The Secret Scripture

by Sebastian Barry

  Except by Roseanne.

  How do I put all this to her? And this is just the end of the first section, there is another part that itemises her own later history. And in it a truly miserable and even horrifying accusation against her. The sins of the father are one thing, but the sins of the mother . . . Well. I must remember, I tell myself again, why I am engaged in this assessment. Be professional. 180

  Keep my distance. After all, having been reared in England, albeit as an Irish child of some kind, I already have distance I believe from the strange chapters of this country’s bewildering story.

  And aren’t all our histories tangled and almost foreign to ourselves, I mean, to our imaginations? My own mother’s death, how cruel that was, in every way, and the only good thing I can think of that came out of it was, it ‘inspired’ me to read psychiatry at Durham, almost as an act of retrospective and hopeless insurance against the thing happening. She lived in paradise across the river from Padstow, in a house envied and admired by the summer visitors, sitting in its trees on the very strand.

  Of course, not my ‘real’ mother, not my ‘real’ father either. Every year in their retirement the two of them went to the Lake District. My father climbed a mountain one morning without her. When he reached the summit, he gazed down on the valley below, there was a lake there, and he saw a tiny figure advance into the water. He was too far away to be heard. He knew instantly who it was.

  Some three years after they adopted me, having given up the hope of having a child of their own, they did have a child of their own, my brother John. He was devoted to me. When we were fishing as kids in our local stream, he would stand for hours in his shorts in the river, bending over with a jamjar to catch minnows for my hooks.

  When I was fourteen, we would cycle in the morning

  around the estuary to get our buses, myself to the Catholic Grammar School and himself to the prep school I had once attended. The bus stops were close to each other, but on opposite sides of the road, because his school was in the other direction. It was just a little country road outside the village, and the buses were those shining, chunky vehicles of those times. One morning – and how everything becomes a little story –

  181

  once upon a time I might as well say – having heaved our bikes behind the hedge as we always did, I saw my bus coming along the road, and his bus coming the other way almost at the same distance. John, aged about ten, gave me a kiss and a hug and started off across the road. I found I was still holding his coat with my own, and called out to him, ‘Hey, young fellow!’ John stopped and turned about. ‘Your coat!’ I said, and made to throw it, and I saw John smiling, and he came back a few steps towards me. By this time the two buses were upon us, and whatever calculation the drivers had made for the little lad crossing the road, my shout to John had done a great mischief, and my bus drove through him, myself still holding the coat out to him. That was the cause of my mother’s sorrow.

  Great sorrow. Beyond imagining. Her deepest heart

  destroyed. And yet there is something in it that eludes me. A true understanding.

  Her life was rich in other ways. She lived in paradise. Indeed she left my poor father in paradise. Was I not also angry with her? That I wasn’t in any way enough? Or my father? That she didn’t endure? That is so unfair, I know. But, there is such a thing as endurance, it is a quality. I suppose what I am trying to write, while not being in any way disrespectful of my mother, is that Roseanne has endured, even though her life is all farthings.

  I am a bit disgusted with myself for writing this.

  And why am I crying?

  I am astounded to read back over what I just wrote. I have made an anecdote out of the tragic death of my brother, for which, as is clear to me from the cooled syntax, I obviously blame myself. Even when I was at Durham, and we students used to practise analysis on each other, I never discussed this. I never even think about it, I have given it no valency at all in the last fifty years. It is a scandal in the halls of myself. I see that, clearly, staring at the bare facts. But how on earth would I start 182

  to look at it now, how would I ever heal myself? It is beyond my capacity. The only man I might have talked to about this is Amurdat Singh, long in his grave. Or my father, likewise. What he must have suffered, in his lovely English privacy. But this is beside the point. I am clearly content to be beyond help. It is disgusting. I am not only crying now, for the record, but trembling also.

  Of course Roseanne’s life spans everything, she is as much as we can know of our world, the last hundred years of it. She should be a place of pilgrimage and a national icon. But she lives nowhere and is nothing. She has no family and almost no nation. A Presbyterian woman. It is sometimes forgotten the effort that was made in the twenties to include all shades of opinion in the first Irish senate, but it was an effort that soon lost heart. Our first president was a Protestant which was a beautiful and poetic gesture. The fact is, we are missing so many threads in our story that the tapestry of Irish life cannot but fall apart. There is nothing to hold it together. The first breath of wind, the next huge war that touches on us, will blow us to the Azores. Roseanne is just a bit of paper blowing on the edge of the wasteland.

  And I realise I have become a little too much engaged with her. Perhaps I am obsessed. Not only can I not get her story from herself, I have a version of her life that I think she would reject. I have a dozen other souls to attend to, to listen to, to see if they can be placed back in the ‘community’. By God, this place is to be dismantled, dispersed, I have much to do, much to do.

  But every day I feel compelled to go up to her room, often I hurry, as if there is an urgency, like at the end of that old film, Brief Encounter. As if, should I delay, she will not be there. As indeed she may not.

  Without Bet it is impossible for me to live. Now I must learn to do that.

  183

  Perhaps I am using Roseanne as a means to that, attending someone I admire and yet at the same time have power over? I must interrogate my own motives now in everything, because I fear there has not been much in the way of justice brought to her in the past, leaving aside the seriousness of the allegation, or perhaps rumour is a better word, against her. Although she is buried here to some degree, she is not Saddam in his terrible hidey hole, she is not to be pulled from it and her teeth examined like a horse (although note to myself, her teeth should be attended to, I noticed a lot of blackness in her mouth). Her teeth examined, her body deloused, disgraced, dispatched. 184

  chapter sixteen

  Roseannne’s Testimony of Herself

  Dr Grene was in just a little while back. As he came into my room he happened to tread on the loose floorboard where I hide these pages, which gave an unmerciful squeak, just like a mouse when the bar of the mousetrap whips down, and gave me a fright. But no, Dr Grene was paying no heed to anything, even to me. He sat in my old chair and said nothing. The small light from the window barely illuminated his face. From my vantage in the bed, he was all profile. He acted really as if he were alone, now and then heaving great sighs that I don’t think he was aware of. They were unselfconscious sighs. I let him be. It was nice to have him in the room, without questions. Anyway, I had my own thoughts to ‘entertain’ me. It is as well our thoughts are silent, closed, unread.

  Why then am I writing this?

  Eventually, just as I thought he was going, like those detectives in the old films, he turned about at the door and looked at me and smiled.

  ‘Do you remember Fr Garvey?’ he said.

  ‘Fr Garvey?’

  ‘Yes, he used to be the chaplain here. About twenty years ago.’

  ‘Was he the little man with the hairs in his nose?’

  ‘Well, I don’t remember the hairs. I was sitting there, and I just remembered, you didn’t like him coming to see you. I don’t know why I suddenly remembered that. Was there any reason for that?’

  ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘No. It’s just that I don’t like the religiou
s.’

  185

  ‘The religious? You mean, people that believe?’

  ‘No, no, priests, and nuns, and such.’

  ‘And is there any reason for that?’

  ‘They are so certain about things, and I am not. It’s not because I am Presbyterian. I don’t like holy people. He was very kind, Fr Garvey. He said he completely understood,’ I said, as indeed he had.

  He lingered there in the door. Was he wanting to say something else? I think so. But he didn’t, he nodded his head a few times.

  ‘You don’t mind doctors, I hope?’ he said.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I don’t mind doctors at all.’

  And he laughed, and went out.

  Fred Astaire. Not a handsome man. He said himself he couldn’t sing. He was balding his whole life. He danced like a cheetah runs, with the grace of the first creation. I mean, that first week. On one of those days God created Fred Astaire. Saturday maybe, since that was the day for the pictures. When you saw Fred you felt better about everything. He was a cure. He was bottled in the films and all around the earth, from Castlebar to Cairo, he healed the halt and the blind. That’s the gospel truth. St Fred. Fred the Redeemer.

  I could have been praying to him that time.

  At the bottom of the mountain I picked a nice smooth stone from the rainy path. It is an old custom to carry up a stone to 186

  put on the cairn above. Oh but, yes, I was in a state. Not from the climb, that was going to be nothing to me that time. No, because my head was ‘in a whirl’ as the bodice-rippers used to say. And I can’t say why exactly, only that I knew there was something amiss in what I was doing. The day was absolutely peaceful, absolutely calm, the sky ripped open by scars of blue across the expanse of clouds, but my mood belonged to some other sort of day. When the tempests poured over Knocknarea and flooded down in invisible armies and extravagant dragons onto Strandhill, having it out there between the village houses and the sea. I was bare-armed there as I stooped to pick a stone, even in my unease careful to choose a decent one, barearmed and bare-hearted. If my father had his fate I also had my fate I suppose. Dear reader, I ask for your protection, because I am afraid now. My old frame is actually trembling. It is all so long ago and I am still afraid. It is all so long ago and yet I am stooping still, and feel the stone in my fingers as if it is still then. How is that? Would that I felt that same vigour now, climbing the mountain with so fierce a step. Climbing, climbing, fiercely, fiercely. Perhaps I even feel a shadow of that. My limbs with such heat in them, my skin as smooth as metal, youth unregarded and unprized in me. Why did I know so little? Why do I know so little now? Roseanne, Roseanne, if I called to you now, my own self calling to my own self, would you hear me? And if you could hear me, would you heed me?

  About half way up the mountain there was a little crowd of people coming down, I could hear them laughing, and now and then a little rock came speeding down the path. Then they were upon me, all gabardine coats, Trilby hats, scarves, and more laughter. It was one of the better sets in Sligo, and I even 187

  knew one of the women, because she had often come into the Café Cairo. I even remembered her habitual order and seemingly so did she.

  ‘Hello, hello!’ she said. ‘Cocoa and a cherry bun, please!’

  I laughed. She certainly meant nothing demeaning by it. Her companions looked at me with mild interest, prepared to be friendly if the woman so willed it. She didn’t quite introduce me. But in a quiet voice, she said:

  ‘I hear you got married,’ she said. ‘To our wonderful man at the Plaza. Many congratulations.’

  This was nice of her, because the marriage had not exactly been the talk of the town, or if it was, not the nice talk of the town. Let’s put it that way. In fact, I am sure it caused a relatively lowscale breeze of scandal, as most things out of the way did in Sligo. It was a very small town under the rain.

  ‘Well, it’s good to see you. Have a nice climb. Cheerio.’

  And with that slight Englishism she was gone, the plummeting path pulling her away, the hats and scarves sinking quickly down the mountain. And the laughter. I could hear the woman talking in her pleasant voice, maybe filling them in, maybe remarking on the fact that Tom was not with me, I don’t know. But it didn’t bolster me much in my task.

  What was my task? I didn’t know. Why was I climbing Knocknarea at the bidding of a man irregular in the recent civil war and maybe just as irregular in his life? A jailbird that was digging Sligo ditches. Who as far as I knew was unmarried and walking out with no one. I knew what it was and how it looked, but I didn’t know what drove me up that mountain. It was maybe a sort of infinite curiosity rising out of my love for my father. Needing to be brought again close to his memory, or any memory of him that seemed to make him more present, even the events of that miserable night in the cemetery – both miserable nights.

  At the summit there was no one at first sight, except maybe 188

  the ancient bones of Queen Maeve under her burden of a million small stones. From far away in the lower fields, by the sea of Strandhill, her cairn looked distinctive but small. Only when I walked up to it on my tired legs did I realise what an enormous thing it was, the labour of a hundred men, gathering from the mountain long ago the strange harvest of fistsized stone, starting maybe with the queen under a few carefully laid slabs, and slowly, like single turves added to a turf stack, like single events added to an epic story, making the great mound for her to sleep under. I say sleep, but I mean moulder, diminish, vanish into the hill, creeping down in the moisture underground, feeding little diamonds and glints of heather and moss. For a moment I thought I could hear music, a swell of old American jazz, but it was only the bleary wind staggering over the summit. And in the music I heard my name.

  ‘Roseanne!’

  I looked around and could see no one.

  ‘Roseanne, Roseanne!’

  Now the old childhood fear got a hold of me, as if I might be hearing a voice from the next world, as if the banshee herself might be sitting atop the cairn with her last strands of dusty hair and her hollow cheeks, wanting to add me to the underworld. No, but it wasn’t a woman’s voice, but a man’s, and now as I looked a figure rose from a little enclosure of stones, in black clothes, black hair and a whitened face.

  ‘There you are,’ said John Lavelle.

  I had taken the time from the clock in the everything shop down in Strandhill village, but I still thought it an unlikely success to have met him here on the barest of information. Sunday at three. If it had been a great necessity, if it had been contingents of an army meeting to overwhelm the enemy by stealth, it might not have worked out so neatly. But fate it would seem is a perfect strategist and will work miracles of timing to assist our destruction.

  189

  I walked down to him where he stood. I think I had a great sympathy for him, I think that was it, he having lost his brother in such a terrible fashion. He was like a piece of the history of my childhood that I could not sever myself from. He had an importance whose nature I could not really fathom. It was a sort of dire respect, for him who was only a ditch-digger maybe, but nevertheless for me had an heroic aspect, the prince in beggar’s clothing.

  He was standing in what looked like a little bare bed of stones. One time it might have been roofed with a slab that had long ago fallen or been pulled sideways.

  ‘I was lying in here,’ he said. ‘It makes a lovely suntrap. Feel my shirt.’

  And he held out the black front of his shirt. When I put a hand on it briefly it was quite warm.

  ‘That’s what the sunlight will do in Ireland,’ he said, ‘given half a chance.’

  Then we had nothing to say it seemed for a few moments. My heart was pounding under my ribs, I was afraid he would hear it. Oh, it wasn’t love for him. It was love of my poor father. To be close to a man who was close to my father. The awful, dangerous, inexplicable stupidity of it.

  I suddenly saw it. I suddenly thought, Tom has married
a mad woman. It is a thought that haunted me many many times since. But I am nearly proud to say that it was I myself first had that thought.

  I could not resist the lure of the river. The open sea could not keep me. The salmon lays her eggs on the shingle of the last narrow reaches of her home river, where the water first trickles from the earth. Mysterious world, mysteries upon mysteries, queens in stones, rivers gathering underground.

  ‘Do you know what it is, Roseanne?’ he said, after a while.

  ‘You are the very spit of my wife.’

  ‘Your wife, John Lavelle?’ I said, suddenly angry.

  190

  ‘My wife, yes. You look like her, or maybe your face has taken the place of hers in my memory.’

  ‘And where is your wife then?’

  ‘She’s on the North Island of the Inishkeas. In ’21 a few of the island lads burned down the police barracks. I don’t know why, because there was no polis in it. So the Black and Tans came out in a boat to see what they could see by way of revenge. My twins were only new born that time. My wife Kitty was standing at the door of our house, holding the two boys, one in each arm, to “air” them as we say in Irish. The Tans who were a good way off decided to take a few pot shots at her. She was shot through the head, and another bullet killed Michael a’Bhilli, and Seanín fell from his mother’s arm, and struck his head on the threshold stone.’

  He was speaking very quietly and as if fearfully now. I gripped his sleeve.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

  ‘Well, I have Seanín still, he’s fifteen now. He’s not just right in the head, you know, after his fall. A little bit strange. He’s a fellow that likes to stand out on the margin of things, looking in quietly. His mother’s people are rearing him, and so he has his mother’s name, you know the fine old island name of Keane. But he likes to talk to me. I told him the last time I was home about you, and he asked me a hundred questions. And I said to him if anything happened to me, he was to look out for you, and he said he would, although I don’t think he understood the half of what I was saying, nor even knows where Sligo is.’