The Temporary Gentleman by Sebastian Barry Read Free Book Online

certainly was not.
    After dinner, in the ashes of everything, Mai played a Schubert nocturne (‘Not the famous one,’ she said) on an ancient, perfectly maintained upright piano. It was the same dark, dark brown as a dress which, for some reason she didn’t offer, she had changed into. The music was slow and melancholy, a nocturne played in the very last night-time of her childhood, no, surely well into the dawn of proper womanhood, and I saw her father crying in his chair, and her mother wept, and so did I, while Mai played on, with a dry eye.
       
    Not a great success, all told. But the strange thing was, there was nothing about Frank Kirwan that I didn’t like. I might have been the specimen ultimately stuck by his pin, but he was a deeply agreeable man, I could see, in essence. I would love to have met with his approval. I would love to have sat with him early and often.
    Although I am not sure her father ever changed his opinion of me much, he was stalwart enough of soul to endure me at first, and thenceforth I was often in their house, even if it was only to talk to her mother in the parlour with the ease of the admired person – for indeed her mother was always very kind to me – while Mr Kirwan occupied somewhere in the house what was referred to as his study.
    I was in a position of knowledge now to note certain things about the Kirwans. It wasn’t all quite as it seemed, but nearly. He sold shilling insurances to all and sundry but being a Kirwan could count himself among the famous Tribes of Galway. Mai loved his aloofness and his lack of the common touch. Perhaps not so handy in an insurance man, and Mai’s mother took in paying lodgers in the summer months, though there was no sign to say so outside the house. It was very discreet. The rains and winds of summer lashed across Salthill with the air of an accepted catastrophe, but it was officially a seaside resort. And indeed there were always a few days that burned with hope and sun, and all in all it was a different world from my father’s, in his little cramped house on John Street, his job at the Lunatic Asylum, his dancing band, and his indirect wife.
    One of the things that put me deeper in love with Mai was her own love for her father. I wondered if I could earn such a depth of love, win it from her as it were, as time passed. While Mai often puzzled me, because she was after all a myriad and complicated person, I admired her tremendously, more and more indeed as the months went on. Her gifts were substantial, her mind was neither deceitful nor shallow, and as for depths, they certainly in her were never hidden. I thought she was the most considerable individual I had ever encountered. She had times of gentleness so complete and profound, she not only took my breath away, she took my heart, my soul, my very purpose in being alive. She took it all to herself and I was proud that she had done so.
       
    I come back to this an hour later. I am shaken to remember myself, gauche and not very sober in that vanished room. Those two people, Mr and Mrs Kirwan, long dead, and yet the memory of that awkward dinner still with the power to dismay me. To be rejected, for a moment of firmness ill-advised, misplaced. But should a Sligoman not defend his fellow Sligomen? What was it about a mere small phrase like that that offended him so? Was there something else, that I missed? Something out of place? Flies open, I dread to think. My accent not right, my eyes, my soul, my youth? Did he suddenly sense something about me in a curious floating text above my head? What I might do to his beloved daughter, the effect a man’s drinking might have on her – West of Ireland drinking, diligent, unrestrained, the antidote to the dark rains and the year-long winter? If so, I can find some sympathy for him, as a father myself. And for her gentle, light-hearted mother, who nevertheless seemed to suffer sometimes in her mind – withdraw to her own room for days on end,