The Secret Scripture

chapter twelve

Roseanne's Testimony of Herself

'It don't do nothing but rain,' sang Gwen Farrar, Billy Mayerl flashing his hands about the keys. And she must have been born in Sligo, she sang so plaintively: 'I guess we were born with our raincoats on…'

Always the deluge of rain falling on Sligo, falling on the streets big and little, making the houses shiver and huddle like people at a football match. Falling fantastically, in enormous amounts, the contents of a hundred rivers. And the river itself, the Garravoge, swelling up, the beautiful swans taken by surprise, riding the torrent, being swept down under the bridge and reappearing the other side like unsuccessful suicides, their mysterious eyes shocked and black, their mysterious grace unassailed. How savage swans are even in their famous beauty. And the rain falling also on the pavements outside the Cafe Cairo, as I tugged at the boilers and the machines, and gazed out through the fuggy windows with burning eyes.

So it seems now. Who was I then? A stranger, but a stranger that hides in me still, in my bones and my blood. That hides in this wrinkled suit of skin. The girl I was.

I started to write about the Cafe Cairo yesterday and then was stilled by some horrible feeling. It was like my bones were turning to water, cold water. It was something Dr Grene had said in passing. The effect of his words was like a slate on top of a dry flower. I brooded in my bed all day, feeling ancient, wretched, and panicky. John Kane came in and even he was so surprised by my face he said nothing, but hurriedly scooped about the room with his awful brush. I suppose I looked quite mad. It is well known that human beings shed a rain of dead skin all the while. That brush of his must carry a little of all the hides of all the patients here. As he scrapes it about in every room. I don't know what that signifies.

I feel put away from my task. I suppose it is odd that I am trying to write out my useless life here, and resisting most of his questions. I suppose he would love to read this, if only to lighten his own task. Well, when I am dead, and if someone thinks to look under the loose board, he will find it. I don't mind him reading it as long as I don't have to be questioned closely, as no doubt he would do if it fell into his hands now. Maybe the truth is, I am writing it for him, as he is really the only person I know, in any full sense of the word. And even then it is only so recently he has been coming up here to me regularly. I do remember when I only saw him twice yearly, at Easter and Christmas, when he would come in quite briskly, ask how I was, not really listen to the answer, and go off again. But then, he has a hundred patients, I don't know, maybe more than that. I wonder indeed are there fewer people here now. Perhaps we are like those sad orders of nuns and monks, who dwindle to a handful in old nunneries. I have no way of knowing, unless I do a tour of the place myself, which is not likely now.

Down in the courtyard, now again today in deep frost, despite John Kane's snowdrops, I am sure the old apple tree is feeling the terrible cold. It must be a hundred years old, that tree. Many many moons ago I used to go down there when I was let. There is a wooden seat that circles the tree like in an old English village, something in an old English story. The village green. But it's just a narrow suntrap down there when there is sun, that warms the old tree into life in the springtime. Then come the mighty blossoms. But not yet I am sure, and if it has dared to put out a few buds, the frost will leave them blackened, and it will have to start again.

There used to be a little kitchenmaid down there that threw the crumbs from the great cuttings of bread that went on in the kitchen, out onto a makeshift bird table. That used to bring the blue-tits, the green-tits, and all the ravening finches you would think of Roscommon. I suppose she is long gone. I suppose the apple tree will outlast everyone.

That old apple tree would make a philosopher of a blackbird. Apple blossom is quieter than the cherry, but it is still overwhelming, heartening. It used to make me cry in the spring. It always came eventually, frost or no frost. I would love to see it again. The frost could only delay the old tree, never defeat it. But who would carry me down there?

When milk comes frozen home in pail, And Dick the shepherd blows his nail.

Old Tom, my father-in-law, had a wonderful garden at his bungalow in Sligo. He was a mighty man for the winter vegetables. I remember him saying that frost improved the winter cabbages and lettuces. He was a demon for growing vegetables all the year round, which apparently is quite possible if you know how to do it. Like most things.

Old Tom McNulty. To this day I don't know if he was enemy or friend. To this day I am in two minds about any of them, Jack – no, no, maybe I can with justice curse Fr Gaunt, and that old woman the mother of Tom and Jack, the real Mrs McNulty as you might say. On the other hand, I don't really know. At least Mrs McNulty was always openly hostile, whereas Jack and Fr Gaunt always presented themselves as friends. Oh, it is a vexing mystery.

Now I am having a bad thought, for doesn't Dr Grene also present himself as a friend? After a manner of speaking, a professional friend maybe. Friend or enemy, no one has the monopoly on truth. Not even myself, and that is also a vexing and worrying thought.

It was very difficult to hear him say so casually that my father was in the police. I do not think he should say that. I have heard that asserted before but I do not remember where or by who. It is a lie, and not a very pretty one. Such lies in the old days could get you shot, and there was a sort of fashion of shooting one time in Ireland, for instance the famous seventy-seven that were shot by the new government. And the executed men were in the main former comrades. John Lavelle was very lucky to escape that, and not make seventy-eight. I am sure on the other hand that there were secret murders, secret shootings, that no one ever recorded or remembers. Sad, cold, wretched deaths of boys on mountainsides and the like, of the sort I saw myself, or the results of at least, as happened to John's brother Willie.

It was a true relief after all that just to wear my waitress's uniform in the Cafe Cairo. The cafe served everyone in Sligo without criticism. It was owned by a Quaker family, and we were told to turn no one from the doors. So you might see a poor lonely pensioner drinking tea, and taking from his lap, thinking he was not seen, a few morsels of cheese brought in with him in his pocket. I remember that man very well, and thinking him so old in his old brown suit. He was probably only seventy! The presence of these more unwashed characters however did not at all dissuade the dames of Sligo from coming in for a natter. Indeed they were like veritable hens in a yard, the way they sat in at the tables, the chat and gossip rising from them like dust from a desert caravan of camels. Some of them were wonderful bright women that we, I mean the platoon of waitresses, loved, and loved to see coming in every day, and who we served gladly. Some were battleaxes as you might expect. But all shades and stripes of quality came in there, it was really my university, I learned so much there, bringing the tea, and being polite, and it might have been the start of a good life, I don't know.

I suppose I might have got the job in the usual way, seen a notice in the window, gone in and somehow made it known that, unpromising as I looked, I was a Presbyterian, and so suited to the job (openhearted as the Quaker owners were, there were no Catholic girls employed there, unless it was Chrissie, who had been a Catholic, but was raised in the Charter School as a Protestant). But it came about in a different way.

After my father died, my mother, already a silent person, probably in the terms of this institution declined even further. One morning waking at home I had gone down to make her her tea, and coming back up found no one in her bed. It was a terrible shock, and I ran downstairs calling her, and looking everywhere, out in the street, everywhere. Then I happened to look out the scullery window and saw her, curled up like a sheepdog under my father's mouldering motorbike. Oh yes, I brought her back and tucked her up in bed, the sheets I am ashamed to admit grey from her lying there unwashed. I was so saddened and upset, I walked out of Sligo that day and all the way to Rosses Point, where the nicest beach was, thinking I might wander about the golf course there, with little lakes of lonely birds, and beautiful sudden views of distant mansions by the water, as if they had gone down to the water's edge to drink (of course it was the salt sea, but at any rate). And I did walk there, coming along first by the cottages of the Rosses, with Coney island across the flow of the Garravoge, and the wonderful, calming figure of the Metal Man, in his old blue iron clothes, and his black hat, pointing eternally into the deep water, to tell the ships coming up where to go. He was a statue on a rock, but so wonderful a method to indicate deep water surely had never been devised before or since. I was told once his brother is in a little park in Dalkey by the sea in Dublin, doing what task I do not know.

Beyond Coney and the Metal Man of course lies the country of Strandhill, the lesser beach, which was the scene of my own suffering later.

When I got to the strand at Rosses Point, there was that fierce little wind blowing, and although there was a number of black cars parked behind the dunes, the owners must have been sitting in them, because there was no one out on the broad strand itself. Only those buffeting cohorts of the wind. But in the distance there was one figure, a woman in a billowing white dress as I soon saw, pushing in a haphazard way a big black perambulator. As I got nearer to her I heard her calling, her words dimming and then growing just as the wind wished. Finally I reached her, and even in the chill weather of that Irish June, she was sweating.

'Oh, my dear, my dear,' she said, looking very like the rabbit in Alice in Wonderland, 'I cannot find her, I cannot find her.'

'Who can't you find, ma'am?' I said, deciding by her accent that she must be a toff of some kind, and likely needing to be called ma'am.

'My daughter, my little daughter,' she said, with a strange screaming tone. 'I fell asleep in the dune, in a lovely suntrap, and my little one playing about just beside me, but when I woke, she was gone. She is only two years old. Oh, my Lord, my Lord.'

'She is not in the pram?' I said, on an inspiration.

'No, she is not, she is walking. Her brother is in the pram, soundly sleeping! My daughter Winnie is walking. Winnie, Winnie!'

And she seemed suddenly to run quite away from me, as if giving up all thought I might be able to help, after my great ignorance on the topic of the perambulator.

'I will help you search,' I said, 'I will help you.' And I actually gripped her arm for a moment. It was thin under the white linen. She stopped and looked at me. Peered at me with eyes of weeping green.

Then I ran over to the dunes and took the old high path among them as I had done with my father a dozen times. The path went rushing down and up, and after a while I was back near the cars. The tide was beginning to tip against the long boots of stone the shore was there. On complete instinct I rushed towards the water, because I remembered a cave that I knew, the sort of strange deep cave that any child would love. My father told me that in the cave was found the oldest remnant of human life in Ireland, and that some of the first people, no doubt heroic, brave and terrified all at the same time, alone in a land of great forests and marshes, had sheltered there.

I came into the murk of the cave and was well rewarded for my instincts. There was a little crouched figure there, digging in the dry sand, her bottom wet as a puddle, the rest of her happy as Larry. I scooped her up, and even that did not frighten her, she maybe thinking me a creature part of her own fantasy. As I came back out into the open air, I saw the mother far off in the distance, searching among the similar rocks at the other end of the strand. It was a sort of picture of utter futility and wrongness, motherhood doomed to failure. How I wished suddenly for my own mother to seek for me so fiercely, so sweatingly, to find me again on the lost strand of the world, to rescue me, to recruit others for my rescue, to bring me again to her breast, as that distant mother so obviously ached to do with the happy creature in my arms.

But I set off nonetheless across the sand, sprinkled with those myriad razor shells, the wind ruckling up the inch of water everywhere. When I was halfway across I think the mother got a sense of me coming, her face vaguely turning to me. Even at that distance I got an immense impression of some mystery, the enormous panic of that figure, and what was almost the flame of relief leaping from it as she thought, she hoped, she spied me with her daughter in my arms. On I sped, splashety-splash across the intervening acre of sand. Now she was galloping towards me, still pushing the huge pram, and at length we were only yards apart, the mother joyfully hooting, that's what it sounded like, the pram nearly crashed into me, and the child wrenched from my arms, and only now crying, caterwauling, roaring. And it was as if I had returned the child to her from the dead, especially when I told the mother about the cave, and the advancing sea.

'I cannot describe to you, I cannot,' she said, 'the feeling of utter wretchedness when I could not see her. My head was screaming like with a thousand of these gulls. My chest was as full of pain as if you had poured hot oil into me. The whole strand was screaming back at me in its emptiness. My dear girl, my dear girl, my dear girl.'

This last was actually to me, though she held the other 'dear girl' in her grip, and gripped my own arm now.

'I thank you, I thank you, dear, dear girl.'

And that was Mrs Prunty, the wife of the owner of the Cafe Cairo. It did not take long for her to know my story, carefully told by me in a guise I hoped was suitable, on the drive back to Sligo in her big black car. And it was her joy to suggest I might come to the Cafe Cairo to work, as my schooling was finished, my father deceased, and my mother 'unwell' as I put it, at home.

I don't remember the especial moment when Tom first came into the cafe, but I have a vivid memory of him as if contained in a sort of photograph, gold trim around the edges, like one of those still pictures outside the cinema in Sligo, of his aura and sense of infinite wellbeing, a short, thickset, almost fat man in a sturdy and neat suit, so unlike his brother Jack, whose suits were tailoring of a higher order, and whose coat was so infinitely fine it had a soft leather collar like a film star's. They both wore extravagantly expensive hats, though they were the sons of the tailor of Sligo Lunatic Asylum, and maybe that accounted for the more brutal cut of Tom's suit – certainly not his brother's. But the fact was the father was also the bandleader of Sligo's principal danceband, Tom McNulty's Orchestra, and that meant they had more shekels than most in those predominantly shekel-less times. His father, another small man seen about the place in a straw boater in that blistering summer, and a striped jacket the like of which you would see only at the races on a Wednesday the back of the town, was called Old Tom, and Tom himself was Young Tom, a thing especially useful since he also played in that famous band, if only famous among the dunes of Strandhill and in the dreams of the Sligo people.

I must have been two years and more already in the Cafe Cairo when I first became aware of these McNulty brothers. Those first years there as a simple waitress were simple happy years, myself and lonesome Chrissie being fast friends and a bulwark to each other against the world. She was a petite, neat, nice person, Chrissie, for such souls do exist. It is not all knives and axes. Moreover Mrs Prunty though rarely seen was always felt by me as a secret presence behind the steaming boilers, and the beautiful many-ledged cake holders, and the river of silver knives and spoons, and those lovely forks used only for delicate cakes. Somewhere behind all that, and the elaborate carved doors, and the touches of an Egypt no one had ever seen, I was sure Mrs Prunty moved, like a Quaker angel, speaking well of me. So I imagined anyhow. I earned the few shillings, and fed and washed my mother, haunted the picture house many many evenings, saw a thousand films, newsreels, and all the rest, wonders beyond the wonders of the finest, most extravagant dreams. And somehow in those times I was content with that, rebuffed all offers to go 'steady' with anyone, dance with anyone in particular more than once or twice. We blew out, a crowd of young girls from the town, to Tom McNulty's dancehall by the sea, like a torrent of roses along the bleak roads, sometimes spilling in tremendous gaiety and simplicity out onto the strand itself, where the road came down from the village of upper Strandhill, and the bollards one after the other on the very sand itself showed the lowtide way to Coney. Maybe you would rather call us gulls, elegant white birds dipping and calling, we were always inland as it were – as if there was always a storm at sea. Oh, it is girls of seventeen and eighteen know how to live life, and love the living of it, if we are let.

No one had seen Egypt I say, but of course Jack had been a sailor in the British Merchant Navy as a lad, and had already travelled to every port of the earth – but of course I didn't know all that. The epic story of Jack – a little epic, an ordinary epic, a local epic, but epic for all that – was unknown to me. All I saw, or began to see, was two spick-and-span brothers coming in for their cups of tea, any Chinese leaf for Tom, and Earl Grey by preference for Jack.

The dark story of their brother Eneas I never knew till long after, if I ever really knew it. Just a scrap of it, a few pages torn from his raggedy book. Can you love a man you only knew – in the Biblical sense – for a night? I do not know. But there was love there, gentle, fierce, proper love. God forgive me.

Dr Grene's Commonplace Book

Mirabile dictu (my having to read Virgil at school did me some good at least, in that it has left me with that phrase), some further documentation has arrived from Sligo Mental Hospital. It is the top copy of the old deposition and their storage arrangements must be better than ours by some measure, because the sheets are quite intact. I must say her story as itemised in the document interested me greatly, offering a sort of landscape to put behind the figure I know in the bed. A sort of human vista of troubles and events, like in a painting by da Vinci or the like, the Mona Lisa itself, with its castle and hills (as I remember it – perhaps there is no castle). As she herself continues unforth-coming, I had also a great frisson of entry to read it, as if I were getting the answers I sought from her, but of this I must be very wary. The written word assumes authority but it may not have it. I must not necessarily let her silence be filled with this, although it is a great temptation, because it is a shortcut, or a way around. The sheets amount to some seventeen closely typed pages and would seem to be offering an account of the events that led up to her, I was going to say incarceration, but I mean of course her sectioning. It is in two parts, the first detailing her earlier life up to her marriage, then the reasons for the annulment of that marriage, if that is the right term of the day. It seems this was followed by a period of tremendous disarray in her life, tremendous, really rather terrible and pitiable. This is all long long ago, in the savage fairytale of life in Ireland in the twenties and thirties, mostly, though the period of her greatest difficulty seems to have occurred actually during the years of the emergency, as de Valera referred to the Second World War.

I do not in all truth and sincerity know how much of it I can present to her. Somehow I doubt, by her reaction the other day, if she will be open to its revelations, which may or may not be revelations to her. If it represents the truth, it is a dreadful and burdening truth. In a place like this we must not concern ourselves too much with moral judgement or even legal judgement. We are like prison chaplains in here, dealing with the remnant human person after the civic powers have had their say. We are trying to ready, to steady the person for what? The axe, the guillotine of sanity? For the long watches of the sentence of living death that being here really is?

The document I was interested if not a little horrified to see was signed by a Fr Aloysius Mary Gaunt, which was a name that rang a bell. I puzzled it over until I suddenly realised who that was, the man who became auxiliary bishop of Dublin in the fifties and sixties, taking from the hemming and hawing of the Irish constitution a clear statement of his powers of moral domination over the city, as did most of his brother clerics. A man who in his every utterance seemed to long for the banishment of women behind the front doors of their homes, and the elevation of manhood into a condition of sublime chastity and sporting prowess. There is something humorous about it now, there was nothing humorous about it then.

This Fr Gaunt as a young curate in Sligo seemed to be very intimate with Roseanne Clear's circumstances. She was it seems the child of a police sergeant in the Royal Irish Constabulary (which I already knew from the damaged section I had found here). De Valera, as a young leader during the war of independence, had declared that any member of the police could be shot if they in any way obstructed the aims of the revolutionary movement. So such individuals, though Irish and for the most part Catholic (Roseanne's father was Presbyterian), and their families lived under constant threat and in real danger. It is all very understandable in a revolutionary period, but I wonder if Roseanne at the age of twelve or so could have seen that. In her eyes what happened must have been genuinely tragic, genuinely bewildering and awful.

I have just looked at my watch and it is seven fifty, the very latest moment I can leave it, to make my rounds at ten past eight. I must flee.

A note to myself: the builders say six weeks and the new building will be completed. This is from the horse's mouth, because I was on site myself, asking them, like a veritable spy, the other day. But enough

chapter thirteen

Roseanne's Testimony of Herself

Curious to relate, it was not in the Cafe Cairo that I 'met' Tom, but in quite another place. It was the sea itself.

It is along the strands of the world that the privilege of possessing children is most blatantly seen. What torment for the spinster and the childless man, to see the various sizes of little demons and angels ranged along the tide line. Like some species of migratory animal. The human animal began as a mere wriggling thing in the ancient seas, struggling out onto land with many regrets. That is what brings us so full of longing to the sea.

I am not an entirely childless person.

That story also belongs to the sea, or the strand anyway.

My child. My child went to Nazareth, that's what they told me. Or, that is what I heard them say. But I was not hearing anything very well, very properly, in that time. They might as well have said Wyoming.

Strandhill's beach is narrow, heaped, endangered, and the hill of sand itself seems to have drawn up its enormous knees to escape the goings on below. There is a long rough promenade where gigs, carts, sidecars, high traps and motorcars used to be parked, the occupants spilling out I am sure always with the same level of human anticipation, the kids barrelling away ahead, the fathers laughing, cursing, the mothers admonishing, panicking – all the to-do and turmoil of normal happiness. Kneelength bathing suits vying in eternity with those wondrous bikinis I have only seen in stray magazines. How I would like to have sported one of them.

And at first no doubt just a few brave houses built on the marsh and acres of blown sand, scotch grass, the land rising and rising until eventually touching on the realm of Knocknarea, where Queen Maeve sleeps in her stony grave. From the top of Knocknarea you can see the beach at Strandhill, but the people are only pins, and anything the size of a child is just a dust mote in your eye.

I have looked down from there, despairing and weeping.

All that country was 'my' country later. Strandhill, Strandhill, the mad woman of Strandhill.

At first, a few houses risked on that uncertain ground, then the old hotel, and then huts and more houses, and then, some time in the vanished twenties, Tom McNulty built the Plaza ballroom. A glorified corrugated-iron warehouse with a round roof, a square concrete front to the hall with an oddly modest door and a ticket window, the brightness of both beckoning, promising, oh, and a tumultuous whirlwind of dreams rising from the approaching crowd every Friday night, reaching no doubt as far as heaven, to comfort God in the doubts of his creation.

That was Tom McNulty's work, father and son, to put a ticket on those dreams. And I felt that dream in me with passionate completeness.

To sit here, writing this, my hands as old as Methuselah's. Look at these hands. No, no, you cannot. But the skin is thin as – did you ever see the shell of a razor fish? They are strewn all about Rosses Strand. Well, there is a filament of transparent stuff that covers those shells, like a drying varnish. It is strange stuff. That is my skin now. I fancy I can count my bones. The truth is my hands look like they have been buried a while and then dug up. They would give you a fright. I have not looked in a mirror for about fifteen years.

The first few feet of water at Strandhill were safe enough. In summer they were like a bath. The sea there made only the slightest effort at going in and out, it always seemed to me. Maybe the children peeing in the water had something to do with it, with the heat I mean. It was lovely though. Myself and Chrissie and the other girls from the Cafe Cairo… Mrs Prunty always tried to employ good girls for the cafe, but good girls that looked good, which is a different thing. I think we looked like young goddesses. Mary Thompson could have been a picture in a magazine, Winnie Jackson was a picture once, in the Sligo Champion. 'Miss Winnie Jackson Enjoys the Fine Weather at Strandhill'. Her in her beautiful one-piece bathing suit sent down to her in a box from Arnott's in Dublin, on the Dublin-to-Sligo train. There was style for you. She had a lovely plump bust and I think the lads felt only despair looking at her, that they would never even get talking to her.

Our skins going all African in the steaming heat of August. Our faces bright red sometimes in the evenings, going home across the strand, burnt off of us, and lying in bed then in the town, hardly daring to let our shoulders touch the sheets. Happy. And then the skin calmed down the next morning, and longing to get away out to the beach again, and then again, and then again. Happy. Just straightforward ordinary girls we were. We liked to bring as much despair as we could to the lads.

Who watched on the sidelines of our happiness like sharks, devouring our attributes with their eyes. Sometimes I'd get talking to a lad at the dance, lads didn't say much, and when they did talk they didn't say much worth hearing. But that was all right. There were all sorts at the dance, toffs from the town, and lads with trousers too short for them, showing their socks, or bare legs stuck into battered shoes. There were always a few donkeys tied up outside, and nags of one sort and another, and carts heeled up. The mountain spilled out its sons and daughters like a queer avalanche. Lovely humanity.

Fr Gaunt was always there or some such, one or other of the curates, the herons among the minnows. By God, there was some sort of Dancehall Act I seem to remember. Or maybe I imagine that. I believe they railed against dances in the church, but I wouldn't have been privy to that. There wasn't supposed to be much touching. It would be queer cold dancing without touching. It was lovely to snuggle up to a lad at the end of a dance, you sweaty and him all sweaty too, in the summer, the smell of soap and turf off him. And that stuff in their hair that time, Brilliantine, was the name I think. There'd be fellas there whose fathers and mothers probably spoke Irish in the back hills of Sligo, and who from going to pictures now and then had the idea they had obligations to look like stars of the silver screen, unless it was looking like Irish patriots they were trying to be, maybe that was it too. Michael Collins had been a strong man for the grease in his hair. Even de Valera was well slicked down.

And Tom McNulty's Band blowing up a storm. Young Tom standing there at the edge of the stage with his trumpet or clarinet raised, blasting out the sort of music we had then. You had to have the jazz for the dancing, but also the foxtrot was still danced there, and even the waltz. Tom even had a recording made, called Tom McNulty's Ragtime Band, by Jesus that sent the hall into a frenzy. There was a light shining out of Tom then. Of course at that time Tom was just the great man I had never spoken to, unless it was in the cafe to say 'What would you like?' To which the answer would most likely be, 'China tea and a deadfly bun. Earl Grey for the brother.' He was dead keen on the deadfly buns. I wonder if they still have them. They were like religious objects at that time, you couldn't have a cafe without them, what would be the point. It is funny how fixed everything was in those times. Deadfly buns, cream cakes, eclairs, cherry buns with white icing on top, it was like those things were as ancient and established as whales, dolphins, mackerel – like natural occurrences, the natural history of the cafe.

It mattered altogether that my father was gone, but somehow I was able to tuck that in under the pillow of my hair, to sleep on it as it were. I couldn't help the happiness, when I woke in the morning, yes, there was my mother to see to, but I was able to feed her and look after her, she never said anything or went anywhere, just kept to the house in her stripy housecoat, and there was that energy in me, like a motorcar being started with a starting handle, cranking me up, I was cranked up mysteriously every morning I woke, I was aflame with energy, it swept me out of the house, and through the streets of Sligo, and in through the glass doors of the Cafe Cairo, and had me kissing my friend Chrissie good morning, and laughing, and if Mrs Prunty was around, she would give me her shy smile, and I would be jubilant, jubilant.

It is always worth itemising happiness, there is so much of the other thing in a life, you had better put down the markers for happiness while you can. When I was in that state, everything looked beautiful to me, the rain slicing down looked like silver to me, everything was of interest to me, everyone seemed at ease with me, even those slit-eyed cornerboys of Sligo, with the yellow fingers from the coffin nails they smoked, the yellow stain above their lips where the fag was stuck in permanent. Accents like bottles being smashed in a back lane.

There now, and all that comes back unbidden. I sat down today to write of Tom and the sea. Rescuing me in the sea of happiness.

I plunged in. I think I knew where I was going. It is curious to me how I remember so completely the feel of that light wool bathing suit on my skin. It had three thick stripes alternating and I had saved the whole winter for it. You couldn't have found a nicer one in Sligo. A hot Irish day is such a miracle we become mad foreigners in a twinkle. The rain drives everyone indoors and history with it. There is a lovely lack of anything on a hot day, and because our world in its inner truth is so wet, the surprised greens of the fields and hills seem to burn with a sort of bewilderment, a wonderment. The land looks lovely to itself, and the girls and boys along the strand are painted into the tawny yellows and the blues and greens of the sea, also burning, burning. Or so it seemed to me. The whole town seemed to be there, everything suffering the same brushstrokes of the heat, everything joining and melding. I don't know if the Plaza existed just at that time, it must have done, because I had seen Tom McNulty playing, but if it did it would have been 1929 or after even, so I wasn't exactly a girl, but I am confused about this. It is hard to know a person's age in a bathing suit, in the riot of the sunlight, and I can't see what age I was, I am peering back with my mind's eye, and all I see is fabulous glitter.

And the undersea just as glittering, speckled, chained in miracles somehow, that wonderful half blindness the eyes have underwater, blurred because the sea itself is a huge lens, like you are wearing the sea itself before your face. So it's gone even more like a painting, a furious mad painting, there was a whole book of them in the town hall library, the fellas that painted in France and were laughed at to begin with, like they didn't know how to paint. I won't risk writing one of the names, but I do remember them, hard harsh names, and troubled lives to match, I can say them in my head as I write. But I'd be ashamed to spell them wrong. And myself in that undersea, my whole body loosened, but also sharpened, my lungs rich with air at first and then beggared, and the head lighter, lovelier, and the chiller water deeper, washing my face, asking my face who it was, what shape it was, in infinite detail. Suddenly I am longing to tell Dr Grene about this, I don't know why, I imagine he would be interested in it, it would please him, but I would also fear he would read something into it. He interprets things, which is dangerous, extremely. Oh yes, the beach at Strandhill, high tide as it was, is good for a little, then it plunges down, you are suddenly in the big water of the bay there, the big muscle, enormous, like the famous Hudson river, no, not as big as that of course, but I felt I was not so much entering as touching something vast flexing there under God's eye. And could I feel it pull me out, swiftly, deeper? I don't know. I do know I gave my heart to it, I do know I was moved by it, maybe I wept, can you weep underwater, it must be possible? How long was I swimming without coming up? A minute, two, three, like a pearl diver in the south seas, wherever they are, whatever they are? Myself and my bathing suit, and inside the suit a little pocket with two bob in it, which would be my fare back to Sligo on the old green bus, for safety's sake stuck in that pocket, like something you could keep a scapular in, if you were Catholic. And I suppose my youth, my softness, my hardness, my blue eyes, my yellow hair sleeking underwater, and maybe three hundred sharks out there, beginning to be in the neighbourhood of sharks, wonderful, wonderful, I didn't care. Become a sort of shark.

The great pull of the current beginning to take me, like a word lost in a swell of music.

Then in all that happiness, suddenly enveloped, stolen back, taken up, by human arms I knew, expert, almost devious. And this person, sleek and round and strong, raised me up through the wild glitter, and we broke the surface, and there was the roaring world again, and the heaving sea, and the sky whether up or down I didn't know. And the swimmer drew me back to the strand, with the boys and the girls, the buckets, the old cannon pointing out to sea, the houses, the Plaza, the stunned donkeys, the few motorcars, Sligo, Strandhill, my fate, my fate as woeful as my father's, my ridiculous, heartless, funny fate.

It couldn't have been anyone in the world fishing me out except Tom McNulty. It was always going to be him. Anyway, he was a famous swimmer, he already had a medal for saving a life given him by the mayor of Sligo himself, which was what got him into the politics, he always said. The other person he saved was an old crone that the tide plucked from the shoreline, like the joker it is – an old crone, but not as old as I am now. No.

'I know you,' he said, glistening on the sand, his nice square fat face smiling at me, and the world and its aunt gathered about us, and Jack also there now, in his sombre black bathing trunks, and his body that never really looked like flesh, but something stonier, the bones and muscles of a traveller. 'You're the lass from the Cafe Cairo.'

And I laughed, or tried to, the salt water spluttering in my throat.

'Oh mercy,' he said. 'You swallowed the ocean. Yes, you did. Jaysus,' he said, 'where's your blessed towel? Do you have one? You do? And your clothes? Yes, come on. Come on with me.'

So my towel was put around my shoulders and my clothes gathered for me by Jack, gingerly holding them, and the two walked me up across the burning hot road towards the Plaza, we kept to the grassy verge when we could, and across the desert of the carpark and into the ticket office with us, and Tom was laughing, very easy and relieved he probably was, to have rescued me. I can't remember if he got another medal for me, I hope he did, because he probably deserved it, all things considered.

Oh, dear, it is difficult to look back on the joy of those days, but on the other hand, it is something rare I know in a life to know such joy, and such luck.

I knew my luck, knew it as well as a sparrow when it finds a speck of bread all to itself.

It was pride too, my pride in him, with his fame and his confidence.

We'd go up the concrete steps to the pictures between those laurel hedges. We might have been a couple in Hollywood, I might have been Mary Pickford herself, though I suppose in all honesty Tom was too small to be Douglas Fairbanks.

The dark in our little world was the drinking habits of Sligo. Men like Tom and his brother would be so drunk in the small hours things would happen which not only could they not remember, but they wouldn't want to, which was no doubt a great blessing.

I would be standing down on the dancefloor, happy to be on my own, looking up at the stage where Tom's band were ranged, his little dapper father a dab hand on the clarinet, on any instrument you liked. Late in the evening Tom would play 'Remarkable Girl' with his hawk's eye peering down at me. When we were walking on the beach at Rosses Strand one time he teased me by singing 'When Lights are Low in Cairo', because I was the girl that worked in the Cafe Cairo. There was a singer called Cavan O'Connor that he modelled his voice on, he thought Cavan was the greatest singer that ever breathed. But Tom had grown up more or less on Jelly Roll Morton and he was cracked on Bubber Miley, like all the trumpeters were, even more than on Louis Armstrong himself. Tom said Bubber had put the jump into Duke Ellington, no question. These matters for Tom were nearly as important as the politics. But my brain left him there, once he started on that. It didn't seem as interesting at all as the music. Soon he had me sitting in with the band playing piano when the piano player proper was unwell. He was a big lad from the back of Knocknarea with TB. 'Black Bottom Stomp' was his party piece as one might say. Jack was never on stage but he liked to sing in the early part of his cups, when he was cheerful, very cheerful. Then it would be 'Roses of Picardy', 'Long Way to Tipperary', because he had been in the British Merchant Navy when he was only a boy, but I think I wrote this before. Saw every port from Cove to Cairo, but I think I wrote this. Maybe it's worth saying twice.

Jack was always about and then he'd be gone for a while. He used to go out to Africa on contracts. Oh, Tom was very proud of Jack, Jack had done two degrees at Galway at the same time, Geology and Engineering. He was just a brilliant man. I have to confess he was about three times better-looking than his brother, but that is neither here nor there. But he was, he had those smalltown filmstar looks, you'd be in the cinema watching Broadway Melody or some such, and when the lights would go up at the end, yes, you'd be back in bloody Sligo – except for Jack. Jack still had some halo of Hollywood about him.

But Jack kept a few feet between us, what sort of feet I don't know. He was too ironical to be friendly, he'd be jesting and joking the while, and sometimes I caught him looking at me with the wrong sort of look. I don't mean coveting me, but maybe disapproving. Long looks when he thought I couldn't see him. Sizing me up.

Jack kept a Ford car though, to go with the leather collar on his coat. We were always in that car, we saw a thousand Irish landscapes through the front screen, we washed a million tons of rain off it with that little wiper back and forth, back and forth, and gallons of whiskey they drank in it, as we went along. The big thing was to get out onto the strand by Coney island at low tide, and surge along through the shallow inch of water, roaring and at our infinite ease. There were always friends with us, the prettiest of the girls that hung after the band, and other likely lads of Sligo and Galway. The funny thing was, Jack had a girlfriend that he was actually going to marry, Mai her name was, but we never saw her, she lived in Galway with her parents, very well-to-do they were. Her father was an insurance salesman, a very impressive fact to Jack, and they lived in a house in Galway that was Something House, and that was a big fact for a man whose father was the tailor in the Sligo Lunatic Asylum. He had met her at the university, she was one of the first girls there, oh, and I'd say one of the first girls at a lot of things, looking down her nose at me being one of them. No, that isn't fair, I don't think I ever met her but the one time.

But actually I do Tom a disservice talking like this. Because his own first cousin owned the Sligo Champion and was a TD in what they used to call the real first Dail, that is to say the Dail after the Treaty. And Jack always said – I used to hear him telling a new acquaintance – that he was a cousin of that dark-hearted person Edward Carson, who opted out of the Free State like a rat leaving a sinking ship, or what he hoped and prayed was a sinking ship. Tom told me his own people had been butter importers in Sligo, or was it exporters, and had had ships, just like the Jacksons and the Pollexfens. And that the Oliver in his name, Thomas Oliver McNulty, was there because they had lost their lands in the time of Cromwell when an Oliver McNulty had refused to become a Protestant. He said this with a wary eye on me, to see how I would take it, being a Protestant myself I suppose. I was a Protestant, but maybe not the right kind of Protestant. Jack liked the big-house Protestants and he had it in his head that he was sort of Catholic gentry. I don't think he thought much of the great Presbyterian tradition in Ireland. Working-class. That was the dread phrase.

'That fella is working-class through and through,' was one of Jack's put downs. Because he had been in Africa he also had strange phrases like 'Act the white man.' And 'hamma-hamma'. Because he had seen a thousand drunken nights, another phrase was 'Keep the party clean.' If he thought someone was untrustworthy, that person was 'a casual pack of buggers'.

Red hair, auburn really, combed back. Quite severe features, very serious about the eyes. Oh yes, Clark Gable or better still Gary Cooper. Gorgeous.

I am looking for my mother in these memories, and I cannot find her. She has simply disappeared.

chapter fourteen

Dr Grene's Commonplace Book

Driving into work this morning I passed a previously unnoticed hillside of windmills. I may not have noticed them before because they just weren't there, but if so I certainly missed their erection, which must have taken quite a long time. They were simply suddenly there. Bet always said I did not have my mind on the world at all. One day I came in from the rain, sat on the couch, and a few minutes later, happening to touch my hair, asked, 'Why is my head wet?' Bet loved to tell that story, or used to, when there was someone to tell it to.

But there were the windmills, suddenly. It is a hill – more of a mountain I suppose, if we have such things in Ireland -called Labanacallach, and there is a wood also, called Nugent's Wood, going up to the frostline. Who Nugent was or why he planted a wood is anyone's guess, or at least there would be only old codgers who know these things. I was driving along in my Toyota, feeling quite wretched, with the same drumming recrimination going on in my stupid head, when I saw the windmills silverly turning, as one might say, and my heart lifted like a quail from the very bog. It lifted. They were so beautiful. I thought of windmills in paintings, the strange emotions still attaching even to their memory. Don Quixote maybe. How sorry I always used to feel when I saw a ruined mill long ago. Magical buildings. These modern versions of course are not quite the same thing. And of course they are strongly objected to. But they are beautiful. They made me optimistic, like I could still achieve something.

I had woken in the night with an appalling sense of shame and disquiet. If I could itemise the attributes of my grief, and print them in a journal, I might do the world a general service. I suspect it is hard to remember grief, and it is certainly invisible. But it is a wailing of the soul nonetheless and I must never again underestimate its acidic force in others. If nothing else I will hoard this new knowledge in the hope that when it passes I may still retain its clinical anatomy. Thank God for those windmills.

But in the small hours of the night I awoke. I think it was that mysterious knocking again, whose source I still don't know. It is Bet beseeching me to remember her. She needn't worry. I looked over what I had written about Roseanne Clear but all I saw, all that registered, was those stupid words I had written about Saddam Hussein. I suppose it is as well I am a man of no importance, which keeps my views, especially when they are inappropriate and embarrassing, private.

When the late Pope died I had also odd emotions then. I was deeply moved by the death of a man who had not been helpful to those of my patients who are religious, but also gay, or God help them, women. While he lived it seemed the apogee of existence was just what he was himself. But in his death he was magnificent, brave. In his death he became more democratic maybe, because death includes everything, likes everything human -can't get enough of it. Death be not proud. Well yes, but death is mighty and dreadful. The Pope made short work of it.

Too much thinking on death. Yet it is the music of our time. As the millennium passed fools like myself thought we were about to taste a century of peace. Clinton and his cigar was so much greater a man than Bush and his rifle.

The more I look at Fr Gaunt's deposition, the more I seem to believe it. It is because he writes well in a sort of classical way, no doubt taking his syntax and his skills from his training in Maynooth. He has a very Latinate style it seems to me, of the kind I remember distantly from struggling with Cicero at school in Cornwall. His desire, almost his anxiety in psychiatric terms, to tell the story illuminates it.

He is unburdening himself, as he might a sin. Certainly his text is far from sacred. But he does not flinch. He is staunch. He is fearless. Fr Gaunt conscientiously details it all.

As a rule, a policeman in Ireland was never stationed near his own home town, one presumes so that there would be no question of favour to people among whom he had grown up. Roseanne's father was actually one of the few exceptions to this rule, as he had been born and bred in Collooney, not so far, and certainly not far enough, from Sligo town itself. So he knew the district in a way that was perhaps not healthy for himself. It was possible for people to take more personally his presence in the town, in particular after the bringing in of the auxiliary police, made up of officers who had fought in World War One, and the Black and Tans, men and officers from the same site of carnage. This was in answer to the various 'outrages' of the war of independence, consisting mostly of the ambushing and shooting of soldiers and police – the crown forces as they used to say.

Her father it seems had the capacity therefore to be very aware of things happening in the town. Perhaps he was able to pick up information casually in a manner not open to a stranger. People might be more inclined to include him in gossip and rumour at the public house in the evening. Certainly her father had an enormous capacity for alcohol, being able like a docker to down fifteen pints of porter in a night and steer himself home afterwards. Apparently his daughter Roseanne would wait, anxiously no doubt, for his tread as he turned into their street, when she would gather him into the house.

Roseanne's playground was Sligo cemetery at the back of their house. She knew every alleyway and quirk of the place, and her special spot was the old ruined temple at its heart, where she liked to play hopscotch and the like in the crumbling portico. One evening, wrote Fr Gaunt, it seems she witnessed a strange burial. It was a group of men coming in with a coffin, quite without priest or ceremony, and lowering it into an open grave, and burying it there quietly in the dark, the only thing to show them the fags sparking in their mouths and the subdued chat. Roseanne, as would be natural in a daughter, ran to tell her father what she had seen. It seems she thought it was grave-robbers, though in truth the coffin was being put in not taken out, and there had not been such thefts in Ireland or anywhere else for half a century.

How Fr Gaunt knew all these details is not clear, and indeed as I read it over now I am puzzled by his omniscience, but then that was the ambition of a priest in his time.

At any rate her father had the coffin disinterred the next morning, Fr Gaunt himself in attendance, and in the coffin was found not a body but a stash of guns, items very hard to get in the war of independence and gathered with great hardship, indeed often by means of taking one from the corpse of a slain policeman. And so it turned out, many of the items in the coffin were indeed police issue, and the haul from ambushes and raids. So from Roseanne's father's point of view, he was looking at the relics and signs of murdered comrades.

The newly cut name on the gravestone was Joseph Brady, but no one of that name had died in the town.

Unbelievably, the men had also buried with the guns notes of secret meetings, including, by some foolish miracle, various names and addresses, including certain individuals wanted for murder. It was a wretched bonanza for the police. Before anyone knew what was happening, some of the names were arrested, and one of them was killed 'evading capture', a man called

Willie Lavelle, whose brother later played a part in Roseanne's life in Sligo, according to the good priest. For some reason this man Willie Lavelle was buried in the very grave where the guns had been so futilely hidden.

The recapture of the guns and documents and the killing of the man caused a subterranean furore in the circles involved in hiding them. Orders were issued no doubt for any and every possible act of reprisal against the police. But this did not happen immediately, long enough for Roseanne and her family to experience living day by day and minute by minute under this pressing tide of dread. I am sure they hoped and prayed that the insurgents would be defeated and Ireland restored to peaceable ways. Chance would be a fine thing, they might have said.

As I lay my hand on these withered sheets of Fr Gaunt, I wonder sincerely how I can use them. Can I really ask Roseanne to live through all this again? But I must remember it is not the pain of her life I am after in the first instance, but the consequence of that pain, and the true reason for her sectioning. Now I go back to the original reason for my quest, which is simply to ascertain if she was mad, and whether or not her committal was justified, and whether or not I may recommend her to be returned out into the world. I think I may decide this without her corroboration, or only with her cor-roboration if she wishes it. I must make a judgement about the verities that are before me, not the verities that are only intimated, or that are suggested by my own instincts.

The bells of St Thomas church in the town are ringing eight. I am as late as the rabbit in Lewis Carroll.

Roseanne's Testimony of Herself

I met the world and his wife with Tom because he was a sociable man in the extreme, but it was actually some years before I was shown to the mother. I heard about the mother of course, two brothers talking will often linger on that subject. I formed an idea of her, her small stature, her fondness for scrapbooks in which she recorded all matters pertaining to her sons, Jack's travel tickets, documents, Tom's dance notices in the Champion, and now, as time went on, his speaking at various times in the town, on various topics. I got the idea that she and her husband were often on poor terms, that Old Tom generally went his way in, to her, a feckless manner. But maybe she was a connoisseur of fecklessness for all that. Not on her own account. I knew she had promised her only daughter to the nuns at a young age and this girl Teasy went duly to the Sisters of Mercy, as a dowried nun. That was a mendicant order that lived in a place called Nazareth House. They had houses all over England and even America. I never knew if the mother had ambitions for her sons in the priesthood, but she must have thought it was some insurance on her immortal soul if she could offer her daughter to that life, I don't know.

There was another son called Eneas of course but he was only spoken of sideways, although once or twice it seemed he did sneak home, returning from the wide world where apparently he roamed to sleep the daylight hours in his mother's house, and only venturing forth at night. This was a small mystery in a time of great mysteries, and I don't remember me paying special heed to it.

'Why's your brother Eneas gone from home the most of the time?' I asked Tom once.

'Just a little peccadillo,' said Tom, and that's all he would say at first.

But another time we were in town together and one of his rivals, one of the up and coming Republican men, taunted him mysteriously in the street. He was a man called Joseph Healy and by no means a blackguard.

'Ah Tom,' he said, 'the policeman's brother.'

'The what?' said Tom, not with his usual ease and bonhomie.

'Never mind, never mind. Sure we all have our skeletons in the cupboard, I am sure.'

'Do you want to make something of this, Healy, in the council elections upcoming?'

'What? No,' said Joseph Healy, almost contritely, because though they were opponents, everyone in truth liked Tom, and Healy as I say was a decent skin at heart. 'I was only teasing you, Tom.'

Then they had a hearty enough handshake. But I could see Tom's mood had changed, and all the way up the street he was quiet and darkened. In a country of cupboards, every one with a skeleton in it, especially after the civil war, no one was exempt. But I could see that Tom resented that, and bitterly. Tom after all had a plan, a road to travel, which was an admirable thing in a young man like him. But skeletons he could do without obviously.

The mother was of the same mind. She loved the glory of Jack and she loved the glory of Tom, even if Jack looked in the ransacked trunk of old decency for his clothing, and Tom was a man to wear a modern hat in the new Ireland. This I gleaned from their conversations, and I always paid heed when they spoke of her, as a spy might pay heed to chit-chat in bars, because I had a feeling that some day I would need every scrap of information I could get, if I was to survive actually meeting her.

If ever there was a cold card in that game it was the blank, dark card of my own mother.

In those strange days when if anything unexpected could happen, it probably would, Mr de Valera became head of the country.

'Now the guns are back in the Dail,' said Tom darkly. 'How do you mean, Tom?' I asked.

'They're so afeared of being there, they're after bringing their guns into the chamber.'

Now Tom spoke with understandable disgust, as these men were the very ones his own crowd had striven to subdue, imprison, and alas execute. So how it came about that the very men against the Treaty, and who lads like Tom had wanted erased from the Irish story, were now the men in charge… You could almost feel a lurch in the life of Sligo. It was fellas like Joseph Healy were up now. This was hard and bitter for Tom all things considered. Myself, I wouldn't have had three thoughts about any of them, but that even in his love-talk Tom could flummox me with the politics.

We were lying up the back of the great dune that gave Strandhill its name in fact, when he uttered the above sentiment. It was a greater obstacle to his future than any he had experienced. He had never been a gunman himself, coming to maturity after all that. To give him his due, he thought the time for guns was past. He had a sort of idea that North might be joined to South at last, but with the crazy notion that it would be some man like Carson would be the first 'king of Ireland', as he jocularly put it. This was an old notion of men like Tom. There was a sort of dancing swing to his notions, like his music. Joseph Healy would've put a bullet in Carson if he could have done it quietly and gone home to his family after.

It was families and young ones mixed up in it now, it wasn't just single lads going round, and lassies maybe helping them.

Well, in spite of all that, he soon turned to kissing me again, in the quiet dunes, with the seagulls outraged but only them seeing us, and the sea bearing Tom's heroic record the other side of the sand. Strandhill's habitual breeze raged along the marram grasses minutely. It was bitter cold but kisses dealt with that.

And a few weeks later walking across the bridge by the Swan Hotel who should stop me but the fading figure of John Lavelle.

He was nearly a young man still but the fringe of something else had touched him. He looked hard beaten by his time in America, or wherever he had been, and I looked down and saw the soles of his shoes were well worn. I imagined him hopping trains like a hobo and gadding about futilely generally. He was handsome though, with his narrow grey face.

'Look at you,' he said. 'I hardly knew you.'

'Likewise,' I said. I was on my own, but wary, because Sligo was like a wretched family, everyone knew everyone and if they didn't know everything about everyone, they wanted to. I think John Lavelle noticed my furtive looking.

'What's up?' he said. 'You don't want to talk to me?'

'Ah, no,' I said. 'I do. How are you keeping? Were you away off in America then?'

'That was the idea,' he said. 'It didn't go just like that. The best laid plans.'

'Ah sure, yes,' I said.

'At least I can walk free in Ireland now,' he said.

'Oh?'

'What with Dev in now.' 'Oh, yes. Well, that's good anyhow.' 'Better than the fucking Curragh jail.' The curse word made me jump, but I thought he had the right to use it.

'Is that where you were?'

'That's it.'

'Well, John, I'll see you around the place.'

'I'm going down home a while to the islands, but yes, you'll see me back here all right. I'm going to be working for the council.'

'You're an elected man?'

'No, no,' he said. 'On the roads. Council work. Digging and the like.'

'That's good. It's work.'

'It is work. Work's hard to find. Even in America I'm told. You working yourself?'

'Cafe Cairo,' I said. 'Waitress.'

'Good for you. I'll come see you when I get back to Sligo.' 'Ah, do, yeh,' I said, suddenly uneasy with myself, and embarrassed, I knew not why hardly.

John Kane brings me my soup just now.

'This bloody job will kill me,' he says. 'I'd rather be a mole-catcher in Connaght.'

All the while with his unfortunate gobbling of the throat.

'But there are no moles in Connaght,' I said.

'In none of Ireland. Isn't it the perfect job for an old man? Them bloody stairs.'

And off he went.

The mother's bungalow was nice enough but it smelt of boiling lamb – in my vivid state of alarm, I might have said sacrificial lamb. Somewhere down the back of the house you sensed pots boiling, curly kale, cabbage, from Old Tom's garden, and a lamb, boiling, boiling, spewing its distinctive mild, damp smell into the corridors. That was my impression. I was only near that bungalow twice in my whole life and both times felt like dying just to be near it. In those days, the odour of cooking meat turned my stomach. But boiling meat took the biscuit. Why, I don't know, since my mother relished all forms of meat, even offal and innards that would frighten a surgeon. She would dine quite happily on a lamb's heart.

I was brought by Tom into the front sitting room. I felt like a farm animal in there, I felt like the cow and the calf and the pig must have felt in times past, when they'd be led into a cottage at night. People and animals slept in the same house one time in Ireland. That's why many a country kitchen still has a sloping floor, sloping down from the fire and the hag's bed and the upper bedroom, so obviously the shit and the piss of the animals couldn't flow that way. Human-wards. But I felt like that, awkward, bumping into the furniture in a fashion I never would have normally. The why of it was that I shouldn't have been there. I wasn't meant to be. It even took God by surprise that I was, I'd say.

She had her few chairs and a sofa covered in a dark, dark red velvet, and they were so old and lumpy it was like things had died in them under the velvet and had become cushions of a kind. And everywhere the stench of that lamb. I don't mean to write stench, I don't mean to describe all this in a bad way. God forgive me.

She gave me a very gentle look. It surprised me. But her voice was not so nice as her look. I think, at this distance, she was probably trying to be kind, to get off on the right foot. She was a tiny woman with what they used to call a widow's peak in her hair. She was dressed entirely in black, a miniature dress of black something, that material with the suspicious shine on it, like the elbows of a priest's jacket. Indeed she had a very beautiful gold cross about her neck. I knew she was the seamstress in the asylum up the town, just as her husband Old Tom was the tailor. Yes, yes, they had met there over the cutting table.

'She looked like an angel in the window-light,' said Old Tom to me once. I don't know apropos of what, or where. Maybe in the earlier, brighter times. His thoughts I think tended to meander. He was an immensely self-satisfied man, as I suppose he had the perfect right to be. But she didn't look like an angel now.

'You have no lap,' she said, staring now sternly at my legs.

'I have no what?' I said.

'No lap, no lap.'

'For to be sitting babies on,' said Tom helpfully, but it didn't help me at all.

'Oh,' I said.

There was a curious skein of whiteness on her features, like a sprinkle of halfhearted snow on a roadside. Perhaps it was a powder she used. The sunlight that the day outside virtually dumped into the room had betrayed it.

I must be careful to write of her fairly.

Then Old Tom sat me down on one of the lumpy chairs. Each arm had a little mat with flowers worked into it in simple threads. It was bare, neat work. Mrs McNulty put herself on the couch, where beside her rose a little mound of books, which I detected to be her scrapbooks. For the moment she left them severely alone, like a chocolate addict torturing herself near a chocolate bar. Old Tom pulled up a wooden chair in front of me. He was as jolly as you would like. In his hands he clasped a little flute or piccolo, and without further ado he began to play an Irish tune on it, with his famous mastery. Then he stopped, and laughed, and played another one.

'How are you on the cello?' he said. 'Do you like it?'

Of course piccolos and cellos were never played by him in the band, and it was as if, instead of conversation, he was talking to me through these more exotic instruments. But what he was trying to say eluded me. We had often spoken at the Plaza, but these exchanges seemed worthless here. I might as well have never met him in my life. It was very strange.

Mrs McNulty made a huh noise, and got up, and drifted away from the room. It might have meant anything, that noise, and I was hoping it was just a characteristic ejaculation, as the old novels used to say. Old Tom got through a little more of his repertoire, then he got up also, and left the room. Then Tom left the room. He didn't even look back at me.

So I sat in the room. It was just me and the room and the echo of Old Tom's music and the other echo that Mrs McNulty had left behind her, something quite as enigmatic as a scrap of O'Carolan.

Tom came back eventually and came over and helped me to my feet. He didn't say anything, just widened his face a moment, as if to say, Well, there you are, what can you do.

We walked out onto the Strandhill Road where the bungalow was just one of four or five similar properties on an acre each. There was something half-done about that road, half-finished, and something very much half-done about meeting Mrs McNulty.

'Did she not like me?' I said.

'Well, well, she is concerned about your own mother. Well, she might be said to take a professional interest in that. But it isn't the main thing. No. And I thought it might be. But no. The mother is very religious,' said Tom. 'That's the real difficulty.'

'Oh,' I said, linking his arm. He smiled at me gently enough, and we were trotting along fairly nicely, approaching all the while the older narrower streets of the town's edge.

'Ah, yes,' he said. 'She would like you to talk to Fr Gaunt, if that would be possible.'

'For what?' I said. So she was a friend of Fr Gaunt, I thought, oh God.

'You know,' he said. 'All the what's-it and to-do of these things. Yes. Decree of bloody Ne temere, you know, and all that. Bugger now, I couldn't care if you were a Hindu, but, you see, it's the Presbyterian angle, you know. Oh, Jesus, I don't think she ever had a Protestant before set foot in her house, that's for sure and certain. By Jesus.'

'But me, does she like me at all?'

'I don't know,' he said, 'she didn't say that at all. It was like a committee meeting in the scullery, formal, you know.'

Tom had not asked me to marry him or anything and yet I knew all this talk was something to do with marrying. I suddenly myself didn't want to marry him, or anyone, or be asked. I was in my early twenties and those times you were an old maid by twenty-five, you wouldn't get a hunchback to marry you then. There were far more girls than men in Ireland those times. Women were wiser and went off to America and England double-quick, before their boots were sunk and stuck for good in the mire of Ireland. America was crying out for women, we were as good an export as gold to America. Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds went, every blessed year. Lovely women, round women, small, ugly, strong, exhausted, youthful, ancient, every damn category. Freedom I suppose they were after, following their instincts. They'd rather be maids in America than old maids in bloody Ireland. I suddenly had a strong, a fervent, almost a violent wish to join them. It was the smell of that lamb was in my clothes, and only a sea-voyage across the Atlantic I thought would shift it.

Now, but you see, I loved that Tom. God help me.

chapter fifteen

Dr Grene's Commonplace Book

Curious and upsetting news today about John Kane. At a staff meeting we were trying to field a report from one of the wards. A relative had found one of the patients in some distress, the patient in question being quite a young Leitrim woman, by comparison with the ageing population here, early fifties I should think. She is a woman that came in only recently, having suffered a psychotic episode involving her being the new female Messiah who had failed to save the world, and must therefore scourge herself. She had used barbed wire for this purpose. All this in the setting of a perfectly ordinary Leitrim farm, and a perfectly ordinary and seemingly happy marriage. So already a tragedy. But the relative, I think her sister, had found her quite distracted in her room the other morning, with her hospital gown drawn up, and a bit of worrying blood on her legs. Not very much, just a smattering. And of course the worst was suspected, as it always is, and hence the staff meeting. All thoughts turned to John Kane because of course he has been implicated in such matters before, and let off. On the other hand he is so ancient, is he still capable? I suppose a man is always capable. But there is no proof, nothing, and we must simply all be vigilant.

I was struck again how terrified everyone always is at these staff meetings, at events in the hospital requiring any sort of outside airing. Of anything having to be mentioned to the visiting professionals in any capacity whatsoever. Even when the kitchen manages to create a mild case of food poisoning on a ward, there is exactly the same level of fear as there was this morning. The staff seems to gather together and roll itself into a ball, needles outward. I must confess I feel the same myself. Perhaps it would shock an outsider the level of things going wrong we feel we can tolerate, even of catastrophe. Nevertheless it is a profound instinct, especially I think in a mental institution, where the work is in itself often so onerous, even bizarre. Where distress can be measured to the degree of hurricane and tsunami on a daily basis. Things are best handled in-hospital. However I don't know how the relative will feel about this.

Very strange to remind oneself that soon all of this, these individuals, these very rooms, these very matters, will be dispersed to the four winds at the demise of the hospital.

Strangely enough this comes in the same week as John Kane being diagnosed with a return of his throat cancer. Not that he was told that, no. He has increasing difficulty swallowing, that's all he knows about it. This would be quite sad for him, if it wasn't for this other matter. If the other matter is true of course we must hope he will die roaring, as Irish people say. He is old enough though for such a cancer to move very slowly. How old though, I could not find out. By his own admission, he has no birth certificate, having been brought up somewhere by adoptive parents. Well, we have that in common, and hopefully little else. The reason he is still working seems to be that no one has thought to retire him, since his age has never registered. Furthermore his job is so menial it would be almost impossible to fill, as it is doubtful even a willing person from China or Bosnia or Russia would take it. John Kane himself shows no desire to lay down his brush of his own free will. And he insists on climbing the stairs to Roseanne's room, though the climb knocks the wind out of him, and he was told he could leave it to someone else. Oh no, he went into a muttering 'thunderousness' about that.

Because of Bet, I must admit I put my mind only lightly to these matters. At least, I attempted lightness. My head is already stuffed with grief I suppose like a pomegranate with its red seeds. I can only bleed grief, having no room for more. While the registrar and the nurses spoke about the poor molested patient, if that is what happened to her, my own head was roaring. I sat there among them with a roaring head.

Then I went up to Mrs McNulty's room and sat with her a while. It seemed like the logical thing to do. Even if it is the logic of poor Mr Spock, who feels nothing. But I was feeling plenty. I didn't continue with my investigation into her presence in the hospital. I couldn't. This is a horrible admission, but there it is.

I sat there in the twilight of her room. I suppose she was watching me. But she said nothing either. I was thinking thoughts that I could not in any case, in any circumstance, have voiced out loud in her presence. Thoughts that are a savage mixture of old desire and continuously new regret.

I was trying to sort myself out, as the Yanks say. Because it was another strange night last night. I do not know what I would say to myself if I came to myself for therapy. I mean, I no longer know. There are pits of grief obviously that only the grieving know. It is a voyage to the centre of the earth, a huge heavy machine boring down into the crust of the earth. And a little man growing wild at the controls. Terrified, terrified, and no turning back.

It's that banging that has me done in. Such a little thing. But it has thrown my nerves into a sort of hyper-awareness. Nerves! Now I am sounding like a Victorian doctor. But it is something very like Victorian nerves, seances, the intimation of the living, those dying tombs in Mount Jerome cemetery, untouchable because bought in perpetuity, but mouldering, and no one alive to go and rub the brasses. Look on my works, ye mighty, et cetera.

Last night things took a step forward into the dark. I was lying in my bed more awake than a dog. Suddenly in the pitch dark, in those un-peopled small hours, Bet's phone started to ring, I heard it going off above my head. I had got her a second line when she complained I was always on the internet and she couldn't ever make calls. She said her friends could only leave messages, and that I never gave her the messages. So yes, I got her a second line, expensive though it was. The phone sits there beside her bed. Now it was suddenly ringing, and such a jump I gave, like in a cartoon. Chemically, I suppose it was like an injection of adrenalin into the head, I don't know. But it was quite sickening, so sudden and so strange. And it rang and rang, of course it did, because there was no one to answer it. I certainly was not going to go up there into that room in the middle of the night. But then it struck me as odd that it didn't go to message, like it normally did, if Bet was out. I suppose the phone company had discontinued it. Then I had the miserable thought that hadn't I actually phoned the phone company a few weeks ago and asked for the line to be discontinued? If I had, and I couldn't really remember, it must be ringing as a result of some sort of fault. Oh, but, to lie there and hear it go on and on.

Then it stopped. I tried to calm myself, induce myself into feeling relieved. Then the terrible thing happened. Oh, Jesus, yes. I heard it so clearly, above my head, a little muffled because it had to come through the floorboards and the old plaster ceiling, but I heard it, the word 'Hello?' It was Bet's voice.

I nearly lost the grip on my bladder I was so startled. I had a vision in my head of a monster wrapping its coils about me, like an anaconda, and starting to squeeze. An anaconda kills by putting such pressure on the inner organs that the heart bursts. That one word nearly burst my heart. I missed Bet so terribly, but in all honesty I did not want to hear her voice, not like that. The living breathing woman, yes, but not that single word floating down to me, piercing down to me. But then I thought, had there been some awful mistake, had I imagined her dying, or had I buried her alive, and – but I had no time for further madness of that sort, because another word followed, it was my name being called, clear as a bell, 'William!'

Oh, Jesus, I thought, it's for me. Now that in itself was a mad thought. I mean, for heaven's sake, the call could not have been answered, and therefore, how could it be for me?

My name had been called. The voice was just as it always had been, the exact same tone, carrying in it that same pulse of impatience, annoyance that I had given her number to someone, and that they were using her line.

I didn't know what to do. 'What?' I called up, without even intending to.

I couldn't just leave it at that – now here was fresh madness

– I couldn't not respond. I got out of bed feeling like a dead man myself, as if I was now in the realm of the dead, or a story by M. R. James himself that Bet so loved. I went out my door with deepest reluctance and walked along the corridor on my bare feet. If she saw me like that, I thought, she would chastise me, going along without my slippers. I reached the little entry to the stairs to the attics, and went up, step by step.

I got to the landing where I had found her struggling for life, almost expecting to see her there. I flicked the switch but the bulb must have died without me noting it, because nothing happened. There was a murk of moonlight on the landing, a mere soup of light. I had left her door a little ajar so as not to impede the movement of air in the room, as a precaution against mildew. So I went to the door with slow, leaden steps, and stood there a moment.

'Bet?' I said.

Now I was all unhappiness. Whatever chemical is allied to fear

– adrenalin and its sisters – was drenching my brain. My knees were literally weak, and I felt the contents of my bowels turn to water. I wanted to vomit. Years ago as a boy in the slaughter house in Padstow I had seen cows going in a queue towards the gun, and watched them pissing and shitting in terror. Now I was just the same. Part of me longed for her to be inside the room, but a far greater part dreaded that same thing, dreaded it like the living are obliged to dread the dead. It is so deep a law of life. We bury or burn the dead because we want to separate their corporeality from our love and remembrance. We do not want them after death to be still in their bedrooms, we want to hold an image of them living, in the full of life in our minds.

And yet, suddenly, equally, like the first breeze of an enormous storm, I wanted her to be there, I wanted it. I pushed open the door and stepped in, wanting Bet to be there, wanting to take her in my arms gently in a way I had not done for so many, many years, and laugh and explain to her, explain the folly of my mind, and how I thought she had been dead, and please, please now could she forgive me the stupidity of Bundoran, and could we start again, let's go on a holiday somewhere, why, to Padstow itself, to see the old house, and eat at the posh new restaurants we heard about, and have a lovely time -

Emptiness. Of course emptiness.

I think for someone to have seen me then would have been as if they were seeing a ghost – as if I were the ghost. A wild-eyed, foolish sixty-five-year-old man in his dead wife's bedroom, gone daft from grief, looking as usual for forgiveness and redemption the way normal people look for the time. The default mechanism of most every thought of her. Bet -redemption, redeem me, forgive me. When the foul truth is she should have thrown me out.

I was sitting in Roseanne's room thinking all this.

There was nothing of it I could say to her. I was in a patient's room, supposedly to assess her for release, 'back into the community'. One of the inspirations of Mrs Thatcher's regime in England, a Thatcherite fashion one might say that hasn't gone away. Roseanne was sitting up in her bed, with that white mantle thing she wears, that in the half light looks like crumpled wings, the new wings of a butterfly before the blood is pumped into them and, much to the astonishment no doubt of the creature, it can suddenly take wing and fly.

Assess her. It suddenly seemed so absurd I laughed out loud. The only person's sanity in doubt in that room was my own.

Roseanne's Testimony of Herself

We were married in Dublin, in the church at Sutton, it was the easiest thing to do. The priest there was a friend of Tom's, they had gone to college at the same time in Dublin, even if different colleges. Tom had only lasted a few months studying law at Trinity College, but long enough to make friends in the city. Tom could fashion a bosom pal out of an afternoon at the races. Whatever needed to be done, licence, banns, whatever you need to do to marry a Presbyterian woman, was done. I suppose the good people of Sutton weren't too impressed by that particular wedding, but even if it lacked tuck and thunder, there were a few of his other Dublin buddies there, and afterwards we went to Barry's Hotel for two nights, and on the second night we went to a dance at the Metropole, because Tom knew the bandleader there, and we danced together nearly for the first time. For some strange reason, we had rarely danced together in his own dancehall. I suppose that was odd, I don't know. Tom seemed quite content in every way and didn't say a word about not having any of his family there. Jack would have been there only he was in Africa, but he paid for the wedding lunch as a gift to his brother. Tom drank so much whiskey at the lunch he wasn't up to much in the hotel that night, but he made up for it the night of the dancing. He was the nicest lover. That is the truth.

We lay in the dark of the hotel room. Tom had bought a packet of these Russian oval cigarettes at College Green, just beside his old college, and he was smoking one of them. I think I was twenty-five, he was just a little older.

'Do you know,' he said. 'It's very nice up here. I wonder could I ever make a go of it in Dublin?'

'You wouldn't miss the west?'

'I suppose I would,' he said, making a swirl of Russian smoke in the gloomy room. 'Tom?' I said.

'Yes?'

'Do you love me?' 'I do, surely. Certainly I do.' 'That's good,' I said, 'because I love you.' 'Do you?' he said. 'You show very good taste. That's very wise of you, I must say. Yes.' And then he laughed. 'Do you know,' he said. 'I really do.'

'What?' I said.

'I mean, not just talking. But I do. Love you.' And I really think he did.

He was the decentest man, I think it is important to say that.

You could judge a lot of the effects of Mr de Valera's famous economic war that time from the window of a train. We had been married in the springtime and because there was no market for lambs now, the farmers had to kill the lambs in the fields. So as the train went through the country every now and then we saw these perishing corpses. Tom was very upset about all this. De Valera's men were in power and to him that was just the same as gunmen and murderers taking over the country, the very selfsame country they had tried to scupper after the Treaty. It all set the teeth of fellas like Tom on edge. Tom was young and coming into his own and he wanted to inherit the country I suppose, make something of it. There was a great feeling in him that de Valera, having tried to strangle the new country at birth, would now make a hames and shambles of its childhood, as it were, and ruin the place in the greater world. Anyway it broke the heart of strong farmers to have to be killing lambs, and have nowhere to send the sheep themselves, it was all a strangulation of their dreams.

'Like a fucking madhouse,' said Tom beside me, looking out on the desolation of the farms. And he knew, because of course his father and mother both worked in a madhouse. 'The whole of Ireland is just a madhouse now.'

So Tom's father was asked to cut and sew a blue shirt for Tom, and he started having little meetings and marches in Sligo, to see if they could get things going the other way. There was a man called O'Duffy had set them up, he had been in charge of the police but lost that job somehow, and now he was like one of those lads like Mussolini or Franco. Tom admired him because when he had been a minister he had tried to bring in laws to protect children in Ireland. He had failed in that, but nevertheless. Also he was a passionate man in his speeches, and Tom thought that all the great men had been killed during the troubles, Collins of course in chief. And O'Duffy had been a great ally of Collins. So it all made sense really, to Tom at any rate. I never knew a man to sweat like Tom and after a march his blue shirt would be drenched. I had to dye it a few times because it would go pale under the armpits and that didn't look right. I never saw him march but I wanted him to look smart, like a wife would naturally.

In the meantime we set up house in a small corrugated place out in Strandhill. It was a shack really, but it was close to the dancehall and kept me out of Sligo. At the same time it was an easy jaunt for him back into the town. Our bedroom looked out on Knocknarea, we could actually see the tip of Maeve's Cairn at the top, it was funny lying there, a young married couple in the thirties, in modern times, and her up there lying in her own bed, her own leaba as they say, and tucked in there all of four thousand years ago. We had a nice view of Coney island from the rickety porch at the front, and although the heap of the island hid him, I knew the Metal Man was there, solid and eternal, I could imagine him in my mind's eye, faithfully and stoically pointing down into the deep water.

Flying Down to Rio. Top Hat. The man that ruled the country of the heart was not de Valera with his skinny, haunted face, but Fred Astaire, with his skinny, haunted face.

Even the grandees came to the pictures. If it had been a church there might have been pews for them. As it was most of the fur coats were to be found in the balcony. The rest of Sligo teemed in the stalls below. There would have been mayhem other than that Mr Clancy and his brothers had all been in the army, and marshalled the patrons like unruly recruits. Any trouble and a lad would be turfed out on his ear into the rainy dark night of Sligo, which was not desirable. Oh he didn't mind kissing, he was no parish priest, and what could he have done anyhow, when the lights were low. It wasn't the church, but it was like the church, better, far better. It was at the pictures that you could look around and see that rapt gaze on people's faces that maybe the priest or the minister dreamed of one day seeing on the faces of their parishioners. The whole of Sligo in a damp crowd, all those different people and different degrees, paupers and princes, united by their enchantment. You could have said Ireland was united and free, at the pictures anyhow. Although Tom kept me in quarantine in Strandhill, till he could get his mother to relent in her hostility to me, he wasn't so cruel as to extend my exile to Saturday nights. We roared into town in his nice little car and took our places as always, as if we feared for our souls if we did not.

There was always great joshing at the cinema, fellas freely called out insults to each other. Sometimes political affiliations were alluded to, sometimes it was all taken in good part, but just now and then things weren't so lightly taken, and bit by bit in the thirties this got worse. You could tell a lot about the state of the country from the quality of the insults at the Saturday night pictures. Of course Mr Clancy was not for any party in particular, and against politics maybe in general. You could be expelled for a nasty remark, which was more than you could say for the Dail itself, according to Tom.

'There's things you can say with impunity in Dail Eireann that'd get you thrun out of the Gaiety,' Tom might say.

There were always newsreels before the features and if there was stuff about the Spanish Civil War for instance, there'd be roars going up about Blueshirts and the like. Mr Clancy and his brothers would be kept real busy trying to root out the satirists.

'Crowd of bowsies,' Tom would say.

'Casual pack of buggers,' Jack would say, if he wasn't in Africa. Not that Jack followed the Blueshirts.

'I'm afraid your friend O'Duffy is a casual pack of buggers,' he might say to Tom.

But Tom always roared with laughter, he liked his brother Jack, he didn't care what he said. That was part of Tom's great charm as a friend and brother. He was easy-going in his very marrow. He thought Jack was a genius too, because he had done the two degrees at Galway, Engineering and Geology, whereas he had lasted only the few months at Law School. He had a way of feasting on Jack's words that was just their ancient practice from the time they were boys together. I don't know how their other brother Eneas fitted into that. Of course I never heard much said about poor Eneas.

One night at the showing of Top Hat as I was going down to the ladies' toilet a familiar dark figure briefly blocked my way. It wasn't usual for a single man to engage a married woman in casual conversation, but on the other hand there was never too much casual about John Lavelle. Now that his crowd were securely in power, he seemed to be flourishing, even though he was only slashing at brambles on the roadside for the council. That was better than being on the run or eating prisoner's hash in the Curragh. He must have liked black clothes because he wore only black, and it gave him a very cowboylike look, with the white pallor of his skin and the sweep of black hair above. For a roadsweeper he certainly understood about waistcoats. Myself I was dressed in my best purple summer dress, which I must suppose was a sort of wordless remark in itself. Anyway John Lavelle didn't care too much for what a person should be doing or not be doing.

'Hello, Roseanne. You know, girl, you look really lovely.'

Now this was an enormous statement for him. For anyone. He had never offered the slightest sort of love-talk to me. After all, we only knew each other because of the direst of tragedies. Maybe he even believed still that I had brought the Free State soldiers down on his head years ago. Maybe talking like that to me was a sort of subtle revenge. Whatever it was, I didn't take it seriously, I brushed past him, and went on my way. Anyway my bladder was bursting.

'I'm out on Knocknarea most Sundays,' he said. 'Most Sundays about three you'll find me at the cairn.'

I flushed with embarrassment. There was a little mill of women and girls trying to do the same as me, but they were very quiet, because the picture was still going on behind our heads. In fact it was quite hard to make out what John Lavelle said, but nevertheless I caught it. I hoped no one else had caught it. Maybe he only meant to be friendly. Maybe he only meant, I know you're living out there, and I'm often out there myself.

I had never seen him at a dance. Mind you, I was not at the Plaza as often as in the old days when I was a single girl and could play the piano without comment. But married women never worked in those days. We were like the Muslims in those times, the men wanted to hide us away, except on occasions like that, when there was a good film to be seen.

John Lavelle wasn't just another fella. He wasn't just a bowsie in the street making a remark behind my back, he was an important person because he had known my father and things about my father. Two deaths and more linked us, you might say, the death of his brother and the death of my father. We should have been enemies but somehow we were not. I wasn't against him, even if I wasn't for him either. To this day I don't really understand it. I rarely saw him and yet he loomed in my dreams. In my dreams he was always being shot and dying, like his brother had in real waking life. I often saw him dying in dreams. Held his hand and the like. Sisterly.

I never did speak about that to Tom though. I didn't like to. How would I begin? Tom loved me, or he loved what he knew of me, what he saw of me. Now I don't want to say something untoward, but he always complimented me on my rear end. That's the truth.

'When I feel blue,' he said once, 'I think of your backside.'

Not very romantic, but in another way, very romantic. Men are not really humans at all, no, I mean, they have different priorities. Mind you, I don't know what women's priorities are either, at least, I know what they are and never did feel them. I did have a shocking desire for Tom myself. The whole lot of him. I don't know. He made me dizzy on a constant basis. There's some things you really can't get enough of. Chocolate you can get enough of. But some things. I liked his company, in all guises of company. I liked drinking cups of tea with him. I liked kissing his ears. Maybe I was never a proper woman. God forgive me. Maybe the biggest error I made was I always felt the equal of him. I felt, it was me and him, like Bonnie and Clyde, who just that time in America were going round killing people and generally what, expressing their love in curious ways.

All right, so why did I go up to Maeve's cairn that very Sunday following? I don't know. Because John Lavelle asked me? No. I know it was a wretched thing to do, a mistake. Why does the salmon go home to the Garravoge, when it has all the sea to roam over?

Dr Grene's Commonplace Book

Every year in the early days we went religiously to Bundoran for our holiday. People now laugh at Bundoran, they think it the prime example of the ancient Irish holiday, damp B &Bs, foul rain, bad food and all. But we liked all that, me and Bet. We laughed at it too, but affectionately, like you might laugh at a mad great-aunt. We loved going there – we fled there, you might say, to refresh ourselves at the altar of Bundoran.

The sunlight is a great reader of faces. Going back to the same place year after year made a sort of clock of Bet's face. Every year there was a new story, the next picture in the sequence. I should have photographed her every year in the same place at the same time. She was always growling and worried about growing old, she spotted every new line on her face just the minute it appeared, like a sleepy dog suddenly wakes when a stranger's foot is distantly heard broaching the boundaries of a property. Her only extravagance was those jars of night cream she invested in, in her war against those lines. She was a deeply intelligent person, she knew great swathes of Shakespeare from her schooldays, when one of those unsung, inspired teachers had got a hold of her, and tried to make a teacher of her too. But she wasn't looking at wrinkles with her intelligence, it was something more primal, ancient. For myself, hand on heart, those things never bothered me. It is one of the graces of married life that for some magical reason we always look the same to each other. Even our friends never seem to grow old. What a boon that is, and never suspected by me when I was young. But I suppose, otherwise, what would we do? There has never been a person in an old people's home that hasn't looked around dubiously at the other inhabitants. They are the old ones, they are the club that no one wants to join. But we are never old to ourselves. That is because at close of day the ship we sail in is the soul, not the body.

Oh, and I write that, the biggest agnostic in Ireland. As usual I don't have words for what I mean. I am trying to say I loved Bet, yes, soul to soul, and the lines and wrinkles were part of some other story, her own harrowing reading of her own life. Nor would I underestimate the pain it caused her. By her own estimation a plain woman, she did not wish to be a plain old woman. However I would also question her plainness. There were times when her face shimmered and flashed with its own beauty. There was the moment we stood side by side in the church, and I looked down at her face just the second before she said 'I do,' and then heard her say it, and then out of her face flew this extraordinary light, flooding up at me. It was love. You do not expect to see love like that. I did not anyhow.

So why did I have to betray her in Bundoran of all places?

I went there innocently enough, without her, but for a conference in that new hotel on the strand. It was a psychiatric gathering, right enough. Our topic as it happened was geriatric psychosis, dementia, all that. I was presenting a paper on versions of memory, the absolute fascist certainty of memory, the bullying oppression of memory. I suppose it was a sort of middle-aged nonsense, but at the time I thought it quite radical, revolutionary. It was received at the conference as a type of throwing caution to the wind. As a type of indiscretion of the mind. So perhaps it wasn't remarkable that it was followed by an indiscretion of the body.

Poor Martha. Four fine boys she had at home, and a husband who was one of the most gifted junior counsels of his generation. A remote, troubled man, but, I am sure, a worthy. It was dreadfully simple. We drank too much wine together, we wandered back to the corridor of unimpressive rooms, we had a sudden desire towards each other, I kissed her, we fumbled in the dark, she never even took her knickers off, God help us, she came under my hand, that seemed to be the end of it. It was a throwback, a surrender, a retreat to adolescence, when such fumblings seemed heroic and poetic.

Martha went home and told her good husband. I don't suppose she meant to, or wanted to. I think what she really wanted was for it not to have happened. The world is not full of betrayers, it is full of people with decent motives and a full desire to do right by those who know them and love them. This is a little-known truth, but I think it is a truth nonetheless. Empirically, from all the years of my work, I would attest to that. I know it is a miraculous conclusion, but there it is. We like to characterise humanity as savage, lustful, and basic, but that is to make strangers of everyone. We are not wolves, but lambs astonished in the margins of the fields by sunlight and summer. She lost her world, Martha. And I lost mine. No doubt it was well deserved. Whatever her husband suffered was not, and whatever Bet suffered I know for a certainty was not.

Because faithfulness is not a human question, but a divine one.

There I go again.

And I wonder what Fr Gaunt would have made of that?

Fr Gaunt, so assiduous, so devoted to revealing Roseanne, her nature, her incriminating story.

The deposition is in the other room, and I am too tired to go and get it. I will see how much of it I can write down from memory. The events at the cemetery I have itemised. Then independence came, the imperial police were disbanded, increasing I must suppose the fears of Roseanne's father, then… I suppose, time passed. The sense of vulnerability decreased, increased? And Roseanne's father got a job in the selfsame cemetery. As this job was in the gift of the town council, it is difficult to understand why so tainted a man was given such a sinecure, unless it was a job so lowly they thought it was a just humiliation. Indeed in due course he lost this job and was given the job of rat-catcher in Sligo, surely the ultimate insult to such a man. Fr Gaunt writes with possible wryness, 'As he had hunted down his fellow countrymen like rats, it might be said he was qualified for the job.' (Or words to that effect). But memories are both long and short in Ireland, like anywhere there are such wars. The civil war that followed caused further mayhem to the kindly instincts of young men in Sligo. Eventually time was found to turn attention to Roseanne's father, and his end was curious and protracted.

One night as he came home he was abducted on the corner of his street. He was drunk as was his custom, and his daughter was waiting as was hers. And I do think, and it is really clear from Fr Gaunt's account, that Roseanne adored her curious father. At any rate he was taken by a number of men and dragged off into the cemetery. She followed. Fr Gaunt thinks the plan was to take him up to the top of the round tower there in the graveyard and fling him out of the window at the top, or some such strategy.

His mouth was stuffed with white feathers no doubt to characterise his former work, though God knows I cannot see wherein his cowardice lay, misguided though he may have been in many respects. Then alas he was beaten with hammers, and an effort made to push him out the little window at the top of the tower. Roseanne herself was below looking up. Awful noises no doubt of horror from the small room at the top. And they did get him half way out the window, except his belly was too rounded by the years of beer, and would not admit him out into the night air. The hammers had not really killed him either, and as he roared, the feathers burst from his mouth. In a desperate rage they pulled him back in, and one of the men flung the bloody hammers out the window. And the feathers flew up and the hammers fell down, striking Roseanne as she stood gazing up a blow to the head, knocking her out cold.

Their less than theatrical solution to the question of his execution was to hang him in a derelict house nearby. I do not think in the atmosphere of the times he would have been much missed. No doubt he had acted against his own people. They were young men trying to avenge a great wrong, and young men are excitable and sometimes clumsy. No, not much missed, such a man.

Except by Roseanne.

How do I put all this to her? And this is just the end of the first section, there is another part that itemises her own later history. And in it a truly miserable and even horrifying accusation against her. The sins of the father are one thing, but the sins of the mother… Well. I must remember, I tell myself again, why I am engaged in this assessment. Be professional.

Keep my distance. After all, having been reared in England, albeit as an Irish child of some kind, I already have distance I believe from the strange chapters of this country's bewildering story.

And aren't all our histories tangled and almost foreign to ourselves, I mean, to our imaginations? My own mother's death, how cruel that was, in every way, and the only good thing I can think of that came out of it was, it 'inspired' me to read psychiatry at Durham, almost as an act of retrospective and hopeless insurance against the thing happening.

She lived in paradise across the river from Padstow, in a house envied and admired by the summer visitors, sitting in its trees on the very strand.

Of course, not my 'real' mother, not my 'real' father either.

Every year in their retirement the two of them went to the Lake District. My father climbed a mountain one morning without her. When he reached the summit, he gazed down on the valley below, there was a lake there, and he saw a tiny figure advance into the water. He was too far away to be heard. He knew instantly who it was.

Some three years after they adopted me, having given up the hope of having a child of their own, they did have a child of their own, my brother John. He was devoted to me. When we were fishing as kids in our local stream, he would stand for hours in his shorts in the river, bending over with a jamjar to catch minnows for my hooks.

When I was fourteen, we would cycle in the morning around the estuary to get our buses, myself to the Catholic Grammar School and himself to the prep school I had once attended. The bus stops were close to each other, but on opposite sides of the road, because his school was in the other direction. It was just a little country road outside the village, and the buses were those shining, chunky vehicles of those times.

One morning – and how everything becomes a little story once upon a time I might as well say – having heaved our bikes behind the hedge as we always did, I saw my bus coming along the road, and his bus coming the other way almost at the same distance. John, aged about ten, gave me a kiss and a hug and started off across the road. I found I was still holding his coat with my own, and called out to him, 'Hey, young fellow!' John stopped and turned about. 'Your coat!' I said, and made to throw it, and I saw John smiling, and he came back a few steps towards me. By this time the two buses were upon us, and whatever calculation the drivers had made for the little lad crossing the road, my shout to John had done a great mischief, and my bus drove through him, myself still holding the coat out to him.

That was the cause of my mother's sorrow.

Great sorrow. Beyond imagining. Her deepest heart destroyed. And yet there is something in it that eludes me. A true understanding.

Her life was rich in other ways. She lived in paradise. Indeed she left my poor father in paradise. Was I not also angry with her? That I wasn't in any way enough? Or my father? That she didn't endure? That is so unfair, I know. But, there is such a thing as endurance, it is a quality. I suppose what I am trying to write, while not being in any way disrespectful of my mother, is that Roseanne has endured, even though her life is all farthings.

I am a bit disgusted with myself for writing this.

And why am I crying?

I am astounded to read back over what I just wrote. I have made an anecdote out of the tragic death of my brother, for which, as is clear to me from the cooled syntax, I obviously blame myself. Even when I was at Durham, and we students used to practise analysis on each other, I never discussed this. I never even think about it, I have given it no valency at all in the last fifty years. It is a scandal in the halls of myself. I see that, clearly, staring at the bare facts. But how on earth would I start to look at it now, how would I ever heal myself? It is beyond my capacity. The only man I might have talked to about this is Amurdat Singh, long in his grave. Or my father, likewise. What he must have suffered, in his lovely English privacy.

But this is beside the point. I am clearly content to be beyond help. It is disgusting. I am not only crying now, for the record, but trembling also.

Of course Roseanne's life spans everything, she is as much as we can know of our world, the last hundred years of it. She should be a place of pilgrimage and a national icon. But she lives nowhere and is nothing. She has no family and almost no nation. A Presbyterian woman. It is sometimes forgotten the effort that was made in the twenties to include all shades of opinion in the first Irish senate, but it was an effort that soon lost heart. Our first president was a Protestant which was a beautiful and poetic gesture. The fact is, we are missing so many threads in our story that the tapestry of Irish life cannot but fall apart. There is nothing to hold it together. The first breath of wind, the next huge war that touches on us, will blow us to the Azores. Roseanne is just a bit of paper blowing on the edge of the wasteland.

And I realise I have become a little too much engaged with her. Perhaps I am obsessed. Not only can I not get her story from herself, I have a version of her life that I think she would reject. I have a dozen other souls to attend to, to listen to, to see if they can be placed back in the 'community'. By God, this place is to be dismantled, dispersed, I have much to do, much to do.

But every day I feel compelled to go up to her room, often I hurry, as if there is an urgency, like at the end of that old film, Brief Encounter. As if, should I delay, she will not be there. As indeed she may not.

Without Bet it is impossible for me to live. Now I must learn to do that.

Perhaps I am using Roseanne as a means to that, attending someone I admire and yet at the same time have power over? I must interrogate my own motives now in everything, because I fear there has not been much in the way of justice brought to her in the past, leaving aside the seriousness of the allegation, or perhaps rumour is a better word, against her. Although she is buried here to some degree, she is not Saddam in his terrible hidey hole, she is not to be pulled from it and her teeth examined like a horse (although note to myself, her teeth should be attended to, I noticed a lot of blackness in her mouth). Her teeth examined, her body deloused, disgraced, dispatched.

chapter sixteen

Roseannne's Testimony of Herself

Dr Grene was in just a little while back. As he came into my room he happened to tread on the loose floorboard where I hide these pages, which gave an unmerciful squeak, just like a mouse when the bar of the mousetrap whips down, and gave me a fright. But no, Dr Grene was paying no heed to anything, even to me. He sat in my old chair and said nothing. The small light from the window barely illuminated his face. From my vantage in the bed, he was all profile. He acted really as if he were alone, now and then heaving great sighs that I don't think he was aware of. They were unselfconscious sighs. I let him be. It was nice to have him in the room, without questions. Anyway, I had my own thoughts to 'entertain' me. It is as well our thoughts are silent, closed, unread. Why then am I writing this?

Eventually, just as I thought he was going, like those detectives in the old films, he turned about at the door and looked at me and smiled.

'Do you remember Fr Garvey?' he said.

'Fr Garvey?'

'Yes, he used to be the chaplain here. About twenty years ago.'

'Was he the little man with the hairs in his nose?'

'Well, I don't remember the hairs. I was sitting there, and I just remembered, you didn't like him coming to see you. I don't know why I suddenly remembered that. Was there any reason for that?'

'Oh,' I said. 'No. It's just that I don't like the religious.'

'The religious? You mean, people that believe?' 'No, no, priests, and nuns, and such.' 'And is there any reason for that?'

'They are so certain about things, and I am not. It's not because I am Presbyterian. I don't like holy people. He was very kind, Fr Garvey. He said he completely understood,' I said, as indeed he had.

He lingered there in the door. Was he wanting to say something else? I think so. But he didn't, he nodded his head a few times.

'You don't mind doctors, I hope?' he said. 'No,' I said. 'I don't mind doctors at all.' And he laughed, and went out.

Fred Astaire. Not a handsome man. He said himself he couldn't sing. He was balding his whole life. He danced like a cheetah runs, with the grace of the first creation. I mean, that first week. On one of those days God created Fred Astaire. Saturday maybe, since that was the day for the pictures. When you saw Fred you felt better about everything. He was a cure. He was bottled in the films and all around the earth, from Castlebar to Cairo, he healed the halt and the blind. That's the gospel truth. St Fred. Fred the Redeemer.

I could have been praying to him that time.

At the bottom of the mountain I picked a nice smooth stone from the rainy path. It is an old custom to carry up a stone to put on the cairn above. Oh but, yes, I was in a state. Not from the climb, that was going to be nothing to me that time. No, because my head was 'in a whirl' as the bodice-rippers used to say. And I can't say why exactly, only that I knew there was something amiss in what I was doing. The day was absolutely peaceful, absolutely calm, the sky ripped open by scars of blue across the expanse of clouds, but my mood belonged to some other sort of day. When the tempests poured over Knocknarea and flooded down in invisible armies and extravagant dragons onto Strandhill, having it out there between the village houses and the sea. I was bare-armed there as I stooped to pick a stone, even in my unease careful to choose a decent one, bare-armed and bare-hearted.

If my father had his fate I also had my fate I suppose.

Dear reader, I ask for your protection, because I am afraid now. My old frame is actually trembling. It is all so long ago and I am still afraid. It is all so long ago and yet I am stooping still, and feel the stone in my fingers as if it is still then. How is that? Would that I felt that same vigour now, climbing the mountain with so fierce a step. Climbing, climbing, fiercely, fiercely. Perhaps I even feel a shadow of that. My limbs with such heat in them, my skin as smooth as metal, youth unregarded and unprized in me. Why did I know so little? Why do I know so little now? Roseanne, Roseanne, if I called to you now, my own self calling to my own self, would you hear me? And if you could hear me, would you heed me?

About half way up the mountain there was a little crowd of people coming down, I could hear them laughing, and now and then a little rock came speeding down the path. Then they were upon me, all gabardine coats, Trilby hats, scarves, and more laughter. It was one of the better sets in Sligo, and I even knew one of the women, because she had often come into the Cafe Cairo. I even remembered her habitual order and seemingly so did she.

'Hello, hello!' she said. 'Cocoa and a cherry bun, please!'

I laughed. She certainly meant nothing demeaning by it. Her companions looked at me with mild interest, prepared to be friendly if the woman so willed it. She didn't quite introduce me. But in a quiet voice, she said:

'I hear you got married,' she said. 'To our wonderful man at the Plaza. Many congratulations.'

This was nice of her, because the marriage had not exactly been the talk of the town, or if it was, not the nice talk of the town. Let's put it that way. In fact, I am sure it caused a relatively lowscale breeze of scandal, as most things out of the way did in Sligo. It was a very small town under the rain.

'Well, it's good to see you. Have a nice climb. Cheerio.'

And with that slight Englishism she was gone, the plummeting path pulling her away, the hats and scarves sinking quickly down the mountain. And the laughter. I could hear the woman talking in her pleasant voice, maybe filling them in, maybe remarking on the fact that Tom was not with me, I don't know. But it didn't bolster me much in my task.

What was my task? I didn't know. Why was I climbing Knocknarea at the bidding of a man irregular in the recent civil war and maybe just as irregular in his life? A jailbird that was digging Sligo ditches. Who as far as I knew was unmarried and walking out with no one. I knew what it was and how it looked, but I didn't know what drove me up that mountain. It was maybe a sort of infinite curiosity rising out of my love for my father. Needing to be brought again close to his memory, or any memory of him that seemed to make him more present, even the events of that miserable night in the cemetery – both miserable nights.

At the summit there was no one at first sight, except maybe the ancient bones of Queen Maeve under her burden of a million small stones. From far away in the lower fields, by the sea of Strandhill, her cairn looked distinctive but small. Only when I walked up to it on my tired legs did I realise what an enormous thing it was, the labour of a hundred men, gathering from the mountain long ago the strange harvest of fist-sized stone, starting maybe with the queen under a few carefully laid slabs, and slowly, like single turves added to a turf stack, like single events added to an epic story, making the great mound for her to sleep under. I say sleep, but I mean moulder, diminish, vanish into the hill, creeping down in the moisture underground, feeding little diamonds and glints of heather and moss. For a moment I thought I could hear music, a swell of old American jazz, but it was only the bleary wind staggering over the summit. And in the music I heard my name. 'Roseanne!'

I looked around and could see no one. 'Roseanne, Roseanne!'

Now the old childhood fear got a hold of me, as if I might be hearing a voice from the next world, as if the banshee herself might be sitting atop the cairn with her last strands of dusty hair and her hollow cheeks, wanting to add me to the underworld. No, but it wasn't a woman's voice, but a man's, and now as I looked a figure rose from a little enclosure of stones, in black clothes, black hair and a whitened face.

'There you are,' said John Lavelle.

I had taken the time from the clock in the everything shop down in Strandhill village, but I still thought it an unlikely success to have met him here on the barest of information. Sunday at three. If it had been a great necessity, if it had been contingents of an army meeting to overwhelm the enemy by stealth, it might not have worked out so neatly. But fate it would seem is a perfect strategist and will work miracles of timing to assist our destruction.

I walked down to him where he stood. I think I had a great sympathy for him, I think that was it, he having lost his brother in such a terrible fashion. He was like a piece of the history of my childhood that I could not sever myself from. He had an importance whose nature I could not really fathom. It was a sort of dire respect, for him who was only a ditch-digger maybe, but nevertheless for me had an heroic aspect, the prince in beggar's clothing.

He was standing in what looked like a little bare bed of stones. One time it might have been roofed with a slab that had long ago fallen or been pulled sideways.

'I was lying in here,' he said. 'It makes a lovely suntrap. Feel my shirt.'

And he held out the black front of his shirt. When I put a hand on it briefly it was quite warm.

'That's what the sunlight will do in Ireland,' he said, 'given half a chance.'

Then we had nothing to say it seemed for a few moments. My heart was pounding under my ribs, I was afraid he would hear it. Oh, it wasn't love for him. It was love of my poor father. To be close to a man who was close to my father. The awful, dangerous, inexplicable stupidity of it.

I suddenly saw it. I suddenly thought, Tom has married a mad woman. It is a thought that haunted me many many times since. But I am nearly proud to say that it was I myself first had that thought.

I could not resist the lure of the river. The open sea could not keep me. The salmon lays her eggs on the shingle of the last narrow reaches of her home river, where the water first trickles from the earth. Mysterious world, mysteries upon mysteries, queens in stones, rivers gathering underground.

'Do you know what it is, Roseanne?' he said, after a while. 'You are the very spit of my wife.'

'Your wife, John Lavelle?' I said, suddenly angry.

'My wife, yes. You look like her, or maybe your face has taken the place of hers in my memory.' 'And where is your wife then?'

'She's on the North Island of the Inishkeas. In '21 a few of the island lads burned down the police barracks. I don't know why, because there was no polis in it. So the Black and Tans came out in a boat to see what they could see by way of revenge. My twins were only new born that time. My wife Kitty was standing at the door of our house, holding the two boys, one in each arm, to "air" them as we say in Irish. The Tans who were a good way off decided to take a few pot shots at her. She was shot through the head, and another bullet killed Michael a'Bhilli, and Seanin fell from his mother's arm, and struck his head on the threshold stone.'

He was speaking very quietly and as if fearfully now. I gripped his sleeve.

'I'm sorry,' I said.

'Well, I have Seanin still, he's fifteen now. He's not just right in the head, you know, after his fall. A little bit strange. He's a fellow that likes to stand out on the margin of things, looking in quietly. His mother's people are rearing him, and so he has his mother's name, you know the fine old island name of Keane. But he likes to talk to me. I told him the last time I was home about you, and he asked me a hundred questions. And I said to him if anything happened to me, he was to look out for you, and he said he would, although I don't think he understood the half of what I was saying, nor even knows where Sligo is.'

'Why would you tell him to do that, John Lavelle?' I said. 'I don't know. Only that…' 'Only that what?'

'That I don't know what's going to happen to me now. I think I must go for the gun again. I haven't taken much to the road digging. That's one reason, and it frightens me to death.

The other reason might be, that I never saw anyone as lovely as you only except Kitty.'

'You're nearly a stranger. There's nothing of normal things in this.'

'There it is,' he said. 'A stranger. It's a country composed entirely of strangers then. You are right. But all the same what do people say when they feel like I do? I love you, they say, I suppose.'

We had been there a good while and now I heard other voices, new voices coming up from below. I gathered my self and my wits, and almost bolted for the path. There was no way down the mountain except by that course, though my first thought was to strike out across the heather and scree eastwards, but at the same time I knew there was a great cliff below Knocknarea, and I might be many hours trying to get round it, and onto a road. So many hours that Tom might finally wonder what was amiss with me, and even raise the country to find me. Such were my thoughts as the wind, stiffened now as it came on towards teatime, threw my hair forward across my face, and the little group came into view below.

It was a group of men in black coats and cassocks. A little party of priests out on a Sunday walk. Wasn't there a touch of blasphemy in that? Would that their piety and their prayers and their rules had kept them close in the town. But here they were, with their different laughter, and their murmuring voices. I looked back wildly to see where John Lavelle might be. Oh, he was standing right behind me, like a component of the wind itself.

'Go back away!' I said. 'Can't you hide yourself? I can't be seen up here with you!' 'Why not?' he said.

'Why not? Are you mad? Are you as mad as me? Go and hide yourself in those rocks.'

But it was too late. Of course it was. The gaggle of holy men was upon us, all smiles and good days, and raising of the hats. Except for one face, whipped red by the exertion and the wind, which looked at me with a blank, heart-hurting look. It was Fr Gaunt.

When I got back down to our little house in Strandhill, Tom was not there because he had gone into Sligo to greet 'the General' at the station, in preparation for a parade along Wine Street, to highlight as Tom put it the great enthusiasm for General O'Duffy's movement in the town. He had begged me to put on a blue blouse that Old Tom had been inveigled into stitching up for me, but the truth was that part of Tom frightened me. I suppose in the original Cafe Cairo, in Cairo itself -and I do not think nice Mrs Prunty was ever there – there was a lot of use of the hubble bubble, not to mention the famous hootchie cootchie girls doing their belly dance. I had never seen a man with opium in him, but I wondered was it something like the almost oriental glow in Tom's face when he spoke of the General, and Corporatism (whatever that was, I'm not sure he really knew himself), and getting back at the 'traitor de Valera', and the 'true start of Ireland's glory', and all the rest of the jangling song of those times. When they had marched in Sligo, they were all coming out to Strandhill for a rally in the Plaza. Not the least of my residual dread after meeting John Lavelle was the obvious fact that a man like him was in effect the 'enemy' of the General's movement. I don't know why that bothered me so much, but it did. I stood in our little sitting room, bare as a tenement but clean and nice, and shivered in my summer dress. I shivered, and shivered all the more when I heard the sound of engines in the distance, a little roaring noise that grew and grew, till I ran to the window and looked out and saw the stream of Fords and the like going by, Tom at the front driving his own vehicle, with a very important-looking creature altogether in the seat beside him, in one of those folding caps and a hooked nose not unlike Tom's brother Jack's. There were dozens and dozens of surging motors, all with their metallic music, the white dust of the narrow seaside road rising from the wheels like the Sahara itself. And all the faces, men and women, alight above the blue blouses and shirts, with that strange glow, just a few fields east of happiness – the picture of impossible optimism, like advertisements in the odd American magazine that reached us in that far-off world of Sligo, sent to relatives wrapped up with the coveted Yankee dollars.

And I had the curious sensation of looking out on someone else's world, someone else's Tom, someone else's Sligo. Like I wasn't going to be there very long, and had not been there long enough, or even had never been there. Like a ghost to myself and certainly not for the first time.

I went to bed and lay in the cool sheets and tried to be calm. I tried to be myself, and yet could not really locate that person. Roseanne. She was maybe slipping away from me. Perhaps had done so long ago. In the war of independence it wasn't just soldiers and policemen had to be killed, even those stupid fellas that had gone out to the Great War without thinking what they were doing, but also tinkers and tramps and the like. People that were dirtying up the edges of things, those people that stood at the edges of photographs of nice places and in certain people's eyes were starting to stink them up. When there were bombs dropped on Belfast by the Germans in that coming war, tens of thousands of people fled out into the countryside, thousands of them from the Belfast slums, and no one wanted them in their houses, because they were a forgotten race of savages, so poor they had never seen a lavatory, and would eat nothing but tea and bread. They pissed on the floors of decent houses. It was all the people that were hidden till the Germans bombed them out of it, burned them out. Like my father's poor rats. I was lying in a bed of clean sheets, but I felt like them. Like them, I wasn't grateful enough, and had fouled my own nest. I knew that in the eyes of Tom's friends outside, gathered in the Plaza, if they knew everything about me, they would want to – I don't know, extinguish me, judge me, put me outside the frame of the photographs of life. The delightful landscapes of ordinary life. Of course I knew nothing of Germans then, except the General was a man like they had in Italy, in Germany, in Finland those times, mighty noisy men that wanted to fire everyone up and have them all clean and fit and pure, so that they could go out in a great horde and extinguish the lousy, the ragged, the morally unsound. Somewhere in my heart, in the passport of my heart, if you opened it, you would see my real face – unwashed, seared by fire, terrified, ungrateful, diseased, and dumb.

I awoke in the small hours, nudged into wakefulness by little sounds of Tom in the room. There was a huge moon over Knocknarea, the cairn visible as if in the very sunlight. I was still caught in a dream, and just for a moment thought I saw a figure atop the cairn, in black clothes, with a great fold of bright wings behind him. But of course it was far too far away for that.

'Are you awake, pet?' said Tom, and when I looked at him, he was struggling out of his braces.

'You have blood on your face,' I said, sitting up.

'I have blood all over my blessed shirt,' he said, 'although you can barely see, what with the blue.'

'My God,' I said, 'whatever happened, Tom?'

'Nothing at all. We had a bit of resistance from the guards in Sligo. We were marching as good as gold, when out from Quay Street comes a fierce little muster of lads, fellas brought in from Collooney I suppose, because they were not regular Sligo guards. And one of them gave me such a swipe with a stick, I tell you, it hurt like the bejaysus. And the General starts roaring at them, and the guards roaring back, "You have no permit to march in Sligo!" And the General the head of the same guards only a few years ago. Well. There was such shouting and frothing about generally. So we were very glad to get out to the hall, let me tell you. And didn't we have a great time then. Such a crowd you never saw.'

By this time he had his nice striped pyjamas on and then he went to the washstand basin and vigorously flung water at his face, and wiped it off in the towel, and then threw himself into the bed beside me.

'What did you do?' he said. 'You ought to have come. It was great.'

'I went walking,' I said.

'Oh ho,' he said, 'did you? And why not?'

Then he put his left arm under my hand and held me close to him, and after a while, between the blood and moonlight, we went to sleep.

Dr Grene's Commonplace Book

There was absolute panic in the building yesterday. I must say I was almost encouraged by the level of response, because so often in the past there has been what felt like a cloud of inaction hanging over these old roofs. But the young lady who had been found upset and bloodstained had then disappeared. The ward nurse was terrified, because her sister had just been in, and given her a gift of a nice new dressing-gown. Nurse had noted the belt made of the same light material as the gown, but had not had the heart to remove it straight away. So she was tearing about the wards, asking everyone had they seen the poor unfortunate woman, and generally making the ancient patients stir for the first time in many years. In the end it was discovered not that she had hanged herself, but that she had gone down to front office in her dressing-gown, and signed herself out, as she has the perfect right to do under the new legislation. And had gone down to the main road and hitched a lift to the town, and from there boarded a bus to Leitrim, all of this still in the gown. It was like a magic coat, carrying her back to Leitrim. Her husband rang last night to tell us, and he was a very angry voice at the other end of the phone. He said the hospital was supposed to be a place of refuge. The head nurse spoke to him, and was very submissive, not in the style of the old matrons we used to have here. I don't know what resolution this will have, but it struck me as having all the qualities of a rescue. I wish the poor woman well and I am sorry we were of so little use to her, quite the opposite. And I am very glad the nurse's panic was unfounded.

This morning I went up to Mrs McNulty's – no, no, Roseanne's – room quite light-hearted. Of course, the position of the young woman is still perilous, but I am old enough now to put a premium on mere life.

The room had a little bit of sideways spring sunlight, that seemed to have crept in through the window-glass with an almost apologetic delicacy. A little square beam of it sat across Roseanne's face. Yes, she is very old. Sunlight as always the most brutal measurer of age, but also, the most faithful painter. I thought of the line from T. S. Eliot that we learned at school in England,

My life is like a feather on the back of my hand, Waiting for the death wind.

It is spoken by Simeon, the man who wished to live long enough to see the newborn Messiah. I do not think Roseanne is waiting for that. I thought also of those self-portraits of Rembrandt van Rijn, so faithfully faithless to the idea of our own looks that we carry as an antidote against remorse. How we decide not to allow the fact that our skin is dropping down our jaws and coming away underneath our chins like plaster detaching from its laths in an old-fashioned ceiling.

Her skin is so thin you can see the veins and whatnot, like roads, rivers, towns, and monuments on a map. Something stretched for purposes of writing on it. No monk however would have risked the nib of a pen on such thin parchment. And again I thought, how beautiful she must have been, if she is so oddly beautiful now at one hundred years old. Good bones, as my father used to say, as if, growing old himself and those he knew growing old around him, he knew the value of them.

She has a rash on one side of her face though, quite red and 'angry' as they say, and I thought her tongue was rather in the way of her talking in some way, like it was a little swollen at the root. I must get the medical doctor Mr Wynn to have a look at her. She may well need an antibiotic.

Whether she caught my mood or what, I don't know, she was very responsive, even revealing. She was at her ease in a curious way. Maybe it was happiness. I know she absolutely delights in the improvement of the weather, in the turning of the year. She puts a lot of faith in those daffodils along the avenue, planted there by some old grandee when this place was a great house and estate, in those old vanished days. With fearful delicacy on my own part, trying to take my cue from the sunlight, I finally broached the subject of her child. I say 'finally' as if I have successfully broached a thousand other subjects, or have been leading up to the child. But I had not. But the whole matter has been much on my mind, because of course, if what Fr Gaunt wrote is true, then the whole question of her state of mind and her long presence here and in Sligo is decidedly and probably permanently vexed. Speaking of Sligo, I have written again to ask if I may visit there sometime soon, and talk to the administrator, who it turns out is an old acquaintance, a man called Percival Quinn, I think the only Percy I have ever heard of in the present era, let alone met. It was he apparently who made the extra effort to dig out Fr Gaunt's deposition, and there may well be other files there that even Percy feels can't be communicated, but I don't know. We are like MI5 sometimes in this our profession of psychiatry. All information becomes sensitive, worrying, and vulnerable, even sometimes I think the mere time of day. However, I will follow my instincts.

Tonight there is total calm in the house. It is almost as eerie as the knocking was. But I am grateful. Human, alone, ageing, and grateful. Would it be out of place to write here, to write here directly to you, Bet, to say, I love you still, and am grateful?

Roseanne was so vulnerable, so admirable, so open in my meeting with her, I knew I could have asked her anything, pursued any topic, and probably got the truth, or what she believes is the truth. Well I knew it, my advantage, and if I had pressed it, I would have gained a great deal but, maybe, lost something. Today was the day she might have told me everything, and today was the day I opted myself for her silence, her privacy. Because it strikes me there is something greater than judgement. I think it is called mercy.

Roseanne's Testimony of Herself

Dr Grene came in, very upbeat, drew up his chair like he certainly meant business. I was so taken aback that I actually engaged in a certain amount of conversation.

'It is a lovely spring day,' he said, 'and I am emboldened to ask you again some of these wearying old questions that I am sure you wish I would stop asking. But I do feel there may be some gain in doing so. Just yesterday I heard something that makes me feel that nothing is impossible. That things that at first sight seem dark and intractable may actually be able to admit some light, some unexpected light.'

He talked like that for a while and finally reached the question. It was again about my father and I was content enough, for the second time, to tell him that my father was never in the police. I told him though that there was a police connection in the McNulty family.

'My husband's brother called Eneas was in the police. He joined them in about 1919, which was not a good time to seek employment there,' I said, or words to that effect.

'Ah,' said Dr Grene, 'so you think that may be how the police connection was – was mooted?'

'I don't know,' I said. 'Are the daffodils out yet on the old avenue?'

'They are nearly out, they are threatening to come out,' he said. 'They may be fearful of a last frost.'

'The frost is nothing to the daffodils,' I said. 'Like the heather, they can bloom in the snow.'

'Yes,' he said, 'I believe you are right. Now, Roseanne, the second topic I thought I might raise with you is the topic of the child. I am reading in the little deposition I mentioned that there was a child. At some point.'

'Yes, yes, there was a child.'

Then I said nothing because what could I say. I am afraid I started to cry as quietly as I could.

'I don't mean to upset you,' he said, with great softness.

'I don't think you do,' I said. 'It is just that – looking back, it is all so -'

'Tragic?' he said.

'That is a big word. Very sad anyhow, it seems to me.' He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a little folded paper handkerchief.

'Don't worry,' he said, 'I haven't used it.'

I took the useless little object gratefully. Why wouldn't he have used it, him with his own troubles so recently? I tried to imagine him sitting somewhere in his house, a place of course unknown to me. With his wife gone from him. Death as ruthless as any other lover, taking her away.

And I dabbed at my tears. I felt like Barbara Stanwyck in a stupid weepie, or at least Barbara Stanwyck when she was a hundred years old. Dr Grene was gazing at me with a face so miserable I laughed. Then he perked up at this and laughed too. Then the two of us were laughing, but very softly and quietly, like we didn't want anyone else to hear.

I must admit there are 'memories' in my head that are curious even to me. I would not like to have to say this to Dr Grene. Memory, I must suppose, if it is neglected becomes like a box room, or a lumber room in an old house, the contents jumbled about, maybe not only from neglect but also from too much haphazard searching in them, and things to boot thrown in that don't belong there. I certainly suspect – well, I don't know what I certainly suspect. It makes me a little dizzy to contemplate the possibility that everything I remember may not be -may not be real, I suppose. There was so much turmoil at that time that – that what? I took refuge in other impossible histories, in dreams, in fantasies? I don't know.

But if I put my faith in certain memories, perhaps they will serve as stepping stones, and I will cross the torrent of 'times past', without being plunged entirely into it.

They say the old at least have their memories. I am not so sure this is always a good thing. I am trying to be faithful to what is in my head. I hope it is trying also to be as faithful to me.

It was the simplest thing in the world. He just never came home. For a whole day I waited. I cooked the hash as I had promised him in the morning, because he had a weakness for foods mashed up and reheated, even though it was his brother Jack was the navy man. It is a great favourite with sailors and soldiers, as my own father might attest. But the food cooled again under its cover. Night closed over Knocknarea, over Sligo Bay, over Ben Bulben, where John Lavelle's brother Willie had been murdered. On the upper slopes, in the privacy of the thinner air and the heather. Shot in the heart, was it, or the head, after surrendering. John Lavelle saw that from his hiding place. His own brother. The brothers of Ireland. John and Willie, Jack and Tom and Eneas.

I knew immediately something was terribly wrong, but you can know that and not allow the thought in your head, at the front of your head. It dances around at the back, where it can't be controlled. But the front of the head is where the pain begins.

I sat there I must confess in a swelter of love for my husband. It was his strange efficiency, even his purposeful stride along the pavements of Sligo. His waistcoats, his gaberdine, or his trenchcoat with the four linings, his boots with the patented double sole, that would never need mending (of course they did). His beaming face and the ruddy signs of health in his cheeks, and his cigarette on the loll in his mouth, the same brand his brother smoked, 'Army Club Sandhurst'. And his musicality and his confidence, the way he was always up in the world, and ready for it. And that he was not only ready for it, he was going to conquer it, conquer Sligo and all points west and east, 'from Portugal to the Sea' as the old saying went, although in truth that is a nonsensical saying. Tom McNulty, a man that had every right to life because he honoured it so in the enjoyment of it.

Oh dear, oh dear, I sat there. I am sitting there still.

I am old enough to know that time passing is just a trick, a convenience. Everything is always there, still unfolding, still happening. The past, the present, and the future, in the noggin eternally, like brushes, combs and ribbons in a handbag.

He just didn't come back.

Out there in Strandhill, on nights there were no dances, when only the odd car was heard coming into the village above, there was an owl that used to call. I think it lived on the backland under Knocknarea, where the land falls and becomes a sort of valley to the sea. The owl lived close enough for his one repeated note to come clearly over the scrubby fields and the wastelands. Calling and calling, as if to say what I don't know. Do creatures that wake and hunt in the night, call to their possible mate in the night? I suppose they must.

My own heart was also calling, signalling out into that difficult human world. For Tom to come home, to come home.

chapter seventeen

Two nights later I think I must have been still sitting there. Although this is hardly possible. Had I not eaten, gone out to the toilet at the back of the hut, stretched my legs? I can't remember. Or rather, I only remember the sitting there, and then, just as the twilight came down on Strandhill, calming everything, even the colours of the grass, that night breeze hurrying in from the bay, making my roses rustle at the window-glass, or at least the new buds, tap tap tap, like Gene Krupa himself starting a little something on the drums. And then, as if on cue, I heard coming up the road and around the corner and in the door the strains of 'Honeysuckle Rose', just a few notes at first, and then I heard Harry B. hit the drums, and then the clarinet going, which I supposed was Tom, and someone on the piano, obviously not myself, and by the rusty stabs he was making I guessed it was maybe Old Tom himself, and that was probably Dixie Kielty on the rhythm guitar he loved like a child, oh, and they were unfolding it, stem by stem and bloom by bloom, just like honeysuckle itself, though that was a bloom for later in the year in those parts.

Of course then I knew it was Saturday. That was something to get my bearings from.

By Jiminy though that is a great song for the guitar solo.

'Honeysuckle Rose'. Whap whap whap go the drums and up and down and round the clock go the chords of the guitar. You can drive even the hill boys of Sligo half mad with that song. A dead man would dance to it. A dumb man would cheer the solos.

It was said, at least Tom told me, that Benny Goodman would give a good twenty minutes to that song, at dances. I could well believe it. You could play it all day and still have things to say with it. That was it, you see, it was a speaking song. Even without someone singing the words.

So.

So, I went over there. It was the strangest darkest feeling to do that. To put on what I had of finery there, my best dress, hurriedly dab on some 'slap', comb my hair, fix it, shove on my stage shoes, and all the while breathing in and out a little heavily, then stepping out into the breeze, feeling the chill in it, so that my breast seemed to shrug minutely. But I didn't care about that.

Because I thought it was still possible everything was all right. Why did I think that? Because I had not heard otherwise. I was in the middle of a mystery.

It was early for the dance but there were cars coming out from Sligo already, their big beams like big shovels shovelling the rutted road. Expectant faces in the cars, and lads standing on the running boards now and then. It was a happy sight, the happiest sight in Sligo.

I was feeling more and more like a ghost the nearer I came to the Plaza. Now the Plaza used to be just a holiday house, and they built the hall on at the back, so the front looked just like an ordinary dwelling, except concreted over, erased somehow. There was a nice flag fluttering above the roof, with P-L-A-Z-A written on it. There wasn't much in the way of lights, but who needed lights, when the building was the Mecca of everyone's weekday dreams and thoughts. You could slave all week in a rotten job in the town, but as long as you had the Plaza…It was bigger than religion, I can tell you, the dancing. It was a religion. To be denied the dancing would have been like what's-it, excommunication, to be not allowed the sacraments, like the IRA men in the civil war.

Boys like John Lavelle of course.

'Honeysuckle Rose'. Now the band let that be and began to play 'The Man I Love', which as the world and his brother knows is a slower tune, and I was thinking it wasn't such a good choice for so early in the night. Ever the band member. Every tune is right in the right moment. Some tunes only rarely find their moment, like some ould Christmas song, or slushy old ballads in the deeps of winter when everyone wants to be melancholy. 'The Man I Love' is for the second last dance, or thereabouts, when everyone is weary but happy, and there is a shine on everything, faces, arms, instruments, hearts.

When I entered the hall there were only a few souls dancing. I had been right, it was much too early for that song. But the band all the same had a late-night look to them. Old Tom was playing the solo bit near the start, and then his son was cutting in with the clarinet. It was actually shocking. Maybe the people there noticed also that Tom, my Tom, seemed a little drunk. He was certainly swaying a bit, but he held the music just fine, until suddenly he seemed to stall, and took the beak out of his mouth. The band played the song to the nearest ending, and stopped as well. Their faces looked round at Tom, to see what he wanted to do. Tom placed his instrument down with his usual care, stepped down off the stage, and swayed away backstage, to where our dressing room was. I didn't know whether he had even seen me.

I was going to go in there too. There was only the dancefloor between me and the old curtains that hung across the door. I stepped forward, full of intent, but suddenly there was Jack at my side, his face very stern in the turning shadows.

'What do you want, Roseanne?' he said, the coldest I had ever heard him, and he could be an arctic man.

'What do I want?'

It was funny, I had been so silent for two or three days that my voice almost cracked when I spoke, gghh, like a needle dropped on a record.

I don't suppose anyone was looking at me. We must have seemed like two old friends chatting, as a thousand old friends did there on a Saturday night. What would friendship have done without the Plaza, let alone love?

My stomach was probably empty, but that didn't stop my body from trying to throw up. It was a reaction to the ice in Jack's words. It told me more than any little speech of his could, no doubt the little speech I was about to hear. It wasn't the voice of the executioner, like that Englishman Pierrepoint the Free State government brought over in the forties to hang IRA men, but it was the voice of the judge, announcing my execution. How many murderers and felons already know by the very look on the judge's face, never mind the black cloth shortly put on his head, their fate, even though every fibre of their being cries out against the knowledge, and hope is brought right to the very brink of irrevocable words. The patient staring up into the face of the surgeon. Death sentence. What Eneas McNulty got for his being in the police. Death sentence.

'What do you want, Roseanne?'

'What do I want?'

Then that dry retching. Then people were looking at me. Probably thought I had downed a half bottle of gin too quick, or the like, like nervous dancers did, or dodgy customers as Tom called them. There was nothing to show for my retching, but that didn't stop my grievous embarrassment. Close on the heels of which was a deep deep feeling of something, maybe remorse, maybe self-horror, that bored down into me.

Jack hung back from me as if indeed I were a cliff, or something dangerous that might crumble at the edge, and send him plummeting to his death. The cliffs of Mohar, Dun Aengus.

'Jack, Jack,' I said, but meaning what, I didn't know.

'What's going on with you?' he said. 'What's going on with you?'

'Me? I don't know. I feel sick.'

'No, not now, not fucking now, Roseanne. What have ya been up to?'

'Why, what's they saying I was up to?' Now, that didn't even sound like English to me. What's they saying. Like some old Black song from the Southern States. But Jack didn't say. 'Can I go back and see Tom?' I said. 'Tom doesn't want to see you.' 'Of course he does, Jack, he's my husband.' 'Well, Roseanne, we'll have to see about that.' 'What do you mean, Jack?'

Then suddenly he wasn't icy any more. Maybe he remembered other days, I don't know. Maybe he remembered I was always friendly to him, and respectful of his achievements. I liked Jack, God knows. I liked his sternness and his queer quick gaiety now and then, when he would suddenly shake out his legs, and do what he called an African dance. At a party as may be, just all of a sudden, no warning, an enormous gaiety that would seem to get a hold of him and sweep him all the way to Nigeria. I liked him, with his nice coats and his even nicer hats, his thin gold watchchain, his car that was always the best car in Sligo, bar the big saloons of the toffs.

'Lookit, Roseanne,' he said. 'It's all very complicated. There's a book opened for you up at the shop in Strandhill. You won't starve.'

'What?'

'You won't starve,' he said.

'Look,' I said, 'there's no reason for me not talking to Tom. Just to have a word. This is what I came down to do. I don't expect to – to play in the band, for God's sake.'

This was not very logical, and I do believe I shouted the last few words. This was not a good move with Jack, who was so extremely selfconscious, and hated a scene above all else. I don't suppose his precious Galway girl ever made a scene. Nevertheless Jack kept his cool, and came a few inches closer to me.

'Roseanne, I've always been a friend to you. Trust me now, and go back to the house. I'll be in touch. This whole thing may blow over yet. Just calm down and go back to the house. Go on, Roseanne. The mother has spoken on this matter and there's no going against the mother.'

'The mother?'

'Yes, yes, the mother.'

'And what in the name of God does she say?'

'Roseanne,' he said, fiercely, quietly, 'there's things about the mother you don't understand. There's things about her I don't understand. She's had her own vicissitudes when she was a child. The result is, she knows her own mind.'

'Vicissitudes? What vicissitudes?'

He was almost hissing now when he spoke, seemingly in a ferment not to be heard, but also, to impress something on me that was maybe impossible to impress.

'Old stuff. She's determined that Tom will make good, because, because – ould reasons, ould reasons.'

'You're talking like a lunatic,' I shouted. I might have burned him with a burning stick.

'But look, but look, the whole thing may blow over,' he said.

Somehow in my heart of hearts I knew if I turned about and left that dancehall that 'the whole thing' would most certainly not blow over. There is a moment to speak to a topic, just like there is a moment for every song, no matter how rare. This was a rare moment in a life and I knew that if I could just see Tom, or rather, just let him see me, the woman he loved so greatly, desired, revered and loved, everything would be all right, eventually.

But Jack was barring my way. No doubt about it. He was standing just a little sideways to me, like a salmon fisherman about to cast out across the stream, leaning his weight on his left foot.

Jack wasn't a bastard, he wasn't a cruel man. But in that instance he was a brother, not a brother-in-law.

He was also a mighty big obstacle. I tried to surge forward, to go past him by mere force of will, a substance much softer than he was trying to go through him. He was hardened by his sojourns in Africa, it was like hitting a tree, he put his arms around me as I tried to break away down the hall, and I was screaming, screaming for Tom, for mercy, for God. His arms closed around my waist, closed tight tight around, hamma-hamma tight, to use the words he had learned in Africa, the pidgin English he liked to mimic and mock, he drew me to him, so that my bottom was fastened into his lap, docked there, held tight, fast, impossible to get away, like a weird love embrace.

'Roseanne, Roseanne,' he said. 'Will you whisht, woman, whisht.'

Myself roaring and caterwauling.

That's how much I loved Tom and my life with Tom. That's how much I baulked at and hated the future.

Back in the corrugated-iron hut I didn't know what to do with myself. I went to bed to sleep but there was no sleep. A cold creeping feeling came into my brain, lending a physical pain, as if someone were opening the back of my grey matter with the sharp sharp blade of a tin opener. Hamma-hamma sharp.

There are some sufferings that we seem as a creature to forget, or we would never survive as a creature among all the other creatures. The pain of childbirth is said to be one, but I cannot agree there. And the pain of whatever had happened to me is certainly not one either. Even as a sere old crone in this room I can still remember it. Still feel a shadow of it. It is a pain that removes all other things except itself, so that the young woman lying there in her marriage bed was just all pain, all suffering. I was drenched in a strange sweat. The chief part of the pain was caused by the enormous panic that nothing would ever arrive, no circus, Yankee cavalry, human agency, to relieve it. That I would always be sweltering in it.

And yet I suppose it was of no importance. In that I was of no account in the world, in a time of dark suffering much greater than mine, if the ordinary history of the world is to be believed. This comforts me to think of now, curiously enough, but not then. What would have comforted that writhing woman in a lost bed in the lost land of Strandhill I do not know. If I were a horse they would have shot me out of mercy.

It is no small thing to shoot a person, yet in those days it seemed to be considered a thing of small account. Generally, in the world. I know Tom was gone shortly with the General out to Spain to fight for Franco, and there was a lot of shooting there. They drove men and women to the edges of scenic abysses and shot them, and let them fall away into those fathomless places. The abyss really was both history and the future. They shot people into the ruin of their country, into the moil and the ruin, just like in Ireland. In the civil war we shot enough of each other to murder the new country in its cradle. Enough and more.

I am speaking for myself, as I see things now. I didn't know much about such things then. I had seen murder though, with my very eyes. And I had seen how murder could travel sideways and take other lives all unbeknownst. The very cleverness and spreadingness of murder.

Next morning it was an absurdly beautiful day. A sparrow had got into the house and was very dismayed and alarmed to see me when I came into the empty sitting room from the bedroom. I walked it into a corner, took its wild beating self into my hands, like a flying heart it seemed, brought it to the door which I had forgotten to close in my strange grief the night before, and walked out onto the porch, raised my arms, and released the little useless grey bird back into the sunshine.

As I did this, Jack McNulty and Fr Gaunt were coming up the road towards me.

As priests felt in those times that they owned the new country, I suppose Fr Gaunt felt he also owned the iron hut, and at any rate he walked straight in, and chose a rickety chair, not speaking a word yet, Jack striding in after him, and myself nearly backing into a corner like the sparrow. But I did not think somehow they would gather me in their hands and let me go.

'Roseanne,' said Fr Gaunt.

'Yes, Father.'

'It's been a little while since we spoke last,' he said. 'Yes, a little while.'

'You've been through a few changes since, I suppose that is true to say. And how is your mother, I haven't seen her either this long time?'

Well, I didn't think that needed answering, it was him had wanted to commit her to the asylum, and anyway I couldn't have answered it even if I had wanted to. I didn't know how my mother was. I suppose that was evil of me not to know. But I didn't. I hoped she was all right, but I didn't know if she was. I thought I knew where she was, but I didn't know how she was.

My poor beautiful mad ruined mother.

And of course I started to cry. Not for myself strangely enough, though I am sure I could have, with capital and interest, but no, not for myself. For my mother? Who can really itemise the cause of our human tears?

But Fr Gaunt wasn't interested in my stupid crying.

'Em, Jack here wishes to represent a certain family angle on things, isn't that correct, Jack?'

'Well,' said Jack. 'We want to keep the party clean. We want to act the white man here. Everything has a solution, no matter how knotted it has become. I believe this to be true. Often in Nigeria there have been problems that seemed insurmountable, but with a certain flair of application…Bridges over rivers that change their course every year. That sort of thing. Engineering has to meet all these problems.'

I stood there patiently enough and listened to Jack. Actually it probably qualified as the longest speech he had ever made to me, or at least in my presence, or my vague direction anyhow. He was looking very shaven, spruce, clean, his leather collar up, his hat set at a perfect angle. I knew from Tom that he had been drinking spectacularly for a few weeks past, but he didn't look at all unwell. He was engaged to be married to his Galway girl, and that, said Tom, had put him in a bit of a manly panic. He was going to marry her and bring her out to Africa with him. Tom had shown me pictures of Jack's bungalow in Nigeria, and Jack with groups of men, both white and black. Indeed I had been intrigued, enchanted maybe was the word, to see Jack in his nice open shirt and white trousers, with a cane, and in one picture there was a black man, maybe an official also, though not in an open shirt, but a full black suit, with waistcoat, and stiff collar and tie, in what degree of heat I did not know, but looking quite cool and confident. Then there was a picture of Jack with a crowd of nearly naked men, dark dark dark black, the lads maybe that had dug the canals there that Jack was building, long straight canals Tom had said, going off upcountry to bring the longed-for water to distant farms. Jack, the saviour of Nigeria, the bringer of water, the builder of bridges.

'Yes,' said Fr Gaunt. 'I am sure it is all fixable. I am sure it is. If we put our heads together.'

I had a not very relaxed vision of my head put near Fr Gaunt's severely cropped head and Jack's elegantly hatted head, but it dissolved in the floating motes of the sunlight that pierced the room.

'I love my husband,' I said, so suddenly it nearly made me jump. Why I said it to those two emissaries of the future puzzles me even now. Two men less likely to say it to, with any good result, I could not think of. It was like shaking the hands of the two poor soldiers requisitioned to attend to my execution. That was how it felt as soon as the words were out.

'Well,' said Fr Gaunt, almost eagerly, now that the subject was broached. 'That is all history now.'

I made a few little grunts then of consonants and vowels, my brain not really sure what words to use, but then got out the word:

'What?'

'I need some time in which to find the boundaries of this problem,' said Fr Gaunt. 'In that time I want you, Roseanne, to remain where you are, here in this hut, and when I am able to bring things to a resolution, I will be better able to inform you of your position, and then make arrangements for the future.'

'Tom has put the matter in Fr Gaunt's hands, Roseanne,' said Jack. 'He has the authority to speak in the matter.'

'Yes,' said Fr Gaunt. 'That is so.'

'I want to be with my husband,' I said, since it was true, and the only thing I could say without anger. Because rising up greater than the feeling of abject grief was a new anger, a sort of hungry wild anger, like a wolf in a fold of sheep.

'You should have thought of that before,' said Fr Gaunt, with a matching succinctness. 'A married woman -'

But he stopped. He either did not know what to say next, or did and chose not to, or did not want to, or could not bring himself to say the words. Jack actually cleared his throat like he was in a film at the Gaiety cinema, and shook his head, as if his hair were wet and needed shaking. Fr Gaunt looked suddenly grievously, gravely embarrassed, just as he had that night long ago when Willie Lavelle's body lay so barely, so ruined, in my father's temple. I suspected what he was thinking. This was the second time I had brought him into a situation that caused him what? Displeasure, disquiet. Displeasure and disquiet at the nature of woman? Who knows? But suddenly I was looking at him with eyes of unexpected contempt. If my gaze had been made of flames it would have turned him to cinders. I knew his power, which in that situation was absolute, and it seemed to me in that moment that I knew his nature. Small, self-believing to every border, north, south, east, and west, and lethal.

'Well,' said Fr Gaunt, 'I think we have done our business here, Jack. You must stay where you are, Roseanne, get your groceries from the shop every week, and be content with your own company. You have nothing to fear, except your own self.'

I stood there. I am content to say that caught as I was, without rescuers as I was in that moment, there was a fierce, dark fury moving through me, wave upon wave, like the sea itself, that was bizarrely a comfort. My face maybe showing only a shadow of it, as faces will.

The two dark-suited men went out into the sunlight. Dark suits, dark coats, dark hats trying to lighten in the flood of seaside blues, yellows, greens.

Rage, dark rage, lightened by nothing.

But a raging woman all alone in a tin hut is a small thing, as I said before.

The real comfort is that the history of the world contains so much grief that my small griefs are edged out, and are only cinders at the borders of the fire. I am saying this again because I want it to be true.

Though one mind at a pitch of suffering seems also to fill the world. But this is an illusion.

I had seen, with my own eyes, much worse things than had befallen me. With my own eyes. And yet that night, alone and unfathomably angry, I screamed and screamed in the hut as if I was the only hurting dog in the whole world, no doubt causing horror and disquiet to any passing person. I screamed and I squawked. I beat my breast till there were bruises there the next morning so that my breast looked like a map of hell, a map of nowhere, or as if the words of Jack McNulty and Fr Gaunt had actually burned me.

And whatever my life had been up to that day, it was another life after that. And that is the gospel truth.