The Secret Scripture

by Sebastian Barry

  ‘Why would you tell him to do that, John Lavelle?’ I said.

  ‘I don’t know. Only that . . .’

  ‘Only that what?’

  ‘That I don’t know what’s going to happen to me now. I think I must go for the gun again. I haven’t taken much to the road digging. That’s one reason, and it frightens me to death. 191

  The other reason might be, that I never saw anyone as lovely as you only except Kitty.’

  ‘You’re nearly a stranger. There’s nothing of normal things in this.’

  ‘There it is,’ he said. ‘A stranger. It’s a country composed entirely of strangers then. You are right. But all the same what do people say when they feel like I do? I love you, they say, I suppose.’

  We had been there a good while and now I heard other voices, new voices coming up from below. I gathered my self and my wits, and almost bolted for the path. There was no way down the mountain except by that course, though my first thought was to strike out across the heather and scree eastwards, but at the same time I knew there was a great cliff below Knocknarea, and I might be many hours trying to get round it, and onto a road. So many hours that Tom might finally wonder what was amiss with me, and even raise the country to find me. Such were my thoughts as the wind, stiffened now as it came on towards teatime, threw my hair forward across my face, and the little group came into view below.

  It was a group of men in black coats and cassocks. A little party of priests out on a Sunday walk. Wasn’t there a touch of blasphemy in that? Would that their piety and their prayers and their rules had kept them close in the town. But here they were, with their different laughter, and their murmuring voices. I looked back wildly to see where John Lavelle might be. Oh, he was standing right behind me, like a component of the wind itself.

  ‘Go back away!’ I said. ‘Can’t you hide yourself? I can’t be seen up here with you!’

  ‘Why not?’ he said.

  ‘Why not? Are you mad? Are you as mad as me? Go and hide yourself in those rocks.’

  But it was too late. Of course it was. The gaggle of holy men 192

  was upon us, all smiles and good days, and raising of the hats. Except for one face, whipped red by the exertion and the wind, which looked at me with a blank, heart-hurting look. It was Fr Gaunt.

  When I got back down to our little house in Strandhill, Tom was not there because he had gone into Sligo to greet ‘the General’ at the station, in preparation for a parade along Wine Street, to highlight as Tom put it the great enthusiasm for General O’Duffy’s movement in the town. He had begged me to put on a blue blouse that Old Tom had been inveigled into stitching up for me, but the truth was that part of Tom frightened me. I suppose in the original Café Cairo, in Cairo itself –

  and I do not think nice Mrs Prunty was ever there – there was a lot of use of the hubble bubble, not to mention the famous hootchie cootchie girls doing their belly dance. I had never seen a man with opium in him, but I wondered was it something like the almost oriental glow in Tom’s face when he spoke of the General, and Corporatism (whatever that was, I’m not sure he really knew himself), and getting back at the ‘traitor de Valera’, and the ‘true start of Ireland’s glory’, and all the rest of the jangling song of those times. When they had marched in Sligo, they were all coming out to Strandhill for a rally in the Plaza. Not the least of my residual dread after meeting John Lavelle was the obvious fact that a man like him was in effect the ‘enemy’ of the General’s movement. I don’t know why that bothered me so much, but it did. I stood in our little sitting room, bare as a tenement but clean and nice, and shivered in my summer dress. I shivered, and shivered all the more when I heard the sound of engines in the distance, a little roaring noise that grew and grew, till I ran to the window and looked out and saw the stream of Fords and the like going by, Tom at 193

  the front driving his own vehicle, with a very importantlooking creature altogether in the seat beside him, in one of those folding caps and a hooked nose not unlike Tom’s brother Jack’s. There were dozens and dozens of surging motors, all with their metallic music, the white dust of the narrow seaside road rising from the wheels like the Sahara itself. And all the faces, men and women, alight above the blue blouses and shirts, with that strange glow, just a few fields east of happiness

  – the picture of impossible optimism, like advertisements in the odd American magazine that reached us in that far-off world of Sligo, sent to relatives wrapped up with the coveted Yankee dollars.

  And I had the curious sensation of looking out on someone else’s world, someone else’s Tom, someone else’s Sligo. Like I wasn’t going to be there very long, and had not been there long enough, or even had never been there. Like a ghost to myself and certainly not for the first time.

  I went to bed and lay in the cool sheets and tried to be calm. I tried to be myself, and yet could not really locate that person. Roseanne. She was maybe slipping away from me. Perhaps had done so long ago. In the war of independence it wasn’t just soldiers and policemen had to be killed, even those stupid fellas that had gone out to the Great War without thinking what they were doing, but also tinkers and tramps and the like. People that were dirtying up the edges of things, those people that stood at the edges of photographs of nice places and in certain people’s eyes were starting to stink them up. When there were bombs dropped on Belfast by the Germans in that coming war, tens of thousands of people fled out into the countryside, thousands of them from the Belfast slums, and no one wanted them in their houses, because they were a forgotten race of savages, so poor they had never seen a lavatory, and would eat nothing but tea and bread. They pissed on the floors of decent houses. It was all the people that were hidden till the Germans 194

  bombed them out of it, burned them out. Like my father’s poor rats. I was lying in a bed of clean sheets, but I felt like them. Like them, I wasn’t grateful enough, and had fouled my own nest. I knew that in the eyes of Tom’s friends outside, gathered in the Plaza, if they knew everything about me, they would want to – I don’t know, extinguish me, judge me, put me outside the frame of the photographs of life. The delightful landscapes of ordinary life. Of course I knew nothing of Germans then, except the General was a man like they had in Italy, in Germany, in Finland those times, mighty noisy men that wanted to fire everyone up and have them all clean and fit and pure, so that they could go out in a great horde and extinguish the lousy, the ragged, the morally unsound. Somewhere in my heart, in the passport of my heart, if you opened it, you would see my real face – unwashed, seared by fire, terrified, ungrateful, diseased, and dumb.

  I awoke in the small hours, nudged into wakefulness by little sounds of Tom in the room. There was a huge moon over Knocknarea, the cairn visible as if in the very sunlight. I was still caught in a dream, and just for a moment thought I saw a figure atop the cairn, in black clothes, with a great fold of bright wings behind him. But of course it was far too far away for that.

  ‘Are you awake, pet?’ said Tom, and when I looked at him, he was struggling out of his braces.

  ‘You have blood on your face,’ I said, sitting up.

  ‘I have blood all over my blessed shirt,’ he said, ‘although you can barely see, what with the blue.’

  ‘My God,’ I said, ‘whatever happened, Tom?’

  ‘Nothing at all. We had a bit of resistance from the guards in Sligo. We were marching as good as gold, when out from Quay Street comes a fierce little muster of lads, fellas brought in from Collooney I suppose, because they were not regular Sligo guards. And one of them gave me such a swipe with a stick, I 195

  tell you, it hurt like the bejaysus. And the General starts roaring at them, and the guards roaring back, “You have no permit to march in Sligo!” And the General the head of the same guards only a few years ago. Well. There was such shouting and frothing about generally. So we were very glad to get out to the hall, let me tell you. And didn’t we have a great time then. Such a crowd you never saw.’

 
By this time he had his nice striped pyjamas on and then he went to the washstand basin and vigorously flung water at his face, and wiped it off in the towel, and then threw himself into the bed beside me.

  ‘What did you do?’ he said. ‘You ought to have come. It was great.’

  ‘I went walking,’ I said.

  ‘Oh ho,’ he said, ‘did you? And why not?’

  Then he put his left arm under my hand and held me close to him, and after a while, between the blood and moonlight, we went to sleep.

  Dr Grene’s Commonplace Book

  There was absolute panic in the building yesterday. I must say I was almost encouraged by the level of response, because so often in the past there has been what felt like a cloud of inaction hanging over these old roofs. But the young lady who had been found upset and bloodstained had then disappeared. The ward nurse was terrified, because her sister had just been in, and given her a gift of a nice new dressing-gown. Nurse had noted the belt made of the same light material as the gown, but had not had the heart to remove it straight away. So she was tearing about the wards, asking everyone had they seen the poor unfortunate woman, and generally making the ancient 196

  patients stir for the first time in many years. In the end it was discovered not that she had hanged herself, but that she had gone down to front office in her dressing-gown, and signed herself out, as she has the perfect right to do under the new legislation. And had gone down to the main road and hitched a lift to the town, and from there boarded a bus to Leitrim, all of this still in the gown. It was like a magic coat, carrying her back to Leitrim. Her husband rang last night to tell us, and he was a very angry voice at the other end of the phone. He said the hospital was supposed to be a place of refuge. The head nurse spoke to him, and was very submissive, not in the style of the old matrons we used to have here. I don’t know what resolution this will have, but it struck me as having all the qualities of a rescue. I wish the poor woman well and I am sorry we were of so little use to her, quite the opposite. And I am very glad the nurse’s panic was unfounded.

  This morning I went up to Mrs McNulty’s – no, no,

  Roseanne’s – room quite light-hearted. Of course, the position of the young woman is still perilous, but I am old enough now to put a premium on mere life.

  The room had a little bit of sideways spring sunlight, that seemed to have crept in through the window-glass with an almost apologetic delicacy. A little square beam of it sat across Roseanne’s face. Yes, she is very old. Sunlight as always the most brutal measurer of age, but also, the most faithful painter. I thought of the line from T. S. Eliot that we learned at school in England,

  My life is like a feather on the back of my hand, Waiting for the death wind.

  It is spoken by Simeon, the man who wished to live long enough to see the newborn Messiah. I do not think Roseanne is waiting for that. I thought also of those self-portraits of Rembrandt van Rijn, so faithfully faithless to the idea of our 197

  own looks that we carry as an antidote against remorse. How we decide not to allow the fact that our skin is dropping down our jaws and coming away underneath our chins like plaster detaching from its laths in an old-fashioned ceiling. Her skin is so thin you can see the veins and whatnot, like roads, rivers, towns, and monuments on a map. Something stretched for purposes of writing on it. No monk however would have risked the nib of a pen on such thin parchment. And again I thought, how beautiful she must have been, if she is so oddly beautiful now at one hundred years old. Good bones, as my father used to say, as if, growing old himself and those he knew growing old around him, he knew the value of them. She has a rash on one side of her face though, quite red and

  ‘angry’ as they say, and I thought her tongue was rather in the way of her talking in some way, like it was a little swollen at the root. I must get the medical doctor Mr Wynn to have a look at her. She may well need an antibiotic.

  Whether she caught my mood or what, I don’t know, she was very responsive, even revealing. She was at her ease in a curious way. Maybe it was happiness. I know she absolutely delights in the improvement of the weather, in the turning of the year. She puts a lot of faith in those daffodils along the avenue, planted there by some old grandee when this place was a great house and estate, in those old vanished days. With fearful delicacy on my own part, trying to take my cue from the sunlight, I finally broached the subject of her child. I say ‘finally’ as if I have successfully broached a thousand other subjects, or have been leading up to the child. But I had not. But the whole matter has been much on my mind, because of course, if what Fr Gaunt wrote is true, then the whole question of her state of mind and her long presence here and in Sligo is decidedly and probably permanently vexed. Speaking of Sligo, I have written again to ask if I may visit there sometime soon, and talk to the administrator, who it turns out is an old 198

  acquaintance, a man called Percival Quinn, I think the only Percy I have ever heard of in the present era, let alone met. It was he apparently who made the extra effort to dig out Fr Gaunt’s deposition, and there may well be other files there that even Percy feels can’t be communicated, but I don’t know. We are like MI5 sometimes in this our profession of psychiatry. All information becomes sensitive, worrying, and vulnerable, even sometimes I think the mere time of day. However, I will follow my instincts.

  Tonight there is total calm in the house. It is almost as eerie as the knocking was. But I am grateful. Human, alone, ageing, and grateful. Would it be out of place to write here, to write here directly to you, Bet, to say, I love you still, and am grateful? Roseanne was so vulnerable, so admirable, so open in my meeting with her, I knew I could have asked her anything, pursued any topic, and probably got the truth, or what she believes is the truth. Well I knew it, my advantage, and if I had pressed it, I would have gained a great deal but, maybe, lost something. Today was the day she might have told me everything, and today was the day I opted myself for her silence, her privacy. Because it strikes me there is something greater than judgement. I think it is called mercy.

  Roseanne’s Testimony of Herself

  Dr Grene came in, very upbeat, drew up his chair like he certainly meant business. I was so taken aback that I actually engaged in a certain amount of conversation.

  ‘It is a lovely spring day,’ he said, ‘and I am emboldened to ask you again some of these wearying old questions that I am sure you wish I would stop asking. But I do feel there may be 199

  some gain in doing so. Just yesterday I heard something that makes me feel that nothing is impossible. That things that at first sight seem dark and intractable may actually be able to admit some light, some unexpected light.’

  He talked like that for a while and finally reached the question. It was again about my father and I was content enough, for the second time, to tell him that my father was never in the police. I told him though that there was a police connection in the McNulty family.

  ‘My husband’s brother called Eneas was in the police. He joined them in about 1919, which was not a good time to seek employment there,’ I said, or words to that effect.

  ‘Ah,’ said Dr Grene, ‘so you think that may be how the police connection was – was mooted?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Are the daffodils out yet on the old avenue?’

  ‘They are nearly out, they are threatening to come out,’ he said. ‘They may be fearful of a last frost.’

  ‘The frost is nothing to the daffodils,’ I said. ‘Like the heather, they can bloom in the snow.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I believe you are right. Now, Roseanne, the second topic I thought I might raise with you is the topic of the child. I am reading in the little deposition I mentioned that there was a child. At some point.’

  ‘Yes, yes, there was a child.’

  Then I said nothing because what could I say. I am afraid I started to cry as quietly as I could.

  ‘I don’t mean to upset you,’ he said, with great softness.

  ‘I don’t
think you do,’ I said. ‘It is just that – looking back, it is all so –’

  ‘Tragic?’ he said.

  ‘That is a big word. Very sad anyhow, it seems to me.’

  He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a little folded paper handkerchief.

  200

  ‘Don’t worry,’ he said, ‘I haven’t used it.’

  I took the useless little object gratefully. Why wouldn’t he have used it, him with his own troubles so recently? I tried to imagine him sitting somewhere in his house, a place of course unknown to me. With his wife gone from him. Death as ruthless as any other lover, taking her away. And I dabbed at my tears. I felt like Barbara Stanwyck in a stupid weepie, or at least Barbara Stanwyck when she was a hundred years old. Dr Grene was gazing at me with a face so miserable I laughed. Then he perked up at this and laughed too. Then the two of us were laughing, but very softly and quietly, like we didn’t want anyone else to hear.

  I must admit there are ‘memories’ in my head that are curious even to me. I would not like to have to say this to Dr Grene. Memory, I must suppose, if it is neglected becomes like a box room, or a lumber room in an old house, the contents jumbled about, maybe not only from neglect but also from too much haphazard searching in them, and things to boot thrown in that don’t belong there. I certainly suspect – well, I don’t know what I certainly suspect. It makes me a little dizzy to contemplate the possibility that everything I remember may not be –

  may not be real, I suppose. There was so much turmoil at that time that – that what? I took refuge in other impossible histories, in dreams, in fantasies? I don’t know. But if I put my faith in certain memories, perhaps they will serve as stepping stones, and I will cross the torrent of ‘times past’, without being plunged entirely into it.