The Secret Scripture

chapter one

Roseanne's Testimony of Herself (Patient, Roscommon Regional Mental Hospital, 1957-)

The world begins anew with every birth, my father used to say. He forgot to say, with every death it ends. Or did not think he needed to. Because for a goodly part of his life he worked in a graveyard.

That place where I was born was a cold town. Even the mountains stood away. They were not sure, no more than me, of that dark spot, those same mountains.

There was a black river that flowed through the town, and if it had no grace for mortal beings, it did for swans, and many swans resorted there, and even rode the river like some kind of plunging animals, in floods.

The river also took the rubbish down to the sea, and bits of things that were once owned by people and pulled from the banks, and bodies too, if rarely, oh and poor babies, that were embarrassments, the odd time. The speed and depth of the river would have been a great friend to secrecy.

That is Sligo town I mean.

Sligo made me and Sligo undid me, but then I should have given up much sooner than I did being made or undone by human towns, and looked to myself alone. The terror and hurt in my story happened because when I was young I thought others were the authors of my fortune or misfortune; I did not know that a person could hold up a wall made of imaginary bricks and mortar against the horrors and cruel, dark tricks of time that assail us, and be the author therefore of themselves.

I am not there now, now I am in Roscommon. It is an old place that was one time a mansion but it is all cream paint and iron beds now, and locks on the doors. It is all Dr Grene's kingdom. Dr Grene is a man I don't understand but I am not afraid of him. What religion he is I don't know, but he looks very like to St Thomas, with his beard and balding crown.

I am completely alone, there is no one in the world that knows me now outside of this place, all my own people, the few farthings of them that once were, my little wren of a mother I suppose in chief, they are all gone now. And my persecutors are gone in the main I believe, and the reason for all this is that I am an old, old woman now, I may be as much as a hundred, though I do not know, and no one knows. I am only a thing left over, a remnant woman, and I do not even look like a human being no more, but a scraggy stretch of skin and bone in a bleak skirt and blouse, and a canvas jacket, and I sit here in my niche like a songless robin – no, like a mouse that died under the hearthstone where it was warm, and lies now like a mummy in the pyramids.

No one even knows I have a story. Next year, next week, tomorrow, I will no doubt be gone, and it will be a smallsize coffin they will need for me, and a narrow hole. There will never be a stone at my head, and no matter.

But small and narrow are all human things maybe.

It is silence all about. My hand is good and I have a beautiful biro full of blue ink, given me by my friend the doctor, because I said I liked its colour – who is not a bad man in truth, maybe even a philosopher – and I have a bundle of paper that I found in a store cupboard among other unwanted things, and I have a floorboard loosened where I hide these treasures. I write out my life on unwanted paper – surplus to requirements. I start with a clean sheet – with many clean sheets. For dearly I would love now to leave an account, some kind of brittle and honest-minded history of myself, and if God gives me the strength, I will tell this story, and imprison it under the floor-board, and then with joy enough I will go to my own rest under the Roscommon sod.

My father was the cleanest man in all the Christian world, all Sligo anyhow. He seemed to me all strapped about in his uniform – not in any manner haphazard, but regular as an account book. He was the superintendent of the graveyard, and for this work he had been given quite a resplendent uniform, or so it seemed to me as a child.

He had a barrel in the yard that gathered the rain and with that he rinsed himself every day of the year. He would turn the faces of my mother and myself to the wall of the kitchen, and stood without fear of being seen among the mosses and the lichens of the yard, stripped entirely, and laved himself mercilessly in all kinds of weather, in the deeps of winter groaning like a bull.

Carbolic soap, that would have cleaned a greasy floor, he agitated into a suit of suds, that fitted him well, and he scraped at his self with a piece of grey stone, that he stuck into the wall in a particular niche when he was done – from where it poked out like a nose. All this I saw by glimpses and quick turns of the head, because I was a dishonest daughter in that way, and couldn't obey.

No circus act could have pleased me in the same way.

My father was a singer that could not be silenced, he sang all the songs of the operettas of those days. And he loved to read the sermons of preachers long gone, because, he said, he could imagine the sermons fresh for some vanished Sunday, and the words new in the mouths of the preachers. His own father had been a preacher. My father was a passionate, I might almost say celestial-minded Presbyterian man, which was not a particularly fashionable quality in Sligo. The Sermons of John Donne he prized above all, but his veritable gospel was Religio Medici by Sir Thomas Browne, a book I still possess in all the flotsam and ruckus of my life, in a little battered volume. I have it here before me on my bed, with his name in black ink inside, Joe Clear, and the date 1888, and the town Southampton, for in his extreme youth he had been a sailor, sailing into every port of Christendom before he was seventeen.

In Southampton occurred one of the kingly or main events of his life, in that he met my mother Cissy, who was a chamber maid in the sailors' boarding house he favoured.

He used to tell a curious story about Southampton, and as a child I received it as the gospel truth. It may have been true for all that.

One season coming into port he could find no bed in his favourite house and was obliged to go further along the windy wastes of terraces and signs, and found a lonely house with a vacant sign stuck out to fish in customers.

In he went and was met by a greyfaced woman in her middle years, who gave him a bed in the basement of her house.

In the middle of the night he woke, thinking he heard someone breathing in the room. Startled, and with that extreme awakeness that attends such panic, he heard a groan, and someone lay on the bed beside him in the dark.

He lit his candle from the tinderbox. There was no one to be seen. But he saw the bedclothes and mattress depressed where a heavy person lay. He leapt from the bed and called out but there was no reply. It was then he noticed also in his very entrails a terrible sense of hunger such as had not afflicted an Irishman since the dark famine. He rushed to the door but to his amazement it was locked against him. Now he was greatly outraged. 'Let me out, let me out!' he called, both terrified and affronted. How dare that old hag lock him in! He banged and banged, and finally the landlady came and calmly unlocked it. She apologised and said she must have unwittingly turned the key against thieves. He told her about the disturbance but she only smiled at him and said nothing, and then went up to her own quarters. He thought he caught from her a strange smell of leaves, of underfloor and undergrowth, like she had been crawling through woodland. Then there was calm, and he snuffed out his candle and tried to sleep.

The same thing happened a little while later. He leapt up again and lit his candle and went to the door. It was locked again! Again that deep gnawing hunger in his belly. For some reason, maybe because of her extreme strangeness, he couldn't bear to call the landlady, and sweating and discommoded he spent the night in a chair.

When morning broke he awoke, and dressed, and when he went to the door it was open. He took his bags and went upstairs. It was then he noticed the decrepitude of the place, which had not been so obvious in the kinder darkness of the night. He could not raise the landlady, and with his ship due to sail, was forced to leave the house without seeing her, throwing the few shillings on the hallstand as he went out.

Outside in the street when he looked back he was greatly perturbed to see many of the windowpanes of the house were broken, and there were slates missing from the sagging roof.

He went into the shop on the corner to compose himself by talking to another human person, and asked the shopkeeper about the house. The house, said the shopkeeper, had been closed up some years ago and was uninhabited. Ideally it would be demolished except it was part of the terrace. He could not have spent the night there, said the shopkeeper. No one lived there and no one would dream of buying it, for the reason that a woman had killed her husband there, locking him in a basement room and starving him to death. The woman herself had been tried and hanged for murder.

My father told me and my mother this story with the passion of a person reliving it as he spoke. The gloomy house, the grey woman, the groaning ghost swam behind his eyes.

'It's as well there was room with us the next time you were in port, then, Joe,' said my mother, in her most neutral tones.

'By God, by God, yes,' said my father.

A little human story, a sailor's story, that somehow had still bound up in it my mother's contrasting beauty, and the enormous lure she had for him then and always.

For her beauty was that darkhaired, darkskinned Spanish sort of beauty, with green eyes like American emeralds, that no man can protect himself against.

And he married her and brought her back to Sligo and there she lived her life henceforth, not bred in that darkness, but like a lost shilling on a floor of mud, glistening in some despair. A more beautiful girl Sligo never saw, she had skin as soft as feathers, and a warm, generous breast all new-baked bread and delight.

The greatest joy of my young life was issuing forth with my mother into the streets of Sligo at dusk, because she liked to meet my father on his way home from his work at the cemetery. It was only many years later when I was more grown myself that I realised, looking back, that there was a certain anxiety in that going forth, as if she did not trust time and the ordinary way of things to bring him home. For I do believe my mother suffered strangely under her halo of beauty.

He was the superintendent there, as I said to you, and wore a blue uniform and a cap with a peak as black as a blackbird's coat.

This was at a time when there was the Great War and the town was full of soldiers, as if Sligo itself were a battlefield, but of course it was not. It was but men on their furlough we saw there. But they had a great look of my own father, what with the uniforms – so that he seemed to pop up everywhere in those streets, as my mother and me were walking, myself looking out as fiercely as she for him. My joy was only completed when at last it turned out to be him, coming home from the cemetery in the dark evenings of winter, as might be, skittering along. And when he spied me he would be playing with me then, larking about like a child. And many a glance he got, and maybe such action didn't go with his dignity as superintendent of the Sligo dead. But he had that rare ability to let things ease in himself in the company of a child, and be stupid and gay in the parched light.

He was the keeper of the graves, but he was also himself, and in his peaked cap and blue uniform could guide a person to whatever plot held relative or friend with solemn dignity enough, but alone in his graveyard house, which was a little temple made of concrete, he would be heard singing wonderfully 'I Dreamt that I Dwelt in Marble Halls' from The Bohemian Girl, one of his favourite operettas.

And on free days he went out on his Matchless motorcycle to race along on the devious roads of Ireland. If the winning of my mother constituted a kingly event, the fact that he in one great year of fortune, around the time of my birth, raced the short course on the Isle of Man, on his lovely bike, coming in respectably in the middle of the field, and not killing himself, was the source of constant memory and joy, and I am sure consoled him in his concrete temple in the dreary stretches of an Irish winter, surrounded as he was by those sleeping souls.

My father's other 'famous' story, that is, famous in our tiny household, happened during his single days, when he was more able to get himself to the few motorcycle meetings of those times. It happened in Tullamore, and was a singularly peculiar tale.

He was going along himself at a great rate, and in front of him was a long wide hill, leading down to a sharp turn where the road met a domain wall, one of those high, thick stone walls built during the Irish famine indeed, as a sort of useless labour to keep labourers alive. At any rate, the racer in front of him, tearing down the hill and picking up an enormous head of speed, instead of braking seemed even to accelerate at the opposing wall, and finally, in a horrible clutter of smoke, metal and a noise as of cannons, struck it mercilessly. My father, peering out through his dirty goggles, nearly lost his grip on his own machine, such was his horror; but then saw a sight he could not and could never explain, which was the rider rising as if on wings, and crossing the huge wall in a swift and gentle movement, like the smooth glide of a seagull in an upwind. For a moment, for a moment he thought indeed he saw a flash of wings, and never could read in his prayerbook again about angels without thinking of that extraordinary instance.

Please do not think my father was dissembling, because he was quite incapable of that. It is true that in country districts – even in the towns – people like to tell you they have seen wonders, such as my husband Tom and the two-headed dog on the road to Enniscrone. It is true also that such stories are only effective if the teller feigns absolute belief – or indeed saw such wonders truly. But my father was no magician of lies and stories.

My father managed to slow his motor-bicycle and stop, and running along the domain wall, found one of those fanciful little gates, and pushing the rusty iron, hurried in through nettles and docks to find his miraculous friend. There on the other side of the wall he lay, quite unconscious, but also, and my father swore to the truth of it, quite unharmed. Eventually the man, who happened to be an Indian gentleman who sold scarves and other items out of his suitcase all over the western seaboard, awoke, and smiled at my father. They both marvelled at this inexplicable escape, which not unnaturally was the talk of Tullamore for years after. If you ever hear that story, the teller might give it the title of 'The Indian Angel'.

Again my father's curious happiness was most clearly evident in the retelling of this story. It was as if such an event were a reward to him for being alive, a little gift of narrative that pleased him so much it conferred on himself, in dreams and waking, a sense of privilege, as if such little scraps of stories and events composed for him a ragged gospel. And if ever there were to be written an evangelical gospel of my father's life – and why should there not, as every person's life is said to be precious to God – I suppose those wings merely glimpsed on his friend the Indian's back would become more substantial, and things merely hinted at by him would become in the new telling by a second hand solid, unprovable, but raised up even higher into the realms of miracle. So that all and sundry might take comfort from it.

My father's happiness. It was a precious gift in itself, as perhaps my mother's anxiety was a perpetual spanner thrown into her works. For my mother never made miniature legends of her life, and was singularly without stories, though I am sure there were things there to tell as good as my father's.

It is funny, but it strikes me that a person without anecdotes that they nurse while they live, and that survive them, are more likely to be utterly lost not only to history but the family following them. Of course this is the fate of most souls, reducing entire lives, no matter how vivid and wonderful, to those sad black names on withering family trees, with half a date dangling after and a question mark.

My father's happiness not only redeemed him, but drove him to stories, and keeps him even now alive in me, like a second more patient and more pleasing soul within my poor soul.

Perhaps his happiness was curiously unfounded. But cannot a man make himself as happy as he can in the strange long reaches of a life? I think it is legitimate. After all the world is indeed beautiful and if we were any other creature than man we might be continuously happy in it.

The principal room in our little house, while already of narrow dimensions, we shared with two large objects, viz. the aforementioned motorbike which had to be kept out of the rain. It lived in our living room a quiet life as one might say, my father being able from his chair idly to run a chamois leather over the chrome when he wished. The other object which I want to mention is the little cottage upright piano, which had been bequeathed him by a grateful widower, as my father had dug a hole for this man's wife at no charge, because the circumstances of the bereaved family had been straitened. So one summer night, soon after the burial, the piano had arrived on a donkey and cart, and was carried in with smiles and embarrassed happiness by the widower and his two sons, and placed in our tiny room. The piano had possibly never been worth a great sum, but it had a most beautiful tone for all that, and had never been played before it reached us, in as much as one could surmise that history from the state of the keys, which were pristine. There were scenes painted on the side panels, of places which were not Sligo as such, most likely being scenes of an imaginary Italy or the like, but might have been all the same, being of mountains and rivers, with shepherds and shepherdesses standing about with their patient sheep. My father, having grown up in his own father's ministry, was able to play this lovely instrument, and his delight as I have said was in the old operettas of the previous century. He considered Balfe a genius. As there was room for me beside him on the stool I soon by grace of my love for him and my own great joy in his ability began to pick up the rudiments of playing, and slowly progressed to some real accomplishment, without in any way feeling it was an effort or a trial.

Then I could play for him as he stood out in the centre of the floor, such as it was, with his hand idly perchance on the seat of his motorbike, the other hand in his jacket like an Irish Napoleon, and sing with utmost perfection, or so it seemed to me, 'Marble Halls', or the other gems of his repertoire – and, for that matter, those little songs called Neapolitan, which of course were not as I thought in memory of Napoleon, but songs invented in the streets of Naples – songs now in exile in Sligo! His voice entered my head as a sort of honey, that lingered there potently, buzzingly, banishing all the fears of childhood. As the voice rose up, so did all of him, arms, whiskers, one foot swinging a little over the old carpet with its pattern of repeating dogs, his eyes brimming with a strange merriment. Even Napoleon might not have scorned him as a man of elevated qualities. At such moments he exhibited a most beautiful timbre in the quieter passages of songs that to this day I have never heard outmatched. Many fine singers made their way to Sligo when I was a young woman and sang in the halls under the rain, and for a few of the more popular sort I even played piano accompaniment, chopping out the notes and chords for them, more of a hindrance than a help to them perhaps. But none seemed to me to equal the strange privacy of my father's voice.

And a man who can make himself merry in the face of those coming disasters that assailed him, as disasters do so many, without grace or favour, is a true hero.

chapter two

Dr Grene's Commonplace Book

(Senior Psychiatrist, Roscommon Regional Mental Hospital)

This building is in a terrible condition, how terrible we were not completely aware until the surveyor's report. The three brave men who climbed into the ancient roof report many timbers on the verge of collapse, as if the very head and crown of the institution were mirroring the condition of many of the poor inmates beneath. For inmates I should write patients. But as the place was constructed in the late eighteenth century as a charitable institution for the 'healthful asylum and superior correction of wounded seats of thought' the word inmate does always spring to mind. How healthful and how superior can only now be guessed. Actually in the mid nineteenth century there was a period of great enlightenment in the asylums, under the revolutionary ideas of various doctors, when strait jackets were used sparingly, a good diet was deemed wise, and plenty of exercise and stimulation of thought. Which was a great advance on the practice of Bedlam with its roaring beasts in chains on the floors. Somehow it all got worse again afterwards, and no sensitive person would choose to be the historian of the Irish asylums in the first part of the last century, with its clitori-dectomies, immersions, and injections. The last century being 'my' century, since I was fifty-five when it turned, and it is difficult wholly to give one's heart and attention to a new century at that age. Or so I found. And find. Nearly sixty-five now, alas.

With the building showing its age so forcefully, we will be obliged to leave it. The department says the new building will start almost immediately, which may be true or may be cant of a sort. But how can we go till we are assured of a new building, and indeed, more philosophically, how can we prise many of the patients out of here, when their very DNA has probably melded with the mortar of the building? There are those fifty ancient women in the central block, so old that age has become something eternal, continuous, so bedridden and encrusted with sores that to move them would be a sort of violation.

I suppose I am resisting the thought of going in my mind, the way any sensible person does when a move is mooted. No doubt we will manage with all the usual mayhem and trauma.

Similarly the attendants and nurses have become as much part of the building as the bats in the roof and the rats in the cellars. Which are both legion I understand, though I am thankful to say I have only seen rats the one time, when the east wing went on fire, and I saw the dark black shapes running from the lower doors, out into the farmer's corn meadows beyond the hedges. The light from the fires threw a glare of a weird marmalade colour into their backs as they fled. I am sure when they heard the firemen give the all clear, they snuck back in in the new darkness.

So, we are to go sometime. I am obliged therefore under the new laws to assess whatever of the patients can be put back into the community (whatever that is, O Lord), and exactly what category of patient each other patient is. Many of them will be shocked even by new decor, modern plaster walls, good insulation and heating. The very moaning of the wind in the corridors, even on still days – how is that? possibly a vacuum created by heat and cold in different areas of the hospital – will be missed as the tiny background music of their dreams and 'madnesses'. I am sure. Those poor old boys in black suits made by the hospital tailor long ago, who are not so much mad as homeless and ancient, and who live along the rooms of the oldest west wing, like soldiers of some forgotten Peninsular or Indian War, will not know themselves outside this lost ground of Roscommon.

Which necessity will also bring me to a task long avoided, which is to establish what circumstances brought in some of the patients, and whether indeed, as was tragically true in some cases, they were sectioned for social rather than medical reasons. Because I am not so great a fool as to think that all the 'lunatics' in here are mad, or ever were, or were before they came here and learned a sort of viral madness. These people are perceived by the all-knowing public at large, or let us say public opinion as it is mirrored in the newspapers, as deserving of 'freedom' and 'release'. Which may be very true, but creatures so long kennelled and confined find freedom and release very problematic attainments, like those eastern European countries after communism. And similarly there is a weird reluctance in me to see anyone go. Why is that? The anxiety of the zoo keeper? Can my polar bears do as well at the pole? I suppose this is a reductive thought. Well, we will see.

In particular I will have to approach my old friend Mrs McNulty, who is not only the oldest person in this place, but in Roscommon itself, perhaps even Ireland. She was old when I got here thirty years ago, although at that time with the energy of, I don't know what, a force of nature. She is a formidable person and though long periods have gone by when I have not seen her, or only tangentially, I am always aware of her, and try to ask after her. I am afraid she is rather a touchstone for me. She has been a fixture, and not only represents the institution, but also, in a curious way, my own history, my own life. 'The star to every wandering bark,' as Shakespeare has it. My marriage troubles with poor Bet, my spirits lowering, plummeting, betimes, my feeling of not getting on, my this, my that – my companionable stupidity, I suppose. While things have ineluctably changed, she has remained the same, if grown of course weaker and slighter as the years go on. Is she a hundred now? She used to play the piano down in the recreation room, really very expert songs, jazz tunes of the twenties and thirties.

I don't know how she knew them. But she used to sit there, with her long silver hair flowing freely down her back, in one of those awful hospital gowns, but looking like a queen, and though she was seventy then, very striking in the face. Really quite beautiful still, and God knows what she must have looked like when she was young. Extraordinary, a sort of manifestation of something unusual and maybe alien in this provincial world. When a mild rheumatism – she wouldn't allow the word, she called it 'a reluctance' in her fingers – set in in later years, she stopped playing the piano. She might have played almost as well, but almost as well didn't suit her. So we lost the sound of Mrs McNulty playing jazz.

As a matter of record, that piano, assailed by woodworm, was later thrown out on a skip with an enormous unmusical clang.

So now I will have to go in and tackle her about this and that. I am unaccountably nervous about it. Why should I be nervous? I think it is because she is so senior to me, and if given to great silences, an extremely agreeable presence, like the company of an older colleague that one reveres. I think that is it. Maybe it is because I have a suspicion she likes me, just as much as I like her. Though why she does I don't know. I have harboured a curiosity about her, but I have never delved into her life, though perhaps as a professional psychiatrist that should be a black mark against me. Nevertheless, there it is, she likes me. Yet I would not trouble that liking, the condition of it I mean, for the world. So I must tread carefully.

Roseanne's Testimony of Herself

How I would like to say that I loved my father so much that I could not have lived without him, but such an avowal would be proved false in time. Those that we love, those essential beings, are removed from us at the will of the Almighty, or the devils that usurp him. It is as if a huge lump of lead were lain over the soul, such deaths, and where that soul was previously weightless, now is a secret and ruinous burden at the very heart of us.

When I was ten or so my father in a fit of educating enthusiasm brought me to the top of the long thin tower in the graveyard. It was one of those beautiful, lofty slim buildings made by monks in a time of danger and destruction. It stood in a nettled corner of the graveyard and was not much remarked on. When you had grown up in Sligo it was just there. But no doubt it was a treasure beyond compare, put up with only a murmur of mortar between the stones, each one remembering the curve of the tower, each one set in with perfect success by ancient masons. Of course it was a Catholic yard. My father had not got that job because of his religion, but because he was deeply liked in the town by all and sundry, and the Catholics did not mind their graves being dug by a Presbyterian, if it was a likeable one. Because in those days there was often much greater ease between the churches than we give credit for, and it is often forgotten that under the old penal laws in vanished days the dissenting churches were just as harried, as he often liked to point out. At any rate, there is seldom a difficulty with religion where there is friendship. And it was only later that this distinction in him made any difference. At any rate I know he was exceedingly liked by the parish priest, a little perky darting man called Father Gaunt who loomed so large later in my own story, if a small man can be said to loom large.

Those were the days just after the first war, and maybe in those ditches of history as it were, minds turn to strangenesses, quirks of education such as he was bent on that day with me. Otherwise I cannot explain why a grown man would take his child to the top of an old tower with a bag of hammers and feathers.

All of Sligo, river, churches, houses, radiated out from the foot of the tower, or so it seemed from the little window at the top. A passing bird might have seen two excited faces trying to peer out at the same time, myself heaping my weight onto my toes and bumping the underside of his chin.

'Roseanne, dearest, I shaved already this morning, and you won't shave me anyhow with the top of your golden head.'

For it was true I had soft hair like gold – like the gold of those selfsame monks. Yellow as the gleams in old books.

'Pappa,' I said, 'for the love of all things, drop the hammers and feathers and let's see what's what.'

'Oh,' he said, 'I am weary from the climb, let's just scope our eyes over Sligo before we attempt our experiment.'

He had waited and chosen a windless day for his work. He wished to prove to me the ancient premise that all things fall at the same rate, in the realm of theory.

'All things fall at the same rate,' he had said, 'in the realm of theory. And I will prove it to you. I will prove it to myself.'

We had been sitting by the spitting anthracite of our fire.

'All may fall at the same rate, as you say,' my mother piped up from her corner. 'But it's the rare thing rises.'

I do not think this was a cut at him, but just an observation. At any rate he looked over at her with the perfect neutrality she herself was mistress of and had taught him.

It is strange to me writing this here in this darkened room, scratching it all out in blue biro ink, somehow to see them in my mind's eye, or somewhere behind my eyes, in the darkened bowl of my head, still there, alive and talking, truly, as if their time was real time and mine was an illusion. And it touches my heart for the thousandth time how beautiful she is, how neat, agreeable and shining, with her Southampton accent like the pebbles on the beach there disturbed by the waves, rushing, shushing, a soft sound that sounds in my dreams. It is also true that when I was bold, when she worried that my path was veering from the path she wanted for me, even in small matters, she was wont to whip me. But in those times children were routinely hit.

So now our two faces were jostling for position, framed by the ancient frame of the monks' little look-see window. What vanished faces had peered out there, sweating in their robes, trying to see where the Vikings were that would come to kill them and take their books, their vessels, and their coins. No mason likes to leave a large window for Vikings, and that window spoke still of old nervousness and peril.

At length it was clear that his experiment was impossible with both of us there. One or other of us would miss the outcome. So he sent me back down on my own by the dank stairway of stones, and I can still feel that wet wall under my hand, and the strange fright that grew in me to be separated from him. My little breast beating as if there was an uncomfortable pigeon trapped there.

I came out from the tower and stood away from the base as he had bid me, for fear of the hammers falling and killing me dead. The tower looked enormous from there, it seemed to stretch up to the filthy grey clouds of that day. To heaven. Not a breeze stirred. The neglected graves of that section of the yard, the graves of men and women of some century where the people could only afford rough stones, and not a name writ upon them, seemed different now on my own, as if their poor skeletons might rise up against me, to devour me in their eternal hunger. Standing on the ground I was a child on a precipice, that was the feeling, like that scene in the old play King Lear where the king's friend imagines he is falling down a beetling cliff, where there is no cliff, so that when you read it, you also think there is a cliff, and fall with the king's friend. But

I peered up faithfully, faithfully, lovingly, lovingly. It is no crime to love your father, it is no crime to feel no criticism of him, and especially so when I knew him into my early womanhood or nearly, when a child tends to grow disappointed in her parents. It is no crime to feel your heart beating up to him, or as much of him as I could see, his arm now stuck out the little window, and the bag held suspended in the Irish air. Now he was calling to me, and I could barely catch his words. But after a few repeats I think I heard him say: 'Are you stood back, dearest?'

'I am stood back, Pappa,' I called, I nearly screamed, such a distance the words had to rise, and such a small window to enter to reach his ears.

'Then I will let loose the bag. Watch, watch!' he called.

'Yes, Pappa, I am watching!'

He loosened the top of the bag as best he could with the fingers of one hand and shook the contents free. I had seen him place them there. It was a handful of feathers from the feather bolster on their bed, plucked out against the screeches of his wife, and two mason's hammers he kept for when he repaired the little walls and headstones of graves.

I stared and stared. Maybe I heard a curious music. The chattering of the jackdaws and the old scratchy talking of the rooks in the great beech trees there mingled like a music in my head. My neck was straining and I was bursting to see the outcome of that elegant experiment, an outcome my father had said might stand to me in my life, as the basis of a proper philosophy.

Although there was not a breath of wind, the feathers immediately drifted away, dispersing like a little explosion, even rising greyly against the grey clouds, almost impossible to see. The feathers drifted, drifted away.

My father was calling, calling, in enormous excitement in the tower, 'What do you see, what do you see?'

What did I see, what did I know? It is sometimes I think the strain of ridiculousness in a person, a ridiculousness born maybe of desperation, such as also Eneas McNulty – you do not know who that is yet – exhibited so many years later, that pierces you through with love for that person. It is all love, that not knowing, that not seeing. I am standing there, eternally, straining to see, a crick in the back of my neck, peering and straining, if for no other reason than for love of him. The feathers are drifting away, drifting, swirling away. My father is calling and calling. My heart is beating back to him. The hammers are falling still.

chapter three

Dear reader! Dear reader, if you are gentle and good, I wish I could clasp your hand. I wish – all manner of impossible things. Although I do not have you, I have other things. There are moments when I am pierced through by an inexplicable joy, as if, in having nothing, I have the world. As if, in reaching this room, I have found the anteroom to paradise, and soon will find it opening, and walk forward like a woman rewarded for my pains, into those green fields, and folded farms. So green the grass is burning!

This morning Dr Grene came in, and I had to scramble and rush to hide these pages. For I did not want him to see, or to question me, for here contains already secrets, and my secrets are my fortune and my sanity. Luckily I could hear him coming from far off down the corridor, because he has metal on the heels of his shoes. Luckily also I suffer not a jot from rheumatism or any particular infirmity associated with my age, at least in my legs. My hands, my hands alas are not what they were, but the legs hold good. The mice that move along the skirting board are faster, but then, they were always faster. A mouse is a brilliant athlete, make no mistake, when he needs to be. But I was quick enough for Dr Grene.

He knocked on the door which is an improvement on the poor wretch that cleans out my room, John Kane, if that is how you spell his name – it is the first time I have written it down -and by the time he had the door opened I was sitting here at an empty table.

As I do not consider Dr Grene an evil man, I was smiling.

It was a morning of considerable cold and there was a rheum of frost over everything in the room. Everything was glimmering. Myself I was dressed in all my four dresses, and I was snug enough.

'Hmm, hmm,' he said. 'Roseanne. Hmm. How are you, Mrs

McNulty?'

'I'm very well, Dr Grene,' I said. 'It's very kind of you to visit me.'

'It's my job to visit you,' he said. 'Has this room been cleaned today?

'It has not,' I said. 'But surely John will be here soon.' 'I suppose he will,' said Dr Grene.

Then he crossed in front of me to the window and looked out.

'This is the coldest day of the year so far,' he said. 'So far,' I said.

'And do you have everything you need?' 'I do, in the main,' I said.

Then he sat on my bed as if it were the cleanest bed in Christendom, which I daresay it is not, and stretched out his legs, and gazed down at his shoes. His long whitening beard was as sharp as an iron axe. It was very hedgelike, saintlike. On the bed beside him was a plate, still with the smeared remnants of beans from the night before.

'Pythagoras,' he said, 'believed in the transmigration of the soul, and cautioned us to be careful when we ate beans, in case we were eating the soul of our grandmother.'

'Oh,' I said.

'This we read in Horace,' he said. 'Batchelors Beans?' 'I suppose not.'

Dr Grene answered my question with his usual solemn face. The beauty of Dr Grene is that he is entirely humourless, which makes him actually quite humorous. Believe me, this is a quality to be treasured in this place. 'So,' he said, 'you are quite well?'

'I am.'

'What age are you now, Roseanne?' 'I suppose I am a hundred.'

'Don't you think it very remarkable to be so well at a hundred?' he said, as if in some way he had contributed to this fact, as perhaps he had. After all, I had been under his care for thirty odd years, maybe more. He himself was growing old, but not as old as myself.

'I think it very remarkable. But, Doctor, I find so many things remarkable. I find the mice remarkable, I find the funny green sunlight that climbs in that window remarkable. I find you visiting me today remarkable.'

'I'm sorry to hear you still have mice.'

'There will always be mice here.'

'But doesn't John put down traps?'

'He does, but he won't set them delicately enough, and the mice eat the cheese with no trouble, and get away, like Jesse James and his brother Frank.'

Now Dr Grene took his eyebrows between two fingers of his right hand, and massaged them for a few moments. He rubbed his nose then and groaned. In that groan was all the years he had spent in this institution, all the mornings of his life here, all the useless talk of mice and cures and age.

'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.

chapter four

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.

It always puzzled me that one of Jack's proudest boasts was that he was a cousin of Carson. But that is by the way.

There was a lot of hatred in Ireland in those times. I was fourteen, a girl trying to bloom up into the world. Fumes of hatred all about.

Dear Fr Gaunt. I suppose I may say so. Never did so sincere and honest a man cause maiden so much distress. For I don't suppose for a moment he acted out of ill intent. Yet he moi-dered me, as the country people used to say. And in a time previous to that he moidered my father.

I have said he was a little man, by which I mean, the crown of his head was at an equal level to my own. Bustling, spare and neat, in his black clothes and his hair cropped tight like a condemned man.

The question breaks in on my thoughts: what does Dr Grene mean, he must assess me? So that I might go out into the world? Where is that world?

He must question me, he said. Did he not? I am sure he did, and yet it is only now I hear him properly, when he has left the room long since.

Panic in me now blacker than old tea.

I am like my father on his old motorbike, careering at speed certainly, but holding so fast to the handlebars there is a sort of safety in that.

Do not prise my fingers from the bars, Dr Grene, I beg you. Be gone from my thoughts, good doctor. Fr Gaunt, from the haunts of death, rush in, rush in, and take his place.

Be present, present before me as I scratch and scribble.

The following account may sound like one of my father's stories, part of his little gospel, but he never made a proper recitation of it, nor improved it a little in the telling, till it was rounded like a song. I give you the bare bones, which is all I have of it.

In the time of that war there were no doubt many deaths, and many deaths that were no better than murder. Of course it was my father's duty to bury some of these in his neat graveyard.

Being fourteen I had one foot in childhood still, and one foot in womanhood. At the little nuns' school I attended I was not indifferent to the boys that lurched past the school gates at the close of lessons, indeed I seem to remember thinking a sort of music rose from them, a sort of human noise that I did not understand. How I heard music arising from such rough forms I do not know at this distance. But such is the magician-ship of girls, that they can transform mere clay into large and classic ideas.

So I was paying but half heed to my father and his world. I was more concerned with my own mysteries, such as, how to get a curl into my wretched hair. I spent many hours labouring at this with a collar iron of my mother's, which she used to iron my father's Sunday shirt. It was a slim, small object that heated quickly on the fender, and if I laid out my straight yellow tresses on the table, I hoped by some alchemy to tease a curl into them. So I was preoccupied with the fears and ambitions of my age.

Nevertheless I was often in my father's temple, doing my lessons as may be, enjoying the little grate of coals he kept burning there, by grace of his fuel stipend. I learned my lessons and listened to him singing 'Marble Halls' or the like. And worried about my hair.

What I would give to have a few strands of that straight yellow hair now.

My father buried anyone that was given him to bury. In peaceful days he buried mostly the old and the sick, but in days of war he more often than not was given the corpse of a boy or nearly boy.

These caused him grief in a manner he never showed over the aged and infirm. He thought those latter deaths were simple and right, and whether the families and mourners wept or were silent at the graveside, he knew there was a sense of proper term and justice. Often he knew the old soul that was to be interred, and would share memories and anecdotes if that seemed pleasant and generous to do so. He was a sort of diplomat of grief in those instances.

But the bodies of those slain in the war grieved him mightily, differently. As a Presbyterian he might be thought to have no place in the Irish story. But he understood rebellion. In his bedroom in a drawer he kept a memorial booklet for the Rising of 1916, with photographs of the principals involved, and a calendar of battles and sorrows. The only wicked thing he thought that Rising enshrined was its peculiar Catholic nature, from which of course he felt excluded.

It was the deaths of the young that grieved him. After all it was just a few years after the slaughter of the Great War. Indeed from Sligo had gone out hundreds of men to fight in Flanders, in the years around the Rising, and since the slain of that war could not be buried at home, it might be said those dozens of men were buried in my father, in the secret graveyard of his thoughts. Now in the civil war, more deaths, and always the young. There wasn't one man of fifty in Sligo fought in the civil war anyhow.

He did not rail against these matters, he knew that there were always wars in every generation, but he gave himself to these things in a curiously professional way, since he was after all the titular custodian of the dead, as if he were a king of absences.

Fr Gaunt himself was young and might have been expected to feel a special kinship for the slain. But Fr Gaunt was so clipped and trim he had no antennae at all for grief. He was like a singer who knows the words and can sing, but cannot sing the song as conceived in the heart of the composer. Mostly he was dry. He spoke over young and old with the same dry music.

But let me not speak against him. He went everywhere in Sligo in his ministry, he walked into bleak rooms in the town where impoverished bachelors feasted on tinned beans, and lousy cabins by the river that looked like ancient starving men themselves, with rotting thatch for hair, and little staring, dull, black windows for eyes. Into those too he went, famously, and never took flea or louse out with him. For he was cleaner than the daylight moon.

And such a small, clean man when crossed was like a scything blade, the grass, the brambles and the stalks of human nature went down before him, as my father discovered.

It happened thus.

One evening as my father and myself in the temple amused ourselves before returning home to our tea, we heard a scuffling and a muttering outside the old iron door. My father looked to me, alert as a dog before it barks.

'Well, what's this now?' he said, more to himself than to me.

Three men came in carrying a fourth and, as if driven themselves by an unseen force, seemed to sweep me back from the table, and before I knew what had happened, I had the back of my school dress rubbed against the damp whitewash of the wall. They were like a little hurricane of activity. They were all young men, and the man being carried was no more I would guess than seventeen. He looked a handsome long person enough, and roughly clothed, much mud about him, and grass stains from the bog, and blood. A great deal of thin-looking blood all over his shirt. And he was obviously as dead as a stone.

The other three lads were all yappering and yammering, hysterical maybe, which caused a hysteria to rise in me. My father however stood darkly by his fireplace, like a man making an effort to be mysterious, his face as blank as you like, but also, I thought, ready to have a thought and act on it if necessary. For the three boys were decked with old rifles and in their pockets bulged other weapons, all haphazardly gathered up as may be after a skirmish. I knew that weapons were the scarcest currency of the war.

'What are you up to, lads?' said my father. 'There's a method in all this, you know, the bringing in of bodies here, and you can't just carry in a boy out of the blue. Have mercy.'

'Mr Clear, Mr Clear,' said one of the men, a lad with a severe-looking face and hair seemingly cropped against lice, 'we'd nowhere else to be bringing him.'

'You know me?' said my father.

'I know you well enough. I know what foot you dig with anyhow, and I'm told by them that might know that you're not against us, not like many a fool here in Sligo town.'

'That's as may be,' said my father, 'but who are you? Are you Free Staters or the other lot?'

'Do we look like Free Staters, and half the mountain bog in our hair?'

'You don't. So, lads then, what do you want me to do? Who is this fellow here?'

'This poor man', said the same speaker, 'is Willie Lavelle, and he was seventeen year old, and he's after being killed up there on the mountain by a crowd of mean, unthinking vile bastards that call theyselves soldiers, but are not, and are worser to us than any Black and Tan ever was in the war just gone by. Just as evil bad anyhow. For we were so high in the mountain we were gone fierce cold and hungry and this boy surrendered to them, and us hiding in the heather all right, but nothing would do for them except to be punching and pushing him, and asking him questions. And they were laughing and one sticking his gun in the lad's face, and he was the bravest lad among us, but saving your presence, girl,' he said to me, 'so frightened he pissed his ould pants, because he knew, and you always do know, you know, sir, when a man is going to shoot you, so they say, and because they thought no one was there, no one was looking and no one to see their evil, they let off three bullets into his belly. And they went off merry as you like back down the mountain. By Christ when we have Willie buried we are going to go after them, aren't we, lads? – and settle their hash for them, if we can find them.'

Then the same man did something unexpected, he burst into violent tears, and threw himself across the body of his fallen comrade, and let out a thin roar of grief that had never been heard before nor since, though it was a little temple of grief.

'Go on easy, John,' said one of the others. 'We're in the town though the bone-yard here is dark and quiet.'

But the first man continued to wail, and lay across the chest of the dead man like – I was going to say, like a girl, but hardly that.

At any rate I was up to the neck of my school blouse in horror, of course I was. My father had lost his calmness and was walking up and down quickly between the fireplace and his chair, with its few flattened old cushions of once-red cloth.

'Mister, Mister,' said the third man, a long thin boy I had never seen, who looked straight off of a mountainy holding, with trousers in no manner reaching his ankles. 'You've got to be burying him now.'

'I can't bury a man without a priest, not to mention the fact that I expect you have no plot bought here?'

'How would we be buying plots when we're fighting for the Irish Republic?' said the first man, wrenching himself from his tears. 'The whole of Ireland is our plot. You can set us down in it anywhere. Because we are Irishmen. Maybe that's something you don't know anything about?'

'I hope I am an Irishman too,' said my father, and I knew he was offended by the remark. Truth was, Presbyterians were not much loved in Sligo, I hardly know the reason for it. Unless it was that in the old days there was a lot of that proselytising going on, with a Presbyterian mission to the west and the like, which though it had not been a raging success, had yet gathered a number of Catholics to the fold in a time of terrible hunger and need, and thereby increased the level of fear and mistrust among the people.

'You have to be burying him,' said the third man. 'Isn't that John's little brother there on the table?'

'This is your brother?' said my father.

Suddenly the man was absolutely quiet, still.

'It is,' he said.

'That is very sad,' said my father. 'That is very sad.'

'And he has had no priest to absolve him. Would it be possible to have a priest fetched for him?'

'It is Fr Gaunt is the priest here,' said my father. 'He is a good man, and I can send Roseanne to get him, if you wished.'

'But she's not to say anything to him, just for him to come here, and she's not to speak to anyone on her way, and by no means to speak to any Free State soldier, for if she does, we will be killed here. They will kill us as easily as they killed Willie on the mountain, that's for sure. I would say to you, we will kill you if she speaks, but I am not sure if we would.'

My father looked at him surprised. And it seemed so honest and polite a thing to say, I resolved to do as he asked, and speak to no one.

'And anyhow, we have no bullets, which is why we stayed in the heather, like hares, and didn't stir. I would we had stirred, lads,' said the brother of the dead man, 'and risen up, and thrun ourselves at them, because this is no way to stand in the world, with Willie dead, and us living.'

And the young fella broke down again, pitifully weeping.

'Look it, have no heed to that,' said my father. 'I'll have Roseanne fetch Fr Gaunt. Go on you out, Roseanne, like I say, and run to the Parish House, and get Fr Gaunt, good girl.'

So I ran out into the windy, winter yard, and through the avenues of the dead, and out onto the top of the hilly road that sails down into Sligo, and hurried down there, and finally reached the house of the priest, and in his little iron gate, and up the gravel, and throwing myself against his stout door, painted as green as the leaf of an aspidistra. Now I was loosed from my father I wasn't thinking of curling irons and hair, but of his very life, because I knew those three living men had seen horrors, and those who see horrors may do horrors just as bad, that is the law of life and war.

Soon thank God Fr Gaunt showed his thin face at the door, and I gabbled at him, and begged him to come to my father, that there was a great need for him there, and would he come, would he come.

'I will come,' said Fr Gaunt, for he was not one of those people that shy away from you when you need them, like many of his brethren, too proud to taste the rain in their mouths. And indeed going back up the hill we had the rain against our faces, and soon his long black coat was glistening wet the whole front of it, and myself also, and for my part I had put on no coat, but showed only wet legs now to the world.

'What person needs me?' said the priest sceptically, when I led him in the gates of the graveyard.

'The person that needs you is dead,' I said.

'If he is dead, is all this great hurry necessary, Roseanne?'

'The other person that needs you is living. It is his brother, Father.'

'I see.'

Inside the graveyard the stones were glistening also in the wetness, and the wind was dancing about among the avenues, so you didn't know where the rain would catch you.

When we reached the little temple, and walked in, the scene had hardly changed, as if the four living persons and certainly the dead had frozen in their spots when I went out and never moved. The irregular soldiers turned their young faces on Fr Gaunt as he stepped in.

'Fr Gaunt,' said my father. 'I am sorry to call you out. These youngsters asked that you be got.'

'Are they holding you prisoner?' said the priest, affronted by the sight of guns.

'No, no, they are not.'

'I hope you will not shoot me?' said Fr Gaunt.

'There was never a priest shot yet in this war,' said the man I called the third man. 'Bad as it is. There is only this poor man shot, John's brother, Willie. He is quite dead.'

'Is he long dead?' said Fr Gaunt. 'Did anyone take his last

breath?'

'I took it,' said the brother.

'Then give it back into his mouth,' said Fr Gaunt, 'and I will bless him. And let his poor soul go up to heaven.'

So the brother kissed his brother's dead mouth, returning I think the last breath that he had taken at the moment of his brother's death. And Fr Gaunt blessed him and leaned into him, and gave the sign of the cross over him.

'Can you absolve him, Father, so he will be clear to go to heaven?'

'And has he done murder, has he killed another man in this war?'

'It is not murder in a war to kill a man. It is war itself only.'

'My friend, you know very well the bishops have forbidden us to absolve you, for they have decided that your war is wrong. But I will absolve him if you tell me he has not done murder, as far as you know. I will do that.'

The three then looked at each other. There was a strange dark fear in those faces. They were young Catholic boys, and they feared this priest, and they feared to tell a lie about this matter, and they feared that they would fail in their responsibility to help their comrade to heaven, and I am sure each of them was racking his brains for an answer that would be truthful, for only the truth would get the dead man to paradise.

'Only the truth will serve you,' said the priest, making me jump that he had echoed my own thoughts. They were the simple thoughts of a simple girl, but maybe that Catholic religion is simple enough always in its intents.

'None of us seen him do anything in that way,' said the brother finally. 'If we had we'd say.'

'That's good then,' said the priest. 'And I sympathise greatly with your sorrow. And I am sorry I had to ask. Greatly sorry.'

He walked up close to the dead man and touched him with utmost gentleness.

'I absolve you from your sins in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.'

And all there, my father and myself included, spake the Amen to that.

chapter five

Dr Grene's Commonplace Book

It would be a very good thing if occasionally I thought I knew what I was doing.

I have completely underestimated the Department of Health, which in honest fact I thought would never happen. I am told for a fact that work on site will begin shortly, the other side of Roscommon town, a very fine site I am assured. Just to make things not all good news, there will be a very small number of beds, whereas here we have so many. Indeed there are rooms here just with beds, not because we could not fill them, but because the rooms have gone beyond the beyonds, with the ceilings endangered, horrible swathes of dampness up the walls. Anything iron, such as bedsteads, rusts away. All the new beds in the new place will be state of the art, without rust, pristine and nice, but fewer of them, far fewer. So we will be winnowing like crazy.

I have not been able to overcome this feeling of trying to eject creatures in my charge that will not prosper away from me. It is possibly understandable, but at the same time I suspect myself. I have a really stupid habit of feeling fatherly towards my patients, even motherly. After all these years, which I know for a fact deaden the impulses and instincts of other souls working in this sector, I am jealous for the safety, the happiness, if slightly despairing of the progress, of my patients. But I am suspicious. I wonder if, having failed with my own wife, I am inclined to regard this whole place as a sort of site of marriage, where I can be sinless, unaccused, even, on a daily basis (wretched need), redeemed.

Second-hand cloth used to be called 'beyond redemption' or not. In the old days all the suits for the males and the gowns for the dames in a place like this would be stitched from charity cloth, the first by a tailor, the second by a seamstress. I am sure even that technically 'beyond redemption' was thought good enough for the poor hearts residing here. But as time goes on, as I am slowly like everyone else worn out, finding a tatter here and a tear there in the cloth of myself, I need this place more and more. The trust of those in dark need is forgiving work. Maybe I should be more frustrated by the obvious cul-de-sac nature of psychiatry, the horrible depreciation in the states of those that linger here, the impossibility of it all. But God help me, I am not. In a few years I will reach retirement age, and what then? I will be like a sparrow without a garden.

Anyway, I know these thoughts come from present necessity. For the first time I have noticed the effrontery, I think that is the word, the effrontery of my profession. The come-around-the-back-of-the-house of it, oh yes, the deviousness. And now, in a further step of stupidity, I am resolved not to be devious. I have been talking all week to particular patients here, some of them quite extraordinary persons. I feel like I am interviewing them for something, their expulsion, their ruin. That if they manifest wellness, then, they must be sent into exile in that blessed 'community'. I am very aware that this thinking is all wrong, which is why I am trying to vent it here. I must on the contrary be disinterested, as the old word goes, detached, and resist compassion at every turn, because compassion is my weakness. There was a man yesterday, a farmer from Leitrim, who used to own four hundred acres. He is mad in an absolute, pristine way. He told me his family were so old they could trace themselves back two thousand years. He himself he told me was the last of his name. He had no children, certainly no sons, and the name would die with him. The name for the record was Meel, which right enough is a very strange name, and may be from the Irish word for honey, or so he said. And he is about seventy, very dignified, unwell, and mad. Yes, he is mad. That is to say, psychotic, and I see from his file that he unfortunately was found years ago sheltering in a schoolyard, under a seat, with three dead dogs tied to his leg, which he was dragging about with him. But as I spoke to him, all I could feel was love. That was ridiculous. And I am deeply, deeply suspicious of it.

So often my patients seem to me like a crowd of ewes pouring down a hill towards the cliff edge. What I need to be is a shepherd that knows all the whistles. I know none of them. But we shall see.

'We shall see, said the rat, as he shook his wooden leg.'

A saying of Bet's. What does it mean? I don't know. Perhaps it is a phrase from a famous childhood story, yet another famous childhood Irish thing I don't know of, having spent my childhood in England. It is very stupefying to be Irish and have none of the traits or the memories or even a recognisable bloody accent. No one on this earth has ever confused me for an Irishman, and yet that is what I am, as far as I know.

Bet was silent all week in her room above me, not even playing the BBC World Service, as she usually does. My wife. It completely spooked me.

I attempted last night a rapprochement with her – if that is how you spell it. There is no doubt in my mind I do love her. Why is my so-called love then no good to her, why does it in fact imperil her? Oh, on reading over my previous entry here, where I seemed to be subtly or not so subtly flattering myself in the matter of compassion, and love – my stomach nearly turned over as I read it – I was so annoyed with myself that I went into the kitchen when I heard her making that awful stuff she drinks at night before she goes to sleep. Complan. A nightmare drink if ever there was one, that tastes of death. I mean, Life-in-Death and Death-in-Life, Coleridge, if I remember right. 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner'. Whose sleeve do I have to grip, to tell my story to? It used to be Bet. Now, sleeveless. And I am sure I gripped her sleeve many a time too many. In my own parlance, 'feasting' on her energy, and giving nothing back. Well, maybe. We had most excellent days. We were the king and queen of coffee in the morning, in the dark of winter, in the early morning sun of summer that came right in our window, right in, to wake us. Ah, yes, small matters. Small matters, that we call sanity, or the cloth that makes sanity. Talking to her in those times made – no, God preserve me from sentimentality. Those days are over. Now we are two foreign countries and we simply have our embassies in the same house. Relations are friendly but strictly diplomatic. There is an underlying sense of rumour, of judgement, of memory, like two peoples that have once committed grave crimes against each other, but in another generation. We are a statelet of the Baltics. Except, blast her, she has never done anything to me. It is atrocity all one way.

I did not intend to write any of this here. I meant this as a professional, semi- at any rate, account of things, the last days perhaps of this unimportant, lost, essential place. The place I have been for my professional life. The queer temple of my aspirations. I know I am as afraid of having done nothing for the inmates here, of sentimentalising them and thereby failing them, I am as afraid of that as I am certain that I have ruined Bet's life. That 'life', that unwritten narrative of herself, that – I don't know. I did not set out to do it. I prided myself in all honesty on my faithfulness to her, my regard for her, my wellnigh worshipping of her. Perhaps I sentimentalised her also. Pernicious, chronic sentimentalising. Damn it, my pride in her was my pride in myself, and that was a good thing. While I had her good opinion, I had the highest opinion of myself. I lived off it, I strode out each day fuelled by it. How wonderful, how vibrant, how ridiculous. But it was a state I would give the world to retrieve. I know it's not possible. But still. When this world here is demolished so many tiny histories will go with it. It is actually frightening, maybe even terrorising.

Into the kitchen I went. How welcome a figure I can't say. Not very, probably, my sudden presence endured.

She wasn't making Complan though, she was dissolving some tablets in a glass, Disprin or the like.

'Are you all right?' I said. 'Headache?'

'I'm quite fine,' she said.

Last January twelvemonth I know she had a little scare, she fainted in the street while she was shopping, and was brought to Roscommon hospital. She was in there all day having tests, and in the evening one of the doctors innocently phoned me to come and get her. He probably thought I knew she was there. I was so alarmed. I nearly crashed the car coming out our gate, nearly hung it on the pillar, drove like a man drives his pregnant wife in the night to hospital, when the famous pains begin, not that she ever endured that, and therein maybe lies the crux of the matter.

She was staring now at the glass.

'How are the legs?' I said.

'Swollen,' she said. 'It's just water. That's what they said. I wish it would go away.'

'Yes, of course,' I said, taking some courage from the phrase 'go away', as in holiday. 'Look, I've been thinking, it might be nice, when I have everything sorted out at work, if we went away for a few days. A holiday.'

She looked at me, swilling the fizzing tablets in the glass, readying herself for the bitter taste. I am sorry to report she laughed, just a little laugh, that I suspect she would have liked not to have let loose, but here it was, a laugh, between us.

'I don't think so,' she said.

'Why not,' I said. 'Old times' sake. Do us both good.' 'Is that right, Doctor?' 'Yes, do us good. Definitely.'

It was suddenly difficult to speak, as if every word was a little lump of mud in my mouth.

'I'm sorry, William,' she said, and that was a bad sign, the full first name, no longer Will, just William, separate, 'I don't really want to. I hate to see all the children.'

'The what?'

'The people, with their children.'

'Why?'

Oh yes, depthless stupid question. Children. The thing we have none of. Infinite pains we took. Infinite. Unrewarded. 'William, you are not a stupid man.' 'We'll go somewhere where there aren't any children.' 'Where? Mars?' she said.

'Somewhere where there aren't any,' I said, lifting my face to the ceiling, as if that was a likely place. 'I don't know where that

is.'

Roseanne's Testimony of Herself

It was then the horror of horrors occurred.

To this day, I swear by my God, I do not know how it happened. Someone else or others surely know, or did while they lived. And maybe the exactly how of it is not important, never was, but only, what certain people thought had happened.

Not that it matters now, maybe, because all those people are swept away by time. But maybe there is another place where everything matters eternally, the courts of heaven as may be. It would be a useful court for the living but the living will never see it.

It was persons unknown that banged on the door then, and shouted out with harsh military voices. We were like a set of hidden woodlice then inside, scattering away in different directions, myself drawing back like a tragedian in a travelling play, such as might be seen in a damp hall in the town, the three Irregulars ducking down behind the table, my father drawing Fr Gaunt near to me, as if he might hide me behind the priest and his own love. For it was clear to anyone that there would be shots now, and just as I had that thought, the iron door pushed open on its big scraping hinges.

Yes, it was lads of the new army in their awkward uniforms. It would be thought as they came in that they had bullets aplenty, at least they levelled their guns at us in their own fierce moments of concentration, and to my young eyes, looking out through my father's legs, the six or seven faces that entered the temple looked only terrified in the light of the fire.

The long thin boy from the mountain, with the trousers not quite to his ankles, jumped up from behind the table, and for mad reasons of his own, charged against the newcomers as if he was out on a proper battlefield. The brother of the dead man was right behind him, maybe in his grief demanding this of himself. It is difficult to describe the noise that guns make in a small enclosed space, but it would make the bones drop out of your flesh. My father, Fr Gaunt and I reared back against the wall as one, and the bullets that went into the two lads must have made queer tracks through them, because I saw sudden exploding pocks in the plaster of the old wall beside me. First the bullets, and then a thin falling cascade of lightest blood, over my uniform, my hands, my father, my life.

The two irregulars were not killed, but writhed now on the ground caught up in each other.

'For the love of God,' cried Fr Gaunt, 'desist – there is a young girl in here, and ordinary people.' Whatever he meant by the latter.

'Put down your guns, put down your guns,' shouted one of the new soldiers, almost a scream it was. Certainly the last man our side of the table threw down his gun, and his handgun out of his waistband, and he stood up immediately and raised his hands. He looked back at me just for a second and I thought his eyes were weeping, his eyes were doing something or other, certainly piercing into me anyhow, fiercely, fiercely, like those eyes could be used to kill, could be better than the bullets they did not have.

'Look,' said Fr Gaunt. 'I believe – I believe these men have no bullets. Just everyone do nothing for a moment!'

'No bullets?' said the commander of the men. 'Because they've put them all into our men up on the mountain. Are you the bastards were up on the mountain?'

Oh dear, oh dear, we knew they were, and yet for some reason none of us spoke a word.

'You've killed my brother,' said the man called John on the ground. He was holding the top of his thigh, and there was a great strange dark pool of blood just under him, blood as black as blackbirds. 'You killed him in cold blood. You had him captured, you had him harmless, and you shot him in the stomach, three fucking times!'

'So you wouldn't be creeping down on us and murdering us where we went!' said the commander. 'Hold these men down, and you,' he cried to him who had surrendered, 'count yourself arrested. Bring them all out to the truck, lads, and we'll sort this out. In the dark of the night we catch you, in this filthy place, gathered like rats. You, man, what's your name?'

'Joe Clear,' said my father. 'I'm the watchman here at the graveyard. This is Fr Gaunt, one of the curates in the parish. I called him, for to see to the dead boy there.'

'So you bury the likes of him in Sligo,' said the commander, with extraordinary force. And he rushed around the table and held the gun to Fr Gaunt's temple. 'What sort of a priest are you, that would be disobeying your own bishops? Are you one of those filthy renegades?'

'Are you going to shoot a priest?' said my father in astonishment.

Fr Gaunt had his eyes closed fast and was kneeling now just the same as he might in the church. He was kneeling and I don't know if he was praying soundlessly, but he wasn't saying anything.

'Jem,' said one of the other Free State soldiers, 'there was never a priest shot yet in Ireland by us. Don't shoot him.'

The commander stood back and raised his gun away from Fr Gaunt.

'Come on, lads, gather them up, we're getting out of here.'

And the soldiers raised up the two wounded gently enough and led them out through the door. Just as the third man was being arrested he turned his face full on me.

'May God forgive you for what you done but I never will.'

'But I never done nothing!' I said.

'You told them we were here.'

'I did not, I swear to God.'

'God's not here,' he said. 'Look at you, guilty as Jack.' 'No!' I said.

The man laughed then a horrible laugh like a lash of rain into your face, and the other soldiers brought him away. We could hear them cajoling the prisoners along the paths. I was shaking in all my body. The commander, when the room was clear, held out a big hand to Fr Gaunt, and helped him to his feet.

'I'm sorry, Father,' he said. 'It has been a terrible night. Murder and mayhem. Excuse me.'

He spoke so sincerely my father I'm sure was as struck by the words as I was.

'It was a blackguardly thing to do,' said Fr Gaunt, in a small voice that nevertheless had a strange taint of violence in it.

'Blackguardly. I support fully the new country. We all do, except those mad misguided boys.'

'You should heed your bishops so. And not give succour to the damned.'

'You let me have my own thoughts on that,' said Fr Gaunt, with a sort of schoolmasterish arrogance. 'What are you going to do with the body? Don't you want to take it with you?'

'What do you want to do with it?' said the soldier, now with a sudden weariness, the fall in energy that comes after great effort. They had charged into an unknown place with God knew what danger, and now it seemed the thought of lugging John's brother Willie was a feather too far. Or a hammer.

'I'll have the doctor fetched and pronounce him dead and find out who owns him, and then perhaps we can bury him somewhere in the yard, if you have no objection.'

'You will be burying a devil if you do. Better throw him in a hole outside the walls, like a criminal, or a bastard child.'

Fr Gaunt said nothing to that. The soldier went out. He never looked at me once. When his boots stopped sounding on the gravel path outside, the queerest coldest silence dreeped into the temple. My father stood silent, and the priest, and I sat silently on the cold damp floor, and John's brother Willie was most silent of all.

'I am extremely angry,' said Fr Gaunt then, in his best Sunday mass voice, 'to have been dragged into this. Extremely angry, Mr Clear.'

My father looked nonplussed. What else was he to do? My father's unmoored face scared me just as much as Willie's stiffening corpse.

'I'm sorry,' said my father. 'I'm sorry if I acted wrongly in getting Roseanne to fetch you.'

'You did wrong to do that, you did wrong, yes. I am deeply aggrieved. You may remember it was I who put you in this post. It was I, and great powers of persuasion were needed, let me tell you. I feel very poorly thanked, very poorly.'

With that, the priest went out into the dark and the rain, leaving my father and myself with the dead boy, till the doctor could arrive.

'I suppose I put his life in danger. I suppose he was frightened. But I did not intend it. By heavens, I thought priests liked to be in on everything. Indeed and I did.'

My poor father sounded frightened too, but now because of a new and different cause.

How delicately, slowly, fate undid him, I suppose.

There are things that move at a human pace before our eyes, but other things move in arcs so great they are as good as invisible. The baby sees a star winking in the dark night window, and puts out his hand to hold it. So my father struggled to grasp things that were in truth far beyond his reach, and indeed when they showed their lights were already old and done.

I think it was that my father embarrassed history.

He was neither willing nor unwilling to bury that boy Willie, and called a priest to help him in his decision. It was as if as a Presbyterian he had meddled in sacred murders, or murders so beyond gentleness and love that to be even in propinquity to them was ruinous, murderous even.

Perhaps in later years I heard versions of that night that didn't fit my own memory of it, but all the same, there was always one grand constant, that I had stopped in my path to fetch Fr Gaunt and told my tale to the Free State soldiers, either at my father's bidding or by my own instincts. The fact that I never saw the soldiers, never spoke to them, never even thought of doing so – for would that not have put my father possibly in further danger? – is in the informal history of Sligo neither here nor there. For history as far as I can see is not the arrangement of what happens, in sequence and in truth, but a fabulous arrangement of surmises and guesses held up as a banner against the assault of withering truth.

History needs to be mightily inventive about human life because bare life is an accusation against man's dominion of the earth.

My own story, anyone's own story, is always told against me, even what I myself am writing here, because I have no heroic history to offer. There is no difficulty not of my own making. The heart and the soul, so beloved of God, are both filthied up by residence here, how can we avoid it? These seem not my thoughts at all, but maybe are borrowed out of old readings of Sir Thomas Browne. But they feel as if they are mine. They sound in my head like my own belling thoughts. It is strange. I suppose therefore God is the connoisseur of filthied hearts and souls, and can see the old, first pattern in them, and cherish them for that.

He had better be in my case, or I may dwell with the devil shortly.

Our house was clean, but did not look so clean the day that Fr Gaunt came to visit us. It was Sunday morning about ten, so I may assume Fr Gaunt was between masses and had hurried from his church along the river to knock on our door. As my mother had an old mirror balanced on a yellow brick in the window of the sitting room, we could always see without showing ourselves who was at the door, and the sight of the priest sent us scurrying about. A fourteen-year-old girl is always vividly aware of her appearance, or thinks she must be, or whatever it is, but speaking of mirrors I was at that time a slave to the one in my mother's bedroom, not because I thought I looked well, but because I did not know how I looked, and laboured many a minute to adjust myself into a picture I could trust, or was content with, and never could achieve it. The gold of my hair looked like some wet grass gone wild to me, and for the life of me I did not know the soul of the person that peered back at me in my mother's mossy little mirror. Because the edges of the mirror were strangely decayed, she had actually bought some unusual enamel paint in the chemist as may be, and decorated the edges of the mirror with tiny black stems and leaves, that lent everything that appeared in that less-than-poetical mirror a funereal look, which perhaps had suited my father's profession, at least up to now. So my first action was to dash up our few little stairs to the mirror and make an assault on my fourteen-year-old sense of horror.

When I got back down to the living room my father was standing in the middle of it, looking about him like a baulking pony, his eyes lighting first on the motorcycle, then on the piano, then on the spaces in between, his hand dashing now to a cushion on the 'best' chair. When I glanced out into the tiny hall, my mother was merely lodged there, stuck there, not moving a muscle, like an actor waiting to go out on a stage, gearing up her courage. Then she lifted the latch.

As Fr Gaunt edged into our room, the first thing I noticed was how glistening he seemed, his face shaved so closely you could write on it with a pen. He looked so safe, the safest thing in Ireland in an unsafe time. Every month of that year was the worst month, my father had said, as every person killed echoed in him. But the priest looked sacrosanct, pristine, separate, as if separate from the history of Ireland itself. Not that I thought this at the time, God knows what I thought, I don't know, only that this cleanliness made me fearful.

I had never seen my father quite so fussed. He could only speak in rushes and gaps.

'Ah, but, yes, sit down there, Father, do, now,' he said, nearly advancing on the unsmiling priest, as if to knock him back into the chair. But Fr Gaunt sat down steady as a dancer.

I knew my mother was in the hallway, in that little gap of privacy and silence. I stood at my father's right side like a watchman, like a sentry against the storm of an attack. My head was filled with some unknown darkness, I couldn't think, I couldn't continue that long conversation we make in our heads, as if an angel were writing there unbeknownst.

'Hmm,' said my father. 'We'll make tea, how about that?' he said. 'Yes, we will. Cissy, Cissy, will you heat the kettle, dear, do.'

'I drink so much tea,' said the priest, 'it's a wonder my skin doesn't turn brown.'

My father laughed.

'I'm sure you do, out of a sense of duty. But no need in my house. No need. I, that owe everything in the world to you, everything in the world. Not that, not that -'

And here my father floundered, and blushed, and I blushed too I dare say, for reasons I could not understand.

The priest cleared his throat, and smiled.

'I will take a cup of tea, of course I will.'

'Ah, well, that's good, that's good,' and already we could hear my mother scraping about in the pantry down the corridor.

'It is so cold today,' said the priest, rubbing his hands suddenly, 'that I am very relieved to be near a fire, now, I am. It is so frosty along the river. Do you think', he said, drawing out a silver case, 'I might smoke?'

'Oh, fire away,' said my father.

The priest now drew his box of Swan matches from his soutane, and a funny oblong-shaped cigarette from the case, struck the match with a beautiful precision and neatness, and drew in the flame with his breath through the crisp tube. Then he exhaled and gave a little cough.

'The – the,' said the priest, 'the position in the graveyard as you can well imagine is not – tenable. Em?'

He gave another elegant pull on the cigarette, adding: 'I am afraid to say, Joe. I dislike this fact as I am sure you dislike it. But I am sure you will appreciate the – the great cloud of dust that has descended on my head, between the bishop, who believes all the renegades must be excommunicated, as was decided at the recent synod, and the mayor, who as you may be aware is very much against the treaty as it stands, and as the most influential man in Sligo carries great – influence. As you can imagine, Joe.'

'Oh,' said my father.

'Yes.'

Now the priest went a third time at the cigarette and found he already had quite an ash to deal with and in that silent dumbshow of smokers looked about for an ashtray, an item that did not exist in our house, even for visitors. My father astonished me by putting out his hand to the priest, admittedly a hard hand coarsened by digging, and Fr Gaunt astonished me by immediately flicking the ash into the offered hand, which perhaps flinched tinily for a moment when the heat hit it. My father, left with the ash, looked about almost foolishly, as if there might have been an ashtray put in the room after all, without his knowledge, and then, with horrible solemnity, pocketed it.

'Hmm,' said my father. 'Yes, I can imagine there is a difficulty to reconcile those two poles.' He spoke the words so gently.

'I have of course looked about, especially in the town hall, for an alternative occupation, and if at first this seemed an impossible – em, possibility – then, when I was just about to give up, the mayor's secretary, Mr Dolan, told me there was a job on offer, in fact, they had been trying to fill it some time past, with some urgency, due to the veritable plague of rats that has been bedevilling the warehouses on the riverside. Finisglen as you know is a very salubrious district, the doctor himself lives there, and unfortunately the docks abut it, as of course you know, as everyone knows.'

Now I could write a little book on the nature of human silences, their uses and occasions, but the silence that my father offered to this speech was very dreadful. It was a silence like a hole with a sucking wind in it. He blushed further, which brought his face to crimson, like the victim of an attack.

At this moment my mother entered with the tea, looking like a servant among kings, you would think, afraid perhaps to look at my father, so keeping her eyes on the little tray with its painted scene of some French field of poppies. I had often gazed at that tray where it lived on the top of the dresser in the pantry, and imagined I could see a wind blowing along the flowers, and wondered what it was like in that world of heat and dark language.

'So,' said the priest, 'I am happy to offer you, in the name of the mayor Mr Salmon, em, the eh – post. Job.'

'Of?' said my father.

'Of,' said the priest.

'What?' said my mother, probably against her better intentions, the word just popping into the room. 'Rat-catcher,' said the priest.

It fell to me, I know not why, to bring the priest to the door. On the narrow pavement, with the chill gathering about him, creeping no doubt up his soutane along his bare legs, the little priest said:

'Please, tell your father, Roseanne, that all the accoutrements of the trade are at the town hall. Traps, et cetera, I suppose. That's where he'll find them.'

'Thank you,' I said.

Then he started off down the street, stopped a moment. I don't know why I stayed there watching him. He took off one of his black shoes, leaning a hand on the brick wall of our neighbour's house, then balanced on one foot, feeling the underside of his sock for whatever hindered his walk, a pebble or piece of grit. Then he unhitched the sock from its gaiter, and removed it in a smooth sweep, revealing a long white foot with the toenails rather yellow like old teeth, folding back on his toes, as if they had never been cut. Then he spotted me with my eyes still on him, and laughed, and having routed out the offending stone, put back his sock and his shoe, and stood there solidly on the pavement.

'Such a relief,' he said pleasantly. 'Good day. And,' he said, 'now I think of it, there is also a dog. A dog attached to the job. For ratting.'

When I went back into the sitting room my father had not moved. The motorbike had not moved. The piano had not moved. My father looked like he would never move again. My mother I heard scratching about in the pantry, very like a rat. Or a little dog looking for a rat.

'Do you know anything about that job, Dadda?' I said.

'Do I – oh, I suppose.'

'You won't find it so hard.'

'No, no, because I have often had to deal with such things at the cemetery. The rats do love the soft soil on the graves, and the gravestones make such good roofs for them. Yes, I have had to deal with them. I will have to study the matter. Perhaps there will be a manual in the library.'

'A rat-catcher's manual?' I said.

'Yes, don't you think, Roseanne?'

'I am sure, Dadda.'

'Oh, yes.

chapter six

Yes, how well I remember the day my father was let go from the cemetery, a living man exiled from the dead. That was a little murder also.

My father loved the world and his fellow humans in it, without much reservation on his part, considering as a good Presbyterian must that all souls are equally assailed, and hearing in the rough laughter of the cornerboy a kind of essential explanation of life, and thereby a redemption of it, in fact believing that since God had created everything, so everything by him must be approved, and also that the devil's own tragedy is he is author of nothing and architect of empty spaces. My father, by cause of all this, based his good opinion of himself on his work, that, as a person of unusual religion, he had yet been given a post to bury the Catholic people of Sligo as time claimed them one by one.

'Such pride, such pride!' he used to say, as together we locked the iron gates at evening, preparatory to going home, and his eyes fell in back through the bars to the darkening rows, the disappearing headstones that were his care. I suppose he was talking to himself, or to the graves, and probably not to me, and he might not have thought for a moment that I would have understood him. Perhaps I did not, but I think I understand him now.

The truth was, my father loved his country, he loved whatever in his mind he thought Ireland to be. Maybe if he had been born a Jamaican, he might have loved Jamaica just as much. But he was not. His ancestors had held the little sinecures available to their kind in Irish towns, inspectors of buildings and the like, and his father had even gained the eminence of a preacher. He was born in a small minister's house in Collooney, his infant heart loved Collooney, his growing heart expanding in its love to the island entire. Because his father was one of those radical thinkers, who had written pamphlets or at least preached sermons – because no pamphlets survive, but I seem to remember my father mentioning one or two – on the history of Protestantism in Ireland, my father held opinions not always favourable to himself. That is to say, he thought of the Protestant religion as an instrument as soft as a feather transformed into a hammer by the old dispensation, and used to batter the heads of those that laboured to live in Ireland, the most of them Catholics by nature. His own father loved Presbyterianism, and he did himself, but he was mortally sorry, no, he was mortally angry at the uses it had been put to, along with the religions of the Anglicans, Baptists et cetera, in Ireland.

How do I know? Because every night of my childhood, every night, the last thing he did in the house was come into my narrow bed, shoving me over with his wide hips, so that I lay half on him, my head on his whiskery face, and talked and talked and talked, while my mother went to sleep in the other room. When he heard her small snores he would leave me and join her, but in that half hour, in the darkness, as he allowed her to settle into sleep on her own, the moon first sitting on the back wall, and then floating darkly and brightly as is the manners of the moon, into the sky of unattainable stars (as I well knew), he recited to me all the intimations, suspicions and histories of his heart, not perhaps even bothering himself with the thought that I might not understand, but offering it all as a music quite as desirable to him and therefore to me as the works of Balfe and Sullivan, two of the greatest Irishmen that had ever lived, in his opinion.

And working in the graveyard, under the patronage as it were of Fr Gaunt, was in some manner to him his life perfected, made good. In some manner, made as a prayer back to his own father. It was the way he had learned to live, in Ireland, the accidental place he loved.

And to lose the job was to lose in some extraordinary fashion himself.

Now it was more difficult to be with him. It was hard for him to bring me ratting, it being such a dirty, tricky and perilous occupation.

Being a thorough man, he soon found the little book that would help him, called A Perfect Account of Rat-Catching,by a pseudonymous author, Rattus Rattus. This booklet recounted the adventures of a rat-catcher in the factories of Manchester, a city of heaped-up factories with infinite places for rats to live and hide. It told my father how to go about his work, itemising everything, even the sort of attention that was needed to be paid to the feet of ferrets, who it seemed were very vulnerable to foot-rot in damp cages. But my father never attained the dignity of owning ferrets. The corporation of Sligo was less ambitious. He was given a Jack Russell dog called Bob.

So began the strangest era of my childhood. I suppose also I was slowly less child than girl, less girl than woman. For the years of my father's ratting, a solemn mood of my own descended on me. Things that had delighted and pleased me as a child delighted and pleased no longer. It was as if something had been taken from the pictures and sounds of the world, or as if the greatest possession of a child is easy joy. So that I felt I was in a condition of waiting, waiting for something unknown to replace the grace of being young. Of course I was young, very young, but, as I remember it, no one is ever quite so old as a fifteen-year-old girl.

People persist with what we call ordinary life, because there is no other sort of life. My father continued to sing 'Roses of Picardy' as he shaved in the morning, the words and lines broken up, skipped here and there, as he manoeuvred the blade about his craggy face, so if I closed my eyes and listened below, I could see him in a sort of mysterious cinema at the back of my head. He continued heroically in this, and went out with his dog and his traps, and learned to make that his 'usual task', and returned from his work, not always at the old regular times, but still tried to carry the Sligo Champion in under his arm, and force his new life into the realm of normality.

But these days he might be reading items in the paper curiously connected to himself, or at least on one occasion, because I heard his little gasp, and looked up at him immersed in the paper. Mr Roddy was the owner of the Champion and very much a new government man, as they called it. So the actions of the civil war were reported in bare, plain terms, terms that also strove to suggest normalcy, solidity.

'By heavens,' said my father, 'they have shot those boys were in the graveyard that time.'

'Which boys?' I said.

'Those wild young lads brought in their murdered friend.'

'He was a brother to one of them,' I said.

'Yes, Roseanne, a brother to one. They have the names here. Lavelle was his name, isn't that a strange one? William. And the brother was John. But he got away it says here. Escaped.'

'Yes,' I said, a little uneasy, but also unexpectedly happy. It was like hearing about Jesse James or the like. You wouldn't like to meet an outlaw but you do like them to get away all the same. Of course John Lavelle we had met.

'Inishkea he is from. One of the islands. The Mullet. Very remote part of the world. Deepest Mayo. He might be safe down there among his own people.'

'I hope so.'

'It has been a very difficult thing for them, I am sure, shooting such men.'

My father spoke without irony. With truth. Indeed it would have been a very difficult thing. To put those boys side by side maybe, or one by one, who knew the way of these things, and shoot them – to death, as one might say. Who knows what happened on that mountain? In the dark. And now they were dead themselves, along with Willie Lavelle, from the Inishkeas.

My father spoke not another word. We were not looking at each other either, but at the same spot on the hearth, where a little hill of coals struggled.

But the silence that was on my mother was the profoundest of all. She might have been a creature underwater, or rather, when I was with her, it could have been so for both of us, because she never spoke, but moved slowly and ponderously like a swimming creature.

My father made his valiant efforts to stir her, and showed her every attention he could. His wages from his new work were small, but small as they were, he hoped they might do, especially in those hard dark years when the civil war was over, and the country was struggling to get off its knees. But I think in those days the whole world was aching with catastrophes, great wheels of history were turning not turned by man at all, but by the hand of some inexplicable agent. My father gave her what he earned, hoping she might parcel and divide the few pounds, and get us through. But something, inexplicable as the enormous forces of history, but a tiny matter since it only affected us, seemed to hold sway, and there was often almost nothing to eat in the house. My mother might bang about in the pantry at supper time, as if about to produce a meal, then come back out into the little sitting room and sit herself down, while my father, all scrubbed and ready after his work, and with a whole night ahead of him – for rats are best molested in the dark – and myself looked at her, with the realisation slowly dawning that there was nothing forthcoming. Then my father slowly shook his head, and maybe mentally tightened his belt, but hardly dared ask her what was amiss. In the face of her troubles, we were beginning to starve!

But nothing could penetrate her silence. Christmas came, and my father and myself plotted to get our hands on something that would please her. He had spotted a scarf for sale near the Cafe Cairo, in a little everything shop, and every week he kept back a halfpenny or so, so he could gather the necessary like a mouse hoards grain. Please remember that my mother was very beautiful, though perhaps not so beautiful now, as her silence had found an echo in some bleak thin cloth that seemed to be pulled over the skin of her face. She was like a painting with its varnish darkening, obscuring the beauty of the work. Because her lovely green eyes were dying in their lights, something of her essential self was vanishing also. But still in her general outline any artist would have been content with her I think, if Sligo had had artists, which I doubt if it had, unless it was fellas painting the faces of the Jacksons, the Middletons and the Pollexfens, who were the better people in the town.

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.

chapter seven

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.

We could see the fire burn even fiercer behind them, offering an enormous flower of yellow and red, with such a noise as mortal never heard before hell, and indeed as hell might be thought to be in nightmares. And the girls, most of them my own age in that particular chamber, started to climb out through the windows onto the wide ledge, every one with their pinnies already burning, screaming and screaming. And when they could do no better, and had no hope of any other sort of rescue, they jumped from the ledge in little groups and single, their clothes burning and burning, the flames blown up from the pinnies till they dragged above them like veritable wings, and these burning girls fell the height of that grand old mansion, and struck the cobbles. A continuous wave of them, a wave of mere girls pouring abundantly from the windows, burning and screaming and dying before our eyes.

At the inquest which my father attended, a girl who survived offered an extraordinary explanation for the fire. She said she had been lying in her bed trying to sleep, facing the old fireplace where a little heap of coals lay smouldering, when she heard a scuffling and a squealing and a little miniature instance of mayhem. She went up on her elbows the better to see, and it was an animal she said, something thin and galloping like a rat, on fire, his fur burning with unusual venom, running about the room, and setting alight as he went the poor web-thin sheets that graced the girls' beds, falling in drapes to the bare floor. And before anyone knew what was happening, there were little fires burning in a hundred places, and the girl leaped up and called to her sister orphans and fled from the growing inferno.

When my father came home he told me this story, not lying beside me in the bed as was his usual practice, but sitting on the old stool by my bed, hunched forward. No one at the inquest could offer an explanation for the burning rat, and my father had said nothing. So bleak was his fate already he dared not say anything. One hundred and twenty-three girls had been killed, from the burning and the falling. He knew from experience, just as I knew from reading his manual, that rats liked to use the handy vertical highways of old chimney flues. A meagre little fire would be no hindrance. But if such a rat were to pass close enough to the fire and it drenched in paraffin, my father knew well the consequence.

chapter eight

Perhaps he should have spoken. I suppose I could have, betraying him like those children of Germans when Hitler asked them to sniff out the loyalty of their parents in that late war. But I never would have spoken.

Well, all speaking is difficult, whether peril attends it or not. Sometimes peril to the body, sometimes a more intimate, miniature, invisible peril to the soul. When to speak at all is a betrayal of something, perhaps a something not even identified, hiding inside the chambers of the body like a scared refugee in a site of war.

Which is to say, Dr Grene came back today, with his questions at the ready.

My husband Tom fished as a boy for ten years in Lough Gill for salmon. Most of that time, he stood by the lake, watching the dark waters. If he saw a salmon jumping, he went home. If you see a salmon, you will never catch one that day. But the art of not seeing a salmon is very dark too, you must stare and stare at the known sections where salmon are sometimes got, and imagine them down there, feel them there, sense them with some seventh sense. My husband Tom fished for ten years for salmon in that way. As a matter of record he never caught a salmon. So if you saw a salmon it seems you would not catch one, and if you did not see a salmon you would not catch one. So how would you catch one? By some third mystery of luck and instinct, that Tom did not have.

But that was how Dr Grene struck me today, as he sat in silence in my little quarters, his neat form stretched out on the chair, saying nothing, not exactly watching me with his eyes, but watching me with his luck and instincts, like a fisherman beside dark water.

Oh, yes, like a salmon I felt, right enough, and stilled myself in the deep water, very conscious of him, and his rod, and his fly, and his hook.

'Well, Roseanne,' he said at last, 'hmm, I think it's true that -you came here about – how many years ago?'

'It's a long long while.'

'Yes. And you came here I believe from Sligo Mental Hospital.' 'Lunatic Asylum.'

'Yes, yes. An interesting old phrase. The second word after all quite – reassuring. The first a very old word, but its meaning a little dubious and not a nice word any more. Though, for myself, when the moon is full, I often wonder, do I feel – a little strange?'

I looked at Dr Grene and tried to imagine him altered by the moon, more whiskery, a werewolf possibly.

'Such enormous forces,' he said. 'The tides being pulled from shore to shore. Yes, the moon. A very considerable object.'

He stood up now and went to my window. It was so early in this winter day that indeed the moon was prince of all outside. Its light lay in a solemn glister on the windowpanes. Dr Grene nodded as solemnly to himself, looking out on the yard below, where John Kane and others banged the bins betimes and all the other clocklike actions of the hospital – the asylum. The lunatic asylum. The place subject to the forces of the moon.

Dr Grene is one of those men that now and then seem to stroke at phantom cravats, or some item of clothing from some other time. Certainly he might have stroked his beard, but he did not. Did he possess some fancy scarf or suchlike at his neck years ago in his youth? I think he might have. Anyway he stroked this phantom object now, running the fingers of his right hand an inch or two above his mere purple tie, the knot thick like a young rose.

'Oh,' he said, in a strange exclamation. It was a noise that spoke of utter weariness, but I do not think he was weary. It was an early-morning sound, made in my room as if he were on his own. As perhaps to all the intents and purposes of the actual world he was.

'Do you want to consider leaving here? Do you want me to make a consideration of it?'

But I could make no answer to that. Do I want freedom of that kind? Do I know what it is any more? Is this queer room my home? Whatever was the case, I felt again that creeping fear, like the frost on the plants of the summer, that blacken the leaves in that saddening way.

'I wonder how long you were in Sligo? Do you remember the year you entered there?

'No. Sometime during the war,' I said. That I knew.

'The Second World War, you mean?'

'Yes.'

'I was only a baby then,' he said.

Then there was a crisp, cold silence.

'We used to go down to one of the little Cornish bays, my father and mother and myself – this is my earliest memory, it is of no other significance. I remember the absolute chill of the water and, do you know, my nappies heavy with that water, a very vivid memory. The government allowed petrol to hardly anyone, so my father built one of those tandem bikes, welding together two different machines. He took the back position because that was where the power was needed, for those Cornish hills. Little hills, but lethal to the legs. Nice days, in the summer. My father at his ease. Tea that we boiled on the beach in a billycan, like fishermen.' Dr Grene laughed, sharing his laugh with the new light gathering outside to make the morning. 'Maybe that was just after the war.'

I wanted to ask him what his father's profession was, I don't know why, but it seemed too bare a question. Maybe he intended me to ask it, now I think of it. So we would begin to speak of fathers? Maybe he was casting his lure over the dark waters.

'I have not heard good accounts of the old hospital in Sligo, in that time. I am sure it was a horrendous place. I am quite sure it was.'

But I let that lie also.

'It's one of the mysteries of psychiatry that our hospitals in the early part of the century were so bad, so difficult to defend, whereas in the early part of the nineteenth century there was often quite an enlightened attitude to, to well, lunacy, as they called it. There was a sudden understanding that the incarceration, the chaining of people et cetera, was not good, and so an enormous effort was made to – alleviate matters. But I am afraid there was a reversion – something awry, eventually. Do you remember why you were changed from Sligo to here?'

He had asked that quite suddenly so that before I knew I had done so, I had spoken.

'My father-in-law arranged it,' I said.

'Your father-in-law? Who was that?'

'Old Tom, the bandman. He was also the tailor in Sligo.'

'In the town, you mean?'

'No, in the asylum itself.'

'You were in the asylum then where your father-in-law worked?'

'Yes.' 'I see.'

'I think my mother was also there, but I can't remember.' 'Working there?'

'No.'

'A patient?'

'I can't remember. I honestly can't.'

Oh, I knew he was longing then to ask me more, but to give him his due, he did not. Too good a fisherman maybe. When you see the salmon leaping, you will not catch one. Might as well go home.

'I certainly don't want you to be fearful,' he said, a little out of the blue. 'No, no. That is not my intention. I must say, Roseanne, we hold you in some regard here, we do.'

'I don't think that is merited,' I said, blushing and suddenly ashamed. Violently ashamed. It was as if some wood and leaves were suddenly cleared from a spring, and the head of water blossomed up. Painful, painful shame.

'Oh yes,' he said, not aware I think of my distress. He was perhaps plamasing me, flannelling me, as my father would have said. To enter me into some subject, where he could begin. A door into whatever he needed to understand. A part of me yearned to help him. Give him welcome. But. The rats of shame bursting through the wall I have constructed with infinite care over the years and milling about in my lap, was what it felt like. That was my job to hide it then, hide those wretched rats.

Why did I feel that dark shame after all these years? Why still in me, that dark dark shame?

Well, well.

Now we had a few mysteries in our laps. But the most pressing soon became again our poverty, which my father could not fathom.

One evening of the winter returning home from school I met up with my father along the river road. It wasn't like the joyful meetings of childhood, but I would be proud to say even now that I do believe it brightened something in my father to see me. It lightened him, dark, deep dark, though that Sligo evening was. I hope that doesn't seem like boasting.

'Now, dear,' he said. 'We'll walk arm in arm home, unless you're afraid to be seen with your father.'

'No,' I said, surprised. 'I am not afraid.'

'Well,' he said. 'I know what it is to be fifteen. Like a fella out on a headland in the blazing wind.'

But I didn't really understand what he meant. It was so cold I fancied there was frost on the stuff he put in his hair to flatten it.

Then we were coming idly, easily up our street. Up along the houses in front of us, one of the doors opened, and a man stepped down onto the pavement, and raised his brown trilby hat to the mask of a face that was just visible in the door. It was my mother's face and our own door.

'Well, Jaysus,' said my father, 'there's Mr Fine himself coming out of our house. I wonder what he was looking for. I wonder does he have rats?'

Mr Fine came towards us. He was a tall, loping man, a great gentleman of the town, with a kind, soft face like a man who had been out in a sunny wind – like the man on the headland maybe.

'Good day, Mr Fine,' said my father. 'How's everything going

on?'

'Just splendidly, yes, indeed,' said Mr Fine. 'How are you both? We were terrible shocked and anxious when we heard about the poor burned girls. That was a most terrible occasion,

Mr Clear.'

'Jaysus, it was,' said my father, and Mr Fine pressed on past us. 'I suppose I shouldn't say Jaysus to him,' my father said.

'Why?' I said.

'Ah, just him being Jewish and all,' he said.

'Don't they have Jesus?' I said, in my deep ignorance.

'I don't know,' he said. 'Fr Gaunt I don't doubt will say the Jews killed Jesus. But, you know, Roseanne, they were troubled times.'

We were quiet then as we reached our door and my father drew out his old key and turned it in the lock and we entered the tiny hall. I knew there was something troubling him now after the speech about Jesus. I was old enough to know that people make a little speech sometimes that is not what is in their thoughts, but is a sort of message of those thoughts all the same.

It was late in the evening just before it was time to go to bed that my father finally mentioned Mr Fine.

'So,' he said, as my mother shovelled ashes over the last few bits of turf, so they would burn slowly through the night, and be beautiful eggs of red sparks in the morning when she would winnow the ashes from them again. 'We met Mr Fine this evening, coming home. We thought for a minute he might have been calling here?'

My mother straightened herself and stood there with the fire-shovel. She stayed so still and so silent she might have been posing for an artist.

'He wasn't calling here,' she said.

'It's just that we thought we saw your face in the door, and he was lifting his hat – to your face like.'

My mother's eyes looked down at the fire. She had only made half a job of the ashes but she didn't look inclined to finish the job. She burst into strange, aching tears, tears that sounded like they had come up from her body somewhere, seeped through her like an awful damp. I was so shocked my body began to tingle in a queer uncomfortable way.

'I don't know,' he said, miserably. 'Maybe we were looking at the wrong door.'

'You know well you weren't,' she said, this time quite differently. 'You know well. Oh, oh,' she said, 'that I had never allowed you to take me from my home, to this cold cruel country, to this filthy rain, this filthy people.'

My father's reaction was to blanch like a boiling potato. This was more than my mother had said for a year. This was a letter, this was a newspaper of her thoughts. For my father I think it was like reading of yet another atrocity. Worse than rebels the age of boys, worse than burning girls.

'Cissy,' he said, so gently it went almost unheard. But I heard

it. 'Cissy.'

'A cheap scarf that would shame an Indian to be selling,' she said.

'What?'

'You can't blame me,' she said, nearly shouting. 'You can't blame me! I have nothing!'

My father leapt up, because my mother had inadvertently struck herself on the leg with the shovel.

'Cissy!' he cried.

She had opened a little inch of herself and there were a few jewels of dark blood glistering there. 'Oh Christ, oh Christ,' she said.

The next evening my father went to see Mr Fine in his grocery shop. When he came back his face was pallid, he looked exhausted. I was already upset because my mother, perhaps suspecting something, had gone out herself into the dark, I knew not where. She had been one minute in the scullery banging about, and the next she was gone.

'Gone out?' said my father. 'Dear me, dear me. She put on her coat in this terrible cold?'

'She did,' I said. 'Shall we go out to look for her?'

'Yes, we must, we must,' said my father, but he stayed sitting where he was. The saddle of his motorbike was just beside him, but he didn't put a hand on it. He let it be.

'What did Mr Fine say?' I asked. 'Why did you go to see

him?'

'Well, Mr Fine is a very fine man, that he is. He was most concerned, apologetic. She told him it was all above board. All agreed. I wonder how she could say that. Get the words into her mouth and say them?'

'I don't understand, Dadda.'

'It's the why we've had so little to be eating,' he said. 'She's after making a purchase on Mr Fine's loan, and every week naturally he comes for his money, and every week I suppose she gives him the most of what I give her. All those rats, dark corners, all those hours of poor Bob scratching through miseries, and the days of queer hunger we have endured, all for – a clock.'

'A clock?'

'A clock.'

'But there's no new clock in the house,' I said. 'Is there,

Dadda?'

'I don't know. Mr Fine says so. Not that he sold her the clock. He only sells carrots and cabbages. But she showed him the clock here one day, when you and me were out. A very nice clock, he said. Made in New York. With a Toronto chime.'

'What is that?' I said.

And as I spoke my mother appeared in the door behind my father. She was holding in her hands a square porcelain object, with its elegant dial, and around it someone, no doubt in New York, had painted little flowers.

'I don't have it ticking,' she said, in a small voice, like a fearless child, 'for fear.'

My father stood up.

'Where did you buy it, Cissy? Where did you buy such a thing?'

'In Grace's of the Weir.'

'Grace's of the Weir?' he said, incredulously. 'I have never even been into that shop. I would be afraid to go into it, in case they charged me for entering.'

She stood there, shrinking in her unhappiness.

'It is made by Ansonia,' she said, 'in New York.'

'Can we take it back, Cissy?' he said. 'Let's take it back to Grace's and see where we are then. We cannot go on making payments to Fine. They will never give you what you gave them for it, but they might give you something on it, and maybe we can close the debt with Mr Fine. I am sure he will oblige me if he can.'

'I never even heard it tick or chime,' she said.

'Well, turn the key in it and have it tick. And when it strikes the hour it will chime.'

'I can't,' she said, 'for they will find it then. They will follow the sound and find it.'

'Who, Cissy? Us, is it? I think we have done all the finding now.'

'No, no,' said my mother, 'the rats. The rats will find it.'

My mother looked up at him with an eerie glow in her face, like a conspirator.

'We will be better to smash it,' she said.

'No,' said my father as desperate as you like.

'No, it would be better. To smash it. To smash Southampton and all. And Sligo. And you. I'll raise it up now, Joe, and bring it down upon the earth like this,' and indeed she did raise it up, and indeed she did throw it down on the thin damp cake of concrete on the floor, 'there, all promises retrieved, all hurts healed, all losses restored!'

The clock lay in its porcelain pieces there, some little ratchet loosened, and for the first and last time in our house, the Ansonia clock chimed with its Toronto chime.

It was soon after this, so soon, that I have to report, my father was found dead.

To this day I don't know what killed him exactly, but I have puzzled it over these eighty years and more. I have given you the run of the thread, and where has it led me? I have lain all the facts before you.

Surely the matter of the clock was too small a thing to kill a man?

Surely the dead boys was a dark thing, but dark enough to darken my father forever?

The girls also, yes, that was a dark matter, bright though they were as they fell.

It was my father's fate to have those things befall him.

He was just as anyone else, and anything, clock or heart, he had a breaking point.

It was in the next street in a derelict cottage, where he was working to rid it of rats, at the behest of the neighbours to right and left of the empty house, that he hanged himself.

Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh.

Do you know the grief of it? I hope not. The grief that does not age, that does not go away with time, like most griefs and human matters. That is the grief that is always there, swinging a little in a derelict house, my father, my father.

I cry out for him.

chapter nine

I suppose I must add the few unpleasant things that befell my father after death, when he was no more than a big pudding of blood and past events. It is possible to love a person more than oneself, and yet as a child, or nearly woman, to have such a thought, when your father is carried into the house for the inevitable wake…Notthat we hoped to have many to wake him.

His motorbike was put out into the little yard by Mr Pine our neighbour, a cold-eyed carpenter who yet put himself immediately to assist us. I need not tell you it was never brought in again but was left to fetch for itself as best it could in the outdoors.

In its place was set the long penny-halfpenny coffin with my father's large nose poking up. Because he had hanged himself, his face was covered in a white paint as thick as a clockface, work done by Silvester's funeral directors. The street then crowded in and if we had few pipes and pots of tea and not a drop of whiskey to offer, nevertheless I was astonished by the ease and merriment of the people there, and the obvious regret they showed for the passing of my father. The Presbyterian minister Mr Ellis came in and also Fr Gaunt, and in the way of supposed enemies or rivals in Ireland, they shared a witticism in the corner for a few moments. Then in the early morning we were left alone, and my mother and myself slept – or I slept. I wept and wept and I slept at length. But grief like that is a good grief.

When I came down in the morning from the loft where my narrow bed was kept, there was a different class of grief. I went over to my father and for a moment could not work out what

I was seeing. There was something wrong with his eyes at any rate. When I peered close I saw what it was. Someone had pierced each eyeball with a tiny black arrow. The arrows pointed upwards. I knew immediately what they were. They were the black metal hands from my mother's Ansonia clock.

I plucked them out again like thorns, like bee-stings. A thorn to find a witch, a sting to find a love is an old country saying. They were not tokens of love. I do not know what they were tokens of. This was the last sorrow of my father. He was buried in the small Presbyterian yard with a goodly show of his 'friends' – friends I hardly knew he had. People who he had rid of rats, or in the old high days, buried people for. Or people who cherished him for the human soul he had exhibited to the world. Who liked his ways. There were many I could not put names to. Fr Gaunt, while the Presbyterian minister of course did the ceremony, stood beside me almost as a friend and spoke a few names, as if that was what I wanted. This name and that name, that I forgot as soon as he spoke them. But there was also a man there called Joe Brady, that had taken my father's job at the cemetery at the invitation of Fr Gaunt, a queer fattish man with burning eyes. I don't know why he was there, and wasn't sure even in my grief if I wanted him there, but you can't keep anyone back from a funeral. Mourners are like Canute's sea. I was content to think he was paying his respects.

My head was aflame with the deep, dark pulse of grief, that beats like a physical pain, like a rat got into your brains, a rat on fire.

Dr Grene's Commonplace Book

Tremendously busy attending to all the arrangements at the hospital and not much time to write here. I have missed the odd intimacy of it. As I characteristically have probably a poor sense of myself, that is to say, a rather miserable sense of my own slightness as a person, as a soul, keeping this book has somehow helped me, but how I can't say. It is hardly a therapy. But it is at least a sign of ongoing inner life. Or so I hope and pray.

Perhaps with some justification. Last night coming home as weary as I have ever been, cursing everything, the dreadful potholes in these Roscommon roads, the lousy suspension in my car, the broken light in the porch that meant I banged my arm against the concrete pillar, I entered the hallway, really in a rather foul mood, prepared to curse everything there also, if given half a chance.

But Bet was standing on the landing above. I don't know if she had been there already, before I came in, maybe so, because she was at the little window, looking out across the tangle of town gardens and the haphazard premises of light industry. There was moonlight on her, and she was smiling. I think she was. Some enormous lightness got a hold of me. It was like the first time I thought I loved her, when she was young and slight as a watercolour, a mere gesture of bones and features, beautiful and perfect in my eyes, when I pledged myself to her, to make her happy, to adore her, to hold her in my arms – the strange, maybe stupid compact of all lovers. She turned about from the moonlight and looked at me, and to my astonishment she started to come down the stairs. She was wearing an ordinary print dress, a summer dress, and as she descended the stairs she brought the moonlight with her, the moonlight and other lights. And when she got to the halldoor, she leaned up and kissed me, yes, yes, fool that I am I was crying, but as quietly and with as much dignity as I could muster, wanting to match her grace for grace, even if it was beyond me. And then she brought me into the front room among all the bric-a-brac of our lives and she held me and she kissed me again, and in a passion that eventually tore the top of my head off, she pulled me against herself in a most gentle, fierce and concentrated way, kissing and kissing, and then all our little play of love we had enacted so many thousands of times in former years, and afterwards we lay there on the Axminster carpet like slain animals.

Roseanne's Testimony of Herself

I have had all my head filled with my father and hardly a word for the nuns at school.

And now I must report I must leave them to the darks of history, without itemising them, interesting women though they were. Towards us poorer girls they were savage, but we allowed that. We screamed and we wept when we were beaten, and watched the solicitous kindnesses shown towards the richer girls of the town with immaculate envy. There is a moment in the history of every beaten child when his mind parts with hopes of dignity – pushes off hope like a boat without a rower, and lets it go as it will on the stream, and resigns himself to the tally stick of pain.

This is a ferocious truth, because a child knows no better.

A child is never the author of his own history. I suppose this is well known.

But savage as they were, though they wielded sticks against us with every ounce of energy in their bodies, to drive out the devils of lust and the shoals of ignorance that teemed in us, they were interesting women enough. But I must let them go. My story hurries me on.

I think all we can offer heaven is human honesty. I mean, at the gates of St Peter. Hopefully it might be like salt to kingdoms without salt, spices to dark Northern countries. A few grams in the bag of the soul, offered as we seek entry. What heavenly honesty is like I cannot say. But I say this to steel myself to my task.

I thought once that beauty was my best possession. Perhaps in heaven it might have been. But in these earthly fields it was not.

To be alone, but to be pierced through with a kingly joy, now and then, as I believe I am, is a great possession indeed. As I sit here at this table marked and scored by a dozen generations maybe of inmates, patients, angels, whatever we are, I must report to you this sensation of some gold essence striking into me, blood deep. Not contentment, but a prayer as wild and dangerous as a lion's roar.

I tell you this, you.

Dear reader. God keep you, God keep you.

Or should I really go around those nuns? Perhaps I can linger a moment with such savagery and modesty mixed. No, no, I will go around them. Although many times in later years I had a dream of them coming to rescue me, like a herd of lotus blossoms with their white headdresses, pouring down Sligo Main Street, nothing of the sort of course ever happened. And I don't know why I thought there was a basis for such a dream, as I don't remember any instance of favour while I was among them. And of course, as my history would have it, I was gone from them entirely then by age sixteen.

Memories that I have of Fr Gaunt are always curiously precise and full, lit brightly, his face clear and intense. As I sit here writing away, I can actually see him behind my eyes, in this instance on the day he came to me with his own version of rescue.

I knew I had to leave school immediately on my father's death, because my mother's wits were now in an attic of her head which had neither door nor stair, or at least none that I could find. If we were to eat, I must find work of any kind.

Fr Gaunt arrived one day in his accustomed sleek soutane -I do not mean this critically – and as it was raining with that special Sligo rain that has made bogland of a thousand ancient farms, he was also covered in a sleek dark-grey coat of similar shiny material. Perhaps the skin of his face was also made of it, anciently, in his mother's womb. He carried a highly ecclesiastical umbrella, like something real and austere, that said its prayers at night in the hatstand.

I let him in and sat him in the parlour. My father's piano still remained, itself as animate as the umbrella, standing there against the wall, as if actively remembering my father somewhere in the brainways of its strings and keys.

'Thank you, Roseanne,' said Fr Gaunt, as I handed him a cup of tea I had heroically made out of a farthing of tea sadly already used three times. But I hoped it had one last squeeze of essence in it, come all the way from China after all, in Jackson's tea ship. We got our tea from the corner, not from the great emporium of Blackwood's, where the toffs shopped, so maybe it wasn't the best tea to begin with. But Fr Gaunt sipped it politely.

'Have you a drop of milk?' he said, kindly, kindly.

'No, Father.'

'No matter, no matter,' he said, regretfully enough. 'Now, Roseanne, you and I have things to talk about, things to talk about.'

'Oh, Father?'

'What will you do now, Roseanne, now that your poor father is gone?'

'I will leave school, Father, and get a job in the town.' 'Will you be advised by me?'

'Oh?' I said.

He drank his tea for a few moments and smiled his priestly smiles, a little repertoire indeed. I know even at this distance that he was trying to do his duty, to be kind, to be helpful. I know this.

'You have, Roseanne, various aspects to yourself, certain obvious gifts if I may say so, of…'

Just for the moment he didn't say what. I sensed that the what of this was something not completely delicate. He was looking in his arsenal of sentences for the correct sentences. He was certainly in no way being unpleasant, nor seeking to be. In fact I think he would have died before he would have offered anything unpleasant.

'Beauty,' he said.

I looked at him.

'The gift of beauty. Roseanne, I think without too much trouble I could – of course bearing in mind the opinion of your mother, and even yourself, although I must still account you almost a child, if I may so, and in grave, gravest need of advice, if I may say – but what was I saying? Oh, yes, that I think here in the town I could find you very quickly, very smartly, easily and in the nicest manner possible, a husband. Of course, there would be certain things to do first.'

Fr Gaunt was as they say warming to his theme. The more he spoke the easier the words came, all nice and milky and honey-touched. Like many a man in authority, he was sublimely happy as long as he was presenting his ideas, and as long as his ideas were meeting with agreement.

'I don't think…' I said, trying to roll back this great boulder of good sense he was pushing on my head – it felt like.

'Before you say anything about this, I know you are only sixteen, and it might not be the usual thing to marry so young, but on the other hand, I have in mind a very suitable man, who I think would have a great regard for you, maybe already has, and is in steady employ, and would be in a position therefore to support you – and your mother of course.'

'I can support us,' I said, 'I am sure I can,' I said, and less sure of anything in my life I had never been.

'You may know this man already, he is Joe Brady that now holds your father's former job at the cemetery, a very steady, pleasant, kind man, who lost his own wife two years ago, and will be quite content to marry again. In life we must look for a certain symmetry of things, and as your father once held -Hmm. And he has no children and I am sure…'

Indeed and I knew Joe Brady, the man who had taken my father's job, and come to see him buried. Joe Brady as far as I knew or could tell was about fifty years of age.

'You'd have me marry an old man?' I said, in my innocence. Because, since he was offering such magnanimous charity, I could hardly expect a man under thirty I suppose. If I wanted a man.

'Roseanne, you are a very lovely young girl, and as such I am afraid, going about the town, a mournful temptation, not only to the boys of Sligo but also, the men, and as such and in every way conceivable, to have you married would be a boon and a rightness very complete and attractive in its – rightness.'

His eloquence had momentarily failed perhaps because he had glanced at my face. I don't know what my face was showing but it wasn't agreement.

'And naturally, I would be so pleased, so relieved and delighted to be the agent, the author as one might say, of receiving you into the fold. Which I hope you will see is a politic and indeed marvellous and magical prospect.'

'Fold?' I said.

'You will be very aware, Roseanne, of the recent upheavals in Ireland, and none of these upheavals favour any of the

Protestant sects. Of course I will be of the opinion that you are in gravest error and your mortal soul is lost if you continue where you are. Nevertheless I can say I pity you, and wish to help you. I can find you a good Catholic husband as I say, and he will not mind your origin eventually, as, as I also have said, you are graced if I may say again with so much beauty. Roseanne, you really are the most beautiful young girl we have ever seen in Sligo.'

This he said with such simplicity and transparent – I almost said innocence, but something like innocence – he spoke so nicely I smiled despite myself. It was like getting a compliment from an old lady of distinction in the Sligo Street, a Pollexfen or a Middleton or the like, in her ermine and her nice tweed clothing.

'It is stupid of me to flatter you,' he said. 'All I mean is, if you will let me take you under my wing, I can help you, and I want to help you. I must also add that I held your father in the highest regard, despite his embarrassing me, and indeed had real love for him, because he was a straightforward soul.'

'But a Presbyterian soul,' I said.

'Yes,' he said.

'My mother is Plymouth Brethren.'

'Well,' he said, for the first time with a taint of animosity, 'never mind.'

'But I must mind my mother. And I will. It is my duty as her daughter.'

'Your mother, Roseanne, is a very sick woman.'

All right, I had not heard this expressed, and it shocked me to hear it. But, yes, I knew that to be true.

'More than likely,' he said, 'you will need to commit her to the asylum, I hope I am not shocking you?'

Oh, but he was shocking me. When he spoke those fearsome words, my belly churned, my muscles ached in their slings of bones. Without knowing I was going to do it, I suddenly and inexplicably vomited onto the carpet in front of me. Fr Gaunt drew back his legs with extraordinary quickness, neatness. There on the floor was the remains of the nice toast I had made for my mother and myself for breakfast. Fr Gaunt stood up.

'Oh. You will need to clean that up, I expect?'

'I will,' I said, and bit my tongue on the urge to apologise. I knew somehow I must never apologise to Fr Gaunt, and that from henceforth he would be a force unknown, like a calamity of weather waiting unknown and un-forecast to bedevil a landscape.

'Father, I can't do what you say. I can't do it.'

'You will think about it? In your grief you may make poor decisions. I understand this. My own father died five years ago of a cancer, it was a terrible death, and I mourn him still. Remember, Roseanne, grief is two years long. You will not make a good thought for a long time. Be advised by me, let me advise you in loco parentis, do you see, in place of your father let me be your father in this, as a priest ought. We have had so many dealings, he and I, and you, that you are almost in the fold already. It will save your immortal soul, and save you in this valley of sorrows and tears. It will protect you against all the foul tides and accidents of the world.'

I shook my head. I see myself, behind my eyes, shaking my head.

Fr Gaunt shook his head also, but in a different way. 'You will think about it? Think about it, Roseanne, and then we will talk again. It is a moment in your life when you are in the greatest danger. Good day to you, Roseanne. Thank you for the tea. It was lovely. And thank your mother.'

He went out into the tiny hall and into the street. When he was quite gone, long out of ear shot, and only the smell of his clothes lingered oddly in the room, I said:

'Goodbye, Father.'

chapter ten

Dr Grene today. He has shaved his beard!

I don't remember if I mentioned his beard. A beard on a man is only a way of hiding something, his face of course, but also the inner matters, like a hedge around a secret garden, or a cover over a bird cage.

I would like to say I didn't know him when he stepped in, because that is what you would expect, but I did know him.

I was sitting here writing when I heard his step in the corridor and just managed to get everything hidden in the floor before he knocked and came in, as always not an easy task for an ancient cailleach like myself. A cailleach is the old crone of stories, the wise woman and sometimes a kind of witch. My husband Tom McNulty was the master of such stories, which he told with perfect force mainly because he believed every word of them. Sometime I will tell you about the two-headed dog that he saw on the road to Enniscrone, if you like. How would I know what you like? I am getting used to thinking of you there, somewhere. This cailleach is deluded in the head! The old midwife. I am only the midwife to my own old story. It is midwifery enough.

Dr Grene was very subdued, very quiet, very shiny in the face. He might have rubbed some unguent onto his skin when he shaved it, to spare it some of the shock of the air. He wandered over to the table – I was now sitting on the bed, among the tiny landscapes of the coverlet, I think they are French scenes, there is a man carrying a donkey on his back and other things – and Dr Grene lifted from the table my father's old copy of Religio Medici and looked at it idly enough. I was surprised when my father died to see that the book was printed in

1869, although I knew he had it always for many years. His name, and the place Southampton, and the date 1888 were of course pencilled onto the flyleaf, but still I hoped maybe the book had been put into his youthful hands by the hands of his own father, my grandfather, a person of course whom I never met. It might have been. So that when I held it in my hands, there was as it were a history of hands surrounding the little volume, the hands of my own people. Because a lone person takes great comfort from her people, in the watches of the night, even the memory of them.

Because I knew the little book so well, I could guess what Dr Grene was looking at. It was a picture of Sir Thomas Browne, with a beard. Perhaps as he looked at the beard, a very fierce jutting object in a round engraving, he may suddenly have been regretting the loss of his own. Sampson Low, Son, and Marston were the printers. That Son was beautiful. The son of Sampson Low. Who was he, who was he? Did he labour under the whip of his father, or was he treated with gentleness and respect? J. W. Willis Bund supplied the notes. Names, names, all passed away, forgotten, mere birdsong in the bushes of things. If J. W. Willis Bund can pass away forgotten, how much easier for me? We share in that at least.

Son. As little I know about my own son. The son of Roseanne Clear.

'An old book,' he said.

'Yes.'

'Whose name is that, Mrs McNulty, Joe Clear?'

Dr Grene now had a perplexed look on his face, a very deep thinking look, like a young boy figuring out an arithmetic problem. If he had had a pencil he might have licked the lead.

He had shaved his beard and was no longer hiding his face, so I felt suddenly I owed him something.

'My father,' I said.

'He was an educated man then?'

'He was indeed. He was a minister's son. From Collooney.'

'Collooney,' he said. 'Collooney suffered so in the troubles in the twenties,' he said. 'I am glad somehow that one time there was a man there that read the Religio Medici.'

The way he said the last two words slowly I knew he had never encountered the book before.

Dr Grene opened the book further, passing by the introduction, and hunting mildly for the beginning of the book, as a person does.

'"To the reader. Certainly that man were greedy of life, who should desire to live when all the world were at an end…"'

Dr Grene gave a strange little laugh, not a true laugh at all, but a sort of miniature cry. Then he laid the book back where he had found it.

'I see,' he said, though I had said nothing. Perhaps he was talking to the old bearded face in the book, or to the book itself. Seventy-six, Thomas Browne was when he died, a youngster compared to me. He died on his birthday, as sometimes happens, if rarely. I suppose Dr Grene is about sixty or so. I had never seen him quite so solemn as this today. He is hardly a man for jests and jokes, but he sometimes has a curious lightness carried about with him. Compared to poor John Kane, with all his sins, his supposed rapes and wrong doing in the asylum, Dr Grene is like an angel. Perhaps compared to many, I can no longer say. If Dr Grene feels himself washed up on this terrible shore of the asylum, if he feels himself in any way yesterday's man, as the saying goes, for me he is tomorrow and tomorrow. Such were my thoughts as I looked at him, trying to untie the knot of his new mood.

Dr Grene crossed to the little chair by the window where I like to sit when the weather is a little warmer. Otherwise there is a chill that seems to penetrate the window-glass. Below the window there is the yard, the high wall, and the endless fields. Roscommon town I am told is over the horizon, and it may be.

There is a river that moves between the fields that in the summer takes the light and uses my window as a signal, signalling to what or who or where I do not know. The riverlight plays in the glass. So naturally I like to sit there. At any rate, Dr Grene put his weight into it, always a cause for slight alarm, for it is a mere dress chair, one of those nice little chairs that country women liked to have in their bedrooms for their dress, even if it was the only nice object in the house. How it got to this room God only knows, and He perhaps hardly.

'Can you remember, Mrs McNulty, what it was – I mean, the events leading up to your presence in the Sligo asylum? You remember me saying I could find no proper record of the matter? I have searched again since and certainly have found nothing further. I am afraid the history of your presence here and in Sligo is no more. But I will continue to look, and I have sent to Sligo just on the off chance they have something. Can you remember anything about the matter?'

'I don't think I remember. The Leitrim Hotel they called it. I do remember that.'

'What?'

'They called the asylum in Sligo the Leitrim Hotel.' 'Did they? I never knew that. Why so? Oh,' he said, nearly laughing, nearly, 'because – yes.' 'Half of Leitrim was said to be in it.' 'Poor Leitrim.'

'Yes.'

'That is an odd word, Leitrim. I wonder what it means? I suppose it is Irish. Of course it is.'

I smiled at him. He was like a boy that has banged his knee and now the pain was subsiding. The cheerfulness of a boy after pain and tears.

Then he sank back again somehow, blackening deeper into himself, like a mole in the earth. I answered him largely to raise him back again.

'I do remember terrible dark things, and loss, and noise, but it is like one of those terrible dark pictures that hang in churches, God knows why, because you cannot see a thing in them.'

'Mrs McNulty, that is a beautiful description of traumatic memory.'

'Is it?'

'Yes, it is.'

Then he sat there in his own version of silence for a long while. He sat so long he was almost an inmate of the room! As if he lived there himself, as if he had nowhere to go to, nothing to do, no one to attend.

He sat in the chill light. The river, drowned in its own water, and drowned a second time in the rains of February, was not in a position to throw its light. The window-glass was severely itself. Only the still grass of winter far below lent it a slight besmirch of green. His eyes, now much clearer somehow and more distinct without the beard, were looking forwards as if at an object about a yard away, that stare that faces have in portraits. I sat on the bed and without the slightest embarrassment watched him, because he wasn't watching me at all. He was looking into that strange place, the middle distance, the most mysterious, human, and rich of all distances. And from his eyes came slowly tears, immaculate human tears, before the world touches them. River, window and eyes.

'What is the matter, Dr Grene?' I said.

'Oh,' he said.

I rose and moved towards him. You would have done the same yourself. It is an ancient matter. Something propels you towards sudden grief, or perhaps also sometimes repels. You move away. I moved towards it, I couldn't help it.

'Please do not mind me if I stand near you,' I said. 'I have had my bath yesterday. I am not foul-smelling.'

'What?' he said, absolutely surprised, but minutely. 'What?'

I stood by him and held out my right hand and placed it on his shoulder, actually a little behind the shoulder on his back. I had this unbidden memory of my father sitting on his bed, holding my mother, and patting her back almost childishly. I didn't dare pat Dr Grene, but just rested my old hand there.

'What is the matter?' I said.

'Oh,' he said. 'Oh. My wife has died.'

'Your wife?'

'Yes,' he said, 'yes. Her breathing deserted her. She choked, she choked – she suffocated.' 'Oh, my poor man,' I said.

'Yes,' he said. 'Yes.'

Then I knew something about Dr Grene. I had opened my mouth to tell him something about myself, by grace of his lost beard, and out of his own mouth had issued this news, this huge information.

With infinite sadness and very quietly, he added: 'It is also my birthday.'

Now here is a story of general stupidity in me. You might not credit the level of it.

I was wanting greatly to speak to my father and my father was dead. I had been a couple of times to his grave in the Presbyterian yard, but I thought I could not find him there. Maybe his bones did not contain him, maybe his signal and his self was elsewhere.

It was the useful gloom of a December afternoon, dark by four. I knew well that the old gates up in the other cemetery would be open, but how easy it would be to slip in those gates in the dark and be there among the graves with no one to note me. I was sure, I was hoping if my father was to be found anywhere, something of him might remain there, some old twist of bushes and paths and buried things that might constitute a sort of ancient radio that would carry a signal of him.

So I crept in there in my old blue dress and my coat, as thin and slight in those days as a heron, and very like a heron I am sure in that garb, with my gawky face and long neck sticking up from it, an out and out opportunity for the cold.

What calm I took from the spreading paths, the quiet stones, the familiar numbers on their iron tags stuck into the ground by each grave, that tallied I knew with the book of graves held for safety in the concrete temple. A yellow light had got stuck in the meagre forest of small trees that covered the general paths, a forest that had been made thin and poor by the very blasts of death. Now I wrapped my coat about me to the collar, and without thinking what I was really doing, without being quite in the present time, penetrated as far as the circular sweep of graves in front of the temple.

There were the pillars, the old sharp arch with its faded figures, Greek heroes and the like, of wars and times unknown, and the iron door slightly agape on its heavy hinges, and that longed-for light within of the stove and the lamp that spoke the volume of my father. Without a thought for the present moment, in other words, in great stupidity, I crept forward towards that light, thinking, my heart begging me to advance, to claim again the cherished cowl of light and warmth and talk. The door was open enough for me to go straight in.

And nothing had changed. Everything inside also spoke of my father. His kettle was on the rickety hob still beside the grate of guttering coals, his enamel cup, even my own, on the table, the few books and ledgers piled neatly there, and the same footprints on the faded slate floor. My eyes opened and opened, and my face, and I felt absolutely certain that I would soon be in his presence, soon be comforted, advised, restored.

Then I felt a sudden and shocking push from behind. I wasn't expecting such a thing in the refuge of my own father. I staggered forward a few steps, quite unbalanced, with that nasty lurching feeling in the belly from having to right myself so abruptly. I turned about and there was a strange man in the door. He had a belly on him under a gansey too small for him, that had the shape and look of the crust of a shop-bought loaf. The face was severe with odd hollow cheeks, and the bushy brows of the old, except he probably wasn't much past fifty. No, no, but I knew this man, of course I did. It was Joe Brady that had replaced my father.

Hadn't Fr Gaunt told me? So why had it gone from my mind? What in the name of God was I doing there? You will say it was a madness, an astrayness in the head. He certainly did not have the appearance of a suitor, or anything like it. He looked angry and turned about, his eyes with that unhappy burning look I had noticed in the graveyard. In my longing for my father I had simply not thought about him again since Fr Gaunt brought his request.

Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, maybe so, but in my experience men are not any better. Terror rose in me from the cold flags of the floor, terror so severe I must confess – and forgive such honesty in an old woman remembering horrors -that I helplessly pissed in my drawers. Even in the poor light of the temple I am sure he saw that, and whether from this cause or another, he let out a laugh. It was a laugh like a dog's growl when it fears to be stepped on, a warning laugh if there is such a thing. And don't they say in books that the laugh of a human person has its origin in an ancient grimacing and growling of the face? So it looked to me that day, proof positive.

'You didn't want me,' he said, the first time in his life he had spoken to me, which amazed me, 'and you preferring to stay the Godless girl you are.'

He walked forward at me and I don't know what he intended. But as he moved I thought that indeed something ancient and irresistible was born in him. The silent temple in the silent yard, the darkness of December, and whatever was in me he wanted. It seemed as he moved forward, his intention changed, humanity cleared from his face, something private and darker than humanity, something before we were given our troublesome souls, stirred in his eyes. I think at this impossible distance that he wanted to kill me, why ever so I do not know. There was a story of this Joe Brady that I had just stepped in on, what huge plot he had plotted with Fr Gaunt I do not know. In seeking to find my father I seemed to have found my murderer. I called out with suddenly found strength of voice. I roared!

Now in behind him stepped another man. What luck I had that there was another man in that quiet place. Joe Brady by this time had completed the last step to my form, and as if it was what he greatly desired in all the things of the world, he closed his hands about my scrawny neck and pulled me to him. Then I knew somehow without knowing that he was scrabbling about at his flies to release whatever was there, God help me, I was only sixteen and though I knew about birds and bees, I hardly knew aught else, except that certain lads might stir you as you passed them, and you would not know why. At this point in my life I may have been the most innocent girl in Sligo, and I do remember even as I remember here, writing, that my first thought was that he was drawing forth a gun or a knife from his britches, because of course this was the very place I had seen guns drawn and heard them explode.

As if in very harmony with that thought, the new man behind Joe Brady indeed had a gun drawn, a big heavy-looking yoke that he brought across the back of Joe Brady's head with a movement like a man cutting a high bramble with a slash-hook. I was aware of all this even as I stood drenched in terror. Joe Brady didn't go out on the first blow, but he sank to his knees, and in utter disgust and misery I saw his swollen penis between his legs and threw my hands to my eyes. The new man gave him another swipe with his gun. I thought, does everyone in this place have a gun, am I fated always to see guns here?

Joe Brady now lay quietly on the floor. I took my hands from my face and looked at him, and then looked at the man behind him. He was a skinny youngish fella with black hair.

'Are ya all right?' he said. 'Is that your father?'

'No, it is not my father,' I said, well-nigh hysterical. 'My father is dead.'

'I see,' said the man, 'and do you not remember me? I remember you.'

'No,' I said, 'I do not remember.'

'Well,' he said, 'you knew me once. I'm going away to America and wanted to come and say goodbye to my brother

Willie.'

'Who's that?' I said stupidly. 'Why would he be here?'

'Because he's buried here. Don't you remember? Aren't you the girleen brought the bloody priest for him, and that likely brought the soldiers, those very soldiers that took us off and killed the some of us, and yet me getting away back home by a miracle.'

'I do know,' I said. 'I do know you.' And his name swam into my mind, maybe only because my father had spoken it, sitting in the little room reading the paper, or was it sitting there in the temple? 'You're John Lavelle. From the islands.'

'John Lavelle from the Inishkeas. And I am going to that other place I am, far away from this stinking lousy country, with its oath of fucking allegiance and its dead betrayed.'

I stared at him. Here truly was an astonishing revenant.

'Since I did you the kindness to save you,' he said, with hostile bravery, 'a kindness you never done for me, you might tell me where my brother's grave is, for I have wandered up and down and up and down those avenues and cannot find him.'

'I don't know, I don't know.' I said. 'But, but, it will be in the book there, on the table. Is this man dead?'

'I don't know if he is dead. It is funny he is not your father, but that I have struck him down anyway. You will know your father had a sentence on his head for what he done. Or not for what he done, for what you done, bringing the soldiers. But we couldn't be shooting girls.'

'I think you could bring yourself to be shooting girls, if you tried. What do you mean, a sentence on my father?'

'While the war raged, we were obliged to send him a letter, with his death sentence in it, and he was lucky when the war was over we let it go.'

'He was lucky?' I said, the words gushing up in fury from my throat. 'The unluckiest man that ever was born in Ireland. The poor man lies dead over in the other yard! You sent him a letter? Don't you know the hard life he had of it? The dark fate of him? Oh, I knew there was another thing I did not know of. You, you, you killed him. You killed him, John Lavelle!'

Now this John Lavelle was silent. The sort of discolouring, excited look went out of his face. He spoke suddenly very normally, even nicely. For some reason I cannot fathom still, I knew my words were untrue. I am proud I could understand that much. Whatever this young man had done in his life, he had not killed my father.

'Well,' he said. 'I am sorry your father is dead. Of course I am. Don't you know they shot my comrades? They took them out without mercy and shot them, Irishmen killing their own.'

It was as if his sudden change were a sort of catching cold, and I caught it.

'I am sorry about that,' I said. Why did I suddenly feel silly and awkward? 'I am sorry about everything. I never brought in the soldiers. I never did. But I don't even care if you think I did. I don't even care if you shoot me down dead. I loved my father. And now your comrades are dead and my father is dead. I never said a word to no one but the priest, and he had no chance to speak on the way. Don't you see, the soldiers were following you? Do you think no one else saw you? This town has eyes. This town can see out secrets, no bother.'

He was staring at me then with his eyes the tainted strange colour of seaweed. The seaweed of his island was in his eyes. Maybe there was seaweed slugging about in the wombs of the women there, people half gone back to the sea, like the first little thrumming creatures in creation, if I am to believe what I read. Oh, he cleared his eyes of everything then, and he stared at me, and for the first time I saw what was also hiding in John Lavelle, a sort of kindness. How much of such kindness the war had covered over with corpses and curses I do not know.

'Will you show me my brother's grave?' he said, in the same tones as another might have said, I love you.

'I will, if I can find it.'

So I went over to the book in question and scanned down the names. There was my father's beautiful blue copperplate writing, the hand of a proper scribe, though he was none such. And among the Ls I found him, Willie, Willie Lavelle. Then I noted the numbers of reference, and as if I was my father himself, and not a girl of sixteen that had nearly been knocked down and raped, I walked past the still inert lump of Joe Brady, and John Lavelle, and out among the avenues, and brought John Lavelle to his brother, so that he might say goodbye.

Then maybe John Lavelle went to America for it was a long while before anyone heard anything about him.

John Lavelle went to America and I went to a place called the Cafe Cairo – which wasn't quite as far.

chapter eleven

John Kane came out today with an extraordinary statement. He said the snowdrops were early this year. You would not expect such a man to notice snowdrops. He said that in the top garden where only the workers at the asylum are allowed to go, he saw a crocus in bloom. He said all this in a very nice way, standing in the middle of the room with the mop. In fact he came in to mop the floor, told me about these miracles, and then went off, forgetting actually to mop. Distracted I must surmise by his own sudden attack of poetry. This goes to prove yet again that few people stick to the articles of their characters, and will keep breaking away from them. At the same time he has been the same stranger to the washbasin and his flies were open as is mostly the case. Some day a small animal will notice his open flies and go in and live there, like a hedgehog in the inviting damp hollow of an ash tree.

I write this calmly although at this moment I am anything but calm.

Dr Grene was here for an hour in the afternoon. I was quite shocked by his ashen face, and he was to my added astonishment wearing the dark suit of the mourner, as he had just attended his wife's removal and burial. He referred to her as Bet, which must be a shorter form of Betty, which is a short form for what name? I cannot remember. Perhaps Elisabeth. He said there were forty-four mourners, he had counted them. I had the thought that there would be fewer for me, fewer, few, or none, unless Dr Grene himself attended my interment. But what does it matter? I could see the grief in the very lines of his face and where he had shaved his beard there was a violent-looking red rash, which he kept touching gingerly. I told him there he might be better not bothering with the likes of me on such a day, but he didn't answer that.

'I have unexpectedly found some additional material,' he said. 'I don't know whether it will help us, as it pertains to matters in the long ago. As they say.'

As who say? The people he is accustomed to seeing? The old people of his youth? When was Dr Grene young? I suppose in the fifties and sixties of the last century. When Queen Elizabeth was young and England was old.

'It was a little deposition someone had made many years ago, I don't know if it belonged to this institution or in fact went back to your time in Sligo Mental Hospital, and had been transferred here with you. It has at least raised the hope in me that the original is there. This copy was in a very poor state, typed but very faint as one might expect. And a great part of it missing. Something from an Egyptian tomb indeed. It referred to your father being in the Royal Irish Constabulary, which is not a phrase I had seen for many a long year, and the circumstances of his death – of his murder as one might say. I was very distressed to read about it. I don't know, but I felt I should see you today, despite my own – challenges at the moment. It seemed so vivid, so recent, perhaps because I am just at the moment susceptible to, to grief and griefs. That might be the why. I was very upset, Roseanne. In the chief part because I did not know.'

His words hung in the room the way such words do hang. 'It must be someone else's document,' I said.

'Oh?' he said.

'Yes,' I said. 'You may have been upset unnecessarily. On my account at least.'

'This wasn't the fate of your father?'

'No.'

'He was not in the police?'

'No.'

'Oh, well, I am relieved to hear it. But it had your name attached, Roseanne McNulty.'

'You call me Mrs McNulty, but there is another story attached to that, I really should be called by my maiden name.'

'But you were married, no?'

'Yes, I was married to Tom McNulty.'

'He died?' 'No, no.'

But I wasn't able in that moment to add anything.

'The document said your father was an RIC man in Sligo during the height of the troubles in the twenties, and was tragically killed by the IRA. I must confess I am still a little musty on that whole period. It seemed to us at school so much a series of dire errors and – it is such a belligerent history. Even the Second World War seemed to us – I don't know what it seemed to us. Ancient History? And yet I was born during the war. Wasn't your father's name Joseph, Joseph

Clear?'

But I was gripped by some unpleasant feeling, I don't know if you have ever had it, as if someone has stopped up your body with putty. When I closed my gums on the feeling I could have sworn I was actually biting through putty. I stared at Dr Grene in panic.

'What is the matter, Roseanne? I have upset you? I am so sorry.'

'Perhaps', I said, at last able to get words through the putty, 'that is your job, Dr Grene?'

'To upset you? No, no. My job is to help you. In this instance, to assess you. It has actually been put upon me as a duty. There is all sorts of legislation nowadays. I would be more than happy to leave you alone – I mean not alone, but be, to leave you be, and talk of other things, or talk of nothing, which I am beginning to think is the healthiest topic of all.'

'My maiden name was Clear,' I said suddenly.

'That is what I thought. I read it, didn't I, in that little book?' he said. 'That is of course a very rare name. Joe Clear. There can't have been too many of that name. There cannot be too many Clears in Ireland. I wonder is it a form of Clare, or connected to Cape Clear, or what?'

He was speaking in oddly agonised tones, with that perplexed look again as of a young boy overwhelmed at school.

'I think it is a Protestant name and maybe comes out of England long ago.'

'Do you think? Of course, McNulty is a common enough name. You might find McNultys everywhere.'

'It is an old Sligo name. My husband told me they were the last recorded cannibal tribe in Ireland. It is written somewhere that they ate their enemies.'

'Oh my.'

'Yes. Myself, I didn't eat meat at that time. The smell of meat made me feel faint, though I cooked it every day for him. So my husband liked to tell people that I was the last recorded vegetarian cannibal in Ireland.'

'He was droll, your husband.'

Oh, oh, oh, shallow rocks again. I buttoned my lip as quick as I could. I did not want to rehearse all that now.

'Well, well,' he said, stirring to go at last, 'I might bring up that document I mentioned tomorrow or the next day, it might interest you to look it over.'

'I cannot read as well as I used to. I read Thomas Browne, but then I know the writing off by heart mostly.'

'We should get you a pair of reading glasses, Mrs McNulty -or should I say Ms Clear?

'I am as happy without them.'

'Very well.'

Then for some reason he laughed, one of those little tinkling laughs that people laugh when a private thought has amused them, and occurs before they have the power to stop it.

'Oh no,' he said, although I had said nothing, 'excuse me -nothing, nothing.'

And off he went, nodding. He raised his right hand at the door and actually waved, like I was a passenger on a ship.

Was it before or after that John Kane came in to talk about the snowdrops? I can't remember.

No, I remember. John Kane did come back in, but it was to mop the floor. He had evidently, somehow or other, realised he had not yet mopped my floor. After all, he is also now becoming elderly, the elderly fetching for the elderly. Not that he fetches. As he swept in under my bed he happened to bring out in the bristles of his brush a spoon. It was not clean but smeared with soup, and I must have knocked it from the tray. He gave me a very brief dark look, slapped my face lightly, and left.

How does good history become bad history by and by?

Dr Grene's Commonplace Book

'Certainly that man were greedy of life, who should desire to live when all the world were at an end…'

She is only two weeks buried. Bet. It is so difficult even to write the name. Sometimes here in the house now alone at night I hear some little banging somewhere, probably a sound I have unconsciously heard a million times, a door in the house that touches against its frame in the draught, and I don't know, I look fearfully up the dark corridor and wonder if it is Bet. It is a terrible and odd thing to be haunted by your wife.

Of course, I am not. It is one of the many strange fruits in the cornucopia of grief.

How difficult it is to live. I would almost say all my world is at an end. How often I must have listened blithely and with professional distance to some poor soul tortured by depression, a sickness that might have had its origin in just such a catastrophe as has hit me.

I feel so bereft I am almost inclined to admire any instance of simple strength of mind, all health of mind. I watched the images of Saddam Hussein, 'President of Iraq' as he still called himself, being hanged, and scoured his face for signs of suffering and pain. He looked confused but strong, almost serene. He had such contempt for his captors even as they taunted him. He did not believe maybe they had the strength to finish his term of life. To complete his story. Or he thought if he could find strength within himself, he would complete his own story with an admirable flourish. He looked so bedraggled and astray when they took him from the hidey hole months before. His jacket and shirt were always immaculate in court. Who washed them, brushed them, ironed them? What handmaiden? What does his story look like seen with the eyes of a friend, an admirer, a fellow townsperson? I envied him the evident peace of his mind as he went to his death. They did not show mercy to Saddam, who himself had shown no mercy to his enemies. He looked serene.

It is true that for the last ten years, a whole decade, Bet removed herself to the old maid's room at the top of the house. I sit here in our old bedroom – old in a few senses, as in, for twenty years we shared it, the room has not been decorated for many years, it was where we 'formerly' slept etc., etc. – as I have sat a thousand times – how many nights in ten years, 3,560 nights – and no longer is she just above me, walking the floorboards, making her narrow bed creak as she lay on it. All is perfectly quiet and still, except for that little banging somewhere, as if she is not dead at all, but has immured herself in a cupboard and wants to get out. In the little room above, her bed is still neatly made just as she left it the last morning, I couldn't bear to touch it. Her collection of books on roses occupies the windowsill as always (when we shared a bed, it was rose books on her side, Irish history on mine), propped up by two extravagantly carved Hawaiian bookends in the shape of two shameless maidens. By the bed, her phone on a little chinoiserie table her great-aunt left her. Her great-aunt had died of Alzheimer's, but she had won the table years ago at a card game in her prime, and Bet had been thrilled and touched to get it. In the drawers are her clothes, in the cupboard are her dresses, summer and winter ones, and her shoes, among the pairs are those heeled shoes she used to wear to dinner, that I thought didn't suit her, but at least I never had the lack of grace to say so, that is not among my sins, years ago when we did such things. But it is not that woman I found in the corridor, struggling for breath as her lung collapsed, one last shout in her that brought me clattering up the little stairs, that assails me, so much as that other younger person she was when I fell in love with her, that is the person that haunts me. The perfectly desirable and neat beauty that she was, who went against her father's wishes, and insisted she must marry a penniless student studying the unknown and unpromising science of psychiatry at a hospital in England, whom she had met on a holiday to Scarborough. The sheer accidental nature of things.

There was nothing about me that her father liked, a man who had been one of the subcontractors on the great Shannon hydroelectric scheme, and as such an historical and epic man, supplying gravel from the quarries of Connaght. But she prevailed, and we had our wedding, God help her, her numerous family ranged on one side of the church, and no one on the other side but my adoptive father, enduring the warlike stares from the other side. My parents were Catholic, which might have stood in their favour, except that they were English Catholics, a people in the eyes of my inlaws more Protestant than the Protestants themselves, and at the very least, deeply deeply mysterious, like creatures from some other time, when Henry VIII was wanting to marry. They must have thought Bet was marrying a phantom.

Her greatest wish I should think was that I would remain exactly as I was, and how I regret that that was not to be. It was only for her roses that she wished for change, the strange moment of floral enchantment when the branch of a rose mutates, and shows a 'sport', something new arising from the known rose. A leap in beauty.

'I'm going out to the garden to see if there's any news,' she would say, at almost any time, because she had roses going the whole length of the year.

She was waiting for whatever God, whatever secret magician, decided things for roses to do His stuff. I am afraid I showed scant interest in all that. Mea culpa. I tried to, but couldn't locate that passion in me. I should have been out there with her, with the gloves and the secateurs, like someone geared for miniature battle.

Little sins of omission that loom large now. You could go mad.

Anyway for my sanity I am writing here. I am sixty-five years old. Past the Beatles song. By some accounts this is young. But when a man wakes on his fortieth birthday he may safely say he has no youth ahead of him. I suppose this is infinitely petty and ridiculous. A healthy person might be content with life as a quality in itself, and look to the passing of the years, and the gaining of age, and then great age, with interest. But I am miserable before the task. When Bet died I looked in the mirror for the first time in many years. I mean, I had glanced every morning in the mirror, trimmed my beard and the like, but had not looked in it at myself. I was amazed at what I saw. I did not know myself. My hair was thinning all about the crown, and was grey as a badger, whereas I had imagined myself to have retained my old colour. The lines in my face were like the folds in a bit of leather that has been outside in the rain for a long time. I was utterly dismayed, utterly shocked. I had not realised it while Bet lived, the simple fact. I was old. I didn't know what to do. So I searched out my old razor and shaved my beard.

Sixty-five. In a few years I will retire. It is not just this building is reaching its point of ultimate depreciation. Retire. To do what? Knock about Roscommon town? Yet there is Roseanne McNulty at a hundred. If she were English the queen would have sent her a letter. Does Mary McAleese send cards to the Irish centenarians? But I am sure, like the rest of the world, Mary McAleese does not know Roseanne exists.

Actually I did not mean to write anything about myself here. What I meant to write about was Roseanne.

For there is a mystery there. I suspect that somewhere in the distant past, in just such an institution as this, she suffered in some way at the hands of her 'nurses'. This would not be unusual in these old histories. Her suffering in the realm of real life, in the so-called outside world, was no doubt even greater. I have attempted a series of cautious questions, of the sort that would not scare her or drive her into silence. She is quite capable, and always has been, of playful and even fanciful talk. Myself and Bet used to be like that, years ago. At our ease – but no, let me leave all that alone. But I wonder is Bet lonely where she lies now? How odd it was at last to ring the funeral directors whose unwished-for premises I had passed in the car so many times, with the posh entrance, the yard of hearses at the back, the quiet efficient phrases, the numbers, the tea, the sandwiches, the grave documents, the service, the removal, the this and the that of death. Then just this morning the discreet bill, the things itemised, the coffin I chose in a sudden fit of meanness, and deeply regretted at the funeral. What I bought to bury my wife.

Every nuance of her, every turn of the head, every moment of tenderness between us, every gift, every surprise, every joke, every outing, holidays in Bundoran and later Benidorm, every kind word, helpful sentence, it all gathered together like a sea, the sea of Bet, and rose up from the depths of our history, the seabed of all we were, in a great wave, and crashed down on the greying shore of myself, engulfed me, and would that it had washed me away for good.

Oh, dear. Again I have strayed. But this has been the pattern of the recent weeks.

Roseanne. Old lady. The cailleach of the stories. So ancient, and yet, one of those faces that is so thin she bears the look of her youth yet, what she was. Oh, she is shrunken as she must be, when the woman washes her no doubt she is skin and bone, everything that was once beautiful and fruitful about her empty and sere. Can I say, Bet was spared that? It is worthless talking about what we have been spared by death. Death grins at that I am sure. Death of all creation knows the value of life.

I would like from sheer curiosity to find an old photograph of Roseanne when she was young. She must have been a beauty in her day. But photographs there are none.

At first I could find out nothing about her. In fact it is safe to say I expected there would be little trace of her in the records, given her great age. What did I know about her? After all I had spoken with her now and then for as many as two dozen years! So few facts. That she was someone called once Mrs McNulty, that she had no known relatives still in touch with her or other contacts, no one had visited her ever in the hospital, and perhaps I had a vague sense that she had been transferred here from Sligo, but maybe forty years ago or more. How I knew this I do not know, unless I had seen once some document that said so, when I was young and came here first from England. Naturally Bet wanted to be near her family and I knew from my father that I had Irish connections, so I was more than content to come here.

Accident, mere accident, everything. How surprised and pleased I had been, flattered, to receive a letter seemingly out of the blue from the then registrar here, Mr Amurdat Singh, offering me a junior post. How he had got my name I didn't know, and I was only a few months out of college, jobless, and desperate to marry Bet. And a job in Ireland, the very thing she had wanted. It was like a miracle. The Arabs say that everything is already written in the book of life, and our job is merely to fulfil the narrative already there, invisible, unknown. I thought Mr Singh had perhaps attended the same college as me, but it wasn't so, he had trained himself in Ireland, under one of the old imperial networks, still persisting long after both Irish and Indian independence, in the way of these things. I don't know if someone had given him my name, and why would they, when I must confess my degree wasn't exactly glittering, if adequate. But nonetheless the miraculous letter came, and I responded joyfully, youthfully and joyfully. I suppose you might say I had not seen Roscommon. But if it was a backwater, it was a backwater beloved by Bet. We had every chance to be happy here.

Amurdat Singh, God rest him, was a sort of saint. Perhaps because of his race he didn't flourish in Ireland as he might have. He deserved to be made Chief Psychiatrist of Ireland. His hospital while he lived was a true haven, and he had radical and exciting views. Jung and R. D. Laing were his gods, and they made a potent mix. Sadly he died a relatively young man, possibly even took his own life. I think on balance I am still glad that he sent for me, however mysteriously.

Of course when I arrived Roseanne Clear had already been here the best part of twenty years, or certainly under the care of the psychiatric services (let me not write 'so-called').

How that door bangs. As if I were five again and at home in our vanished house in Padstow, I am afraid to go and see what makes that sound. I am sure it is just a door, perhaps the door into the spare bedroom that Bet scorned, as being on the same floor as me.

I have sent to Sligo Mental Hospital to see if they have anything about her. They may not. Meantime I found here the remnant of some sort of deposition, mostly eaten away by mice and crawling with silverfish, like some ancient scroll of the desert. A little apocryphal gospel as may be. I don't know who wrote it, except that it was an educated sort of effort, though I do not think a doctor wrote it. It was faintly typed, probably from an old-fashioned carbon, that crinkly blue paper put in under the top copy in a typewriter. I am hoping that Sligo might have the original.

Meanwhile I have been talking as much as I can to Roseanne, stealing the time from my various duties, and sometimes I must confess inclined to linger longer than I should. When I am in her room it is safe to say the poison of grief is briefly lessened. Just the other day I actually broke down in her company and in a desperate attempt at professional distance blurted out that Bet had died, and far from achieving distance, it brought Mrs McNulty creeping over to me. But it was like being touched by a sort of benign lightning, something primitive, strange, and oddly clear.

Maybe a person who is never visited, stores up a sort of heat, like a power station never called on for its power – like the Shannon scheme itself in the early years, when no one had electricity in their houses.

Yes, I received few answers to my questions. At first I wondered did she know any answers, was she, in the matter of her past, truly incapable of memory, that is, in some sense, actually insane? Had she been placed in the 'care' of an asylum because she had suffered some true psychosis or breakdown of her faculties? Like some psychotics she was very certain about, and consistent in, what she seemed to know. Yet she also confessed openly to ignorance on many matters, which suggested to me she was not psychotic, but that her memory too perhaps had suffered the silverfish of age. A psychotic person often supplies answers to everything, whatever their truth. They intensely dislike not knowing, because it brings on the pain and storm of confusion.

My next thought was that she was being cagey because she feared me, or was even perhaps in dread of speaking, in case it led her back to things she would rather forget. Of course either way I know she has suffered enormously. You can see it in her eyes as plain as day. It is actually what gives her her strange grace, if I may say that. Now, that is not a thought I had before I wrote it down. So perhaps there is a certain usefulness in writing in this book.

And anyway, I would like in some way to find the heart and the thread of her story, as one might put it. Her true history or as much of it as can be salvaged. She obviously has not many years to live. I think the oldest recorded Irish person in modern times was one hundred and seven, which would give her seven years more. But I think it unlikely she will enjoy so many.

I am hoping there will be some further news from Sligo.

I regret Bet's exodus to the maid's room above all other regrets. My dalliance – oh, a quaint word chosen by my stupid inner self to hide my sin – with another, whose life I also altered for the worse, being the cause. I think it was the cause. More likely, the sudden view she got of me in the light of it. A smaller, nastier person than she had thought.