The Secret Scripture (31 page)

Round and round and round in my head it went, mile after mile, my feet plodding on, with that kind of splayed-out motion because of my big belly, not a pretty sight you may be sure, and me convincing myself of this certainty.

Dr Grene's Commonplace Book

We have a demolition date now, of all things, not that far off. I must keep reminding myself. It is somehow very difficult to imagine this eventuality, although everywhere in the hospital are items standing boxed up and ready, every day vans and lorries come and bring stuff away, great reams of correspondence and records have been put in store, dozens of patients have been moved out, places suddenly, unexpectedly, in the daft way of these things, found even for my poor black-coated men, and some even tentatively put back among – among the living I almost said. Sheltered housing is the official phrase, for once a decent, human phrase. At my assessment, such as it is. A core group at the end will go to the new facility. Oh, but, I feel mightily desirous to reach a conclusion about Roseanne. Nice letter from Percy Quinn in Sligo saying to come over any time I liked. So I must set my mind to doing that. He sounded so friendly that in writing back I asked him if he knew where old Royal Irish Constabulary records were kept in Sligo, and if he could find out, he might look for the name of Joseph Clear among them, of his kindness. The civil war years were so disruptive, destructive, I don't even know if such arcana survive, or if anyone would have bothered to protect them if they had. The Free State army, trying to bomb the Irregulars out of the Four Courts in Dublin, burned almost every civil record to ashes, births, deaths, marriages, and other documents beyond price, wiping out the records of the very nation they were trying to give new life to, actually burning memory in its boxes. With guns given or lent to them if I remember rightly by the exiting British, trying no doubt to be helpful to the new government, with that appealing, large-hearted characteristic of the British, as opposed to their concomitant murderousness. Not that I said any of this to Percy. I remembered suddenly as I replied to his letter that he had been at that fateful conference in Bundoran, but he certainly hadn't said anything about that, and I certainly didn't refer to it.

Yesterday afternoon, coming in early and weary, I went up rather fearlessly I thought to Bet's room. I think I may have moved beyond the stage of self-recrimination and guilt. After all, when all is said and done, I am on my own now, and our story is over. I lay on her bed trying to get close to her. I smelled the faint smell of her perfume, Eau de Rochas, that I used to look for at airport duty-frees when they still had such things. I just felt rather light and strange, but not unhappy. I was asking her absence to be there as a sort of bizarre inverted comfort. Just for a few minutes I felt I was her, lying there, and that I, the real other I, was downstairs in the old bedroom, and I wondered what I thought about myself. An inadequate, traitorous, unloving man? A presence oddly necessary, even with a floor and ceiling between? I didn't know. Even as Bet I didn't know

Bet. But just for a few minutes also I had something of her strength, her niceness, her integrity. What a wonderful feeling.

My eye fell on her choice library of rose books, and I took one up and started to read. I have to say it was very interesting, even poetic. I gathered myself up then, and carefully put my hands each side of the collection, and lifted them as one, and turned them on their sides so I could carry them downstairs, like booty, like something stolen. I lay down on my own bed and continued reading, long into the night. It was as if I were reading a letter from her, or was privileged to enter a subject that probably lined her mind like wallpaper. Rosa Gallica, a plain little rose like the one you see carved on medieval buildings as Rosa Mundi, was the first. The late roses are the huge tea roses that look in gardens like dancers' bottoms in frilly knickers. What a creature we are, bringing a simple bloom to that over the centuries, and turning those mangy scavenging animals at the edge of our ancient camp fires into Borzois and poodles. The thing itself, the first thing, will never do us alone, we must be elaborating, improving, poeticising. 'To palliate the shortness of our lives,' I suppose, as Thomas Browne wrote in the book that Roseanne has given me to give to her son. Between Religio Medici and the Royal Horticultural Society's Roses I have pitched a tent of sorts. And that Bet needed and wanted to know all these things about roses suddenly filled me with happiness, and pride. And curiously enough, this feeling didn't give way to regret and guilt. No, it opened room upon room, rose upon rose, to further happiness. That was not only the best day I have had since she died, but one of the best days of my life. It was as if she had dipped something of her essence down from heaven and helped me. I was so bloody grateful to her.

Oh, and I forgot to say (but to whom am I saying it?) that while putting Roseanne's book carefully aside, so I could concentrate on Bet's volumes, a letter almost fell out of it. It was a very curious letter, in that the envelope seemed not to have been opened, unless the damp of her room had somehow resealed it. Furthermore the postmark was from May 1987, fully twenty years ago. So I didn't know what to make of it, or quite what to do with it. My father always taught me that post was somehow sacred, and not only was it an actual crime to open another person's letter, as I believe it is, but a grave moral lapse also. I am afraid I am sorely tempted into such a moral lapse. On the other hand, maybe I should return it. Or burn it? No, hardly. Or leave it?

Roseanne's Testimony of Herself

The edges of the town received me coldly. I suppose I looked like something very wild blown in from the bog. A little girl sitting with her doll in the window of her house, trapped indoors by the storm, gave me a wave, with the mercy of little girls. I was thankful I did not have to go into the town proper. The hard pavement seemed to send bangs into my stomach, but I soldiered on. Then I was at the gates of Mrs McNulty's bungalow.

Old Tom's garden was an acre of beauty just withheld. I could see all his beds of well-prepared plants and flowers trying to bud, with bamboos holding everything against the wind. It was going to be a wonderful show in a few weeks right enough. In the top corner of the field there was an indistinct man digging, who might have been Old Tom. Digging, unperturbed by the twisting gusts and the sleeting rain, in a big coat and a solemn sou'wester. I thought to go over to him but I didn't know who was my enemy. Or I thought, by Jack's bleak stare at the gates across the road from my hut, they were all enemies. I decided not to approach him. I decided to take my chance at the door. I do remember at this point that the muscles in my stomach felt like they had highwire artists using them for swings.

I suppose I was muddy and drenched, I suppose I was. All my efforts to look well had no doubt been entirely undone by the journey. I had no mirror to check myself, except the dark windows each side of the door, and when I looked in there I saw only a ghoul with outlandish hair. That wasn't going to help me. But what could I do? Go back the way I came, in silence, defeated? I was frightened, I was terrified of this house, but I was more frightened of what would happen if I did not press the bell.

I sit here dry and old with measly shins writing this. It is not like long ago, it is not like a story, it is not like it is over and done. It is all to do. It is something like the gates of St Peter, banging on the gates, asking for entrance to heaven, and in my heavy heart knowing, too many sins, too many sins. But perhaps mercy!

I pushed in the thick Bakelite bell. It made no sound going in, but on withdrawing, I heard its petulant rattle inside the hall. Nothing happened for a long time. I could hear my own distressed breathing in the close porch. I thought I heard my heartbeat. I thought I could hear my infant's heartbeat, willing me on. I pushed in the fat button again. Would that I were anyone else ringing there, a butcher's boy, a travelling salesman, and not this heavy, panting embarrassment of a creature. I had a vision of Mrs McNulty's miniature form, her neatness, her face as white as the flower honesty, and just as I did, I heard a scuffling the other side of the door, and the door pulled open, and herself in the gap.

She gazed out at me. I don't know if she knew immediately who it was. She might have thought me a beggerwoman, or a tinker, or something escaped from the madhouse where she worked. Indeed I was a sort of beggarwoman, begging another woman to understand my plight. Forsaken, forsaken was the word that began to ring in my head.

'What do you want?' she said, understandably, probably eventually realising it was me, the undesirable woman her son had married and not married. I supposed she had plotted against me years before, but that did not concern me now. I didn't know how many weeks I was. I was almost afraid I would start to bring forth the baby on her doorstep. Maybe better for the baby if I had.

I didn't know what to say to her. I had never known anyone in my situation. I did not know what my situation was. I needed – I desperately needed someone to…

'What do you want?' she said again, as if inclined to shut the door if I didn't speak.

'I'm in trouble,' I said.

'I see that, child,' she said.

I tried to peer into her face. Child. That sounded there in the porch with the force of a beautiful word. 'I am in desperate trouble,' I said.

'You're nothing to do with us any more,' she said. 'Nothing.'

'I know that,' I said. 'But I've nowhere else to go. Nowhere.'

'Nothing and nowhere,' she said.

'Mrs McNulty, I am begging you to help me.'

'There's nothing I can do. What could I do for you? I am frightened of you.'

This suddenly gave me pause. I had not considered that. Frightened of me.

'I'm not to be frightened of, Mrs McNulty. I need help. I'm,

I'm -'

I was trying to say pregnant, but it didn't seem a word that could be said. I knew in her ears if I said the word it would have the same meaning as whore, prostitute. Or she would hear those shadowing words in the word pregnant. It felt like there was wood in my mouth, the exact shape of my mouth. A big heave of wind came up the path behind me and tried to bundle me into the door. I think she thought I was trying to force my way in. But I was so weak on my legs suddenly, I thought I was going to collapse.

'I know you have had your own troubles in the past,' I said, desperately trying to remember what Jack had said at the Plaza. But had he said anything? Whatever you say, say nothing.

'Vicissitudes, he said. In the long ago?'

'Don't!' she shouted. And then she shouted, 'Tom!'

Then she whispered, as woundable as a wounded bird.

'What did he tell you, what did Jack tell you?'

'Nothing. Vicissitudes.'

'Filthy gossip,' she said. 'All it was.'

I don't know how Old Tom had heard her, maybe by long attention to her voice, but in a few moments he appeared around the house in his coat and hat, looking like a half-drowned mariner.

'Jesus, Mary and Joseph,' he said. 'Roseanne.'

'You have to get her to go away,' said Mrs McNulty.

'Come on, Roseanne,' said Old Tom, 'come on, come back out the gate.'

I did obediently as I was told. His voice was friendly. He was nodding his head as he drove me backwards.

'Go on,' he said, 'go on,' like I was a calf in the wrong part of the field.

'Go on.'

Then I was out on the pavement again. The wind drove along the street like a gang of invisible lorries, roaring and piercing.

'Go on,' said Old Tom.

'Where?' I said, with utmost desperation.

'Go back,' he said. 'Go back.'

'I need you to help me.'

'There's no one to help you.'

'Ask Tom to help me, please.'

'Tom can't help you, girl. Tom's getting married. You know? Tom can't help you.' Married? My God. 'But what will I do?' 'Go back the road,' he said. 'Go on.'

I didn't go back the road at his bidding but because I had no other choice.

My thought was, if I could reach the hut again, I could dry myself, and rest, and think of another plan. But only to get out of the rain and the wind, and be able to think.

Tom marrying again. No, not again, for the first time.

If I had had him in front of me then, I might have killed him with whatever implement I could find. I might have torn a stone from a wall, a stick from a fence, and battered him, and killed him.

For bringing me with love into such wretched danger.

I don't think I was walking then but sort of heaving myself along. The little girl was still behind the window-glass as I passed, still with her doll, still waiting for the storm to abate, so she could go outside and play. This time for some reason she didn't wave.

They say that we come from apes and maybe it is the residing animal in us that knows things deep down that we almost don't realise we know. There was something, some clock or engine, beginning to stir in me, and my whole instinct was to hurry my steps, to hurry my steps, and find somewhere quiet and sheltered where I could try and understand that engine. There was an urgency in it, and a smell to it, some strange noise rose from me, and was whipped away by the wind. Now I was out on the tarmacadam road to Strandhill, green fields and stone walls around me, and the visible rain striking the surface of the road and leaping about with a sort of anger. It was like I had music in my belly, strong driving drumming music, the 'Black Bottom Stomp' gone over the edge, the piano player going wilder and wilder at the keys.

The road took a slow turn and then the bay began to be visible below. Who did I have to help me? No one. Where was the world? How was it I had managed to live in the world with no one? How was it that the inhabitants of the few houses along the way didn't rush out to me, to hurry me into their houses, to hold me in their arms? A savage sense entered me, of being of such small account in the world that I wasn't to be helped, that priest and woman and man had put out an edict that I wasn't to be helped, I was to be left to the elements, just as I was, a walking animal, forsaken.