The Secret Scripture (17 page)

The dark story of their brother Eneas I never knew till long after, if I ever really knew it. Just a scrap of it, a few pages torn from his raggedy book. Can you love a man you only knew – in the Biblical sense – for a night? I do not know. But there was love there, gentle, fierce, proper love. God forgive me.

Dr Grene's Commonplace Book

Mirabile dictu (my having to read Virgil at school did me some good at least, in that it has left me with that phrase), some further documentation has arrived from Sligo Mental Hospital. It is the top copy of the old deposition and their storage arrangements must be better than ours by some measure, because the sheets are quite intact. I must say her story as itemised in the document interested me greatly, offering a sort of landscape to put behind the figure I know in the bed. A sort of human vista of troubles and events, like in a painting by da Vinci or the like, the Mona Lisa itself, with its castle and hills (as I remember it – perhaps there is no castle). As she herself continues unforth-coming, I had also a great frisson of entry to read it, as if I were getting the answers I sought from her, but of this I must be very wary. The written word assumes authority but it may not have it. I must not necessarily let her silence be filled with this, although it is a great temptation, because it is a shortcut, or a way around. The sheets amount to some seventeen closely typed pages and would seem to be offering an account of the events that led up to her, I was going to say incarceration, but I mean of course her sectioning. It is in two parts, the first detailing her earlier life up to her marriage, then the reasons for the annulment of that marriage, if that is the right term of the day. It seems this was followed by a period of tremendous disarray in her life, tremendous, really rather terrible and pitiable. This is all long long ago, in the savage fairytale of life in Ireland in the twenties and thirties, mostly, though the period of her greatest difficulty seems to have occurred actually during the years of the emergency, as de Valera referred to the Second World War.

I do not in all truth and sincerity know how much of it I can present to her. Somehow I doubt, by her reaction the other day, if she will be open to its revelations, which may or may not be revelations to her. If it represents the truth, it is a dreadful and burdening truth. In a place like this we must not concern ourselves too much with moral judgement or even legal judgement. We are like prison chaplains in here, dealing with the remnant human person after the civic powers have had their say. We are trying to ready, to steady the person for what? The axe, the guillotine of sanity? For the long watches of the sentence of living death that being here really is?

The document I was interested if not a little horrified to see was signed by a Fr Aloysius Mary Gaunt, which was a name that rang a bell. I puzzled it over until I suddenly realised who that was, the man who became auxiliary bishop of Dublin in the fifties and sixties, taking from the hemming and hawing of the Irish constitution a clear statement of his powers of moral domination over the city, as did most of his brother clerics. A man who in his every utterance seemed to long for the banishment of women behind the front doors of their homes, and the elevation of manhood into a condition of sublime chastity and sporting prowess. There is something humorous about it now, there was nothing humorous about it then.

This Fr Gaunt as a young curate in Sligo seemed to be very intimate with Roseanne Clear's circumstances. She was it seems the child of a police sergeant in the Royal Irish Constabulary (which I already knew from the damaged section I had found here). De Valera, as a young leader during the war of independence, had declared that any member of the police could be shot if they in any way obstructed the aims of the revolutionary movement. So such individuals, though Irish and for the most part Catholic (Roseanne's father was Presbyterian), and their families lived under constant threat and in real danger. It is all very understandable in a revolutionary period, but I wonder if Roseanne at the age of twelve or so could have seen that. In her eyes what happened must have been genuinely tragic, genuinely bewildering and awful.

I have just looked at my watch and it is seven fifty, the very latest moment I can leave it, to make my rounds at ten past eight. I must flee.

A note to myself: the builders say six weeks and the new building will be completed. This is from the horse's mouth, because I was on site myself, asking them, like a veritable spy, the other day. But enough

Roseanne's Testimony of Herself

Curious to relate, it was not in the Cafe Cairo that I 'met' Tom, but in quite another place. It was the sea itself.

It is along the strands of the world that the privilege of possessing children is most blatantly seen. What torment for the spinster and the childless man, to see the various sizes of little demons and angels ranged along the tide line. Like some species of migratory animal. The human animal began as a mere wriggling thing in the ancient seas, struggling out onto land with many regrets. That is what brings us so full of longing to the sea.

I am not an entirely childless person.

That story also belongs to the sea, or the strand anyway.

My child. My child went to Nazareth, that's what they told me. Or, that is what I heard them say. But I was not hearing anything very well, very properly, in that time. They might as well have said Wyoming.

Strandhill's beach is narrow, heaped, endangered, and the hill of sand itself seems to have drawn up its enormous knees to escape the goings on below. There is a long rough promenade where gigs, carts, sidecars, high traps and motorcars used to be parked, the occupants spilling out I am sure always with the same level of human anticipation, the kids barrelling away ahead, the fathers laughing, cursing, the mothers admonishing, panicking – all the to-do and turmoil of normal happiness. Kneelength bathing suits vying in eternity with those wondrous bikinis I have only seen in stray magazines. How I would like to have sported one of them.

And at first no doubt just a few brave houses built on the marsh and acres of blown sand, scotch grass, the land rising and rising until eventually touching on the realm of Knocknarea, where Queen Maeve sleeps in her stony grave. From the top of Knocknarea you can see the beach at Strandhill, but the people are only pins, and anything the size of a child is just a dust mote in your eye.

I have looked down from there, despairing and weeping.

All that country was 'my' country later. Strandhill, Strandhill, the mad woman of Strandhill.

At first, a few houses risked on that uncertain ground, then the old hotel, and then huts and more houses, and then, some time in the vanished twenties, Tom McNulty built the Plaza ballroom. A glorified corrugated-iron warehouse with a round roof, a square concrete front to the hall with an oddly modest door and a ticket window, the brightness of both beckoning, promising, oh, and a tumultuous whirlwind of dreams rising from the approaching crowd every Friday night, reaching no doubt as far as heaven, to comfort God in the doubts of his creation.

That was Tom McNulty's work, father and son, to put a ticket on those dreams. And I felt that dream in me with passionate completeness.

To sit here, writing this, my hands as old as Methuselah's. Look at these hands. No, no, you cannot. But the skin is thin as – did you ever see the shell of a razor fish? They are strewn all about Rosses Strand. Well, there is a filament of transparent stuff that covers those shells, like a drying varnish. It is strange stuff. That is my skin now. I fancy I can count my bones. The truth is my hands look like they have been buried a while and then dug up. They would give you a fright. I have not looked in a mirror for about fifteen years.

The first few feet of water at Strandhill were safe enough. In summer they were like a bath. The sea there made only the slightest effort at going in and out, it always seemed to me. Maybe the children peeing in the water had something to do with it, with the heat I mean. It was lovely though. Myself and Chrissie and the other girls from the Cafe Cairo… Mrs Prunty always tried to employ good girls for the cafe, but good girls that looked good, which is a different thing. I think we looked like young goddesses. Mary Thompson could have been a picture in a magazine, Winnie Jackson was a picture once, in the Sligo Champion. 'Miss Winnie Jackson Enjoys the Fine Weather at Strandhill'. Her in her beautiful one-piece bathing suit sent down to her in a box from Arnott's in Dublin, on the Dublin-to-Sligo train. There was style for you. She had a lovely plump bust and I think the lads felt only despair looking at her, that they would never even get talking to her.

Our skins going all African in the steaming heat of August. Our faces bright red sometimes in the evenings, going home across the strand, burnt off of us, and lying in bed then in the town, hardly daring to let our shoulders touch the sheets. Happy. And then the skin calmed down the next morning, and longing to get away out to the beach again, and then again, and then again. Happy. Just straightforward ordinary girls we were. We liked to bring as much despair as we could to the lads.

Who watched on the sidelines of our happiness like sharks, devouring our attributes with their eyes. Sometimes I'd get talking to a lad at the dance, lads didn't say much, and when they did talk they didn't say much worth hearing. But that was all right. There were all sorts at the dance, toffs from the town, and lads with trousers too short for them, showing their socks, or bare legs stuck into battered shoes. There were always a few donkeys tied up outside, and nags of one sort and another, and carts heeled up. The mountain spilled out its sons and daughters like a queer avalanche. Lovely humanity.

Fr Gaunt was always there or some such, one or other of the curates, the herons among the minnows. By God, there was some sort of Dancehall Act I seem to remember. Or maybe I imagine that. I believe they railed against dances in the church, but I wouldn't have been privy to that. There wasn't supposed to be much touching. It would be queer cold dancing without touching. It was lovely to snuggle up to a lad at the end of a dance, you sweaty and him all sweaty too, in the summer, the smell of soap and turf off him. And that stuff in their hair that time, Brilliantine, was the name I think. There'd be fellas there whose fathers and mothers probably spoke Irish in the back hills of Sligo, and who from going to pictures now and then had the idea they had obligations to look like stars of the silver screen, unless it was looking like Irish patriots they were trying to be, maybe that was it too. Michael Collins had been a strong man for the grease in his hair. Even de Valera was well slicked down.

And Tom McNulty's Band blowing up a storm. Young Tom standing there at the edge of the stage with his trumpet or clarinet raised, blasting out the sort of music we had then. You had to have the jazz for the dancing, but also the foxtrot was still danced there, and even the waltz. Tom even had a recording made, called Tom McNulty's Ragtime Band, by Jesus that sent the hall into a frenzy. There was a light shining out of Tom then. Of course at that time Tom was just the great man I had never spoken to, unless it was in the cafe to say 'What would you like?' To which the answer would most likely be, 'China tea and a deadfly bun. Earl Grey for the brother.' He was dead keen on the deadfly buns. I wonder if they still have them. They were like religious objects at that time, you couldn't have a cafe without them, what would be the point. It is funny how fixed everything was in those times. Deadfly buns, cream cakes, eclairs, cherry buns with white icing on top, it was like those things were as ancient and established as whales, dolphins, mackerel – like natural occurrences, the natural history of the cafe.

It mattered altogether that my father was gone, but somehow I was able to tuck that in under the pillow of my hair, to sleep on it as it were. I couldn't help the happiness, when I woke in the morning, yes, there was my mother to see to, but I was able to feed her and look after her, she never said anything or went anywhere, just kept to the house in her stripy housecoat, and there was that energy in me, like a motorcar being started with a starting handle, cranking me up, I was cranked up mysteriously every morning I woke, I was aflame with energy, it swept me out of the house, and through the streets of Sligo, and in through the glass doors of the Cafe Cairo, and had me kissing my friend Chrissie good morning, and laughing, and if Mrs Prunty was around, she would give me her shy smile, and I would be jubilant, jubilant.

It is always worth itemising happiness, there is so much of the other thing in a life, you had better put down the markers for happiness while you can. When I was in that state, everything looked beautiful to me, the rain slicing down looked like silver to me, everything was of interest to me, everyone seemed at ease with me, even those slit-eyed cornerboys of Sligo, with the yellow fingers from the coffin nails they smoked, the yellow stain above their lips where the fag was stuck in permanent. Accents like bottles being smashed in a back lane.

There now, and all that comes back unbidden. I sat down today to write of Tom and the sea. Rescuing me in the sea of happiness.

I plunged in. I think I knew where I was going. It is curious to me how I remember so completely the feel of that light wool bathing suit on my skin. It had three thick stripes alternating and I had saved the whole winter for it. You couldn't have found a nicer one in Sligo. A hot Irish day is such a miracle we become mad foreigners in a twinkle. The rain drives everyone indoors and history with it. There is a lovely lack of anything on a hot day, and because our world in its inner truth is so wet, the surprised greens of the fields and hills seem to burn with a sort of bewilderment, a wonderment. The land looks lovely to itself, and the girls and boys along the strand are painted into the tawny yellows and the blues and greens of the sea, also burning, burning. Or so it seemed to me. The whole town seemed to be there, everything suffering the same brushstrokes of the heat, everything joining and melding. I don't know if the Plaza existed just at that time, it must have done, because I had seen Tom McNulty playing, but if it did it would have been 1929 or after even, so I wasn't exactly a girl, but I am confused about this. It is hard to know a person's age in a bathing suit, in the riot of the sunlight, and I can't see what age I was, I am peering back with my mind's eye, and all I see is fabulous glitter.