The Temporary Gentleman Read Online Free PDF Page A

meaning to, I laughed. Maybe without meaning to also, she laughed as well. A heap of stray wind from the river broke against us both in that moment, her right hand reached up to pull her coat closed, one of my hands dashed to secure my hat. She shook her head then, still laughing, and turned about, walked on, still laughing, her head thrown a little back, much to my delight, much to my delight, laughing, laughing.
       
    The next time I asked her to go out with me it seemed I had fulfilled the list of the necessary efforts a young man must make, and she agreed.
    Rin Tin Tin had gone the way of all last week’s films, and there was a ferocious weepie on instead. In the foyer, for reasons that are now lost, I fetched out a photograph of myself that I had brought to show her. It was of me, about sixteen, in my white uniform, standing with the other officers on board ship somewhere in the Straits Settlements.
    ‘Well,’ she said, without detectable irony, ‘you look lovely. You really do.’ She had quite lit up at the sight of me, and I was immensely pleased. ‘What did you have to do in that uniform?’
    ‘I was a radio operator. It was a two-year course, but I got through it in six weeks.’
    She mercifully allowed this boast to go by unmocked.
    ‘You look about twelve,’ she said.
    ‘I was only sixteen.’
    ‘The uniform is very youthening,’ she said, linking my arm to go into the cinema.
    ‘Yes,’ I said.
    ‘Such a lovely young fellow,’ she said, laughing, quite mysterious, but very, very delightful.

Chapter Four
    When I started to bring her almost weekly to the cinema in Galway I realised the pictures were something of a religion for her. There were a dozen photographs of the stars on the walls of the foyer, and she knew all the names, like a good Russian would know the icons in her local church. Something poured down on her from those staring eyes, and she indeed had something of the same, looking up at them.
    ‘The Town Hall’ they called it. It looked like an old palace in the Orient, and smelled of face-powder, disinfectant, and dead mice. The front-of-house usher would have given Tom Quaye a run for his money in the sergeant-major stakes.
    Now we were talking like lunatics, in the first voluble flood of love. She was interested in everything, in a way perhaps that I was not. I lived in a sort of lowered ignorance about politics, and truth to tell, politics, even during the civil war, seemed to happen on the fringes of everything, in the corner of your eye if anywhere. History was the burnt edges of the Book of Life, as if it had indeed been in a great fire, but it was not the story itself. And the troubles my brother Eneas had endured as regards politics had caused a sort of silence in me around such questions, up till now. But Mai was passionately interested in and supported the new government, and was constitutionally able to do nothing except worship at the altar of Michael Collins, who it turned out was a kind of family friend, through an aunt in Cavan. Luckily my brother Tom was an enthusiastic Collins man, too, so I was able to offer his opinions as my own, as it were, in what I hoped was an allowable subterfuge.
    ‘This old country needs a new lick of paint,’ she would say, with fervour, her face glowing, as if still staring at the pictures of the stars, and Collins I am sure was mingled in her imagination with Gary Cooper and the like.
    ‘When I get my degree,’ she would say, ‘I am going to try and get a post in government, you see if I don’t. I may teach for a few years and then somehow make my presence felt in Dublin, and then . . .’
    The ‘and then’ was a little vague, but her ambitions were honest and inspiring.
       
    One night, maybe six weeks into our courtship – if that was what it was, we never put a name on it – she told me she was bringing me home afterwards to meet her father. To be informed of this without notice gave me a dreadful fright. She herself was