The Temporary Gentleman (6 page)

Mai made friends with everyone, as if her life depended on it. I was warmly congratulated, in her hearing and out of her hearing both, as if I had done a great thing in finding her. But I knew my luck too. I felt like the luckiest man in Sligo, in Ireland.

Roseanne, who was actually the piano player in Tom’s band, and of course his sweetheart, Mai especially liked, not only because they knew a lot of the same music, but because Roseanne herself was as pretty as a film star, and shone with youth and beauty, different from Mai’s, but as mysterious. Unusually enough, she was a Presbyterian. When she was younger she had been a waitress in the Café Cairo and I suppose every young man in Sligo had been soft on her, including myself.

It was the great fortune of our youth that such girls were there in Sligo, living and breathing, and willing to give us the time of day, and, when it came to dancing anyhow, the time of night.

And Tom at that time was just getting going at the politics, and was hoping to get elected to the town council when the civil war calmed down, if it ever did, and Mai was fascinated by all that, a person in front of her who she thought really would be able to get things done, to give the country the lick of paint she yearned for. When all would be made new, spruced up, and the future shine before us like the path the moon made on the sea at the Rosses.

Then streaming out to the cars and taking our way back to Sligo town along the white roads of Strandhill, gleaming in the moonlight, skirting the brimming tide of the estuary, and then myself content to surge through the small hours across bog and small farms to Galway city, to get her safely home to her father’s house. Mai tired as a child after a long day, and sober as a child, never touching a drop of drink, never, her body warm against me in the car, as the windscreen wiper lashed away the rain, and I hunched forward, peering into the shattered darkness.

The ingredients of nothing maybe, nothing at all – but everything, everything that at close of day we value, everything.

Do I imagine it all? Was there really such happiness? There was, there was.

Towards the end of the year Michael Collins was killed in Cork. The bullet might as well have passed through his body and into all the countless hearts that loved him, like Mai’s. She had loved him, the idea of him, and the future that he seemed to hold in his gift, as Mai saw it. But they killed him.

*

Suspecting that Tom Quaye would be a better historian than myself of my lapse from grace, I have been trying to draw him out about our night in Osu, but he is a very difficult man to get to talk when he has no desire to. He listens, staring me straight in the eye, but then he just turns his head and goes about some other business.

Today he put a new element in one of the Tilley lamps, then for some reason, though I tried to dissuade him, he hauled out my old cavalry boots from the cupboard, one of the few remaining things of my army uniform, which I brought out with me this time thinking they would be handy as mosquito boots. But even in the dozen years since the war ended, I find my calves have increased in girth to such a degree that I cannot accommodate the boots on them. I can get them on but cannot get myself out of them again, as if my legs were corks in wine bottles and nary a corkscrew handy. Then Tom Quaye is pulling at them, with me being dragged slowly across the floor, chair and all, till, poof! the leg gives up and surrenders the wretched boot. So they live a dark and dusty life in the cupboard now. But Tom Quaye has a thing about polishing them, and this afternoon he carried them forth into the light and rather angrily I thought lashed on the polish, and then worked away mightily with a cloth to give them a barrack-room shine. But all wasted work really.

And all the while this was going on, it was myself trying to draw him out about Osu. There were little snatches and sparking illuminations and ill-remembered moments of it that were still bothering me. I tried first to winkle a way in by talking about his beloved Highlife music, which only launched him into a panegyric about E. T. Mensah, the man who wrote ‘Freedom Highlife’, part of Tom’s ‘under his breath’ repertoire. Tom, no more than myself, doesn’t like to hit nails on the head, seemingly, he likes to come at things sideways, or rather, move away from them sideways. But this is the way of the world. A direct question in the company of men is in most contexts a sort of insult, something you learn young in Sligo bars.

He had got from a woman he called his ‘Aunty-aunty’ some sort of concoction in a little twist of paper, and, having put the boots back in the cupboard, this he then tipped out on a saucer, mixed it with water, using a tiny salt spoon that I never use for salt, a survivor of a little vanished hoard of such things from my in-laws, and then, really without asking me, undid my white shirt, laid my chest and belly bare, and still talking about Highlife and its byways and main roads, without much in the way of interruption, he proceeded to dab a little button of this stuff on each mosquito bite, which he well knew were causing me tremendous itchiness. My belly in particular was a dreepy constellation of disintegrating red stars. He let this all dry and then he put on my shirt for me again, as if I were suddenly armless myself, and did up the buttons, and, just before he left now for the day, gave what amounted as far as I could see to a bow in my direction, which wordless gesture flummoxed me.

‘Thank you, Tom,’ I said. ‘Jesus, there’s great cooling in that stuff, right enough. How much does Aunty-aunty need for it?’

‘I will give her sixpence, with your permission, major.’

‘You certainly will,’ I said, and fetched out the coins from my trousers. ‘Oh, there’s an old one,’ I said, glancing as I always do at the dates of the coins, an old habit. It was a worn, deep-brown penny from 1860, with the head of a youngish Victoria on it. Tom Quaye smiled, but he didn’t bother looking at it.

Then he was readying to go off, and not for the first time I felt a little tug of regret. I like having him about. When you live as if you were Robinson Crusoe on his island, everything starts to get gathered into what you have left to you – and what I have at the moment is the friendship of this man, whom of course I pay to come in and do the damn chores. It’s not exactly an empire of family and friends. But, remarkably enough, it does me for the moment.

So off he went, singing as is his wont. The door closed on his song, and the mosquito screen rattled against it ineptly like a small child’s idea of drumming:

Before it starts raining

The wind will blow

I warned you but you did not listen

*

Mr Kirwan banned me from the house. There was an unfortunate incident in Sligo town, as he was wending his way home one day from his insurance selling. It was just the worst bit of luck. I suppose he was heading up to the station to retrieve himself from the mean folk of Sligo. It was a bleak, dark evening in December and I had spent the day with pals in Hardigan’s Bar. I do remember him vaguely, standing above me in Wine Street, with that same absent stare, and his top hat incongruous against the scudding clouds. I was heeled up like a cart against the wall of the bank building. I couldn’t have spoken to him if he had asked me a question, but he didn’t bother himself with that. I remember the roar of the Garvoge in the near distance, because it had rained mercilessly for three days and the old river was in flood.

The next morning, before heading up to the university, I discussed the whole matter with my mother.

‘Holy Crimea,’ she said, for once in no manner optimistic, ‘that’s not good.’

Then she gave me a sermon about temperance as well she might. Eneas, while still in Ireland before his exile, had been not much of a drinker, but Tom, still a youngster really, and working hard at the cinema and with his father in the band, already drank a deal. Old Tom she laboured to regulate like you might a faulty pump. Whisky was the McNulty drink. I associate it now with those wild blanked-out skies between Strandhill and town, waking up in inclement ditches, then seeking far and wide in the throbbing misery of morning my motorcar, like it was a lost heifer, abandoned somewhere in the muddle and the chaos.

Mr Kirwan pleaded with Mai, he beseeched her, she said, he went down on his knees to her, imploring, imploring. Calling to heaven to help him make her understand the peril she was in. It wasn’t the
buveur
of Sligo he called me now, which might have been misinterpreted as vaguely affectionate. He told her that any association with me would be disastrous for her, that I would surely drag her down to the same level in time, and so on, and so on.

But she was telling me this with a strange little laughter running through it. It amused her. We were sitting in the little cafe at the edge of Strandhill beach. I had run her down to Sligo in the Austin and we were going to go to the dance later in the Plaza. The bay there, so primitive and wide, as if desolate and unknown to mankind, with not a house in view, showed us its army upon army of white horses, their white-plumed heads rearing and tumbling on the fierce beaten colours of the water, strange blues and blacks, as if blue and black could be fire, and thrown from these wild acres, the heaven-ascending spray. And myself and Mai sitting at a little table, in a little tin room, our eyes drawn out to the ruckus of the bay as we talked. By deep contrast, the strange calm in her.

‘He thinks I am at Queenie Moran’s house today,’ she said. ‘We will just have to be as clever as Aquinas.’

Chapter Seven

Nevertheless when Mai graduated she kept her promise to herself and went to England to teach. She said it would just be for a year. In her Russian coat with the fur collar, her yellow gloves, and the neat cases with her name in gold upon them beside her, her father’s gift, she stood in the station looking momentarily woebegone. She stepped in close to me and, lifting a yellow-gloved hand, touched my cheek.

‘Take care, Jack,’ she said, which sounded both like an endearment and a warning.

‘Take care, you, Mai, please.’

And she gave me one of her good kisses.

Then she was alone in the carriage, the frame of the window giving me the sense of an oil painting, a genre picture to assail the heart. Then she blew me a kiss, and nodded her lovely head. The waterfall of her black hair, the hat like a boat trying to weather it, her dark eyes in the dark carriage, not so much absent as deep, deep as a well, with the water a far coin below of brightness and blackness. Looking, looking at me, as the train drew out. Was that a flash of doubt across her features, just for a moment? I was shivering.

What was I going to do without her, what was I going to do without her?

*

This village of Tom’s, called Titikope, somewhere up the Volta river, is both the centre of his world but also the very thing he has lost. I am sure it enjoys its own reality. But it also exists in Tom’s inner mind. Though he himself is an element of that imaginative place that has been excluded, he carries it at the heart of himself.

Now I know that his wife’s name is Miriam, and that he has a son and daughter. His children are more or less grown, as I calculate it, because they were born before the war.

And it is the war, still, that is Tom’s difficulty. Not only in the matter of savings and pensions, but the very effect of going to the war in the first place.

Everything that he says about his war experiences circles back to the fact that he is no longer wanted in his home place by his wife. So that when the dog of his story seems to stray away and meander about, no, it is just an illusion, because in fact it always doubles back to Miriam. He talks about prostitutes and killing, but not because he seems to feel such things are what has caused his dilemma. And they are not, at all. It is something much more mysterious. The largeness of the difference between how he thinks about the world and how I think about it is actually what makes him interesting to me. His guilt is not the usual guilt of a European man like me.

When he first left his village to join the Gold Coast Regiment he had no idea he would be away for three or four years, without any leave. His local chieftain came to the village one evening and, speaking passionately about the English king, and the danger to the Gold Coast from the French in Sierra Leone, moved him to leave his wife and young children and join up, even though he was not particularly young. He told his wife he would be back by the end of the rainy season, or failing that, soon after. Of course he had no idea when he would be back, he knew nothing about that, he knew nothing about the world, he had actually never seen a town before, let alone a place like Accra.

Anyway, before he quite knew what was happening, he and his new comrades were bumped across Africa to Kenya, where they were put in a camp outside Nairobi. Here they sweltered for nine months. Tom took a prostitute to cook for him and share his bed. There was immense rivalry for these women. There were pitched battles on the outskirts of the camp, where men laid into each other with ferocity. White soldiers were involved too, fellas from South Africa and Rhodesia.

Then they were transported through Arabia and India to Burma, where Tom learned to hate the Japanese and give them no quarter. They killed every prisoner they took.

After the war he was a year waiting to be demobbed, stuck in Burma. The war was long over when he got back to the Gold Coast, and his people, hearing no news of him, had presumed he was dead, and had already held their ceremony of mourning. This meant, he said, that he was in fact dead, or at least, a walking ghost. So when he came to the outskirts of his village, and people cast their eyes on him and wailed in wonder and horror, he was sprinkled with sacred dust by the witch doctor, to try to return him to the living.

But Miriam, his wife, had also believed him dead. She didn’t think the witch doctor sprinkling him with dust changed anything. In her great fear of the dead she wanted nothing to do with him and asked him to go away again, which, in his grief and confusion, he did.