The Temporary Gentleman (15 page)

Dr Snow had twined himself around the falling tree that was Mai, and was growing on her like ivy – that was my understanding of it anyhow. Dr Snow was said to be a bit of a Lothario. He inspired a great devotion in some of his women patients anyway. Maybe I wasn’t seeing things with clarity, but I didn’t trust him, traipsing in and out, ministering to her, and a wonderful bill being run up as well. In came the gin bottles too somehow or other, not via Dr Snow of course, but more mysteriously. I am inclined to believe that Gaffney’s delivered to the back gate under cover of darkness. Then up the stairs they went somehow to her bedroom.

It was the fleet footstep of Dr Snow twice a week up the same stairs that used to give me pause. But I am telling myself now there was nothing in it. Perhaps the truth was he liked her and felt sorry for her.

I soon had cause to be glad of Dr Snow, because much to Mai’s surprise, and mine, she fell pregnant once more. Late ’38, early ’39 maybe. Mai had thought she had a chest infection, pleurisy maybe, because she had a pain in her back. When Dr Snow told her what really ailed her, she sank down on her knees, such was the shock of it.

‘I can’t have another baby!’ she said.

‘Well,’ said Dr Snow.

When my Mam congratulated her Mai just stared back at her. But then, bit by bit, she seemed to be reconciled to it. She began to see the funny side of it. We had occasionally ended up in the bed together, certainly, but still, this was bordering on the miraculous. She said she’d be writing a letter to the Holy Ghost to complain. She didn’t say that to Father Gaunt or my mother of course. It was our private joke.  

It was in the same year the war began in Europe. It was as if a wraith had become pregnant, and it needed all Dr Snow’s delicate knowledge to get her through. It was a beautiful spring. The two children were loosed into the street itself and ancient traditional games were reinvented in a thrice as is in the gift of children.

Mai took a continuous fancy to knocking about with me again, and when I wasn’t traversing the complicated and contentious acres of my district for the Land Commission, I would ferry her to the Rosses, where she might walk in her gravid state along the fringe of the shore. She was talkative in a way I hardly remembered, even in the early days. The twice-weekly visits to the cinema were religiously resumed. Fred Astaire, formerly her emperor and her god, crept back into her conversation. She suddenly had life in her, and was in the process of giving life to another, and something about this pregnancy was very different from the others, as if the years of drinking in her room were a long preparation for an almost holy sobriety now. She was not even herself, or herself restored, it was a new self.

Kipling’s stories are buoyant, but sometimes buoyant on a very dark sea. If something is sad in a way that does not hurt, I will openly cry as I read a book, I don’t see any shame in that. But my own story is making me sad. It is hurting me, here under the Accra sky.

I don’t feel like myself, or rather, my self. ‘I’m not myself,’ we say, but what does it mean? Until I began to write everything down I didn’t have the slightest notion what it purported to mean. Maybe now when I think I am understanding, I am instead mistaking everything, but at least I am perceiving something in the place of the great fog that has persisted through my life. A fog that no light apparently could properly pierce. There is a great mountain, and high ravines, and great danger, but the fog says nothing about that, the fog only talks on and on about itself. It is not interested in any fashion in clarity, naturally. But now and then, the fog disperses, and in little gloamings of clear light I seem to see the figures, my parents, Mai, my children, standing or sitting, talking, prosecuting you might say their lives and days. Continuing. But I am now at a great disadvantage too, because what is filling me, like rain in a low meadow without proper drainage, is sorrow, a fierce and hurtful sorrow. Hurtful. I would ask God, and if not God, a beneficent-minded angel, for some answer as to why Mai Kirwan had such a fate as hers, why she among all the people, all the women of the world, was assigned that fate, when to begin with she was so full of promise and laden indeed with gifts. Who was one of the brightest instances of womankind in the Galway of her youth, who seemed to be a person that might do anything, go anywhere, be anything she liked. So why was this bleak fate assigned? It is inexplicable, unless God or his deputy angel knows why, and of course He is saying nothing, and his angel is keeping mum also.

A ball of wool so knotted it could not be resolved, the knots pulled tighter and tighter. I see it better now but this enlightenment does not bring happiness. It does bring a sort of cold certainty, that I might even associate with the courage of the soldier, when a great cataclysm of bomb or army is upon him, and he finds himself not as terrified as he imagined he would be, but unexpectedly resigned and ready – poised for heroism and even death.

Because, it is terrible to me that in that time of her pregnancy, when the usually unhelpful environs of Sligo itself seemed to conspire with her, the white heather replacing the snow on Knocknarea, then the sun all summer long pouring yellow light into the cups and bowls of the land, and every Sligo child was roasted red on the strands, the human creature mirroring that strange weather in her own strange heart, when the gin was not for that term her mysterious companion, and when, despite everything she turned to me as if I might be again, or even for the first time, her husband and her friend, that these efforts, these manifestations of the ability of the human soul to recover, to begin again, just as the child may innocently invent again the old game so oft invented, were met only with the poor hand and dour face of tragedy.

Our child was born dead. It is not feasible for a nondrinking man to write those words, but I have written them anyway. I don’t know what to do. The rain falls on the roof like dancers, dancing there in two hundred hobnailed boots. Colin, a little scrap we put in his swaddling clothes and buried in a grave belonging to my father in Sligo cemetery. In early winter, when the ground was beginning to be resistant to the spade. When the gravedigger gets an intimation of the hardship awaiting him in the frozen months, should there be more deaths. When the day begins to lack its proper freight of hours. When, in that instance of our ill luck, it seemed there was more cruelty than joy stored up in the human story, and kindness and comfort only rationed, and the ration book for both indeed not issued to everyone. An hour when the bell of the cathedral sounded in the lower town with a fantastical and overwhelming meaning. When the mother stood there without her child. When the father stood without his son.

Maggie and Ursula were sad as owls. I would always try to read to them before bed, on my tour of their two small rooms under the roof, and now all the more assiduously, trying to hold onto normal things. Normal things are the hardest to hold onto, in my experience.
The Tale of Mrs Tiggy-Winkle.
Sally Henny-penny looking for her long yellow gloves. Lucy walking so high above the town she might throw a pebble down a chimney. The thimble filling under the waterfall, the robin’s red waistcoat in the laundry basket.

But soon after Colin died, Maggie banished me from the edge of her bed. When you lose these little dispensations you see them for the house-high boons they are. And so I carried my book to Ursula only.

It was the loss of those small things also then to make you cry.

I was so sad about Colin I didn’t pay enough attention to what was happening to Tom and Roseanne. But there was a dark kerfuffle there. Roseanne somehow going off the rails, meeting some bowsie on the top of Knocknarea mountain. But other things too. Tom so shocked and hurt, and the Mam moving then to disencumber him of Roseanne, that’s the only word for it. Mam’s hero Father Gaunt weighing in to help, said he would work for an annulment in Rome. Poor Roseanne put into the old tin hut in Strandhill that Tom formerly used to store things for his dancehall. Like she was a broken chair. I went out there myself with Father Gaunt to try and explain things to her. Dreadful commission. But she didn’t seem to understand, she didn’t seem to be thinking clearly, not at all.

A dark business. A dark time, indeed.

Then the war came, swallowing suddenly, in one great gulp, these smaller matters, the ground of the world opening, and everything pouring down through it.

Chapter Seventeen

I spent a couple of weeks trying to settle our affairs. Then I was going to join up. I was thirty-seven, which is old for a soldier, but the army was looking for engineers and the like. My reasons were obscure to me, but I knew I would do it. My first idea was to get Mai and the girls out of Ireland, because everyone seemed to think the Germans would invade immediately, as a way of getting to England. Or that Churchill would invade instead, and bring the war onto us that way. De Valera was weaving and ducking in a dance of neutrality which seemed doomed to speedy failure. So I asked around and someone told me that Malta would be a good bet, that no one would bother with Malta, and there were houses going there for the price of a Sligo henhouse. So I put Magheraboy on the market and sold it to a lad from Bonniconlon, and much to my relief Mai seemed to go along with the Malta idea. I managed to purchase a house there through an agency in Dublin. Then we packed up everything you could take in an Austin motorcar. The children were in the car, bursting with excitement, and I went back to fetch Mai, and pull the hall door closed. She was standing in the hall, shaking.

‘I can’t go, Jack,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘But Mai, we’re all packed.’

She shook her head, as if there were invisible bonds tying her to the floor, her face so uncertain, so betwixt and between, I felt terribly sorry for her. She had been through hell and the record of that journey was written on her face. But I was angry too, angry, Jesus, Mary and St Joseph.

I resold the Malta house, whatever it had looked like, I never even saw a photograph of it, and in great haste found a place in Finisklin, the former premises of the harbourmaster. So instead of driving from Sligo to Malta, via many a ship and unknown way, we drove from Sligo to Sligo, and unpacked our goods and chattels in an old stone house by the river.

1940. Tom had driven up from Sligo to Ballycastle with the girls so they could ‘see their father in his new get-up’. We met in a little seaside hotel. Beyond the grimy windows lay Rathlin Island, like a hunting dog asleep on the sea. My temporary commission was just in the offing, and my officer training nearly at an end. I had been away from home for five or six months.

‘Well, Jack,’ said Tom, ‘there you are, in all your finery.’

‘Aye,’ I said.

‘I suppose you know ten years ago you’d have been shot for wearing that garb,’ he said, smiling.

‘Arra,’ I said.

‘If the British want to invade Ireland you can tell them they can cross the border at Belcoo. By Jesus, there wasn’t a soul to stand in our way.’

‘Ah, sure,’ I said.

‘And I had the children hiding in the back seat.’

‘Ah, sure, they don’t mind you coming over, Tom. Sure haven’t you played Ballycastle often enough with the band?’

‘Jesus, I have, in happier times.’

Then we settled in to drink some tea and I gave Maggie a few tanners to buy lollipops if there were still such things in the world, and she herded the smaller one out onto the wharf.

‘Don’t be falling into the water now,’ I said.

We talked about nothing then as people do, and then we ran out of nothing.

‘It’s nice of you to drive them over,’ I said.

‘It’s a long time not to see their father,’ he said, and in my private mind I said
uh-oh
, here it comes.

‘I don’t need to tell you there’s been difficulties since you left,’ he said, and seemed to get stuck immediately.

‘What difficulties, Tom?’ I said.

‘Well, I suppose I don’t need to say anything about the heart of the matter. Is there any chance you might get back to see her, you know? Mai, I mean.’

‘Well, I’m not due leave for a bit anyhow.’

‘That’s a pity then,’ he said.

‘I know,’ I said.

‘Mai’s in the doss mostly and Mam says she’s just crying most of the day.’

I sat there in silence for a moment, withdrawing my legs a little.

‘How’s Roseanne getting on?’ I said.

‘There’s talk of getting her into the asylum, you know.’

‘Jesus, how do things get so bad? You’d have to ask.’

‘Well, it has my heart broken, let me tell you.’

‘It’s a terrible business, Tom.’

‘Ah, Jesus,’ said Tom, ‘this marriage business. Did anyone tell us it would be so bloody tricky?’

‘I don’t remember anyone telling us,’ I said.

I sensed he wanted to go now. Maybe he was just on a mission for the Mam. But still, he had come all that way. Smuggling the girls across into the bargain.

‘I hope those children haven’t gone and drowned themselves,’ he said.

‘Well, haven’t you the two medals for the life-saving, Tom?’ I said, and indeed he had, one of them for pulling Roseanne from the sea years ago when she got into trouble. A young woman of unfathomable beauty nearly drowned in the fathoms themselves. Strandhill beach. ‘Earl Grey, and a dead-fly bun,’ I used to say to her, when she was just a girleen in the Café Cairo. I was forgetting things about normal life. I was forgetting ordinary things. Mai had been a divil for the Earl Grey too. In happier times.

‘Damme, I do,’ he said, laughing. ‘Two bloody medals.’ Nice, round, friendly Tom, I thought, on a mercy mission to Ballycastle, in the middle of a world war.

‘Take them to the Giant’s Causeway on the way back,’ I said. ‘Sure they’ll love that.’

‘I will,’ said Tom, ‘I will. Good idea.’

The colonel listened to my account of my wife’s distress and granted me compassionate leave. I was surprised and apprehensive in the same breath. I didn’t know how much of that he read in my face.