The Temporary Gentleman (16 page)

‘We’ll have time enough to make proper use of you, McNulty,’ he said.

In Derry as I swept through I bought her a bracelet with rubies – worthy of an officer’s wife, I was thinking. I had the strength of character to scorn the garnets anyhow. I drove over the border to Donegal still in my uniform, somewhat in defiance of the recent law against wearing such garb in Eire. I understood why de Valera wanted the country to stay neutral, he was afraid the place would erupt in civil war again if he so much as allowed one British battleship into an Irish harbour, but I didn’t agree with him when it came to not being allowed to show the pride I felt in my undertaking as a soldier. Indeed, I passed across the border as if there was no border between the North and South, just as Tom had said. As if there was a secret unity between the two places – the secret unity of that bloody awkward, ferociously demanding thing called daily life.

I bought the bracelet because I still loved her. That is the bare fact of it. However much I feared our life together, and I did fear it, the chaos sometimes, and the hurt, now I was boundlessly eager to see her. I wanted her to be different, and absolutely the same. I wanted the same dust to be lingering on the furniture in the bedroom in Harbour House and I wanted a new broom of grace and usefulness to wipe everything clean.

When I got to the house I thought I might have been granted my strange wish. She or someone anyhow had washed winter from the door and the five staring windows at the front of the house shone with polished cleanliness, and sparkled back at the whale-coloured waters of the Garvoge hurrying past. Across the river the remnant town lay in a fierce scratched line of dark ink and pencil. A motorcar turning somewhere distantly against the weak sunlight threw out a cold plaque of light briefly on the tumbling water. A cargo ship took its course between the deep-water bollards, burning with softened light like a huge floating ember. I saw the rage of weeds and grass in our bit of garden across the road, with its toppling arched gate, and suddenly I could see myself in there, in some undetermined future, with a spade, turning the sods, laying out the rows for potatoes, carrots and cabbages, in old clothes specially kept for the purpose. I hesitated, staring at all this, past, present and future in a tumble of old light, with my hand on the latch and the key inserted in the lock. Happiness and fear invaded me – the cocktail of wartime.

The interior had that scant look of the drinker’s house right enough, when so many articles, old dinner plates and servers, have been smashed in so many arguments and fumbling, flustered wars, and only a selection of the objects that might decorate a dwelling are on view, as if many things have been packed away carefully in trunks and boxes, or, as in our case, shoved into bins over the years in cascades of shattered delph, the archaeology and remnant grandeur of her father’s life. The mezzotint of that same grandee was in the hall, that had been in her bedroom at Magheraboy, beside the one of her mother in a Victorian gossamer dress, with her permanent look of worried defiance.

Everything otherwise was as it should be. As it should be and so rarely was. The carpets, brushmarks of Persian weaving, were worn but had the look of having been recently beaten. Someone had swept the floorboards and the linoleum, someone had polished the surface of the bockety hall table – one of the feet missing its ivory wheel. Now here was the open door into the sitting room, and here was Mai coming out, looking very springlike and coiffured in her best silk dress. There was a little yellowness about the gills, but she had obviously spent a long time sitting at her dressing table, smoothing out her face with make-up, and choosing the right lipstick for her complexion. And the thing most rare of all in recent times, she was smiling.

She came right up to me and laid her head on my khaki chest. I hadn’t put down my valises and wished heartily that I had but did not wish simply to drop them at our feet or ask her to let me put them down because I wanted to embrace her gently – I thought I might never get her back at my chest again if I said or did anything.

‘Oh Jack, dear Jack,’ she said.

Chapter Eighteen

It didn’t last of course, it couldn’t have. I think she thought I was coming back for good, that I had found some way out of the army, at Tom’s request maybe, or that some hidden clause had been uncovered and invoked. It wasn’t so good when I had to remind her that I had signed up for the duration of the war. But the war I said mightn’t last long, and then I would be back, right as rain, and we could pick everything up. I said I might be able to stay in the army, that promotion came quickly oftentimes in wartime, and we might find ourselves stationed somewhere nice, in peacetime, maybe even England, and then she could maybe find work as a teacher if she so wished, as her married state would not be a bar to that there. And she made an enormous and obvious effort to listen with a good grace. I suppose I could see now that her nerves, as Queenie had put it, were not good, not good at all. And that if they had been good, the death of our little boy had set her back.

That night, after a few gins, she whispered to me in the first friendliness of drunkenness that she had not been feeling well, not well at all, that Queenie didn’t understand and Jack Kirwan had made a ghost of himself in her life, he wouldn’t or couldn’t come to her. That there was a terror in her, a terror she did not know the name of. That it scampered through her veins like a rat and took away from her every semblance of peace or enjoyment. That her head, her very head, was heavy with pain, as if it were a pail of poison. And then after a few more gins, slowly slowly it all became my fault, and in the deep of the night she threw the old wall clock at my head, and then she threw the cat, having nothing else at hand, and I drank till I was dizzy, and in the morning, waking alone in the sitting room, I wandered out into the hall, and found Ursula at the foot of the stairs, staring at the body of her mother where she had fallen, sometime in the lost hours of the night, neither an angel from heaven, nor a demon risen from the earth, but a human and tormented soul.

When I got back to Ballycastle I found the ruby bracelet forgotten in my inside pocket, and so was obliged, rather mournfully, to post it.

*

Outside in the yard, in one of those queer little gaps between downpours, some nameless blue bird is singing with immense sweetness. I am staring at a photo of Mai and the children that I carry in my wallet. I am not in the picture myself, possibly because I am taking it. It is around this time it was taken, judging by the size of Maggie, although she was always a tall child. In which case the reason I am not in it might be not because I am taking the photo but because I am away at the war. They both look well turned out, Mai herself quite trim. She’s wearing sunglasses like a jazz musician, but there is no sun. Her stern, unsmiling expression doesn’t say much about anything, but her clothes have been put on with care. Somehow it makes me rather stupidly sad, as if it is a photo of what might have been even though it is an actual photo of what was. Maybe Ursula looks a bit cold in her gansaí, and her hair with that dry, dead look hair gets when there are nits in it. That may be fanciful of me, and maybe not. Both of the girls had nits from time to time. It was the great era of the head-louse.

*

I had to leave her to it. That is not an easy thing to think of. None of it is easy to think of. As a young man of sixteen, seventeen, before I went to the university, the First World War just finishing, the seas heaving still with mines, in my beautiful white uniform, a wireless officer with the face of a child, proud as Punch, I saw every port of the earth, yes, and rounded Cape Horn a dozen times in tempests and in resplendent calms, I saw evil dens and heard dark talk, and knew the world was not entirely a pleasant place, as you hope it might be when you are young, setting out for the first time to seek your fortune. Bleak streets of Bombay and Liverpool, men who didn’t care if they lived or died, and would blithely stick you with a knife as they themselves slid down into hell. But none of those things ever struck me with the overwhelming force of Mai’s allotted fate. I wrote something like this a few days ago, I am writing it again today. I still don’t understand, really, what language it is told in properly, or what place, truly, it describes. The Arabs say everything is already written and that we’ve got to fulfil the book. What darkness, what vileness, what a tome blacked out with blackest ink, was tendered to Mai. And she was obliged, day by day, paragraph by paragraph, chapter by chapter, to live it. My mind withers at the thought just as it shrinks from the task of remembering these fragments of it now, and struggles to find light.

My first job after getting my commission was to help bolster British Africa against possible French invasion, as I have already described. In Accra after my ship was torpedoed, they hospitalised me and a hundred other rescued soldiers. Many, many others had been lost in the attack or drowned in the sea. My body, somewhat to my surprise, because I thought I had come through ‘unscathed’ as they say, was marked with bruises like a strange map of a new world, the seas and oceans my unmarked skin, the bruises, red and black, the unknown landmasses with their deceptive harbours. The ward sister was a little Irish nun with a heart as big as the Sahara, and as warm, and her African nurses were joyful, pretty and adroit. She was of the opinion that it was the whisky I had drunk had saved me. Perhaps she meant it humorously. I healed, and when I was let out of hospital after a couple of months, I found myself seconded as an engineer to a unit of the Gold Coast Regiment. Everyone was still thinking that the Vichy French might invade, though it was a thought that was fading. The looming danger dissolving in the acid of what actually was fated to happen, that no one, not the brightest general or statesman, really knows.

I was bussed up to Asante country, feeling every rut in the road, staring out at the queer procession of epic landscape, lovely distant hills with soft greens marked on them by the subtlest touch of the brush, and then narrow treed-in fields, where children ran screaming alongside the truck like dark river-stones turned over and over by a current. I was headed for the old town of Kumasi. My rank by then was already first lieutenant, and when I came into barracks there was some confusion, because apparently there was already a man there of the same rank and name.

‘You are already here, sir,’ said the quartermaster, a small bronze-coloured man. His cheeks were marked by old knife cuts like the shallow ruts on Brazil nuts.

‘Well, I don’t know what to say about that,’ I said.

‘The mess sergeant already served you, sir, last night, look, sir, I have it on the mess sheet. First Lieutenant John Charles McNulty.’

‘And did you meet me yesterday yourself?’ I said.

‘I did, sir, and I can tell you, it was not you, sir.’

But he was laughing of course. Nevertheless this was verging on miracle and mystery, and I was intrigued and a small bit discombobulated. It is not a stable thought to be suddenly two in the world when you were sure you had only been one.

Then I had a strange meeting in the officers’ quarters. The beds were narrow and metal, not in any way better than what the ordinary soldiers had. A democratic barracks, such as you find now and then in the army overseas. The quartermaster brought me along to meet a long, skinny man lounging on a bed, or at least one third of him lounging and the rest sticking out onto the floor. I could see him glancing at my cap to see how he should address me, but we were the same rank right enough. I noted he wasn’t in the sappers, but in a tank corps.

He was immensely friendly and quite happy to meet me. We went for a stroll about the camp, then took refuge from the roasting heat in the commandant’s office, the only place with a man working a cooling fan. We laughed a bit, and he asked me about my experiences getting up to Kumasi, and was very interested to hear about the torpedoed ship. I knew he knew my name and he knew I knew his name, and maybe for a moment he tried to imagine himself, First Lieutenant John Charles McNulty, roiling about in the murderous waters. I could tell he was a bit of a toff, and by something he said about something else, I opined he was from Ireland also, and then by something else he said that he was from Sligo, and then, in the coarse gravelly heat of the Gold Coast, my head felt all the dizzier, wondering how this could be.

So we talked further, and he mentioned his home place, an old estate I knew from seeing its granite gates when you passed in a car on the road to Enniscrone. Then I felt the blood leaving my cheeks, and the air deserting my gills. I was seized for a moment by something as close to a heart attack as I ever want to experience. It was a ludicrous reaction. As a little child I had of course believed my father’s stories like a Christian believes the Bible. And when I got older, I told myself I believed them, and made an act of faith in them, but all underneath that was doubt and disbelief and faithlessness. In particular, the unlikely old tale of a dispossessed brother in the seventeenth century, similar to a thousand old tales in a thousand Irish families. But now, from everything this man said, the story was being validated, inch by inch and line by line. The man before me was the descendant of a brother of the Oliver McNulty that my father had often spoken of. Oh, yes, he said, it is all in the family archive. This was spoken in the most amicable, even regretful way, in his English accent from his schooling at Eton, while I stood before him dumbfounded and halting in speech.

We shook hands over a little rickety table of papers, containing I would imagine the plans to blow all the bridges in that district if the French looked like coming to take it. I gave him my version of the story, as if before a strange court where we were obliged to say truthfully who we were, as if we could ever know such a thing before God or man, who I was, or who I imagined I was, and the other First Lieutenant John Charles McNulty nodded enthusiastically at my shadowy story, and then he gripped my hand. There was no trace of a family likeness, but to the quartermaster, standing on the edge of this and listening, it must have seemed odd that these two men had never met, the same age and from the same town, and with the same name. But then the quartermaster could not be expected to understand the lives of Catholic and Protestant souls in Irish provincial towns.