The Temporary Gentleman by Sebastian Barry Page A

said, ‘Mai. What a turn-up for the books. A child. I’m so bloody happy.’
    ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘yes, you’re right,’ she said, veritably beaming. ‘It’s a good thing alright. I think I’m supposed to say well done to you. Or is that just what men say to each other?’
    ‘You can say well done if you like.’
    ‘I will then. Well done.’
    ‘Well done, you, Mai.’
    ‘Ah, yes, sure, yes, I had to make a great effort, I must say.’
    ‘You’re a horrible woman,’ I said, laughing.
    ‘I know,’ she said. ‘Horrible.’
    She had recently rescued an orphaned Diana monkey, so she decided to take him with her.
    ‘At last,’ she said, ‘a decent conversationalist.’
    ‘Well, well,’ I said.
    ‘I will miss you, Jack, though,’ she said, in her serious voice.
    ‘Will you?’
    ‘God, yes,’ she said.
    Mrs Ketchum and Mrs Reynolds came out to say their goodbyes, all handkerchiefs and genuine sorrow, and promises to visit her one day in Ireland. She was given a send-off by the women of the village, which pleased her greatly, and an ivory elephant to remember her time in Africa.
    I travelled down with her as far as the sea and entrusted her to the long looming ship of the Peninsular and Orient line. In the car she had taken my left hand between gear changes, and once or twice had laid it on her stomach. She was shaking going up the gangplank. A liner like that makes everyone look small at the rail.
       
    While she was aboard ship on the long journey, I had to go higher up in Asante country, checking on the progress of a new canal.
    There were the sweltering hours of work to endure, while I paced among the diggers, as we tried to extend the supply of water northward. The ruling chiefs had requested a canal and the Colonial Office had obliged. It was a noble exercise, and my heart would normally have been in it. But my heart on this occasion had slipped away with Mai.
       
    My mother came all the way up from Sligo to Dublin to meet her. Mai stepped off the boat at the North Wall, and there was the Mam, in her old black dress, faithfully attending. Mai said my mother wanted to hold her hand along the quay, as if she were a child, but because Mai was tall enough and my mother so diminutive, it was the older woman who gave at a glance the appearance of youth. And anyway Mai was not sure she wished for her hand to be taken, she in her capacious dark blue coat that she had bought while the ship docked at Gibraltar, to hide her condition, the monkey like a black and white flame tinged with orange on her shoulder. She was grateful to my mother for coming to meet her, but she didn’t want to be treated like an invalid. But my mother persisted, and led Mai all the way to the train at Kingsbridge, and fussed over her every inch of the journey to Sligo.
    She was to have the baby in the little house in John Street. She didn’t think it would be feasible for her brother in Roscommon to take her, even though he was a doctor. Maria Sheridan said she would be glad to receive her in Omard, but Mai was not that sure, as if somehow or other a pregnancy was something beyond the scope of a visit to Omard. John Street was hardly big enough to swing a cat, let alone a Diana monkey, but Mai preferred to be there.
    *
    The rains, finally. All day there had been a metallic greyness at the edges of the usual egg-blue sky. A few minutes ago the universe gave a shrug, time seemed to step back, then surged forward to catch up, and then the heavens were ripped in a thousand places like a rotten topsail. And a solid water poured down, you might think no creature could breathe in it. It rubbed out every other sound, of insect, bird and animal. The palm trees dipped under it like dancers, their lovely costumes dragged and battered. The iron roof was betrayed, a dozen holes immediately found out where they had grown unnoticed. I had to rush to move my table down a few feet as the pages of the minute-book were splattered with a dusty