The Temporary Gentleman (21 page)

Chapter Twenty-four

Tomelty is his name, I discover, the white inspector as I was calling him, because he was back today, without his constable. I hardly knew who or what he was because he arrived in an enormous gabardine cloak and a pair of failed galoshes, which brought a great deal of muddy water into my living room. As he divested himself of his rain-gear, with a rather exasperated, almost savage movement of his arm, another few pints of rain were spewed across the floorboards. And within his covering he had been sweating copiously. I think I had heard the low grumble of his car arriving and had certainly witnessed it parking in the three inches of water that cover Mr Oko’s property at present. And just as I was expecting more veiled threats and intimations of an unsettling nature, it turned out he was on something of a mercy mission – a friendly visit almost, except nothing could really persuade me that he wants to be on friendly terms with me.

‘I understand that Mr Mensah was here to see you,’ he said.

‘Who is Mr Mensah?’ I said. I knew it was a common name in Accra, and the name of the famous singer, but I didn’t remember knowing anyone of that name.

‘The brother of the woman you may or may not have had dealings with. The man who may or may not have beaten up Kofi Genfi, unless it was you who did or did not beat him up.’

‘Right,’ I said, a little reassured that the whole dark affair was still cloaked in multiple ambiguity.

‘It isn’t important now,’ said Tomelty, trying to squeeze some further moisture out of the bottom of his trouser legs, ruining the crease of his uniform in the process. ‘It’s a closed matter. But I have heard, the way that one hears things out here, that Mensah was extremely unhappy with his visit to you, I don’t know if you want to throw light on that.’

‘I can’t,’ I said. It seemed like a thousand years ago. ‘I was in the throes of a little malarial attack. Tom Quaye was looking after things. I believe he sent him on his way.’

‘Well, he has been going about the various drinking places he frequents, saying hard things about you, very hard things, and I don’t know, the reason I’m telling you is, this Mensah character is quite a respectable man in some ways, despite his criminal record, and when I was questioning him I got the impression of quite a straight sort of character, you know, no double talk, no evasion, really rather raw in his honesty. So when a man like that is threatening to kill someone, I pay it more heed than when I hear a gangster do so, if you follow me.’

‘I do.’

‘So I would just keep a weather eye out for him, if I were you,’ said Tomelty, not without a certain enjoyment I thought. He was warning me but he was also content to be alarming me at the same time.

‘I’m sure he won’t come out here again,’ I said.

‘No, no, he probably won’t. But he is very vexed. He has had to pay out quite a bit of money to his friend, and he was expecting you to underwrite his losses, if you follow me. A floater, you know.’

‘I’m sure he was,’ I said, laughing, in my man-of-the-world guise that sometimes I find myself assuming.

‘Well,’ said Tomelty, giving himself a last shake before having to set out again and undoing all his good work, ‘I am glad you are not too bothered. These chaps have long memories. Not unlike those wild boys in Ireland in the twenties. You won’t catch me going home any time soon. No, sir.’

‘That’s sad,’ I said.

He looked at me. Maybe he thought it was sad too, or maybe it annoyed him that I had commented on it. Maybe a real man of the world would just have let the comment pass. So many things said by Irish people can very profitably be just let pass, I suppose. But did I also see a little window of vulnerability open up for a moment? A shadow of doubt and pain across the eyes? A moment of darkness? Is this how my brother Eneas looks now when someone mentions the Tan war? Somewhere, even far away like this, catching him off guard, unawares? Eneas, who can’t come home again either, but has crept back a couple of times and hidden in the Mam’s house, not daring to go out in daylight, and my Mam wringing her hands in the kitchen, and weeping her private tears over him. Tomelty hadn’t said before he was involved in the South, he had only mentioned his presence north of the border, if I wasn’t mistaken in my recollection. Perhaps being near me again, the brother of an old Royal Irish Constabulary man, had betrayed him into the shadow of a confession. What strange men were about the earth, after this half century of wars. Men who once were true, and their very trueness turned into betrayal, as the pages of history turn in the wind. Men who were vicious oftentimes and ruthless, turned into heroes and patriots. And a hundred shades and mixtures of both. Perhaps he also took some strange comfort from my war service. Yes, just for a moment, I saw the casement of a tiny window of entry into Tomelty. There was something stricken and lost about him, just for a moment, just for a moment, and then it was as if he banged the casement shut again.

I didn’t know what he was going to say, and maybe he didn’t either. He certainly wasn’t a sentimentalist though. He was back all shipshape in a thrice, his hatches all battened.

‘How’s the diary going?’ he said, nodding towards this table.

‘Oh, Jaysus, it’s . . .’ I said, and was stuck somehow for the rest of the sentence.

‘I’ll get on,’ he said. ‘Don’t forget, McNulty.’ It struck me that when a policeman says your name it always sounds ironical. And he made a gesture with his right hand across his eyes, as if to say, keep a look-out. ‘Mensah’s a taxi driver. He can move about. He’s angry. I tell you, half the time I’m out here, it’s like I never left Ireland. Take away the heat and the fucking palm trees and the black skins and it’s all just Ballymena in the rain, I tell you.’

And then he flung the cape over his head again and plunged back out into the deluge, like one enormous elephant ear.

It was only when he was gone that I thought maybe I should have thanked him, but it was too late, his car was creating two great vees of water as it surged away.

*

Ursula. She had been going fine at the nursing, and she sent me a photo of herself in the nursing gear, at her graduation, and very impressive it was, and a great relief. I sent her a five-pound note and apologised for not being there, as I thought I ought to have been.

In the midwinter of ’52 I got a letter from her with such an amount of distress in it, urgently requesting funds. She said she had been dismissed from her nursing job, and was living in some hardship in Toxteth. Some ten days later I got another letter from her, saying things were better, which for some reason worried me even more than the first letter.

Off I went then to England to see what was up. I said nothing to Mai about my journey.

Toxteth had an Irish bleakness, with its lowering sky and sharp, bitter wind. When I got to her little house and was let in by her astonished self, it didn’t take me too long to notice that she was very afraid. She looked trim and nice enough, but her eyes were bright with fear.

‘How is poor Mammy?’ she said.

‘Much as always,’ I said. ‘Much as always.’

‘Did she get my birthday card, do you know, Pop?’

‘Oh, she got it, yes, and very glad she was to get it. Did she write and thank you?

‘No, but – that’s alright.’

‘She usen’t to answer my letters, either, if that’s any comfort, when I was away at the war.’

‘She’s no letter writer, Mammy,’ she said.

‘She used to write a good letter when she was teaching in Manchester,’ I said. ‘But that was a long time ago.’

I asked her then why she had been dismissed from her nursing job. She told me the truth straight off, which was always her way. She said she had been caught filching from the drugs cabinet in the hospital and had been sacked. Barbiturates, she said, which she had begun to take for her nerves. She was blushing now, into the roots of her hair. And then she said she had been very hungry, and homeless for a week or two, because she lost her place at the nurses’ home. Then she said she met a nice man, and they were going to be married.

I asked her who this man was and she said he was called Patrick Pawu, and spelled the name for me, and she said he was the grandson of the Olowu of Owu, and spelled that out too, and I asked her if it was a Portuguese name, and she said no, it was Nigerian. My heart was panicking in my chest. The ghost of all the Ketchums and Reynoldses of the world hovered in the back of my head. I don’t think I had at that time ever heard of such a thing in England, a white woman and a black man. Then I suddenly thought of Mai, and her affection years ago for the first Tom in Nigeria. But I wanted to shout at her – ‘You will never be able to come home with such a man, and think of the children, think of the children you would have?’ But thank God, thank God I did not.

‘I love him, Pop,’ she said, looking at me with those fearful eyes. She had her head lowered, for the axe, no doubt. She hadn’t asked me to come, and now I was there, and now she would get her punishment.

It was like the angel rolling the stone away from Christ’s tomb. I had been alone with this great boulder of a thing, the boulder that has blocked up so much of human history, the weight of dominion over others, of slavery. Then the angel rolled it away. I confess I was a bloody whiteman to the last second. But then, suddenly, freedom, true bloody freedom.

‘I think it is wonderful news,’ I said, astonished at the words in my own mouth. ‘It is the best news, Ursula, the very best.’

I was light-headed with some species of joy.

‘Pop,’ she said, getting up, as happy as I had ever seen her, and she had been a child originally with a gift for happiness. ‘I didn’t write and tell you because I was afraid.’

‘Well, don’t be,’ I said, ‘there’s no need.’

Then the fog of fear cleared from her eyes, and she put her face in her hands, and quietly wept. Had I never spoken gently to her before? I feared maybe not, I feared not. Had either of us really ever treated her with a proper measure of gentleness, as much as she deserved? Why should she have thought I would now? She had no example of it. I saw this, as if someone had shone a light into my vicious heart. I saw it, and could do nothing else but step forward and hold her in my arms.

To remember drunkenness is so difficult because it is really a form of human absence, a maelstrom that blanks out the landscape. Maybe from the outside, looking at it . . . But how terrible it would be to pretend that I stood outside it all. I was fully involved in the battle, and every morning knew I had been mentioned in the dispatches of grace or disgrace. Grace, because sometimes, as rare as a hot Irish day, there was a kind of huge human kindness, descending on us, Mai and Jack, and for a little while we were in the same uniform, and fighting for the same powers. When Mai would say quick, unexpected, precious things, sweet nothings indeed, maybe engendered in gin, but priceless to me for all that. For you had to have some currency to keep going in the daylight hours of relative sobriety.

But the savagery, the gear of savagery. The subtle metallic click of the machinery, when the rack is brought to the starting point, and the ropes are tied to the body. The terrifying eloquence of the barely articulate drinker. Insults, that might have done as well in the form of a knife, fashioned into a great bludgeon, for fear it would not strike home. Our heads battered by a storm of words, shards of them, rocks of them, blades of them, bullets of them, bombs. The aftermath of surging hatred, the exhaustion when we lay as it might be in the sitting room, not in the chairs, but she maybe slumped against a wall, myself stretched flat on the floor. As if the house had been struck by a falling bomb, breaking everything, but failing to explode. So that something lay there also with its secret heart beating, ticking, and who knew the devious nature of those fuzes? Their numbers and solutions? -– not I. Sad beyond words to think about, shameful, the shame the worst. Turning ourselves night after night into monsters, the creations of some failed Frankenstein -– pitiful because so wretched, so base, so provisional, so stripped of all good things that she especially had once had in her in abundance. Myself no better, not a jot, but in my case, I have to think, starting with so much less. The two crazy devils in Dunseverick Road. Maggie grown up now, bestriding the professional stage, but affrighted in her bed, like a child electrified by a thrashing cable. The poor neighbours oftentimes banging on the walls. The thinning, wasting body of Mai. The ludicrous bloom of rude health on my face, the rotund, padded body. Nothing left at the centre but the cinder of what had been, splinters of the lost panel depicting our setting forth nearly thirty years before, in heroic guise, on this darkening journey.

‘You piece of human excrement, you useless, whining, faithless man.’

Over and over and over again, there was no ending, and the beginning was lost in time.

In the morning – nothing ever mentioned. If a Sunday, I would watch her at Mass in St Fintan’s, kneeling in the pew, hungrily praying, her face white and dusty from the worried over-use of her compact. The events of the night left behind, till it all started round again. What is the point in saying I hated her – as indeed I did, often and often – when running in the pith of things, like a vein of ravaged blood, was that love, always rising again, impervious to sense, killing and giving life in equal measure?

‘Efforts’ were made. A few gins less, a few whiskies less, and an effort made to go out to Jammet’s restaurant, in whatever finery was at our disposal.

‘We must make an effort, Jack,’ she would say, and when she did say it, there was always a little trim of tears, a lace of them, around her voice.

Then we were bound to chart a choppy course to the Abbey Theatre, every couple of months, to gaze at our daughter in her new show. Mai stooped, old before her time, nervous, not sure of anything, least of all herself. Grudging the time in the seats, the frightening sobriety of it. She was not able really to ‘see’ Maggie, there was a blindness there, nothing was ever said about the performance or the play, as if being sober now had only the authority of dreams, and not ones a person could recount, or even remember.