The Temporary Gentleman (2 page)

By the grace of God we were travelling in convoy that night. And by the grace of God, for some reason only known to its captain and its crouching sailors, the submarine melted off into the deeps, not that any of us saw it. A corvette bristling with machine guns manoeuvered up near me, I heard the confident voices with wild gratitude, arms reached down into the darkness for me, pulled me from the chaos, and I slumped, suddenly lumpish and exhausted, at the boots of my rescuers, falling down to lie with other survivors, some with dark-blooded wounds, a few entirely naked, the clothes sucked off them.

I lay there, ticking with life, triumphant, terrified. I noticed myself checking my inside pocket for the roll of banknotes, as if watching someone else, as if I were two people, and I laughed at my other self for his foolishness.

We steamed into Accra the following morning.

Chapter Two

Now it is 1957 and I am back in Accra, after many comings and goings. The war has been over for twelve years. The Gold Coast has turned into Ghana, the first African country to gain independence. As a former UN observer I watched it all with immense interest and excitement – the enormous politeness of the departing British, the beautiful speeches, the Ciceronian phrases. We are very good at leaving. At the same time, there is still a governor here for the moment, and a skeleton of the old administration. There are currents of darkness in this bright new river and slowly-slowly seems to be the ticket, for fear of old hatreds and old scores fomenting up –- indeed as they did in Ireland in the twenties.

Soon I’ll go back to Sligo. It is so strange to be in a freed country, and yet not so strange, since my own home place once was freed. I did not understand freedom. I understand it better now, just a little. I have been renting this little plaster house, with an old design of swirls and squares on the outside, like one of the local temples. It is not a temple, but the temperate, honest quarters of a minor official, Mr Peter Oko, who was happy to rent out his extra house to this whiteman, while gainfully employed by the UN, and now staying on when many of his type, ‘the others’ who have haunted Africa for three hundred years, have packed their trunks and gone. When I first arrived over a year ago he was described to me by the lady, whose name I forget, in the letter from the UN, as ‘the lovely Mr Oko, who will help you in all things’. And he was as good as her word. Two thirds my height, with a penny-sized patch of baldness on his pleasant crown, fluent in English, more so than many an Irishman, he kept me fully informed and decently housed throughout the period of my contract. Maybe a few years my senior, he referred to me as ‘his son’, as in, ‘Mr McNulty, my son,’ and generally gave himself and all his fellow Accrans a good name in my heart. And I remember Accra when it was all tin roofs and ant hills, long before the war, and it was the despair of the European wives, asking the old administrative headquarters here by means of persistent and frantic letters for information about dresses, hats, and most urgently of all, mosquito-proof stockings, as we lurked vulnerably in our distant station.

The local English newspaper, the
Accran Clarion
, whose pages have shrunk from twenty to one single sheet, says there is still a little trouble here and there, that old trouble for instance bubbling back up between Togoland and the Gold Coast that I and others laboured to fix just a few months ago. If the men come in their new uniforms to ask me to quit their Ghana, of course I will have to go. But as yet nothing disturbs the delightful atmosphere here at the edge of the city, where the houses give way to the bright green squares of passionately growing vegetables. I cannot see the Atlantic, but I can smell it, half a mile distant, that hazy and infinite expanse of acres, with its immense depths, and sometimes terrifying waters. So I am content enough not to be in sight of it. Even as I looked it over last year, the house I mean, with Mr Oko, and he darted about showing me its glories and idiosyncrasies, I was thinking, ‘But Mai would have liked to be by the sea, for the swimming.’ And with the next thought remembered she would not be living here with me.

Mai.

And I will go back to Ireland, I must, I must, I have duties there, not least to my children.

*

1922. There she was, the first time I ever saw her, sailing along in her loose black skirts, her lovely face above a long-boned frame, on the cinder path of the university, hidden by tree trunks and then revealed, so that she whirred in my eyes like a film reel, a shadow half-ruined by sunlight under the famous plane trees. Her blouse so white, with the soft bosom plainly moving within, that it was a bright shield in the underwood. And myself still very young, when the brain seemed to brook no real thought of the past or the future – the movement of time and the world stilled. I watched her from under the dark arch of the entrance to the quadrangle. It was still my first year in the university, in the time of the civil war.

She had many friends, chief of them a splendid girl called Queenie Moran, a great favourite in the college, but none of them among my own set, which was very male I suppose, technical-minded boys among the engineers, and those dark, mysterious chaps who got light only from the more distant galaxies of mathematics and physics. Her friends were the new girls of the century, who had come into the university on fearless feet, and who swished up and down the paths of the college with the confidence of Cortez and Magellan. Sometimes she could be seen in the small swarm of these women, coming out of lectures talking fast and loud, well aware I do not doubt of the lonesome male gazes thrown their way. And then there were those boys in their set that can insert themselves among a group of women, a talent in itself, the sons of doctors and even people in the new government, with the smoke of both victory and surrender drifting above their heads.

The way I found out she lived on the Grattan Road was I followed her home one evening, keeping at a distance behind her, like a detective or a thief, as she swept along the seafront. I was impressed by the fact that she never looked back, not once. The glass-dark acreage of the bay over to her left and the muddle of small cottages and bigger houses to her right seemed to funnel her efficiently all the way to Salthill.

She disappeared in through old gate-posts with granite balls on top. I knew there must be metal spikes securing them invisibly and I found myself hoping her father did not have a similar spike in him, for the place spoke of considerable status and grandeur. I watched her open the big front door, go in, drag off her hat and scarlet coat and, with her right boot raised behind her like a skater, without looking back out into the dreary evening, kick the door shut.

In order for her to make her first remark to me, I had to keep putting myself in her way. I didn’t know any other method to utilise. I placed myself near her as she wandered out of one of her commerce lectures. I had watched her go in, spent the hour of the lecture traipsing about – and then more or less threw myself in her path. Terrified but resolute.

‘I suppose you put a colour in that?’ she said, looking at my red hair. ‘Who are you anyway? Everywhere I go, you seem to pop up like a Jack-in-the-box.’

‘Well, my name
is
Jack, now you mention it.’

‘Which of the Jacks are you?’ she said, as if there were a hundred Jacks in her life.

‘Jack McNulty,’ I said. ‘John Charles McNulty.’ Then I added, as if for full illumination: ‘Engineering.’

She was silent for a moment. What I noticed suddenly was that she was nervous too, I am not quite sure how I knew that, but I did. Of course she was nervous, she was only nineteen years old, accosted by a blushing, red-haired boy she had never met.

‘That’s a decent handle. I’m Mai Kirwan,’ she said, as if anyone would be fully aware of the name, and she was now but putting a face to it.

Then, as if we were diplomats at a border somewhere, she held out her gloved hand. The glove was an orange-coloured leather. I stared at the hand a moment, then rushed to shake it lightly. She smiled at me and laughed.

‘No doubt I’ll see you about the place,’ she said, maybe not having the arsenal of phrases to bring us any further.

‘You will,’ I said, ‘you will,’ and then she was past me in a pleasant fog of perfume, and gone.

That was how it started.

*

It is evening now in the fringy fields. Tom Quaye was here all day, and cooked a lovely fish stew with okra and palm-nut. He sings songs in Ewe under his breath the whole time, and has excellent English from an Irish priest who taught him years ago. Indeed he has a bit of a Roscommon accent, which makes me homesick. It was Mr Oko found Tom. He is the perfect houseboy for me, as he was in the Gold Coast Regiment in the war. He survived the horrors of Burma, and finished up a sergeant major. He is a big, wide man that scorns shoes, and indeed as far as I remember NCOs of the GCR didn’t always wear shoes, even on parade. He is exactly my age, down to the very month, as I noted from his scrupulous papers.

There was some trouble with pensions when he came home from the war and he and his fellows marched in protest through Accra, and the police killed some of them. Which was a poor way to say thank you for their defence of the Empire, no doubt. But he doesn’t say too much about this, and is more concerned to fashion a decent stew, or whatever he happens to be doing. Sweeping out the ants. Shining up the whisky glasses. He just gets on with it. Life. Precious life.

I pay him two shillings a day, which is a bob less than Eneas got in the Royal Irish Constabulary in the twenties, at home in Ireland, which was his undoing. ‘The ould death sentence’ as Eneas quaintly called it, conferred on him by his own childhood butty, Jonno Lynch, in best Irish style. Now Eneas is in exile somewhere and I don’t know where he is. Easy money is a treacherous thing.

In the army, Tom tells me, he was paid a bob a day, unlike most of the other nationalities, who got two. They kept a third back from his pay too, which was to be given to him as a sort of bonus after the war. This came to £23 in his case, for three years’ fighting, including Burma. As for a pension, he says only wounded lads get one of those, and it’s only a pittance really. Thousands of soldiers couldn’t find work, and they all pledged themselves to Nkrumah as a result. The best you could hope for was a job in the police, but Tom didn’t want to do that, especially after being shot at by the same gentlemen. He says he was a happy man when Mr Oko sent him a message that there was a sort of job going with me, although I am not sure he really knows how short-lived it might be. It sufficeth for the day, I suppose.

Tom has a wife and children upcountry somewhere that he never sees. Up along the Volta river somewhere, he did say the name of the village, but I didn’t retain it. The reason for this is apparently that the wife won’t let him come. He told me that regularly he sends a message to her, asking if he can see his sons and daughters. The messenger has to take a bus, walk twenty miles, and then hire two boats. It is very expensive for Tom. But she always sends a message back to say no. It was strange when he talked about this to see his usually confident, ‘manly’ face in disarray.

It took him a few months to confide in me. I had asked him to sit but he didn’t sit, he just stood there, telling me about his wife.

‘Some day I pray she will tell me to come,’ he said.

On my new writing table – which I bought in the labyrinthine Kingsway department store in Accra, breasting my way through the great sea of wives – is an old photo of myself, in a flyblown frame. A chubby six-year-old child on Strandhill beach with a wooden spade and one of those wintry smiles that little boys specialise in. I am holding up the spade with pride to the person taking the photograph. My father, with his box Brownie. When I look at the photo of course I can see myself, but I can also still see him, standing on the sand in his black suit, frowning down at the viewer, and yet smiling, being a somewhat contradictory person sometimes, like a sun-shower.

When we were small boys, myself, Eneas, and Tom – Teasy came later – my father used to come in at night and make himself what he called ‘the great bird’. He would stand at our bedsides and spread his arms, and we would try to disappear under the blankets, the three of us in a row in the single bed. With our eyes closed, half terrified, half crazy with delight, we would sense ‘the great bird’ slowly slowly alighting above us, and then we would feel the human kiss he laid on each of our foreheads.

When I was ten I asked him not to be the great bird any more, and watched his face alter with emotion as he agreed. The difficulty was, he couldn’t reach the part of the kiss without it, so myself, Tom, and Eneas went without.

My mother, small, black-clothed as if she were already a widow, was the foundation stone that I based my stability on, like the pier of a bridge. If she seemed harsh sometimes when I was small, it was only a habit that had got a hold of her. And there were times, in particular when my father was away in Roscommon or Mayo with his little orchestra, when she was inclined to take your arm, and tell you things, funny, quick and startling things, little truths, stories maybe of her youth, before her marriage. And she would stand on the hearthstone of the tiny parlour, and show us one of her dances, which she performed with great dexterity and expertise. And her children would stare gobsmacked at her as she clattered her soles on the black slate.

She rarely addressed my father directly, but called him ‘he’ and ‘him’ – even when he was in the old doss beside her. It was a curious habit.

Her occasional crossness had its roots in her terror of being connected to a mystery, something clouded, which was the unknown story of her true origin. She had been raised by the Donnellans, but had eventually found out she was not theirs. This tore at my mother’s core. My mother had a horror of her own self sometimes, and her great fear, and the word fear does not encompass her suffering, was that she was illegitimate, which then and now can make a small pit of torment inside a person’s soul. Not that she ever spoke of this to me, even when I was a young man, it was Pappy told me about it, in familial whispers.