The Temporary Gentleman (20 page)

Fear filled me and then seemed to trickle away. There was a sudden clarity in being helpless. There were no plans to make, no routes to draw up, no water to find, no food to cook. Life was cancelled somehow. The burden of my life with Mai was inexplicably lifted. I was going to die. Would there be grief? I wondered would Maggie make her scoffing noise when she heard, as if something entirely unimportant had taken place. And Mai, and Mai? Even as I gazed about me, awkwardly noting the run of the rocks, and puzzling how there were limestone beds so near to granite, and wondering what slow catastrophes of millennia had produced such an absurdity, I was also inwardly trying to understand the story of my marriage. I gazed inwardly upon the spectacle of it. I looked at it and tried to sort and arrange its sequence of epochs. And a bell started to ring in me, a deep-voiced bell, tolling in me with dreadful but forensic meaning. Mai McNulty, her life erased even as she lived it, a sort of Life-in-Death and Death-in-Life –
all your fault
, tolled the bell,
all your fault
. That strange day, just before nightfall.

Are there things we do that rescind our humanity, and bring us a death before the real death?

What broke these thoughts was a sudden pain, so fierce it was like an animal separate from myself. It flared in my lower legs somewhere under the jeep, and began to seep up my body.

I must have passed out. Then I opened my eyes and began slowly to be aware of a puzzling sound. I thought it must be water, from higher up the valley, a deluge coming down after unseen rainfall. I listened and listened and thought I could hear not only the river coming but my own blood inside my skin, and I wondered was that it, was it just my own blood in my ears? For some reason it tormented me, not knowing, I supposed I was now half mad, and everything would be disproportionate now, and witless, and without explanation. Like my life, I was thinking, like my bloody life.

Then down the valley, just within my view, came a hundred goats, each one with a bell around its neck, the bells all together making a sound like a river, and in their company a goatherd, a young boy, with loose white trousers, long shift and round felt hat, and a sort of easy, heedless gait, as unbothered as the goats by the rough way. He gazed on me a few moments as his charges flooded past, then reached into the herd, and grabbed a nanny goat. Holding her by the front legs, he showed me her belly of teats, and with a gesture of his face and eyes asked me if I wanted to drink. Then he knelt closer to me, and though the goat kicked at my shoulders and head, he got a teat to my mouth, and I sucked on it with boundless gratitude.

This accident more or less saw me through to the end of the war, for I was seven months in hospital in India. In memory of my rescuer, the goatherd, I brought two Pathan dolls home to the girls, along with myself.

Chapter Twenty-three

Just now and then I seem, in my effort to form some sort of narrative, to touch accidentally on something rawer than a mere wound, it is more like a viciousness, a poisonous compound, that even to touch brings a sudden sense of illness and unhappiness – the opposite of the King’s Touch. And at the very moment of touching there is caused also a sensation of deepest alarm, of approaching disaster, and even horror, no, especially horror, like any of those old, dark dreams of childhood when I was astray in the thickest, blackest woods, and something was creeping, creeping up on me. Waking from those dreams as a child I used to cry, and sometimes now writing in this minute-book I have cried, even when I have no idea why I am crying – and cried all the harder for that. I have invoked the gods of truth, and they will have their way with me.

The war ended. I was proud, more or less, to have served in the army. But pride in that ‘foreign’ war meant little in Ireland. Hundreds of thousands had traipsed over to England to work in the factories and tens of thousands had joined the various forces, and they certainly knew all about it. But the stay-at-homes, and those not inclined to favour any force allied with the British, remained blank on the subject, or vibrant with contempt. There wasn’t a drop of petrol in Ireland, everything desirable was rationed, there was more turf dug out of the bogs than in all the millennia before it. The war had been just a kind of giant inconvenience.

But the war ended. I went home to silences, to surprise in people’s faces, as if they had forgotten I was away – ‘Ah, Jack, ah, Jack, how’s it going? Where have you been, man?’ And all the rest of the life-giving guff of bars.

The army offered me a half-colonelship if I would stay on afterwards. I was immensely pleased to be asked. But Mai couldn’t face it, and I thought she had been through enough.

‘I want you here,’ she said. ‘I want you here.’

There was chaos and confusion everywhere after the war, but at the same time, some mechanisms were freed up. Tom’s marriage annulment came through at last from Rome. Roseanne had been accused of various things and now it was all done and dusted and as if the marriage had never been. I was sent out by Mam to the dreary tin hut with Father Gaunt to tell her this, one uncherishable day, and I was shocked to find she was pregnant, but not, it seemed, with any child of Tom’s. She never did have a child with Tom. When the baby was born, it was put up for adoption in England, through the order of nuns that my sister Teasy belonged to. Roseanne was committed to the Sligo asylum, and I believe she died of TB not too long afterwards. Thus closed a terrible chapter.

If you had told me, or Tom, or anyone, that lovely bright day when they were married in Dublin, that by war’s end she would be in the mad house, and shortly afterwards die, I would not have believed you. No one could have imagined such a ferocious fate for that beauteous, shining girl.

A thousand mornings then in Harbour House, waking to find myself strewn somewhere like a length of deep-water seaweed, torn away from the sea-bed by a storm, parched, shaking my head at the world, feeling for bruises and cuts, recovering half-remembered insults and curses, surveying the debris of the night, thrown plates, cutlery, the Arklow teapot, the little Belleek basket, the Dresden shepherdess, pictures knocked down from the walls, cigarette stubs everywhere, my mother’s doilies flung to the four corners of a room, carpets rucked against the walls, savagery ringing in my head, my own and hers, and if I peeped into our bedroom, yes, Mai there in the bed, her greying hair on the dirty pillows, and maybe Maggie tucked in beside her, where I must have put her yet again, Mai crying out for company, for comfort, terrified, so drunk she could not register her terror, only a receptacle of terror.

Maggie wanted to be an actress and it was decided she could go away to Dublin to the acting school there. Mam arranged for Ursula to go to Liverpool to train as a nurse. So we were left then on our own. More seldom and then not at all sounded the knock on the door, of brother or mother, as if the spinning top of our wretched life was throwing everyone off, try as they might to hang on. The only thing it seems that brings the same people back that were at your marriage ceremony, in such circumstances, is your funeral.

To part Mai from Maggie was not without its station of the cross. That night after Maggie had struggled away with her box and suitcase – it was 1947, the year of the great snow -– across the flagstones of the station platform, tall as a heron, in her blue coat that thinned her even more than the thin person she was, with her stark black hair, Mai poisoned herself with gin in an enormous effort of extinction against herself that was the equal in size of the gigantic tonnage of snow that fell on Sligo, that fell on Ireland, that cast an uncanny stillness on everything, the muddled roofs of the town, the utilitarian roads, the fine houses along the Finisklin road, that froze the river itself.

It was no bother to her to down the two bottles of gin, she did it with almost a steady hand all through the evening and early night, not in her room as she usually did, but at the kitchen table itself, as if she had nothing to hide now, nothing at all. And when she had the bottles drunk, she must have disrobed herself in the freezing kitchen, she must have taken off every stitch of clothes, a woman in her mid-forties, with all her battle scars, and then walked out through the front door into the maze and haze of snow. And I only knew it because I was standing at the sitting-room window myself, looking out, gobsmacked by the continuing snowfall, and wondering would there ever be a cease to it, and I saw her thin figure about twenty feet from the house, and if she had walked on further I would never have seen her. And I raced through the room and out through the hall, and fairly galloped up the road, the snow treacherous under my slippers, so I might have been a citizen suddenly of Moscow, and I tore along as the snowflakes veritably whipped my face, whipped it and whipped it, and when I reached her, I called out, and asked her where she was going. And she said in her strange drunken voice, with its perfect diction, ‘I am looking for the river,’ and even though she had lost her course for the river because of the snow, she seemed inclined just to persevere on, so I rushed to her and lifted her into my arms, more or less scooped her into my arms, shocked, shocked, even in that queer emergency, by the terrible lightness of the woman, and she a tall person enough, and I carried her back, doing my best not to fall with her, marvelling also at the utter whiteness now in the world, not just covering everything but wiping it out, erasing it, as if all our story might be returned to a blank page, and nothing written on it, only perhaps the very first promise of our love.

And then, how could I leave her like that, bereft, confused, drinking with an even greater ferocity, like a child rubbing a drawing out with gigantic anger and extravagant impatience?

Something I nearly forgot, how could I forget it? Perhaps because it brought such strange sorrow after, such confusion. But a few months after Maggie left, she came home on the train one day and said she had managed to ‘book’ her mother – a strange term, as if it were an hotel – into a drying-out hospital in the midlands, a few miles from Mullingar. And whatever Maggie said to her mother, whatever good moment she found her in, asking her to go, Mai agreed, I could hardly credit it. And Pappy, rather than myself, why I am not sure, drove her over in his old jalopy, and he told me later, Mai was somewhat ‘refreshed’ as my father always puts it, but in high good spirits, and he said there really was a general feeling in that dilapidated motorcar that a great thing was afoot. And they put Mai ‘under’ in some fashion for ten days, with drugs of some kind, maybe morphine, I don’t know, and after another ten days she was ferried back to me, as right as rain, as shipshape as a bloody ship.

‘Mai,’ I said, ‘Mai,’ not really knowing what to say, and with a few whiskies in me, and I must admit I had found the evenings very long and lonely without her, maybe that is a curious thing to say, ‘you look like a girl – a mere girl!’

‘I don’t know what you mean by that, Jack,’ she said, but brightly, ‘I am no girl.’

The first thing she did was go down to Queenie’s house, Queenie had five children of her own by now, and it had been many years since they had had much to do with one another, the two friends. But they went about that day, and had a lovely time, a lovely time, Mai told me that herself, and the very fact she was telling me something, in that fashion, simple, true and ordinary, gave me hope and joy.

So it was wretched, it was perhaps even evil and disgusting, that in the general atmosphere of drinking in the house, that is to say, my own drinking, she seemed to slip back into it, just as easy as a pivot into a pivot hole. I suppose that was a terrible and tragic thing. By Christ, it was.

God forgive me, I pray, God forgive me.

And she began to imagine that if only Maggie were there she might make another attempt, another effort, but Maggie was not there, was she, she was gone, and would never be living at home again – never, never, never, never, never.

I couldn’t see her so distraught about Maggie, I just couldn’t. Even though I thought it was good for Maggie to get away. I put Harbour House on the market. There was no work worth taking in Sligo anyhow, after the war there was such a scarcity of everything, but decent work was nonexistent. The tens of thousands of people that had gone to England to do war work didn’t even bother to come home, sure they couldn’t, it would have been an absurdity. So maybe I thought I could do better in Dublin. Or that was what I told myself, as I sold the house for less than I had paid for it all those years before. I had told Mai my plan and she had not demurred, and this was no Malta plan, because when the day came, she got into the motorcar with perfect obedience, even haste, and had put on her best surviving coat as was her way in something she needed to make an effort for, rare as that was, and without looking back up the Finisklin Road, we set off for the new house in Dublin.

Of course there was nothing to be had of much desirability for the price of a Sligo house, so I had only managed to buy a rather mean little premises in Clontarf, but when we reached Dunseverick Road, Mai didn’t seem to give the matter a first let alone a second thought, and assisted me in carrying in our goods and chattels, which I had dragged up from Sligo on a builder’s trailer lashed to the back of the car. And though we never painted a wall in that house, or hardly changed a stick of furniture from the place we threw it that first afternoon – and indeed my boxes of books never were unpacked, but stood in the little hallway for five ragged years – it had the nomenclature of ‘home’ for Maggie then, after we fished her out of her digs in Westland Row. She had only been planning to come home for the holidays, I suppose, poor soul. The holidays. Not a very apt title for any of the days in that house, I must confess. A measure of ferocity, sickness, shouting, smashing of the last few things carried over from the distant, distant past, sometimes a clement time in between, when Mai’s essential nature shone forth, and we laughed ‘like drains’ as she would say, and everything was sunny for a space – but there was a bend in every time-dulled spoon, and a crack in everything.