The Temporary Gentleman Read Online Free PDF

dressed as if for a royal occasion, but she always was anyway, she would have given Lillian Gish a run for her money. Luckily I had recently bought a fine coat with a leather collar, and my best trilby, grey as an otter, was set at an angle on my head. She had a garnet bracelet on one wrist like drops of blood, and a short string of pearls around her neck, jewellery her father had bought her.
    Her father.
    A young man who has been a radio operator, with two years’ service, will have a bit of money saved up. Despite the great expense now of going to the university, I still had a few pounds in the bank. I hoped her father would recognise the splendour of this.
    I didn’t pay complete heed to the picture on the screen. I sat beside her and watched, in the strange privacy that a cinema bestows on a person, her face held up to the lights and shadows. The white powder she had rubbed on it gave it the sheen and silver of the flower honesty. She had a subtle net on her black hair, with tiny bits of tinsel on it that took the light briefly as her head stirred. She smiled, she frowned, she cried, but all in some otherworldly state, as if she were asleep with her eyes open, or I were asleep and dreaming her.
    After the picture we stepped out on vulnerable leather soles into a street that was flooded by a savage temper tantrum of summer rain, a great, moving varnish of glistening black.
    ‘Let’s go into Rabbitt’s a minute and wait for this to stop,’ I said, not usually inclined to bring her to a public house – not something I thought Mr Kirwan would approve of for his daughter.
    I was grateful for the excuse of the rain because I was in need of courage from any source I could find. I put her into the snug with a few other rain-bedraggled women, furnished her with a red lemonade, and went on into the bar proper with its line of dark men, and asked for two whiskies, which I drank down smartly.
    Then I felt ready, or at least more ready.
    *
    I haven’t been able to write anything for the last three days. I haven’t been able to do much except breathe in and out.
    One afternoon about three years ago, I suddenly decided to give up drinking entirely. It just came to me, as I walked as usual towards the clubhouse, that it was time. I turned on my heel and went back home. After nearly forty years of drinking. The strange thing was, I barely missed it, I felt no pain in giving up, it just seemed the right thing to do, and I was able to do it.
    Tom Quaye knows as well or better than I do that the rains are imminent and that once they start to hammer down there won’t be much point setting off on the Indian, because this end of town will turn into a quagmire. There is a semblance of paving here and there, but it will be all drenched clothes and ruined boots, and even Tom couldn’t steer the Indian through the mud and leaps of the sudden rivers that will shortly rule over everything and everyone.
    So I didn’t have too much of a defence against his suggestion to go with him into Osu in search of a relaxing evening. In fact he filled me so full of dread about the coming rain that for the first time I felt uneasy about being here alone, though I have managed pretty well these many months. So I rashly set out with him, an hour after sundown, with a fulsome, heavy red light still sitting in the sky, and the very green of the plants queerly blazing, myself having given way to Tom’s hunger for the handlebars, and perched myself on the flimsy pillion.
    And off we went, looking more like a comedy duo than either of us would wish, some curious Stan and Ollie, though hopefully this was just in my mind. I had to hold onto his old khaki shirt, and had the opportunity to notice the remarkable number of holes in the back of it, as if rats had got at a grain sack.
    We stopped by his little quarters and in the shortest imaginable time he was out again in that sharp suit I had seen before, his hair slicked down till it was as shiny now as a beetle