The Temporary Gentleman Read online

  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.

  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.’