Off I went then to England to see what was up. I said nothing to Mai about my journey.
Toxteth had an Irish bleakness, with its lowering sky and sharp, bitter wind. When I got to her little house and was let in by her astonished self, it didn’t take me too long to notice that she was very afraid. She looked trim and nice enough, but her eyes were bright with fear.
‘How is poor Mammy?’ she said.
‘Much as always,’ I said. ‘Much as always.’
‘Did she get my birthday card, do you know, Pop?’
‘Oh, she got it, yes, and very glad she was to get it. Did she write and thank you?
‘No, but – that’s alright.’
‘She usen’t to answer my letters, either, if that’s any comfort, when I was away at the war.’
‘She’s no letter writer, Mammy,’ she said.
‘She used to write a good letter when she was teaching in Manchester,’ I said. ‘But that was a long time ago.’
I asked her then why she had been dismissed from her nursing job. She told me the truth straight off, which was always her way. She said she had been caught filching from the drugs cabinet in the hospital and had been sacked. Barbiturates, she said, which she had begun to take for her nerves. She was blushing now, into the roots of her hair. And then she said she had been very hungry, and homeless for a week or two, because she lost her place at the nurses’ home. Then she said she met a nice man, and they were going to be married.
I asked her who this man was and she said he was called Patrick Pawu, and spelled the name for me, and she said he was the grandson of the Olowu of Owu, and spelled that out too, and I asked her if it was a Portuguese name, and she said no, it was Nigerian. My heart was panicking in my chest. The ghost of all the Ketchums and Reynoldses of the world hovered in the back of my head. I don’t think I had at that time ever heard of such a thing in England, a white woman and a black man. Then I suddenly thought of Mai, and her affection years ago for the first Tom in Nigeria. But I wanted to shout at her – ‘You will never be able to come home with such a man, and think of the children, think of the children you would have?’ But thank God, thank God I did not.
‘I love him, Pop,’ she said, looking at me with those fearful eyes. She had her head lowered, for the axe, no doubt. She hadn’t asked me to come, and now I was there, and now she would get her punishment.
It was like the angel rolling the stone away from Christ’s tomb. I had been alone with this great boulder of a thing, the boulder that has blocked up so much of human history, the weight of dominion over others, of slavery. Then the angel rolled it away. I confess I was a bloody whiteman to the last second. But then, suddenly, freedom, true bloody freedom.
‘I think it is wonderful news,’ I said, astonished at the words in my own mouth. ‘It is the best news, Ursula, the very best.’
I was light-headed with some species of joy.
‘Pop,’ she said, getting up, as happy as I had ever seen her, and she had been a child originally with a gift for happiness. ‘I didn’t write and tell you because I was afraid.’
‘Well, don’t be,’ I said, ‘there’s no need.’
Then the fog of fear cleared from her eyes, and she put her face in her hands, and quietly wept. Had I never spoken gently to her before? I feared maybe not, I feared not. Had either of us really ever treated her with a proper measure of gentleness, as much as she deserved? Why should she have thought I would now? She had no example of it. I saw this, as if someone had shone a light into my vicious heart. I saw it, and could do nothing else but step forward and hold her in my arms.
To remember drunkenness is so difficult because it is really a form of human absence, a maelstrom that blanks out the landscape. Maybe from the outside, looking at it . . . But how terrible it would be to pretend that I stood outside it all. I was fully involved in the battle, and every morning knew I had been mentioned in the dispatches of grace or disgrace. Grace, because sometimes, as rare as a hot Irish day, there was a kind of huge human kindness, descending on us, Mai and Jack, and for a little while we were in the same uniform, and fighting for the same powers. When Mai would say quick, unexpected, precious things, sweet nothings indeed, maybe engendered in gin, but priceless to me for all that. For you had to have some currency to keep going in the daylight hours of relative sobriety.
But the savagery, the gear of savagery. The subtle metallic click of the machinery, when the rack is brought to the starting point, and the ropes are tied to the body. The terrifying eloquence of the barely articulate drinker. Insults, that might have done as well in the form of a knife, fashioned into a great bludgeon, for fear it would not strike home. Our heads battered by a storm of words, shards of them, rocks of them, blades of them, bullets of them, bombs. The aftermath of surging hatred, the exhaustion when we lay as it might be in the sitting room, not in the chairs, but she maybe slumped against a wall, myself stretched flat on the floor. As if the house had been struck by a falling bomb, breaking everything, but failing to explode. So that something lay there also with its secret heart beating, ticking, and who knew the devious nature of those fuzes? Their numbers and solutions? -– not I. Sad beyond words to think about, shameful, the shame the worst. Turning ourselves night after night into monsters, the creations of some failed Frankenstein -– pitiful because so wretched, so base, so provisional, so stripped of all good things that she especially had once had in her in abundance. Myself no better, not a jot, but in my case, I have to think, starting with so much less. The two crazy devils in Dunseverick Road. Maggie grown up now, bestriding the professional stage, but affrighted in her bed, like a child electrified by a thrashing cable. The poor neighbours oftentimes banging on the walls. The thinning, wasting body of Mai. The ludicrous bloom of rude health on my face, the rotund, padded body. Nothing left at the centre but the cinder of what had been, splinters of the lost panel depicting our setting forth nearly thirty years before, in heroic guise, on this darkening journey.
‘You piece of human excrement, you useless, whining, faithless man.’
Over and over and over again, there was no ending, and the beginning was lost in time.
In the morning – nothing ever mentioned. If a Sunday, I would watch her at Mass in St Fintan’s, kneeling in the pew, hungrily praying, her face white and dusty from the worried over-use of her compact. The events of the night left behind, till it all started round again. What is the point in saying I hated her – as indeed I did, often and often – when running in the pith of things, like a vein of ravaged blood, was that love, always rising again, impervious to sense, killing and giving life in equal measure?
‘Efforts’ were made. A few gins less, a few whiskies less, and an effort made to go out to Jammet’s restaurant, in whatever finery was at our disposal.
‘We must make an effort, Jack,’ she would say, and when she did say it, there was always a little trim of tears, a lace of them, around her voice.
Then we were bound to chart a choppy course to the Abbey Theatre, every couple of months, to gaze at our daughter in her new show. Mai stooped, old before her time, nervous, not sure of anything, least of all herself. Grudging the time in the seats, the frightening sobriety of it. She was not able really to ‘see’ Maggie, there was a blindness there, nothing was ever said about the performance or the play, as if being sober now had only the authority of dreams, and not ones a person could recount, or even remember.
Chapter Twenty-five
1952. I was working on a little water scheme in Collooney, of all places, the other side of the country, which was just the way of things in those mad days, and one evening I was late getting back. When I crept into the kitchen to see if there was a sandwich to be had, starving from the drive home, I was there banging about in the dark for half a minute before I realised she was sitting at the kitchen table. I put on the lamp beside the cooker. She had her coat on, as if she was intending to go out or had come back in from somewhere and had not taken it off. Her brown hat was fast
ened to her hair by a long silver pin of her mother’s. It is curious to me now how I knew almost everything about her, down to the items of her jewellery. I suppose it was from watching her closely, too closely, or not closely enough, I do not know. Anyway, there she sat, and even the new creep of light against her right side did not make her move. There was neither glass nor bottle near her. I walked over to her and stood at her right elbow.
‘Are you alright?’ I said.
‘I was just going to bed,’ she said, as if it was the most natural thing in the world for her to be sitting there, and she did it every night, sat there in her fine black coat with the Russian fox-fur on the collar, a coat now twenty years old and more – maybe thirty. Her dark eyes had something indeed of the fox about them, and her skin, although she was now fifty, was as smooth as an apple. There was something painterly about her, as if Whistler himself might have leapt forth from behind a door and begun to paint her, her profile strong, shadowed, and so deeply familiar to me. I myself was as sober as a baby also, because I knew I had a five-o’clock start the next morning, and I had an hour now at the drawing-board before I could sleep, with the measurements I had taken, with the help of a boy, from the levelling-stick to be transferred to the town map, and the pipelines to be marked out in my red pencil. I had been rather looking forward to the work, as sometimes my mother used to look forward to her ironing, or so she would say, at midnight, when all the household was asleep.
‘Can I get you some cocoa?’ I said, on an inspiration, thinking that’s what normal people did at this time of night, more than likely.
‘Cocoa, Jack?’ she said. ‘I don’t think we have cocoa.’
‘I think we have cocoa, I’m sure we do, I’m sure I saw a tin of cocoa in the cupboard.’
‘That will have been there an awful long time. That was Ursula’s cocoa.’
‘It’s made from the cocoa bean,’ I said. ‘That doesn’t go off.’
So I made her some cocoa because she looked like a woman in need of something. There was no milk but I made it on water and put in lots of sugar. Then I put the steaming cup in front of her and she put out a gloved hand and held onto it.
‘The perfect thing,’ she said.
The next morning she told me she had to go to the city to see a particular doctor because she had been to see her GP in Clontarf and he had referred her. She said she would take the tram in, but I rang the relevant person in Collooney, Mr Ryan, who was the foreman for the job in hand, and said I would not be driving over that week. I put Mai in the car, it was a Ford we had in those days, one of those made in the factory in Cork. It was a fairly basic car but it did the job. It was a cold, bright February day under an enormous sky of etched-looking blue, and we drove across Clontarf and into the environs of the old city as if it were merely a pleasant jaunt, though truth to tell it had been many years since we had driven out on jaunts.
In Dublin the specialist brought her into his room and examined her while I waited outside. After about an hour, they came back, looking curiously like a married couple themselves, and Mai was smiling at him, and chatting about Rosses Point. It turned out he had grown up there and was one of the Midletons, though that was not his second name. Then he made an appointment for her at the hospital in two weeks’ time, and Mai and I drove home, again under the extraordinary benefice of that extravagant spring sky.
We were as peaceful as doves for the two weeks and I cooked hash for her, and chops, and even ran one night to a chicken boiled with cabbage, though even as I made it I was not sure it was a real dish. At any rate she ate it mercifully, and said it was the nicest way to do chicken. All this time she seemed very quiet, and if I am being truthful rather strange. As far as I could judge she was feeling some pain, but where I didn’t think I could ask her. Every day she bathed in the bathroom, and then did her face and hair at her dressing table, which throughout all the wars and drinking had somehow remained intact and elegant in our bedroom. Then she would pick out her underclothes and the dress she wanted to wear that day, and one day we found the old mosquito boots in the back of a cupboard, and we laughed when she put them on. They barely fitted her on account of her ankles being rather swollen.
On the appointed day I drove her over to the hospital in Dublin, and she was prepped up by the nurses, and given some pills, and when she went into the operating theatre she was given gas, and she was back out in an hour that time as well, which took me by surprise, and it was just as well I had not acted on my plan to have a walk down towards the Liffey as far as the North Wall.
After a while she was put into bed in a ward and I was sitting there beside her until she came round, and then the surgeon, his name was Mr Blakely, obviously the Blakelys of Rosses Point, though I had never heard of them, but Sligo people can be somewhat ubiquitous, came in, having returned himself to his Donegal tweed suit and his stylish hat. He had very fine, very clean, long-fingered hands which I suppose was useful in his line of business, and he laid these now on the pillow near Mai’s head. Mai was still groggy, but she came alive when she saw him, and smiled her confident, egalitarian smile that I am not sure I had seen that often since our marriage, but that I remembered very well from her university days, when she would be walking with friends along the tree-lined ways. He said he had made a thorough examination, he had opened up the area above the liver as it were, and had a good look, and he did not think there was anything for him to do beyond that, he had had a look and then sewn her up again, and said he would certainly be prescribing a good regimen of pills for any pain that might arise in the coming times. He said he knew, because she had told him in his office the fortnight before, that she would appreciate him calling a spade a spade, and he would do so, and named the type of cancer that she had, and what she could expect, and all the while he spoke, Mai listened to him with the perfect equanimity of the battle-hardened soldier. It was as if you could not tell her anything too terrible, she was immune, or so her smile seemed to say.
He talked to her at length about diet, he said this was all the new talk now, the beneficial effects of good food, what to eat, what not to, and quizzed her about the degree of exercise she usually aimed for, and she said she liked to walk the dogs as far as Gibraltar, and when he raised an eyebrow at this, I explained it was a bathing place in Sligo, and for a moment I knew in her confusion she had forgotten we had moved to Dublin long since, and anyhow the two dogs were dead. Then he laughed, shook my hand, ‘Of course,’ he said, ‘didn’t I swim there as a boy,’ and he took her right hand in both of his, clasped it briskly, and left us. A week later we were headed back to Dunseverick Road and all Mai had to show for her ordeal so far was the vivid purple scar across where her liver was, swollen and hard.
Every night for three months or so I read her Dostoevsky – The Idiot was her favourite book – and The Brothers Karamazov, which she thought was a bit long-winded, but endured it nonetheless, and she liked the way Dostoevsky always wrote out the whole of someone’s name, patronymic and all, in the Russian style. I tried to get her going at the Kipling but she thought Kim was strange, and Bengal Lancer she said was a lot of baloney. So I double-backed to Dostoevsky, then Madame Bovary, which she thought maybe the second best of the bunch. The trouble was she could do no drinking because the pain subsequent to drinking was too immense. She did try, but it was not a pleasant business, and the aftermath of vomiting and groaning too terrible and pitiful for her to want to repeat it. Bizarrely enough some of the colour came back into her cheeks, and she began to look very well, very thin and stylish anyhow, and she said she certainly enjoyed losing the weight. You can’t lose enough weight, she said. She was able to wear dresses now that she hadn’t worn since the early 1930s, but she had kept everything, because as she said that was her library, the long array of dresses, skirts, blouses, trousers, chemises and God knows what else, still just holding out in one of the wardrobes, though in truth sometimes musty and faded. I let the water scheme job in Sligo go to hell, and stayed at home, I even
went into the bank in Clontarf and borrowed a few pounds on the security of her bracelets and necklaces. As if sensing something, or some information had drifted to him on the air, more mysterious but as reliable as Maria Sheridan’s telegrams, her brother Jack arrived one day, all the way from Roscommon, and the two of them ensconced themselves in the bare and shameful sitting room, and talked themselves stupid, Jack emerging at the bell of evening, embracing me briefly in the hall, and driving off back to the West.
I was cooking then for the three of us, and indeed Mai stood in the kitchen peeling potatoes and talking about nothing, her serious face held sideways as she rushed the knife under the potato skin with deadly precision. In the nights I threw caution to the wind and lit the fire in the dank grate, although it was supposed to be July, and read the books to her by the light of the lengthened days, the new tar roads of Dublin transformed by the late sunlight, the hesitant tide between Clontarf and Bull Island flowing past limpid and deceptively still.
In due course the cancer bit deeper into her and we were obliged then to return to the hospital. She was put into another room than the one she had previously occupied, on her own, and I pillaged the city of Dublin for fashion magazines, and some of the time Mai was in a high good humour, and joked and talked just the way she had done as a student, as if I were her friend at college.
It wasn’t that all the history of chaos fled away, or seemed never to have happened. It was just a fleeting, blessèd time of grace, when by some mercy we were at our ease together in a fashion that we had not always managed while she was in her prime and health. It didn’t mean that our sins were not forever on our heads, it didn’t mean we were forgiven. And Mai certainly was not healed, and maybe there was no true joy in it for her, since she had her walking papers, and well she knew. But all the same I never saw any courage to match hers, even in a dying soldier. The wolf is always in the dog, and the briar in the rose, she did not suffer a sea change, she was still Mai McNulty, née Kirwan, and I was still Jack. But I still can never be ashamed that I loved her to the degree I did, nor can ever speak against that love, or pick over it for its veracity or trueness. For it was franked and stamped by the same hand that franks and stamps all human loves.