The Temporary Gentleman by Sebastian Barry Page A

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