The Temporary Gentleman

by Sebastian Barry

  That night, after a few gins, she whispered to me in the first friendliness of drunkenness that she had not been feeling well, not well at all, that Queenie didn’t understand and Jack Kirwan had made a ghost of himself in her life, he wouldn’t or couldn’t come to her. That there was a terror in her, a terror she did not know the name of. That it scampered through her veins like a rat and took away from her every semblance of peace or enjoyment. That her head, her very head, was heavy with pain, as if it were a pail of poison. And then after a few more gins, slowly slowly it all became my fault, and in the deep of the night she threw the old wall clock at my head, and then she threw the cat, having nothing else at hand, and I drank till I was dizzy, and in the morning, waking alone in the sitting room, I wandered out into the hall, and found Ursula at the foot of the stairs, staring at the body of her mother where she had fallen, sometime in the lost hours of the night, neither an angel from heaven, nor a demon risen from the earth, but a human and tormented soul.

  When I got back to Ballycastle I found the ruby bracelet forgotten in my inside pocket, and so was obliged, rather mournfully, to post it.

  *

  Outside in the yard, in one of those queer little gaps between downpours, some nameless blue bird is singing with immense sweetness. I am staring at a photo of Mai and the children that I carry in my wallet. I am not in the picture myself, possibly because I am taking it. It is around this time it was taken, judging by the size of Maggie, although she was always a tall child. In which case the reason I am not in it might be not because I am taking the photo but because I am away at the war. They both look well turned out, Mai herself quite trim. She’s wearing sunglasses like a jazz musician, but there is no sun. Her stern, unsmiling expression doesn’t say much about anything, but her clothes have been put on with care. Somehow it makes me rather stupidly sad, as if it is a photo of what might have been even though it is an actual photo of what was. Maybe Ursula looks a bit cold in her gansaí, and her hair with that dry, dead look hair gets when there are nits in it. That may be fanciful of me, and maybe not. Both of the girls had nits from time to time. It was the great era of the head-louse.

  *

  I had to leave her to it. That is not an easy thing to think of. None of it is easy to think of. As a young man of sixteen, seventeen, before I went to the university, the First World War just finishing, the seas heaving still with mines, in my beautiful white uniform, a wireless officer with the face of a child, proud as Punch, I saw every port of the earth, yes, and rounded Cape Horn a dozen times in tempests and in resplendent calms, I saw evil dens and heard dark talk, and knew the world was not entirely a pleasant place, as you hope it might be when you are young, setting out for the first time to seek your fortune. Bleak streets of Bombay and Liverpool, men who didn’t care if they lived or died, and would blithely stick you with a knife as they themselves slid down into hell. But none of those things ever struck me with the overwhelming force of Mai’s allotted fate. I wrote something like this a few days ago, I am writing it again today. I still don’t understand, really, what language it is told in properly, or what place, truly, it describes. The Arabs say everything is already written and that we’ve got to fulfil the book. What darkness, what vileness, what a tome blacked out with blackest ink, was tendered to Mai. And she was obliged, day by day, paragraph by paragraph, chapter by chapter, to live it. My mind withers at the thought just as it shrinks from the task of remembering these fragments of it now, and struggles to find light.

  My first job after getting my commission was to help bolster British Africa against possible French invasion, as I have already described. In Accra after my ship was torpedoed, they hospitalised me and a hundred other rescued soldiers. Many, many others had been lost in the attack or drowned in the sea. My body, somewhat to my surprise, because I thought I had come through ‘unscathed’ as they say, was marked with bruises like a strange map of a new world, the seas and oceans my unmarked skin, the bruises, red and black, the unknown landmasses with their deceptive harbours. The ward sister was a little Irish nun with a heart as big as the Sahara, and as warm, and her African nurses were joyful, pretty and adroit. She was of the opinion that it was the whisky I had drunk had saved me. Perhaps she meant it humorously. I healed, and when I was let out of hospital after a couple of months, I found myself seconded as an engineer to a unit of the Gold Coast Regiment. Everyone was still thinking that the Vichy French might invade, though it was a thought that was fading. The looming danger dissolving in the acid of what actually was fated to happen, that no one, not the brightest general or statesman, really knows.

  I was bussed up to Asante country, feeling every rut in the road, staring out at the queer procession of epic landscape, lovely distant hills with soft greens marked on them by the subtlest touch of the brush, and then narrow treed-in fields, where children ran screaming alongside the truck like dark river-stones turned over and over by a current. I was headed for the old town of Kumasi. My rank by then was already first lieutenant, and when I came into barracks there was some confusion, because apparently there was already a man there of the same rank and name.

  ‘You are already here, sir,’ said the quartermaster, a small bronze-coloured man. His cheeks were marked by old knife cuts like the shallow ruts on Brazil nuts.

  ‘Well, I don’t know what to say about that,’ I said.

  ‘The mess sergeant already served you, sir, last night, look, sir, I have it on the mess sheet. First Lieutenant John Charles McNulty.’

  ‘And did you meet me yesterday yourself?’ I said.

  ‘I did, sir, and I can tell you, it was not you, sir.’

  But he was laughing of course. Nevertheless this was verging on miracle and mystery, and I was intrigued and a small bit discombobulated. It is not a stable thought to be suddenly two in the world when you were sure you had only been one.

  Then I had a strange meeting in the officers’ quarters. The beds were narrow and metal, not in any way better than what the ordinary soldiers had. A democratic barracks, such as you find now and then in the army overseas. The quartermaster brought me along to meet a long, skinny man lounging on a bed, or at least one third of him lounging and the rest sticking out onto the floor. I could see him glancing at my cap to see how he should address me, but we were the same rank right enough. I noted he wasn’t in the sappers, but in a tank corps.

  He was immensely friendly and quite happy to meet me. We went for a stroll about the camp, then took refuge from the roasting heat in the commandant’s office, the only place with a man working a cooling fan. We laughed a bit, and he asked me about my experiences getting up to Kumasi, and was very interested to hear about the torpedoed ship. I knew he knew my name and he knew I knew his name, and maybe for a moment he tried to imagine himself, First Lieutenant John Charles McNulty, roiling about in the murderous waters. I could tell he was a bit of a toff, and by something he said about something else, I opined he was from Ireland also, and then by something else he said that he was from Sligo, and then, in the coarse gravelly heat of the Gold Coast, my head felt all the dizzier, wondering how this could be.

  So we talked further, and he mentioned his home place, an old estate I knew from seeing its granite gates when you passed in a car on the road to Enniscrone. Then I felt the blood leaving my cheeks, and the air deserting my gills. I was seized for a moment by something as close to a heart attack as I ever want to experience. It was a ludicrous reaction. As a little child I had of course believed my father’s stories like a Christian believes the Bible. And when I got older, I told myself I believed them, and made an act of faith in them, but all underneath that was doubt and disbelief and faithlessness. In particular, the unlikely old tale of a dispossessed brother in the seventeenth century, similar to a thousand old tales in a thousand Irish families. But now, from everything this man said, the story was being validated, inch by inch and line by line. The man before me was the descendant of a brother of the Oliver McNulty that my father had often spoken
of. Oh, yes, he said, it is all in the family archive. This was spoken in the most amicable, even regretful way, in his English accent from his schooling at Eton, while I stood before him dumbfounded and halting in speech.

  We shook hands over a little rickety table of papers, containing I would imagine the plans to blow all the bridges in that district if the French looked like coming to take it. I gave him my version of the story, as if before a strange court where we were obliged to say truthfully who we were, as if we could ever know such a thing before God or man, who I was, or who I imagined I was, and the other First Lieutenant John Charles McNulty nodded enthusiastically at my shadowy story, and then he gripped my hand. There was no trace of a family likeness, but to the quartermaster, standing on the edge of this and listening, it must have seemed odd that these two men had never met, the same age and from the same town, and with the same name. But then the quartermaster could not be expected to understand the lives of Catholic and Protestant souls in Irish provincial towns.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, with solemnity, ‘we know who we are, you and I.’

  That night we tore into the whisky without mercy and cancelled out everything, stars and old stories and the electric radio of the insects, the spinning mess room and the other young officers. Our stories dissolved in the happy chaos of the alcohol, someone must have carried us to our beds, First Lieutenant John Charles McNulty and First Lieutenant John Charles McNulty. He was due out at 0400 hours the next morning, I heard him go, and I never saw him again.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Furlough. It was the snow I remember as the first thing, a crumbly, thick fall of it, as if the whole of Sligo was turned into a great hall just to contain the whim and majesty of that snow, with the roof too high and dark to see, the walls obscured by the consummate genius of those small, white flakes, with a music so silent you cocked an ear to it. I came up the Finisklin road slowly in the ancient taxi, a road by chance I had designed and overseen the building of some years before myself, for the town council, one of whose members was my brother Tom. Now that Great Labourer whose face is not known was quietly spreading this tonnage of white gravel as a curious and useless surface, and the tyres pressed it down as if it were white insects to be crushed, and the lamps saw only whiteness and bright darkness, and now and then opening and closing, short vales and copses of snowless air, where a house I knew might appear, the doctor’s gates on the left, the deep black of the Garvoge mixing with the black Atlantic that had crept up on the tide, an ink so dark it was like a billion words printed over and over each other, the story of the world pushing up to the town bridge, the story of the world being sucked back down to Oyster Island and the Rosses, all unreadable, unknowable, cancelled out. The old Wolseley crept on. I heard the engine purring in the hood. I was anxious to reach home. Is this still 1940? – it’s so hard to be precise, but I think it was after Africa, before London. I was heading for Harbour House of course, heading home. At the top of the road it would be standing, looking back towards Sligo, the river close there, scratching past the great stones of the wharf wall and the mid-water bollards, the Garvoge, a being so entirely capable and strong, wide, deep and dark, that it always seemed to me while we lived there as if it might pull away the town from its moorings, pull away the house, pull away the landscape like a strange carpet, the model school, and Middleton’s fields, and my potato garden with its imperilled arch.

  At last, still with the curious obligation of slowness, we reached the front of the house, with its pillared portico and five black windows, clean or grimy this time I could not make out, not a light in the place that I could see. And I climbed out of the car, leaving the warm squeak of the cracked leather seat, and shut the door with its genial click, paid old McCormack, and stepped carefully to the house in my engineer’s boots. I opened my own front door, and went into the black hall with its brown linoleum and haggard table, pulled my coat off and cast it on a chair, and perched my hat on one of its wooden horns. Then I walked on down the dark corridor, wondering where everyone was, maybe thinking the little ones were asleep in the rooms above. I heard some sounds from the back of the house and went on further down, and was obliged to open the second door into our small garden. The light from a rear bedroom was trying to pierce the snowfall, and in the difficult muddle of the whiteness I saw two figures, Mai clearest in a black dress, and at her feet half lying and half risen, was the form of my daughter Ursula, who when I peered and peered I could see was in her nightshift, a small, pale person maybe nine or ten years old, and Mai with her right arm raised, and then letting it fall, her right arm raised, then letting it fall, and I stepped two feet out onto the pristine snow, which had already covered the tracks of my wife and her daughter, as if they had merely appeared in the centre of that bare garden, and I looked up at the window of light, something catching my eye, and saw in the glare of a lamp another standing, Maggie still and staring, as the dark arm rose and fell, rose and fell, with the switch gripped in the hand, that I could just see also, like a feathery line on an engraving, rising and falling, and Ursula silent, silent as a stone, and Mai panting, panting, I could hear her, as if she couldn’t hit enough, as if she couldn’t work hard enough at it, lashing and lashing the child, in the snow, in Sligo, in the darkness, and the snow falling, and nothing left in God’s creation but that watching child, and the beaten child, and the ruined woman, and the consternated father.

  ‘Mai, Mai!’

  I rushed across the snow and got a hand on Mai’s arm, to still it. Up to that moment I don’t think she knew where she was, who she was. She stared at me in the muddled light. She must have forgotten I was due home, she must have forgotten a lot of things. I gathered up Ursula under an arm, registered the weight of her, and had to put my other arm around her too. For a moment I stood there with my daughter, just staring at my wife.

  ‘What in the name of Jesus, Mai,’ I said.

  ‘Jack, Jack, is that you? Where did you spring from?’ she said.

  I carried Ursula into the cold house, wrapped her in a coverlet, and lit the fire in the sitting room, while the girl sat in a chair, sobbing. I rubbed her limbs to get some warmth back into her. I was inclined to sob myself. It was one thing to be at the war, trying to find a path through that, and another thing to be here, pathless, rudderless.

  Then Mai came in from the garden and stood in the sitting room, not saying anything, very still, looking at me lighting the fire.

  ‘Do you have matches, Mai?’ I said.

  ‘Yes, yes, I do,’ she said, and went hurrying off to the kitchen maybe, to fetch them, coming back in with all the bustle and intent of a nurse.

  ‘Has this child eaten anything?’ I said.

  ‘She got the stew, she got the stew,’ said Mai.

  ‘I’m going to bed her down here, and then we will go into the kitchen to talk,’ I said. ‘Don’t you realise I have to go back tomorrow? I have only a day.’

  ‘Only a day, Jack? Yes, yes, alright.’

  Then we were in the freezing kitchen. There had been no housekeeping done for a while, that was for sure. Every plate we had was on the sink, every cup, every glass, every bit of cutlery. The place stank of bad meat and milk gone off.

  ‘This is disgusting, Mai. What were you doing, out in the snow like that with Ursula?’

  ‘She was being bold, Jack, being bold.’

  ‘You wouldn’t treat a dog like that.’

  ‘Spare the rod and spoil the child, Jack.’

  ‘Do you think? The child in her shift, in the bloody snow?’

  ‘You’re not here, Jack. They need their father here.’

  ‘I am away at the war. Away at the war. The whole world is away at the war.’

  ‘What the hell are you doing going out there?’ she said. ‘Nobody in Ireland gives a tuppenny damn about it.’

  ‘When you see Hitler coming up Wine Street in a tank you might take a different view,’ I said.

  ‘Bloody Hitler – what did he ever do to you, Jack?�
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  ‘Mai!’ I said, shouting now, because we were drifting off into the ancient topic of my culpability for everything. I felt a huge sense of emergency. I would have to go the next day, and I couldn’t be thinking she would ever do what she had done again.

  ‘If you ever go at Ursula like that again, so help me, Mai, I will kill you myself.’

  ‘You will kill your own wife?’

  ‘I will, Mai, in the most expedient manner I can think of.’

  ‘You killed me already, Jack.’

  ‘That ochón is ochón ó is no good now, Mai. That was for other days. Now I am telling you, you will not touch that child again. What sort of bloody foolishness is it, to be out in a yard, with a switch, beating and beating at her? Do you ever want to see heaven, Mai? There is no place in heaven for such a person.’

  ‘You’re not my priest, Jack, you’re not my priest.’

  ‘No, I am your husband, your unfortunate husband.’

  ‘But you love me, Jack.’

  Now she raised her face and looked at me squarely. There was a certain wild pride in her words. It was so strange. It was all so strange.

  ‘There are limits to everything, even love. Not love for a child, there are no limits to that. But love for a wife, now, maybe I am thinking there are some limits to that.’

  ‘Why are you at that war, Jack?’

  And then she was weeping, weeping. Maggie streeled in and stood behind her mother’s legs.