The Temporary Gentleman

by Barry, Sebastian

  For all that Mai was bringing me into her house – her father’s favourite child – for all that my coat had leather on the collar, the gold tie-pin a diamond on it, for all that I had travelled the seas of the earth, drank my beer in Galveston and the ports of the Straits Settlements, I prayed he wouldn’t think me a ragamuffin, a potential assassin of the life of his daughter. By force of character I hoped to carry the day, but I knew it would be tricky for me to prosper in that house.

  Which was why I had stopped the Austin again at the old hotel in Salthill and downed another double. Which was why I was fairly indifferent to the event by the time I suffered it, and took the questioning of her father more or less under the anaesthetic of four whiskies.

  Mr Kirwan spoke about his work, about the people of Galway, and indeed about the people of Sligo, where he also did business. About the great reluctance of a certain class of Sligo person to buy insurance.

  ‘There are people, you see, who do not think much about the future. They cannot be made to live sensibly even in the present.’

  Then her mother spoke very pleasantly about Collins and I could see that Mai’s politics had not sprung out of nowhere. Her mother seemed nervous, yes, but extremely loving towards Mai, and even as she spoke she moved unasked various dishes and items towards her daughter. Now Mai also began to speak, talking of things that I didn’t wholly understand, mentioning people familiar to her and her parents, places, times, events. She spoke though as a grown-up, not a child, as if she was expected to hold views, and as strong as she liked. Her father was not afraid to vex her with contrary opinions, and now launched into a long speech about the horrors of the civil war, which just lately had affected Salthill itself, with some poor hotelier dragged out and shot, by which side and for what reason I could not make out.

  John Redmond, the leader of the old Irish Party at Westminster, had been the man, I surmised, for Mr Kirwan, but he was dead, and all that old dream was gone. Mr Kirwan wasn’t comfortable with countries won by force of arms.

  ‘But sure, Dad,’ said Mai, ‘Michael Collins is just John Redmond with guns.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘yes,’ vehemently in that forgotten Galway night, ‘and isn’t that the problem, isn’t that the whole problem, Mai?’

  ‘But, Dad, didn’t John Redmond form the Volunteers, and didn’t he arm them against the Ulstermen?’

  ‘Well, well, he never intended to use them,’ said her father.

  ‘I think if you have guns you should use them,’ said Mai triumphantly, ‘if only to keep them from becoming unsafe.’

  ‘You can keep them perfectly safe by oiling them,’ said her father sagely.

  And on and on, pleasantly, buoyantly.

  I didn’t say so aloud, but I knew my own father didn’t really care what bugger was in government, although he had liked the old king, and was sad that he was gone. ‘People don’t seem to notice the efforts the king made to have peace in Ireland,’ he used to say, his fiddle or his piccolo poised between tunes.

  Suddenly though I felt emboldened to speak, because a plan was forming in my mind, which was maybe to go out to Africa with Mai when we were married – well, if we were ever married, I had to say to myself, sitting there in that company.

  ‘I am just grateful that we are still bound somewhat to the crown.’

  ‘What do you mean, Jack?’ Mai said, laughing.

  ‘By the oath of allegiance and so on. The king is still the head of state. I think that is a good thing, all in all.’

  Although Mr Kirwan did not exactly baulk at this, he seemed troubled by it. He seemed to need to make a great effort to tease this thought of mine out. But it was difficult for him, because he obviously did not wish to offend, but at the same time could not agree with me.

  I was having my own difficulties. I sat in an armless chair while he pursued his ideas, an armless chair with a nearly legless man. The whisky, having made a subtle and deceptive entry into my bloodstream, had now stirred those little rivers up, and whatever organs it reached and touched in the body, it revved them up mercilessly, so that my heart pounded, my temples I was quite sure were visibly throbbing, and some kind of rather pleasant rictus claimed my upper legs, so that they wanted, independently of myself, to kick vigorously the underside of the table. This I managed to control. But the long, wide expanse of the table swam in its deep polish, like a pool under dark trees, and when I lifted my sweating hands from the wood, I saw I had left twelve little whorled impressions on it.

  Mr Kirwan had taken the longer route through his speech, and somewhere in the seventh or eighth minute of it he had circled back to his views on insurance and the recalcitrant people of Sligo, with his wife smiling her nervy smile, and Mai frowning now neutrally and carefully eating her plaice.

  ‘And I am sure it is because of all this that many a Sligo family, many a bereaved wife, with her brood of children, has suffered the consequence of the reluctance of your common or gardener Sligoman to make proper provision for his family.’

  I could somehow imagine him giving this speech long ago, on the Magheraboy Road, say, on a rainy February evening in Sligo, or out in Strandhill village with its cliff-edge economies, and never forgetting his lack of success with it, among the ungrateful citizens. But I wasn’t paying absolute attention to him, I was looking at Mai as she ate with minute fierceness, marvelling at her, wondering what her true purpose was now, her true condition, was she suffering, was she keeping her head down, was it all passing off with great effect, I couldn’t tell. And then my mind was wandering out through the windows and mentally down the long sloping garden to the sea-wall, and I sensed the callows beyond the wall, and was thinking of those notorious high tides of spring and autumn, and could just see the water breast the wall, and pour over onto the rose bushes and the violets, all in my mind’s eye, not a real flood at all, and I was smiling then, with a whisky smile, all was right with the world, and I suddenly said, not entirely disconnected from what Mr Kirwan was saying, but somewhat, I suppose:

  ‘I sincerely doubt it.’

  Just that, not spoken with perfect diction, slurred no doubt, and maybe it was the blatant slurring that offended him, but he stopped speaking, or rather, declined to speak further, he sat there in his carving chair, with its two splendid arms, and under the plain antimacassar, which my mother would love to have adorned, a blank coat of arms, as if waiting for the final carving, the final ennoblement of the Kirwans, or despairing of it, despairing of the hidden and secret middle classes of Ireland. And he looked at me with an open, smileless look, that didn’t need words, that had all the appearance of a final judgement, on this bloody Jack McNulty, the buveur of Sligo, that he be cast forever into the deepest and dampest dungeon, and the keys thrown away.

  For if Mai was to be given every latitude in her ideas and her remarks, I suddenly realised, too late, that her dubious beau certainly was not.

  After dinner, in the ashes of everything, Mai played a Schubert nocturne (‘Not the famous one,’ she said) on an ancient, perfectly maintained upright piano. It was the same dark, dark brown as a dress which, for some reason she didn’t offer, she had changed into. The music was slow and melancholy, a nocturne played in the very last night-time of her childhood, no, surely well into the dawn of proper womanhood, and I saw her father crying in his chair, and her mother wept, and so did I, while Mai played on, with a dry eye.

  Not a great success, all told. But the strange thing was, there was nothing about Frank Kirwan that I didn’t like. I might have been the specimen ultimately stuck by his pin, but he was a deeply agreeable man, I could see, in essence. I would love to have met with his approval. I would love to have sat with him early and often.

  Although I am not sure her father ever changed his opinion of me much, he was stalwart enough of soul to endure me at first, and thenceforth I was often in their house, even if it was only to talk to her mother in the parlour with the ease of the admired person – for indeed her mother was always very kind to
me – while Mr Kirwan occupied somewhere in the house what was referred to as his study.

  I was in a position of knowledge now to note certain things about the Kirwans. It wasn’t all quite as it seemed, but nearly. He sold shilling insurances to all and sundry but being a Kirwan could count himself among the famous Tribes of Galway. Mai loved his aloofness and his lack of the common touch. Perhaps not so handy in an insurance man, and Mai’s mother took in paying lodgers in the summer months, though there was no sign to say so outside the house. It was very discreet. The rains and winds of summer lashed across Salthill with the air of an accepted catastrophe, but it was officially a seaside resort. And indeed there were always a few days that burned with hope and sun, and all in all it was a different world from my father’s, in his little cramped house on John Street, his job at the Lunatic Asylum, his dancing band, and his indirect wife.

  One of the things that put me deeper in love with Mai was her own love for her father. I wondered if I could earn such a depth of love, win it from her as it were, as time passed. While Mai often puzzled me, because she was after all a myriad and complicated person, I admired her tremendously, more and more indeed as the months went on. Her gifts were substantial, her mind was neither deceitful nor shallow, and as for depths, they certainly in her were never hidden. I thought she was the most considerable individual I had ever encountered. She had times of gentleness so complete and profound, she not only took my breath away, she took my heart, my soul, my very purpose in being alive. She took it all to herself and I was proud that she had done so.

  I come back to this an hour later. I am shaken to remember myself, gauche and not very sober in that vanished room. Those two people, Mr and Mrs Kirwan, long dead, and yet the memory of that awkward dinner still with the power to dismay me. To be rejected, for a moment of firmness ill-advised, misplaced. But should a Sligoman not defend his fellow Sligomen? What was it about a mere small phrase like that that offended him so? Was there something else, that I missed? Something out of place? Flies open, I dread to think. My accent not right, my eyes, my soul, my youth? Did he suddenly sense something about me in a curious floating text above my head? What I might do to his beloved daughter, the effect a man’s drinking might have on her – West of Ireland drinking, diligent, unrestrained, the antidote to the dark rains and the year-long winter? If so, I can find some sympathy for him, as a father myself. And for her gentle, light-hearted mother, who nevertheless seemed to suffer sometimes in her mind – withdraw to her own room for days on end, sitting on the edge of a narrow single bed, looking out on the great wordless theatre of Galway Bay, unless the words were the secret words of God.

  A memory I have carried with me like the little creature that gets into the apple barrel, climbs in all unseen, and by the time your ship reaches Madagascar and the provisioner opens the barrel, there is not one apple left integral and whole.

  Chapter Six

  When my brother Tom was still a teenager he got a job as the organist at the Picture House in Sligo. It is not given to every man to see his brother in such a guise. The owners had gone full out for their effects, including the installation of hydraulic lifts very interesting to me as a young engineering student. These had been invented during the First World War as a way to raise a Zeppelin undercarriage – so my text book said.

  Three hundred faces raised and expectant, the motley population of Sligo that could afford the sixpence for a ticket. It began in Stygian darkness, then a mighty release of sound somewhere under the earth, then the floor of the fore-stage opened, and a geyser of light burst upward, like a veritable explosion. Then an engine was seen rising, bearing the great organ, then my brother, if it was my brother now really, in his blazing white suit, his army-like cap, his stocky frame, his still back and his arms distorted by light into the wide thick arms of a gorilla, powerful as Zeus, working the keys like a wizard, and he seemed to be sitting astride the sun itself, such a great flower of light forced its way out, blazing and frantic, wonderfully lunatic, then noise upon noise, and more noise, then, with a calculated majesty, he let it all go, stopped it all, so that for a moment the breath was burned out of the audience, like the force of a detonation, their hearts paused, their hopes were held suspended, the past had no sting, just for a moment, just for a moment, and then life was given back, the first scenes of the film flashed and flared into life, and Tom would throw the kindling of one note into the silence, the little Lucifer of a note, graciously allowing us reprieve, our knees settling down again, here and there a redeemed soul clearing their throat, a little laughter here and there, a brave man somewhere giving his date a quick squeeze, her cry of surprise, and then laughing, the great bliss of it, the life and death of it, the death and life, and my brother Tom the captain of it.

  The Plaza, Strandhill. My father Old Tom, my brother Young Tom, their dancehall. Sometimes I imagine that everyone’s to be found there still, everyone that was important to me, Tom and Eneas, the girls we thought we were in love with, the girls we definitely were in love with, lovely Roseanne, vivid and vibrant Mai, and what was the name of the girl Eneas loved, wasn’t it Viv, it was, eternally present in those tin walls, the to-do and turmoil of the Atlantic oftentimes lending the little orchestra inside an added music, the ferocious tantrums and deceitful moods and sudden violence and queer hatreds and manias of the sea. But of course it is all long ago, and a hundred different fates and stories have swallowed up my comrades, as my own fate has swallowed me. We are in the great belly of the whale of what happens, we mistook the darkness for a pleasant night-time, and the phosphorescent plankton swimming there for stars.

  Mai dancing there, in her youth. What immense pride I felt in her, so happy to show her off to my friends and my brother. Even as he struck out the notes from his trumpet, I could see his eyes following her. She loved all the new American dances and could do them to the nth degree into the bargain, and I was well-nigh obliged to learn them quick. Such joy in that, her strength, her fiery steps, her willingness to allow for my lack of polish, as long as I would thunder through the hours with her, mashing our arms and legs, with that measured wildness. Her face aglow, her stamina infinite, always eager to take up the gauntlet of the next dance. Her face glistening in the helpful darkness, her eyes all ember and turf-black, her body swirling in her smart dresses, turning and leaping, her legs as strong as a circus performer, lovely firm legs, her delicate hands, her habit of happiness, her radiant and infective joy.

  Mai made friends with everyone, as if her life depended on it. I was warmly congratulated, in her hearing and out of her hearing both, as if I had done a great thing in finding her. But I knew my luck too. I felt like the luckiest man in Sligo, in Ireland.

  Roseanne, who was actually the piano player in Tom’s band, and of course his sweetheart, Mai especially liked, not only because they knew a lot of the same music, but because Roseanne herself was as pretty as a film star, and shone with youth and beauty, different from Mai’s, but as mysterious. Unusually enough, she was a Presbyterian. When she was younger she had been a waitress in the Café Cairo and I suppose every young man in Sligo had been soft on her, including myself.

  It was the great fortune of our youth that such girls were there in Sligo, living and breathing, and willing to give us the time of day, and, when it came to dancing anyhow, the time of night.

  And Tom at that time was just getting going at the politics, and was hoping to get elected to the town council when the civil war calmed down, if it ever did, and Mai was fascinated by all that, a person in front of her who she thought really would be able to get things done, to give the country the lick of paint she yearned for. When all would be made new, spruced up, and the future shine before us like the path the moon made on the sea at the Rosses.

  Then streaming out to the cars and taking our way back to Sligo town along the white roads of Strandhill, gleaming in the moonlight, skirting the brimming tide of the estuary, and then myself content to surge through the small hours across bog
and small farms to Galway city, to get her safely home to her father’s house. Mai tired as a child after a long day, and sober as a child, never touching a drop of drink, never, her body warm against me in the car, as the windscreen wiper lashed away the rain, and I hunched forward, peering into the shattered darkness.

  The ingredients of nothing maybe, nothing at all – but everything, everything that at close of day we value, everything.

  Do I imagine it all? Was there really such happiness? There was, there was.

  Towards the end of the year Michael Collins was killed in Cork. The bullet might as well have passed through his body and into all the countless hearts that loved him, like Mai’s. She had loved him, the idea of him, and the future that he seemed to hold in his gift, as Mai saw it. But they killed him.