The Secret Scripture (22 page)

John Lavelle wasn't just another fella. He wasn't just a bowsie in the street making a remark behind my back, he was an important person because he had known my father and things about my father. Two deaths and more linked us, you might say, the death of his brother and the death of my father. We should have been enemies but somehow we were not. I wasn't against him, even if I wasn't for him either. To this day I don't really understand it. I rarely saw him and yet he loomed in my dreams. In my dreams he was always being shot and dying, like his brother had in real waking life. I often saw him dying in dreams. Held his hand and the like. Sisterly.

I never did speak about that to Tom though. I didn't like to. How would I begin? Tom loved me, or he loved what he knew of me, what he saw of me. Now I don't want to say something untoward, but he always complimented me on my rear end. That's the truth.

'When I feel blue,' he said once, 'I think of your backside.'

Not very romantic, but in another way, very romantic. Men are not really humans at all, no, I mean, they have different priorities. Mind you, I don't know what women's priorities are either, at least, I know what they are and never did feel them. I did have a shocking desire for Tom myself. The whole lot of him. I don't know. He made me dizzy on a constant basis. There's some things you really can't get enough of. Chocolate you can get enough of. But some things. I liked his company, in all guises of company. I liked drinking cups of tea with him. I liked kissing his ears. Maybe I was never a proper woman. God forgive me. Maybe the biggest error I made was I always felt the equal of him. I felt, it was me and him, like Bonnie and Clyde, who just that time in America were going round killing people and generally what, expressing their love in curious ways.

All right, so why did I go up to Maeve's cairn that very Sunday following? I don't know. Because John Lavelle asked me? No. I know it was a wretched thing to do, a mistake. Why does the salmon go home to the Garravoge, when it has all the sea to roam over?

Dr Grene's Commonplace Book

Every year in the early days we went religiously to Bundoran for our holiday. People now laugh at Bundoran, they think it the prime example of the ancient Irish holiday, damp B &Bs, foul rain, bad food and all. But we liked all that, me and Bet. We laughed at it too, but affectionately, like you might laugh at a mad great-aunt. We loved going there – we fled there, you might say, to refresh ourselves at the altar of Bundoran.

The sunlight is a great reader of faces. Going back to the same place year after year made a sort of clock of Bet's face. Every year there was a new story, the next picture in the sequence. I should have photographed her every year in the same place at the same time. She was always growling and worried about growing old, she spotted every new line on her face just the minute it appeared, like a sleepy dog suddenly wakes when a stranger's foot is distantly heard broaching the boundaries of a property. Her only extravagance was those jars of night cream she invested in, in her war against those lines. She was a deeply intelligent person, she knew great swathes of Shakespeare from her schooldays, when one of those unsung, inspired teachers had got a hold of her, and tried to make a teacher of her too. But she wasn't looking at wrinkles with her intelligence, it was something more primal, ancient. For myself, hand on heart, those things never bothered me. It is one of the graces of married life that for some magical reason we always look the same to each other. Even our friends never seem to grow old. What a boon that is, and never suspected by me when I was young. But I suppose, otherwise, what would we do? There has never been a person in an old people's home that hasn't looked around dubiously at the other inhabitants. They are the old ones, they are the club that no one wants to join. But we are never old to ourselves. That is because at close of day the ship we sail in is the soul, not the body.

Oh, and I write that, the biggest agnostic in Ireland. As usual I don't have words for what I mean. I am trying to say I loved Bet, yes, soul to soul, and the lines and wrinkles were part of some other story, her own harrowing reading of her own life. Nor would I underestimate the pain it caused her. By her own estimation a plain woman, she did not wish to be a plain old woman. However I would also question her plainness. There were times when her face shimmered and flashed with its own beauty. There was the moment we stood side by side in the church, and I looked down at her face just the second before she said 'I do,' and then heard her say it, and then out of her face flew this extraordinary light, flooding up at me. It was love. You do not expect to see love like that. I did not anyhow.

So why did I have to betray her in Bundoran of all places?

I went there innocently enough, without her, but for a conference in that new hotel on the strand. It was a psychiatric gathering, right enough. Our topic as it happened was geriatric psychosis, dementia, all that. I was presenting a paper on versions of memory, the absolute fascist certainty of memory, the bullying oppression of memory. I suppose it was a sort of middle-aged nonsense, but at the time I thought it quite radical, revolutionary. It was received at the conference as a type of throwing caution to the wind. As a type of indiscretion of the mind. So perhaps it wasn't remarkable that it was followed by an indiscretion of the body.

Poor Martha. Four fine boys she had at home, and a husband who was one of the most gifted junior counsels of his generation. A remote, troubled man, but, I am sure, a worthy. It was dreadfully simple. We drank too much wine together, we wandered back to the corridor of unimpressive rooms, we had a sudden desire towards each other, I kissed her, we fumbled in the dark, she never even took her knickers off, God help us, she came under my hand, that seemed to be the end of it. It was a throwback, a surrender, a retreat to adolescence, when such fumblings seemed heroic and poetic.

Martha went home and told her good husband. I don't suppose she meant to, or wanted to. I think what she really wanted was for it not to have happened. The world is not full of betrayers, it is full of people with decent motives and a full desire to do right by those who know them and love them. This is a little-known truth, but I think it is a truth nonetheless. Empirically, from all the years of my work, I would attest to that. I know it is a miraculous conclusion, but there it is. We like to characterise humanity as savage, lustful, and basic, but that is to make strangers of everyone. We are not wolves, but lambs astonished in the margins of the fields by sunlight and summer. She lost her world, Martha. And I lost mine. No doubt it was well deserved. Whatever her husband suffered was not, and whatever Bet suffered I know for a certainty was not.

Because faithfulness is not a human question, but a divine one.

There I go again.

And I wonder what Fr Gaunt would have made of that?

Fr Gaunt, so assiduous, so devoted to revealing Roseanne, her nature, her incriminating story.

The deposition is in the other room, and I am too tired to go and get it. I will see how much of it I can write down from memory. The events at the cemetery I have itemised. Then independence came, the imperial police were disbanded, increasing I must suppose the fears of Roseanne's father, then… I suppose, time passed. The sense of vulnerability decreased, increased? And Roseanne's father got a job in the selfsame cemetery. As this job was in the gift of the town council, it is difficult to understand why so tainted a man was given such a sinecure, unless it was a job so lowly they thought it was a just humiliation. Indeed in due course he lost this job and was given the job of rat-catcher in Sligo, surely the ultimate insult to such a man. Fr Gaunt writes with possible wryness, 'As he had hunted down his fellow countrymen like rats, it might be said he was qualified for the job.' (Or words to that effect). But memories are both long and short in Ireland, like anywhere there are such wars. The civil war that followed caused further mayhem to the kindly instincts of young men in Sligo. Eventually time was found to turn attention to Roseanne's father, and his end was curious and protracted.

One night as he came home he was abducted on the corner of his street. He was drunk as was his custom, and his daughter was waiting as was hers. And I do think, and it is really clear from Fr Gaunt's account, that Roseanne adored her curious father. At any rate he was taken by a number of men and dragged off into the cemetery. She followed. Fr Gaunt thinks the plan was to take him up to the top of the round tower there in the graveyard and fling him out of the window at the top, or some such strategy.

His mouth was stuffed with white feathers no doubt to characterise his former work, though God knows I cannot see wherein his cowardice lay, misguided though he may have been in many respects. Then alas he was beaten with hammers, and an effort made to push him out the little window at the top of the tower. Roseanne herself was below looking up. Awful noises no doubt of horror from the small room at the top. And they did get him half way out the window, except his belly was too rounded by the years of beer, and would not admit him out into the night air. The hammers had not really killed him either, and as he roared, the feathers burst from his mouth. In a desperate rage they pulled him back in, and one of the men flung the bloody hammers out the window. And the feathers flew up and the hammers fell down, striking Roseanne as she stood gazing up a blow to the head, knocking her out cold.

Their less than theatrical solution to the question of his execution was to hang him in a derelict house nearby. I do not think in the atmosphere of the times he would have been much missed. No doubt he had acted against his own people. They were young men trying to avenge a great wrong, and young men are excitable and sometimes clumsy. No, not much missed, such a man.

Except by Roseanne.

How do I put all this to her? And this is just the end of the first section, there is another part that itemises her own later history. And in it a truly miserable and even horrifying accusation against her. The sins of the father are one thing, but the sins of the mother… Well. I must remember, I tell myself again, why I am engaged in this assessment. Be professional.

Keep my distance. After all, having been reared in England, albeit as an Irish child of some kind, I already have distance I believe from the strange chapters of this country's bewildering story.

And aren't all our histories tangled and almost foreign to ourselves, I mean, to our imaginations? My own mother's death, how cruel that was, in every way, and the only good thing I can think of that came out of it was, it 'inspired' me to read psychiatry at Durham, almost as an act of retrospective and hopeless insurance against the thing happening.

She lived in paradise across the river from Padstow, in a house envied and admired by the summer visitors, sitting in its trees on the very strand.

Of course, not my 'real' mother, not my 'real' father either.

Every year in their retirement the two of them went to the Lake District. My father climbed a mountain one morning without her. When he reached the summit, he gazed down on the valley below, there was a lake there, and he saw a tiny figure advance into the water. He was too far away to be heard. He knew instantly who it was.

Some three years after they adopted me, having given up the hope of having a child of their own, they did have a child of their own, my brother John. He was devoted to me. When we were fishing as kids in our local stream, he would stand for hours in his shorts in the river, bending over with a jamjar to catch minnows for my hooks.

When I was fourteen, we would cycle in the morning around the estuary to get our buses, myself to the Catholic Grammar School and himself to the prep school I had once attended. The bus stops were close to each other, but on opposite sides of the road, because his school was in the other direction. It was just a little country road outside the village, and the buses were those shining, chunky vehicles of those times.

One morning – and how everything becomes a little story once upon a time I might as well say – having heaved our bikes behind the hedge as we always did, I saw my bus coming along the road, and his bus coming the other way almost at the same distance. John, aged about ten, gave me a kiss and a hug and started off across the road. I found I was still holding his coat with my own, and called out to him, 'Hey, young fellow!' John stopped and turned about. 'Your coat!' I said, and made to throw it, and I saw John smiling, and he came back a few steps towards me. By this time the two buses were upon us, and whatever calculation the drivers had made for the little lad crossing the road, my shout to John had done a great mischief, and my bus drove through him, myself still holding the coat out to him.

That was the cause of my mother's sorrow.

Great sorrow. Beyond imagining. Her deepest heart destroyed. And yet there is something in it that eludes me. A true understanding.

Her life was rich in other ways. She lived in paradise. Indeed she left my poor father in paradise. Was I not also angry with her? That I wasn't in any way enough? Or my father? That she didn't endure? That is so unfair, I know. But, there is such a thing as endurance, it is a quality. I suppose what I am trying to write, while not being in any way disrespectful of my mother, is that Roseanne has endured, even though her life is all farthings.

I am a bit disgusted with myself for writing this.

And why am I crying?

I am astounded to read back over what I just wrote. I have made an anecdote out of the tragic death of my brother, for which, as is clear to me from the cooled syntax, I obviously blame myself. Even when I was at Durham, and we students used to practise analysis on each other, I never discussed this. I never even think about it, I have given it no valency at all in the last fifty years. It is a scandal in the halls of myself. I see that, clearly, staring at the bare facts. But how on earth would I start to look at it now, how would I ever heal myself? It is beyond my capacity. The only man I might have talked to about this is Amurdat Singh, long in his grave. Or my father, likewise. What he must have suffered, in his lovely English privacy.