The Temporary Gentleman (12 page)

By this time my brother Tom had been going out with Roseanne Clear for years.

Roseanne’s father had been in the old police force, just like brother Eneas, and had got himself into a whole lot of bother during the civil war, and was said to have been murdered in cold blood by the new National Army. After independence of course that would have been, so her father would have been no longer an RIC man by then, because they had been disbanded. But it was said he had tried to ingratiate himself with the new crowd by informing in some fashion or another – and informing was certainly in fashion just then. He went the way of all informers in Ireland and was killed. None of this deterred Tom. But now we were back from Africa, Mai made it her business to take him aside and explain a few things to him, that going out and an engagement were two different things, and marriage another thing again. Tom took it all in good part, and anyway, he wasn’t in disagreement, no, he was well smitten.

The Mam was none too keen on her, not only because she was a Presbyterian, but because she said every blessed man in Sligo looked at her ‘in the wrong way’, and she didn’t think a woman should be playing the piano in a dance band.

But despite that, Tom married her. They had to go to Dublin to get the job done discreetly. Mai was her bridesmaid. That must have been 1934, a couple of years after de Valera got into power, and knocked Tom’s political ambitions out of kilter. He was running with that O’Duffy character, as near to a little Irish Mussolini as you could get, but there was no talking to him about it, and somehow or other marrying Roseanne Clear got bound into all that, like a corncrake is sometimes bound into a sheaf of corn by the careless reaper.

That was the news then, that was how things went on.

Chapter Thirteen

Then there came one afternoon two gentlemen from the bank. The manager himself, Mr Tuohy, and his assistant.

It was a blustery day in summer, the wind stirring in the east.

Mr Tuohy had an impressive goitre under his chin, which had altered his speech, so that he seemed to sing rather than talk, in a melancholy plainchant. He was a man of a generally exhausted demeanour, who was said to be a demon for the seaweed baths in Enniscrone. He was thin, so that in the distance, in his black suit, he always looked like a pencil mark.

Mai knew Mr Tuohy better than myself, though he had facilitated a few loans for me in recent times. The house of course was held in my name and was good collateral, and small loans had been issued to me with a smile.

The Kerry maid brought them into the sitting room, where Mai was licking through the pages of
La Femme chic
(always an embarrassing item to pick up at the paper shop, where it came on special order – ‘Mr McNulty, your French magazine . . .’), and I was reading through the racing paper, readying for another descent on some distant racecourse. Mai rose, and looked pleased to see them, if surprised. She told the maid to fetch some tea but Mr Tuohy it seemed was not thirsty and he didn’t consult his abashed-looking assistant. So we all sat down again, and smiled at each other.

Mr Tuohy gazed out for a few moments at the white horses moving across the bay, nodded his head, making his swollen underchin wobble.

‘Such a fine property,’ he said. ‘I have noted from the deeds that your father purchased it all of sixty years ago, Mrs McNulty. That is a long time to have something in the family. And so nice to come in and hear the voices of the little ones. I know it will be exceptionally hard for you.’

This caught Mai off guard, if not quite myself.

‘Exceptionally hard?’ she said.

There had been a few letters regarding the loans, more than a few, which I had assiduously read. Deep in my heart I knew why he had come. But I was alarmed, sickened. I held onto the arms of my chair and uttered without speaking, privately in my burning brain, a hasty and heartfelt prayer. How successfully, in the great effort to keep everything shipshape and afloat and going forward, I had blanked out the possibility of this terrible event. It was a talent, I was desperately thinking, a talent, and now in payment for this talent would come the inquisition.

‘Excuse me, Mr Tuohy, but I have no idea what you are talking about,’ said Mai, in her pleasant Galway accent, even and musical in its own way.

‘I have written extensively to Mr McNulty, kept him fully abreast of things. He knew when he took the loans that they needed repaying, and that when you give something as collateral, of course that is the item that must eventually be surrendered in order to honour the repayment of the loans, if not otherwise attended to.’

I could tell from Mr Tuohy’s tone that he had opted to spell everything out as if we were children. Mai was no child. She was looking at Mr Tuohy now as if she had enlarged to ten times her size. I thought the four walls might be sundered by her gaze and washed out into the wind-ruined sea. To say I felt embarrassed now could not begin to describe the feeling. I sat there, cancelled out, even to myself, and then came the moment when Mai turned her face to me, that striking, smooth-featured, bright-eyed, now smouldering face.

‘Jack?’ she said, and only that.

‘Well,’ I said, in a triumph of feebleness, ‘there have been a few loans, that’s true.’

‘Mr McNulty,’ said Mr Tuohy, ‘I have no wish to contradict you in your own sitting room, but the whole purpose of my visit today is to explain the necessity for selling the house immediately. You are many hundreds of pounds in debt.’

‘Jack,’ she said again, this time much quieter.

Guilt, dreadful guilt, was now stealing upon me.

‘There has been absolutely,’ began Mr Tuohy, and here his assailed voice cracked a moment, so he attempted the word again, ‘absolutely no attempt,
no
attempt, made to repay, so our interest in the property is now to the entire value of same. It is my solemn and bounden duty to dispose of it. I am so sorry, Mrs McNulty.’

Then his assistant spoke for the first and last time:

‘Indeed,’ he said, as if the obvious pain in Mai’s face forbade him to maintain his silence, even if his employer had impressed on him the need to keep silent at all times in such a delicate situation.

Mai said ‘Hmm,’ and flounced her head, and stared out into the bay. ‘Hmm,’ she said again. I thought for one helpful moment that she had forgiven me, or that indeed this event fulfilled a desire she had hidden from me, to be rid of the house maybe . . .

‘But,’ she said. ‘There is no problem with money. If it’s just money you need . . .’ And she moved towards the door. ‘I have funds, Mr Tuohy, that you won’t be aware of. You see, we don’t keep everything in the bank. Oh, no,’ she said, laughing now. ‘Just you wait here a moment, and I will show you.’

‘Where are you going, Mai?’ I said, now doubly, trebly, alarmed.

‘You’ll see, Mr Tuohy,’ she said, and went out on her errand. We sat on, Mr Tuohy nodding now and again as if in further conversation with himself, and offering me a half-extinguished smile, and I heard Mai’s step on the stairs, going up in a hurry to our bedroom. I heard her high heels – two-tone leather – stamp across the Persian carpet and the polished boards to the cupboard, I could picture it in my head, perfectly, and heard the door open, and heard more dimly her scrambling about in the ordered debris of our time in Africa, looking confidently, I supposed, for the bag of coins. Then I heard, if you can hear such a thing, the gap of silence, of disbelief, of her brain whirring, trying to reach a good thought, a good explanation, had Jack put them in the bank after all? Had she in a vague moment? Why, she hadn’t looked in that little bag for five years, had she? Or had she moved them somewhere else in the house, where were they, where were they?

No good answers coming to her, and no sign of her fortune, she was obliged to retrace her steps, across the handsome carpet, and down the well-trimmed stairs, and across the gaping sorrow of the hallway, and back to us in the sombre room, and she could do no other than to return with her heart half broken, but ready in a crazy instant to be reassured, restored, and then she stood there, looking out at the now thunderous waves, muted behind the old window glass, as she had done before, the gap of aeons between the two actions. And I knew she wanted to speak, but it was as if she hadn’t the energy to form one word. And not having really the desire to do so, in case in the upshot of her speaking there would be an answer. Fully for five minutes she maintained her silence, like a diver balanced out on the lip of the board, ready to spring out, leap out, through the clear air, and then, because there was nothing else to be done, she turned her face away from the sea, and with a withering strength, a strength despite everything, looked again at me, and smiled, smiled gorgeously, that smile that was part of the reason I loved her and had pursued and married her, a smile I set such store on I couldn’t help but smile back at now. Mai, standing there – even now, sitting in Africa, writing this, I mourn that moment, even as I feel the terror of it.

‘All the money, Jack, all the money,’ she said. There was still love in her voice, as August still has the summer in it. But also the desolation of winter.

Grattan House was sold. Now all the truth was out, and like most truth that is eventually revealed after long hiding, it was little or no use to Mai, certainly not to me. Yes, I had made dozens of little visits to the cupboard, for racing debts, for debts at the dress shops and the hat shops, for bills that came down from Switzer’s and Weir’s, for this, for that, and for the other thing. Each time reaching into the bag without disturbing it too much, not wanting to know too much about what I was doing, thinking each time, ‘It’s just a few coins, there are plenty there yet,’ until the vile day when my hand went in and even a man making the greatest effort in the history of the world not to notice something, noticed that what I fetched out was the last sovereign.

*

The guilt attached to ‘losing’ Grattan House is still profound, eternal, and terrifying. But at the time I am not sure I fully understood what I had done.

Looking back now, sitting in this simple clay and wooden room in Accra, it is clear that it was a time to lay my heart bare to her, to talk to her about how we lived, and to beg her to forgive me for what had happened. But I did none of those things.  

*

I settled her bills at Divilly’s butchers and Mrs Synott’s grocery shop in Salthill, and my bar bill at the Bal, utilising my very last resources, just not quite able to leave them in the lurch, the house was put on the market and sold in a thrice to a friend of Mr Tuohy’s, and off we went, lock, stock and barrel, or lockless, stockless and barrel-less, to a ‘nice little house’ in Magheraboy in Sligo, which Pappy was able to get a hold of from one of his
butties, for a sum so tiny that Mai, mysteriously enough, slapped her two hands on her thighs when I told her, whether out of disgust at our new status, or delight at the affordability of Sligo, I couldn’t quite tell – but probably not the latter.

Because, as if it were a sort of hidden illness in McNulty marriages, she had stopped talking to me directly, as Mam had done with Pappy. If we had had tea at my Mam’s house now, it would surely have been a complicated evening. As Mai had no liaison officer of the age of reason in the house, but only two streeling children, this scheme of indirect speech was very tricky for her fully to effect, and occasionally she was obliged by blind necessity to say something, in which case she kept it short, clipped, and to the point, like the orders of a superior officer.

And she insisted on separate bedrooms.

Although it caused me immense pain, I also thought there was some justice in her stance, and prayed nightly on the narrow couch which was now my bed that there might be some truth in the saying that time will heal all wounds. But her despair, her air of hopelessness and outrage, was frightening to behold, and I was drinking as fast and as much as I could in the evenings in the cold, dank bars of Sligo town to try and erase the floating image in my brain of the tall, thin, white-faced ghost that was now my wife. One night I headed home so drunk that I was looking everywhere for Grattan House, in the muddled misconception it was still our home, searching up and down the streets of Sligo for a house that was in another city.

I was not entirely hopeless though. She was still nearby, and I had a belief that whatever bound us would eventually be restored. I said as much to Tom and he nodded in sage silence.

I would have to hole up like Jesse James in my own house, and hope fervently for a pardon, if not from Mai, then from the Secret Judge of life. And pray that we might find a firm footing again in the ordinary carnival of things.

Chapter Fourteen

It was a mean little house, it was true. But it had room for the two babies and even the strange dislocations of their parents, and it bore a better relation to my actual income. Out back was a lonesome square of grass and dandelions, and the wind twisted itself into the desolate space and ran its chilly fingers through the grass, and asked the time from the dandelion heads. The houses were new, built as a little speculation by a builder from Rossaveal, far enough away in Connemara to be unavailable when a slate began its slide down the roof, or his sewerage pipes parted underground.

In the first summer was the small mercy that Mai discovered Gibraltar, a concrete sea-baths that had been built on the stony lip of the shore in Far Finisklin. There was a big lump of a rock abutting it, hence the name, and here Mai spread herself on hot days, and made a little kingdom of her towel, her bag, and her clothes, and had Maggie for a border guard at her feet. Ursula was deposited at their grandparents’, my Mam toiling to bring the great pram over the inconvenient granite step of her front door. Indeed Mai had pleased Mam by naming Ursula after St Ursula of the Ursulines. My mother was a great liker of religious orders and indeed had promised my sister Teasy many years before to the Sisters of Nazareth House, and had delivered her to their premises in Bexhill-on-Sea when she was fourteen, where now she thrives as a mendicant nun among the little hills and backways of East Sussex.