The Secret Scripture (2 page)

He was the superintendent there, as I said to you, and wore a blue uniform and a cap with a peak as black as a blackbird's coat.

This was at a time when there was the Great War and the town was full of soldiers, as if Sligo itself were a battlefield, but of course it was not. It was but men on their furlough we saw there. But they had a great look of my own father, what with the uniforms – so that he seemed to pop up everywhere in those streets, as my mother and me were walking, myself looking out as fiercely as she for him. My joy was only completed when at last it turned out to be him, coming home from the cemetery in the dark evenings of winter, as might be, skittering along. And when he spied me he would be playing with me then, larking about like a child. And many a glance he got, and maybe such action didn't go with his dignity as superintendent of the Sligo dead. But he had that rare ability to let things ease in himself in the company of a child, and be stupid and gay in the parched light.

He was the keeper of the graves, but he was also himself, and in his peaked cap and blue uniform could guide a person to whatever plot held relative or friend with solemn dignity enough, but alone in his graveyard house, which was a little temple made of concrete, he would be heard singing wonderfully 'I Dreamt that I Dwelt in Marble Halls' from The Bohemian Girl, one of his favourite operettas.

And on free days he went out on his Matchless motorcycle to race along on the devious roads of Ireland. If the winning of my mother constituted a kingly event, the fact that he in one great year of fortune, around the time of my birth, raced the short course on the Isle of Man, on his lovely bike, coming in respectably in the middle of the field, and not killing himself, was the source of constant memory and joy, and I am sure consoled him in his concrete temple in the dreary stretches of an Irish winter, surrounded as he was by those sleeping souls.

My father's other 'famous' story, that is, famous in our tiny household, happened during his single days, when he was more able to get himself to the few motorcycle meetings of those times. It happened in Tullamore, and was a singularly peculiar tale.

He was going along himself at a great rate, and in front of him was a long wide hill, leading down to a sharp turn where the road met a domain wall, one of those high, thick stone walls built during the Irish famine indeed, as a sort of useless labour to keep labourers alive. At any rate, the racer in front of him, tearing down the hill and picking up an enormous head of speed, instead of braking seemed even to accelerate at the opposing wall, and finally, in a horrible clutter of smoke, metal and a noise as of cannons, struck it mercilessly. My father, peering out through his dirty goggles, nearly lost his grip on his own machine, such was his horror; but then saw a sight he could not and could never explain, which was the rider rising as if on wings, and crossing the huge wall in a swift and gentle movement, like the smooth glide of a seagull in an upwind. For a moment, for a moment he thought indeed he saw a flash of wings, and never could read in his prayerbook again about angels without thinking of that extraordinary instance.

Please do not think my father was dissembling, because he was quite incapable of that. It is true that in country districts – even in the towns – people like to tell you they have seen wonders, such as my husband Tom and the two-headed dog on the road to Enniscrone. It is true also that such stories are only effective if the teller feigns absolute belief – or indeed saw such wonders truly. But my father was no magician of lies and stories.

My father managed to slow his motor-bicycle and stop, and running along the domain wall, found one of those fanciful little gates, and pushing the rusty iron, hurried in through nettles and docks to find his miraculous friend. There on the other side of the wall he lay, quite unconscious, but also, and my father swore to the truth of it, quite unharmed. Eventually the man, who happened to be an Indian gentleman who sold scarves and other items out of his suitcase all over the western seaboard, awoke, and smiled at my father. They both marvelled at this inexplicable escape, which not unnaturally was the talk of Tullamore for years after. If you ever hear that story, the teller might give it the title of 'The Indian Angel'.

Again my father's curious happiness was most clearly evident in the retelling of this story. It was as if such an event were a reward to him for being alive, a little gift of narrative that pleased him so much it conferred on himself, in dreams and waking, a sense of privilege, as if such little scraps of stories and events composed for him a ragged gospel. And if ever there were to be written an evangelical gospel of my father's life – and why should there not, as every person's life is said to be precious to God – I suppose those wings merely glimpsed on his friend the Indian's back would become more substantial, and things merely hinted at by him would become in the new telling by a second hand solid, unprovable, but raised up even higher into the realms of miracle. So that all and sundry might take comfort from it.

My father's happiness. It was a precious gift in itself, as perhaps my mother's anxiety was a perpetual spanner thrown into her works. For my mother never made miniature legends of her life, and was singularly without stories, though I am sure there were things there to tell as good as my father's.

It is funny, but it strikes me that a person without anecdotes that they nurse while they live, and that survive them, are more likely to be utterly lost not only to history but the family following them. Of course this is the fate of most souls, reducing entire lives, no matter how vivid and wonderful, to those sad black names on withering family trees, with half a date dangling after and a question mark.

My father's happiness not only redeemed him, but drove him to stories, and keeps him even now alive in me, like a second more patient and more pleasing soul within my poor soul.

Perhaps his happiness was curiously unfounded. But cannot a man make himself as happy as he can in the strange long reaches of a life? I think it is legitimate. After all the world is indeed beautiful and if we were any other creature than man we might be continuously happy in it.

The principal room in our little house, while already of narrow dimensions, we shared with two large objects, viz. the aforementioned motorbike which had to be kept out of the rain. It lived in our living room a quiet life as one might say, my father being able from his chair idly to run a chamois leather over the chrome when he wished. The other object which I want to mention is the little cottage upright piano, which had been bequeathed him by a grateful widower, as my father had dug a hole for this man's wife at no charge, because the circumstances of the bereaved family had been straitened. So one summer night, soon after the burial, the piano had arrived on a donkey and cart, and was carried in with smiles and embarrassed happiness by the widower and his two sons, and placed in our tiny room. The piano had possibly never been worth a great sum, but it had a most beautiful tone for all that, and had never been played before it reached us, in as much as one could surmise that history from the state of the keys, which were pristine. There were scenes painted on the side panels, of places which were not Sligo as such, most likely being scenes of an imaginary Italy or the like, but might have been all the same, being of mountains and rivers, with shepherds and shepherdesses standing about with their patient sheep. My father, having grown up in his own father's ministry, was able to play this lovely instrument, and his delight as I have said was in the old operettas of the previous century. He considered Balfe a genius. As there was room for me beside him on the stool I soon by grace of my love for him and my own great joy in his ability began to pick up the rudiments of playing, and slowly progressed to some real accomplishment, without in any way feeling it was an effort or a trial.

Then I could play for him as he stood out in the centre of the floor, such as it was, with his hand idly perchance on the seat of his motorbike, the other hand in his jacket like an Irish Napoleon, and sing with utmost perfection, or so it seemed to me, 'Marble Halls', or the other gems of his repertoire – and, for that matter, those little songs called Neapolitan, which of course were not as I thought in memory of Napoleon, but songs invented in the streets of Naples – songs now in exile in Sligo! His voice entered my head as a sort of honey, that lingered there potently, buzzingly, banishing all the fears of childhood. As the voice rose up, so did all of him, arms, whiskers, one foot swinging a little over the old carpet with its pattern of repeating dogs, his eyes brimming with a strange merriment. Even Napoleon might not have scorned him as a man of elevated qualities. At such moments he exhibited a most beautiful timbre in the quieter passages of songs that to this day I have never heard outmatched. Many fine singers made their way to Sligo when I was a young woman and sang in the halls under the rain, and for a few of the more popular sort I even played piano accompaniment, chopping out the notes and chords for them, more of a hindrance than a help to them perhaps. But none seemed to me to equal the strange privacy of my father's voice.

And a man who can make himself merry in the face of those coming disasters that assailed him, as disasters do so many, without grace or favour, is a true hero.

Dr Grene's Commonplace Book

(Senior Psychiatrist, Roscommon Regional Mental Hospital)

This building is in a terrible condition, how terrible we were not completely aware until the surveyor's report. The three brave men who climbed into the ancient roof report many timbers on the verge of collapse, as if the very head and crown of the institution were mirroring the condition of many of the poor inmates beneath. For inmates I should write patients. But as the place was constructed in the late eighteenth century as a charitable institution for the 'healthful asylum and superior correction of wounded seats of thought' the word inmate does always spring to mind. How healthful and how superior can only now be guessed. Actually in the mid nineteenth century there was a period of great enlightenment in the asylums, under the revolutionary ideas of various doctors, when strait jackets were used sparingly, a good diet was deemed wise, and plenty of exercise and stimulation of thought. Which was a great advance on the practice of Bedlam with its roaring beasts in chains on the floors. Somehow it all got worse again afterwards, and no sensitive person would choose to be the historian of the Irish asylums in the first part of the last century, with its clitori-dectomies, immersions, and injections. The last century being 'my' century, since I was fifty-five when it turned, and it is difficult wholly to give one's heart and attention to a new century at that age. Or so I found. And find. Nearly sixty-five now, alas.

With the building showing its age so forcefully, we will be obliged to leave it. The department says the new building will start almost immediately, which may be true or may be cant of a sort. But how can we go till we are assured of a new building, and indeed, more philosophically, how can we prise many of the patients out of here, when their very DNA has probably melded with the mortar of the building? There are those fifty ancient women in the central block, so old that age has become something eternal, continuous, so bedridden and encrusted with sores that to move them would be a sort of violation.

I suppose I am resisting the thought of going in my mind, the way any sensible person does when a move is mooted. No doubt we will manage with all the usual mayhem and trauma.

Similarly the attendants and nurses have become as much part of the building as the bats in the roof and the rats in the cellars. Which are both legion I understand, though I am thankful to say I have only seen rats the one time, when the east wing went on fire, and I saw the dark black shapes running from the lower doors, out into the farmer's corn meadows beyond the hedges. The light from the fires threw a glare of a weird marmalade colour into their backs as they fled. I am sure when they heard the firemen give the all clear, they snuck back in in the new darkness.

So, we are to go sometime. I am obliged therefore under the new laws to assess whatever of the patients can be put back into the community (whatever that is, O Lord), and exactly what category of patient each other patient is. Many of them will be shocked even by new decor, modern plaster walls, good insulation and heating. The very moaning of the wind in the corridors, even on still days – how is that? possibly a vacuum created by heat and cold in different areas of the hospital – will be missed as the tiny background music of their dreams and 'madnesses'. I am sure. Those poor old boys in black suits made by the hospital tailor long ago, who are not so much mad as homeless and ancient, and who live along the rooms of the oldest west wing, like soldiers of some forgotten Peninsular or Indian War, will not know themselves outside this lost ground of Roscommon.

Which necessity will also bring me to a task long avoided, which is to establish what circumstances brought in some of the patients, and whether indeed, as was tragically true in some cases, they were sectioned for social rather than medical reasons. Because I am not so great a fool as to think that all the 'lunatics' in here are mad, or ever were, or were before they came here and learned a sort of viral madness. These people are perceived by the all-knowing public at large, or let us say public opinion as it is mirrored in the newspapers, as deserving of 'freedom' and 'release'. Which may be very true, but creatures so long kennelled and confined find freedom and release very problematic attainments, like those eastern European countries after communism. And similarly there is a weird reluctance in me to see anyone go. Why is that? The anxiety of the zoo keeper? Can my polar bears do as well at the pole? I suppose this is a reductive thought. Well, we will see.

In particular I will have to approach my old friend Mrs McNulty, who is not only the oldest person in this place, but in Roscommon itself, perhaps even Ireland. She was old when I got here thirty years ago, although at that time with the energy of, I don't know what, a force of nature. She is a formidable person and though long periods have gone by when I have not seen her, or only tangentially, I am always aware of her, and try to ask after her. I am afraid she is rather a touchstone for me. She has been a fixture, and not only represents the institution, but also, in a curious way, my own history, my own life. 'The star to every wandering bark,' as Shakespeare has it. My marriage troubles with poor Bet, my spirits lowering, plummeting, betimes, my feeling of not getting on, my this, my that – my companionable stupidity, I suppose. While things have ineluctably changed, she has remained the same, if grown of course weaker and slighter as the years go on. Is she a hundred now? She used to play the piano down in the recreation room, really very expert songs, jazz tunes of the twenties and thirties.