The Secret Scripture (12 page)

Memories that I have of Fr Gaunt are always curiously precise and full, lit brightly, his face clear and intense. As I sit here writing away, I can actually see him behind my eyes, in this instance on the day he came to me with his own version of rescue.

I knew I had to leave school immediately on my father's death, because my mother's wits were now in an attic of her head which had neither door nor stair, or at least none that I could find. If we were to eat, I must find work of any kind.

Fr Gaunt arrived one day in his accustomed sleek soutane -I do not mean this critically – and as it was raining with that special Sligo rain that has made bogland of a thousand ancient farms, he was also covered in a sleek dark-grey coat of similar shiny material. Perhaps the skin of his face was also made of it, anciently, in his mother's womb. He carried a highly ecclesiastical umbrella, like something real and austere, that said its prayers at night in the hatstand.

I let him in and sat him in the parlour. My father's piano still remained, itself as animate as the umbrella, standing there against the wall, as if actively remembering my father somewhere in the brainways of its strings and keys.

'Thank you, Roseanne,' said Fr Gaunt, as I handed him a cup of tea I had heroically made out of a farthing of tea sadly already used three times. But I hoped it had one last squeeze of essence in it, come all the way from China after all, in Jackson's tea ship. We got our tea from the corner, not from the great emporium of Blackwood's, where the toffs shopped, so maybe it wasn't the best tea to begin with. But Fr Gaunt sipped it politely.

'Have you a drop of milk?' he said, kindly, kindly.

'No, Father.'

'No matter, no matter,' he said, regretfully enough. 'Now, Roseanne, you and I have things to talk about, things to talk about.'

'Oh, Father?'

'What will you do now, Roseanne, now that your poor father is gone?'

'I will leave school, Father, and get a job in the town.' 'Will you be advised by me?'

'Oh?' I said.

He drank his tea for a few moments and smiled his priestly smiles, a little repertoire indeed. I know even at this distance that he was trying to do his duty, to be kind, to be helpful. I know this.

'You have, Roseanne, various aspects to yourself, certain obvious gifts if I may say so, of…'

Just for the moment he didn't say what. I sensed that the what of this was something not completely delicate. He was looking in his arsenal of sentences for the correct sentences. He was certainly in no way being unpleasant, nor seeking to be. In fact I think he would have died before he would have offered anything unpleasant.

'Beauty,' he said.

I looked at him.

'The gift of beauty. Roseanne, I think without too much trouble I could – of course bearing in mind the opinion of your mother, and even yourself, although I must still account you almost a child, if I may so, and in grave, gravest need of advice, if I may say – but what was I saying? Oh, yes, that I think here in the town I could find you very quickly, very smartly, easily and in the nicest manner possible, a husband. Of course, there would be certain things to do first.'

Fr Gaunt was as they say warming to his theme. The more he spoke the easier the words came, all nice and milky and honey-touched. Like many a man in authority, he was sublimely happy as long as he was presenting his ideas, and as long as his ideas were meeting with agreement.

'I don't think…' I said, trying to roll back this great boulder of good sense he was pushing on my head – it felt like.

'Before you say anything about this, I know you are only sixteen, and it might not be the usual thing to marry so young, but on the other hand, I have in mind a very suitable man, who I think would have a great regard for you, maybe already has, and is in steady employ, and would be in a position therefore to support you – and your mother of course.'

'I can support us,' I said, 'I am sure I can,' I said, and less sure of anything in my life I had never been.

'You may know this man already, he is Joe Brady that now holds your father's former job at the cemetery, a very steady, pleasant, kind man, who lost his own wife two years ago, and will be quite content to marry again. In life we must look for a certain symmetry of things, and as your father once held -Hmm. And he has no children and I am sure…'

Indeed and I knew Joe Brady, the man who had taken my father's job, and come to see him buried. Joe Brady as far as I knew or could tell was about fifty years of age.

'You'd have me marry an old man?' I said, in my innocence. Because, since he was offering such magnanimous charity, I could hardly expect a man under thirty I suppose. If I wanted a man.

'Roseanne, you are a very lovely young girl, and as such I am afraid, going about the town, a mournful temptation, not only to the boys of Sligo but also, the men, and as such and in every way conceivable, to have you married would be a boon and a rightness very complete and attractive in its – rightness.'

His eloquence had momentarily failed perhaps because he had glanced at my face. I don't know what my face was showing but it wasn't agreement.

'And naturally, I would be so pleased, so relieved and delighted to be the agent, the author as one might say, of receiving you into the fold. Which I hope you will see is a politic and indeed marvellous and magical prospect.'

'Fold?' I said.

'You will be very aware, Roseanne, of the recent upheavals in Ireland, and none of these upheavals favour any of the

Protestant sects. Of course I will be of the opinion that you are in gravest error and your mortal soul is lost if you continue where you are. Nevertheless I can say I pity you, and wish to help you. I can find you a good Catholic husband as I say, and he will not mind your origin eventually, as, as I also have said, you are graced if I may say again with so much beauty. Roseanne, you really are the most beautiful young girl we have ever seen in Sligo.'

This he said with such simplicity and transparent – I almost said innocence, but something like innocence – he spoke so nicely I smiled despite myself. It was like getting a compliment from an old lady of distinction in the Sligo Street, a Pollexfen or a Middleton or the like, in her ermine and her nice tweed clothing.

'It is stupid of me to flatter you,' he said. 'All I mean is, if you will let me take you under my wing, I can help you, and I want to help you. I must also add that I held your father in the highest regard, despite his embarrassing me, and indeed had real love for him, because he was a straightforward soul.'

'But a Presbyterian soul,' I said.

'Yes,' he said.

'My mother is Plymouth Brethren.'

'Well,' he said, for the first time with a taint of animosity, 'never mind.'

'But I must mind my mother. And I will. It is my duty as her daughter.'

'Your mother, Roseanne, is a very sick woman.'

All right, I had not heard this expressed, and it shocked me to hear it. But, yes, I knew that to be true.

'More than likely,' he said, 'you will need to commit her to the asylum, I hope I am not shocking you?'

Oh, but he was shocking me. When he spoke those fearsome words, my belly churned, my muscles ached in their slings of bones. Without knowing I was going to do it, I suddenly and inexplicably vomited onto the carpet in front of me. Fr Gaunt drew back his legs with extraordinary quickness, neatness. There on the floor was the remains of the nice toast I had made for my mother and myself for breakfast. Fr Gaunt stood up.

'Oh. You will need to clean that up, I expect?'

'I will,' I said, and bit my tongue on the urge to apologise. I knew somehow I must never apologise to Fr Gaunt, and that from henceforth he would be a force unknown, like a calamity of weather waiting unknown and un-forecast to bedevil a landscape.

'Father, I can't do what you say. I can't do it.'

'You will think about it? In your grief you may make poor decisions. I understand this. My own father died five years ago of a cancer, it was a terrible death, and I mourn him still. Remember, Roseanne, grief is two years long. You will not make a good thought for a long time. Be advised by me, let me advise you in loco parentis, do you see, in place of your father let me be your father in this, as a priest ought. We have had so many dealings, he and I, and you, that you are almost in the fold already. It will save your immortal soul, and save you in this valley of sorrows and tears. It will protect you against all the foul tides and accidents of the world.'

I shook my head. I see myself, behind my eyes, shaking my head.

Fr Gaunt shook his head also, but in a different way. 'You will think about it? Think about it, Roseanne, and then we will talk again. It is a moment in your life when you are in the greatest danger. Good day to you, Roseanne. Thank you for the tea. It was lovely. And thank your mother.'

He went out into the tiny hall and into the street. When he was quite gone, long out of ear shot, and only the smell of his clothes lingered oddly in the room, I said:

'Goodbye, Father.'

Dr Grene today. He has shaved his beard!

I don't remember if I mentioned his beard. A beard on a man is only a way of hiding something, his face of course, but also the inner matters, like a hedge around a secret garden, or a cover over a bird cage.

I would like to say I didn't know him when he stepped in, because that is what you would expect, but I did know him.

I was sitting here writing when I heard his step in the corridor and just managed to get everything hidden in the floor before he knocked and came in, as always not an easy task for an ancient cailleach like myself. A cailleach is the old crone of stories, the wise woman and sometimes a kind of witch. My husband Tom McNulty was the master of such stories, which he told with perfect force mainly because he believed every word of them. Sometime I will tell you about the two-headed dog that he saw on the road to Enniscrone, if you like. How would I know what you like? I am getting used to thinking of you there, somewhere. This cailleach is deluded in the head! The old midwife. I am only the midwife to my own old story. It is midwifery enough.

Dr Grene was very subdued, very quiet, very shiny in the face. He might have rubbed some unguent onto his skin when he shaved it, to spare it some of the shock of the air. He wandered over to the table – I was now sitting on the bed, among the tiny landscapes of the coverlet, I think they are French scenes, there is a man carrying a donkey on his back and other things – and Dr Grene lifted from the table my father's old copy of Religio Medici and looked at it idly enough. I was surprised when my father died to see that the book was printed in

1869, although I knew he had it always for many years. His name, and the place Southampton, and the date 1888 were of course pencilled onto the flyleaf, but still I hoped maybe the book had been put into his youthful hands by the hands of his own father, my grandfather, a person of course whom I never met. It might have been. So that when I held it in my hands, there was as it were a history of hands surrounding the little volume, the hands of my own people. Because a lone person takes great comfort from her people, in the watches of the night, even the memory of them.

Because I knew the little book so well, I could guess what Dr Grene was looking at. It was a picture of Sir Thomas Browne, with a beard. Perhaps as he looked at the beard, a very fierce jutting object in a round engraving, he may suddenly have been regretting the loss of his own. Sampson Low, Son, and Marston were the printers. That Son was beautiful. The son of Sampson Low. Who was he, who was he? Did he labour under the whip of his father, or was he treated with gentleness and respect? J. W. Willis Bund supplied the notes. Names, names, all passed away, forgotten, mere birdsong in the bushes of things. If J. W. Willis Bund can pass away forgotten, how much easier for me? We share in that at least.

Son. As little I know about my own son. The son of Roseanne Clear.

'An old book,' he said.

'Yes.'

'Whose name is that, Mrs McNulty, Joe Clear?'

Dr Grene now had a perplexed look on his face, a very deep thinking look, like a young boy figuring out an arithmetic problem. If he had had a pencil he might have licked the lead.

He had shaved his beard and was no longer hiding his face, so I felt suddenly I owed him something.

'My father,' I said.

'He was an educated man then?'

'He was indeed. He was a minister's son. From Collooney.'

'Collooney,' he said. 'Collooney suffered so in the troubles in the twenties,' he said. 'I am glad somehow that one time there was a man there that read the Religio Medici.'

The way he said the last two words slowly I knew he had never encountered the book before.

Dr Grene opened the book further, passing by the introduction, and hunting mildly for the beginning of the book, as a person does.

'"To the reader. Certainly that man were greedy of life, who should desire to live when all the world were at an end…"'

Dr Grene gave a strange little laugh, not a true laugh at all, but a sort of miniature cry. Then he laid the book back where he had found it.

'I see,' he said, though I had said nothing. Perhaps he was talking to the old bearded face in the book, or to the book itself. Seventy-six, Thomas Browne was when he died, a youngster compared to me. He died on his birthday, as sometimes happens, if rarely. I suppose Dr Grene is about sixty or so. I had never seen him quite so solemn as this today. He is hardly a man for jests and jokes, but he sometimes has a curious lightness carried about with him. Compared to poor John Kane, with all his sins, his supposed rapes and wrong doing in the asylum, Dr Grene is like an angel. Perhaps compared to many, I can no longer say. If Dr Grene feels himself washed up on this terrible shore of the asylum, if he feels himself in any way yesterday's man, as the saying goes, for me he is tomorrow and tomorrow. Such were my thoughts as I looked at him, trying to untie the knot of his new mood.