The Temporary Gentleman by Barry Sebastian

Author:Barry, Sebastian [Barry, Sebastian]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Literary fiction
ISBN: 9780571276981
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2014-03-25T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Fifteen

When I got back to Magheraboy I found she was out with Maggie after all though I had not seen them in the town. I went up to her room to look around. I didn’t feel I should be in there, poking about, but if I was longing to find something it was evidence that what Mai had said to Queenie was fanciful nonsense, or that Queenie had gone mad.

The room, as I expected it would be, was beautifully arranged. The old marriage bed was carefully made, Bristol fashion. On the sugar-twist side table her fashion magazines were in a neat stack, her reading glasses waiting on top. The grate was swept clean and a scuttle of coal all ready. Two mezzotints, of her father and her mother in their heyday, were framed each side of the fireplace, her father looking quite cross but magisterial. The carpet-sweeper had recently done its work. The curtains she had saved from Grattan House and adapted for this humbler window, old scenes of rural France in red and white, were almost closed, discreetly and demurely.

I began to feel very sad. Not because I thought her room was sad, but because it reminded me how happily in the main we had lived together. It was a room without me in it, though I stood in it now. I looked in the wardrobe and there were only her clothes hanging there, whereas once it had held my suits and waistcoats too. I didn’t now for a moment believe Queenie. I would have seen signs of it, signs of such great distress – I would have known at the time, of course I would have. She never showed the children anything but love. Maybe she was a bit fonder of Maggie, but still Ursula was looked after carefully – spoiled really, the two of them.

In the drawer of her dressing table right enough were a few bottles of those little tablets. Only one of them had pills in it, and the date on it was recent. Was that a good or a bad thing? I had thought, right enough, that the pills had been only to get her through a bumpy time, when she was pregnant with Maggie. Still and all, these were private matters – women’s trouble, as my Mam would have put it. I had no right to be rummaging there, and concocting theories.

In the bottom drawer were her silk knickers for special occasions and her better brassieres, and her copy of Married Love, that many a Sligo woman at that time had in her knicker drawer. Wrapped in one of her mother’s best tea-towels was the red-tinted Venetian tumbler her father had used for his one glass of whisky on a Saturday. Tucked in neatly, like bits of ordnance, were two bottles of gin, one three-quarters empty, one full. Would these date from the time Queenie said she had swallowed pills, or the time she was pregnant with Ursula – the hot bath and the gin? – I couldn’t believe they did.

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