The Secret Scripture (36 page)

The next morning, I went round to the old stableblock. I wanted to ask John Kane while I still could the few questions, with now all the more reason to do so. I knew it was unlikely that he would be able or even willing to answer me. I supposed at the very least I might offer him profoundest thanks, for all his strange work.

There was absolutely no sign of him. His quarters was a single room with an old-fashioned gramophone sideboard, the sort of one where you had to open the right-hand door for the sound to escape, because the door hid a simple wooden amplifier. There was a collection of 78 records in the niche supplied by the manufacturers (Shepherds, Bristol). It contained Benny Goodman, Bubber Miley, Jelly Roll Morton, Fletcher Henderson, and Billy Mayerl records. Otherwise the room was empty, except for a neat little iron bed, with a coverlet crudely sewn with flowers. I thought immediately of Mrs McNulty's work as described by Roseanne. I have no doubt that to get his way, or what he thought was the best way to serve Roseanne, he used all the pressure he could bring on the McNultys and their secret. The first wife who did not legally exist, and about whom the second family of Tom McNulty was probably never told. The mad wife who was not a wife, but nevertheless was flesh and blood. I am sure Mrs McNulty and her good daughter went as far as they humanly could to humour John Kane, even to the extent of supplying my new name, and my story up to that point. I do not know what he intended to do after he had found me, and can only suppose that having found out I had miraculously trained as a psychiatrist, he adapted himself to this, and hatched a better plan than the first, which after all, if it was a simple reunion he had in mind, might have resulted in my refusal to see Roseanne, or having seen her, my rejection of her. Because why would I not reject her, when everyone else had?

Well, I supposed all these things. It is not history. But I am beginning to wonder strongly what is the nature of history. Is it only memory in decent sentences, and if so, how reliable is it? I would suggest, not very. And that therefore most truth and fact offered by these syntactical means is treacherous and unreliable. And yet I recognise that we live our lives, and even keep our sanity, by the lights of this treachery and this unreliability, just as we build our love of country on these paper worlds of misapprehension and untruth. Perhaps this is our nature, and perhaps unaccountably it is part of our glory as a creature, that we can build our best and most permanent buildings on foundations of utter dust.

I should also memorialise a box of Cuban cigars by John

Kane's bed, which, on opening it, I discovered to be half empty. Or half full.

Otherwise nothing, except this curious and important little note on top of the gramophone:

Dear Doctor Green,

I am not no angel but I took the baby off that island. I run to the doctor with it. I would like to speke to you but I am bound to go. You will ask why I done it all for Roseanne and the anser is because I loved my father. My father was killed by Peerpoint. I got Doc Sing to right you a letter and it was a miracle he did and that you came. I am glad you came. Someday I was going to tell you the truth and now that day is come. You know the truth I am certan and plese now you do do not throw off your mother. No one among us is perfect look at me but that is not the idea. If we do not come to the gates of heaven with love averred, St Peter cannot let us in the gates. Now I say goodbye, Doc, forgive me, and God also forgive me.

Faithfully,

Seanin Keane Lavelle (John Kane)

PS. It is Doran attacked that Leitrim woman, the one that went home safely.

The other nurses and attendants did not know where he was. It wasn't as if he had packed a bag, or crept into the woodland behind us to die. There was simply no trace of him. Of course the police were informed and I am sure the gardai are keeping a weather eye out for him, and spot him everywhere and nowhere. Max Doran, the orderly referred to by John Kane, quite a young fellow and rather handsome and who has a girlfriend, confessed privately to me about the Leitrim woman, about which he is obviously ashamed and, more to the point, worried. He confessed, but then retracted. When the solicitors are ready he will go to trial, which may be some time. As the hospital and its staff are dispersed, I cannot say morale has been harmed. Perhaps something small has been gained. I would like to think it is the start of safety for our patients but alas I am not so great a fool.

Now here is the autumn and she is in good quarters. Purpose-built, state of the art, really, in truth, an asylum worthy of that ancient and desirable name. No doubt with her great age it is only a matter of time, but then, what is not? Many a good man died long before my own age. Many days she is silent, and difficult, and won't eat, and asks me brusquely why I have come. Sometimes she tells me she doesn't need me to come.

Like John Kane, I am trying to pick my moment. I see very well the difficulty he had.

One day as I was going she stood up and came the few inches towards me like a scrap of parchment, embraced me, and thanked me. Even her bones have lost weight. I was so moved I almost told her. But I still did not.

I think I fear, though she may be satisfied hopefully with me as a doctor and a friend, she may be disappointed with me as a son, as being not sufficient recompense for all her travails – a ridiculous, sober, ageing, confused English Irishman. Furthermore I am terrified of shocking her in the wrong way, medically, psychically. On this I might consult with Dr Wynn, but it might be a shock well beyond the business of medicine, beyond what he knows, and what I know. Something subtle, gentle, and fragile might be broken, beyond our clumsy fixing. The kernel of her endurance. But I believe it will keep, it will keep. The important thing is, she is safe and cared for. And she is free.

The month after I returned from England the asylum was demolished. They decided to do it by controlled explosion, so that the top four floors would collapse when the ground floor was blown away. That morning it was like going out to see my life being erased, with wires and dynamite and beautiful calculations. We all stood back on a little hill, about a quarter mile from the building. At the appointed hour the engineer pushed down on the box, and after an eternal second we heard a massive noise and saw the underside of the old building dissolve in a fiery crown of mortar and ancient stone. The huge edifice immediately headed earthward, leaving only a hanging memory of its old positions against the sky line. Behind it was an angel, a great man of fire the height of the asylum, with wings spread from east to west. It was evidently John Kane. I looked about me at my companions and asked them if they saw what I saw. They looked at me as if I was mad, and I suppose, having lost my asylum and now being only the superintendent of an enormous absence, filled by an unlikely angel, I suppose I was.

It was of course grief that saw the angel. I know that now. I was thinking I was quite over Bet, Bet was a safe memory, but it was only just beginning. Grief is about two years long, they say, it is a platitude out of manuals for grievers. But we are in mourning for our mothers before even we are born.

I will tell her. Just as soon as I can find the words. Just as soon as we reach that part of the story.

Today I drove back to Sligo. At the top of the town I passed the municipal graveyard, and wondered what time had done to the concrete temple and the acres of graves. I dropped in on Percy after all, and thanked him for helping me. I don't know if he was surprised. When I told him what had happened he certainly looked at me gobsmacked for a few moments. Then he got up from behind his desk. I was standing by the door, not having been sure whether fully to enter, or half to stay outside, so as not to disturb him. 'My dear man,' he said.

I don't know, I thought he was going to embrace me. I smiled like a boy, that's what it felt like, and I gave a laugh of happiness. It was only then really that it hit me. I am content to report that at the centre of it all, given everything, the nature of her history and mine, there was a very simple emotion.

I wanted to tell him that I thought it wasn't so much a question of whether she had written the truth about herself, or told the truth, or believed what she wrote and said was true, or even whether they were true things in themselves. The important thing seemed to me that the person who wrote and spoke was admirable, living, and complete. I wanted to tell him, to confess in a way, that from a psychiatric point of view I had totally failed to 'help' her, to prise open the locked lids of the past. But then, my original intention was not to help, but to assess her. All the time I might have helped her, all those years she was here, I had more or less left her alone. I wanted to tell him, she has helped herself, she has spoken to, listened to, herself. It is a victory. And that, in the matter of her father, in the upshot I preferred Roseanne's untruth to Fr Gaunt's truth, because the former radiated health. That moreover I believed that if the wonderful Amurdat Singh had not summoned me, I probably would never have practised psychiatry, and did not believe that I had ever been a good psychiatrist, whatever about a good man. That Roseanne had instructed me in the mystery of human silence and the efficacy of a withdrawal from the task of questioning. But I wasn't able to say these things.

Then he made a remark that might have been offensive, but actually I think represented an aper^u on his part, of which he was quite proud, and for which I was quite grateful, in the circumstances.

'You will be retiring soon,' he said, 'and yet, in many ways, you are just starting out.'

Then I thanked Percy again and went back to the car and drove out to Strandhill. I sort of knew the road from

Roseanne's account, and went there as if I had been before. When I reached the C-of-I church, obediently where it was supposed to be, I got out and looked about me. There was Knocknarea as she had often described it, rearing up as if fleeing away into the past, the remote and unknowable past. Below was Sligo Bay, with Rosses over to the right, and Ben Bulben where Willie Lavelle was killed, and I saw the bollards still on the strand leading out to Coney island. It was just a little place heaped up, a few fields and houses. I almost couldn't say it in my mind, that is where I was born. Somewhere there at the edge of things, appropriately enough, as Roseanne had always lived on the edges of our known world, and John Kane too. I was born on the edges of things, and even now, as the guardian of the mentally ill, I have by instinct pitched my tent in a similar place. Beyond the island, distantly, was the faithful figure of the Metal Man, eternally pointing.

To my left was the little village, I would say not much changed, but there are of course many more houses in Strandhill than there would have been in Roseanne's day. Nevertheless I could make out below the facade of an old hotel near the beach, and the great mound of sand that gave this place its simple name, and even I fancied the front of what looked like a humble dancehall.

It seems it was a well-chosen day, because as I drove down to the seaside, noting the cannon and the innocuous water, I saw there were men at work on the dancehall. It looked like they were readying it for demolition. There was an architect's sign that said there were going to be apartments built in due course. The hall itself looked almost ridiculously small, the hump of corrugated iron behind, the front itself that must indeed have once been a seaside dwelling. The flag was gone that once would have said the name, but in later years someone had affixed five iron letters to the front, now all greyed and rusted: P-L-A-Z-A. It was extraordinary for me to think of all the vanished history of this place. To think of Eneas McNulty walking here in his burned uniform, of Tom going in with his instruments, of the cars coming out from Sligo along the glistening strand, and the strains of music leaking out into the untrustworthy Irish summer air, and maybe straying even as far as the ancient ears of Queen Maeve. Certainly the ears of listening Roseanne, in her own buried exile.

It was more difficult to locate her hut. I found I had already passed the spot where it must have been, because I was able to find the fine wall of the big house across from it, and the gate where Jack's wife had humiliated Roseanne. At first I thought it was all just brambles and ruin, but the old stone chimney was still almost intact, though covered in lichen and climbing weeds. The rooms where Roseanne had lived out her sentence of living death were no more.

I walked in the ruined gap of the little gate and stood on the scruffy grass. There was nothing to see but in my mind's eye I could see everything, because she had supplied the ancient cinema of this place. Nothing except a neglected rose bush among the brambles, with a few last vivid blooms. Despite my reading of Bet's books, I found that I didn't know the name of it. But hadn't Roseanne mentioned it? Something, something…For the life of me, I couldn't remember what she had written. But I pushed forward through the thorns and weeds, thinking I might take a few blooms of it back to Roscommon as a souvenir. All the blooms were uniform, a neat tight-curled rose, except on one branch, whose roses were different, bright and open. I could feel the brambles tearing at my legs, and pulling at my jacket like beggars, but suddenly I knew what I was doing. I carefully peeled off a sprig as recommended in the books in the chapters on propagation, and slipped it in my pocket, feeling almost guilty, as if I were stealing something that didn't belong to me.