‘Trust me, Jack.’

  ‘Well, we mightn’t be alive to see it.’

  ‘Just as well, Jack, you being a district officer and all.’

  Then she had the good grace to laugh.

  ‘I’m not blaming you, Jack. I like you. I will definitely step in and stop them when they try to hang you.’

  ‘Thank you, Mai.’

  The plain fact is, I was delighted to sit there with her, whatever she said, whatever she was thinking. I was proud of her. I thought, no, I knew, that she was a wonderful and unique woman. Unusual was the unkindest adjective you could have used about her. She was unusual. Her allure for me anyway was boundless.

  Even last night I had a vivid dream where she was being ‘kind’ to me, as she called it – ‘Now I’ll be kind,’ she would say – listening to me speaking with a slightly ironical attention, doing her level best, and not making that little snorting noise, and when I paused in my speech – I can’t remember what I was saying – she moved nearer to me and put her arms around my shoulders. Then she shifted just an inch closer. It was the barest movement, and yet in my dream it crushed the breath from me.

  Then she was obliged to head homeward. She was pregnant.

  ‘It must be catching,’ she said. ‘All those healthy young babies in the clinic.’

  However, Dr Booth and the ladies of the station advised her to go back to Europe. Alas, I had six months of my contract to run. So off she would have to go, alone, indomitable, with her leather cases, and one black sea-trunk marked in white letters:

  Mrs Mai McNulty,

  c/o Mrs Thomas McNulty,

  John Street, Sligo, Irish Free State.

  Not Wanted on the Voyage.

  ‘You’ll be sure and take care of yourself, Mai,’ I said.

  ‘Don’t worry, Jack. I think I know what’s involved. Don’t be late for the christening.’

  ‘Oh, Mai,’ I said, ‘Mai. What a turn-up for the books. A child. I’m so bloody happy.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘yes, you’re right,’ she said, veritably beaming. ‘It’s a good thing alright. I think I’m supposed to say well done to you. Or is that just what men say to each other?’

  ‘You can say well d
one if you like.’

  ‘I will then. Well done.’

  ‘Well done, you, Mai.’

  ‘Ah, yes, sure, yes, I had to make a great effort, I must say.’

  ‘You’re a horrible woman,’ I said, laughing.

  ‘I know,’ she said. ‘Horrible.’

  She had recently rescued an orphaned Diana monkey, so she decided to take him with her.

  ‘At last,’ she said, ‘a decent conversationalist.’

  ‘Well, well,’ I said.

  ‘I will miss you, Jack, though,’ she said, in her serious voice.

  ‘Will you?’

  ‘God, yes,’ she said.

  Mrs Ketchum and Mrs Reynolds came out to say their goodbyes, all handkerchiefs and genuine sorrow, and promises to visit her one day in Ireland. She was given a send-off by the women of the village, which pleased her greatly, and an ivory elephant to remember her time in Africa.

  I travelled down with her as far as the sea and entrusted her to the long looming ship of the Peninsular and Orient line. In the car she had taken my left hand between gear changes, and once or twice had laid it on her stomach. She was shaking going up the gangplank. A liner like that makes everyone look small at the rail.

  While she was aboard ship on the long journey, I had to go higher up in Asante country, checking on the progress of a new canal.

  There were the sweltering hours of work to endure, while I paced among the diggers, as we tried to extend the supply of water northward. The ruling chiefs had requested a canal and the Colonial Office had obliged. It was a noble exercise, and my heart would normally have been in it. But my heart on this occasion had slipped away with Mai.

  My mother came all the way up from Sligo to Dublin to meet her. Mai stepped off the boat at the North Wall, and there was the Mam, in her old black dress, faithfully attending. Mai said my mother wanted to hold her hand along the quay, as if she were a child, but because Mai was tall enough and my mother so diminutive, it was the older woman who gave at a glance the appearance of youth. And anyway Mai was not sure she wished for her hand to be taken, she in her capacious dark blue coat that she had bought while the ship docked at Gibraltar, to hide her condition, the monkey like a black and white flame tinged with orange on her shoulder. She was grateful to my mother for coming to meet her, but she didn’t want to be treated like an invalid. But my mother persisted, and led Mai all the way to the train at Kingsbridge, and fussed over her every inch of the journey to Sligo.

  She was to have the baby in the little house in John Street. She didn’t think it would be feasible for her brother in Roscommon to take her, even though he was a doctor. Maria Sheridan said she would be glad to receive her in Omard, but Mai was not that sure, as if somehow or other a pregnancy was something beyond the scope of a visit to Omard. John Street was hardly big enough to swing a cat, let alone a Diana monkey, but Mai preferred to be there.

  *

  The rains, finally. All day there had been a metallic greyness at the edges of the usual egg-blue sky. A few minutes ago the universe gave a shrug, time seemed to step back, then surged forward to catch up, and then the heavens were ripped in a thousand places like a rotten topsail. And a solid water poured down, you might think no creature could breathe in it. It rubbed out every other sound, of insect, bird and animal. The palm trees dipped under it like dancers, their lovely costumes dragged and battered. The iron roof was betrayed, a dozen holes immediately found out where they had grown unnoticed. I had to rush to move my table down a few feet as the pages of the minute-book were splattered with a dusty grey blood, it looked like. It was so alive, the rain, that I laughed out loud. Tom stood by my side watching it, forcefully cursing the deluge. He knew it might be making a hames of his shelter, over in the big-leaved trees.

  I looked at him. Though his eyes are hooded and nearly hidden, yet out through the folds of skin shine two slivers of emerald. I don’t know how sad he is, but I do know that he is sad. He has been extraordinarily kind, I was thinking. He is a dependable, decent man. There was goodness in him, yes, there was something of God in him. He is just a local man I employ to clean and see to the house, that’s one way of looking at it. But. Something about Tom Quaye’s care and loyalty, even if words like care and loyalty might usually suggest servility, is entrancing. He is like a big lump of medicine to me.

  ‘Do you know, Tom, when this weather blows over, in a few weeks, you know, we might make that trip north.’

  He turned his face to me, not on the same wavelength.

  ‘What trip, major?’ he said.

  ‘We might make a run up on the Indian to see, you know, that wife of yours, and the two children.’

  This was a possibility that had obviously never occurred to him. Perhaps he didn’t even like the sound of it.

  ‘To Titikope, major?

  ‘Yes, or you could just take the motorcycle, if you preferred.’

  ‘No, I – I think this is one good idea.’

  ‘Well, we can wait till the rains are done, and then make a plan. By the time these rains have finished we’ll be stir-crazy, I’ll be bound. We’ll need a jaunt of some description. Unless you wanted to go alone as I say.’

  ‘No, no, not alone, major,’ said Tom.

  ‘We can share the driving,’ I said.

  Tom looked at me as closely as I had looked at him. His green eyes just stared at me. I was beginning to twitch with embarrassment. Then slowly, like the very rumble of the distant thunder outside, he started to laugh. He pointed his right hand at me, wagging it, making absolutely sure I got the joke. I got the joke. I laughed and laughed with him, under the enormous rain.

  Chapter Twelve

  Soon enough I was home. I had missed the birth by a few weeks. I came in the door and found Mai waiting for me in the narrow hall, one hand supporting herself against the wine-coloured wall. Her body was bent a little sideways, and I had to draw her into my arms to get a proper hold of her. I was concerned that the birth had weakened her so. But I could sense her enormous relief. She cried, and patted my chest. Such a moment of love that seemed. Then she brought me into the parlour to see Maggie. There is no experience in the world to match seeing your first child, for the first time. She was a little lost face in a nest of tiny blankets.

  Mai on her own return had cut quite the figure in Sligo, my mother said, walking along Wine Street or O’Connell Street, crossing Grattan Bridge with her firm stride, going in and out of the fancier shops, drinking tea in the Café Cairo with all its hissing boilers and small-voiced maids, the fashionable ladies of Sligo arranged among the tables like the fabulous beasts of some impossible watering hole – in her Gibraltar coat, and the monkey swaying minutely on her shoulder. There was nothing else but Mai now in the talk of my mother. She thought her a rare person.

  Yes, Mam cherished her. I wonder now if she didn’t also invest Mai with some residual idea of her own real mother, whom she would never speak about. The spectre of illegitimacy kept her silent in her torment. But perhaps in Mam’s mind her mother had been just such as Mai, tall, a touch theatrical, in well-chosen furs and dresses. Certainly, when I saw them together on the street, you couldn’t help seeing, as I said, due to their very different heights, a mother and child.

  But my mother, not being in any way a stupid woman, also picked up other signals from Mai. For twenty years and more she had stitched pinafores and smocks for the women in the asylum, and she knew something of female distress. She had found Mai a number of times in the back bedroom, sunken in what Mam called ‘black thoughts’.

  Dr Snow had prescribed some pills – little white ones they were, like the buttons you might sew on a robin’s waistcoat.

  When April came around we were not able to honour Maria Sheridan’s call to go to Omard for the mayfly. But Mai said we would go next year for certain. She didn’t feel quite up to it with the baby, and what she called ‘a bit of lethargy’ that she was feeling.

  A few months later, I was sitting beside her in the tiny par
lour in John Street. Our baby was sleeping in her Moses basket, there were no lamps or candles lit, and only the murmuring glow of the fire, now in its last hour of burning, played across Mai’s features. Outside, Sligo town was silent in the deep, camphory folds of darkness and rain, the small hours given over only to last wanderers home, and Old Keighron’s horse clopping past to the bakery. Mai was as still as a cat. It was so quiet we could hear Maggie breathing, a sound all smallness and quaintness that would make a darkened criminal smile in recognition. My father was off with his band somewhere, and my mother had kindly taken herself off to a Redemptorist mission with her own mother, or I should say her foster mother, Ma Donnellan. There was a fiery young curate in town now, a Father Gaunt, that Mam thought was Jesus returned to the earth.

  The monkey sat by the fender, as contemplative as ourselves, and Mam’s cat beside him, licking her thin arms. There was a dark, introspective unsmilingness to Mai’s face, and yet in that moment I sensed that she was happy.

  I was thinking of the poem by Coleridge, where he describes himself seated by just such a fire, his own child asleep in her cot beside him, and the film of ash on the grate, trembling in some tiny wind, putting him in mind of his own state, private, alone, in some lost evening of 1798. The eyes of the cat took the small firelight into their green depths. The monkey snaked out a skinny arm, and with great delicacy, plucked out one of the cat’s eyes. Mai leaped to her feet, consternated, wrenched from her daydream.