The Temporary Gentleman (13 page)

Mam had a special love for Ursula, initially through the very act of naming her. Mai had greeted her suggestion that Ursula be also promised to the nuns without enthusiasm, though Mai in her own way was just as religious as Mam.

‘I think one McNulty is enough for any order to cope with,’ Mai said.

My mother laughed heartily.

‘You may be right, Mai, you may be right.’

Maggie was in Low Babies at school now and full of talk, and her first job as a talker was official intermediary between her mother and me.

There was the rash of ‘jiltses and shams’ from the town that also spread themselves on Gibraltar, and raised cries and tidal waves by leaping into the sea from the rocky ledges. One summer evening, while she cooked in the back scullery, home from a long summer day of sunbathing and swimming – I could see the salt crystals drying on her face – I asked her whether she minded that she shared her Newfoundland with the savages.

‘Tell your father I prefer their company to his,’ she said to Maggie.

‘Mammy says . . .’ said Maggie.

‘It’s alright, Maggie,’ I said. ‘I got the message.’

One day later that same year, I got a card in an envelope from her friend Queenie Moran, to ask if she might meet with me privately in the town. This was an unusual communication, in that I had never had much dealings with Queenie, except in so far as she was Mai’s friend. Queenie sometimes sailed in for tea in Magheraboy. Then Maggie was put into her Shirley Temple dress and her black hair tortured into curls, and Mai would put her up on the sitting-room table to sing, as a hundred other little girls of Sligo were obliged to do in that era. And a very good fist Maggie made of it, tap-dancing, curtsying, and singing out the songs.

So I stared a while at Queenie’s card, looking at the handsome swirls of her handwriting. But the words were polite, and I couldn’t see the harm in it, and I agreed to meet her in Lyons’ cafe, a premises that Mai herself did not frequent.

It was a Saturday morning and I went forth in my best bib and tucker, although I had a murderous headache from the night before. I had shaved and swallowed a raw egg with a little brandy to make some amends to my innards. There was a danger from a Saturday morning, in that Mai did like to make her pilgrimage among the shops with Maggie, something Maggie herself delighted in. It gave me heart to think Mai had devised a method and routine for living in Sligo, the town of her exile from Galway. Sligo did have a few beads on its thread, some good haberdasheries and the like, not to mention in the evenings the otherworlds and swooning dreams of the Gaiety picture house. Mai still went to the pictures the way other mortals go to public houses, to be immersed in what to her was the opium of high fashion, trailing gowns, shimmering light, and Fred Astaire or suchlike singing his romantic songs, putting on a top hat, shooting a cuff, and shaking out a leg. So I was keeping a weather eye out to make sure she was not abroad on her travels, at least anywhere near Wine Street.

Here was Queenie now, who had chosen a more or less conspiratorial table out of the way of the various wives of Sligo having their Saturday treat. The place hummed with them, reminding me of the noise that starlings make. She stood when I approached the table and held out her hand for me to shake, removing the glove expertly as she did so. I felt her cold hand in mine, and was thinking idly what bad circulation she must have, for a district nurse indeed, to be cold in this overheated, muggy room, the Russian cigarettes in holders and the rough Sweet Afton fags mingling democratically in the air.

‘Jack,’ she said. ‘It’s really kind of you to see me. Truly.’

‘Ah well, sure, Queenie, why not? It’s not often I get a card from a lady, let me tell you, to be meeting her quietly somewhere.’

I got a little sense that she considered this remark off-colour, because her face showed the tiniest flinch, but whatever about that, she sat down, I sat down, after dragging off my greatcoat and throwing it across another chair, causing a little ruckus of anxiety to the women at the nearest table, as if the coat were a dead body.

‘Will you have something, Jack?’ she said, raising her left hand, ringless and white.

‘No, no,’ I said, ‘no, not feeling the best, you know.’

She let the hand drift up further to her head and smoothed her red hair. Queer enough that Mai’s best friend was a red-haired woman, and that I had red hair, and Ursula. If Ursula had been there we would have looked like a little family.

‘Look, Jack,’ she said, ‘if there’s one thing my father said to me, a thousand times, it was never to interfere in a marriage, never to come between a couple in any way, and, you know, Jack, he is a solicitor, and grapples with human matters every day. And I would not like you to think I was attempting to do that!’

She had spoken these words with some emphasis, as if she meant them maybe to be humorous, but mostly they alarmed me.

‘The fact is, Jack, I am very worried about Mai.’

‘Oh?’

‘Are you sure you wouldn’t like a cup of tea? You do seem a little peaky, Jack.’

‘No, no, I’m fine, Queenie, fine . . . What is it then about Mai that troubles you?’

‘Do you know,’ she said, ‘troubles me is the right phrase. I am troubled, I am. There are things she has said to me over the last year . . . I know you have had your difficulties . . . Although I don’t know the details of course, and haven’t asked her. But. Jack, do you know that when she was found to be pregnant with Ursula, she came to see me, in great floods of tears. She had come down on the bus from Galway, weeping. She said she just couldn’t have another baby. She said – well, some terrible things . . .’

‘What terrible things?’ I said, thinking I might as well hear everything, I couldn’t feel any more alarmed.

‘She isn’t – do you think . . . No, what am I saying . . . Technically, do you know, as a nurse, Jack, and I am not a doctor, but do you know, there is a sadness in her sometimes, am I shocking you when I say that?’

‘What do you mean?’ I said, admittedly getting a touch angry suddenly. Just a touch. What was she suggesting, that Mai was unwell in some way? As a child of the Sligo asylum I was not going to have this woman tell me my wife was . . .

‘What are you trying to say?’ I said, undoubtedly somewhat stonily.

‘Is there any chance you think that maybe Mai suffers from her nerves?’

‘Well,’ I said, ‘no, I don’t believe so, Queenie, and I must say I’m with your father there on his very wise advice not to interfere in people’s lives, I must say, I really must, Queenie now.’

‘I’m not putting it right. I am making a terrible mess of this. Please, Jack, forgive me. All this weighs so on my mind, and she says things to me, and I wonder is she saying the same things to you, or to anyone, maybe lovely Maria Sheridan, or her brother, such a lovely man too . . .’

Then she was silent. She had reached the place we all reach when we are trying to help someone, but find there is a great ditch between our help and the object of our help. A yawning and unhelpful gap. I felt suddenly sorry for her. Queenie Moran, spinster, district nurse, daughter of a Galway solicitor, trying to broach a horrible subject with the husband of her dear friend.

‘Look it, Queenie,’ I said, ‘I appreciate you writing to me. Something is on your mind. Rest assured that Mai is fine. My God, ain’t she always feisty? Yes, she is. She talks wild talk sometimes. She brings her thoughts to extremes certainly. But look, Queenie, she’s Mai McNulty, Mai Kirwan as was, did you ever meet in your life a more . . .’

But I couldn’t think of the phrase I needed to describe her. I realised I had become emotional now, there was a miniature rivulet of a tear coming down my cheek, which she might interpret hopefully as the result of my hangover.

‘It’s just, Jack,’ she said, in a little resigned tone, as if she had decided now to breach her father’s advice after all, ‘if I say nothing, and something awful happens, I would never, ever forgive myself.’

Now I was silent, looking at her. Maybe I twitched an eyebrow, because she responded as if I had encouraged her, though I would have been glad as a rose if she had just disappeared now in a puff of smoke, like the unwelcome genie she seemed to me in that moment.

‘Do you know, when Ursula was born, she said to me she wished she could kill the child, kill it, that’s what she said, she sat there in the Café Cairo, just a couple of years ago, hissing with anger and God knows what, and said she wanted to kill the baby because it had red hair. That’s not sensible, Jack. I reminded her I had red hair. She sat there in the Café Cairo and told me she had no maternal instinct whatsoever, which was hard for me to hear because, because . . . Because I do love that girl, Jack, everybody loves her that knows her . . . Such things to be saying. And even before Ursula was born, for heaven’s sake, Jack, she said that she would deal with the matter next chance she got, she would drink a bottle of gin in a hot bath, she begged me to tell her how to get rid of the baby, Jack, don’t you see, the horror of a conversation like that, with your own childhood friend?’

Now Queenie was weeping openly, and it is impossible to be angry with a weeping person, I have found.

‘But, Queenie, she did none of those things.’

‘But she tried, Jack, she tried, I know she did, she drank the bottle of gin, she sat in a hot bath, she did everything she could, I know she did, and I should have told you before, now I see I should, because of the other thing she said, when Ursula was born, and her without a shred, without a shred she said, of feeling for either of them . . .’

‘No, no,’ I said, but wondering had she taken the chance to try to do something grievous when I was away on Land Commission business, ‘we were still in Grattan House when Ursula was born, we were still – ’ I was going to say, in the same bedroom, but of course I did not, ‘and anyway, she’s very fond of Maggie, and very much devoted to Ursula, oh, yes,’ I said, ‘she is a splendid mother, don’t pay any heed to her.’

‘But, Jack,’ she said.

What? I thought. There was a longer silence then. The women at the nearest table were queerly quiet, so that I feared they were listening to all this. Maybe they knew me, maybe they knew Mai. Oh, Queenie, Queenie, I thought, take your lousy truth away with you. If you take it away I won’t have to think about it, I will banish it from my mind.

‘She told me, Jack, she has made, you know . . .’

‘What?’ I said, in the greatest despair. I knew she would tell all now, and I didn’t want her, God forgive me, to tell all. Better the fog than the clearing weather.

‘Attempts,’ said Queenie, as if hoping the one word would suffice, and she wouldn’t have to say any more.

‘Attempts?’ I said, shivering suddenly in the fuggy room, glancing at the other table, throwing a little brief smile their way. Whatever you can hear of this, pay no heed, pay no heed.

‘Yes. Dr Snow, you know.’

‘What, Dr Snow?’

‘Prescribed her these pills, you know, and she said, she said she took a lot of them one night, this was just a month ago, washed down with gin . . .’

‘Look, Queenie,’ I said, laughing then, laughing. ‘Mai doesn’t even drink. She has never touched a drop of alcohol in her whole life. Never.’

Queenie looked at me, not knowing in the least what to say to me. I suddenly felt mortally foolish, ignorant, small. Of course, Mai could have been smoking opium for all I knew, and dancing naked about her bedroom, because after nine at night I didn’t see her again till morning. That’s how it was in those days, and I lived in hopes of a better time. I lived in hope of a reconciliation, the way real couples do, the way ordinary decent people do, eventually, in the upshot, after time has healed all wounds.

‘She has never touched a drop in all her days,’ I said again, as if this were a religious tenet.

‘Oh, Jack, oh, Jack,’ she said, weeping.

The air went out of me.

Chapter Fifteen

When I got back to Magheraboy I found she was out with Maggie after all though I had not seen them in the town. I went up to her room to look around. I didn’t feel I should be in there, poking about, but if I was longing to find something it was evidence that what Mai had said to Queenie was fanciful nonsense, or that Queenie had gone mad.

The room, as I expected it would be, was beautifully arranged. The old marriage bed was carefully made, Bristol fashion. On the sugar-twist side table her fashion magazines were in a neat stack, her reading glasses waiting on top. The grate was swept clean and a scuttle of coal all ready. Two mezzotints, of her father and her mother in their heyday, were framed each side of the fireplace, her father looking quite cross but magisterial. The carpet-sweeper had recently done its work. The curtains she had saved from Grattan House and adapted for this humbler window, old scenes of rural France in red and white, were almost closed, discreetly and demurely.

I began to feel very sad. Not because I thought her room was sad, but because it reminded me how happily in the main we had lived together. It was a room without me in it, though I stood in it now. I looked in the wardrobe and there were only her clothes hanging there, whereas once it had held my suits and waistcoats too. I didn’t now for a moment believe Queenie. I would have seen signs of it, signs of such great distress – I would have known at the time, of course I would have. She never showed the children anything but love. Maybe she was a bit fonder of Maggie, but still Ursula was looked after carefully – spoiled really, the two of them.

In the drawer of her dressing table right enough were a few bottles of those little tablets. Only one of them had pills in it, and the date on it was recent. Was that a good or a bad thing? I had thought, right enough, that the pills had been only to get her through a bumpy time, when she was pregnant with Maggie. Still and all, these were private matters – women’s trouble, as my Mam would have put it. I had no right to be rummaging there, and concocting theories.

In the bottom drawer were her silk knickers for special occasions and her better brassieres, and her copy of
Married Love
, that many a Sligo woman at that time had in her knicker drawer. Wrapped in one of her mother’s best tea-towels was the red-tinted Venetian tumbler her father had used for his one glass of whisky on a Saturday. Tucked in neatly, like bits of ordnance, were two bottles of gin, one three-quarters empty, one full. Would these date from the time Queenie said she had swallowed pills, or the time she was pregnant with Ursula – the hot bath and the gin? – I couldn’t believe they did. I didn’t believe either thing had really happened. I couldn’t allow that she wanted to kill poor Ursula, just because she had red hair. Ridiculous! Maybe poor Queenie was drinking, maybe poor Queenie was going mad. Hearing voices, imagining things. Because this was Mai McNulty’s bedroom, shipshape and composed, and even if there were these little bits of evidence, I knew in my heart it was the truth, the gospel truth, that Mai had never drunk a drop of alcohol in her life. It was part of her legend. Even nuns drank on the western seaboard of Ireland. But not Mai, not Mai Kirwan, no, most certainly not. Mai who plainly loved her children, and if she and I were going through a rough patch, all would surely be mended at length. Mai, Mai, whom I loved to distraction, Mai who was too proud and good to drink bloody alcohol, she could leave that to the rest of us! And what of it if she did want to drink a few glasses in the evening, even alone in her bedroom, she was perfectly entitled, there was no harm in it as such, no, not at all, but it was a definite and palpable truth, that Mai McNulty, née Kirwan, had never, had never touched a drop in her born days. And therefore could never, ever, have sought to take her life, or the life of her unborn baby, it was not possible, not remotely possible, and anyone who said otherwise was a pitiful liar.