The Temporary Gentleman

by Barry, Sebastian

  ‘All the money, Jack, all the money,’ she said. There was still love in her voice, as August still has the summer in it. But also the desolation of winter.

  Grattan House was sold. Now all the truth was out, and like most truth that is eventually revealed after long hiding, it was little or no use to Mai, certainly not to me. Yes, I had made dozens of little visits to the cupboard, for racing debts, for debts at the dress shops and the hat shops, for bills that came down from Switzer’s and Weir’s, for this, for that, and for the other thing. Each time reaching into the bag without disturbing it too much, not wanting to know too much about what I was doing, thinking each time, ‘It’s just a few coins, there are plenty there yet,’ until the vile day when my hand went in and even a man making the greatest effort in the history of the world not to notice something, noticed that what I fetched out was the last sovereign.

  *

  The guilt attached to ‘losing’ Grattan House is still profound, eternal, and terrifying. But at the time I am not sure I fully understood what I had done.

  Looking back now, sitting in this simple clay and wooden room in Accra, it is clear that it was a time to lay my heart bare to her, to talk to her about how we lived, and to beg her to forgive me for what had happened. But I did none of those things.

  *

  I settled her bills at Divilly’s butchers and Mrs Synott’s grocery shop in Salthill, and my bar bill at the Bal, utilising my very last resources, just not quite able to leave them in the lurch, the house was put on the market and sold in a thrice to a friend of Mr Tuohy’s, and off we went, lock, stock and barrel, or lockless, stockless and barrel-less, to a ‘nice little house’ in Magheraboy in Sligo, which Pappy was able to get a hold of from one of his butties, for a sum so tiny that Mai, mysteriously enough, slapped her two hands on her thighs when I told her, whether out of disgust at our new status, or delight at the affordability of Sligo, I couldn’t quite tell – but probably not the latter.

  Because, as if it were a sort of hidden illness in McNulty marriages, she had stopped talking to me directly, as Mam had done with Pappy. If we had had tea at my Mam’s house now, it would surely have been a complicated evening. As Mai had no liaison officer of the age of reason in the house, but only two streeling children, this scheme of indirect speech was very tricky for her fully to effect, and occasionally she was obliged by blind necessity to say something, in which case she kept it short, clipped, and to the point, like the orders of a superior officer.

  And she insisted on separate bedrooms.

  Although it caused me immense pain, I also thought there was some justice in her stance, and prayed nightly on the narrow couch which was now my bed that there might be some truth in the saying that time will heal all wounds. But her despair, her air of hopelessness and outrage, was frightening to behold, and I was drinking as fast and as much as I could in the evenings in the cold, dank bars of Sligo town to try and erase the floating image in my brain of the tall, thin, white-faced ghost that was now my wife. One night I headed home so drunk that I was looking everywhere for Grattan House, in the muddled misconception it was still our home, searching up and down the streets of Sligo for a house that was in another city.

  I was not entirely hopeless though. She was still nearby, and I had a belief that whatever bound us would eventually be restored. I said as much to Tom and he nodded in sage silence.

  I would have to hole up like Jesse James in my own house, and hope fervently for a pardon, if not from Mai, then from the Secret Judge of life. And pray that we might find a firm footing again in the ordinary carnival of things.

  Chapter Fourteen

  It was a mean little house, it was true. But it had room for the two babies and even the strange dislocations of their parents, and it bore a better relation to my actual income. Out back was a lonesome square of grass and dandelions, and the wind twisted itself into the desolate space and ran its chilly fingers through the grass, and asked the time from the dandelion heads. The houses were new, built as a little speculation by a builder from Rossaveal, far enough away in Connemara to be unavailable when a slate began its slide down the roof, or his sewerage pipes parted underground.

  In the first summer was the small mercy that Mai discovered Gibraltar, a concrete sea-baths that had been built on the stony lip of the shore in Far Finisklin. There was a big lump of a rock abutting it, hence the name, and here Mai spread herself on hot days, and made a little kingdom of her towel, her bag, and her clothes, and had Maggie for a border guard at her feet. Ursula was deposited at their grandparents’, my Mam toiling to bring the great pram over the inconvenient granite step of her front door. Indeed Mai had pleased Mam by naming Ursula after St Ursula of the Ursulines. My mother was a great liker of religious orders and indeed had promised my sister Teasy many years before to the Sisters of Nazareth House, and had delivered her to their premises in Bexhill-on-Sea when she was fourteen, where now she thrives as a mendicant nun among the little hills and backways of East Sussex.

  Mam had a special love for Ursula, initially through the very act of naming her. Mai had greeted her suggestion that Ursula be also promised to the nuns without enthusiasm, though Mai in her own way was just as religious as Mam.

  ‘I think one McNulty is enough for any order to cope with,’ Mai said.

  My mother laughed heartily.

  ‘You may be right, Mai, you may be right.’

  Maggie was in Low Babies at school now and full of talk, and her first job as a talker was official intermediary between her mother and me.

  There was the rash of ‘jiltses and shams’ from the town that also spread themselves on Gibraltar, and raised cries and tidal waves by leaping into the sea from the rocky ledges. One summer evening, while she cooked in the back scullery, home from a long summer day of sunbathing and swimming – I could see the salt crystals drying on her face – I asked her whether she minded that she shared her Newfoundland with the savages.

  ‘Tell your father I prefer their company to his,’ she said to Maggie.

  ‘Mammy says . . .’ said Maggie.

  ‘It’s alright, Maggie,’ I said. ‘I got the message.’

  One day later that same year, I got a card in an envelope from her friend Queenie Moran, to ask if she might meet with me privately in the town. This was an unusual communication, in that I had never had much dealings with Queenie, except in so far as she was Mai’s friend. Queenie sometimes sailed in for tea in Magheraboy. Then Maggie was put into her Shirley Temple dress and her black hair tortured into curls, and Mai would put her up on the sitting-room table to sing, as a hundred other little girls of Sligo were obliged to do in that era. And a very good fist Maggie made of it, tap-dancing, curtsying, and singing out the songs.

  So I stared a while at Queenie’s card, looking at the handsome swirls of her handwriting. But the words were polite, and I couldn’t see the harm in it, and I agreed to meet her in Lyons’ cafe, a premises that Mai herself did not frequent.

  It was a Saturday morning and I went forth in my best bib and tucker, although I had a murderous headache from the night before. I had shaved and swallowed a raw egg with a little brandy to make some amends to my innards. There was a danger from a Saturday morning, in that Mai did like to make her pilgrimage among the shops with Maggie, something Maggie herself delighted in. It gave me heart to think Mai had devised a method and routine for living in Sligo, the town of her exile from Galway. Sligo did have a few beads on its thread, some good haberdasheries and the like, not to mention in the evenings the otherworlds and swooning dreams of the Gaiety picture house. Mai still went to the pictures the way other mortals go to public houses, to be immersed in what to her was the opium of high fashion, trailing gowns, shimmering light, and Fred Astaire or suchlike singing his romantic songs, putting on a top hat, shooting a cuff, and shaking out a leg. So I was keeping a weather eye out to make sure she was not abroad on her travels, at least anywhere near Wine Street.

  Here was Queenie now, who had c
hosen a more or less conspiratorial table out of the way of the various wives of Sligo having their Saturday treat. The place hummed with them, reminding me of the noise that starlings make. She stood when I approached the table and held out her hand for me to shake, removing the glove expertly as she did so. I felt her cold hand in mine, and was thinking idly what bad circulation she must have, for a district nurse indeed, to be cold in this overheated, muggy room, the Russian cigarettes in holders and the rough Sweet Afton fags mingling democratically in the air.

  ‘Jack,’ she said. ‘It’s really kind of you to see me. Truly.’

  ‘Ah well, sure, Queenie, why not? It’s not often I get a card from a lady, let me tell you, to be meeting her quietly somewhere.’

  I got a little sense that she considered this remark off-colour, because her face showed the tiniest flinch, but whatever about that, she sat down, I sat down, after dragging off my greatcoat and throwing it across another chair, causing a little ruckus of anxiety to the women at the nearest table, as if the coat were a dead body.

  ‘Will you have something, Jack?’ she said, raising her left hand, ringless and white.

  ‘No, no,’ I said, ‘no, not feeling the best, you know.’

  She let the hand drift up further to her head and smoothed her red hair. Queer enough that Mai’s best friend was a red-haired woman, and that I had red hair, and Ursula. If Ursula had been there we would have looked like a little family.

  ‘Look, Jack,’ she said, ‘if there’s one thing my father said to me, a thousand times, it was never to interfere in a marriage, never to come between a couple in any way, and, you know, Jack, he is a solicitor, and grapples with human matters every day. And I would not like you to think I was attempting to do that!’

  She had spoken these words with some emphasis, as if she meant them maybe to be humorous, but mostly they alarmed me.

  ‘The fact is, Jack, I am very worried about Mai.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Are you sure you wouldn’t like a cup of tea? You do seem a little peaky, Jack.’

  ‘No, no, I’m fine, Queenie, fine . . . What is it then about Mai that troubles you?’

  ‘Do you know,’ she said, ‘troubles me is the right phrase. I am troubled, I am. There are things she has said to me over the last year . . . I know you have had your difficulties . . . Although I don’t know the details of course, and haven’t asked her. But. Jack, do you know that when she was found to be pregnant with Ursula, she came to see me, in great floods of tears. She had come down on the bus from Galway, weeping. She said she just couldn’t have another baby. She said – well, some terrible things . . .’

  ‘What terrible things?’ I said, thinking I might as well hear everything, I couldn’t feel any more alarmed.

  ‘She isn’t – do you think . . . No, what am I saying . . . Technically, do you know, as a nurse, Jack, and I am not a doctor, but do you know, there is a sadness in her sometimes, am I shocking you when I say that?’

  ‘What do you mean?’ I said, admittedly getting a touch angry suddenly. Just a touch. What was she suggesting, that Mai was unwell in some way? As a child of the Sligo asylum I was not going to have this woman tell me my wife was . . .

  ‘What are you trying to say?’ I said, undoubtedly somewhat stonily.

  ‘Is there any chance you think that maybe Mai suffers from her nerves?’

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘no, I don’t believe so, Queenie, and I must say I’m with your father there on his very wise advice not to interfere in people’s lives, I must say, I really must, Queenie now.’

  ‘I’m not putting it right. I am making a terrible mess of this. Please, Jack, forgive me. All this weighs so on my mind, and she says things to me, and I wonder is she saying the same things to you, or to anyone, maybe lovely Maria Sheridan, or her brother, such a lovely man too . . .’

  Then she was silent. She had reached the place we all reach when we are trying to help someone, but find there is a great ditch between our help and the object of our help. A yawning and unhelpful gap. I felt suddenly sorry for her. Queenie Moran, spinster, district nurse, daughter of a Galway solicitor, trying to broach a horrible subject with the husband of her dear friend.

  ‘Look it, Queenie,’ I said, ‘I appreciate you writing to me. Something is on your mind. Rest assured that Mai is fine. My God, ain’t she always feisty? Yes, she is. She talks wild talk sometimes. She brings her thoughts to extremes certainly. But look, Queenie, she’s Mai McNulty, Mai Kirwan as was, did you ever meet in your life a more . . .’

  But I couldn’t think of the phrase I needed to describe her. I realised I had become emotional now, there was a miniature rivulet of a tear coming down my cheek, which she might interpret hopefully as the result of my hangover.

  ‘It’s just, Jack,’ she said, in a little resigned tone, as if she had decided now to breach her father’s advice after all, ‘if I say nothing, and something awful happens, I would never, ever forgive myself.’

  Now I was silent, looking at her. Maybe I twitched an eyebrow, because she responded as if I had encouraged her, though I would have been glad as a rose if she had just disappeared now in a puff of smoke, like the unwelcome genie she seemed to me in that moment.

  ‘Do you know, when Ursula was born, she said to me she wished she could kill the child, kill it, that’s what she said, she sat there in the Café Cairo, just a couple of years ago, hissing with anger and God knows what, and said she wanted to kill the baby because it had red hair. That’s not sensible, Jack. I reminded her I had red hair. She sat there in the Café Cairo and told me she had no maternal instinct whatsoever, which was hard for me to hear because, because . . . Because I do love that girl, Jack, everybody loves her that knows her . . . Such things to be saying. And even before Ursula was born, for heaven’s sake, Jack, she said that she would deal with the matter next chance she got, she would drink a bottle of gin in a hot bath, she begged me to tell her how to get rid of the baby, Jack, don’t you see, the horror of a conversation like that, with your own childhood friend?’

  Now Queenie was weeping openly, and it is impossible to be angry with a weeping person, I have found.

  ‘But, Queenie, she did none of those things.’

  ‘But she tried, Jack, she tried, I know she did, she drank the bottle of gin, she sat in a hot bath, she did everything she could, I know she did, and I should have told you before, now I see I should, because of the other thing she said, when Ursula was born, and her without a shred, without a shred she said, of feeling for either of them . . .’

  ‘No, no,’ I said, but wondering had she taken the chance to try to do something grievous when I was away on Land Commission business, ‘we were still in Grattan House when Ursula was born, we were still – ’ I was going to say, in the same bedroom, but of course I did not, ‘and anyway, she’s very fond of Maggie, and very much devoted to Ursula, oh, yes,’ I said, ‘she is a splendid mother, don’t pay any heed to her.’

  ‘But, Jack,’ she said.

  What? I thought. There was a longer silence then. The women at the nearest table were queerly quiet, so that I feared they were listening to all this. Maybe they knew me, maybe they knew Mai. Oh, Queenie, Queenie, I thought, take your lousy truth away with you. If you take it away I won’t have to think about it, I will banish it from my mind.

  ‘She told me, Jack, she has made, you know . . .’

  ‘What?’ I said, in the greatest despair. I knew she would tell all now, and I didn’t want her, God forgive me, to tell all. Better the fog than the clearing weather.

  ‘Attempts,’ said Queenie, as if hoping the one word would suffice, and she wouldn’t have to say any more.

  ‘Attempts?’ I said, shivering suddenly in the fuggy room, glancing at the other table, throwing a little brief smile their way. Whatever you can hear of this, pay no heed, pay no heed.

  ‘Yes. Dr Snow, you know.’

  ‘What, Dr Snow?’

  ‘Prescribed her these pills, you know, and she s
aid, she said she took a lot of them one night, this was just a month ago, washed down with gin . . .’

  ‘Look, Queenie,’ I said, laughing then, laughing. ‘Mai doesn’t even drink. She has never touched a drop of alcohol in her whole life. Never.’

  Queenie looked at me, not knowing in the least what to say to me. I suddenly felt mortally foolish, ignorant, small. Of course, Mai could have been smoking opium for all I knew, and dancing naked about her bedroom, because after nine at night I didn’t see her again till morning. That’s how it was in those days, and I lived in hopes of a better time. I lived in hope of a reconciliation, the way real couples do, the way ordinary decent people do, eventually, in the upshot, after time has healed all wounds.

  ‘She has never touched a drop in all her days,’ I said again, as if this were a religious tenet.

  ‘Oh, Jack, oh, Jack,’ she said, weeping.

  The air went out of me.

  Chapter Fifteen

  When I got back to Magheraboy I found she was out with Maggie after all though I had not seen them in the town. I went up to her room to look around. I didn’t feel I should be in there, poking about, but if I was longing to find something it was evidence that what Mai had said to Queenie was fanciful nonsense, or that Queenie had gone mad.