The Temporary Gentleman (3 page)

My father for his part loved nothing more than going out on those sorties with his band. All kitted out in his best suit, his straw boater cocked sideways, he would shove his instruments into the pony and trap, and often me also. I was reckoned to be a decent hand at shaving a reed, or replacing a string. Not to lower the high tone of the band I was also kitted out in a little frock coat perfectly sewn by him, down to the tiny tin buttons.

But my father was also the tailor in the Sligo Lunatic Asylum, that was his real job.

Every year the staff there held their dance, clearing the lunatics back into the further recesses of the enormous building and dragging the old benches out of the Lunatics’ Hall. So then I was standing at the rear of an impromptu platform with my penknife poised and my spare strings. I had a privileged view of the buoyant arses of the band, and their bobbing boaters. They wiggled and twisted their bodies like seaweed in the sea as they ground out the evening’s music, and the little crowd of revellers milled in a democratic maelstrom on the huge drum of the floorboards. There was something of mania in the wildness of it, as if only mania after all could be manifested in an asylum. Arms were flung around like hurlers, legs were swung in extravagant moves. Normally sober and discouraged females were nearly thrown into the air during the set dances. And I stood there, my face open and staring, delighted with everything, while my father lashed away on the violin, or drove at the cello with his stick like he was trying to saw himself in half.

Then in the little back room, when all was done, and the motley dancers had drifted home, we would eat big white sandwiches, the jam a bloodstain on the bread, and drink cold, cold glasses of milk, the only music now the drifting cries and lamentations of the inmates, raging or sorrowing in the rooms of the echoing building.

Standing beside the little photo of myself, a genuine relic now, is a daguerreotype of my great-uncle Thomas McNulty, who was scalped by a band of Comanches in the central grasslands of Texas. He was a trooper in the US cavalry. It is so faded that I can only just make him out, in his blue uniform. My father was named after him, and my brother too, necessitating the terms Old Tom and Young Tom. It was this photograph made me want to be a soldier when I was small.

It was our bit of ‘ancestry’, a thing thin on the ground in general in my family. My father also told me with great solemnity that we had once been butter exporters in Sligo, and had lived in a mansion called the Lungey House, just around the corner from our quarters on John Street. This old place was by then a charmless and festering ruin. In an even more heartfelt confidence, he told me that up to the time of Cromwell, our ancestor, Oliver McNulty, had been chief of his tribe, only to lose his lands to a brother who turned Protestant.

Though this was a history without documents, it constituted in my father’s mind a faithful and important record of real things. And it was from this that inevitably I drew a sense of myself in the world, and I never questioned any of it.

Chapter Three

Last night I lent my Indian motorbike to Tom Quaye again, because he was going off to a dance in Osu. He lives in a little tin house at the back of the palm trees somewhere, just a minute away. He was wearing a suit so sharp it would have stunned the natives west of the Shannon.

He just loves that motorbike, as I do myself.

‘Now, major, if you don’t want me riding that motorbike,’ he said, ‘you just say. Just because I am seating myself on it does not mean I think it is mine.’

I knew exactly what he meant.

I have told him a few times that I don’t exactly have the right to the title major, now the war is over, but he doesn’t pay any heed to that.

He displays a very agreeable solicitousness towards me. I wonder what it is about me that causes that. I always think I am hiding my feelings with perfect success, but apparently, no, my heart beats plainly on my sleeve. Otherwise I can’t account for Tom Quaye’s kindness, which I think is real – I mean, not the ‘kindness’ of an employee.

‘I am going to bring you soon to hear that Highlife music,’ he said this morning. ‘Highlife music is good for a man. You can drive and I will go on the back,’ he said, as if he wasn’t absolutely sure this would be the case.

Then to dispel this whole matter for the moment, he sang quietly, quickly, and very tunefully:

Ghana, we now have freedom,

Ghana, land of freedom,

Toils of the brave and the sweat of their labours,

Toils of the brave which have brought results.

Then he raised an imaginary saxophone to his head, and if it wasn’t the very spit of my brother Tom, years ago in his dancehall at Strandhill, I don’t know what would be. I was laughing then, from the sheer memory of that, superimposed on this present moment.

‘You better watch out, Tom, or I’ll be singing “Faith of Our Fathers”. Then you’ll be sorry,’ I said.

‘I think a man should sing. What we are here for on this earth if not for singing? Singing and dancing. Otherwise everything is so-so
yeye
,’ he said, breaking into pidgin. ‘I tell you, ever since my wife she left me, if I was not singing I would go crazy.’

Krezy
, he pronounced it,
krezy
. Pure Roscommon. Pure Ghana.

The truth is I shouldn’t be here in Ghana. I should be at home in Sligo, sorting out something for my children. I should be there, even on the margins, ready to help, ready to advise. That is what a father can do. Instead I am lurking here in Africa like a broken-down missionary, without church or purpose, and merely holding off the hour of my leaving. No wonder Mr Oko, with his kind face, looked at me so strangely when I told him I intended to stay on a while. Why would I? My work here is over.

My heart though, my heart is broken. I know it is. For nearly four years I have laboured through life with this broken heart, but it just gets worse and worse, like an engine with a neglected fault that weakens all the other parts. Now I must try and mend it, I must. I must go back over everything and find the places where it broke and ask the god of good things to mend me, if that is possible. Write it down honestly in this old minute-book of the now defunct Gold Coast Engineering and Bridge-Building Company. Then the man who goes back to Ireland will be a better man, a mended man. That is my prayer now.

An hour ago I rose from the table and went out onto the veranda. A little wind was skipping through the leaden humours of the yard, the wind that, if I remember rightly, means the approach of the rains.

‘(What Did I Do to Be So) Black and Blue’ . . . Talk about honesty. That was Louis Armstrong here in Accra of all places, last year, as the pot of freedom was boiling. Dropped in from the heavens like a black god. A big open-air concert in Osu. Satchmo smiling, smiling. How Tom would love to have been there, my brother Tom I mean. Tom Quaye probably was, I must ask him. The white wives laughed with delight at the sheer musicality of it all, a few inches from the black wives, laughing with the same delight.

*

I drove home to Sligo in the Austin – I remember the dusty, baked-cake smell of the leather seats, as I took regretted ‘short cuts’ across high bog roads – the weekend after my first conversation with Mai, and told my mother about her. And said how hopeless it was, how impossible.

‘Why don’t you bring her to the magic-lantern show, you
amadán
,’ my mother said. She was in the parlour, pasting little cuttings and items that had caught her interest into a scrapbook. It was dark in the little room, but that curious darkness where you can somehow see everything, as if we were turned briefly into cats. That is the dark I think of when I think of my mother. She is probably sitting there now as I write this.

‘What?’ I said.

‘The magic-lantern show, Jack.’

‘Mam, Mam, there’s no magic-lantern show now, it’s “the pictures”.’

My mother was not old, but she affected oldness. She had wonderful red hair. She had had me when she was only seventeen. Tom had a job at the picture house in Sligo, so she knew well what I meant. Maybe she preferred the old things.

‘Merciful hour, what do I know about modern times? But I tell you, Jack, when she gets a hoult of an understanding of you, everything will be hunky-dory.’

‘There’s no chance on earth she will go to the pictures with the likes of me,’ I said.

So I lay in wait for her again, like a veritable Dick Turpin.

She didn’t even speak when she saw me, just gave a sort of
heh
sound, as if to say, I thought you’d be here. Hoped, even? There was a bright, cheery look to her anyhow, she seemed happy enough to see me. My heart tumbled down into my polished black boots, then soared straight back up to the trilby hat on my head. I had no interest in that moment in geology or engineering – just a week before the two passions of my existence. It was all the science of Mai for me then.

Her shoulders in the dark blue dress made me tremble – invisibly, I hoped and prayed. It was the strange sense of hard bone and possibly yielding grace. Her bosom swelled in the embroidered placket of the bodice. It dizzied me. Her black eyes, her hair as black as worry. Her skin which I believe could be called olive-coloured, but so soft it made me wild to touch it, to smooth her cheek with a desolate hand, though I kept my hands fiercely at my sides. Olives of old Mediterranean hillsides, glimpsed from the deck of my ship when I was away with the merchant navy as a youngster, before ever I thought of going to the university . . .

‘Well?’ she said, with her touch of gentleness that I was beginning to recognise, a condiment, a medicine of gentleness – mixed with the fierceness.

‘I was wondering now if you would like to come with me to the Gaiety, to see the show on Saturday? Rin Tin Tin.’

I didn’t even think I was speaking English any more. I was surprised when she seemed to understand me.

‘Rin Tin Tin,’ she said, as a person might recite a sacred creed. ‘I like Rin Tin Tin. I am not so sure about you, in your funny old car-coat, and your driving gloves sticking out of your pocket.’

Oh, she was observant. Indeed I had perched my gloves on the rim of my pocket, so that she might see I had such accoutrements. I blanched with embarrassment.

‘I’m not going to be hard on you, Jack McNulty,’ she said, perhaps regretting causing such blatant distress. ‘Sometimes I talk with too much force. I’m only teasing really.’ Then a little pause. ‘I like you.’

‘If you would do me the honour,’ I said, ‘I would be a happy man.’

‘I don’t know anything about that,’ she said.

‘How do you mean?’ I said.

‘Making other people happy is a mug’s game,’ she said. Maybe, now I think of it, I should have listened to her, parsed then and there what she was saying, but there was that wild wave like something advancing on an extremity of Ireland, the Maharees say, pouring through me, jolting every atom in my blood. Her habitual abruptness I could see now was a form of honesty, a species of communication that a person might be well advised to attend to carefully, a Morse signal that needed urgent interpretation. How often as a mere boy in the bowels of ships I had attended to Morse messages in the radio operator’s room, ever alert for a Mayday signal. But I wasn’t heeding any of that now. It was the undertow of kindness in her voice that was drawing me to her, drowning me, delightfully.

‘I have to get home,’ she said. ‘I like to be there when my father comes back from work.’

‘I could run you home in the Austin,’ I said, on an inspiration, with a feigned nonchalance.

‘No,’ she said, just that, the bare word.

‘It would be no bother,’ I said.

‘No,’ she said, ‘I like to walk in the wind, so I do.’

Then I was more or less obliged to stand aside and let her pass. I had offered her everything I could think of, almost everything I possessed, up to that point. I wanted to pass a chain around her leg and the other end about my own leg. I wanted us to be bound together, in such a fashion that there would be escape for neither of us. It was a strange, wild desire. Even as I tried not to stare at her, I was staring, staring.

She was six feet past me when I drew up a last sentence from the well of myself.

‘I’ll ask you again next week, if you don’t mind. Just in case.’

‘Just in case what?’ she said, stopping in exasperation, or with an emotion that I assumed was exasperation. She was suddenly vehement, forceful, turned to me again, her feet planted on the cobbles. She might have been about to draw a six-gun on me.

‘Just in case what?’ she repeated, rather crazily I thought. The lovely black eyes searing me.

‘You change your mind,’ I said.

‘Do you think I’d ever change my mind?’ she said. ‘Do I look like the shilly-shallying sort?’ she said, without the odd anger now, just plain as day, even somewhat surprised.

‘You certainly do not.’

I had spoken so forcefully it gave me a fright. Without meaning to, I laughed. Maybe without meaning to also, she laughed as well. A heap of stray wind from the river broke against us both in that moment, her right hand reached up to pull her coat closed, one of my hands dashed to secure my hat. She shook her head then, still laughing, and turned about, walked on, still laughing, her head thrown a little back, much to my delight, much to my delight, laughing, laughing.

The next time I asked her to go out with me it seemed I had fulfilled the list of the necessary efforts a young man must make, and she agreed.

Rin Tin Tin had gone the way of all last week’s films, and there was a ferocious weepie on instead. In the foyer, for reasons that are now lost, I fetched out a photograph of myself that I had brought to show her. It was of me, about sixteen, in my white uniform, standing with the other officers on board ship somewhere in the Straits Settlements.

‘Well,’ she said, without detectable irony, ‘you look lovely. You really do.’ She had quite lit up at the sight of me, and I was immensely pleased. ‘What did you have to do in that uniform?’