The Secret Scripture (9 page)

My father was not obliged to work on Christmas eve, and it was our delight to go to the service, given by the minister Mr Ellis in his neat old church. My mother came with us silently, small like a monk in her shabby outdoor coat. I remember the scene so well, the small church lit with candles, and the Protestant people of the parish, poor and not poor and wealthy enough, gathered there, the men in their dark gaberdines, the women if they could manage it with a dash of fur about the neck, but mostly, the sombre green tones of those days. The light of the candles pierced everywhere, into the lines of my father's face as he sat beside me, into the stones of the church, into the voice of the minister as he spoke his words in that mysterious and stirring English of the bible, in through my own breastbone, right into my young heart, piercing me fiercely there, so that I wanted to cry out, but cry out what I could not say. Cry out against my father's fate, my mother's silence, but also, cry out in praise of something, the beauty of my mother that was going but still there. I felt as if my mother and my father were in my care, and that it was by some action of my own that they would be rescued. For some reason this plumped me up with sudden joy, a feeling so scarce in that time, so that when the local voices began to sing some forgotten hymn, I began to flush with weird happiness, and then in the sparkling dark, to cry, long full hot tears of treacherous relief.

And I cried there, and I suppose little good it did anyone. The smell of the wet clothes all about me, the coughing of the church-goers. What would I give to put them back in that church, back in that Christmas time, put everything back that time soon took away, as time must, the shillings back in the pockets of the people, the bodies back in the long johns and the mittens, everything, everything back, so we might be balanced there, kneeling and sitting on the mahogany planks, if not eternally then again for those moments, that very inch of the material of time, the lines of my father's face accepting the glimmering light, his face slowly slowly turning to both my mother and me, and smiling, smiling in easy, ordinary kindness.

The next morning my father produced for me a beautiful segment of what I learned later was called costume jewellery. All girls going out in Sligo liked to sport a bit of 'magpie' glitter. I like other girls dreamed of the fabled magpie's nest, where brooches and bracelets and earrings would be found, a nest of lovely plunder. I took my father's gift and opened its silvercoloured pin and pinned it on my cardigan, showed it proudly to the piano and the motorbike.

Then my father handed my mother the great something wrapped in good shop paper, the sort that in older days she would have saved and folded and put in a drawer. She opened the packet quietly, and gazed on the speckled scarf folded itself within, and raised her face and asked:

'Why, Joe?'

My father had not the least idea what she meant. Was it the pattern was wrong? Had he failed in the task of buying a scarf in some manner he would not be aware of, for who would tell him, the rat-catcher, about women's fashions?

'Why? I don't know, Cissy. I don't know,' he said, valiantly. Then, suddenly, he added, as if on an inspiration: 'It's a scarf.'

'What did you say, Joe?' she said, as if lost in a mysterious deafness.

'For your head, for your neck, as you like,' he said. Beginning to churn, it was obvious to me, with that desperate feeling that grows in the belly of the giver of the wrong present. He was having to explain the obvious, always an unpleasant task.

'Oh,' she said, staring at it now in her lap. 'Oh.'

'I hope you like it,' he said, which I suppose was presenting his own neck for the axe.

'Oh,' she said, 'oh.' But what class of an oh it was, or what the oh signified, neither of us knew.

Dr Grene's Commonplace Book

Very distressed to discover, quite by accident, that Bet has decided not to attend the specialist to whom she had been referred last year (was it a year ago already, or am I dreaming? Was it this year?). By the tin of Complan last night I happened to find, temporarily forgotten, her diary. Now, of course it was wrong, unethical, wrong, wrong, but I opened it, just from the tiny passion of the husband disliked. To see what she had written in it. No, no, just to see her writing, something as intimate and private as that. Maybe not even to read the words. Just to look at the black ink of her biro for a brief moment. And there it was, just a few weeks ago, an entry bold as brass, but of course, meant only for herself: 'Rang clinic, cancelled appointments.'

Why?

This was the follow-up for her dizzy spell, I was vaguely aware, in fact when she told me she had been given the referral, I was so comforted I put the entire matter from my mind. I was in two minds. First, alarmed that she had done so, and secondly, perfectly aware that I only knew because I had violated her privacy – a further violation of herself, as I knew she would see it. And she would be right.

What to do?

So I was distracted all night. My usual solution to the problem, distraction. Possibly. But I think, with good reason.

Somewhere in the small hours I grew mysteriously furious, really really angry, with her, and wanted to storm up the stairs and have it out with her. What did she think she was doing? The bloody foolishness of it!

Thank God I did not. That would have solved nothing. But very real worries assail me. The swelling in her legs could well be due to clotting, and if the clot should climb into the lungs or the heart, she will drop dead. Is this what she wants? Now yet again I discover I do not have the language, the lingo, to talk to her about this, or about anything. We have neglected the tiny sentences of life and now the big ones are beyond our reach.

I had meant to spend the evening devising some non-devious way to question Roseanne McNulty in such a manner as to get a result. It strikes me that if I cannot speak helpfully to my own wife about her health, I have little chance with Roseanne. But maybe it is easier with a stranger, one can be the 'expert', and not the great human fool that tries to lead a life. On the plus side, I am fairly confident in my assessment of most of the other patients. They are in the main open books and their distress is self-evident. Although I cannot shed myself of the feeling of being the perpetual invader. Roseanne however confounds me.

I had wanted to consult my edition of Barthus on Pathologies of Secrecy, which of course is a marvellous book, if I would only find time to read it again. I suppose I could have gone into my study and looked at it, but I was trembling. I was nearly apoplectic, if that is still a real condition in the modern world. So in the upshot I neither read my Barthus nor resolved Bet's recklessness. I am exhausted.

Roseanne's Testimony of Herself

Some weeks later it must have been, I was with my father on a particular job.

Rats start to breed with a vengeance in early spring, so late winter is a good time to go get them, when they have not expanded in numbers for a while, and the weather is not too murderous to the rat-catcher. I suppose looking back it was a queer thing to bring a young girl on the trail of rodents, but I did take a great interest in it, especially after my father read me the manual, which presented the task as one highly skilled, even verging on the vocational and the magical.

He had been working a few nights already in the Protestant orphanage, a strange place in its own right, rats or no rats. It was already about two hundred years old, and my father knew old stories attached to the place, and I do not think it was a very good idea to be an orphan in centuries gone by, judging by what he said. Perhaps in those days it was a decent place enough. He intended to work from the roof down, which was the proper way to do it, ridding the place of rats floor by floor. The upper attics had been cleared, and the top floor, and there were three floors to do, where the orphan girls actually lived, about two hundred of them in their nice canvaslike pinnies, which they wore in their beds.

'They've a bed each these times, Roseanne, yes,' said my father. 'But in the times of your grandfather, or maybe it was his grandfather, but anyway, things were very different. Your grandfather, or perhaps your grandfather's grandfather, used to tell a terrible tale about this place. He came in here, inspector of buildings he was, and had been commissioned by the government in Dublin at the time, because there had been an outcry against the practices in these places, an outcry. He came in here,' and we were standing out in the ancient courtyard at the time, in a rather murky light, with two cages of rats full as you like, and Bob the dog looking very pleased with himself, having chased the rats through the very walls, which were seven or eight feet thick in places, with cavities galore, 'say maybe in one of those big rooms up there,' and he pointed up the gloomy stones of the building to the second floor, 'and there was what looked to him like an acre of beds, and on each bed was babies, maybe twenty of them, newborn or nearly, lying side by side, and he came in there with the ould nurse, as manky now as you like, as you can imagine, and he surveys the sea of babies, and he notices that there was no glass in some of the windows, not like now, and just a little fire in the huge grate, not enough to warm anything, and indeed holes in the ceiling also with the cold drear winter wind howling in, and he exclaims, "My God, woman," or however they might speak in those times, "my God, woman, but these children are not being cared for, by God," he says, "they are not even clothed," and sure enough, Roseanne, they had barely a scrap of clothing between them. And the old woman says, like it was the most reasonable and ordinary thing in the world, "But sure, Mister, aren't they lying in here to die." And he realised that these arrangements were meant, and it was a way to be rid of the sickly or surplus babies. And that was a great scandal in those days, for a while, I suppose.'

He worked away at the traps for a while, and I stood near him, the night wind moaning a little where it crept along the buildings. There was a cold cheap cankered-looking moon risen, just sitting on the roof of the orphanage. My father was dousing the rats with paraffin, preparatory to throwing them on the fire one by one, a fire he had managed to get lit in the centre of the courtyard, using smelly old boards and the like from one of the stores. This was his own method of disposing of the rats, that he had devised, working on from the manual, and he was quite proud of the method. When I think back it was perhaps a little unfortunate that the rats were still alive going into the flames, but I do not think it ever struck my father as cruel, and maybe he hoped it might serve as a warning to other rats if they were watching from the shadows. Which would be to some degree how my father's mind worked.

At any rate he was opening the traps, grabbing the rats one by one as I said and now I think of it, giving each a rap over the head before the flames, that has just popped up in my head as a picture, thank God, and chatting away to me, and maybe it was because he was not able to give it his full concentration, because I was with him, but didn't one of the rats escape between the trap and the knock on the head, wriggling out of his fingers suddenly, skirting the astonished Bob, who had nary a chance to react, and was gone back towards the orphanage in a dark blaze of blackness, but with that characteristic galloping motion…Myfather cursed gently and maybe thought no more of it, thinking he would get that rat again the following day.

So he worked away at the remainder, registering no doubt the squeaking yelp that each rat gave as he dispatched it, soaked in the paraffin, and threw it onto the bonfire, a sound that I imagine he heard in his dreams. And after about an hour, he wrapped up his bits and bobs, slung his traps around his body, put Bob on his habitual string, and we passed back through the dark orphanage to the street side, where it presented a rather elaborate carved front to the town, being no doubt the result of much philanthropic cash in the vanished century of its building. It was when we were just crossing the street that we heard a roaring, and turned about and looked up.

There was a strange, full, mysterious sound coming from the building, high up on the floor where the girls were sleeping. Although not all sleeping now, because pushing up through the slates of the roof was a thick black smoke, and a grey smoke, and a white smoke, all eerily lit by nothing but the moon and the meagre illuminations of Sligo. Now we heard the glass of windows break somewhere, and suddenly a long thin arm of bright yellow flame came streaking out, seemed to hang solidly in the night air, showing up my father's upturned face, and no doubt mine, and then just as strangely retrieved itself, with a horrible roaring moan, worse than any wind. It seemed to me in my enormous fright that the fire had spoken a word: 'Death, death,' said the fire I thought.

'Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,' said my father, like a man paralysed by some awful turn in his blood and brain, and as he spoke the doors of the orphanage opened, no doubt sending up a wild fierce blow of wind through the house, and a few stunned girls, their pinnies covered in ash and dirt, came stumbling out, their faces wild like little demons. I had never seen such terror. Two or three of the attendants of the place, a woman and two men, also tumbled out, in their black clothes, and hurried out onto the cobbles to see what could be seen.

What could be seen – and now the fire engines could be heard in the distance, clanging their bells – was the floor of girls bright as day, with a foaming of flames behind the great windows, and though we were at a strict angle, the faces and arms of girls beating at the windows like moths do in daytime, or sleeping butterflies in winter when a room is suddenly heated, fatally thinking spring has come. Then some of the windows seemed to explode out, sending lethal shards and fragments of glass down towards us, making everyone run for the other side of the street. People came out of their houses, women with hands to their faces, wailing strangely, and men in their long johns from their beds, shouting and calling, and if they had never felt compassion for those parentless girls, they felt it now, calling out to them like fathers and mothers.