The Temporary Gentleman by Sebastian Barry Read Free Book Online Page B

always eager to take up the gauntlet of the next dance. Her face glistening in the helpful darkness, her eyes all ember and turf-black, her body swirling in her smart dresses, turning and leaping, her legs as strong as a circus performer, lovely firm legs, her delicate hands, her habit of happiness, her radiant and infective joy.
    Mai made friends with everyone, as if her life depended on it. I was warmly congratulated, in her hearing and out of her hearing both, as if I had done a great thing in finding her. But I knew my luck too. I felt like the luckiest man in Sligo, in Ireland.
    Roseanne, who was actually the piano player in Tom’s band, and of course his sweetheart, Mai especially liked, not only because they knew a lot of the same music, but because Roseanne herself was as pretty as a film star, and shone with youth and beauty, different from Mai’s, but as mysterious. Unusually enough, she was a Presbyterian. When she was younger she had been a waitress in the Café Cairo and I suppose every young man in Sligo had been soft on her, including myself.
    It was the great fortune of our youth that such girls were there in Sligo, living and breathing, and willing to give us the time of day, and, when it came to dancing anyhow, the time of night.
    And Tom at that time was just getting going at the politics, and was hoping to get elected to the town council when the civil war calmed down, if it ever did, and Mai was fascinated by all that, a person in front of her who she thought really would be able to get things done, to give the country the lick of paint she yearned for. When all would be made new, spruced up, and the future shine before us like the path the moon made on the sea at the Rosses.
    Then streaming out to the cars and taking our way back to Sligo town along the white roads of Strandhill, gleaming in the moonlight, skirting the brimming tide of the estuary, and then myself content to surge through the small hours across bog and small farms to Galway city, to get her safely home to her father’s house. Mai tired as a child after a long day, and sober as a child, never touching a drop of drink, never, her body warm against me in the car, as the windscreen wiper lashed away the rain, and I hunched forward, peering into the shattered darkness.
    The ingredients of nothing maybe, nothing at all – but everything, everything that at close of day we value, everything.
    Do I imagine it all? Was there really such happiness? There was, there was.
       
    Towards the end of the year Michael Collins was killed in Cork. The bullet might as well have passed through his body and into all the countless hearts that loved him, like Mai’s. She had loved him, the idea of him, and the future that he seemed to hold in his gift, as Mai saw it. But they killed him.
    *
    Suspecting that Tom Quaye would be a better historian than myself of my lapse from grace, I have been trying to draw him out about our night in Osu, but he is a very difficult man to get to talk when he has no desire to. He listens, staring me straight in the eye, but then he just turns his head and goes about some other business.
    Today he put a new element in one of the Tilley lamps, then for some reason, though I tried to dissuade him, he hauled out my old cavalry boots from the cupboard, one of the few remaining things of my army uniform, which I brought out with me this time thinking they would be handy as mosquito boots. But even in the dozen years since the war ended, I find my calves have increased in girth to such a degree that I cannot accommodate the boots on them. I can get them on but cannot get myself out of them again, as if my legs were corks in wine bottles and nary a corkscrew handy. Then Tom Quaye is pulling at them, with me being dragged slowly across the floor, chair and all, till, poof! the leg gives up and surrenders the wretched boot. So they live a dark and dusty life in the cupboard now. But Tom Quaye has a thing about polishing them, and