The Temporary Gentleman

by Sebastian Barry

  ‘There is nothing to do. Didn’t your father look through the registers in the church at Collooney, where I’m supposed to be from, and not a sign of me there, not a sign. Not a sign of me anywhere,’ she said.

  ‘Mam, tell me the names you know. Just say it all out, the little remnants of things that you know.’

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘no,’ wringing her hands.

  ‘Look it, Mam, it was all so long ago now, you were a little mite of a baby, weren’t you, and the doings of grown-ups was none of your doing, that’s all.’

  She contemplated this for a few moments. Then she fetched out her hanky from her sleeve, and wiped at her nose with it, where a ticklish pearl of moisture had begun to hang.

  ‘Well,’ she said, slowly, gathering herself in, her two small hands placed now on her two small knees, ‘of course my maiden name is Donnellan, and it was the name of my father, who was a soldier, and they brought me up as their own child, but I wasn’t their own child. But the trouble is, I have no birth certificate, even now, and when I was marrying Pappy, I was supposed to have one by me, and I didn’t, and it all had to be explained to the priest. That my mother, my mother – ’ And now she stopped, so it might be thought she wouldn’t speak again, but she did, she surged herself forward into speech, and it seemed to me I was no longer in the room, no longer even born myself, but that it was all long ago, when as a young girl, pregnant at sixteen, she had had the good fortune, for of course that was what it had been, to have young Tom McNulty stand by her, and want to marry her, ‘ – that my mother was a dancing woman, a dancing woman, Jack,’ she said, as if something gritty had got into her mouth, ‘called Lizzie Finn, and that she got herself in trouble with a man called Gibson, the son I was told of a lord, one of those Castlemaines over in Kerry, and that . . . And that the baby, the baby, me, was given away to Gibson’s batman, when the mother died. And,’ she added, but she didn’t seem to have anything to say after the ‘And’. Maybe she knew no more than that, and anyway this was more than I had ever heard her tell. Her face was so wet with tears she had ceased to bother about it.

  ‘And were they married when they had you, Mam?’ I said.

  ‘I suppose they were not,’ she said, with sudden vehemence.

  ‘But did anyone ever say that to you, Mam? Did old Ma Donnellan ever say it? Did Pa Donnellan say it to the priest was marrying you and Pappy?’

  ‘It’s not a thing that people say out, Jack.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because of the shame!’

  ‘I suppose that is how it may have been. But, Mam, it doesn’t feel like shame. I don’t feel any shame about it. I feel sorry for you, Mam. I feel sorry for her too.’

  ‘For who?’ she said, incredulous. ‘You don’t mean that dancing woman?’

  ‘Maybe I do,’ I said.

  My mother looked at me, as if she had never seen me before in her life.

  I had spoken freely suddenly, about a matter that had only ever been in chains, of silence and unhappiness. It shocked me as much as it shocked my mother. Suddenly, there seemed a path forward, or a little item of light thrown out across an old darkness. I actually laughed, further confusing my poor mother. Because, in not being able to do anything about my wife’s death, I felt I could do something about my mother’s birth, unexpectedly – if only to strengthen her against her own self-accusation, and turn an evil story into a good one.

  ‘We should drive over some day to Kerry and have tea with the Castlemaines, so we should, Mam.’

  Again the amazed stare.

  ‘Aren’t they family?’ I said.

  ‘They threw me away,’ she said, making a valiant attempt to return herself and me to a proper ochón is ochón ó about the matter.

  ‘Sure didn’t you find shelter with the Donnellans? And, Mam, you’re an aristocrat, aren’t you, an aristocrat, without all the trouble.’

  ‘What trouble?’ she said, suspiciously.

  ‘A big mouldy house you can’t heat, a great rake of ragged acres, and, these times, bombs thrown in the door and the house burned.’

  ‘What?’ she said, as if worried for a moment about her own little bungalow.

  ‘And, Mam, aren’t you better off with us, who like you more than any ould lord or lady could?’

  For the first time, in all my efforts, that seemed to find her funny bone. She started to laugh, a sound in our childhood that always signalled an end for a while to frost. That went on like a quiet bit of fiddle music for a bit, and then grew to a respectable volume, and then she let her head knock back with the force of the laughter pouring out of her.

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  The only thing I could think to do then was go back out to Africa. My memory of the first year after that is not very clear. I was drinking more heavily than I ever had, and God knows how my employers put up with me. Then came my little Damascene moment in ’54, and I stopped drinking. But there is a thing called dry drunkenness, I found, and my head did not clear properly for a long time. And all the while, the very people I was working for seemed to have lost their grip on the world.

  When I washed up on the Gold Coast during the Togo plebiscite, it wasn’t that I lacked a moral view of things, I lacked a view, like a hotel-room window facing a high, blank wall.

  Nevertheless, home on leave, I lingered for a few days in Dublin. I had had the inspiration that my mother’s mother most likely had been a Protestant, which was why everything was so shrouded in mystery. I went over to the Church Representative Body and was told that if there had been a wedding, and the man was well-to-do, it might have taken place in Christ Church Cathedral. I went in there, spent an afternoon reading down the names in the marriage registry for the 1870s and 80s – and there it was, the miraculous fact, the marriage of Elizabeth Finn and Robert Gibson. And I carried that nugget of freedom home to my mother.

  ‘The bad news, Mam, is that she was a Protestant. The good news is they were married.’

  ‘Well, is this any improvement?’ said my mother, but laughing. She was buoyant, radiant with legitimacy.

  I went out to Glasnevin on the same leave because it was the third anniversary of Mai’s death. There was no one else there at the grave. The mason had been in finally, after much correspondence on my part, and got up the stone, and carved her name onto it.

  MARY (MAI) MCNULTY

  1902–1953

  It occurred to me that this name would signify nothing and no one except to someone that remembered her, and that had loved her, and so I resolved to do my utmost to remember and love her.

  As I wandered back out through the iron gates who was coming in only Queenie Moran.

  ‘Queenie,’ I said, uneasily, remembering our last exchange of words, but glad also somehow that Mai had someone else to commemorate her.

  ‘Oh, Jack,’ she said. ‘Jack.’

  She was carrying a posy of freesias, Mai’s favourite flowers. It was a little out of season for them, but I supposed Queenie would know people with a greenhouse.

  ‘It’s good to see you, Jack,’ she said. ‘How have you been?’

  Words of no import, sometimes the most powerful kind.

  It was from that moment on that I began to feel better, but also, much worse.

  Back in Togoland, I struggled to believe in the work. Emmanuel Heyst was a charismatic man. In the first place, he had five native wives, each one more glisteningly beautiful than the last. He had gone to the immense trouble of building himself a swimming pool, right at the top of a hundred-foot hill, which is why I had doings with him in the first place. He liked to bring his white friends up there at sundown, in his fleet of ex-military jeeps, and drink his cocktails, his five black wives ranged decorously in their wooden chairs painted with gold, like the chairs and wives of a chieftain.

  When he suggested his little scheme for bringing guns into the equation of the Togo plebiscite, he presented it more as a social than a commercial proposition. And although I made some half-hearted efforts in that d
irection, and perhaps a few cases were creamed off an assignment of official army rifles, I soon thought better of it. By then there was paperwork to undo me. And so it came about that the UN, in their surprisingly decent and roundabout way, eventually more or less cashiered me. But I can’t really say I feel much guilt about it, considering the strange chaos of those times, a slow, rather murderous, dubious, disheartening chaos, when there were multiple factions in Togoland wanting multiple things, and even when they wanted the same thing that Britain wanted, which was for them to annexe themselves to the Gold Coast, it was not for the same reasons.

  The same sort of men who bedevilled Tom Quaye, holding him and interrogating him as an agitator, also were busy there. My impression was of violence and coercion, covered over sometimes with official words and aspirations. And indeed having heard Tom talk about his suffering at the hands of the Accra police after the war, maybe this was more widespread than I knew. What we have done with the Kikuyu in Kenya over the last few years, which any old Kenyan hand might tell you about in whispers, over a few bitters in the Army and Navy Club in London, has been a dark, dark business. Inspector Tomelty I feel sure is not a stranger to these things. The tie with Britain is still tight here, and I am not entirely certain Tom may not even have recognised him from other days. Everything new contains the rotten cancer of the old here, as indeed we found ourselves in Ireland.

  And I was thinking last night about poor brother Eneas, and what he might have got up to in the old RIC, when Ireland was moving towards independence, and there were efforts to stop it at all costs, and the Auxies and the Black and Tans causing mayhem, havoc, and despair all over Ireland. And Eneas always said the RIC kept out of that, but I didn’t really believe him. Of course they didn’t. He was a sort of crossed-out character. And I must admit it causes me extreme grief, as a one-time officer of the Empire, to feel, to sense, to intimate, that it has all come to this. An utterly decent man like Tom Quaye tortured with iron bars by creatures whose souls were left far behind them on the track of life. Tomelty mentioned Palestine, and if ever a person wanted to know where the hell the Black and Tans went to after Ireland, that’s where they have their answer – the Holy Land.

  Before the axe descended on me at work I was seconded temporarily to Suez.

  One afternoon I found myself standing on the shore of the Small Bitter Lake. There were soldiers and officials milling about. There was a pale yellow sand under my boots, so finely ground by the sun and the wind of the infinite desert that even as the lake water sucked at it, it seemed to suck at the water. I took out my two passports, my British and my Irish.

  Colonel Nasser was set to come across the desert and take back the Canal Zone, retrieving the Bitter Lakes and the waters of the canal back into the bosom of Egypt. Hundreds, thousands of Egyptian diggers had died into that ditch a hundred years before and anyhow it was only a zone, a sort of colonial scar, on the flank of Egypt. Its birds called with foreign cries and its fish dreamed of pharaohs not kings. Nasser was coming, with his modern tanks and his passionate soldiery. I was standing there, shuffling my passports. I imagined Nasser as being thorough, sudden, and brutal. He was up against an ancient force, an idea with an enormous juju attached to it, the insouciant might of the Empire, so I was sure he would know to strike with all his might. Expecting by the wildness and inspiration of his will to gain the day. There would be erasure and chaos, I felt that approaching.

  I cast my British passport into the silky waters. I thought I would have a better chance of living, with the Irish one. The fact that Nasser never did come was neither here nor there.

  Of course I was born British, like all my generation. British. Such a strange word. It means a hundred different things. People mean by it what they choose. It is a mysterious word. The British Isles, where do they lie, in what ocean?

  I threw my British passport into the canal and I might as well have thrown the rest of me too. It wasn’t just the part of me that had tried to think of myself as a gentleman that was over – a member of the professional classes, a British officer, a district officer in the British Foreign Service, a radio operator in the British Merchant Marine – it was the whole kit and caboodle that had been Jack McNulty. The passionate drinking man was gone, the husband was gone.

  And then I made my way back to the Gold Coast, flying down by the beautiful network of airplanes and little airports, touching down here and there on the burning skin of central Africa – with my Irish passport. And came back to my little house in Accra, to the ministrations of Tom Quaye, and the slow intimation at work that something was wrong.

  *

  This morning, in my shaving mirror, was I mistaken in thinking there was a new fuzz of hair on the top of my head? Tiny shoots of it, but definitely there? Not red, but white as the snows of Kilimanjaro?

  I am back from my journey to Tom’s village of Titikope.

  I went into town to talk to Inspector Tomelty, despite my opinion of him, to tell him I was resolved now to leave Ghana. Some impulse brought me to do that. I didn’t need to. I thought somehow I should, but could not pinpoint the reason.

  We were in his wooden-walled office, in the extensive compound of the Ghana Police. Everything is shipshape there, the parade ground swept and the buildings painted freshly, in contrast to the cheerful dereliction of the district around it. He seemed at his ease throughout our meeting, and yet looked at me with his policeman’s face, occasionally taking notes, but sparely. He was sweating marvellously in his stiff khaki shirt, although he was barely moving a muscle. I remembered him sweating under his rain-covering the second time we met. At any rate it was murderously, viciously hot, in the manner the world of Accra assumes after the rains. The air was not really breathable, it was like an audacious experiment to see how hot you could make a person before he started to die. There was a bottle of Scotch whisky on an iron table, but Tomelty made no gesture towards it. I was so deep in strange emotion that I felt all the old thirst, and a glass of that amber liquid seemed very desirable. I was in such an altered condition of being. If I had discovered that the top of my skull had been severed by a quick blow, so quick I had not felt it, and that the skull was only sitting on my brains like a hat, I wouldn’t have been surprised. I wasn’t sweating like Tomelty, I was as dry as a hob. It was so odd to sit there with him, talking, as if he were the grown-up person of the two of us, the receiver of important truths. Suddenly I was saying all sorts of things I had not intended to say. Things I would have been afraid to whisper even when I was alone. I did not feel I could merely depart the country, I said. I wanted to know if some reparation could be made, and did he or the judiciary want to issue a charge against me. I spoke in detail about Togoland and confessed my part in the gunrunning. I said I thought it was an atrocious act in a time of great unrest and uncertainty, and absolutely contrary to what I should have been doing there. And did Mr Oko and the UN want to make a prosecution?

  Even in the fierce heat I was shivering now. When I came in I don’t believe I had intended to say anything except that I was going. But suddenly I found I needed to tell the whole story. It was dangerous, I suppose, ruinous, and I could see at the very fringes of his large impassive face a sort of smile, that I thought wasn’t a smile of encouragement, but of mockery, kept well in check.

  Then I said it seemed to me that the good people were taken out of the world first, as a sort of general rule of thumb. The good go first, and the just, and the bad and the unjust live long lives, and are never brought to book, in the main. This might have been a step too far for Tomelty, because as I finished my speech, he said:

  ‘Is this something to do with what you were writing in that book?’ Suddenly, suddenly, I liked him. Swift as a swift flying from the eaves, I liked him.

  ‘Well, I don’t know,’ I said. ‘That might be so.’

  ‘I told you before, McNulty, you need to leave Ghana. It was the first thing I told you. You are going now, you say, and this is good. My warning to you from before s
till stands. You need to watch your back, McNulty. You’ve made enemies here. You need to get out now while the going is still good.’

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Tom, who I might now call dear Tom, as I account him a true friend, the man after all who has made my sojourn here in Accra not only bearable, but at times lightened and valuable to me, it was about Tom that I was trying to tell Tomelty also, but I never got to it. I wish I knew more about the workings of the world as it pertains to emotions. I think I can safely say that I could throw a bridge across any span of river, I could work out the likely currents even in the rainy season, I would know the stresses on the metal and the stone, no bridge I put up would ever be washed away or fall under undue weight. Yet I am not sure I could say the same for my heart, or the heart of any other person. I’ve been caught out somehow in my ignorance, and it has shaken me, the degree of it.

  We mounted the trusty Indian motorbike early on the morning of our journey. Tom sat behind me obligingly, and being bigger than me, and the seat higher, must have presented a rather looming figure as we progressed east along the Labadi Road. I had of course told Tom about Tomelty and his repeated warning, and though he seemed to treat the news lightly, nevertheless I did notice him glancing about in an unusual way as we left the house, and even now when we were perched on the motorbike I sensed he might be keeping a weather eye out. It made me nervous, and I wondered would we be followed now.

  ‘I have no trust for Mensah,’ was all Tom actually said about it.

  We had a pretty good idea where we were going. Tom had drawn a rough map for me, and of course he knew the roads well, and the names of the places on the river where we were to take the local boats. Titikope was his own village, every person knows how to get to their own village.

  An excitement had gripped him at the thought of the journey and its purpose. We had no idea what class of welcome we would get from his wife, though he had sent a letter to her a few days previously. I am not sure now what was even on my mind, what I thought we could achieve for him by going up. It was something to do with Mai, though, something, and nothing to do with her, too. I was very glad to get out onto the country roads, and I think it is true to say that I was curiously happy, as happy as I have ever been. I was doing something, tackling something, grasping a bull by the horns. I would be neutral to the occasion of his meeting her, or not meeting her, or whatever was going to befall him. And yet be a catalyst I hoped of his improved situation. It seemed to me highly desirable that a rapprochement could be made, not least because I thought when I left Tom’s employment would cease. But in truth I don’t know now if my plans had anything of sense in them. They were merely intentions, isolated and separate, like the lovely plans of a child. And maybe the very childish audacity of my thinking contributed to the outcome. We were choosing to place ourselves in a landscape that wished to exclude Tom, and might always wish to exclude him, evermore – but we were challenging the facts. A landscape which entertained in potential any number of outcomes, romantic or terrifying, the return of Odysseus to Ithaca, or perishing in the attempt. Tom clung to my shirt resolutely, and when he wished me to take this or that turn in the dusty road, he would wave an arm either right or left ahead of my face, leaning forward as if crouching over me, and shout his instructions into the wind. I had a sense the whole way of the solidity of the man, a man whose body, though large, had elected not to take up one inch more space in the world than absolutely necessary, and was hard and trim behind me. Whereas my own vague corpulence seemed all the more untrimmed and even degenerate, plumped down in front of him.