The Temporary Gentleman (17 page)

‘Yes,’ he said, with solemnity, ‘we know who we are, you and I.’

That night we tore into the whisky without mercy and cancelled out everything, stars and old stories and the electric radio of the insects, the spinning mess room and the other young officers. Our stories dissolved in the happy chaos of the alcohol, someone must have carried us to our beds, First Lieutenant John Charles McNulty and First Lieutenant John Charles McNulty. He was due out at 0400 hours the next morning, I heard him go, and I never saw him again.

Chapter Nineteen

Furlough. It was the snow I remember as the first thing, a crumbly, thick fall of it, as if the whole of Sligo was turned into a great hall just to contain the whim and majesty of that snow, with the roof too high and dark to see, the walls obscured by the consummate genius of those small, white flakes, with a music so silent you cocked an ear to it. I came up the Finisklin road slowly in the ancient taxi, a road by chance I had designed and overseen the building of some years before myself, for the town council, one of whose members was my brother Tom. Now that Great Labourer whose face is not known was quietly spreading this tonnage of white gravel as a curious and useless surface, and the tyres pressed it down as if it were white insects to be crushed, and the lamps saw only whiteness and bright darkness, and now and then opening and closing, short vales and copses of snowless air, where a house I knew might appear, the doctor’s gates on the left, the deep black of the Garvoge mixing with the black Atlantic that had crept up on the tide, an ink so dark it was like a billion words printed over and over each other, the story of the world pushing up to the town bridge, the story of the world being sucked back down to Oyster Island and the Rosses, all unreadable, unknowable, cancelled out. The old Wolseley crept on. I heard the engine purring in the hood. I was anxious to reach home. Is this still 1940? – it’s so hard to be precise, but I think it was after Africa, before London. I was heading for Harbour House of course, heading home. At the top of the road it would be standing, looking back towards Sligo, the river close there, scratching past the great stones of the wharf wall and the mid-water bollards, the Garvoge, a being so entirely capable and strong, wide, deep and dark, that it always seemed to me while we lived there as if it might pull away the town from its moorings, pull away the house, pull away the landscape like a strange carpet, the model school, and Middleton’s fields, and my potato garden with its imperilled arch.

At last, still with the curious obligation of slowness, we reached the front of the house, with its pillared portico and five black windows, clean or grimy this time I could not make out, not a light in the place that I could see. And I climbed out of the car, leaving the warm squeak of the cracked leather seat, and shut the door with its genial click, paid old McCormack, and stepped carefully to the house in my engineer’s boots. I opened my own front door, and went into the black hall with its brown linoleum and haggard table, pulled my coat off and cast it on a chair, and perched my hat on one of its wooden horns. Then I walked on down the dark corridor, wondering where everyone was, maybe thinking the little ones were asleep in the rooms above. I heard some sounds from the back of the house and went on further down, and was obliged to open the second door into our small garden. The light from a rear bedroom was trying to pierce the snowfall, and in the difficult muddle of the whiteness I saw two figures, Mai clearest in a black dress, and at her feet half lying and half risen, was the form of my daughter Ursula, who when I peered and peered I could see was in her nightshift, a small, pale person maybe nine or ten years old, and Mai with her right arm raised, and then letting it fall, her right arm raised, then letting it fall, and I stepped two feet out onto the pristine snow, which had already covered the tracks of my wife and her daughter, as if they had merely appeared in the centre of that bare garden, and I looked up at the window of light, something catching my eye, and saw in the glare of a lamp another standing, Maggie still and staring, as the dark arm rose and fell, rose and fell, with the switch gripped in the hand, that I could just see also, like a feathery line on an engraving, rising and falling, and Ursula silent, silent as a stone, and Mai panting, panting, I could hear her, as if she couldn’t hit enough, as if she couldn’t work hard enough at it, lashing and lashing the child, in the snow, in Sligo, in the darkness, and the snow falling, and nothing left in God’s creation but that watching child, and the beaten child, and the ruined woman, and the consternated father.

‘Mai, Mai!’

I rushed across the snow and got a hand on Mai’s arm, to still it. Up to that moment I don’t think she knew where she was, who she was. She stared at me in the muddled light. She must have forgotten I was due home, she must have forgotten a lot of things. I gathered up Ursula under an arm, registered the weight of her, and had to put my other arm around her too. For a moment I stood there with my daughter, just staring at my wife.

‘What in the name of Jesus, Mai,’ I said.

‘Jack, Jack, is that you? Where did you spring from?’ she said.

I carried Ursula into the cold house, wrapped her in a coverlet, and lit the fire in the sitting room, while the girl sat in a chair, sobbing. I rubbed her limbs to get some warmth back into her. I was inclined to sob myself. It was one thing to be at the war, trying to find a path through that, and another thing to be here, pathless, rudderless.

Then Mai came in from the garden and stood in the sitting room, not saying anything, very still, looking at me lighting the fire.

‘Do you have matches, Mai?’ I said.

‘Yes, yes, I do,’ she said, and went hurrying off to the kitchen maybe, to fetch them, coming back in with all the bustle and intent of a nurse.

‘Has this child eaten anything?’ I said.

‘She got the stew, she got the stew,’ said Mai.

‘I’m going to bed her down here, and then we will go into the kitchen to talk,’ I said. ‘Don’t you realise I have to go back tomorrow? I have only a day.’

‘Only a day, Jack? Yes, yes, alright.’

Then we were in the freezing kitchen. There had been no housekeeping done for a while, that was for sure. Every plate we had was on the sink, every cup, every glass, every bit of cutlery. The place stank of bad meat and milk gone off.

‘This is disgusting, Mai. What were you doing, out in the snow like that with Ursula?’

‘She was being bold, Jack, being bold.’

‘You wouldn’t treat a dog like that.’

‘Spare the rod and spoil the child, Jack.’

‘Do you think? The child in her shift, in the bloody snow?’

‘You’re not here, Jack. They need their father here.’

‘I am away at the war. Away at the war. The whole world is away at the war.’

‘What the hell are you doing going out there?’ she said. ‘Nobody in Ireland gives a tuppenny damn about it.’

‘When you see Hitler coming up Wine Street in a tank you might take a different view,’ I said.

‘Bloody Hitler – what did he ever do to you, Jack?’

‘Mai!’ I said, shouting now, because we were drifting off into the ancient topic of my culpability for everything. I felt a huge sense of emergency. I would have to go the next day, and I couldn’t be thinking she would ever do what she had done again.

‘If you ever go at Ursula like that again, so help me, Mai, I will kill you myself.’

‘You will kill your own wife?’

‘I will, Mai, in the most expedient manner I can think of.’

‘You killed me already, Jack.’

‘That
ochón is ochón ó
is no good now, Mai. That was for other days. Now I am telling you, you will not touch that child again. What sort of bloody foolishness is it, to be out in a yard, with a switch, beating and beating at her? Do you ever want to see heaven, Mai? There is no place in heaven for such a person.’

‘You’re not my priest, Jack, you’re not my priest.’

‘No, I am your husband, your unfortunate husband.’

‘But you love me, Jack.’

Now she raised her face and looked at me squarely. There was a certain wild pride in her words. It was so strange. It was all so strange.

‘There are limits to everything, even love. Not love for a child, there are no limits to that. But love for a wife, now, maybe I am thinking there are some limits to that.’

‘Why are you at that war, Jack?’

And then she was weeping, weeping. Maggie streeled in and stood behind her mother’s legs.

‘Maggie, dear, come here, and give your father a kiss,’ I said, not expecting she would. But I thought I had to keep on saying the old things, the old things that didn’t get old the way some old things did.

But she came around her mother and crossed the cold flags to me and gave me a kiss right enough.

‘You must answer my letters when you get a chance. Did you keep all the stamps?’

Before I went away again, I brought Ursula over to the Mam’s house and deposited her there. I said she was to live there till I got home, or the war was over. My mother asked me nothing about the marks the switch had left on Ursula’s side. But she nodded sagely enough. I asked her had she heard anything of Eneas, and she said she had got a soldier’s postcard from France. Then I kissed her and Ursula and said I had to be away again.

I marched back to Harbour House and asked Mai to do her best to pull herself together. I asked her to stop the drinking forthwith. She promised solemnly she would. I said she must apologise to Ursula, she must find some way to make amends. I could see she was very frightened, not by anything that was going to happen to her, but by what had happened. For myself, I could only wonder at her – was this a sort of evil borrowed from alcohol? I didn’t believe that in herself, in her heart and soul, she was a vicious woman. How is it that for some people drinking is a short-term loan on the spirit, but for others a heavy mortgage on the soul? How is it many a drinker becomes gay and light-hearted, but some so darkly morose and rescinded, filleted of every scrap of happiness, that they might beat their child in the snow? I couldn’t answer these questions then, and I can’t answer them now. I took the risk of embracing Mai, and told her that I loved her. She looked defeated by the news. It was with a heavy heart and a feeling of dread that I went off again about the business of the war.

Chapter Twenty

I shunted myself to England, as my orders bid me, and was assigned to a unit in bomb disposal. I didn’t know if I wanted to be in bomb disposal but at the same time didn’t know much about it either.

I did a four-day course. Hitler had started to drop thousands of bombs on London, among which were many unexploded bombs. So we would be sent to defuse them. It’s a tricky thing to be learning your trade off a big, mean-looking yoke that could blow you to kingdom come.

My sappers would dig to find it. Unexploded bombs had a habit of boring into the earth as far down as thirty feet. And they would veer about, depending on the ground, and end up not quite where you would expect. So my knowledge of geology came in handy. I would push down a long thin spike as the sappers dug, and hope finally to feel metal on metal. Then we could really scare ourselves, uncovering the sullen-looking thing, and checking it wasn’t ticking or lying on its fuze.

Those were lovely boys, the sappers in my little unit. Pat Millane was a lad from the Aran islands.

‘I don’t tell them what I’m doing at home, sir,’ he said. ‘They think going off to war is a load of old billy goats’ balls.’

Things like this he would say in Gaelic, privately to me, as it were.
Magalraí pocaide
is the Irish for billy goats’ balls.

After my sappers dug out the hole, it was me on my own going down the ladder then and trying to get the fuze or fuzes out. Sometimes, in the boiling sweat of such occasions, I forgot about Mai. I forgot about everything, except the bomb I was sitting on. You used to sit on the bombs when you were drawing the fuze out, because in that way you wouldn’t know a thing about it if it went up.

They had these fairly common jobs, (15)s they called them, that was the number the Germans would have marked on them. Their pilots had to know the numbers themselves, so the bombs could be armed properly before they dropped them. And later we began to find (17)s, which were tricky, because there was a booby trap under the main gaine, and when you had one of those coupled with a (50), which was motion-sensitive, well, at first people said nothing could be done then, only wait till the (50) deteriorated, or the bomb exploded, which was not always possible. Then the poor benighted BD men had to do their best, whatever was put in front of us, and the divil take the hindmost – which the divil was sometimes only too happy to do. When a man was blown up, you might only get a pound of flesh left of him, or a bit of an arm, or maybe a ruined cap – and that’s what went into the coffin, and they’d weigh the rest of it down with sandbags, so the relatives wouldn’t know. We knew all about that.

So that’s why sometimes even Mai was driven from my thoughts. Then she would drift back in. I would wonder how Ursula and Maggie were getting on. Then we would be off again on some job, bumping through the streets of London in our BD truck.

We all saw terrible things. We were at the ‘terrible things’ end of things. I defused bombs, fifty kilos, 250, five hundred, a thousand, and those huge bombs, the parachute mines, in the very different geologies of the East End or the West End, and Bloomsbury, and the Isle of Dogs – all points of the compass.

Something shrank in us all the while, and something also grew in its place. It was thoughts of the possible future shrank. It was a sort of confidence in the nature of other people, the nature of the inhabitants of England mostly, that grew. BD men as time went on were appreciated. You got free drink in pubs when they saw the bomb insignia. Yellow and red, a little bomb on your shoulder, designed by Queen Mary herself.

Because you couldn’t be thinking about the future. It was a cure for the present, any ills of the present. In a strange way it allowed me to survive my worries about Mai and the girls.