The Secret Scripture Page 5

  So the brother kissed his brother’s dead mouth, returning I think the last breath that he had taken at the moment of his brother’s death. And Fr Gaunt blessed him and leaned into him, and gave the sign of the cross over him.

  ‘Can you absolve him, Father, so he will be clear to go to heaven?’

  ‘And has he done murder, has he killed another man in this war?’

  ‘It is not murder in a war to kill a man. It is war itself only.’

  ‘My friend, you know very well the bishops have forbidden us to absolve you, for they have decided that your war is wrong. But I will absolve him if you tell me he has not done murder, as far as you know. I will do that.’

  The three then looked at each other. There was a strange dark fear in those faces. They were young Catholic boys, and 42

  they feared this priest, and they feared to tell a lie about this matter, and they feared that they would fail in their responsibility to help their comrade to heaven, and I am sure each of them was racking his brains for an answer that would be truthful, for only the truth would get the dead man to paradise.

  ‘Only the truth will serve you,’ said the priest, making me jump that he had echoed my own thoughts. They were the simple thoughts of a simple girl, but maybe that Catholic religion is simple enough always in its intents.

  ‘None of us seen him do anything in that way,’ said the brother finally. ‘If we had we’d say.’

  ‘That’s good then,’ said the priest. ‘And I sympathise greatly with your sorrow. And I am sorry I had to ask. Greatly sorry.’

  He walked up close to the dead man and touched him with utmost gentleness.

  ‘I absolve you from your sins in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.’

  And all there, my father and myself included, spake the Amen to that.

  43

  chapter five

  Dr Grene’s Commonplace Book

  It would be a very good thing if occasionally I thought I knew what I was doing.

  I have completely underestimated the Department of

  Health, which in honest fact I thought would never happen. I am told for a fact that work on site will begin shortly, the other side of Roscommon town, a very fine site I am assured. Just to make things not all good news, there will be a very small number of beds, whereas here we have so many. Indeed there are rooms here just with beds, not because we could not fill them, but because the rooms have gone beyond the beyonds, with the ceilings endangered, horrible swathes of dampness up the walls. Anything iron, such as bedsteads, rusts away. All the new beds in the new place will be state of the art, without rust, pristine and nice, but fewer of them, far fewer. So we will be winnowing like crazy. I have not been able to overcome this feeling of trying to eject creatures in my charge that will not prosper away from me. It is possibly understandable, but at the same time I suspect myself. I have a really stupid habit of feeling fatherly towards my patients, even motherly. After all these years, which I know for a fact deaden the impulses and instincts of other souls working in this sector, I am jealous for the safety, the happiness, if slightly despairing of the progress, of my patients. But I am suspicious. I wonder if, having failed with my own wife, I am inclined to regard this whole place as a sort of site of marriage, where I can be sinless, unaccused, even, on a daily basis (wretched need), redeemed.

  44

  Second-hand cloth used to be called ‘beyond redemption’ or not. In the old days all the suits for the males and the gowns for the dames in a place like this would be stitched from charity cloth, the first by a tailor, the second by a seamstress. I am sure even that technically ‘beyond redemption’ was thought good enough for the poor hearts residing here. But as time goes on, as I am slowly like everyone else worn out, finding a tatter here and a tear there in the cloth of myself, I need this place more and more. The trust of those in dark need is forgiving work. Maybe I should be more frustrated by the obvious cul-de-sac nature of psychiatry, the horrible depreciation in the states of those that linger here, the impossibility of it all. But God help me, I am not. In a few years I will reach retirement age, and what then? I will be like a sparrow without a garden. Anyway, I know these thoughts come from present necessity. For the first time I have noticed the effrontery, I think that is the word, the effrontery of my profession. The comearound-the-back-of-the-house of it, oh yes, the deviousness. And now, in a further step of stupidity, I am resolved not to be devious. I have been talking all week to particular patients here, some of them quite extraordinary persons. I feel like I am interviewing them for something, their expulsion, their ruin. That if they manifest wellness, then, they must be sent into exile in that blessed ‘community’. I am very aware that this thinking is all wrong, which is why I am trying to vent it here. I must on the contrary be disinterested, as the old word goes, detached, and resist compassion at every turn, because compassion is my weakness. There was a man yesterday, a farmer from Leitrim, who used to own four hundred acres. He is mad in an absolute, pristine way. He told me his family were so old they could trace themselves back two thousand years. He himself he told me was the last of his name. He had no children, certainly no sons, and the name would die with him. The name for the record was Meel, which right enough is a very 45

  strange name, and may be from the Irish word for honey, or so he said. And he is about seventy, very dignified, unwell, and mad. Yes, he is mad. That is to say, psychotic, and I see from his file that he unfortunately was found years ago sheltering in a schoolyard, under a seat, with three dead dogs tied to his leg, which he was dragging about with him. But as I spoke to him, all I could feel was love. That was ridiculous. And I am deeply, deeply suspicious of it.

  So often my patients seem to me like a crowd of ewes pouring down a hill towards the cliff edge. What I need to be is a shepherd that knows all the whistles. I know none of them. But we shall see.

  ‘We shall see, said the rat, as he shook his wooden leg.’

  A saying of Bet’s. What does it mean? I don’t know. Perhaps it is a phrase from a famous childhood story, yet another famous childhood Irish thing I don’t know of, having spent my childhood in England. It is very stupefying to be Irish and have none of the traits or the memories or even a recognisable bloody accent. No one on this earth has ever confused me for an Irishman, and yet that is what I am, as far as I know. Bet was silent all week in her room above me, not even playing the BBC World Service, as she usually does. My wife. It completely spooked me.

  I attempted last night a rapprochement with her – if that is how you spell it. There is no doubt in my mind I do love her. Why is my so-called love then no good to her, why does it in fact imperil her? Oh, on reading over my previous entry here, where I seemed to be subtly or not so subtly flattering myself in the matter of compassion, and love – my stomach nearly turned over as I read it – I was so annoyed with myself that I went into the kitchen when I heard her making that awful stuff she drinks 46

  at night before she goes to sleep. Complan. A nightmare drink if ever there was one, that tastes of death. I mean, Life-in-Death and Death-in-Life, Coleridge, if I remember right. ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’. Whose sleeve do I have to grip, to tell my story to? It used to be Bet. Now, sleeveless. And I am sure I gripped her sleeve many a time too many. In my own parlance,

  ‘feasting’ on her energy, and giving nothing back. Well, maybe. We had most excellent days. We were the king and queen of coffee in the morning, in the dark of winter, in the early morning sun of summer that came right in our window, right in, to wake us. Ah, yes, small matters. Small matters, that we call sanity, or the cloth that makes sanity. Talking to her in those times made

  – no, God preserve me from sentimentality. Those days are over. Now we are two foreign countries and we simply have our embassies in the same house. Relations are friendly but strictly diplomatic. There is an underlying sense of rumour, of judgement, of memory, like two peoples that have once committed grave crimes against each other, but in a
nother generation. We are a statelet of the Baltics. Except, blast her, she has never done anything to me. It is atrocity all one way.

  I did not intend to write any of this here. I meant this as a professional, semi-at any rate, account of things, the last days perhaps of this unimportant, lost, essential place. The place I have been for my professional life. The queer temple of my aspirations. I know I am as afraid of having done nothing for the inmates here, of sentimentalising them and thereby failing them, I am as afraid of that as I am certain that I have ruined Bet’s life. That ‘life’, that unwritten narrative of herself, that – I don’t know. I did not set out to do it. I prided myself in all honesty on my faithfulness to her, my regard for her, my wellnigh worshipping of her. Perhaps I sentimentalised her also. Pernicious, chronic sentimentalising. Damn it, my pride in her was my pride in myself, and that was a good thing. While I had her good opinion, I had the highest opinion of myself. I lived 47

  off it, I strode out each day fuelled by it. How wonderful, how vibrant, how ridiculous. But it was a state I would give the world to retrieve. I know it’s not possible. But still. When this world here is demolished so many tiny histories will go with it. It is actually frightening, maybe even terrorising. Into the kitchen I went. How welcome a figure I can’t say. Not very, probably, my sudden presence endured.

  She wasn’t making Complan though, she was dissolving some tablets in a glass, Disprin or the like.

  ‘Are you all right?’ I said. ‘Headache?’

  ‘I’m quite fine,’ she said.

  Last January twelvemonth I know she had a little scare, she fainted in the street while she was shopping, and was brought to Roscommon hospital. She was in there all day having tests, and in the evening one of the doctors innocently phoned me to come and get her. He probably thought I knew she was there. I was so alarmed. I nearly crashed the car coming out our gate, nearly hung it on the pillar, drove like a man drives his pregnant wife in the night to hospital, when the famous pains begin, not that she ever endured that, and therein maybe lies the crux of the matter.

  She was staring now at the glass.

  ‘How are the legs?’ I said.

  ‘Swollen,’ she said. ‘It’s just water. That’s what they said. I wish it would go away.’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ I said, taking some courage from the phrase

  ‘go away’, as in holiday. ‘Look, I’ve been thinking, it might be nice, when I have everything sorted out at work, if we went away for a few days. A holiday.’

  She looked at me, swilling the fizzing tablets in the glass, readying herself for the bitter taste. I am sorry to report she laughed, just a little laugh, that I suspect she would have liked not to have let loose, but here it was, a laugh, between us.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ she said.

  48

  ‘Why not,’ I said. ‘Old times’ sake. Do us both good.’

  ‘Is that right, Doctor?’

  ‘Yes, do us good. Definitely.’

  It was suddenly difficult to speak, as if every word was a lit tle lump of mud in my mouth.

  ‘I’m sorry, William,’ she said, and that was a bad sign, the full first name, no longer Will, just William, separate, ‘I don’t really want to. I hate to see all the children.’

  ‘The what?’

  ‘The people, with their children.’

  ‘Why?’

  Oh yes, depthless stupid question. Children. The thing we have none of. Infinite pains we took. Infinite. Unrewarded.

  ‘William, you are not a stupid man.’

  ‘We’ll go somewhere where there aren’t any children.’

  ‘Where? Mars?’ she said.

  ‘Somewhere where there aren’t any,’ I said, lifting my face to the ceiling, as if that was a likely place. ‘I don’t know where that is.’

  Roseanne’s Testimony of Herself

  It was then the horror of horrors occurred.

  To this day, I swear by my God, I do not know how it happened. Someone else or others surely know, or did while they lived. And maybe the exactly how of it is not important, never was, but only, what certain people thought had happened. Not that it matters now, maybe, because all those people are swept away by time. But maybe there is another place where everything matters eternally, the courts of heaven as may be. It would be a useful court for the living but the living will never see it.

  49

  It was persons unknown that banged on the door then, and shouted out with harsh military voices. We were like a set of hidden woodlice then inside, scattering away in different directions, myself drawing back like a tragedian in a travelling play, such as might be seen in a damp hall in the town, the three Irregulars ducking down behind the table, my father drawing Fr Gaunt near to me, as if he might hide me behind the priest and his own love. For it was clear to anyone that there would be shots now, and just as I had that thought, the iron door pushed open on its big scraping hinges.

  Yes, it was lads of the new army in their awkward uniforms. It would be thought as they came in that they had bullets aplenty, at least they levelled their guns at us in their own fierce moments of concentration, and to my young eyes, looking out through my father’s legs, the six or seven faces that entered the temple looked only terrified in the light of the fire. The long thin boy from the mountain, with the trousers not quite to his ankles, jumped up from behind the table, and for mad reasons of his own, charged against the newcomers as if he was out on a proper battlefield. The brother of the dead man was right behind him, maybe in his grief demanding this of himself. It is difficult to describe the noise that guns make in a small enclosed space, but it would make the bones drop out of your flesh. My father, Fr Gaunt and I reared back against the wall as one, and the bullets that went into the two lads must have made queer tracks through them, because I saw sudden exploding pocks in the plaster of the old wall beside me. First the bullets, and then a thin falling cascade of lightest blood, over my uniform, my hands, my father, my life.

  The two irregulars were not killed, but writhed now on the ground caught up in each other.

  ‘For the love of God,’ cried Fr Gaunt, ‘desist – there is a young girl in here, and ordinary people.’ Whatever he meant by the latter.

  50

  ‘Put down your guns, put down your guns,’ shouted one of the new soldiers, almost a scream it was. Certainly the last man our side of the table threw down his gun, and his handgun out of his waistband, and he stood up immediately and raised his hands. He looked back at me just for a second and I thought his eyes were weeping, his eyes were doing something or other, certainly piercing into me anyhow, fiercely, fiercely, like those eyes could be used to kill, could be better than the bullets they did not have.

  ‘Look,’ said Fr Gaunt. ‘I believe – I believe these men have no bullets. Just everyone do nothing for a moment!’

  ‘No bullets?’ said the commander of the men. ‘Because they’ve put them all into our men up on the mountain. Are you the bastards were up on the mountain?’

  Oh dear, oh dear, we knew they were, and yet for some reason none of us spoke a word.

  ‘You’ve killed my brother,’ said the man called John on the ground. He was holding the top of his thigh, and there was a great strange dark pool of blood just under him, blood as black as blackbirds. ‘You killed him in cold blood. You had him captured, you had him harmless, and you shot him in the stomach, three fucking times!’

  ‘So you wouldn’t be creeping down on us and murdering us where we went!’ said the commander. ‘Hold these men down, and you,’ he cried to him who had surrendered, ‘count yourself arrested. Bring them all out to the truck, lads, and we’ll sort this out. In the dark of the night we catch you, in this filthy place, gathered like rats. You, man, what’s your name?’

  ‘Joe Clear,’ said my father. ‘I’m the watchman here at the graveyard. This is Fr Gaunt, one of the curates in the parish. I called him, for to see to the dead boy there.’

  ‘So you bury the likes of
him in Sligo,’ said the commander, with extraordinary force. And he rushed around the table and held the gun to Fr Gaunt’s temple. ‘What sort of a priest are 51

  you, that would be disobeying your own bishops? Are you one of those filthy renegades?’

  ‘Are you going to shoot a priest?’ said my father in astonishment. Fr Gaunt had his eyes closed fast and was kneeling now just the same as he might in the church. He was kneeling and I don’t know if he was praying soundlessly, but he wasn’t saying anything.

  ‘Jem,’ said one of the other Free State soldiers, ‘there was never a priest shot yet in Ireland by us. Don’t shoot him.’

  The commander stood back and raised his gun away from Fr Gaunt.

  ‘Come on, lads, gather them up, we’re getting out of here.’

  And the soldiers raised up the two wounded gently enough and led them out through the door. Just as the third man was being arrested he turned his face full on me.

  ‘May God forgive you for what you done but I never will.’

  ‘But I never done nothing!’ I said.

  ‘You told them we were here.’

  ‘I did not, I swear to God.’

  ‘God’s not here,’ he said. ‘Look at you, guilty as Jack.’

  ‘No!’ I said.

  The man laughed then a horrible laugh like a lash of rain into your face, and the other soldiers brought him away. We could hear them cajoling the prisoners along the paths. I was shaking in all my body. The commander, when the room was clear, held out a big hand to Fr Gaunt, and helped him to his feet.

  ‘I’m sorry, Father,’ he said. ‘It has been a terrible night. Murder and mayhem. Excuse me.’

  He spoke so sincerely my father I’m sure was as struck by the words as I was.

  ‘It was a blackguardly thing to do,’ said Fr Gaunt, in a small voice that nevertheless had a strange taint of violence in it. 52

  ‘Blackguardly. I support fully the new country. We all do, except those mad misguided boys.’