The Temporary Gentleman (4 page)

‘I was a radio operator. It was a two-year course, but I got through it in six weeks.’

She mercifully allowed this boast to go by unmocked.

‘You look about twelve,’ she said.

‘I was only sixteen.’

‘The uniform is very youthening,’ she said, linking my arm to go into the cinema.

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Such a lovely young fellow,’ she said, laughing, quite mysterious, but very, very delightful.

Chapter Four

When I started to bring her almost weekly to the cinema in Galway I realised the pictures were something of a religion for her. There were a dozen photographs of the stars on the walls of the foyer, and she knew all the names, like a good Russian would know the icons in her local church. Something poured down on her from those staring eyes, and she indeed had something of the same, looking up at them.

‘The Town Hall’ they called it. It looked like an old palace in the Orient, and smelled of face-powder, disinfectant, and dead mice. The front-of-house usher would have given Tom Quaye a run for his money in the sergeant-major stakes.

Now we were talking like lunatics, in the first voluble flood of love. She was interested in everything, in a way perhaps that I was not. I lived in a sort of lowered ignorance about politics, and truth to tell, politics, even during the civil war, seemed to happen on the fringes of everything, in the corner of your eye if anywhere. History was the burnt edges of the Book of Life, as if it had indeed been in a great fire, but it was not the story itself. And the troubles my brother Eneas had endured as regards politics had caused a sort of silence in me around such questions, up till now. But Mai was passionately interested in and supported the new government, and was constitutionally able to do nothing except worship at the altar of Michael Collins, who it turned out was a kind of family friend, through an aunt in Cavan. Luckily my brother Tom was an enthusiastic Collins man, too, so I was able to offer his opinions as my own, as it were, in what I hoped was an allowable subterfuge.

‘This old country needs a new lick of paint,’ she would say, with fervour, her face glowing, as if still staring at the pictures of the stars, and Collins I am sure was mingled in her imagination with Gary Cooper and the like.

‘When I get my degree,’ she would say, ‘I am going to try and get a post in government, you see if I don’t. I may teach for a few years and then somehow make my presence felt in Dublin, and then . . .’

The ‘and then’ was a little vague, but her ambitions were honest and inspiring.

One night, maybe six weeks into our courtship – if that was what it was, we never put a name on it – she told me she was bringing me home afterwards to meet her father. To be informed of this without notice gave me a dreadful fright. She herself was dressed as if for a royal occasion, but she always was anyway, she would have given Lillian Gish a run for her money. Luckily I had recently bought a fine coat with a leather collar, and my best trilby, grey as an otter, was set at an angle on my head. She had a garnet bracelet on one wrist like drops of blood, and a short string of pearls around her neck, jewellery her father had bought her.

Her father.

A young man who has been a radio operator, with two years’ service, will have a bit of money saved up. Despite the great expense now of going to the university, I still had a few pounds in the bank. I hoped her father would recognise the splendour of this.

I didn’t pay complete heed to the picture on the screen. I sat beside her and watched, in the strange privacy that a cinema bestows on a person, her face held up to the lights and shadows. The white powder she had rubbed on it gave it the sheen and silver of the flower honesty. She had a subtle net on her black hair, with tiny bits of tinsel on it that took the light briefly as her head stirred. She smiled, she frowned, she cried, but all in some otherworldly state, as if she were asleep with her eyes open, or I were asleep and dreaming her.

After the picture we stepped out on vulnerable leather soles into a street that was flooded by a savage temper tantrum of summer rain, a great, moving varnish of glistening black.

‘Let’s go into Rabbitt’s a minute and wait for this to stop,’ I said, not usually inclined to bring her to a public house – not something I thought Mr Kirwan would approve of for his daughter.

I was grateful for the excuse of the rain because I was in need of courage from any source I could find. I put her into the snug with a few other rain-bedraggled women, furnished her with a red lemonade, and went on into the bar proper with its line of dark men, and asked for two whiskies, which I drank down smartly.

Then I felt ready, or at least more ready.

*

I haven’t been able to write anything for the last three days. I haven’t been able to do much except breathe in and out.

One afternoon about three years ago, I suddenly decided to give up drinking entirely. It just came to me, as I walked as usual towards the clubhouse, that it was time. I turned on my heel and went back home. After nearly forty years of drinking. The strange thing was, I barely missed it, I felt no pain in giving up, it just seemed the right thing to do, and I was able to do it.

Tom Quaye knows as well or better than I do that the rains are imminent and that once they start to hammer down there won’t be much point setting off on the Indian, because this end of town will turn into a quagmire. There is a semblance of paving here and there, but it will be all drenched clothes and ruined boots, and even Tom couldn’t steer the Indian through the mud and leaps of the sudden rivers that will shortly rule over everything and everyone.

So I didn’t have too much of a defence against his suggestion to go with him into Osu in search of a relaxing evening. In fact he filled me so full of dread about the coming rain that for the first time I felt uneasy about being here alone, though I have managed pretty well these many months. So I rashly set out with him, an hour after sundown, with a fulsome, heavy red light still sitting in the sky, and the very green of the plants queerly blazing, myself having given way to Tom’s hunger for the handlebars, and perched myself on the flimsy pillion.

And off we went, looking more like a comedy duo than either of us would wish, some curious Stan and Ollie, though hopefully this was just in my mind. I had to hold onto his old khaki shirt, and had the opportunity to notice the remarkable number of holes in the back of it, as if rats had got at a grain sack.

We stopped by his little quarters and in the shortest imaginable time he was out again in that sharp suit I had seen before, his hair slicked down till it was as shiny now as a beetle under his hat and, when we arranged ourselves again on the motorbike, smelling of some pungent, potent oil.

A sort of grimness had descended on Tom as if he were burdened now with the responsibility to entertain me, and I did my best with scraps of sentences and little broken comments offered from the pillion to relieve him of it. Maybe he was reconsidering bringing this balding, ageing Irish ex-major into the night world of Osu, but if he was, he didn’t say. And when we reached the better stretch of road between our district and Osu, he opened up the throttle on the motorbike, and seemed to find a better, gayer gear in himself too. Under his breath he was singing as he usually did some little song to himself, this time in his own tongue of Ewe.

Soon we were weaving and cutting through a great host of Saturday-night souls making a tremendous ruckus in the streets of Osu. We swept past the Regal cinema, which I was noticing for the first time – Mai would have clocked it long since. The sullen, sunken presence of the Atlantic shore, a vast silken darkness over to our left, framed this oddly neat back end of a place, with its tin houses and improvised lights, its Tilley lamps and generators, and suddenly my mind was filled with memories of Sligo nights, the traps with their big lamps taking the short cut to Strandhill across the wide expanse of tidal sand, if the moon was accommodating, my friends and acquaintance calling out to each other, driven almost mad by anticipation of the dancing. And the Fords and Austins taking to the sand like dimly shining animals, blinding the cold bands of walkers, trudging on, trudging on, after the long, long walk from the town, holding onto their wind-ravaged hats in the banging storm and the sleeting rain, the lovelier girls flagging down lifts that would rescue them from such torrents and sorrows. And Mai as alive as any living person ever was, radiating simple human joy.

Tom steered us to a safe spot to leave the Indian, courteously gave me the keys, and we bumped and apologised our way into a premises glorying in the name of The Silver Slipper. I was mollified in my creeping worry about what I was doing there at all by the fact that ‘The Silver Slipper’, in the guise of ‘
An Slipear Airgid
’, was my father’s favourite jig tune on the flute, not to mention the name of a famous dancehall in Bundoran.

Once in the door, and two tickets bought for pennies, the crowd oozed through a corridor and then, as if carried on floodwater, spread out into a big room with instantly confusing lights, and a band playing Tom’s Highlife music on a wide stage. What at first seemed a roaring whirlpool of dancers, when you got eyes for it resolved into men in loose white suits like Tom’s, and women in their bright summer dresses, the whole a sort of conspiracy to bamboozle and knock you senseless as you came in.

Tom’s friends were there, in jubilant spirits. A friendly lot, though God knows what they really made of me. There was an extremely pretty woman among them, who leaned forward to greet me with a gentleness that shocked me. I realised I had been living the life of a virtual prisoner. But all I seemed to feel was panic. I accepted the first tin of palm wine offered to me, and drained it.

Then the evening slipped into a new gear, so familiar to me from countless nights throughout my drinking days. My drinking days, had there been any other kind of days? In the last few years, yes, is my own answer to myself.

New swirls and deluges of colour were added to the real motions and joys of the room. One hour roared after another. At some point my head must have stopped recording anything, I have a blurred memory of bits of dark road and things looming up, and that smell of Tom’s hair oil mixed up in the memory, like it was some crazy salad of odds and ends, of glimpses and shards. And then nothing, nothing, nothing, and a sudden, vague sense of horror at snatched-at recollections, who was that I had been holding and kissing in the whirling darkness, or did I dream that, why for a while did I have the sense that someone was sitting on me, what in the name of hell was that? And then nothing, nothing again, and nothing.

And then in the bright glare of morning, opening my eyes to find myself in my bed, with the mosquito curtains all in disarray, and my stomach bare to the world, and my pyjamas strewn, I could just see, on the writing table in the next room, and a long, horrifying piss mark on the polished floor, and all along my arms, my belly, and my feet, the red marks of mosquitoes. And in the centre of the floor, queerly self-possessed, the pyramid of a turd.

And then probably what woke me, the sound of Tom Quaye coming in to work, and me making a wild lunge towards the blessed turd, for pity’s sake, for pity’s sake to cover it, so my shame would not be made manifest, and yet Tom getting in the door innocently before I could reach it, and opening his arms, the spectacle before him of his naked employer, in mid-leap, and him saying, in kindness and astonishment, searing me to the marrow:

‘Major, you shit on the floor?’

I am staring out the window at the searing yard outside. A large fly, as black as a railing, a moment ago staggered and stopped in mid-air, such is the mighty hand of the heat. The weather is a sort of celestial pointsman.

My head is empty. It is a little moment before thought, I suppose. Before thoughts rush in again. A thousand times I have felt this in my life. It has little to do with true peace, it’s the body recovering from the onslaught of alcohol.

When you are alone, there is a special quality to this, I find. I was drunk alone, I felt guilt alone, and now I feel this deceitful peace alone, for which nevertheless I am grateful.

Here is my little library, ranged along my work table, complete with two huge dead moths, and a brick-sized beetle that didn’t have the strength fully to retrieve his wings before he died:

Bridges and Structural Design
.

Bengal Lancer
, by F. Yeats-Brown.

Barrack-Room Ballads
.

Foundations of Bridges and Buildings
, by Jacoby and Davis.

Hound of Heaven
.

Chapter Five

‘The
buveur
of Sligo’ Mai’s father used to call me, though not in my hearing. Today the phrase came winging back to me.

Those heavy rooms of Grattan House, weighted down by the accumulated bullion of her father’s life, the sideboard in the dining room for instance, I could see the floorboards cupping under its crouching legs and lion’s paws, and Mrs Kirwan had given each bare foot of everything, chair and table and whatnot, a little embroidered covering. The whole room looked like it might break into movement nonetheless, the sideboard walk forward, the chair make for the door, but they didn’t, everything held its breath, it felt like, and the vast cornucopia of silken scarves that was the bay outside stirred and heaved in the wide windows, shrouded all the same in sun-faded and dusty-looking curtains. Those heavy rooms, and myself entering them for the first time, with Mai just ahead, and the quick little change in her somehow that I detected, almost with an unwanted sixth sense, a distance made between her and me, as if disowning me temporarily in the aura, the principality of her father. Her block heels banging across the dark boards. Her mother, bony as a cat, with her child’s smile, as if no one was looking at her, as if she was in some measure invisible, in a dress so old-fashioned it seemed a mistake had been made in time, and we were walking into the 1880s. My own good shoes with their heel-plates and metal studs to give them wear, beating out a smaller tattoo than Mai’s across the floor, yet too much noise to make me comfortable or easy. And then the room itself, the smell of fried plaice and cabbage, as it turned out, and the two waiting, the diminutive mother, and the utterly present father, with his waistcoat and his stomach, and his Dundrearies, his chin shaved clean, and his head bald, and the sudden riot of horse-black hair along his cheeks, and his face turned in a certain way, expectant, but maybe also ready to strike, the
paterfamilias
, the solid man, with his air of tremendousness, and his agreeable Galway voice of a man who bought things in shops and hadn’t to worry too much about the price, and you could sense
his
father a shadow at his side, a similar substantial man, and his father too, a double shadow, and all the way back to when Macs and O’s like myself were banned from the streets of the city, but I could see it in the eyes too, large, trout-dark, the quiet welcome and the stern dismissal, like a failed harmony in a song.