The Secret Scripture Page 3

  I peered up faithfully, faithfully, lovingly, lovingly. It is no crime to love your father, it is no crime to feel no criticism of him, and especially so when I knew him into my early womanhood or nearly, when a child tends to grow disappointed in her parents. It is no crime to feel your heart beating up to him, or as much of him as I could see, his arm now stuck out the little window, and the bag held suspended in the Irish air. Now he was calling to me, and I could barely catch his words. But after a few repeats I think I heard him say:

  ‘Are you stood back, dearest?’

  ‘I am stood back, Pappa,’ I called, I nearly screamed, such a distance the words had to rise, and such a small window to enter to reach his ears.

  ‘Then I will let loose the bag. Watch, watch!’ he called.

  ‘Yes, Pappa, I am watching!’

  He loosened the top of the bag as best he could with the fingers of one hand and shook the contents free. I had seen him place them there. It was a handful of feathers from the feather bolster on their bed, plucked out against the screeches of his wife, and two mason’s hammers he kept for when he repaired the little walls and headstones of graves.

  I stared and stared. Maybe I heard a curious music. The chattering of the jackdaws and the old scratchy talking of the rooks in the great beech trees there mingled like a music in my head. My neck was straining and I was bursting to see the outcome of that elegant experiment, an outcome my father had said might stand to me in my life, as the basis of a proper philosophy.

  Although there was not a breath of wind, the feathers immediately drifted away, dispersing like a little explosion, even rising greyly against the grey clouds, almost impossible to see. The feathers drifted, drifted away.

  My father was calling, calling, in enormous excitement in the tower, ‘What do you see, what do you see?’

  21

  What did I see, what did I know? It is sometimes I think the strain of ridiculousness in a person, a ridiculousness born maybe of desperation, such as also Eneas McNulty – you do not know who that is yet – exhibited so many years later, that pierces you through with love for that person. It is all love, that not knowing, that not seeing. I am standing there, eternally, straining to see, a crick in the back of my neck, peering and straining, if for no other reason than for love of him. The feathers are drifting away, drifting, swirling away. My father is calling and calling. My heart is beating back to him. The hammers are falling still. 22

  chapter three

  Dear reader! Dear reader, if you are gentle and good, I wish I could clasp your hand. I wish – all manner of impossible things. Although I do not have you, I have other things. There are moments when I am pierced through by an inexplicable joy, as if, in having nothing, I have the world. As if, in reaching this room, I have found the anteroom to paradise, and soon will find it opening, and walk forward like a woman rewarded for my pains, into those green fields, and folded farms. So green the grass is burning!

  This morning Dr Grene came in, and I had to scramble and rush to hide these pages. For I did not want him to see, or to question me, for here contains already secrets, and my secrets are my fortune and my sanity. Luckily I could hear him coming from far off down the corridor, because he has metal on the heels of his shoes. Luckily also I suffer not a jot from rheumatism or any particular infirmity associated with my age, at least in my legs. My hands, my hands alas are not what they were, but the legs hold good. The mice that move along the skirting board are faster, but then, they were always faster. A mouse is a brilliant athlete, make no mistake, when he needs to be. But I was quick enough for Dr Grene.

  He knocked on the door which is an improvement on the poor wretch that cleans out my room, John Kane, if that is how you spell his name – it is the first time I have written it down –

  and by the time he had the door opened I was sitting here at an empty table.

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  As I do not consider Dr Grene an evil man, I was smiling. It was a morning of considerable cold and there was a rheum of frost over everything in the room. Everything was glimmering. Myself I was dressed in all my four dresses, and I was snug enough.

  ‘Hmm, hmm,’ he said. ‘Roseanne. Hmm. How are you, Mrs McNulty?’

  ‘I’m very well, Dr Grene,’ I said. ‘It’s very kind of you to visit me.’

  ‘It’s my job to visit you,’ he said. ‘Has this room been cleaned today?

  ‘It has not,’ I said. ‘But surely John will be here soon.’

  ‘I suppose he will,’ said Dr Grene.

  Then he crossed in front of me to the window and looked out.

  ‘This is the coldest day of the year so far,’ he said.

  ‘So far,’ I said.

  ‘And do you have everything you need?’

  ‘I do, in the main,’ I said.

  Then he sat on my bed as if it were the cleanest bed in Christendom, which I daresay it is not, and stretched out his legs, and gazed down at his shoes. His long whitening beard was as sharp as an iron axe. It was very hedgelike, saintlike. On the bed beside him was a plate, still with the smeared remnants of beans from the night before.

  ‘Pythagoras,’ he said, ‘believed in the transmigration of the soul, and cautioned us to be careful when we ate beans, in case we were eating the soul of our grandmother.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said.

  ‘This we read in Horace,’ he said.

  ‘Batchelors Beans?’

  ‘I suppose not.’

  Dr Grene answered my question with his usual solemn face. The beauty of Dr Grene is that he is entirely humourless, 24

  which makes him actually quite humorous. Believe me, this is a quality to be treasured in this place.

  ‘So,’ he said, ‘you are quite well?’

  ‘I am.’

  ‘What age are you now, Roseanne?’

  ‘I suppose I am a hundred.’

  ‘Don’t you think it very remarkable to be so well at a hundred?’ he said, as if in some way he had contributed to this fact, as perhaps he had. After all, I had been under his care for thirty odd years, maybe more. He himself was growing old, but not as old as myself.

  ‘I think it very remarkable. But, Doctor, I find so many things remarkable. I find the mice remarkable, I find the funny green sunlight that climbs in that window remarkable. I find you visiting me today remarkable.’

  ‘I’m sorry to hear you still have mice.’

  ‘There will always be mice here.’

  ‘But doesn’t John put down traps?’

  ‘He does, but he won’t set them delicately enough, and the mice eat the cheese with no trouble, and get away, like Jesse James and his brother Frank.’

  Now Dr Grene took his eyebrows between two fingers of his right hand, and massaged them for a few moments. He rubbed his nose then and groaned. In that groan was all the years he had spent in this institution, all the mornings of his life here, all the useless talk of mice and cures and age.

  ‘You know, Roseanne,’ he said, ‘as I have been obliged recently to look at the legal position of all our inmates, as this has been so much in the public discourse, I was looking back over your admittance papers, and I must confess –’

  He said all this in the most easy-going voice imaginable.

  ‘Confess?’ I said, prompting him. I knew his mind had a habit of drifting off silently into a private thought.

  ‘Oh, yes – excuse me. Hmm, yes, I was wanting to ask you, 25

  Roseanne, if you remember by any chance the particulars of your admittance here, which would be most helpful – if you did. I will tell you why in a minute – if I have to.’

  Dr Grene smiled and I had a suspicion he meant this last remark as a jest, but the humour of it escaped me, especially as, as I said, he never usually attempted humour. So I surmised something unusual was stirring here.

  Then, as bad as himself, I forgot to answer him.

  ‘You remember anything about it?’

  ‘Coming here, you mean, Dr Grene?’

  ‘Y
es, I think that’s what I mean.’

  ‘No,’ I said, a foul and utter lie being the best answer.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘unfortunately a great swathe of our archive in the basement has been used, not surprisingly, by generations of mice for bedding, and it is all quite ruined and unreadable. Your own file such as it is has been attacked in a most interesting fashion. It would not shame an Egyptian tomb. It seems to fall apart at the touch of a hand.’

  There was a long silence then. I smiled and smiled. I tried to think what I looked like to him. A face so creased and old, so lost in age.

  ‘Of course, I know you very well. We have talked so often over the years. I wish now I had made more notes. These do not come to many pages, you will not be surprised to learn. I am a reluctant taker of notes, perhaps not admirable in my job. It is sometimes said that we do no good, that we do nothing for anyone. But I hope we have done our best for you, despite my culpable lack of notes. I do. I’m glad you say you are well. I would like to think you are happy here.’

  I smiled at him my oldest old-woman smile, as if I did not quite understand.

  ‘God knows,’ he said then, with a certain elegance of mind,

  ‘no one could be happy here.’

  ‘I am happy,’ I said.

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  ‘Do you know,’ he said, ‘I do believe you. I think you are the happiest person I know. But I think I will be obliged to reassess you, Roseanne, because there has been very much an outcry in the newspapers against – such people as were incarcerated shall we say for social reasons, rather than medical –

  being, being . . .’

  ‘Held?’

  ‘Yes, yes. Held. And continuing in this day and age to be held. Of course, you have been here these many, many years, I should think maybe even fifty?’

  ‘I do not remember, Dr Grene. It may well be so.’

  ‘You might consider this place your home.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well. You as well as any other person have the right to be free if you are suitable for, for freedom. I suppose even at one hundred years of age you might wish to – to walk about the place and paddle in the sea in the summer, and smell the roses –’

  ‘No!’

  I did not intend to cry out, but as you will see these small actions, associated in most people’s minds with the ease and happiness of life, are to me still knives in my heart to think of.

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘No, no, please, go on.’

  ‘At any rate, if I found you to be here without true cause, without medical basis as it were, I would be obliged to try and make other arrangements. I don’t wish to upset you. And I don’t intend, my dear Roseanne, to throw you out into the cold. No, no, this would be a very carefully orchestrated move, and as I say, subject to an assessment by me. Questions, I would be obliged to question you – to a degree.’

  I was not entirely certain of its origin, but a feeling of sweeping dread spread through me, like I imagine the poison of broken and afflicted atoms spread through people on the far margins of Hiroshima, killing them just as surely as the 27

  explosion. Dread like a sickness, a memory of a sickness, the first time in many years I had felt it.

  ‘Are you all right, Roseanne? Please don’t be agitated.’

  ‘Of course I want freedom, Dr Grene. But it frightens me.’

  ‘The gaining of freedom’, said Dr Grene pleasantly, ‘is always accomplished in an atmosphere of uncertainty. In this country at least. Perhaps in all countries.’

  ‘Murder,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, sometimes,’ he said, gently.

  We stopped speaking then and I gazed at the solid rectangle of sunlight in the room. Ancient dust moiled there.

  ‘Freedom, freedom,’ he said.

  Somewhere in his dusty voice there was the vague bell of longing. I know nothing of his life outside, of his family. Does he have a wife and children? Mrs Grene somewhere? I don’t know. Or do I? He is a brilliant man. He looks like a ferret, but no matter. Any man that can talk about old Greeks and Romans is a man after my father’s heart. I like Dr Grene despite his dusty despair because he brings to me always an echo of my father’s line of talk, filleted out of Sir Thomas Browne and John Donne.

  ‘But, we won’t begin today. No, no,’ he said, rising. ‘Certainly not. But it is my duty to set out the facts before you.’

  And he crossed again with a sort of infinite medical patience to the door.

  ‘You deserve no less, Mrs McNulty.’

  I nodded.

  Mrs McNulty.

  I always think of Tom’s mother when I hear that name. I was once also a Mrs McNulty, but never as supremely as she. Never. As she made quite clear a hundred times. Furthermore, why did I give my name ever since as McNulty, when those great efforts were made by everybody to take the name away? I do not know.

  28

  ‘I was at the zoo last week,’ he said suddenly, ‘with a friend and his son. I was up in Dublin to collect some books for my wife. About roses. My friend’s son is called William, which as you know is my name also.’

  I did not know this!

  ‘We came to the house of the giraffes. William was very pleased with them, two big, long lady giraffes they were, with soft, long legs, very, very beautiful animals. I think an animal so beautiful I have never seen.’

  Then in the glimmering room I fancied I saw something strange, a tear rising from the corner of his eye, slipping to his cheek and tumbling quickly down, a sort of dark, private crying.

  ‘So beautiful, so beautiful,’ he said.

  His talk had locked me in silence, I know not why. It was not opening, easy, happy talk like my father’s, after all. I wanted to listen to him, but I did not want to answer now. That strange responsibility we feel towards others when they speak, to offer them the solace of any answer. Poor humans! And anyway he had not asked a question. He was merely floating there in the room, insubstantial, a living man in the midst of life, dying imperceptibly on his feet, like all of us.

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  chapter four

  Later John Kane lumbered in, muttering and pushing his brush, a person I have come to accept in the way of things here, which, if they can’t be changed, must be endured.

  I noted with a small degree of dread that his flies were open. His trousers are decked with a series of clumsy-looking buttons. He is a little man but at the same time he is all brawn and braces. There is something wrong with his tongue, because he is obliged to swallow every few moments with strange hardship. His face has a veil of dark-blue veins in it, like a soldier’s face that has been too near a cannon mouth when it exploded. In the gossip of this place he has a very poor reputation.

  ‘I can’t see how you want all them books, missus, since you have no spectacles to read them.’

  Then he swallowed again, swallowed.

  I can see perfectly without spectacles but I did not say this. He was referring to the three volumes in my possession, my father’s copy of Religio Medici, The Hounds of Hell, and Mr Whitman’s Leaves of Grass.

  All three brown and yellow with thumbing.

  But conversation with John Kane can lead anywhere, like those conversations with boys when I was a young girl of twelve or so, a gaggle of them at the corner of our road, standing in the rain indifferently, and saying things to me, in soft voices – at first in soft voices. In here, among the shadows and the distant cries, the greatest virtue is silence.

  Those that feed them do not love them, those that clothe them do not fear for them.

  That is a quotation from something, what or where I do not know.

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  Even gibberish is dangerous, silence is better.

  I have been here a long time and in that time have learned the virtue of silence certainly.

  Old Tom put me here. I think it was him. It was a favour to him, for he himself worked as tailor in the Sligo Lunatic Asylum. I think he put money in with me, because of this room. Or does Tom my hus
band pay for me? But he could not still be alive. It is not the first place I was put, the first place was –

  But I am not concerned with recrimination. This is a decent place, if not home. If this were home I would go mad!

  Oh, I must remind myself to be clear, and be sure I know what I am saying to you. There must be accuracy and rightness now.

  This is a good place. This is a good place.

  There is a town not far off, I am told. Roscommon town itself. I don’t know how far, except it takes half an hour in a fire engine.

  This I know because one night many years ago I was roused from my sleep by John Kane. He led me out into the hallway and hurried me down two or three flights of stairs. There was a fire in one of the wings and he was leading me to safety. Instead of bringing me to the ground floor, he had to cut across through a long dark ward, where the doctors and other staff were also gathered. There was smoke coming up from below, but this place was deemed to be safe. The gloom gradually brightened, or my eyes adjusted to it. There were maybe fifty beds there, a long thin room with curtains drawn everywhere. Thin ragged curtains. Old, old faces, as old as my own now. I was astonished. They had lain there not too far away from me and I did not know. Old faces that said nothing, lying in stupor, like fifty Russian icons. Who were they? Why, they were your own people. Silent, silent, sleeping towards death, crawling on bleeding knees towards our Lord.

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  A tribe of onetime girls. I whispered a prayer to hurry their souls to heaven. For I think they crept up there very slow. I suppose they are all dead now or mostly. I never visited them again. The fire engine came in half an hour. I remember because one of the doctors remarked on it.

  These places unlike the world, with none of the things we praise the world for. Where sisters, mothers, grandmothers, spinsters, all forgotten lie.

  The human town not so far off, sleeping and waking, sleeping and waking, forgetting its lost women there, in long rows. Half an hour. Fire brought me in to see them. Never again. Those that feed them do not love them.

  ‘Do you want this?’ says John Kane in my ear.

  ‘What is it?’

  He was holding it in the palm of his hand. Half the shell of a bird’s egg, blue like the veins in his face.