The Secret Scripture (25 page)

'It is a lovely spring day,' he said, 'and I am emboldened to ask you again some of these wearying old questions that I am sure you wish I would stop asking. But I do feel there may be some gain in doing so. Just yesterday I heard something that makes me feel that nothing is impossible. That things that at first sight seem dark and intractable may actually be able to admit some light, some unexpected light.'

He talked like that for a while and finally reached the question. It was again about my father and I was content enough, for the second time, to tell him that my father was never in the police. I told him though that there was a police connection in the McNulty family.

'My husband's brother called Eneas was in the police. He joined them in about 1919, which was not a good time to seek employment there,' I said, or words to that effect.

'Ah,' said Dr Grene, 'so you think that may be how the police connection was – was mooted?'

'I don't know,' I said. 'Are the daffodils out yet on the old avenue?'

'They are nearly out, they are threatening to come out,' he said. 'They may be fearful of a last frost.'

'The frost is nothing to the daffodils,' I said. 'Like the heather, they can bloom in the snow.'

'Yes,' he said, 'I believe you are right. Now, Roseanne, the second topic I thought I might raise with you is the topic of the child. I am reading in the little deposition I mentioned that there was a child. At some point.'

'Yes, yes, there was a child.'

Then I said nothing because what could I say. I am afraid I started to cry as quietly as I could.

'I don't mean to upset you,' he said, with great softness.

'I don't think you do,' I said. 'It is just that – looking back, it is all so -'

'Tragic?' he said.

'That is a big word. Very sad anyhow, it seems to me.' He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a little folded paper handkerchief.

'Don't worry,' he said, 'I haven't used it.'

I took the useless little object gratefully. Why wouldn't he have used it, him with his own troubles so recently? I tried to imagine him sitting somewhere in his house, a place of course unknown to me. With his wife gone from him. Death as ruthless as any other lover, taking her away.

And I dabbed at my tears. I felt like Barbara Stanwyck in a stupid weepie, or at least Barbara Stanwyck when she was a hundred years old. Dr Grene was gazing at me with a face so miserable I laughed. Then he perked up at this and laughed too. Then the two of us were laughing, but very softly and quietly, like we didn't want anyone else to hear.

I must admit there are 'memories' in my head that are curious even to me. I would not like to have to say this to Dr Grene. Memory, I must suppose, if it is neglected becomes like a box room, or a lumber room in an old house, the contents jumbled about, maybe not only from neglect but also from too much haphazard searching in them, and things to boot thrown in that don't belong there. I certainly suspect – well, I don't know what I certainly suspect. It makes me a little dizzy to contemplate the possibility that everything I remember may not be -may not be real, I suppose. There was so much turmoil at that time that – that what? I took refuge in other impossible histories, in dreams, in fantasies? I don't know.

But if I put my faith in certain memories, perhaps they will serve as stepping stones, and I will cross the torrent of 'times past', without being plunged entirely into it.

They say the old at least have their memories. I am not so sure this is always a good thing. I am trying to be faithful to what is in my head. I hope it is trying also to be as faithful to me.

It was the simplest thing in the world. He just never came home. For a whole day I waited. I cooked the hash as I had promised him in the morning, because he had a weakness for foods mashed up and reheated, even though it was his brother Jack was the navy man. It is a great favourite with sailors and soldiers, as my own father might attest. But the food cooled again under its cover. Night closed over Knocknarea, over Sligo Bay, over Ben Bulben, where John Lavelle's brother Willie had been murdered. On the upper slopes, in the privacy of the thinner air and the heather. Shot in the heart, was it, or the head, after surrendering. John Lavelle saw that from his hiding place. His own brother. The brothers of Ireland. John and Willie, Jack and Tom and Eneas.

I knew immediately something was terribly wrong, but you can know that and not allow the thought in your head, at the front of your head. It dances around at the back, where it can't be controlled. But the front of the head is where the pain begins.

I sat there I must confess in a swelter of love for my husband. It was his strange efficiency, even his purposeful stride along the pavements of Sligo. His waistcoats, his gaberdine, or his trenchcoat with the four linings, his boots with the patented double sole, that would never need mending (of course they did). His beaming face and the ruddy signs of health in his cheeks, and his cigarette on the loll in his mouth, the same brand his brother smoked, 'Army Club Sandhurst'. And his musicality and his confidence, the way he was always up in the world, and ready for it. And that he was not only ready for it, he was going to conquer it, conquer Sligo and all points west and east, 'from Portugal to the Sea' as the old saying went, although in truth that is a nonsensical saying. Tom McNulty, a man that had every right to life because he honoured it so in the enjoyment of it.

Oh dear, oh dear, I sat there. I am sitting there still.

I am old enough to know that time passing is just a trick, a convenience. Everything is always there, still unfolding, still happening. The past, the present, and the future, in the noggin eternally, like brushes, combs and ribbons in a handbag.

He just didn't come back.

Out there in Strandhill, on nights there were no dances, when only the odd car was heard coming into the village above, there was an owl that used to call. I think it lived on the backland under Knocknarea, where the land falls and becomes a sort of valley to the sea. The owl lived close enough for his one repeated note to come clearly over the scrubby fields and the wastelands. Calling and calling, as if to say what I don't know. Do creatures that wake and hunt in the night, call to their possible mate in the night? I suppose they must.

My own heart was also calling, signalling out into that difficult human world. For Tom to come home, to come home.

Two nights later I think I must have been still sitting there. Although this is hardly possible. Had I not eaten, gone out to the toilet at the back of the hut, stretched my legs? I can't remember. Or rather, I only remember the sitting there, and then, just as the twilight came down on Strandhill, calming everything, even the colours of the grass, that night breeze hurrying in from the bay, making my roses rustle at the window-glass, or at least the new buds, tap tap tap, like Gene Krupa himself starting a little something on the drums. And then, as if on cue, I heard coming up the road and around the corner and in the door the strains of 'Honeysuckle Rose', just a few notes at first, and then I heard Harry B. hit the drums, and then the clarinet going, which I supposed was Tom, and someone on the piano, obviously not myself, and by the rusty stabs he was making I guessed it was maybe Old Tom himself, and that was probably Dixie Kielty on the rhythm guitar he loved like a child, oh, and they were unfolding it, stem by stem and bloom by bloom, just like honeysuckle itself, though that was a bloom for later in the year in those parts.

Of course then I knew it was Saturday. That was something to get my bearings from.

By Jiminy though that is a great song for the guitar solo.

'Honeysuckle Rose'. Whap whap whap go the drums and up and down and round the clock go the chords of the guitar. You can drive even the hill boys of Sligo half mad with that song. A dead man would dance to it. A dumb man would cheer the solos.

It was said, at least Tom told me, that Benny Goodman would give a good twenty minutes to that song, at dances. I could well believe it. You could play it all day and still have things to say with it. That was it, you see, it was a speaking song. Even without someone singing the words.

So.

So, I went over there. It was the strangest darkest feeling to do that. To put on what I had of finery there, my best dress, hurriedly dab on some 'slap', comb my hair, fix it, shove on my stage shoes, and all the while breathing in and out a little heavily, then stepping out into the breeze, feeling the chill in it, so that my breast seemed to shrug minutely. But I didn't care about that.

Because I thought it was still possible everything was all right. Why did I think that? Because I had not heard otherwise. I was in the middle of a mystery.

It was early for the dance but there were cars coming out from Sligo already, their big beams like big shovels shovelling the rutted road. Expectant faces in the cars, and lads standing on the running boards now and then. It was a happy sight, the happiest sight in Sligo.

I was feeling more and more like a ghost the nearer I came to the Plaza. Now the Plaza used to be just a holiday house, and they built the hall on at the back, so the front looked just like an ordinary dwelling, except concreted over, erased somehow. There was a nice flag fluttering above the roof, with P-L-A-Z-A written on it. There wasn't much in the way of lights, but who needed lights, when the building was the Mecca of everyone's weekday dreams and thoughts. You could slave all week in a rotten job in the town, but as long as you had the Plaza…It was bigger than religion, I can tell you, the dancing. It was a religion. To be denied the dancing would have been like what's-it, excommunication, to be not allowed the sacraments, like the IRA men in the civil war.

Boys like John Lavelle of course.

'Honeysuckle Rose'. Now the band let that be and began to play 'The Man I Love', which as the world and his brother knows is a slower tune, and I was thinking it wasn't such a good choice for so early in the night. Ever the band member. Every tune is right in the right moment. Some tunes only rarely find their moment, like some ould Christmas song, or slushy old ballads in the deeps of winter when everyone wants to be melancholy. 'The Man I Love' is for the second last dance, or thereabouts, when everyone is weary but happy, and there is a shine on everything, faces, arms, instruments, hearts.

When I entered the hall there were only a few souls dancing. I had been right, it was much too early for that song. But the band all the same had a late-night look to them. Old Tom was playing the solo bit near the start, and then his son was cutting in with the clarinet. It was actually shocking. Maybe the people there noticed also that Tom, my Tom, seemed a little drunk. He was certainly swaying a bit, but he held the music just fine, until suddenly he seemed to stall, and took the beak out of his mouth. The band played the song to the nearest ending, and stopped as well. Their faces looked round at Tom, to see what he wanted to do. Tom placed his instrument down with his usual care, stepped down off the stage, and swayed away backstage, to where our dressing room was. I didn't know whether he had even seen me.

I was going to go in there too. There was only the dancefloor between me and the old curtains that hung across the door. I stepped forward, full of intent, but suddenly there was Jack at my side, his face very stern in the turning shadows.

'What do you want, Roseanne?' he said, the coldest I had ever heard him, and he could be an arctic man.

'What do I want?'

It was funny, I had been so silent for two or three days that my voice almost cracked when I spoke, gghh, like a needle dropped on a record.

I don't suppose anyone was looking at me. We must have seemed like two old friends chatting, as a thousand old friends did there on a Saturday night. What would friendship have done without the Plaza, let alone love?

My stomach was probably empty, but that didn't stop my body from trying to throw up. It was a reaction to the ice in Jack's words. It told me more than any little speech of his could, no doubt the little speech I was about to hear. It wasn't the voice of the executioner, like that Englishman Pierrepoint the Free State government brought over in the forties to hang IRA men, but it was the voice of the judge, announcing my execution. How many murderers and felons already know by the very look on the judge's face, never mind the black cloth shortly put on his head, their fate, even though every fibre of their being cries out against the knowledge, and hope is brought right to the very brink of irrevocable words. The patient staring up into the face of the surgeon. Death sentence. What Eneas McNulty got for his being in the police. Death sentence.

'What do you want, Roseanne?'

'What do I want?'

Then that dry retching. Then people were looking at me. Probably thought I had downed a half bottle of gin too quick, or the like, like nervous dancers did, or dodgy customers as Tom called them. There was nothing to show for my retching, but that didn't stop my grievous embarrassment. Close on the heels of which was a deep deep feeling of something, maybe remorse, maybe self-horror, that bored down into me.

Jack hung back from me as if indeed I were a cliff, or something dangerous that might crumble at the edge, and send him plummeting to his death. The cliffs of Mohar, Dun Aengus.

'Jack, Jack,' I said, but meaning what, I didn't know.

'What's going on with you?' he said. 'What's going on with you?'

'Me? I don't know. I feel sick.'

'No, not now, not fucking now, Roseanne. What have ya been up to?'

'Why, what's they saying I was up to?' Now, that didn't even sound like English to me. What's they saying. Like some old Black song from the Southern States. But Jack didn't say. 'Can I go back and see Tom?' I said. 'Tom doesn't want to see you.' 'Of course he does, Jack, he's my husband.' 'Well, Roseanne, we'll have to see about that.' 'What do you mean, Jack?'