The Temporary Gentleman

by Sebastian Barry

When my mother returned, disclosure had to be made. Mai made her a pot of tea, and put her to bed.

  The next day she telephoned to Dublin Zoo and they said they would be glad to have a Diana monkey. Mai left me to look after things, and went up to Dublin on the train, and deposited the creature among his own kind in the monkey house.

  ‘A one-eyed cat is better than no cat,’ said my mother, philosophically.

  Dr Snow was a regular visitor, trying to help Mai with the breast milk, which was awfully hard for her, my mother said. She couldn’t keep a proper supply going. A wet nurse was engaged from Far Finisklin but sent home again by Mam as she said the girl was not washed.

  Mai wanted to see her brother Jack. He turned up in a new Crossley coupé, that gleamed even in the metal Sligo air. I was walking up John Street after a quick visit to the bookies when I saw him alight from the tremendous car, as neat and dark as a bishop.

  ‘Ho, Jack Kirwan!’ I called to him.

  I let him in the little front door. Jack nodded at Mam as if he wasn’t quite sure who she was, but then, that was always his manner, vague, and confusing to the mortals he laboured to engage with. Then it was up the coffin-narrow stairs to the back bedroom, which, when Jack stepped into it, suddenly looked like one of those old illustrations in Alice in Wonderland. It was clear enough from the gaze he gave me that he wanted to speak to Mai alone. The sun had come out in Mai’s heart, that was for sure, to judge by her smile of welcome.

  I stayed in the scullery helping Mam to cut the mutton for the evening meal. Maggie woke and my mother fed her from the curiously shaped bottle. Bound in swaddling clothes, nevertheless her feet, in violet pampooties – the epitome of infant style, since Mai had had them specially made by Johnston’s of O’Connell Street, from an illustration in a Paris magazine – wriggled and turned.

  Then Jack came down, followed by Mai.

  ‘Jack, Jack,’ said Mai, ‘he is giving us Grattan House. What do you make of that?’

  I was gobsmacked. Giving us Grattan House!

  ‘That is extraordinarily generous,’ I said to him, ‘but we couldn’t hope to recompense you properly for that.’ I was dizzy now. Did he expect money from us? Was he selling at a ‘friendly’ price?

  ‘He’s giving it to us,’ said Mai. ‘Oh, Jack,’ she said, meaning her brother, not myself, ‘I don’t think I can ever be unhappy again, not if I can hang my hat in Grattan House!’

  ‘Well, well,’ said Jack. ‘You’ll be doing me a favour, Mai. Get it off my hands. Sitting empty. A house needs people in it. I am settled in Roscommon. Who better than my own sister?’

  This was an enormous speech for Jack. Even Mai looked at him as if he were Edmund Burke of a sudden, teasing out a thought in the House of Commons.

  *

  Watching Tom through the open door as I am writing this. I can just make out what he is doing, as he sways about, chopping, gathering. It is so violently hot he is wearing what amounts to a garment of sweat. The rains cascade mercilessly outside. The roof has a hundred lunatic drummers beating on it. It is a belligerent cacophony, chaotic, but weirdly peaceful.

  Tom Quaye’s ‘Capital’ Braised Beef: Melt an ounce of dripping in your stewing pot, brown 1 lb. of chopped beef. Remove beef. Fry carrots, turnips and onions, add half pint stock. Return meat, cover pot, simmer for an hour. Bob’s your uncle.

  ‘That’s capital,’ I said, the first time he served it.

  ‘Do you want the “Capital”, major?’ he might say now, when he has found decent beef in the market.

  I usually mash it up into a hash. Just the job.

  If you wonder why

  Old soldiers never die,

  Fall in, fall in,

  And follow your uncle Bob.

  *

  Mai never spoke now of going to Dublin and making a name for herself in government circles and she took to speaking of the new people who had just been elected with humorous disparagement. But then, it was the era of disappointment and disillusionment. A great effort of the spirit had been expended in creating a new country. Inevitably it couldn’t match expectations. Especially when De Valera came to power in ’32, the so-called loser of the civil war.

  ‘Pappy was right,’ Mai said, ‘we should have stuck with old John Redmond, for these lads are not the lads we thought they were.’

  But she didn’t follow my brother Tom, in her mind or otherwise, towards the likes of General O’Duffy, she didn’t like the cut of him. One of Mai’s friends in Galway was Rosie Fine, the daughter of Fine the pawnbroker. When Tom made casual remarks about Jews, aping O’Duffy, Mai would tense up with exasperation.

  ‘This is just stupidity,’ she would say, and shake her head. When Tom reminded Mai that O’Duffy had been Collins’s right-hand man while he lived, Mai snorted.

  ‘Collins would have horsewhipped him now,’ she said.

  It was exciting somehow to hear her talk in the old way. It strikes me now, if everyone had said, ‘This is just stupidity,’ we would never have had the war that eventually came.

  Myself, I was finding it impossible to find good work as an engineer, and so went into the Land Commission as an assistant inspector. My career in the British Foreign Service didn’t count for anything at home, and I was obliged to start off again. I purchased a nice little Baby Austin, because the work brought me all over Donegal, Leitrim and Cavan, carving up old places into serviceable farms and the like. But the pay was poor and I was struggling. Mai’s joy in getting Grattan House endured, but it was an expensive property to run. When we went in first, the only things not mouldering in the salt air were the armies of dinner plates, carvers and saucers that Mai’s mother had acquired over the decades, as well-to-do family members fell off their perches and left things in bequests. But the old curtains and carpets had to be replaced, and the legions of woodworm, rats, and mice gradually shown the door.

  But Mai paid no blessed heed to this, parked her bag of gold sovereigns that had come to her from her mother, a remnant of an old legacy, in the cupboard with her mosquito boots and other retired gear from Africa. She gathered her acquaintance around her, and two or three nights a month cooked for her friends, or went off with Maggie to eat at their houses. Queenie Moran when she was up from Sligo, Rosie Fine – a little bevy of strong women that she had gathered to herself with some expertise in the line of friendship. I would often come home from a long run somewhere and, standing in the porch, hear inside the laughter of the women, and envy them somewhat. Men have less talent for such friendships maybe. She was in possession of the house she loved, in the city that she approved of. Galway was held higher in her heart than Dublin, though she liked very much to go on excursions there, to shop in Switzer’s for the latest clothes, and Weir’s for bracelets and rings, and to go to the theatre or the concert, always taking the same room in her favoured hotel in Kildare Street. And speaking of approval, how many dresses and coats and blouses came down to her from the great department stores in Dublin ‘on approval’. You couldn’t count them.

  A year after Maggie, Ursula was born. Two children in the space of two years, which was hard for Mai, and apart from anything else, costly for a junior man in the Land Commission.

  Nevertheless, Mai in full stride along the esplanade at Salthill was a sight, the little Kerry maid pushing the perambulator, the two dogs skittering and scattering about. She loved the sea wind, the rougher the better. Maggie’s hand in her mother’s, with her black hair blowing in the wind and her Parisian coat. As soon as Mai got the signal from her magazines to wear trousers, she donned them, jodhpurs at first, and then loose pyjama-like affairs that seemed to help her sail along. She had a ‘Jersey’ swimsuit and didn’t scorn to enter the cold waters in it, breasting the waves and swimming far out into the bay. This caused, both the trousers and the swimming out so far, equal scandal in Salthill village. It was a rule with Mai when she encountered a child begging in the street, to press a sixpence into the outstretched paw. The righteous shook their heads.

/>   Her other joy was murdering friends on the courts of the tennis club. After these games I would be given a full account, stroke by stroke, victory by victory, in the doss at night, the two of us ensconced in her father’s regal old bed, she shadowing the games with demonstrations of a forward or backward drive, her long arms swishing about over the old damask covers and eiderdowns.

  In the winter in that room it was so cold that a rheum of ice formed on everything, so that we awoke like arctic explorers after a light snow has fallen on them, and it took a prayer and a curse to get us out of bed and into our clothes.

  The other great joy of those days, separate and even secret from Mai, was the horse-racing. On my travels for the Land Commission I would often make a run sideways to a racecourse, little point-to-points on windy Donegal strands, or big meetings further afield, or failing that I would place my bets in any of the bookies’ shops in Galway that were discreet and off the main streets.

  Oh, Sligo racecourse, in the wild rains of spring, the intoxication of it. Or in the long evenings of summer, the most poetic racecourse in Ireland, Phoenix Park, worth the long drive back to Galway in the small hours, passing through the little sleeping towns and villages, buoyed up occasionally by an unexpected win, the wipers flashing back and forth like an afflicted metronome. Perhaps there were more losses than wins, in the upshot. Many, many losses. My great failing it is true was spending whole nights studying the form sheets and then, in a form of admirable cowardice, backing the bloody favourites. But, but, Phoenix Park, with the great trees around the enclosure, and the air of conspiracy every last thing possessed, the smart wooden buildings, the carved clocks, the eccentric old tipsters who never left the bar to watch a race, the bookies up on their boxes, crying out their information in strange codes, the trainers’ secrets spreading out from stable boys and infecting every conversation with anxiety and excitement, the summer wind moving through the trees, and the crowds roaring, roaring like the very choir of life. All those matters gladdened me, and no distance would have been too great to go.

  By this time my brother Tom had been going out with Roseanne Clear for years.

  Roseanne’s father had been in the old police force, just like brother Eneas, and had got himself into a whole lot of bother during the civil war, and was said to have been murdered in cold blood by the new National Army. After independence of course that would have been, so her father would have been no longer an RIC man by then, because they had been disbanded. But it was said he had tried to ingratiate himself with the new crowd by informing in some fashion or another – and informing was certainly in fashion just then. He went the way of all informers in Ireland and was killed. None of this deterred Tom. But now we were back from Africa, Mai made it her business to take him aside and explain a few things to him, that going out and an engagement were two different things, and marriage another thing again. Tom took it all in good part, and anyway, he wasn’t in disagreement, no, he was well smitten.

  The Mam was none too keen on her, not only because she was a Presbyterian, but because she said every blessed man in Sligo looked at her ‘in the wrong way’, and she didn’t think a woman should be playing the piano in a dance band.

  But despite that, Tom married her. They had to go to Dublin to get the job done discreetly. Mai was her bridesmaid. That must have been 1934, a couple of years after de Valera got into power, and knocked Tom’s political ambitions out of kilter. He was running with that O’Duffy character, as near to a little Irish Mussolini as you could get, but there was no talking to him about it, and somehow or other marrying Roseanne Clear got bound into all that, like a corncrake is sometimes bound into a sheaf of corn by the careless reaper.

  That was the news then, that was how things went on.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Then there came one afternoon two gentlemen from the bank. The manager himself, Mr Tuohy, and his assistant.

  It was a blustery day in summer, the wind stirring in the east.

  Mr Tuohy had an impressive goitre under his chin, which had altered his speech, so that he seemed to sing rather than talk, in a melancholy plainchant. He was a man of a generally exhausted demeanour, who was said to be a demon for the seaweed baths in Enniscrone. He was thin, so that in the distance, in his black suit, he always looked like a pencil mark.

  Mai knew Mr Tuohy better than myself, though he had facilitated a few loans for me in recent times. The house of course was held in my name and was good collateral, and small loans had been issued to me with a smile.

  The Kerry maid brought them into the sitting room, where Mai was licking through the pages of La Femme chic (always an embarrassing item to pick up at the paper shop, where it came on special order – ‘Mr McNulty, your French magazine . . .’), and I was reading through the racing paper, readying for another descent on some distant racecourse. Mai rose, and looked pleased to see them, if surprised. She told the maid to fetch some tea but Mr Tuohy it seemed was not thirsty and he didn’t consult his abashed-looking assistant. So we all sat down again, and smiled at each other.

  Mr Tuohy gazed out for a few moments at the white horses moving across the bay, nodded his head, making his swollen underchin wobble.

  ‘Such a fine property,’ he said. ‘I have noted from the deeds that your father purchased it all of sixty years ago, Mrs McNulty. That is a long time to have something in the family. And so nice to come in and hear the voices of the little ones. I know it will be exceptionally hard for you.’

  This caught Mai off guard, if not quite myself.

  ‘Exceptionally hard?’ she said.

  There had been a few letters regarding the loans, more than a few, which I had assiduously read. Deep in my heart I knew why he had come. But I was alarmed, sickened. I held onto the arms of my chair and uttered without speaking, privately in my burning brain, a hasty and heartfelt prayer. How successfully, in the great effort to keep everything shipshape and afloat and going forward, I had blanked out the possibility of this terrible event. It was a talent, I was desperately thinking, a talent, and now in payment for this talent would come the inquisition.

  ‘Excuse me, Mr Tuohy, but I have no idea what you are talking about,’ said Mai, in her pleasant Galway accent, even and musical in its own way.

  ‘I have written extensively to Mr McNulty, kept him fully abreast of things. He knew when he took the loans that they needed repaying, and that when you give something as collateral, of course that is the item that must eventually be surrendered in order to honour the repayment of the loans, if not otherwise attended to.’

  I could tell from Mr Tuohy’s tone that he had opted to spell everything out as if we were children. Mai was no child. She was looking at Mr Tuohy now as if she had enlarged to ten times her size. I thought the four walls might be sundered by her gaze and washed out into the wind-ruined sea. To say I felt embarrassed now could not begin to describe the feeling. I sat there, cancelled out, even to myself, and then came the moment when Mai turned her face to me, that striking, smooth-featured, bright-eyed, now smouldering face.

  ‘Jack?’ she said, and only that.

  ‘Well,’ I said, in a triumph of feebleness, ‘there have been a few loans, that’s true.’

  ‘Mr McNulty,’ said Mr Tuohy, ‘I have no wish to contradict you in your own sitting room, but the whole purpose of my visit today is to explain the necessity for selling the house immediately. You are many hundreds of pounds in debt.’

  ‘Jack,’ she said again, this time much quieter.

  Guilt, dreadful guilt, was now stealing upon me.

  ‘There has been absolutely,’ began Mr Tuohy, and here his assailed voice cracked a moment, so he attempted the word again, ‘absolutely no attempt, no attempt, made to repay, so our interest in the property is now to the entire value of same. It is my solemn and bounden duty to dispose of it. I am so sorry, Mrs McNulty.’

  Then his assistant spoke for the first and last time:

  ‘Indeed,’ he said, as if the obvious pain in
Mai’s face forbade him to maintain his silence, even if his employer had impressed on him the need to keep silent at all times in such a delicate situation.

  Mai said ‘Hmm,’ and flounced her head, and stared out into the bay. ‘Hmm,’ she said again. I thought for one helpful moment that she had forgiven me, or that indeed this event fulfilled a desire she had hidden from me, to be rid of the house maybe . . .

  ‘But,’ she said. ‘There is no problem with money. If it’s just money you need . . .’ And she moved towards the door. ‘I have funds, Mr Tuohy, that you won’t be aware of. You see, we don’t keep everything in the bank. Oh, no,’ she said, laughing now. ‘Just you wait here a moment, and I will show you.’

  ‘Where are you going, Mai?’ I said, now doubly, trebly, alarmed.

  ‘You’ll see, Mr Tuohy,’ she said, and went out on her errand. We sat on, Mr Tuohy nodding now and again as if in further conversation with himself, and offering me a half-extinguished smile, and I heard Mai’s step on the stairs, going up in a hurry to our bedroom. I heard her high heels – two-tone leather – stamp across the Persian carpet and the polished boards to the cupboard, I could picture it in my head, perfectly, and heard the door open, and heard more dimly her scrambling about in the ordered debris of our time in Africa, looking confidently, I supposed, for the bag of coins. Then I heard, if you can hear such a thing, the gap of silence, of disbelief, of her brain whirring, trying to reach a good thought, a good explanation, had Jack put them in the bank after all? Had she in a vague moment? Why, she hadn’t looked in that little bag for five years, had she? Or had she moved them somewhere else in the house, where were they, where were they?

  No good answers coming to her, and no sign of her fortune, she was obliged to retrace her steps, across the handsome carpet, and down the well-trimmed stairs, and across the gaping sorrow of the hallway, and back to us in the sombre room, and she could do no other than to return with her heart half broken, but ready in a crazy instant to be reassured, restored, and then she stood there, looking out at the now thunderous waves, muted behind the old window glass, as she had done before, the gap of aeons between the two actions. And I knew she wanted to speak, but it was as if she hadn’t the energy to form one word. And not having really the desire to do so, in case in the upshot of her speaking there would be an answer. Fully for five minutes she maintained her silence, like a diver balanced out on the lip of the board, ready to spring out, leap out, through the clear air, and then, because there was nothing else to be done, she turned her face away from the sea, and with a withering strength, a strength despite everything, looked again at me, and smiled, smiled gorgeously, that smile that was part of the reason I loved her and had pursued and married her, a smile I set such store on I couldn’t help but smile back at now. Mai, standing there – even now, sitting in Africa, writing this, I mourn that moment, even as I feel the terror of it.