The Secret Scripture

by Sebastian Barry

  Roseanne did perk up when she saw me, and asked me to go to her table and find a book for her. It was a book called Religio Medici in that very old battered copy I have often noticed as I passed. She said it was her father’s favourite book, had she ever told me that, and I said, yes, I thought so. I said I thought she might even have showed me her father’s name in it once, yes.

  ‘I am a hundred years old,’ she said then, ‘and I want you to do something for me.’

  ‘What is it?’ I said, wondering at her now, coming back so courageously from her panic, if panic it was, and her voice 246

  steady again now, even if her old features were aflame still from the damn rash. She looks like she has jumped through a bonfire and dipped her face to the heat.

  ‘I want you to give this to my child,’ she said. ‘To my son.’

  ‘Your son?’ I said. ‘And Roseanne, where is your son?’

  ‘I do not know,’ she said, her eyes abruptly clouding, almost fainting away, and then she seemed to shake her mind clear again. ‘I do not know. Nazareth.’

  ‘Nazareth is a long way,’ I said, humouring her.

  ‘Dr Grene, will you do it?’

  ‘I will, I will,’ I said, absolutely certain I would not, would not be able to, considering what I knew from Fr Gaunt’s blunt statement in his document. And anyhow, all the sea of time between. Her child would be also an old person now surely, even if living? I suppose I might have asked her, Did you kill your child? I suppose I might have asked her that, if I had been so mad myself. No, that wasn’t a question that could be posed nicely, even I think professionally. And anyway, she had given me answers to nothing really. Nothing that could alter my opinion of her status, medically speaking.

  Oh, and I was suddenly weary, weary, as if I were all her years and more. Weary, because I could not lift her back into

  ‘life’. I could not do it. I could not even lift myself.

  ‘I think you will,’ she said, looking at me acutely. ‘I hope so anyhow.’

  Then rather incongruously she took the book from my hands and then put it back into them, and nodded her head, as if to say, be sure that you do do it.

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  Roseanne’s Testimony of Herself

  I am not very well, it seems, I am poorly, but I need to keep going at this because I am coming to the part that I need to be telling you.

  Dear Reader, God, Dr Grene, whoever you may be.

  Whoever you are, I pledge you again my love.

  Being an angel now. I am joking.

  Flapping my heavy wings in heaven.

  Maybe. Do you think so?

  Terrible, dreepy, dark February weather I remember, and the worst, most frightened days of my life.

  Maybe seven months I was at that time. But I could not mark it for sure.

  I was growing so heavy that my old coat could not hide my

  ‘condition’ at the shop in Strandhill, though I chose only the last hours of darkness in the working day ever to go there, and in that way winter was a mercy, dark by four.

  When I looked at myself in the mirror of the wardrobe I saw a whitened phantom woman with a strangely lengthened face, as if the weight of my belly was drawing me down everywhere, like a melting statue. My belly button was pushed out like a little nose and the hair under my belly seemed to have grown to twice its length.

  I had something in me, like the river had something in it when the salmon were running. If there were still salmon in the poor Garravoge. Sometimes the talk in the shop was of the river, and how it was silting up because of the war, because the wharves and harbour upriver in the town itself were closed for the duration, and the dredgers no longer hauled up the great buckets of mud and sand. They talked about submarines out 248

  in the bay of Sligo, and the shortages, the scarcity of tea and the odd abundance of things like Beecham’s powders. They might also have mentioned the scarcity of mercy. There were next to no cars on the roads and my hut was silent most nights, though bicycles and walkers and pony-and-traps did make their way out for the dance. Someone in Sligo had got up a charabanc and it would come crawling over the sand with its cargo of revellers like a stray vehicle from another century. The Plaza sent out a few points of light which might have been a beacon to any German airplanes in the sky, the like of which I had seen returning from their work in Belfast, but nothing rained down on those dancers except time.

  I was only the observer of these matters. I wonder what my fame was in those days, the woman in the corrugated-iron hut, the fallen woman, the witch, the creature ‘gone over the edge’. Like there was a waterfall at the edge of their world that a woman could be washed over, like an invisible Niagara in daily life. A vast high wall of boiling, misty water.

  A nice-looking woman in an ermine-collared coat looked at me one day as she passed. She was very well-to-do, with black polished boots, and brown hair whose style was the result of many hours in the hairdressers. There was an old house with a high wall across the road from my hut, and she was going there, and there was the sound of a party somewhere, a gramophone playing that song Greta Garbo used to sing. I thought I knew her, so that I had stopped uncharacteristically on the road, without meaning to, as if it were some other days. Much to my astonishment, when I glanced in the gates, I saw Jack McNulty, in the most tremendous coat as usual, but I must say also with a haunted, exhausted face. Or maybe I saw everything in those terms in those days. I wondered therefore if this was the famous Mai, the grand girl of Galway that he had married. I supposed it was. She was my sister-in-law, I suppose – as was.

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  She seemed suddenly angry and bothered. I am sure I looked a sight, in my wretched coat that had never been much to write home about, and my brown shoes that had turned into clogs of a sort because I had no laces for them, they needed delicate, long laces that such a shop as Strandhill boasted did not stock. Yes, maybe my lower legs showed I had no stockings, which I know was a crime, and as for the swelling stomach under the coat . . .

  ‘Gone over the deep end, have we?’ she said, and that’s all she said. She went on then through the gates. I looked after her, marvelling at the words, but also, wondering how she meant it, cruelly, despairingly, factually? It was impossible for me to know. The couple went on together into the house, not looking back, in case I suppose Mai were to be turned to a pillar of salt, glancing back at Sodom.

  The weather was worsening and I was growing sick. It wasn’t just the sickness in the morning, going out the back of the hut onto the marram grass and heather to retch into the wind. It was another sort of sickness, something that seemed to boil in my legs, and hurt my stomach. I was getting so heavy that it was starting to be difficult to rise from my chair, and I had a great fear of being suddenly stuck there, stranded, and my greatest fear was for the child. I could see sometimes little elbows and knees poking out under my skin, and who could want to bring danger to such a thing? I did not know the number of months, and I was so terrified I would start to birth the baby, far from anyone who would help me. I wished time and again I had spoken to Mai, or called out to Jack, and I don’t know why I did not, except that my state was visible and plain to them, and they had not thought to help me. I knew that wild women on the plains of America went into the scrubland 250

  alone to give birth to their children, but I did not want Strandhill to be my America, and have to attempt something so lonesome, so full of danger. While it had been just myself, I had learned a little strategy of secrecy and survival, but now I was drifting well beyond that. I did pray to God that He might help me, I said the Our Father a thousand thousand times, if not on my knees, then by necessity in my chair. I knew I must do something, not for myself, as it was clear I was beyond help and sympathy, but for the baby.

  It was somewhere in those days of February that I set out on the road to Sligo town. I had spent an hour or two washing myself. The night before I had washed my dress, and tried to dry it all night before the dying fire. It was a little dam
p when I put it on. I stood before the mirror and combed my hair again and again with my fingers, because for the life of me I couldn’t find my brush. I had one last spark of red lipstick in a surviving tube, just one last smudge for the lips. I wished I had some pancake for my skin, and all I could do was take some old plaster off the part of the hut that was the fireplace, built of solid stone, crumble it in my hands, and try to smear it on evenly. I was going into the town itself and I would have, to some degree, to be respectable. I worked away at myself like Michelangelo on his ceiling. There was nothing I could do about my coat, but I tore a strip off the sheet on my bed, and wound it round my throat for a scarf. I did not have a hat, but anyway, the wind was so fierce it wouldn’t last long. Then off I went, pushing further up the hill than I had been for a long time, passing the Church of Ireland church at the corner, and onto the Strandhill road. I wished I could hitch a lift from the underbelly of one of those German planes I had seen, because the road stretched long and forbidding before me. The mountain reared up at my right, and I wondered at myself that I had ever walked up there so readily, so easily. It was as if a hundred years had elapsed.

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  I don’t know how many hours’ walking it was, but it was a long, hard walk. The sickness, though, seemed to pass from my body as I went along, as if there was no room for it in my present emergency. I started to become strangely buoyant and hopeful, as if my mission might be blessed after all. I started to tell myself, she will help me, of course she will help me, she is a woman also, and I was married to her son. Or might have been if it hadn’t been crossed out in Rome. I thought, cold though she had been those years ago, when first I appeared in her bungalow, surely her long experience of the world would oblige her to cast aside her dislike and – and so on.

  Round and round and round in my head it went, mile after mile, my feet plodding on, with that kind of splayed-out motion because of my big belly, not a pretty sight you may be sure, and me convincing myself of this certainty.

  Dr Grene’s Commonplace Book

  We have a demolition date now, of all things, not that far off. I must keep reminding myself. It is somehow very difficult to imagine this eventuality, although everywhere in the hospital are items standing boxed up and ready, every day vans and lorries come and bring stuff away, great reams of correspondence and records have been put in store, dozens of patients have been moved out, places suddenly, unexpectedly, in the daft way of these things, found even for my poor black-coated men, and some even tentatively put back among – among the living I almost said. Sheltered housing is the official phrase, for once a decent, human phrase. At my assessment, such as it is. A core group at the end will go to the new facility. Oh, but, I feel mightily desirous to reach a conclusion about Roseanne. Nice letter from Percy Quinn in Sligo saying to come over 252

  any time I liked. So I must set my mind to doing that. He sounded so friendly that in writing back I asked him if he knew where old Royal Irish Constabulary records were kept in Sligo, and if he could find out, he might look for the name of Joseph Clear among them, of his kindness. The civil war years were so disruptive, destructive, I don’t even know if such arcana survive, or if anyone would have bothered to protect them if they had. The Free State army, trying to bomb the Irregulars out of the Four Courts in Dublin, burned almost every civil record to ashes, births, deaths, marriages, and other documents beyond price, wiping out the records of the very nation they were trying to give new life to, actually burning memory in its boxes. With guns given or lent to them if I remember rightly by the exiting British, trying no doubt to be helpful to the new government, with that appealing, largehearted characteristic of the British, as opposed to their concomitant murderousness. Not that I said any of this to Percy. I remembered suddenly as I replied to his letter that he had been at that fateful conference in Bundoran, but he certainly hadn’t said anything about that, and I certainly didn’t refer to it. Yesterday afternoon, coming in early and weary, I went up rather fearlessly I thought to Bet’s room. I think I may have moved beyond the stage of self-recrimination and guilt. After all, when all is said and done, I am on my own now, and our story is over. I lay on her bed trying to get close to her. I smelled the faint smell of her perfume, Eau de Rochas, that I used to look for at airport duty-frees when they still had such things. I just felt rather light and strange, but not unhappy. I was asking her absence to be there as a sort of bizarre inverted comfort. Just for a few minutes I felt I was her, lying there, and that I, the real other I, was downstairs in the old bedroom, and I wondered what I thought about myself. An inadequate, traitorous, unloving man? A presence oddly necessary, even with a floor and ceiling between? I didn’t know. Even as Bet I didn’t know 253

  Bet. But just for a few minutes also I had something of her strength, her niceness, her integrity. What a wonderful feeling. My eye fell on her choice library of rose books, and I took one up and started to read. I have to say it was very interesting, even poetic. I gathered myself up then, and carefully put my hands each side of the collection, and lifted them as one, and turned them on their sides so I could carry them downstairs, like booty, like something stolen. I lay down on my own bed and continued reading, long into the night. It was as if I were reading a letter from her, or was privileged to enter a subject that probably lined her mind like wallpaper. Rosa Gallica, a plain little rose like the one you see carved on medieval buildings as Rosa Mundi, was the first. The late roses are the huge tea roses that look in gardens like dancers’ bottoms in frilly knickers. What a creature we are, bringing a simple bloom to that over the centuries, and turning those mangy scavenging animals at the edge of our ancient camp fires into Borzois and poodles. The thing itself, the first thing, will never do us alone, we must be elaborating, improving, poeticising. ‘To palliate the shortness of our lives,’ I suppose, as Thomas Browne wrote in the book that Roseanne has given me to give to her son. Between Religio Medici and the Royal Horticultural Society’s Roses I have pitched a tent of sorts. And that Bet needed and wanted to know all these things about roses suddenly filled me with happiness, and pride. And curiously enough, this feeling didn’t give way to regret and guilt. No, it opened room upon room, rose upon rose, to further happiness. That was not only the best day I have had since she died, but one of the best days of my life. It was as if she had dipped something of her essence down from heaven and helped me. I was so bloody grateful to her.

  Oh, and I forgot to say (but to whom am I saying it?) that while putting Roseanne’s book carefully aside, so I could concentrate on Bet’s volumes, a letter almost fell out of it. It was a very curious letter, in that the envelope seemed not to have 254

  been opened, unless the damp of her room had somehow resealed it. Furthermore the postmark was from May 1987, fully twenty years ago. So I didn’t know what to make of it, or quite what to do with it. My father always taught me that post was somehow sacred, and not only was it an actual crime to open another person’s letter, as I believe it is, but a grave moral lapse also. I am afraid I am sorely tempted into such a moral lapse. On the other hand, maybe I should return it. Or burn it? No, hardly. Or leave it?

  Roseanne’s Testimony of Herself

  The edges of the town received me coldly. I suppose I looked like something very wild blown in from the bog. A little girl sitting with her doll in the window of her house, trapped indoors by the storm, gave me a wave, with the mercy of little girls. I was thankful I did not have to go into the town proper. The hard pavement seemed to send bangs into my stomach, but I soldiered on. Then I was at the gates of Mrs McNulty’s bungalow. Old Tom’s garden was an acre of beauty just withheld. I could see all his beds of well-prepared plants and flowers trying to bud, with bamboos holding everything against the wind. It was going to be a wonderful show in a few weeks right enough. In the top corner of the field there was an indistinct man digging, who might have been Old Tom. Digging, unperturbed by the twisting gusts and the sleeting rain, in a big coat and a solemn sou’wester. I thought
to go over to him but I didn’t know who was my enemy. Or I thought, by Jack’s bleak stare at the gates across the road from my hut, they were all enemies. I decided not to approach him. I decided to take my chance at the door. I do remember at this point that the 255

  muscles in my stomach felt like they had highwire artists using them for swings.

  I suppose I was muddy and drenched, I suppose I was. All my efforts to look well had no doubt been entirely undone by the journey. I had no mirror to check myself, except the dark windows each side of the door, and when I looked in there I saw only a ghoul with outlandish hair. That wasn’t going to help me. But what could I do? Go back the way I came, in silence, defeated? I was frightened, I was terrified of this house, but I was more frightened of what would happen if I did not press the bell. I sit here dry and old with measly shins writing this. It is not like long ago, it is not like a story, it is not like it is over and done. It is all to do. It is something like the gates of St Peter, banging on the gates, asking for entrance to heaven, and in my heavy heart knowing, too many sins, too many sins. But perhaps mercy!

  I pushed in the thick Bakelite bell. It made no sound going in, but on withdrawing, I heard its petulant rattle inside the hall. Nothing happened for a long time. I could hear my own distressed breathing in the close porch. I thought I heard my heartbeat. I thought I could hear my infant’s heartbeat, willing me on. I pushed in the fat button again. Would that I were anyone else ringing there, a butcher’s boy, a travelling salesman, and not this heavy, panting embarrassment of a creature. I had a vision of Mrs McNulty’s miniature form, her neatness, her face as white as the flower honesty, and just as I did, I heard a scuffling the other side of the door, and the door pulled open, and herself in the gap.