The Temporary Gentleman

by Sebastian Barry

  The room, as I expected it would be, was beautifully arranged. The old marriage bed was carefully made, Bristol fashion. On the sugar-twist side table her fashion magazines were in a neat stack, her reading glasses waiting on top. The grate was swept clean and a scuttle of coal all ready. Two mezzotints, of her father and her mother in their heyday, were framed each side of the fireplace, her father looking quite cross but magisterial. The carpet-sweeper had recently done its work. The curtains she had saved from Grattan House and adapted for this humbler window, old scenes of rural France in red and white, were almost closed, discreetly and demurely.

  I began to feel very sad. Not because I thought her room was sad, but because it reminded me how happily in the main we had lived together. It was a room without me in it, though I stood in it now. I looked in the wardrobe and there were only her clothes hanging there, whereas once it had held my suits and waistcoats too. I didn’t now for a moment believe Queenie. I would have seen signs of it, signs of such great distress – I would have known at the time, of course I would have. She never showed the children anything but love. Maybe she was a bit fonder of Maggie, but still Ursula was looked after carefully – spoiled really, the two of them.

  In the drawer of her dressing table right enough were a few bottles of those little tablets. Only one of them had pills in it, and the date on it was recent. Was that a good or a bad thing? I had thought, right enough, that the pills had been only to get her through a bumpy time, when she was pregnant with Maggie. Still and all, these were private matters – women’s trouble, as my Mam would have put it. I had no right to be rummaging there, and concocting theories.

  In the bottom drawer were her silk knickers for special occasions and her better brassieres, and her copy of Married Love, that many a Sligo woman at that time had in her knicker drawer. Wrapped in one of her mother’s best tea-towels was the red-tinted Venetian tumbler her father had used for his one glass of whisky on a Saturday. Tucked in neatly, like bits of ordnance, were two bottles of gin, one three-quarters empty, one full. Would these date from the time Queenie said she had swallowed pills, or the time she was pregnant with Ursula – the hot bath and the gin? – I couldn’t believe they did. I didn’t believe either thing had really happened. I couldn’t allow that she wanted to kill poor Ursula, just because she had red hair. Ridiculous! Maybe poor Queenie was drinking, maybe poor Queenie was going mad. Hearing voices, imagining things. Because this was Mai McNulty’s bedroom, shipshape and composed, and even if there were these little bits of evidence, I knew in my heart it was the truth, the gospel truth, that Mai had never drunk a drop of alcohol in her life. It was part of her legend. Even nuns drank on the western seaboard of Ireland. But not Mai, not Mai Kirwan, no, most certainly not. Mai who plainly loved her children, and if she and I were going through a rough patch, all would surely be mended at length. Mai, Mai, whom I loved to distraction, Mai who was too proud and good to drink bloody alcohol, she could leave that to the rest of us! And what of it if she did want to drink a few glasses in the evening, even alone in her bedroom, she was perfectly entitled, there was no harm in it as such, no, not at all, but it was a definite and palpable truth, that Mai McNulty, née Kirwan, had never, had never touched a drop in her born days. And therefore could never, ever, have sought to take her life, or the life of her unborn baby, it was not possible, not remotely possible, and anyone who said otherwise was a pitiful liar.

  Mai came home, sprightly, with far fewer parcels than in the old days, just some little bargains she had picked up on her way, not paying much heed to me, plonking some vegetables into the scullery for washing later. Then she brought Maggie into the sitting room, and got her over by the good light at the window, because she wanted to run the nit comb through her head of thick hair. She stood there, in the painterly light, expertly drawing the comb through the strands, peering at the head for eggs, and seeming quite content in those moments, and oblivious, and not in any way fitting the description of a suicide or a murderer.

  When Maggie had run out again into the haggard patch of garden to play, I geared myself up. My first obstacle was her practised ignoring of me, the first thing I prayed would go in the hoped-for healing. Because it was very painful, very diminishing as one might say.

  ‘Mai,’ I said, ‘do you mind if I ask you a question?’

  It occurred to me that it might be more efficacious if I could tie her down and question her under pain of torture, I might have a better chance of getting an answer. But I had to try. I was already feeling routed, before I had even begun, in the face of her lack of response. She was checking the comb in the windowlight for those rascally eggs.

  ‘I don’t want to talk, Jack.’

  ‘I know, Mai, but we haven’t really talked about anything for about – is it a year?’

  ‘I don’t really feel like talking, Jack.’

  ‘Mai, can I just say, I am really really sorry for what I did, I am really sorry about everything, I mean, desolate to have caused you such grief, and I absolutely understand how you are feeling, and I believe you are quite entitled to feel monumentally angry, and you must go on feeling angry of course if that is how it must be. But I wonder if I have apologised properly. I thought of writing you a letter, but here we are in our own house, and I just wish to say it clearly, because things are not always said clearly in life, I have found. I am sorry, I am very sorry, and what’s more I love you and revere you and just want you to be happy again.’

  I saw her pause in her examination of the comb. I felt like Cicero might have when he had at last managed to get some argument written out in defence of a client. For the first time in many months, I felt relieved, lighter, more I suppose of a man. Not a gentleman, I knew, but a man for all that. She was looking at the comb, moving her closed lips back and forward across each other slowly.

  ‘Are you, Jack?’ she said then.

  ‘I could have sorry carved into my forehead and it wouldn’t tell you how sorry I am. I regret my stupidity, my bloody stupidity. I don’t think you should forgive me, as a matter of fact, because I believe the whole matter was unforgivable.’

  Now she nodded her head, not in order to agree or disagree, I thought, but simply as a reflection of her thinking mind. Everything held still for about a minute. Another minute. Another.

  ‘I accept your apology,’ she said.

  ‘What?’ I said.

  She turned around, and looked me square in the face, across the ten feet that separated us. Across the hundred miles.

  ‘I have been so lonely,’ she said, just that, and hovered there, holding the comb still. I stepped forward and crossed the little Persian carpet, and got to her as quickly as I could without knocking her over. I thought she was going to faint. Her head had dropped and her eyes closed, and her whole body seemed to droop, as if she had been holding up the sky with her head, and someone had just put in a pillar for it instead. I had seen construction workers with just that reaction, trying to get in a bridge support. I put my arms around her, feeling such great relief that I think I cried out briefly, and she put her arms around me. We just stood there for fifteen minutes, maybe more, holding on, feeling slightly ridiculous and wondrously happy.

  1938, three years later. It was as if the bricks and mortar of the house itself were saturated in alcohol. As if the house itself were drinking. There was something enjoyable about some of it, at least at the beginning, at least at the beginning of certain evenings. As it was my custom to bring friends and cronies home after the pubs closed, there might be a good crowd of people in the front room in the small hours. There would be singing, especially when Tom was there with a couple of his band members, you’d hear ‘The Leitrim Lass’, which was Tom’s most requested tune, and sometimes the noise made was very pleasant, with Joe Burns as may be making the very plaster shift on the ceiling with his clarinet. And Mai’s old piano in the corner would not be neglected, and there were plenty of hands that played. And I would look forward to singing ‘Roses of Picardy’.<
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  Eventually, after many evenings, many months and months of evenings, Mai appeared in the room at last, a tiny bit thrown sideways by whatever she had been drinking in truth, but properly dressed, and in a pleasant good humour, and she sat down at the piano and started to play ‘Let’s Keep the Party Clean’, while I did the words in my best mock-English accent.

  Don’t give way to the old temptation

  Of treating simple virtue with a sneer.

  Then Pappy played a suite of reels and jigs, which led to clumsy dancing. But Tom was well known for his old-fashioned solo dancing, and he stood up now on Mr Kirwan’s solid dining-room table, throwing caution to the wind, and clattered out his dance, his arms fastened to his sides in the best style, only his fingers slightly stirring, and everything a mighty blur from the knee down of swirling sideways moves of the shinbones, and banging shoes.

  And in Mai there was suddenly a strange and wonderful gaiety, and something of the reason why all the friends of her youth loved her shone out. And there was a happiness in all that, even if it was the happiness of people lifted out of themselves by the drinking. But didn’t the Romans themselves, who had the best of everything, say life would be intolerable without it? Certainly I believe my life would have been, even if the intolerability of life was caused in some part by the very cure for it. Because as the night wore on, there would always be a great if gradual sea change, not only in Mai, but in the company generally, like children obliged to pay the price eventually for their happiness. And then there were bleak faces as blanched as moons, and weary bodies stumbling forward into the darkness of Magheraboy, and words of farewell thrown back in muddled grunts and whispers.

  And then as Mai went back up the stairs, I might see the faces of Maggie and Ursula looking down at us through the banisters, not quite young courtiers gazing down on the gay and bright life of adults, but witnesses maybe mostly of their darknesses. And always I remember in myself the confused desire to follow her, and the flooding hope that she might turn on the stair and beckon me, but no, that was a great rarity, and usually she would not – for our rapprochement reached but seldom to sharing a bed – and I would return to the now empty room, with its plates of cigarette stubs and cigars, the bottles fallen over like so many little towers, and take up my station on the couch. And curious to me now that in all that there was a sort of contentment, and even in the hard sickness of the morning a certain wry amusement at it all, as if a man may find comfort in the unexpected humour of his execution.

  Chapter Sixteen

  As an experiment in going out without actually bringing mayhem to Osu, and feeling mightily stir-crazy, I drove off alone last night to sample the fare of the Regal cinema. When I say drove, I mean mostly skidded and squelched about, but I made it. There were dozens of couples in the nice good humour of people released from daily lives, and though I was alone, and, as I saw from my visage briefly in the window of the ticket kiosk, had gone somewhat beetroot from the rain and heat on my face, I didn’t feel I was being unduly stared at. There were no other white faces in the audience, and the film was one of those mysterious epics made by the Gold Coast Film Unit, and also an old picture from the late thirties, it looked like, about cattlemen in Colorado. I had a lovely time, eating out of a box of local chocolates that tasted curiously of childhood.

  *

  Around that time we were sent word that Nicholas Sheridan had died and would we cross to Omard for the funeral. Well, there was no doubt that we would, but it presented a difficulty for Mai. In the first place, the grief of the news utterly dismayed her. I could see when I went up to her bedroom and told her, she in her long blue silken dressing gown that would not have disgraced a Hollywood star, if a little less clean than it should have been, with smears across the lap and breast where she had eaten her dinners alone over the months, that this was news she was no longer able to bear with equanimity, if she ever had been. She looked at me with her open stare and wailed out a long streeling cry, like some old mournful scene in a peasant play.

  But now she would have to gird her loins in a fashion she had left behind her, maybe a year since, and clothe herself not only in her best black clothes, but also in the daily fortitude of ordinary persons, who understand what’s what and what’s required for the funeral of a beloved friend. I don’t believe Mai thought she was up to the task, but nevertheless she bathed herself and got Maggie to run the brush through her hair the necessary hundred times, as in other days, as if about to venture out on a pilgrimage of the shops.

  The children were put with their grandparents, and we headed east in the intrepid Austin, which by virtue of my work almost knew the way to Cavan on its own. How often I had run past Kilnaleck and decided not to venture in and see Nicholas and Maria, fearing their intelligence and the inability of my face to mask any unpalatable truths. It seemed a long, long journey and Mai said not a word the whole way, which is a fearsome thing in a small motorcar. It was not that I felt hostility from her. Now and then I would glance at her as she peered forth it seemed without seeing through the rain-speckled windscreen, and wondered at her state of mind. She seemed folded into herself, folded flat, like some linen to be stored away.

  ‘Just pull over, Jack, for a minute,’ she said, when we got to the upper gates of Omard.

  It was a place where she had been happy so many times, as a girl and a young woman, and it seemed she needed a few minutes to allow an echo of that happiness to touch her. I knew she was trying to inflate herself, organ by inner organ, find a semblance of her old character, the indomitable young woman who by sheer force of character was so famously ‘loved by all’. The woman whose force in those early days oftentimes had left me oddly abashed. This effort to refind herself now filled me with worry and watchfulness.

  The day had been unsettled and now and then a wind buffeted the motorcar. Fifteen minutes passed, half an hour. Still Mai sat on.

  ‘Jaysus,’ I said finally, ‘poor old Nicholas. I was very fond of him.’

  ‘He was very fond of you,’ she said, without irony.

  ‘Was he?’

  ‘He was, Jack,’ she said.

  I sighed, because suddenly it was a pleasure to be in the car, talking to her. Oh, a strange old world. An echo indeed of other days. Talking at our ease, like human persons. A person, especially a person that had married the other person, might be forgiven for missing that. But the hard truth was, Mai looked yellow, sickly, thinned away, with that curious false pregnancy about the stomach that gin will give. We rarely made love, it was true, what I lived on was merely the memory of her body – the intoxication that it had been to me, without any such crude assistance as alcohol. Just as I was thinking this, there was a gap in the clouds, and a big placard of sunlight threw itself across the avenue ahead of us. The old metal gates, unpainted this long while, the chilly-looking eagles on each pillar, and the unusual decrepitude of the grass either side of the avenue, were suddenly laid bare, illuminated, and in that moment something about Omard was betrayed: it had been gradually changing too, it too gradually making itself unreachable in the true sense. For some years now there had been no telegrams with ‘mayfly up’ urgently stencilled on them. And whatever the Sheridans had heard about us in Sligo, and I presumed given the nature of the country and its multitudes of ears and mouths ready to relay secrets and hidden things, they had heard most of our news, I also had heard news now and then about them, and how Nicholas’s illness had weakened him, not to mention the horrors of the so-called economic war, when cattlemen like Nicholas, with no one to send their beef to, had been oftentimes obliged to kill their calves in the fields where they dropped.

  Mai beside me started to laugh. It was scarifying laughter. She just sat there laughing for a few minutes and I didn’t dare ask her at what.

  After a while then she bid me drive on and we went up the winding mile of the avenue to the house. There was a little crowd of farm workers in their best bib and tucker, and a few black cars parked up on the lawn, and ha
lf a dozen pony and traps, and a couple of fancier gigs of some ancient design, and clumps of friends and remnant family, and just as we reached the semicircular carriage-turn before the front door, whose gravel unlike in former days was unraked and overgrown with grass, out came six men in dark suits carrying the coffin, with Maria a seventh figure behind, looking more rotund, more silent, and much older, as if myself and Mai had not seen her for twenty years, rather than the ten years or so that had intervened. Mai hurriedly opened the car door and went quickly over to her, holding the smaller woman in an embrace, laying her heavily powdered cheek on Maria’s shoulder, itself covered in a snowfall of dandruff, very clear and copious on the shiny old satin dress.

  Maria herself died a month later and Omard was left to a nephew who showed no interest in the place. Indeed it was the ironical duty of the Land Commission to ‘stripe’ the land, after the nephew took the roof off the house to avoid the rates, and made no use of Nicholas’s generous acres. I was thankful that that particular job didn’t fall to me.

  Everything had been said without saying a word, everything had been understood without any intimation of understanding.

  Dr Snow had twined himself around the falling tree that was Mai, and was growing on her like ivy – that was my understanding of it anyhow. Dr Snow was said to be a bit of a Lothario. He inspired a great devotion in some of his women patients anyway. Maybe I wasn’t seeing things with clarity, but I didn’t trust him, traipsing in and out, ministering to her, and a wonderful bill being run up as well. In came the gin bottles too somehow or other, not via Dr Snow of course, but more mysteriously. I am inclined to believe that Gaffney’s delivered to the back gate under cover of darkness. Then up the stairs they went somehow to her bedroom.