The Temporary Gentleman by Sebastian Barry

rate fell to nearly nothing. Mrs Ketchum marvelled at the fact that the heat did not seem to trouble Mai in the least. She went about the burning compound without umbrella or hat, and was quite content to be so tanned she might have passed for an Arab woman. One morning early I awoke, and turned to look at her in the bed. The sheet had been kicked away in the darkness, and now her long white body lay there, with the darkened face, and the arms brown to the elbows. Her body innocent and eternal, like in an old painting.
       
    By then, married for three years, I sometimes worried that she might be growing tired of me. You have to worry about something. But it was a worry that waxed and waned. As district officer I was often away on tour, and then I could imagine all sorts of things, worrying myself as I lay uncomfortably on my camp bed, but when I was at home I realised afresh that life in the colonies suited her. Nothing so confining, you might think, as to be one of only three white women for a thousand miles, in the great, weather-afflicted, unwalkable spaces of West Africa. But no, she liked that. There was sometimes a sense of ‘inspection’ from her. We would sit in the evenings in the bungalow on our cane chairs, and if I was reading Tennyson or Kipling, drinking whisky slowly, the moths burning themselves to death on the Tilley lamps, she was sometimes simply watching me, and it was not always a completely comfortable feeling. She said little enough in that mood, but now and then after a long silence she might make a comment, as if in answer to a companion I couldn’t see or hear. Oftentimes she took me by surprise, commenting on some aspect of things that had never occurred to me.
    ‘Do you know,’ she said once, ‘in a hundred years, the Africans might be in charge of us. I hope they’ll forgive us.’
    ‘What do you mean, Mai?’ I said.
    ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘we’ve got used to having the power of life and death over people. Do you know Billy Ketchum hanged a man here last year? Oh, yes,’ she said, ‘that sort of thing tends to see-saw back and forth.’
    ‘No, Mai, I don’t think so. No.’
    ‘Trust me, Jack.’
    ‘Well, we mightn’t be alive to see it.’
    ‘Just as well, Jack, you being a district officer and all.’
    Then she had the good grace to laugh.
    ‘I’m not blaming you , Jack. I like you. I will definitely step in and stop them when they try to hang you.’
    ‘Thank you, Mai.’
    The plain fact is, I was delighted to sit there with her, whatever she said, whatever she was thinking. I was proud of her. I thought, no, I knew, that she was a wonderful and unique woman. Unusual was the unkindest adjective you could have used about her. She was unusual. Her allure for me anyway was boundless.
    Even last night I had a vivid dream where she was being ‘kind’ to me, as she called it – ‘Now I’ll be kind,’ she would say – listening to me speaking with a slightly ironical attention, doing her level best, and not making that little snorting noise, and when I paused in my speech – I can’t remember what I was saying – she moved nearer to me and put her arms around my shoulders. Then she shifted just an inch closer. It was the barest movement, and yet in my dream it crushed the breath from me.
       
    Then she was obliged to head homeward. She was pregnant.
    ‘It must be catching,’ she said. ‘All those healthy young babies in the clinic.’
    However, Dr Booth and the ladies of the station advised her to go back to Europe. Alas, I had six months of my contract to run. So off she would have to go, alone, indomitable, with her leather cases, and one black sea-trunk marked in white letters:
Mrs Mai McNulty,
c/o Mrs Thomas McNulty,
John Street, Sligo, Irish Free State.
    Not Wanted on the Voyage.
    ‘You’ll be sure and take care of yourself, Mai,’ I said.
    ‘Don’t worry, Jack. I think I know what’s involved. Don’t be late for the christening.’
    ‘Oh, Mai,’ I