The Secret Scripture (10 page)

We could see the fire burn even fiercer behind them, offering an enormous flower of yellow and red, with such a noise as mortal never heard before hell, and indeed as hell might be thought to be in nightmares. And the girls, most of them my own age in that particular chamber, started to climb out through the windows onto the wide ledge, every one with their pinnies already burning, screaming and screaming. And when they could do no better, and had no hope of any other sort of rescue, they jumped from the ledge in little groups and single, their clothes burning and burning, the flames blown up from the pinnies till they dragged above them like veritable wings, and these burning girls fell the height of that grand old mansion, and struck the cobbles. A continuous wave of them, a wave of mere girls pouring abundantly from the windows, burning and screaming and dying before our eyes.

At the inquest which my father attended, a girl who survived offered an extraordinary explanation for the fire. She said she had been lying in her bed trying to sleep, facing the old fireplace where a little heap of coals lay smouldering, when she heard a scuffling and a squealing and a little miniature instance of mayhem. She went up on her elbows the better to see, and it was an animal she said, something thin and galloping like a rat, on fire, his fur burning with unusual venom, running about the room, and setting alight as he went the poor web-thin sheets that graced the girls' beds, falling in drapes to the bare floor. And before anyone knew what was happening, there were little fires burning in a hundred places, and the girl leaped up and called to her sister orphans and fled from the growing inferno.

When my father came home he told me this story, not lying beside me in the bed as was his usual practice, but sitting on the old stool by my bed, hunched forward. No one at the inquest could offer an explanation for the burning rat, and my father had said nothing. So bleak was his fate already he dared not say anything. One hundred and twenty-three girls had been killed, from the burning and the falling. He knew from experience, just as I knew from reading his manual, that rats liked to use the handy vertical highways of old chimney flues. A meagre little fire would be no hindrance. But if such a rat were to pass close enough to the fire and it drenched in paraffin, my father knew well the consequence.

Perhaps he should have spoken. I suppose I could have, betraying him like those children of Germans when Hitler asked them to sniff out the loyalty of their parents in that late war. But I never would have spoken.

Well, all speaking is difficult, whether peril attends it or not. Sometimes peril to the body, sometimes a more intimate, miniature, invisible peril to the soul. When to speak at all is a betrayal of something, perhaps a something not even identified, hiding inside the chambers of the body like a scared refugee in a site of war.

Which is to say, Dr Grene came back today, with his questions at the ready.

My husband Tom fished as a boy for ten years in Lough Gill for salmon. Most of that time, he stood by the lake, watching the dark waters. If he saw a salmon jumping, he went home. If you see a salmon, you will never catch one that day. But the art of not seeing a salmon is very dark too, you must stare and stare at the known sections where salmon are sometimes got, and imagine them down there, feel them there, sense them with some seventh sense. My husband Tom fished for ten years for salmon in that way. As a matter of record he never caught a salmon. So if you saw a salmon it seems you would not catch one, and if you did not see a salmon you would not catch one. So how would you catch one? By some third mystery of luck and instinct, that Tom did not have.

But that was how Dr Grene struck me today, as he sat in silence in my little quarters, his neat form stretched out on the chair, saying nothing, not exactly watching me with his eyes, but watching me with his luck and instincts, like a fisherman beside dark water.

Oh, yes, like a salmon I felt, right enough, and stilled myself in the deep water, very conscious of him, and his rod, and his fly, and his hook.

'Well, Roseanne,' he said at last, 'hmm, I think it's true that -you came here about – how many years ago?'

'It's a long long while.'

'Yes. And you came here I believe from Sligo Mental Hospital.' 'Lunatic Asylum.'

'Yes, yes. An interesting old phrase. The second word after all quite – reassuring. The first a very old word, but its meaning a little dubious and not a nice word any more. Though, for myself, when the moon is full, I often wonder, do I feel – a little strange?'

I looked at Dr Grene and tried to imagine him altered by the moon, more whiskery, a werewolf possibly.

'Such enormous forces,' he said. 'The tides being pulled from shore to shore. Yes, the moon. A very considerable object.'

He stood up now and went to my window. It was so early in this winter day that indeed the moon was prince of all outside. Its light lay in a solemn glister on the windowpanes. Dr Grene nodded as solemnly to himself, looking out on the yard below, where John Kane and others banged the bins betimes and all the other clocklike actions of the hospital – the asylum. The lunatic asylum. The place subject to the forces of the moon.

Dr Grene is one of those men that now and then seem to stroke at phantom cravats, or some item of clothing from some other time. Certainly he might have stroked his beard, but he did not. Did he possess some fancy scarf or suchlike at his neck years ago in his youth? I think he might have. Anyway he stroked this phantom object now, running the fingers of his right hand an inch or two above his mere purple tie, the knot thick like a young rose.

'Oh,' he said, in a strange exclamation. It was a noise that spoke of utter weariness, but I do not think he was weary. It was an early-morning sound, made in my room as if he were on his own. As perhaps to all the intents and purposes of the actual world he was.

'Do you want to consider leaving here? Do you want me to make a consideration of it?'

But I could make no answer to that. Do I want freedom of that kind? Do I know what it is any more? Is this queer room my home? Whatever was the case, I felt again that creeping fear, like the frost on the plants of the summer, that blacken the leaves in that saddening way.

'I wonder how long you were in Sligo? Do you remember the year you entered there?

'No. Sometime during the war,' I said. That I knew.

'The Second World War, you mean?'

'Yes.'

'I was only a baby then,' he said.

Then there was a crisp, cold silence.

'We used to go down to one of the little Cornish bays, my father and mother and myself – this is my earliest memory, it is of no other significance. I remember the absolute chill of the water and, do you know, my nappies heavy with that water, a very vivid memory. The government allowed petrol to hardly anyone, so my father built one of those tandem bikes, welding together two different machines. He took the back position because that was where the power was needed, for those Cornish hills. Little hills, but lethal to the legs. Nice days, in the summer. My father at his ease. Tea that we boiled on the beach in a billycan, like fishermen.' Dr Grene laughed, sharing his laugh with the new light gathering outside to make the morning. 'Maybe that was just after the war.'

I wanted to ask him what his father's profession was, I don't know why, but it seemed too bare a question. Maybe he intended me to ask it, now I think of it. So we would begin to speak of fathers? Maybe he was casting his lure over the dark waters.

'I have not heard good accounts of the old hospital in Sligo, in that time. I am sure it was a horrendous place. I am quite sure it was.'

But I let that lie also.

'It's one of the mysteries of psychiatry that our hospitals in the early part of the century were so bad, so difficult to defend, whereas in the early part of the nineteenth century there was often quite an enlightened attitude to, to well, lunacy, as they called it. There was a sudden understanding that the incarceration, the chaining of people et cetera, was not good, and so an enormous effort was made to – alleviate matters. But I am afraid there was a reversion – something awry, eventually. Do you remember why you were changed from Sligo to here?'

He had asked that quite suddenly so that before I knew I had done so, I had spoken.

'My father-in-law arranged it,' I said.

'Your father-in-law? Who was that?'

'Old Tom, the bandman. He was also the tailor in Sligo.'

'In the town, you mean?'

'No, in the asylum itself.'

'You were in the asylum then where your father-in-law worked?'

'Yes.' 'I see.'

'I think my mother was also there, but I can't remember.' 'Working there?'

'No.'

'A patient?'

'I can't remember. I honestly can't.'

Oh, I knew he was longing then to ask me more, but to give him his due, he did not. Too good a fisherman maybe. When you see the salmon leaping, you will not catch one. Might as well go home.

'I certainly don't want you to be fearful,' he said, a little out of the blue. 'No, no. That is not my intention. I must say, Roseanne, we hold you in some regard here, we do.'

'I don't think that is merited,' I said, blushing and suddenly ashamed. Violently ashamed. It was as if some wood and leaves were suddenly cleared from a spring, and the head of water blossomed up. Painful, painful shame.

'Oh yes,' he said, not aware I think of my distress. He was perhaps plamasing me, flannelling me, as my father would have said. To enter me into some subject, where he could begin. A door into whatever he needed to understand. A part of me yearned to help him. Give him welcome. But. The rats of shame bursting through the wall I have constructed with infinite care over the years and milling about in my lap, was what it felt like. That was my job to hide it then, hide those wretched rats.

Why did I feel that dark shame after all these years? Why still in me, that dark dark shame?

Well, well.

Now we had a few mysteries in our laps. But the most pressing soon became again our poverty, which my father could not fathom.

One evening of the winter returning home from school I met up with my father along the river road. It wasn't like the joyful meetings of childhood, but I would be proud to say even now that I do believe it brightened something in my father to see me. It lightened him, dark, deep dark, though that Sligo evening was. I hope that doesn't seem like boasting.

'Now, dear,' he said. 'We'll walk arm in arm home, unless you're afraid to be seen with your father.'

'No,' I said, surprised. 'I am not afraid.'

'Well,' he said. 'I know what it is to be fifteen. Like a fella out on a headland in the blazing wind.'

But I didn't really understand what he meant. It was so cold I fancied there was frost on the stuff he put in his hair to flatten it.

Then we were coming idly, easily up our street. Up along the houses in front of us, one of the doors opened, and a man stepped down onto the pavement, and raised his brown trilby hat to the mask of a face that was just visible in the door. It was my mother's face and our own door.

'Well, Jaysus,' said my father, 'there's Mr Fine himself coming out of our house. I wonder what he was looking for. I wonder does he have rats?'

Mr Fine came towards us. He was a tall, loping man, a great gentleman of the town, with a kind, soft face like a man who had been out in a sunny wind – like the man on the headland maybe.

'Good day, Mr Fine,' said my father. 'How's everything going

on?'

'Just splendidly, yes, indeed,' said Mr Fine. 'How are you both? We were terrible shocked and anxious when we heard about the poor burned girls. That was a most terrible occasion,

Mr Clear.'

'Jaysus, it was,' said my father, and Mr Fine pressed on past us. 'I suppose I shouldn't say Jaysus to him,' my father said.

'Why?' I said.

'Ah, just him being Jewish and all,' he said.

'Don't they have Jesus?' I said, in my deep ignorance.

'I don't know,' he said. 'Fr Gaunt I don't doubt will say the Jews killed Jesus. But, you know, Roseanne, they were troubled times.'

We were quiet then as we reached our door and my father drew out his old key and turned it in the lock and we entered the tiny hall. I knew there was something troubling him now after the speech about Jesus. I was old enough to know that people make a little speech sometimes that is not what is in their thoughts, but is a sort of message of those thoughts all the same.

It was late in the evening just before it was time to go to bed that my father finally mentioned Mr Fine.

'So,' he said, as my mother shovelled ashes over the last few bits of turf, so they would burn slowly through the night, and be beautiful eggs of red sparks in the morning when she would winnow the ashes from them again. 'We met Mr Fine this evening, coming home. We thought for a minute he might have been calling here?'

My mother straightened herself and stood there with the fire-shovel. She stayed so still and so silent she might have been posing for an artist.

'He wasn't calling here,' she said.

'It's just that we thought we saw your face in the door, and he was lifting his hat – to your face like.'

My mother's eyes looked down at the fire. She had only made half a job of the ashes but she didn't look inclined to finish the job. She burst into strange, aching tears, tears that sounded like they had come up from her body somewhere, seeped through her like an awful damp. I was so shocked my body began to tingle in a queer uncomfortable way.

'I don't know,' he said, miserably. 'Maybe we were looking at the wrong door.'

'You know well you weren't,' she said, this time quite differently. 'You know well. Oh, oh,' she said, 'that I had never allowed you to take me from my home, to this cold cruel country, to this filthy rain, this filthy people.'