The Temporary Gentleman (11 page)

Chapter Twelve

Soon enough I was home. I had missed the birth by a few weeks. I came in the door and found Mai waiting for me in the narrow hall, one hand supporting herself against the wine-coloured wall. Her body was bent a little sideways, and I had to draw her into my arms to get a proper hold of her. I was concerned that the birth had weakened her so. But I could sense her enormous relief. She cried, and patted my chest. Such a moment of love that seemed. Then she brought me into the parlour to see Maggie. There is no experience in the world to match seeing your first child, for the first time. She was a little lost face in a nest of tiny blankets.

Mai on her own return had cut quite the figure in Sligo, my mother said, walking along Wine Street or O’Connell Street, crossing Grattan Bridge with her firm stride, going in and out of the fancier shops, drinking tea in the Café Cairo with all its hissing boilers and small-voiced maids, the fashionable ladies of Sligo arranged among the tables like the fabulous beasts of some impossible watering hole – in her Gibraltar coat, and the monkey swaying minutely on her shoulder. There was nothing else but Mai now in the talk of my mother. She thought her a rare person.

 Yes, Mam cherished her. I wonder now if she didn’t also invest Mai with some residual idea of her own real mother, whom she would never speak about. The spectre of illegitimacy kept her silent in her torment. But perhaps in Mam’s mind her mother had been just such as Mai, tall, a touch theatrical, in well-chosen furs and dresses. Certainly, when I saw them together on the street, you couldn’t help seeing, as I said, due to their very different heights, a mother and child.

But my mother, not being in any way a stupid woman, also picked up other signals from Mai. For twenty years and more she had stitched pinafores and smocks for the women in the asylum, and she knew something of female distress. She had found Mai a number of times in the back bedroom, sunken in what Mam called ‘black thoughts’.

Dr Snow had prescribed some pills – little white ones they were, like the buttons you might sew on a robin’s waistcoat.

When April came around we were not able to honour Maria Sheridan’s call to go to Omard for the mayfly. But Mai said we would go next year for certain. She didn’t feel quite up to it with the baby, and what she called ‘a bit of lethargy’ that she was feeling.

A few months later, I was sitting beside her in the tiny parlour in John Street. Our baby was sleeping in her Moses basket, there were no lamps or candles lit, and only the murmuring glow of the fire, now in its last hour of burning, played across Mai’s features. Outside, Sligo town was silent in the deep, camphory folds of darkness and rain, the small hours given over only to last wanderers home, and Old Keighron’s horse clopping past to the bakery. Mai was as still as a cat. It was so quiet we could hear Maggie breathing, a sound all smallness and quaintness that would make a darkened criminal smile in recognition. My father was off with his band somewhere, and my mother had kindly taken herself off to a Redemptorist mission with her own mother, or I should say her foster mother, Ma Donnellan. There was a fiery young curate in town now, a Father Gaunt, that Mam thought was Jesus returned to the earth.

The monkey sat by the fender, as contemplative as ourselves, and Mam’s cat beside him, licking her thin arms. There was a dark, introspective unsmilingness to Mai’s face, and yet in that moment I sensed that she was happy.

I was thinking of the poem by Coleridge, where he describes himself seated by just such a fire, his own child asleep in her cot beside him, and the film of ash on the grate, trembling in some tiny wind, putting him in mind of his own state, private, alone, in some lost evening of 1798. The eyes of the cat took the small firelight into their green depths. The monkey snaked out a skinny arm, and with great delicacy, plucked out one of the cat’s eyes. Mai leaped to her feet, consternated, wrenched from her daydream.

When my mother returned, disclosure had to be made. Mai made her a pot of tea, and put her to bed.

The next day she telephoned to Dublin Zoo and they said they would be glad to have a Diana monkey. Mai left me to look after things, and went up to Dublin on the train, and deposited the creature among his own kind in the monkey house.

‘A one-eyed cat is better than no cat,’ said my mother, philosophically.

Dr Snow was a regular visitor, trying to help Mai with the breast milk, which was awfully hard for her, my mother said. She couldn’t keep a proper supply going. A wet nurse was engaged from Far Finisklin but sent home again by Mam as she said the girl was not washed.

Mai wanted to see her brother Jack. He turned up in a new Crossley coupé, that gleamed even in the metal Sligo air. I was walking up John Street after a quick visit to the bookies when I saw him alight from the tremendous car, as neat and dark as a bishop.

‘Ho, Jack Kirwan!’ I called to him.

I let him in the little front door. Jack nodded at Mam as if he wasn’t quite sure who she was, but then, that was always his manner, vague, and confusing to the mortals he laboured to engage with. Then it was up the coffin-narrow stairs to the back bedroom, which, when Jack stepped into it, suddenly looked like one of those old illustrations in
Alice in Wonderland
. It was clear enough from the gaze he gave me that he wanted to speak to Mai alone. The sun had come out in Mai’s heart, that was for sure, to judge by her smile of welcome.

I stayed in the scullery helping Mam to cut the mutton for the evening meal. Maggie woke and my mother fed her from the curiously shaped bottle. Bound in swaddling clothes, nevertheless her feet, in violet pampooties – the epitome of infant style, since Mai had had them specially made by Johnston’s of O’Connell Street, from an illustration in a Paris magazine – wriggled and turned.

Then Jack came down, followed by Mai.

‘Jack, Jack,’ said Mai, ‘he is giving us Grattan House. What do you make of that?’

I was gobsmacked. Giving us Grattan House!

‘That is extraordinarily generous,’ I said to him, ‘but we couldn’t hope to recompense you properly for that.’ I was dizzy now. Did he expect money from us? Was he selling at a ‘friendly’ price?

‘He’s
giving
it to us,’ said Mai. ‘Oh, Jack,’ she said, meaning her brother, not myself, ‘I don’t think I can ever be unhappy again, not if I can hang my hat in Grattan House!’

‘Well, well,’ said Jack. ‘You’ll be doing me a favour, Mai. Get it off my hands. Sitting empty. A house needs people in it. I am settled in Roscommon. Who better than my own sister?’

This was an enormous speech for Jack. Even Mai looked at him as if he were Edmund Burke of a sudden, teasing out a thought in the House of Commons.

*

Watching Tom through the open door as I am writing this. I can just make out what he is doing, as he sways about, chopping, gathering. It is so violently hot he is wearing what amounts to a garment of sweat. The rains cascade mercilessly outside. The roof has a hundred lunatic drummers beating on it. It is a belligerent cacophony, chaotic, but weirdly peaceful.

Tom Quaye’s ‘Capital’ Braised Beef: Melt an ounce of dripping in your stewing pot, brown 1 lb. of chopped beef. Remove beef. Fry carrots, turnips and onions, add half pint stock. Return meat, cover pot, simmer for an hour. Bob’s your uncle.

‘That’s capital,’ I said, the first time he served it.

‘Do you want the “Capital”, major?’ he might say now, when he has found decent beef in the market.

I usually mash it up into a hash. Just the job.

If you wonder why

Old soldiers never die,

Fall in, fall in,

And follow your uncle Bob.

*

Mai never spoke now of going to Dublin and making a name for herself in government circles and she took to speaking of the new people who had just been elected with humorous disparagement. But then, it was the era of disappointment and disillusionment. A great effort of the spirit had been expended in creating a new country. Inevitably it couldn’t match expectations. Especially when De Valera came to power in ’32, the so-called loser of the civil war.

‘Pappy was right,’ Mai said, ‘we should have stuck with old John Redmond, for these lads are not the lads we thought they were.’

But she didn’t follow my brother Tom, in her mind or otherwise, towards the likes of General O’Duffy, she didn’t like the cut of him. One of Mai’s friends in Galway was Rosie Fine, the daughter of Fine the pawnbroker. When Tom made casual remarks about Jews, aping O’Duffy, Mai would tense up with exasperation.

‘This is just stupidity,’ she would say, and shake her head. When Tom reminded Mai that O’Duffy had been Collins’s right-hand man while he lived, Mai snorted.

‘Collins would have horsewhipped him now,’ she said.

It was exciting somehow to hear her talk in the old way. It strikes me now, if everyone had said, ‘This is just stupidity,’ we would never have had the war that eventually came.

Myself, I was finding it impossible to find good work as an engineer, and so went into the Land Commission as an assistant inspector. My career in the British Foreign Service didn’t count for anything at home, and I was obliged to start off again. I purchased a nice little Baby Austin, because the work brought me all over Donegal, Leitrim and Cavan, carving up old places into serviceable farms and the like. But the pay was poor and I was struggling. Mai’s joy in getting Grattan House endured, but it was an expensive property to run. When we went in first, the only things not mouldering in the salt air were the armies of dinner plates, carvers and saucers that Mai’s mother had acquired over the decades, as well-to-do family members fell off their perches and left things in bequests. But the old curtains and carpets had to be replaced, and the legions of woodworm, rats, and mice gradually shown the door.

But Mai paid no blessed heed to this, parked her bag of gold sovereigns that had come to her from her mother, a remnant of an old legacy, in the cupboard with her mosquito boots and other retired gear from Africa. She gathered her acquaintance around her, and two or three nights a month cooked for her friends, or went off with Maggie to eat at their houses. Queenie Moran when she was up from Sligo, Rosie Fine – a little bevy of strong women that she had gathered to herself with some expertise in the line of friendship. I would often come home from a long run somewhere and, standing in the porch, hear inside the laughter of the women, and envy them somewhat. Men have less talent for such friendships maybe. She was in possession of the house she loved, in the city that she approved of. Galway was held higher in her heart than Dublin, though she liked very much to go on excursions there, to shop in Switzer’s for the latest clothes, and Weir’s for bracelets and rings, and to go to the theatre or the concert, always taking the same room in her favoured hotel in Kildare Street. And speaking of approval, how many dresses and coats and blouses came down to her from the great department stores in Dublin ‘on approval’. You couldn’t count them.

A year after Maggie, Ursula was born. Two children in the space of two years, which was hard for Mai, and apart from anything else, costly for a junior man in the Land Commission.

Nevertheless, Mai in full stride along the esplanade at Salthill was a sight, the little Kerry maid pushing the perambulator, the two dogs skittering and scattering about. She loved the sea wind, the rougher the better. Maggie’s hand in her mother’s, with her black hair blowing in the wind and her Parisian coat. As soon as Mai got the signal from her magazines to wear trousers, she donned them, jodhpurs at first, and then loose pyjama-like affairs that seemed to help her sail along. She had a ‘Jersey’ swimsuit and didn’t scorn to enter the cold waters in it, breasting the waves and swimming far out into the bay. This caused, both the trousers and the swimming out so far, equal scandal in Salthill village. It was a rule with Mai when she encountered a child begging in the street, to press a sixpence into the outstretched paw. The righteous shook their heads.

Her other joy was murdering friends on the courts of the tennis club. After these games I would be given a full account, stroke by stroke, victory by victory, in the doss at night, the two of us ensconced in her father’s regal old bed, she shadowing the games with demonstrations of a forward or backward drive, her long arms swishing about over the old damask covers and eiderdowns.

In the winter in that room it was so cold that a rheum of ice formed on everything, so that we awoke like arctic explorers after a light snow has fallen on them, and it took a prayer and a curse to get us out of bed and into our clothes.

The other great joy of those days, separate and even secret from Mai, was the horse-racing. On my travels for the Land Commission I would often make a run sideways to a racecourse, little point-to-points on windy Donegal strands, or big meetings further afield, or failing that I would place my bets in any of the bookies’ shops in Galway that were discreet and off the main streets.

Oh, Sligo racecourse, in the wild rains of spring, the intoxication of it. Or in the long evenings of summer, the most poetic racecourse in Ireland, Phoenix Park, worth the long drive back to Galway in the small hours, passing through the little sleeping towns and villages, buoyed up occasionally by an unexpected win, the wipers flashing back and forth like an afflicted metronome. Perhaps there were more losses than wins, in the upshot. Many, many losses. My great failing it is true was spending whole nights studying the form sheets and then, in a form of admirable cowardice, backing the bloody favourites. But, but, Phoenix Park, with the great trees around the enclosure, and the air of conspiracy every last thing possessed, the smart wooden buildings, the carved clocks, the eccentric old tipsters who never left the bar to watch a race, the bookies up on their boxes, crying out their information in strange codes, the trainers’ secrets spreading out from stable boys and infecting every conversation with anxiety and excitement, the summer wind moving through the trees, and the crowds roaring, roaring like the very choir of life. All those matters gladdened me, and no distance would have been too great to go.