The Secret Scripture (4 page)

'You know, Roseanne,' he said, 'as I have been obliged recently to look at the legal position of all our inmates, as this has been so much in the public discourse, I was looking back over your admittance papers, and I must confess -'

He said all this in the most easy-going voice imaginable.

'Confess?' I said, prompting him. I knew his mind had a habit of drifting off silently into a private thought.

'Oh, yes – excuse me. Hmm, yes, I was wanting to ask you,

Roseanne, if you remember by any chance the particulars of your admittance here, which would be most helpful – if you did. I will tell you why in a minute – if I have to.'

Dr Grene smiled and I had a suspicion he meant this last remark as a jest, but the humour of it escaped me, especially as, as I said, he never usually attempted humour. So I surmised something unusual was stirring here.

Then, as bad as himself, I forgot to answer him.

'You remember anything about it?'

'Coming here, you mean, Dr Grene?'

'Yes, I think that's what I mean.'

'No,' I said, a foul and utter lie being the best answer.

'Well,' he said, 'unfortunately a great swathe of our archive in the basement has been used, not surprisingly, by generations of mice for bedding, and it is all quite ruined and unreadable. Your own file such as it is has been attacked in a most interesting fashion. It would not shame an Egyptian tomb. It seems to fall apart at the touch of a hand.'

There was a long silence then. I smiled and smiled. I tried to think what I looked like to him. A face so creased and old, so lost in age.

'Of course, I know you very well. We have talked so often over the years. I wish now I had made more notes. These do not come to many pages, you will not be surprised to learn. I am a reluctant taker of notes, perhaps not admirable in my job. It is sometimes said that we do no good, that we do nothing for anyone. But I hope we have done our best for you, despite my culpable lack of notes. I do. I'm glad you say you are well. I would like to think you are happy here.'

I smiled at him my oldest old-woman smile, as if I did not quite understand.

'God knows,' he said then, with a certain elegance of mind, 'no one could be happy here.'

'I am happy,' I said.

'Do you know,' he said, 'I do believe you. I think you are the happiest person I know. But I think I will be obliged to reassess you, Roseanne, because there has been very much an outcry in the newspapers against – such people as were incarcerated shall we say for social reasons, rather than medical -being, being…'

'Held?'

'Yes, yes. Held. And continuing in this day and age to be held. Of course, you have been here these many, many years, I should think maybe even fifty?'

'I do not remember, Dr Grene. It may well be so.'

'You might consider this place your home.'

'No.'

'Well. You as well as any other person have the right to be free if you are suitable for, for freedom. I suppose even at one hundred years of age you might wish to – to walk about the place and paddle in the sea in the summer, and smell the roses -'

'No!'

I did not intend to cry out, but as you will see these small actions, associated in most people's minds with the ease and happiness of life, are to me still knives in my heart to think of.

'Excuse me?'

'No, no, please, go on.'

'At any rate, if I found you to be here without true cause, without medical basis as it were, I would be obliged to try and make other arrangements. I don't wish to upset you. And I don't intend, my dear Roseanne, to throw you out into the cold. No, no, this would be a very carefully orchestrated move, and as I say, subject to an assessment by me. Questions, I would be obliged to question you – to a degree.'

I was not entirely certain of its origin, but a feeling of sweeping dread spread through me, like I imagine the poison of broken and afflicted atoms spread through people on the far margins of Hiroshima, killing them just as surely as the explosion. Dread like a sickness, a memory of a sickness, the first time in many years I had felt it.

'Are you all right, Roseanne? Please don't be agitated.'

'Of course I want freedom, Dr Grene. But it frightens me.'

'The gaining of freedom', said Dr Grene pleasantly, 'is always accomplished in an atmosphere of uncertainty. In this country at least. Perhaps in all countries.'

'Murder,' I said.

'Yes, sometimes,' he said, gently.

We stopped speaking then and I gazed at the solid rectangle of sunlight in the room. Ancient dust moiled there. 'Freedom, freedom,' he said.

Somewhere in his dusty voice there was the vague bell of longing. I know nothing of his life outside, of his family. Does he have a wife and children? Mrs Grene somewhere? I don't know. Or do I? He is a brilliant man. He looks like a ferret, but no matter. Any man that can talk about old Greeks and Romans is a man after my father's heart. I like Dr Grene despite his dusty despair because he brings to me always an echo of my father's line of talk, filleted out of Sir Thomas Browne and John Donne.

'But, we won't begin today. No, no,' he said, rising. 'Certainly not. But it is my duty to set out the facts before you.'

And he crossed again with a sort of infinite medical patience to the door.

'You deserve no less, Mrs McNulty.'

I nodded.

Mrs McNulty.

I always think of Tom's mother when I hear that name. I was once also a Mrs McNulty, but never as supremely as she. Never. As she made quite clear a hundred times. Furthermore, why did I give my name ever since as McNulty, when those great efforts were made by everybody to take the name away? I do not know.

'I was at the zoo last week,' he said suddenly, 'with a friend and his son. I was up in Dublin to collect some books for my wife. About roses. My friend's son is called William, which as you know is my name also.'

I did not know this!

'We came to the house of the giraffes. William was very pleased with them, two big, long lady giraffes they were, with soft, long legs, very, very beautiful animals. I think an animal so beautiful I have never seen.'

Then in the glimmering room I fancied I saw something strange, a tear rising from the corner of his eye, slipping to his cheek and tumbling quickly down, a sort of dark, private crying.

'So beautiful, so beautiful,' he said.

His talk had locked me in silence, I know not why. It was not opening, easy, happy talk like my father's, after all. I wanted to listen to him, but I did not want to answer now. That strange responsibility we feel towards others when they speak, to offer them the solace of any answer. Poor humans! And anyway he had not asked a question. He was merely floating there in the room, insubstantial, a living man in the midst of life, dying imperceptibly on his feet, like all of us.

Later John Kane lumbered in, muttering and pushing his brush, a person I have come to accept in the way of things here, which, if they can't be changed, must be endured.

I noted with a small degree of dread that his flies were open. His trousers are decked with a series of clumsy-looking buttons. He is a little man but at the same time he is all brawn and braces. There is something wrong with his tongue, because he is obliged to swallow every few moments with strange hardship. His face has a veil of dark-blue veins in it, like a soldier's face that has been too near a cannon mouth when it exploded. In the gossip of this place he has a very poor reputation.

'I can't see how you want all them books, missus, since you have no spectacles to read them.'

Then he swallowed again, swallowed.

I can see perfectly without spectacles but I did not say this. He was referring to the three volumes in my possession, my father's copy of Religio Medici, The Hounds of Hell, and Mr Whitman's Leaves of Grass.

All three brown and yellow with thumbing.

But conversation with John Kane can lead anywhere, like those conversations with boys when I was a young girl of twelve or so, a gaggle of them at the corner of our road, standing in the rain indifferently, and saying things to me, in soft voices – at first in soft voices. In here, among the shadows and the distant cries, the greatest virtue is silence.

Those that feed them do not love them, those that clothe them do not fear for them.

That is a quotation from something, what or where I do not know.

Even gibberish is dangerous, silence is better.

I have been here a long time and in that time have learned the virtue of silence certainly.

Old Tom put me here. I think it was him. It was a favour to him, for he himself worked as tailor in the Sligo Lunatic Asylum. I think he put money in with me, because of this room. Or does Tom my husband pay for me? But he could not still be alive. It is not the first place I was put, the first place was -

But I am not concerned with recrimination. This is a decent place, if not home. If this were home I would go mad!

Oh, I must remind myself to be clear, and be sure I know what I am saying to you. There must be accuracy and rightness now.

This is a good place. This is a good place.

There is a town not far off, I am told. Roscommon town itself. I don't know how far, except it takes half an hour in a fire engine.

This I know because one night many years ago I was roused from my sleep by John Kane. He led me out into the hallway and hurried me down two or three flights of stairs. There was a fire in one of the wings and he was leading me to safety.

Instead of bringing me to the ground floor, he had to cut across through a long dark ward, where the doctors and other staff were also gathered. There was smoke coming up from below, but this place was deemed to be safe. The gloom gradually brightened, or my eyes adjusted to it.

There were maybe fifty beds there, a long thin room with curtains drawn everywhere. Thin ragged curtains. Old, old faces, as old as my own now. I was astonished. They had lain there not too far away from me and I did not know. Old faces that said nothing, lying in stupor, like fifty Russian icons. Who were they? Why, they were your own people. Silent, silent, sleeping towards death, crawling on bleeding knees towards our Lord.

A tribe of onetime girls. I whispered a prayer to hurry their souls to heaven. For I think they crept up there very slow.

I suppose they are all dead now or mostly. I never visited them again. The fire engine came in half an hour. I remember because one of the doctors remarked on it.

These places unlike the world, with none of the things we praise the world for. Where sisters, mothers, grandmothers, spinsters, all forgotten lie.

The human town not so far off, sleeping and waking, sleeping and waking, forgetting its lost women there, in long rows.

Half an hour. Fire brought me in to see them. Never again.

Those that feed them do not love them.

'Do you want this?' says John Kane in my ear.

'What is it?'

He was holding it in the palm of his hand. Half the shell of a bird's egg, blue like the veins in his face.

'Oh, yes, thank you,' I said. It was something I had picked up in the gardens many years before. It had sat in the window niche and he had never referred to it before. But it had lain there, blue and perfect and never ageing. Yet an old thing. Many many generations of birds ago.

'That is a robin's egg maybe,' he said.

'Maybe,' I said.

'Or a lark.'

'Yes.'

'I will put it back anyhow,' he said, swallowing again, as if his tongue were hardened at the root, his throat bulging for a moment.

'I don't know where all the dust comes from,' he said. 'I sweep it every day and there is always dust, by God there is, ancient dust. Not new dust, never new dust.'

'No,' I said, 'No. Forgive me.'

He straightened a moment and looked at me.

'What is your name?' he said.

'I don't know,' I said, in a sudden panic. I have known him for decades. Why was he asking me this question? 'You don't know your own name?' 'I know it. I forget it.' 'Why do you sound frightened?' 'I don't know.'

'There is no need,' he said, and taking the dust into his dustpan neatly, began to leave the room. 'Anyhow, I know your name.'

I started to cry, not like a child, but like the old old woman I am, slow, slight tears that no one sees, no one dries.

Next thing my father knew, the civil war was upon us.

I write this to stop my tears. I stab the words into the page with my biro, as if pinning myself there.

Before the civil war there was another war against the country being ruled from England but that was not much fought in

Sligo.

I am quoting my husband's brother Jack when I write this, or at least I hear Jack's voice in the sentences. Jack's vanished voice. Neutral. Jack, like my mother, was master of the neutral tone, if not of neutrality. For Jack eventually donned an English uniform and fought against Hitler in that later war – I nearly said, that real war. He was a brother also of Eneas McNulty.

The three brothers, Jack, Tom and Eneas. Oh, yes.

In the west of Ireland by the way Eneas is three syllables, En-ee-as. In Cork I fear it is two, and sounds more like a person's backside than anything else.

But the civil war was definitely fought in Sligo, and all along the western seaboard, with fierce application.

The Free Staters had accepted the treaty with England. The Irregulars so-called had baulked at it like horses at a broken bridge in the darkness. Because left out of the whole matter was the North of the country, and it seemed to them that what had been accepted was an Ireland without a head, a body lopped off at the shoulders. That was Carson's crowd in the North that kept them linked to England.