The Temporary Gentleman

by Barry, Sebastian

  There she was, my new wife, still fifty yards ahead. Now the storm decided it wasn’t doing enough and started to roar and howl. Only a few years previously I had followed her along this very road, as she went home from the college. I had known nothing about her then. Did I know much more now? At the surface of things perhaps I was embarrassed, not in any way knowing what I would say to our wedding guests, but deeper somewhere I was moved by a wild concern for her, as if it wasn’t me she was fleeing from, and I was only the observer of this strange emergency.

  The barracks where the Black and Tans used to be stationed passed on my right, as gloomy and as derelict as the history it remembered or forgot. Indeed I recalled Mr Kirwan inveighing against their one-time presence there ‘in an innocent Irish seaside place’. Finally I reached the turn of the Grattan Road that brought a traveller round to the front of the houses. I could see poor Grattan House huddled in the rain, like a forlorn image of the vanished Mr Kirwan, his times and hours all done.

  Now I got to the handsome old gates and looked in through the bars. Much to my relief, there she was, inside the porch itself, in rather a strange position, her right hand grasping the door-knocker but no longer banging on it, if she had been banging on it, and her body hanging from this arm, her head lain sideways on her left shoulder, and the torso and legs slumping. Her face was resting it looked like against the neglected paint of the front door. I slipped in and walked quietly up to her. I could have been angry I suppose. I could have railed and accused, but in truth I felt for her only an unexpected respect.

  ‘Mai,’ I said. I fancied I could hear her breathing heavily. Black clouds went racing high above the cold roof of the house. All the prettiness and the desirability seemed to have gone out of it. I was surprised that her brother Jack, to whom the house was left, had let it go, but of course he lived in Roscommon where his practice was. There was a bloom of spring grass across the once pristine gravel. Because the tide was high, the callows field beside the house was brimming with dark water, and only the brown stalks of last year’s ragwort showed above the waterline. It was such a melancholy sight.

  ‘He’s not here,’ she said then. ‘He’s not here.’

  ‘There’s no one here, Mai,’ I said.

  ‘I thought maybe Pappy would be here but he’s not.’

  ‘Your father, you remember, Mai, your father is gone.’

  ‘I know,’ she said.

  Then she straightened and turned herself about. I never saw a human person so utterly drenched unless it was a swimmer. Her lovely wedding dress looked like white seaweed on her, clinging everywhere.

  ‘Jesus, Mary, and St Joseph,’ I said.

  ‘I know,’ she said.

  ‘Is this it, Mai? Do you not want to be married to me? Is that what it is?’

  ‘I took fright,’ she said. ‘I took fright.’

  ‘At what, at what?’

  ‘I don’t know. I took fright.’

  She lifted her face and looked at me.

  ‘There’s nothing to be frightened of,’ I said, but wondered if that were true.

  ‘Do you think we could get in through a window?’ she said. ‘I would love to see the old place again.’

  ‘It’s not in a fit state,’ I said, stepping to the parlour window, where I had sometimes knocked to get her mother’s attention. I was intending to try and peer in. But it was only a subterfuge. As soon as I moved away, she was gone, moving at speed to the garden wall, and was over it swiftly, and splashed down into the flooded field. She waded twenty feet out towards God knew what limit of the ground, where surely she would imminently plunge underwater and be lost. I cleared the wall myself and sloshed along in the murky floodwaters, trying to catch up with her, alarmed by the darkness of everything, the indistinctness. Then she stopped and I came up behind her. I saw her shoulders fall. I could hear her crying, a sound I don’t think I had ever heard from her before. Her crying was oddly deep, and I was horribly affrighted by it.

  ‘I want to go back,’ she said.

  ‘You want to go back where?’

  ‘I want to go back, I want to go back,’ she said.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ I said.

  I stepped closer to her and put my two hands on her hips either side, and then when she made no obvious objection, put my arms around her, and stood as close to her as I could. I was fearful of knocking her over, on the rough ground beneath us. It was very surprising that, soaked as she was, coatless and hatless, in the vicious storm, her body under the silk was as warm as a running engine.

  ‘I gave my wedding ring to a little beggar girl.’

  ‘I got it back,’ I said, ‘I gave her a shilling for it.’

  ‘Poor little mite of a thing she was.’

  There was no difficulty after all explaining things to the wedding guests. They were puzzled I am sure, but amused, and put it all down to Mai’s high-spirited nature. Maria Sheridan said it was the most romantic thing she had ever heard, how I had followed her into the water. Maria was very close to Mai, it seemed, and intended to leave her her property in Cavan when she and Nicholas ‘went to a better place’, as she put it. So whatever Maria said was gospel, I supposed. It was just Mai’s high-spirited nature. Her brother Jack prescribed her a calming powder and made sure she had not caught her death. The soaking clothes were taken off her by Maria and my mother, and in the corridor while I waited I heard their laughter now in the hotel room.

  Then we had the nicest honeymoon. Mai loved Dublin. Every afternoon we went to the pictures, and in the evenings to a concert. Mai’s favourite composer was Purcell, and we saw Dido and Aeneas at the Antient Concert Rooms. How often I have heard Mai humming that to herself. ‘Dido’s Lament’. She was gracious about the shortcomings of Barry’s Hotel, and later wrote a nice note about it to Tom, thanking him. She seemed a different woman now in Dublin, certain and vigorous. She linked me in the streets confidently, she told me long stories about her youth in Salthill and her adventures teaching in England. It was suddenly as if our marriage was a shell on the stormy sea from which she was going to step, Venus renewed, ready for her second life. We made love to each other in the dowdy hotel room with the unfakeable and ineradicable happiness of ordinary lovers.

  When I am laid in earth

  May my wrongs create

  No trouble in thy breast –

  Remember me, forget my fate.

  Chapter Ten

  For the last two weeks, the mosquitoes having had their wicked way with me, I have suffered the inevitable outcome. The first I knew of it, I awoke feeling as if I had drunk a jar of spoiled potín, though I hadn’t touched a drop of anything since the night of the fracas – the night indeed when the mosquitoes ravaged me. A tide of nausea and fever poured through me, saturating everything in sweat. I could neither rise nor stay comfortably where I was. My mother came to my bedside in ghostly ministration and soothed my brow, an unlikely visitation in every respect, including the fact that she was standing on the side of my bed where it abuts the solid wall, or what passes for a solid wall here in Oiswe Street. She smiled at me and then melted away. An enormous sorrow assailed me, only rubbed out by fits of coughing, bullying coughing. When Tom Quaye finally came in to work, he found his employer with his arms outstretched like a petty Jesus, chest heaving, and his head a small boulder struck again and again by a lump hammer.

  Tom hurried away to fetch the doctor but he knew immediately, as I did myself, that it was malaria. I’ve had malaria many times, but the chaos and the storm of it always surprises me. A man forgets the experience of malaria. Mai said if a woman could really remember the experience of childbirth she would never have another baby. With a proper memory of malaria no man would ever abide in Africa.

  Tom brought back a doctor from the town, a Dr Christiansen, a big blockhouse of a Dane with a hearty laugh and a merciless manner. I don’t remember what I said to him in those first days. I don’t remember much of anything. There was a lot of to-ing and fro-ing of people,
but apart from Tom and the doctor, none of these was real, I suppose. Mai did not make an entrance, though in my deepest delirium I seem to remember calling out to her. Maybe it was best she did not come. It would have been so strange.

  Actually while I lay suffering we did have a visitor of real flesh and blood, but I don’t remember him either. Apparently, according to Tom, it was Kofi Genfi’s assailant, his second assailant shall we say, the brother of his beautiful woman, asking for money. It seems the police have closed their investigation, and now this other man feels emboldened or perhaps obliged to seek compensation for his victim, which is rather odd and complicated, and Tom struggled even with his excellent English to explain it to me. The fact that it was he himself who decked his sister’s lover is not as relevant as I would have first thought, except maybe as an added encouragement to come all the way out to me here, in so far as I imagine he must be feeling guilty about it. But in his eyes, the man believes he did me a good turn, in preventing a murder, or even a double murder, of the woman and of me. The main gist of it was, however, that he wanted money to give to Kofi Genfi, who has been impoverished by his stay in hospital, which Tom tells me is ruinously expensive for a Ghanaian. Kofi Genfi received a felling blow to the side of the head, and is having difficulty going about his usual tasks, not to mention a broken arm that is healing badly. I think Tom was delicately implying that I might have been responsible for the arm.

  ‘Well, Tom,’ I said, ‘what did you say to him? Do you think I should pay something towards Mr Genfi’s costs?’

  ‘No, major, you should not. He is not a good man. He was many times in prison. He is a violent man. Krezy! Once you give a man like that a shilling he will be back every day for a pound. Mark my words,’ said Tom, with his nice use of phrases.

  I found this immensely reassuring, because up to that point, all the while he had been talking I had been under the heavy premonition of being touched for money by Tom himself, which would have made me very sorrowful. Now his certainty and wisdom encouraged me. Moreover, he had nursed me through the floodtide of the sickness, his large arms lifting me to the latrine again and again, and mopping up vomit and whatnot with the indifferent will of a mother. Every night for the two weeks I knew he had sat out in the front room with my table and jottings, the cane chair pulled to the wall, because he liked to lean it back and balance on the back legs. As I came out of my fever I had heard him softly singing there, and telling o’er and o’er the secret beads of his own private concerns. I am deeply in his debt and indeed might well have been content to hand over a few quid to help Mr Genfi. But Tom would have none of that.

  ‘I hope this man understood the situation, Tom, when you had explained there would be no money?’

  ‘Ah,’ said Tom, and left it there, as if he didn’t wish to venture a lie about such a matter, or any opinion at all. Then he went off to the kitchen and brewed up some tea. Dr Christiansen had put me to the expense of various bought medicines, and Tom had dutifully doled these out to me, spoon by spoon, and pill by pill. Maybe he didn’t think Aunty-aunty was the woman for malaria itself, even if her remedy for the bites had been very effective.

  *

  We rented a few rooms in a battered old mansion in Galway and gathered a few sticks about us, and called ourselves proper married people.

  A month hadn’t passed before we got the famous telegram from Maria Sheridan, ‘mayfly up’, and we were excited to drive ourselves eastwards to Omard, to show ourselves off there as a newly married couple.

  Omard House was a lodestar of welcome, and Mai had often talked about it. The Sheridans had no children of their own and it had always been intimated that Mai as their favourite niece would inherit Omard – an exciting thing to contemplate. When the yellow wings of the mayfly clogged the air above Lough Sheelin, this was the much longed-for signal for Maria’s friends and family to drop everything and set out to Cavan. And Nicholas’s brother Felix, not the full shilling, but a harmless soul, would faithfully sweep the leaves and the debris of winter off the tennis court, and mend the old dam in the stream that came down from the mountains, so a salmon-pool there would deepen for the swimming. And the parish priest, the doctor, the solicitor, and the bank manager, and sundry strong Catholic farmers from round about, and all the aunts and cousins, would converge on the old house as if they too were a species of mayfly, obeying an immemorial call.

  Mai’s brother, Jack, with his atmosphere of silence and his preternatural height, was already there when we arrived, having hurried over from Roscommon with his fishing rods and his reels. Coming into the old hall I was relieved when he came forward and shook my hand.

  ‘There now,’ he said, and I don’t think he uttered much more than that the whole visit.

  As Mai’s husband, I was welcomed, I felt the special honour of it. At the long kitchen table heaped with the fruits of the farm, we took our places not just as guests but as guests delighted in – Maria plainly adored the presence of these living souls she had chosen to be in her house.

  Mai fearlessly played the piano in the evening. During the day on the tennis court she destroyed opponents, young and old. In her one-piece bathing suit of darkest blue, she swam in confident circles about the salmon-pool, her cousin Felix laughing in his daft way as he watched her. Secure in Maria’s regard, and rejoicing in it, I talked to her about my travels, which she seemed to like, and to her husband Nicholas, a former Justice of the Peace under the old regime, and that rare bird, a Catholic landlord, about bridges, roads and ditches, the three points we had in common.

  In 1920 Omard had sheltered Michael Collins’s fiancée, Kitty Kiernan. Collins of course by the time of our first visit was dead. But during the war of independence he had come down to Cavan on election business, and became friends with the Kiernans, who ran a little hotel in Granard, and a general store. One day a police inspector from Dublin was shot dead while he was drinking at the hotel bar. The Kiernans were friendly with that young policeman, and yet also friends with Collins – the two opposing parties, as we would say in the UN, of the conflict. And most likely the inspector was killed by associates of Collins. But whatever about the Irish complexities of the situation, nine lorry-loads of RIC policemen and soldiers from the barracks in Cavan came into the town and torched the Kiernan properties in reprisal, and most of Granard into the bargain. The Kiernans themselves, including Kitty, fled to Omard, where the Sheridans sheltered them, earning I am sure the gratitude of Collins in those uncertain times.

  The rooks complained mightily in the beech trees, the twilight lost heart under the branches, and the tennis players played on into the darkness, mad to win. Jack Kirwan came back from the river with his sticks of dangling trout, old Felix raved in the avenues, and Maria stoked the fires in the rooms, and boiled up great pots of spuds, and roasted and baked and broiled, and the sense of things going forward steady and right was palpable and inspiring.

  I was proud, very proud to be among such people, and be accepted by them. I was introduced to the lights and luminaries of Kilnaleck as ‘Jack McNulty, Mai Kirwan’s husband, a young civil engineer’ – as if they were a string of noble titles.

  Our days in Africa, days of our youth, unrepeatable, beyond price.

  At first she wasn’t sure she wanted to go out, in the service, as it were, of the British.

  I crossed to London for my interview at the Foreign Office. There was a very nice gentleman there, who was surprisingly encouraged by the fact that I had only a second-class degree. He said the best sort of man for the colonies was not your first-class honours man, all push and polish, but a resourceful, second-class sort. I was offered a post in the Gold Coast, what they used to call the Whiteman’s Grave. I didn’t tell Mai that.

  But if I go back thirty years to 1927, when we came out together, I wonder to what degree I can step back into a realm that is real? The colonial life around me then for the first time, the bright, expanded world that it seemed, lent that present time as I lived it a curious, heigh
tened quality.

  I seem to see Mai clearly nonetheless, in the startling guise of her youth. Her hair has not submitted to the African light, her skin has not surrendered to the African heat, like the wives of old Jack Reynolds and Billy Ketchum, the two other colonial officers in our station. Her beautiful ease with everyone is evident, resulting in her being liked by everyone, sometimes extravagantly, in particular Mrs Reynolds and Mrs Ketchum, both of whom had daughters of Mai’s age, but far away in England. Mai was not a drinking woman like they were, though she delighted in the cherries from their cocktails, which they fed her like you might a special pet.

  ‘Dear Mrs McNulty’ they called her, as if ‘dear’ were a sort of honorary title, and even when she wasn’t in their company, I would hear them referring to her, sitting perhaps in the shade of the baobab trees, as ‘dear Mrs McNulty’ this, and ‘dear Mrs McNulty’ that.

  We had reached the station, initially, after what she had called ‘rather interesting hardship’. Our means of transport was a small, sand-filled, boiling bus going down across the Sahara between North Africa and the Gold Coast. It had once been painted, but a dozen sandstorms had stripped it back to the metal. The desert was as big as Europe. Humanity, local and imperial, milled about the oases, scorning the heat in mysterious displays of intent. Then these would drop away, and the wide, soul-emptying desert begin again, in which the bus was only a loudmouthed intruder.

  Inside the bus, in its jacket of burning metal, sat myself and Mai, she gazing out at this increasing distance between herself and civilisation, and myself gazing at her when she wasn’t looking, worrying about her opinion of Africa, and her opinion of me bringing her there.

  But as I watched her, there was sometimes a look of pure gaiety on her face, whether from thinking her own thoughts, or because something she had seen had pleased her, though what there was in the vast, repeated sameness of the desert I didn’t know. With my degree in geology I knew what sort of ground we drove over. I could guess the history of the sand grains, and know what rocks were folded into others, and could visualise the ancient forests and seas that would once have graced that place. I knew all that but little enough about the geology of my new wife.