The Temporary Gentleman (8 page)

‘It’s just a sort of memoir, I suppose,’ I said, as embarrassed now as I had been proud. ‘My wife died some years ago. It is a memoir about her, I suppose. Jottings.’

‘Do you think I could take it?’ he said.

‘It’s just a personal, very personal account of things. It has no relevance to anyone except myself, and even then, I am not sure why I am writing it. By the way, I didn’t catch your name.’

He was still scanning through the pages.

‘Is it a diary?’ he said.

‘No, I don’t believe so. I didn’t catch your name, inspector.’

He seemed to have become briefly deaf. I devoutly did not wish him to take the book away. I knew if he took it away I would not be able to go on with it, illogical as that was.

But much to my relief he seemed to lose interest in the book, and placed it back down where he had found it, and returned to the chair. Then he sat for a half-minute saying nothing, but looking at me quietly.

‘What was interesting to us when your name came up was not that you were drinking in Osu, or even that Mr Genfi was so badly injured. It was that, when I brought your name to Mr Oko, your landlord, and he spoke of your service in the UN, I contacted them, and was told the reason you were let go.’

He let this sink in a little, and I smiled, not knowing what else to do.

‘Do you want to say anything about that?’ he said.

‘I think there might be a certain confidentiality attached to it,’ I said.

I felt I knew now what was coming. That unpleasantness in Ho was going to haunt me. The Swede, Emmanuel Heyst, and his mad schemes. I had been duped by him, and his promises of easy money. There is no such thing.

‘Oh?’ he said. ‘Gunrunning, wasn’t it? Do you see, Ghana is still a volatile entity as I’m sure you appreciate. Certain aspects of things still festering . . . And we are very interested in the reason you have remained here in Accra, with this implication hanging over you of gunrunning in the past.’ Then he said, in the next breath, as if the two things were connected, ‘You might be amused to know that I served for some years in the Ulster Constabulary. There is a long association between Ireland and the police force here, in one form or another.’

‘Oh?’ I said.

Gunrunning. That word ringing in my ears.

‘Well, what may one say about that?’ he said, smiling.

‘About what?’

‘Your activities.’

‘There were no activities. It was a misunderstanding. There is no record of me gunrunning in Togo or anywhere else. The official in the UN was quite wrong to say so. I was friendly with a man there, a Swede, who did indeed turn out to be supplying guns to rebels, rebels who, I may add, never had occasion to rebel, in the upshot, because the plebiscite was successful. And the Swede, Emmanuel Heyst, as I am sure you know, was arrested and prosecuted.’

‘He was, of course, yes,’ said the inspector. Then he stood up. ‘This visit is by way of warning. Do you understand? I didn’t come through Ireland and Palestine only to be fucked around by the likes of you.’

I could only look at him quizzically, neutrally.

‘If we were to find that you were engaged in a similar activity – and if you are it will come to light, as sure as night follows day – we would bring the full force of the law down on you, and you will be dealt with definitively and thoroughly.’

Now he was not so calm, or calm in a different way, rather austere and proud-looking, like the matador driving in his thin sword.

‘You are not an entirely desirable person here. My advice to you would be to go home as soon as you can. You have absolutely no role to play here in Ghana. If you are up to no good, you will find you have made a terrible mistake in thinking you could get away with it.’

He had made his point, and knew it. I was filled suddenly with foreboding and misery. Not just because of what he had said. Something less concrete, something deep under everything, some alteration in the ground of myself, a little earthquake. Why
had
I stayed in Accra? Why was I here, with Tom, on the wrong side of the Atlantic Ocean? It was the question I had not been able to answer, and having been asked it again by this policeman, still could find no answer, for him or for me.

‘Well,’ he said. ‘Good evening.’

I nodded to him, not able to find a decent response. The constable, who of course had not said a word to me throughout but had stood there looking as fierce as a Malay god, followed his inspector out into the full darkness of the night.

I just sat there for a while, and Tom stayed where he was too.

‘Policemen are not good people,’ he said then.

‘What happened to Genfi,’ I said, ‘this Kofi Genfi?’

‘You kissed his woman and you had a fight and then he sat on you and then someone pulled him off because he was wanting to kill you and then he went out to kill his woman and her brother stopped him with a great blow and he is in the hospital.’

‘This is why I swore off drinking, this is why I will never drink again.’

‘It was these policemen killed my friends during the veterans’ march. Arrested us, and tortured us. They say it is a different force but they are the same.’

‘Never, never again, so help me God.’

‘Amen,’ said Tom.

Chapter Nine

1926. Our marriage. On the one side of the church, the rather elegant and choice individuals who had travelled to see Mai wed, her aunt Maria Sheridan from Cavan, the one with the connection to Collins, encased in a brocaded day dress, giving her a slightly ironclad look, but very smart. Mai’s other aunts from Roscommon, Cavan and Leitrim, glinting in the holy gloom of the chapel, with small dots of gold and ruby light playing on old rings and necklaces and bracelets. And chief before all, her resplendent brother, Jack, the doctor from Roscommon, lofty, silk-hatted, confident, and silent. He was a man Mai adored, and he was said to adore her, even if he was a rare visitor, being devoted to fishing the rivers of Roscommon, and shooting at the wildlife there. He was six foot six in his stockings, I knew, and in every way he was as impressive to me as her father had been, and I prayed he would approve of me.

All of these souls sitting on their side with the easy, rather solemn, occupying air that in other circumstances would have put me in suspicion that they were actually Protestants.

On the other side, my side, my very dapper brother Tom, in his best suit, tailored by my father of course, and no tailor in Dublin could have made a better one, even if it was a few years out of date, strictly speaking, but, if he looked provincial, nevertheless it was provincial with a touch of pleasing swagger about it. Then there was my father, Old Tom, who had decided to retrieve a straw boater from some dark corner of his bedroom. And he had fashioned for himself a set of tails and black trousers, to some degree let down by an old grey coat, an item he never attempted as a tailor, and so was shop-bought. He sat very still on the pew, with his eyes closed, so that he looked like one of those old photographs of executed train robbers in America, put out somewhere as a warning to the frontier populace.

Beside him sat my mother and something in the day had undone her intentions somewhat because it is probably true to say that her attire was not quite right. She wore her old cloth hat and her plain, black, severe little dress that, unlike Maria Sheridan’s, which was also severe, had not cost too much in the first place, because my mother didn’t care about such things.

Mai herself, then, coming in on the arm of Nicholas Sheridan, Maria’s husband, in her wedding dress, a long brushmark of silk.

Now I was beside Mai, staring forward at the priest. He spoke the question to me, and I answered him, ‘I do,’ he fixing me with his eyes, keeping my eyes on his with a fierce effort, as if for a crazy moment I were marrying him, and then he put the same question to Mai, and there was a silence, that begged to be filled with her voice, with her assenting, and yet there was nothing, I hardly dared look sideways at her, now I was getting a little angry, angry at this bloody silence, you wouldn’t treat a dog like that, a man in a wedding suit tailored by his own father, with a fine little buttonhole, my mother’s face now in the furthest reach of my sight whitened by fright, as perhaps my own was – ‘I do,’ she said.

We signed the Register of Marriages in the porch of the church, a huddle of varied souls, my mother, elated, on the edge of dancing, you might think, my father smiling and innocently pleased, the boater knocked back on his head. He shook Mai’s hand with fervour after she signed her name beside my own in the old book, and she kissed him on the cheek, leaning down to him a little. Then she kissed my mother and her own many aunts and cousins. Then her brother shook my hand and I thanked him for his kind offices of the day. There was a moment of peace. All was right, everything in its place, a consummation so far of my life, the logical and just outcome of my love for Mai. It was Nicholas who had paid for the little reception in the Great Southern Hotel, and it was my mother had put together the stupendous cake. It was Tom who had bought the train tickets to Dublin and arranged the few nights in Barry’s Hotel. The priest, having finished his performance, had all the ease of the actor released from his work. The rainy light, shouldering into the porch from the great door, seemed the light of goodness and promise.

Mai was gone so quickly that when I went out into the narrow street there was no sign of her. But down beside the old church was her veil, like a spider’s web cleaned out of God’s mansion, that gave all the signs of having been wrenched from her head and discarded. It was pelting with rain and I had no coat, but I thought if I made a dash along Buttermilk Walk I might catch her. As I rounded the corner into St Augustine Street, a little girl was standing there, looking at the palm of her hand, where I could see a gold band, Mai’s wedding ring. Fifty yards along was Mai, a white ghost in the sheeting rain, hurrying away towards the river.

In the distance the rain was dropping in dozens of huge, grey curtains, frittered and torn, across the vista of small houses. Although it was early afternoon, there was a darkness everywhere caused by the very solidity of the countless raindrops. In the midst of this, like a pulsing white heart, was Mai’s diminishing figure.

She will be crossing Wolfe Tone Bridge in a second, I thought. Then she would be scudding along the edge of the Claddagh. Where was she going? What was she thinking of? I crossed the bridge in her wake, I skirted along the Claddagh, keeping her within view. The spring tide had risen and the sea wind was noisily throwing the tide at the dry-harbours and sea-walls, so that spouts of water were pirouetting and twisting into the air, drenching anyone who passed. Now I reached the Grattan Road, where the violent-looking sea crowded the bay, it looked like.

There she was, my new wife, still fifty yards ahead. Now the storm decided it wasn’t doing enough and started to roar and howl. Only a few years previously I had followed her along this very road, as she went home from the college. I had known nothing about her then. Did I know much more now? At the surface of things perhaps I was embarrassed, not in any way knowing what I would say to our wedding guests, but deeper somewhere I was moved by a wild concern for her, as if it wasn’t me she was fleeing from, and I was only the observer of this strange emergency.

The barracks where the Black and Tans used to be stationed passed on my right, as gloomy and as derelict as the history it remembered or forgot. Indeed I recalled Mr Kirwan inveighing against their one-time presence there ‘in an innocent Irish seaside place’. Finally I reached the turn of the Grattan Road that brought a traveller round to the front of the houses. I could see poor Grattan House huddled in the rain, like a forlorn image of the vanished Mr Kirwan, his times and hours all done.

Now I got to the handsome old gates and looked in through the bars. Much to my relief, there she was, inside the porch itself, in rather a strange position, her right hand grasping the door-knocker but no longer banging on it, if she had been banging on it, and her body hanging from this arm, her head lain sideways on her left shoulder, and the torso and legs slumping. Her face was resting it looked like against the neglected paint of the front door. I slipped in and walked quietly up to her. I could have been angry I suppose. I could have railed and accused, but in truth I felt for her only an unexpected respect.

‘Mai,’ I said. I fancied I could hear her breathing heavily. Black clouds went racing high above the cold roof of the house. All the prettiness and the desirability seemed to have gone out of it. I was surprised that her brother Jack, to whom the house was left, had let it go, but of course he lived in Roscommon where his practice was. There was a bloom of spring grass across the once pristine gravel. Because the tide was high, the callows field beside the house was brimming with dark water, and only the brown stalks of last year’s ragwort showed above the waterline. It was such a melancholy sight.

‘He’s not here,’ she said then. ‘He’s not here.’

‘There’s no one here, Mai,’ I said.

‘I thought maybe Pappy would be here but he’s not.’

‘Your father, you remember, Mai, your father is gone.’

‘I know,’ she said.

Then she straightened and turned herself about. I never saw a human person so utterly drenched unless it was a swimmer. Her lovely wedding dress looked like white seaweed on her, clinging everywhere.

‘Jesus, Mary, and St Joseph,’ I said.

‘I know,’ she said.

‘Is this it, Mai? Do you not want to be married to me? Is that what it is?’

‘I took fright,’ she said. ‘I took fright.’

‘At what, at what?’

‘I don’t know. I took fright.’

She lifted her face and looked at me.

‘There’s nothing to be frightened of,’ I said, but wondered if that were true.

‘Do you think we could get in through a window?’ she said. ‘I would love to see the old place again.’

‘It’s not in a fit state,’ I said, stepping to the parlour window, where I had sometimes knocked to get her mother’s attention. I was intending to try and peer in. But it was only a subterfuge. As soon as I moved away, she was gone, moving at speed to the garden wall, and was over it swiftly, and splashed down into the flooded field. She waded twenty feet out towards God knew what limit of the ground, where surely she would imminently plunge underwater and be lost. I cleared the wall myself and sloshed along in the murky floodwaters, trying to catch up with her, alarmed by the darkness of everything, the indistinctness. Then she stopped and I came up behind her. I saw her shoulders fall. I could hear her crying, a sound I don’t think I had ever heard from her before. Her crying was oddly deep, and I was horribly affrighted by it.