The Secret Scripture

chapter eighteen

Unfathomable. Fathoms. I wonder is that the difficulty, that my memories and my imaginings are lying deeply in the same place? Or one on top of the other like layers of shells and sand in a piece of limestone, so that they have both become the same element, and I cannot distinguish one from the other with any ease, unless it is from close, close looking?

Which is why I am so afraid to speak to Dr Grene, lest I give him only imaginings.

Imaginings. A nice sort of a word for catastrophe and delusion.

Years and years they left me there, because it takes years to sort out what they were trying to sort out, Jack and Fr Gaunt and no doubt others, for the saving of Tom McNulty. Was it as much as six, seven, even eight? I cannot remember.

When I wrote those words a few minutes ago, I put down my biro and placed my forehead in my hands, and thought a while, trying to fathom those years. Difficult, difficult. What was true, what was not true? What road did I take, what road refuse? Poor ground, false ground. I think an account before God must, must contain only truth. There is no human agency I need to bamboozle. God knows the true story before I write it, so can easily catch me out in falsehood. I must carefully winnow out one from the other. If I have a soul remaining, and perhaps I do not, it will depend on it. I think it must be possible that souls are rescinded in hard cases, cancelled at some office in the halls of heaven. That you arrive at the gates of heaven already at the wrong address, before St Peter says a word.

But it is all so dark, so difficult. I am only frightened because I don't know how to proceed. Roseanne, you must leap a few ditches now. You must find the strength in your old corpse to leap.

Is it possible I spent all those years in that hut without event, collecting my groceries every week, saying nothing to no one? I think it is. I am trying to be certain. Without event, I say, and yet I knew that war had begun in Europe, just like those days when I was a little girl. And yet I saw no army uniforms now. The hut was like the centre of a huge clock, the turning of the year in Strandhill, the roaring of the cars going by on Saturday night, the kids with their buckets, the starlings all winter, the darkening and brightening mountain, the heather with its snow of tiny flowers, what a comfort, and myself trying to do my bit with the roses on the front porch, tending them, clipping them back ready for the off, and watching them day by day in the strengthening year plump out their bulbs; 'Souvenir de St Anne's' they were, now I think of it, a rose bred in a Dublin garden out of that famous rose bred by Josephine in memory of Napoleon's love for her, 'Souvenir de Malmaison'.

Now, dear reader, I am calling you God for a moment, and God, dear dear God, I am trying to remember. Forgive me, forgive me if I am not remembering right.

I would rather remember aright than just to remember things so they will stand in my favour. That luxury is not allowed to me.

When Fr Gaunt finally came back to me, he did so alone. I suppose a priest is always alone in some sense. Never a creature to lie at his side. And he looked older suddenly, less the bright prospect, I could see he was losing his hair just at the temples, it was drifting back, a little tide that would not be coming in again.

It was high summer and he looked very hot in his woollen clothes. He ordered his clothes from the clerical outfitters in Marlborough Street in Dublin – how I knew that I do not know now. These clothes were quite new, oddly stylish, the soutane like something a woman might wear at a pinch to a formal dance, if in another colour, and shorter. I was tending to my roses as he came in the little gate, surprising me, giving me a fright really, because no one for a long, long time had made that noise on the latch except myself, creeping out late at night to walk on the dunes and the marshy ground, which was now dry and springy from a few weeks of comparative heat. I think I was presentable, unlike later, I had a scissors to cut my own hair in front of Tom's little shaving mirror, and my dress was clean, with that lovely stiffness in the cotton from being dried on a bush.

He carried a little leather case with him, scuffed and dented here and there from long and assiduous use. Really this man might have qualified as an old friend, I had known and had dealings with him so long. He was certainly qualified to write quite an intimate history of my life, since he had been witness to certain curious parts of it.

'Roseanne,' he began, with just exactly the same tone as he had used those years before, indeed as if this was a mere continuance of that conversation. There was no hello, how are you, or hesitancy. In fact he had the demeanour of a doctor with serious news to impart, not even the friendly alertness of Dr Grene when he has to make yet another gentle assault on my 'secrets'. Can I say I disliked him? I don't think so. Nor though did I understand him. What gave him pleasure in life, what sustained him. He did give my roses a glance as he went up the little steps and on into the dark hut.

I wiped my fingers on the wood of the steps, just to get the green juice off them, and followed him in.

Was it not an extraordinary meekness in me to stay in that hut at his bidding? I am almost ashamed to think it might be so. Should I not have raged at him that time before, rushed at his throat and the throat of Jack, got my teeth on his jutting Adam's apple and ripped out his voice? Berated them, shouted at them? But to what end? Only rage, useless rage expending itself on the white dust of a Strandhill road.

'I haven't anything to offer you, Father,' I said. 'Unless you will take a glass of Beecham's powders?'

'Why would I drink a glass of stomach powders, Roseanne?'

'Well, it says on the packet, a refreshing summer drink. That's why I bought it.'

'It is for those who have overindulged,' he said. 'But thank you.'

'Well, you are welcome, Father.'

Then he sat down just where he had sat before and indeed I had not seen any reason to move the chair from where it stood. The sunlight had followed us both into the room and lay about us in dusty bushels.

'I see you are keeping well,' he said.

'Oh, yes.'

'Of course, I have had my spies keep an eye on you.' He said this without any trace of guilt. Spies. 'Oh,' I said. 'I did not notice them.' 'Well, naturally,' he said.

Then he opened the case on his lap, the lid obscuring the contents. He took out a sheaf of papers, very neat and clean, the top one containing I could see a very impressive-looking design or seal.

'I have been successful,' he said, 'in my efforts to free Tom.'

'Excuse me?' I said.

'If you had followed my advice, Roseanne, some years ago, and put your faith in the true religion, if you had behaved with the beautiful decorum of a Catholic wife, you would not be facing these difficulties. But I do appreciate that you are not entirely responsible. Nymphomania is of course by definition a madness. An affliction possibly, but primarily a madness, with its roots possibly in a physical cause. Rome has agreed with this estimate, in fact the department of the Curia that deals with these thankfully rare cases not only agreed, but also posited the same theory. So you may rest assured that your case was seen to with all the thoroughness and fairness of minds well-informed, disinterested, and with no bad intention of any kind.'

I looked at him. Neat, black, clean, strange. Another human creature in the lair of a human creature. His words sombre, measured, at ease. No trace of excitement, victory, nothing only his usual careful, measured tones.

'I don't understand,' I said, nor did I, though I think I knew, all the same.

'Your marriage is deemed null, Roseanne.'

As I did not speak, after a full half minute, he said, 'It never happened. It does not exist. Tom is free to marry another, as if he had never been married. Which as I say he never was.'

'This is what you have been doing these last years?'

'Yes, yes,' he said, with some impatience. 'It is a monumentally complex undertaking. Something like this is never granted lightly. Deep deep thought at Rome, and my own bishop of course. Weighing everything, sifting through everything, my own deposition, Tom's own words, the elder Mrs McNulty who of course has experience of the troubles of women, in her work. Jack of course is away in India at the war, or else he might have made his contribution. The courts sit in careful judgement. No stone unturned.'

I was still staring at him.

'You may rest assured every possibility of justice has been afforded to you.'

'I want my husband to come here.'

'You have no husband, Roseanne. You are not in a state of matrimony.' 'I am divorced?'

'It is not a divorce,' he said, suddenly with vehemence, as if he found the word disgusting in my mouth. 'There is no divorce in the Catholic church. The marriage never existed. By reason of insanity at the time of the contract.'

'Insanity?'

'Yes.'

'How do you reckon that?' I asked after a moment, and with difficulty, words now becoming awkward and thick in my mouth.

'We do not believe your indiscretions are confined to one instance, an instance you will remember I was witness to with my own eyes. It was not thought probable that that instance did not have a history, given of course your own position visa-vis your early years, not to mention of course the condition of your mother, which we may assume was hereditary. Madness, Roseanne, has many flowers, rising from the same stem. The blooms of madness, from the same root, may be variously displayed. In your mother's case an extreme retreat into herself, in your case, a pernicious and chronic nymphomania.'

'I don't know what that word means.'

'It means,' he said, and yes, with a trace of fright now in his eyes, because he had used the word once and maybe thought I had accepted it. But he knew I spoke the truth and he was suddenly afraid now. 'It means a madness manifest in the desire to have irregular relations with others.'

'What?' I said. The explanation was as mystifying as the word.

'You know what it is.'

'I don't,' I said, and I did not.

I had shouted the last words, and indeed he had shouted his. He put the papers swiftly back into the case, closed it with a snap, and stood up. For some reason I noticed how polished his shoes were, with that little skirt of road dust on them from when he had no doubt reluctantly left his car and approached my house.

'I will not explain it to you further,' he said, almost in a paroxysm of annoyance and anger. 'I have tried to make your position clear. I believe I have done so. You understand your position?'

'What is that word you used?' I shouted. 'Relations!' he shouted, 'Relations! Congress, sexual congress!'

'But,' I said, and before God this was the truth, 'I never had relations with another besides Tom.'

'Of course, you may take refuge in an atrocious lie, if you choose that.'

'You may ask John Lavelle. He will not fail me.'

'You do not keep up with your paramours,' he said, quite nastily. 'John Lavelle is dead.'

'How can he be dead?'

'He went back into the fold of the IRA, thinking we would be weakened by this German war, shot a policeman, and was justly hanged. The Irish government brought Albert Pierre-point himself over from England to do the work, so you can be sure it was done well.'

Oh, John, John, foolish John Lavelle. God rest and forgive him. I will admit I had often wondered about him, where he was, what he was doing. Had he gone back to America? To be a cowboy, a train-robber, a Jesse James? He had shot a policeman. An Irish policeman in an Irish state. That was a terrible act. And yet he had done me the great grace of keeping away, he had not haunted me again as I had feared he might, he had kept himself away, he had not sought to trouble me again, having no doubt a true understanding of the trouble he had brought me on Knocknarea. That had been his promise, and he had kept it. After the priests had gone, he had gripped my hand, and promised me. He had honoured his promise. Honour. I did not think this other man in front of me now had as much.

Fr Gaunt wanted to move past me now, to get to the narrow door and out and away. For a moment I blocked his path. I blocked it. I knew I would have the strength if I willed it to kill him, I felt it in that moment. I knew I could snatch at something, a chair or anything close to hand, and bring it down on his head. And as true as my declaration to him was, this was also true. I would have if not happily, at least gladly, open-heartedly, fiercely, finely, murdered him. I don't know why I did not.

'You are menacing me, Roseanne. Step back away from the door, there's a good woman.' 'A good woman? You say that?' 'It is an expression,' he said.

But I stepped out of his way. I knew, I knew any proper, decent life was over. The word of a man like that was like a death sentence. I felt all about me the whole hinterland of Strandhill speaking against me, the whole town of Sligo murmuring against me. I had known it all along, but it is a very different matter to know your sentence, and then to hear it spoken by your judge. Perhaps they would come out and burn me in my hut for a witch. Truest of all things, there was no one to help me, no one to stand at my side.

Fr Gaunt removed himself neatly from the dreaded house. The fallen woman. The mad woman. Freedom for Tom, my lovely Tom. And what for me?

Dr Grene's Commonplace Book

Absolute stillness again in the house last night. It is as if, having called out to me one last time, she will never need to call out to me again. This thought brought me out of fear, and into quite a different state. A sort of pride that after all I had love in me, buried in the mess. And that maybe she also. I listened again not out of fear, but a sort of sombre longing. But knowing nothing again would be asked or answered. A strange state. Happiness I suppose. It didn't last, but like I would a vulnerable patient in the throes of grief, I asked myself to note it, remember it, give it passionate credence when other darker feelings assail me again. It is very difficult to be a hero without an audience, although, in a sense, we are each the hero of a peculiar, half-ruined film called our life. Now there is a remark that will not bear much scrutiny, I fear.

What is that passage in the bible about the angel that sits inside us? Something similar. I can't remember. I think it is only the angel, the part of us unbesmirched maybe, that is such a connoisseur of happiness. He would want to be, because he tastes little enough of it. And yet… Enough.

Angels. A sorry subject for a psychiatrist. But now I am old, and have tasted grief that in the first days I thought might murder me, flay me, hang me, so I say, if only in the privacy of this book, why not? I am mortally sick of the rational mind. What creature does that look like? The celestial pedant?

I have been reading through Fr Gaunt's deposition again. I wonder if such all-knowing, stern-minded, and entirely unforgiving priests still exist? I suppose they do, but in private as it were. Maybe it was because de Valera's parentage was so insecure or mysterious that he took especial comfort in the confidence of the clergy. He certainly enshrined them in his constitution, but it is also true that he resisted the final demand of the archbishop of that day actually to make the Catholic church an established church. Thank God he didn't go so far, but he went far enough, far further than perhaps he ought. He was a leader wrestling with angels and demons, sometimes in the same body. Having been in the IRA in the war of independence, then the IRA as it was represented by the anti-Treaty forces, and indeed imprisoned after the civil war, he found when he came to power in the thirties that his erstwhile comrades, who rejected both the Treaty and him for good measure, needed to be suppressed with the utmost force. This must have caused him enormous grief, and troubled his dreams, as it would anyone's. Fr Gaunt itemises the fate of a man called John Lavelle, who figured in Roseanne's life, who in the end was hanged by de Valera at the outbreak of World War Two, quite without mercy. Others of his comrades were flogged, and I did not know there was judicial flogging in Ireland, not to mention hanging. Fr Gaunt says it was thirty-six lashes of a cat-o'-ninetails, but that sounds much too harsh. But for de Valera it must have been like whipping and hanging his sons, or the sons or heirs of the companions of his youth. Which must have constituted another sort of disruption in him. It is a wonder the country ever recovered from these early miseries and traumas, and de Valera is to be greatly pitied that he was met with these necessary horrors. Perhaps here we can also trace the origin of the strange criminality of the last generation of politicians in Ireland, not to mention so many priests being found to have moved across the innocence of our children with the harrows and ploughshares of abuse. The absolute power of such as Fr Gaunt leading as day does to night to absolute corruption.

I had the unworthy thought that maybe de Valera's great desire to avoid the Second World War was not because he feared the enemy within, feared to split his new country, but that it actually constituted a further effort to expunge sexuality. A sort of extension of the intentions of the clergy. In that instance, if this is not too obvious and crude, male sexuality.

I am so tired at this moment that I do not know whether what I am writing is banal. Later I can tear it out.

This man Lavelle, for all that he may have shared a prison yard with Dev long ago, and was hanged on Dev's watch, as you might say, was no angel. According to Fr Gaunt, he brought his captive policeman into the hills behind Sligo, put a hood over his head, and held a gun to his temple. He kept spinning the barrel and pulling the trigger. I should think the poor garda was soon in a state of terror. Lavelle was trying to find out when the wages were brought into the barracks, because he had a desire to rob the very pay of the police. It seems an esoteric crime. But the garda for whatever reason, courage or ignorance, would not or could not answer. Lavelle clicked away with the gun. Some of his accomplices had also kidnapped the garda's wife and daughter, and were holding them in a derelict house in the town, and Lavelle kept telling him that they would be killed if he did not answer. But truth to tell the poor man mustn't have known too much. Eventually Lavelle shot him. This all came out because one of his companions turned State's evidence, and got away with the above-mentioned flogging. But the war had begun and de Valera was terrified the IRA would become strong again and he knew that they were already in contact with the Germans. And if Dev had a second religion its name was neutrality, he defended that to the last ounce of his sense. So he could not spare Lavelle. In all honesty I cannot say he was any great loss.

I write this as if I were a holy man in a beehive hut on Skellig. Of course I am not. It behoves us I suppose to admit we are all brother and sister to these modern sins. And civil war is an evil that befalls all souls equally.

Although there was nothing in my training that allowed me to talk of sins.

Fr Gaunt tells all this in his document in I think a sort of massive Ciceronian effort to implicate, no, perhaps that's not the right word, somehow to wrap Roseanne in some of the same knotted wool, to catch her up in it. Fr Gaunt spared no ink in that direction. It really is a remarkable piece of work, clerical, thorough, and convincing. It is like a forest fire, burning away all traces of her, traversing her narrative and turning everything to ashes and cinders. A tiny, obscure, forgotten Hiroshima. There is a sort of anxiety throughout the document, an anxiety that expresses itself sometimes in excessive, or I should say unexpected, detail. Fr Gaunt is almost clinical in his anatomising of Roseanne's sexuality. It is exceedingly strange of course to read about this Roseanne of old, when the bearer of the same name is one hundred years old and in my care. I don't know if really it is privileged information. It feels sometimes highly voyeuristic, morally questionable to read it. Partly because Fr Gaunt's own morality is of an old-fashioned kind. He betrays at every stroke an intense hatred if not of women, then of the sexuality of women, or sexuality in general. For him it is the devil's cloak and hood, whereas for me, it is a sort of saving grace of being alive. I am no enemy of Mr Sigmund Freud. It is also crystal clear that he regards her Protestantism as a simple, primal evil in itself. His anger that she would not let herself be made a Catholic at his request is absolute, long before she married her Catholic husband, and likewise remained what she was. This in itself for Fr Gaunt is a real perversion.

So he believes from very early on that she is, if not evil, then stubborn, difficult, perhaps mysterious. He does not ever pretend to understand her, but he certainly claims a hold on her history. She has laid herself open to the eyes of the town, she has flaunted her beauty by, it must be said, merely being beautiful. It is as if she has tempted all of male Sligo, and then, having snared this Tom McNulty, a rising man in the new country, she chooses to abase herself before a wild creature like John Lavelle, whom Fr Gaunt describes as a 'savage man from the darkest corner of Mayo'.

Then, having done such a thing, and having been duly offered assistance by Fr Gaunt, this assistance is rejected. You can feel his new fury here. Fury. She is put to live in an iron hut in Strandhill, where again she is like a magnet to the lusts of Sligo. Most terrible of all, Fr Gaunt having secured from Rome an annulment of her marriage, Roseanne then becomes mysteriously pregnant, and bears a child. Bears a child, says Fr Gaunt, and in a savage line of his own, containing only three words, he writes: 'And kills it.'

If I had read those words years ago, with the authority of a priest behind them, I would myself have been obliged to commit her.

chapter nineteen

Roseanne's Testimony of Herself

John Kane is becoming more mysterious by the minute. He does not speak at all now, but this morning offered what I think was a smile. It was certainly an odd, broken-sided effort. The left side of his face seems to have fallen a little. When he was going out he managed to give the loose floorboard another whack with his shoes. I wonder does he do it to signal to me that he knows there's something there. He can't think it is of any value anyhow, or it is not in his nature to look under floorboards. I was trying to remember as I stood by the window watching him how long I have known him. It seems like my acquaintance with him stretches into the very ashy distant times of childhood, but that is not correct. It is a long long time anyway. He has been wearing the same blue denim coat for about thirty years I should say. Which is a match for my own threadbare wardrobe. My dressing-gown shamed me in the windowlight, because there I could see how splashed and blotched the front of it is. My instinct was to retreat from the light, but having got so far from the bed, I couldn't give up my advantage. I wanted to ask him about the progress of the spring outside, now that he has revealed himself a botanist, or the nearest thing I have to it. White, yellow, blue is the sequence. Snowdrops, daffodils and bluebells, and as the daffodils come on the snowdrops are beginning to die away. I wonder why that is. I wonder why anything is.

Then I became quite dizzy at the window and felt a sort of lurching in my limbs, like my joints wanted to fold me over. I lifted my arms and tried to balance myself against the wall. To give John Kane his due, he was not yet out into the corridor, and came back in and helped me into bed, though it is not his task. He was quite gentle and was still smiling. I looked up into his face. He has hair on his face not quite a beard, more like the patchy heather on bogland. His eyes are quite blue. Then I realised he wasn't truly smiling, but that his mouth is caught somehow, he can't seem to move it easily. I wanted to ask him about it, but didn't want to embarrass or upset him. I suppose that was stupid of me.

It was not so long after Fr Gaunt's 'visit' that I was wandering over the further dunes of Strandhill beach on a crisp, moonlit night. Since he had come to see me I had felt very confined in the iron hut, as if his presence were somehow still in the room. I waited with no trace of patience every night for darkness, which at least gave me the liberty of the dunes and the marshland.

I had no desire to be seen by anyone, or talk to anyone. Sometimes out walking I would be in such a peculiar state of mind that I would rush home at the merest hint of another person. Indeed, there were times I used to fancy I actually saw people that possibly weren't there, little tricks of the marram grass or whatnot, the rise of a marsh bird – in particular I seemed to be 'haunted' by a figure that sometimes appeared, seemed to appear, at the far edges of where I was, in what might have been a black suit, and what might have been a brown hat, but even when I gathered my courage and walked towards him, the few times I thought I saw him, he instantly disappeared. But such matters were the nature of those days.

I remember this night in particular because it is probably the single most peculiar thing I ever witnessed, having seen a few peculiar things in my time.

I have to be very careful with these 'memories' because I realise there are a few vivid remembrances from this troubled time that I know in my heart cannot have happened. But I don't think this night is one of them, improbable though it was.

It is a measure of my shame that instead of climbing to the top of the hill of sand itself, which I had previously loved to do, though it was at the risk of bumping into, even stumbling over, the courting couples, I had walked out right to the edge of everything, where a deep narrow river poured into the sea, and in the daytime was a sort of luncheonette for seabirds.

I stood on the sand. The tide was out a way, and it was all perfectly quiet. Far off to the right of Knocknarea, some twisting little road entertained the lights of an unseen motorcar, appearing and disappearing. But it was too far away to hear it.

There was no wind and the sky was enormous and that enamel blue the moonlight makes. It was very easy to suppose that one human creature was the least important element there. The sea stood off in acre after acre of private, dreamy water.

Then in the distance, that tiny growling. I actually looked behind me, thinking there might be a rabid dog or some such on the beach. But no, the sound was coming from far off to the right of me. I looked towards it, all along the empty beach, to the small lights of the few buildings on the strand about an eighth of a mile away. There I saw a sort of line of piercing yellow light begin to grow on the horizon, a horizon half land and half sea.

I thought God was coming to cancel me out just as surely as Fr Gaunt had. I don't know why I thought that, except, I felt that guilty.

The thin glimmering line grew and grew. The noise also increased, and under my bare feet I thought I felt the sand tremble, tremble deep under me, as if something were rising up through the ground. The lights widened and grew taller, and then it was roaring, gathering and gathering, and then it was what looked like the edge of a flying carpet of monsters, and then that noise had grown into the noise of an enormous waterfall, and I was looking up, indeed like a mad woman, certainly feeling as mad as a hatter, and fuller and fuller, bigger and bigger, came the noise and the lights, till I could see the round bellies of individual parts of it, and metal noses, and gigantic whirrings, and it was airplanes, dozens of them, maybe hundreds, all animal-like in the moonlight, but bizarrely, with the little thin windows visible at the front, and perhaps it was really madness, but I thought I could see little heads and faces, and it was all in formation as they say, grim, catastrophic, like something at the end of the world. And because the airplanes were all together, their noise was increased truly to biblical proportions, something out of Revelation, and the sky was filled with it over my head, metal, light and ruckus, and they poured over me, flying so close to the water that the power of the engines sucked up the water, tore the water up in torn sheets, that fell back to the surface with a swishing of snakes, and I could feel the airplanes pull at me, pull at the beach, trying to tear us from our places, trying to pull the brains out of my skull, the eyes out of my sockets, and then they were pouring over me, line after line, were there fifty, a hundred, a hundred and fifty? – for full minutes pouring over, and then beginning to draw away further, leaving a huge vacuum it seemed in the sky, leaving a silence almost more painful than the noise, as if those mysterious airplanes had taken the oxygen out of the Sligo air. And off they went, rattling and ravelling the Irish coast.

Some days later I was out on my porch, fussing over my roses. It was an activity that even in my distress brought a tincture of comfort. But then it is clear to me that any effort at gardening, even a haphazard, stop-go one such as mine was, is an effort to drag to earth the colours and the importances of heaven. It was cold that day and there were goosebumps raised along my bare arms. The very existences of the roses, not yet seen, furled so tightly and mysteriously in their green buds, was making me almost dizzy.

I looked back over my right shoulder because I heard someone moving along the road. Someone or something, it might have been an old donkey scuffling along, to judge by the noises. I didn't really want to be seen by man nor beast, even though there was such comfort in my roses. Maybe this year there would be a new look to them, not quite 'St Anne's' or Malmaison', but becoming slowly Sligo, 'Souvenir de Sligo', a memory of Sligo. But it wasn't a donkey, it was a man, a very strange man, I thought, because his hair was cut tight to his head in a sort of frizz, like a Negro jazzman, and his suit of clothes was a strange dark ashen colour. No, it wasn't a suit of clothes, more of a uniform of some kind. Even his face looked queerly blue. And to my astonishment I saw that it was Jack. Of course, that would explain the uniform, and him off in India wasn't it, fighting in the king's name – but if he was off in India what in the world was he doing in Strandhill, No-Man's-Land that it was?

And then it seemed suddenly colder than the mere cold of the treacherous Irish seaside day, and there seemed to be goosebumps added to my goosebumps. Wasn't this odd apparition my enemy now?

'Jack?' I called out anyhow, throwing caution to the wind. I had the mad thought that he might have come to help me. But what had happened to him? Now he was closer and even odder, if I didn't know better I would say he was singed, he was veritably singed.

The man stopped on the path, maybe astonished I had spoken to him. In fact he looked frightened.

'Jack McNulty?' I said, as if that might be helpful. Surely he knew his own name. Now I'm sure I looked as uncertain as he did.

He spoke like a man who has not spoken for a few days, the words stumbling out of his lip.

'What?' he said. 'What, what?'

He looked so solemnly scared I went down the path to the gate and stood nearer to him. I thought he might bolt away down the road, like a donkey after all. But I was just a small woman in a cotton dress.

'You're not Jack McNulty, are you?' I said. 'You certainly look like him.'

'Who are you?' he said, and gazed back towards the sea like he feared an ambush.

'I'm no one,' I said, meaning no one for him to fear. 'I'm Roseanne, Tom's wife – as was maybe.'

'Oh, I heard about you,' he said, but without the expected censure. He suddenly seemed very glad to be talking to me, to be meeting me. He raised his right hand a moment as if he meant to shake one of mine, but he let it drop. 'Yes.'

I was so relieved, I was so delighted he had taken this tone with me that I wanted to joke with him, to be pleasant with him, to tell him all the things that had happened, just little things, like the two rats the night before that I had caught in the act of carrying away one of my eggs through a hole in the hut wall, a hole so small one rat had put the egg up on his belly and let the other rat pull him away through the gap! Ridiculous. But it was the friendliness in his voice that did it, the mere simple friendliness, a thing I hadn't heard for so long, and didn't even know I missed.

'I'm Eneas,' he said, 'Tom's brother.'

'Eneas?' I said. 'What are you doing here?'

'I'm not really here,' he said. 'I shouldn't be here, and I should be gone shortly.'

'What's the stuff all over you?'

'What stuff?' he said.

'You're all black,' I said, 'And grey, like ashes.' 'Jesus, so I am,' he said. 'I was in Belfast. I was going back to France, you know. I'm a soldier.' 'Like Jack,' I said.

'Like Jack, only he's an officer. I was in Belfast, Roseanne, waiting for my ship, sleeping in a little hotel, when the few poor lousy sirens they have there went off, and in a few minutes they came in, the bombers, dozens and dozens and dozens, dropping their bombs at will, not a puff in the sky of an antiaircraft gun, not a puff, and all around me the houses and streets erupted. How did I get out, I ran like a demon along the ways, screaming I do not doubt, and saying wild prayers for the people of Belfast, and soon there were hundreds in the streets, all doing the same as me, people in their nightdresses and people naked as babes, running and screaming, and at the edge of the city we just kept going, and the waves of planes had come in behind us, all the while without mercy letting go the bombs, and an hour later, or maybe more, I cannot say, I was perched on the edge of a huge dark mountain, and looked back, and Belfast was a huge lake of fire, burning, burning, the flames leaping like red creatures, tigers and such, high high into the sky, and those that had run with me were also looking, and weeping, and giving out sounds like the lamentations of the bible. And I thought of the bit of the bible they like to give out in the seamen's missions, where I used to frequent before the war, being just a wandering man, They who are not written in the book of life will be cast into the lake of fire, and I trembled trembled to see the anger of the Lord, excepting it wasn't the Lord, but those Germans away up nearer the stars, looking down on their work and I should think marvelling, marvelling as much as us.'

This man Eneas stopped. He was trembling again now. He was in a bad state. The reflection of that lake of fire was still burning in his eyes.

'Come in,' I said, 'just for a minute, and rest.' Whether this was a maternal instinct or a sisterly I cannot say. But suddenly an enormous rush of tenderness went from me to him. I thought, he is like me, a little. He has been cast out from his world, this world of Sligo. And I cannot say he looked like a villain. I cannot say he looked like a murdering policeman of old, of his legend – not that I knew his legend then. Indeed and indeed, how little I knew about him, how rarely his brothers had spoken of him – only with heavy sighs and meaningful looks.

'No, I cannot,' he said. 'You don't know me. I am not a man you want in your house. I'll bring trouble to you. Didn't they tell you, I have a death sentence on my head? I shouldn't even be here in Sligo. I have walked out of Belfast, and through Enniskillen, and just sort of came here, like a pigeon flying home and cannot help it.'

'Come in,' I said, 'and never mind any of that. I am your sister-in-law after all. Come in.'

So in he came. As he walked, little tumbles of black dust fell from him. He had walked all the way from Belfast, a long long way indeed, returning to Sligo like a pigeon – like a salmon looking for the mouth of the Garravoge. He seemed to me the saddest man I had ever met.

When I got him in the hut, I indicated to him without much ceremony to remove his uniform. The first thing he needed was a cup of water to drink, which he drank with a miniature ferocity, like he had a fire also in his insides that needed putting out. I had an old tin bath for my own use, and filled it with a few visits to the well, trying to keep the water clean, while my kettle came to boiling on the fire. Then I was able to take the chill off the bath with the boiled water, but no more than that. All this while the small ashen man stood in the centre of the floor in his long johns, and the cleanliness of that garment surprised me. He was a neat-boned, well-constructed man, not in the slightest plump like Tom, no, not a pick on him.

'I'll go out to the scullery now and put some cheese in a sandwich,' I said.

So for modesty's sake, I left him to it, and I could hear him stumble about a little as he took off his long johns, and stood into the tub, and gave himself a wash. I suppose an army man like him was used to cold washing, I hoped so. Anyway, there wasn't a squeak out of him. When I deemed it right, I came back in. He had suds-ed himself rightly, the tub was a boil of ash-streaked soap, and now was standing again in the centre of the floor, doing up the buttons of his long johns. His hair I now could see was a sort of russet red, even burned so close to his scalp. His skin was darkly marked by the sun, and his hands were rough and thick-fingered. I nodded to him as if to say, Are you all right? and he nodded back, as if to say, I am. I handed him the thick slice of bread and cheese, and he wolfed it down gently where he stood.

'Well,' he said then, smiling, 'it's nice to have family.'

And I laughed.

'I know what you mean,' I said.

Outside it was falling dark and my old companion the owl was starting up his motor. Now I didn't know what to do with him. I seemed to know him so well, at least the makeup of his body and his face, and of course didn't know him from Adam. And yet so gentle and strange a man I never had encountered. He was standing with absolute stillness like a deer on the mountain when he hears a twig snap.

'I thank you,' he said, with complete simplicity and sincerity. I was so affected to be thanked by another human being. I was so affected by hearing another human speak to me with grace and respect. I was standing still also now, staring at him, almost astounded.

'I can take the uniform outside and beat it,' I said, 'otherwise it would never be dry on the morrow.'

'No,' he said, 'leave it alone. I'm not supposed to wear it in the Free State. It'll do as it is, all covered over like that. I'll make my way to Dublin and try to rejoin my unit from there. The sergeant will be very worried about me.'

'I'm sure he will,' I said.

'I'm a good soldier, you know,' he said.

'I'm sure you are,' I said.

'Not the deserting type,' he said, unnecessarily. I could tell he wasn't.

'Do you know,' he said, 'I don't mean anything by this, I mean, me standing here in my long johns, and you a stranger, but, the reason I came to Strandhill was because I used to have a girl, and she and me used to come down here, for the dancing of course, and her name was Viv, and she was warned off of me, you know, and I don't see her. But I wanted to stand on the beach where we used to stand, looking out on the bay. You know, a simple thing like that. And Viv was a lovely-looking girl, she was indeed. And I wanted to say, and not meaning anything by it, but you are also the most beautiful-looking person I ever saw, you and she both.'

Well, that was a lovely speech. And he didn't mean anything by it, unless it was to speak the truth. I was suddenly flushed with a sort of pride, that I hadn't felt for a long time. This man, and he didn't know, spoke like my father when my father wished to say something important. There was a sort of strange old flounce to it, like out of a book, the very book I still guarded and cherished, old Thomas Browne's Religio Medici. And he was a boy from the seventeenth century, so I don't know how that lingo had crept into Eneas McNulty.

'I know you're a married woman,' he said, 'so please forgive me, and you married to my brother.'

'No,' I said, also in the interests of truth, and before I could think better of it, 'I am not a married woman. Or so I'm told.'

'Oh?' he said.

'No,' I said. 'You see, I have had my own death sentence spoke against me.'

Then he was standing there and I was standing there. And I went over to him like a mouse, quietly, quietly, in case I would scare him, and took one of those calloused hands of his, and led him into the room behind, where the owl was better heard, and Knocknarea more easily seen, from the poor feather bed.

Then after that later, we were lying there like two stone figures on a tomb, quite as happy as any moment of childhood.

'I think Jack told me your father was in the Merchant Navy,' he said after a little.

'Oh, yes, he was,' I said.

'Like myself – and Jack too, you know.'

'Oh, yes?'

'Oh, yes. And he said your father was in the old police then, wasn't that it?'

'Jack said that?' I said.

'I think he did. And I was interested to hear that of course, since I was in myself. Which of course cost me dear in the end. But sure, we didn't know. We seem to like to be signing up to things, the McNulty boys. There's Jack now in the Royal Engineers. And even young Tom himself going off to Spain with that Duffy character, hah?'

'O'Duffy. Did he? I didn't know that.'

'O'Duffy, that's right. I should know because he was head of the new police after. Yes, Tom went off, so I'm told.'

'And how did he get on?'

'Jack said he was back in two weeks. Jack didn't think much of Tom going off giving support to Franco now. No. Anyhow, Tom came back. Disgusted he was. Broke with O'Duffy then entirely. He had them stuck in trenches with rats eating their toes, and O'Duffy himself off somewhere, Salamanca I don't doubt. Living it up. Ah well, sure.'

'Poor Tom,' I said. 'That lovely uniform, gone to waste.'

'Oh, indeed,' said Eneas. 'So he wasn't in the police then, your father?' he said, innocently enough, chatting in the moonlight.

'What sort of love-talk is this?' I said, not wanting to offend so innocent a man. He laughed anyhow.

'Irish love-talk,' he said. 'Battles, and who you're for, and all

that.'

And he laughed again.

'When was all that anyhow, going to Spain and everything?' I said.

'Oh, '37, I suppose. It's a long while back, isn't it? Seems like.'

'And do you hear any other more recent news of Tom?'

'Oh, just that he's thriving, you know. The coming man and all that, you know.'

And he looked at me then, maybe fearing he was upsetting me. But he wasn't really. It was nice to have him there. His leg was very warm against my leg. No, I didn't mind him.

The medical doctor was in to me a while ago. He didn't like the rash on my face, and indeed he found it on my back also. Truth to tell I have been feeling a little tired, and I told him so. It was strange, because usually as the spring got going outside I perked up in myself. I could see in my mind's eye the daffodils ablaze along the avenue and I longed to go out and see them, give them a raise of the old hand in greeting. Such long lurking under the cold wet earth, and then, all their resplendent joy. So that was strange, and I told him so.

He said he didn't like my breathing either, and I said I liked it well enough, and he laughed, and said, 'No, I mean, I don't like that odd little rattle in your chest, I think I will give you some antibiotics.'

Then he gave me real news. He said the whole main body of the hospital had been cleared out, and the two wings up my end were the only ones still going. I asked him if the old dames had been cleared out and he said they had. He said it was a terrible job, because of the bed sores, and the pain. He said I was very wise to keep moving about, and not have the bed sores. I said I had had them when I first went into Sligo and hadn't liked them much. He said, 'I know.'

'Does Dr Grene know of these changes?' I said.

'Oh, yes,' he said, 'he has masterminded the whole thing.'

'And what will happen to the old place now?'

'It will be demolished in due course,' he said. 'And of course you will be put in a nice new place.'

'Oh,' I said.

I was suddenly frantic, because I was thinking of these pages under the floor. How would I gather them and keep them secret if I was to be moved? And where would I be moved to? I was in turmoil now, like that blow hole in the cliff the back of Sligo Bay, when the tide comes in and forces the water into the rock.

'I thought Dr Grene had mentioned all this, or I wouldn't have said anything. You're not to worry.'

'What will happen to the tree below, and the daffodils?

'What?' he said. 'Oh, I don't know. Look, I'll have Dr Grene discuss all this with you. You know. That's his department and I am afraid I have strayed into it, Mrs McNulty.'

I was then too weary to explain yet again, for the millionth time in sixty years and more, that I wasn't Mrs McNulty. That I wasn't anybody, wasn't in fact anybody's wife. I was just Roseanne Clear.

chapter twenty

Dr Grene's Commonplace Book

Catastrophe. The medical doctor Mr Wynn, having gone up to attend Roseanne at my request, has inadvertently let the cat out of the bag vis-a-vis the hospital. I mean, I think I thought she knew, that someone would have told her. If they did, the information flew out of her head. I should have been wiser and prepared her. Mind you, I don't know how I would have broached this, without a similar result. She seemed most distressed that the bedbound old ladies are gone. Actually I feel we have all been moved on much quicker than we wanted, but the new facility in Roscommon town will be ready in a while, and there were complaints in the paper that it might be lying unused. So we bestirred ourselves in a final push. Now all that remain are the people here in Roseanne's block and the men's wing to the west. They are mostly old codgers of one sort and another, in their black hospital clothes. They are also very unhappy to hear of imminent plans, and actually what delays everything now is that there is nowhere for them to go. We cannot put them out on the road, and say, right, lads, off you go. They gather about me like rooks, when I talk to them in the yard where they do a bit of walking about and smoking. These are some of the fellows that were so helpful the night there was a fire in the hospital, many of them carrying old ladies on their backs, down the long stairs, quite amazing, and afterwards making jokes about it being a long time since they went with a girl, and wasn't it nice to do the foxtrot again, and related jests. They are certainly not mentally ill the most of them, they are just the 'detritus' of the system, as I once heard them referred to. One of them that I know well fought in the Congo with the Irish army. A good few of them in fact are ex-army men. I suppose we lack a place like Chelsea barracks, or Les Invalides in Paris. Who would be an old soldier in Ireland?

Roseanne was actually sweating in her bed when I went in to her. It may be a reaction to the antibiotics, but I fancy it is simple fear. This may be a terrible place in a terrible condition, but she is a human creature like the rest of us, and this is her home, God help her. I was surprised to find John Kane there, with his gobble-gobble voice like a turkey, the poor man, and though I was suspicious of him, he actually seemed concerned, old rogue that he may be, and worse.

Truth to tell I am not so sanguine about all this myself, and feel very much hurried and harried, but all the same it must be a good thing to be getting new premises, and ones not streaked with rainwater in some of the rooms, and gashes in the slates of the roof that we could get no one to risk fixing, because I am assured the timbers themselves are going. Yes, yes, it is a deathtrap, the whole building, but at the same time the element of depreciation has been scandalously ignored and never funded, and what could have been maintained has been let go to hell. And a species of hell it most likely appears to the untutored eye. Not Roseanne's eye.

Roseanne did perk up when she saw me, and asked me to go to her table and find a book for her. It was a book called Religio Medici in that very old battered copy I have often noticed as I passed. She said it was her father's favourite book, had she ever told me that, and I said, yes, I thought so. I said I thought she might even have showed me her father's name in it once, yes.

'I am a hundred years old,' she said then, 'and I want you to do something for me.'

'What is it?' I said, wondering at her now, coming back so courageously from her panic, if panic it was, and her voice steady again now, even if her old features were aflame still from the damn rash. She looks like she has jumped through a bonfire and dipped her face to the heat.

'I want you to give this to my child,' she said. 'To my son.'

'Your son?' I said. 'And Roseanne, where is your son?'

'I do not know,' she said, her eyes abruptly clouding, almost fainting away, and then she seemed to shake her mind clear again. 'I do not know. Nazareth.'

'Nazareth is a long way,' I said, humouring her.

'Dr Grene, will you do it?'

'I will, I will,' I said, absolutely certain I would not, would not be able to, considering what I knew from Fr Gaunt's blunt statement in his document. And anyhow, all the sea of time between. Her child would be also an old person now surely, even if living? I suppose I might have asked her, Did you kill your child? I suppose I might have asked her that, if I had been so mad myself. No, that wasn't a question that could be posed nicely, even I think professionally. And anyway, she had given me answers to nothing really. Nothing that could alter my opinion of her status, medically speaking.

Oh, and I was suddenly weary, weary, as if I were all her years and more. Weary, because I could not lift her back into 'life'. I could not do it. I could not even lift myself.

'I think you will,' she said, looking at me acutely. 'I hope so anyhow.'

Then rather incongruously she took the book from my hands and then put it back into them, and nodded her head, as if to say, be sure that you do do it.

Roseanne's Testimony of Herself

I am not very well, it seems, I am poorly, but I need to keep going at this because I am coming to the part that I need to be telling you.

Dear Reader, God, Dr Grene, whoever you may be. Whoever you are, I pledge you again my love. Being an angel now. I am joking. Flapping my heavy wings in heaven. Maybe. Do you think so?

Terrible, dreepy, dark February weather I remember, and the worst, most frightened days of my life.

Maybe seven months I was at that time. But I could not mark it for sure.

I was growing so heavy that my old coat could not hide my 'condition' at the shop in Strandhill, though I chose only the last hours of darkness in the working day ever to go there, and in that way winter was a mercy, dark by four.

When I looked at myself in the mirror of the wardrobe I saw a whitened phantom woman with a strangely lengthened face, as if the weight of my belly was drawing me down everywhere, like a melting statue. My belly button was pushed out like a little nose and the hair under my belly seemed to have grown to twice its length.

I had something in me, like the river had something in it when the salmon were running. If there were still salmon in the poor Garravoge. Sometimes the talk in the shop was of the river, and how it was silting up because of the war, because the wharves and harbour upriver in the town itself were closed for the duration, and the dredgers no longer hauled up the great buckets of mud and sand. They talked about submarines out in the bay of Sligo, and the shortages, the scarcity of tea and the odd abundance of things like Beecham's powders. They might also have mentioned the scarcity of mercy. There were next to no cars on the roads and my hut was silent most nights, though bicycles and walkers and pony-and-traps did make their way out for the dance. Someone in Sligo had got up a charabanc and it would come crawling over the sand with its cargo of revellers like a stray vehicle from another century. The Plaza sent out a few points of light which might have been a beacon to any German airplanes in the sky, the like of which I had seen returning from their work in Belfast, but nothing rained down on those dancers except time.

I was only the observer of these matters. I wonder what my fame was in those days, the woman in the corrugated-iron hut, the fallen woman, the witch, the creature 'gone over the edge'. Like there was a waterfall at the edge of their world that a woman could be washed over, like an invisible Niagara in daily life. A vast high wall of boiling, misty water.

A nice-looking woman in an ermine-collared coat looked at me one day as she passed. She was very well-to-do, with black polished boots, and brown hair whose style was the result of many hours in the hairdressers. There was an old house with a high wall across the road from my hut, and she was going there, and there was the sound of a party somewhere, a gramophone playing that song Greta Garbo used to sing. I thought I knew her, so that I had stopped uncharacteristically on the road, without meaning to, as if it were some other days. Much to my astonishment, when I glanced in the gates, I saw Jack McNulty, in the most tremendous coat as usual, but I must say also with a haunted, exhausted face. Or maybe I saw everything in those terms in those days. I wondered therefore if this was the famous Mai, the grand girl of Galway that he had married. I supposed it was. She was my sister-in-law, I suppose – as was.

She seemed suddenly angry and bothered. I am sure I looked a sight, in my wretched coat that had never been much to write home about, and my brown shoes that had turned into clogs of a sort because I had no laces for them, they needed delicate, long laces that such a shop as Strandhill boasted did not stock. Yes, maybe my lower legs showed I had no stockings, which I know was a crime, and as for the swelling stomach under the coat…

'Gone over the deep end, have we?' she said, and that's all she said. She went on then through the gates. I looked after her, marvelling at the words, but also, wondering how she meant it, cruelly, despairingly, factually? It was impossible for me to know. The couple went on together into the house, not looking back, in case I suppose Mai were to be turned to a pillar of salt, glancing back at Sodom.

The weather was worsening and I was growing sick. It wasn't just the sickness in the morning, going out the back of the hut onto the marram grass and heather to retch into the wind. It was another sort of sickness, something that seemed to boil in my legs, and hurt my stomach. I was getting so heavy that it was starting to be difficult to rise from my chair, and I had a great fear of being suddenly stuck there, stranded, and my greatest fear was for the child. I could see sometimes little elbows and knees poking out under my skin, and who could want to bring danger to such a thing? I did not know the number of months, and I was so terrified I would start to birth the baby, far from anyone who would help me. I wished time and again I had spoken to Mai, or called out to Jack, and I don't know why I did not, except that my state was visible and plain to them, and they had not thought to help me. I knew that wild women on the plains of America went into the scrubland alone to give birth to their children, but I did not want Strandhill to be my America, and have to attempt something so lonesome, so full of danger. While it had been just myself, I had learned a little strategy of secrecy and survival, but now I was drifting well beyond that. I did pray to God that He might help me, I said the Our Father a thousand thousand times, if not on my knees, then by necessity in my chair. I knew I must do something, not for myself, as it was clear I was beyond help and sympathy, but for the baby.

It was somewhere in those days of February that I set out on the road to Sligo town. I had spent an hour or two washing myself. The night before I had washed my dress, and tried to dry it all night before the dying fire. It was a little damp when I put it on. I stood before the mirror and combed my hair again and again with my fingers, because for the life of me I couldn't find my brush. I had one last spark of red lipstick in a surviving tube, just one last smudge for the lips. I wished I had some pancake for my skin, and all I could do was take some old plaster off the part of the hut that was the fireplace, built of solid stone, crumble it in my hands, and try to smear it on evenly. I was going into the town itself and I would have, to some degree, to be respectable. I worked away at myself like Michelangelo on his ceiling. There was nothing I could do about my coat, but I tore a strip off the sheet on my bed, and wound it round my throat for a scarf. I did not have a hat, but anyway, the wind was so fierce it wouldn't last long. Then off I went, pushing further up the hill than I had been for a long time, passing the Church of Ireland church at the corner, and onto the Strandhill road. I wished I could hitch a lift from the underbelly of one of those German planes I had seen, because the road stretched long and forbidding before me. The mountain reared up at my right, and I wondered at myself that I had ever walked up there so readily, so easily. It was as if a hundred years had elapsed.

I don't know how many hours' walking it was, but it was a long, hard walk. The sickness, though, seemed to pass from my body as I went along, as if there was no room for it in my present emergency. I started to become strangely buoyant and hopeful, as if my mission might be blessed after all. I started to tell myself, she will help me, of course she will help me, she is a woman also, and I was married to her son. Or might have been if it hadn't been crossed out in Rome. I thought, cold though she had been those years ago, when first I appeared in her bungalow, surely her long experience of the world would oblige her to cast aside her dislike and – and so on.

Round and round and round in my head it went, mile after mile, my feet plodding on, with that kind of splayed-out motion because of my big belly, not a pretty sight you may be sure, and me convincing myself of this certainty.

Dr Grene's Commonplace Book

We have a demolition date now, of all things, not that far off. I must keep reminding myself. It is somehow very difficult to imagine this eventuality, although everywhere in the hospital are items standing boxed up and ready, every day vans and lorries come and bring stuff away, great reams of correspondence and records have been put in store, dozens of patients have been moved out, places suddenly, unexpectedly, in the daft way of these things, found even for my poor black-coated men, and some even tentatively put back among – among the living I almost said. Sheltered housing is the official phrase, for once a decent, human phrase. At my assessment, such as it is. A core group at the end will go to the new facility. Oh, but, I feel mightily desirous to reach a conclusion about Roseanne. Nice letter from Percy Quinn in Sligo saying to come over any time I liked. So I must set my mind to doing that. He sounded so friendly that in writing back I asked him if he knew where old Royal Irish Constabulary records were kept in Sligo, and if he could find out, he might look for the name of Joseph Clear among them, of his kindness. The civil war years were so disruptive, destructive, I don't even know if such arcana survive, or if anyone would have bothered to protect them if they had. The Free State army, trying to bomb the Irregulars out of the Four Courts in Dublin, burned almost every civil record to ashes, births, deaths, marriages, and other documents beyond price, wiping out the records of the very nation they were trying to give new life to, actually burning memory in its boxes. With guns given or lent to them if I remember rightly by the exiting British, trying no doubt to be helpful to the new government, with that appealing, large-hearted characteristic of the British, as opposed to their concomitant murderousness. Not that I said any of this to Percy. I remembered suddenly as I replied to his letter that he had been at that fateful conference in Bundoran, but he certainly hadn't said anything about that, and I certainly didn't refer to it.

Yesterday afternoon, coming in early and weary, I went up rather fearlessly I thought to Bet's room. I think I may have moved beyond the stage of self-recrimination and guilt. After all, when all is said and done, I am on my own now, and our story is over. I lay on her bed trying to get close to her. I smelled the faint smell of her perfume, Eau de Rochas, that I used to look for at airport duty-frees when they still had such things. I just felt rather light and strange, but not unhappy. I was asking her absence to be there as a sort of bizarre inverted comfort. Just for a few minutes I felt I was her, lying there, and that I, the real other I, was downstairs in the old bedroom, and I wondered what I thought about myself. An inadequate, traitorous, unloving man? A presence oddly necessary, even with a floor and ceiling between? I didn't know. Even as Bet I didn't know

Bet. But just for a few minutes also I had something of her strength, her niceness, her integrity. What a wonderful feeling.

My eye fell on her choice library of rose books, and I took one up and started to read. I have to say it was very interesting, even poetic. I gathered myself up then, and carefully put my hands each side of the collection, and lifted them as one, and turned them on their sides so I could carry them downstairs, like booty, like something stolen. I lay down on my own bed and continued reading, long into the night. It was as if I were reading a letter from her, or was privileged to enter a subject that probably lined her mind like wallpaper. Rosa Gallica, a plain little rose like the one you see carved on medieval buildings as Rosa Mundi, was the first. The late roses are the huge tea roses that look in gardens like dancers' bottoms in frilly knickers. What a creature we are, bringing a simple bloom to that over the centuries, and turning those mangy scavenging animals at the edge of our ancient camp fires into Borzois and poodles. The thing itself, the first thing, will never do us alone, we must be elaborating, improving, poeticising. 'To palliate the shortness of our lives,' I suppose, as Thomas Browne wrote in the book that Roseanne has given me to give to her son. Between Religio Medici and the Royal Horticultural Society's Roses I have pitched a tent of sorts. And that Bet needed and wanted to know all these things about roses suddenly filled me with happiness, and pride. And curiously enough, this feeling didn't give way to regret and guilt. No, it opened room upon room, rose upon rose, to further happiness. That was not only the best day I have had since she died, but one of the best days of my life. It was as if she had dipped something of her essence down from heaven and helped me. I was so bloody grateful to her.

Oh, and I forgot to say (but to whom am I saying it?) that while putting Roseanne's book carefully aside, so I could concentrate on Bet's volumes, a letter almost fell out of it. It was a very curious letter, in that the envelope seemed not to have been opened, unless the damp of her room had somehow resealed it. Furthermore the postmark was from May 1987, fully twenty years ago. So I didn't know what to make of it, or quite what to do with it. My father always taught me that post was somehow sacred, and not only was it an actual crime to open another person's letter, as I believe it is, but a grave moral lapse also. I am afraid I am sorely tempted into such a moral lapse. On the other hand, maybe I should return it. Or burn it? No, hardly. Or leave it?

Roseanne's Testimony of Herself

The edges of the town received me coldly. I suppose I looked like something very wild blown in from the bog. A little girl sitting with her doll in the window of her house, trapped indoors by the storm, gave me a wave, with the mercy of little girls. I was thankful I did not have to go into the town proper. The hard pavement seemed to send bangs into my stomach, but I soldiered on. Then I was at the gates of Mrs McNulty's bungalow.

Old Tom's garden was an acre of beauty just withheld. I could see all his beds of well-prepared plants and flowers trying to bud, with bamboos holding everything against the wind. It was going to be a wonderful show in a few weeks right enough. In the top corner of the field there was an indistinct man digging, who might have been Old Tom. Digging, unperturbed by the twisting gusts and the sleeting rain, in a big coat and a solemn sou'wester. I thought to go over to him but I didn't know who was my enemy. Or I thought, by Jack's bleak stare at the gates across the road from my hut, they were all enemies. I decided not to approach him. I decided to take my chance at the door. I do remember at this point that the muscles in my stomach felt like they had highwire artists using them for swings.

I suppose I was muddy and drenched, I suppose I was. All my efforts to look well had no doubt been entirely undone by the journey. I had no mirror to check myself, except the dark windows each side of the door, and when I looked in there I saw only a ghoul with outlandish hair. That wasn't going to help me. But what could I do? Go back the way I came, in silence, defeated? I was frightened, I was terrified of this house, but I was more frightened of what would happen if I did not press the bell.

I sit here dry and old with measly shins writing this. It is not like long ago, it is not like a story, it is not like it is over and done. It is all to do. It is something like the gates of St Peter, banging on the gates, asking for entrance to heaven, and in my heavy heart knowing, too many sins, too many sins. But perhaps mercy!

I pushed in the thick Bakelite bell. It made no sound going in, but on withdrawing, I heard its petulant rattle inside the hall. Nothing happened for a long time. I could hear my own distressed breathing in the close porch. I thought I heard my heartbeat. I thought I could hear my infant's heartbeat, willing me on. I pushed in the fat button again. Would that I were anyone else ringing there, a butcher's boy, a travelling salesman, and not this heavy, panting embarrassment of a creature. I had a vision of Mrs McNulty's miniature form, her neatness, her face as white as the flower honesty, and just as I did, I heard a scuffling the other side of the door, and the door pulled open, and herself in the gap.

She gazed out at me. I don't know if she knew immediately who it was. She might have thought me a beggerwoman, or a tinker, or something escaped from the madhouse where she worked. Indeed I was a sort of beggarwoman, begging another woman to understand my plight. Forsaken, forsaken was the word that began to ring in my head.

'What do you want?' she said, understandably, probably eventually realising it was me, the undesirable woman her son had married and not married. I supposed she had plotted against me years before, but that did not concern me now. I didn't know how many weeks I was. I was almost afraid I would start to bring forth the baby on her doorstep. Maybe better for the baby if I had.

I didn't know what to say to her. I had never known anyone in my situation. I did not know what my situation was. I needed – I desperately needed someone to…

'What do you want?' she said again, as if inclined to shut the door if I didn't speak.

'I'm in trouble,' I said.

'I see that, child,' she said.

I tried to peer into her face. Child. That sounded there in the porch with the force of a beautiful word. 'I am in desperate trouble,' I said.

'You're nothing to do with us any more,' she said. 'Nothing.'

'I know that,' I said. 'But I've nowhere else to go. Nowhere.'

'Nothing and nowhere,' she said.

'Mrs McNulty, I am begging you to help me.'

'There's nothing I can do. What could I do for you? I am frightened of you.'

This suddenly gave me pause. I had not considered that. Frightened of me.

'I'm not to be frightened of, Mrs McNulty. I need help. I'm,

I'm -'

I was trying to say pregnant, but it didn't seem a word that could be said. I knew in her ears if I said the word it would have the same meaning as whore, prostitute. Or she would hear those shadowing words in the word pregnant. It felt like there was wood in my mouth, the exact shape of my mouth. A big heave of wind came up the path behind me and tried to bundle me into the door. I think she thought I was trying to force my way in. But I was so weak on my legs suddenly, I thought I was going to collapse.

'I know you have had your own troubles in the past,' I said, desperately trying to remember what Jack had said at the Plaza. But had he said anything? Whatever you say, say nothing.

'Vicissitudes, he said. In the long ago?'

'Don't!' she shouted. And then she shouted, 'Tom!'

Then she whispered, as woundable as a wounded bird.

'What did he tell you, what did Jack tell you?'

'Nothing. Vicissitudes.'

'Filthy gossip,' she said. 'All it was.'

I don't know how Old Tom had heard her, maybe by long attention to her voice, but in a few moments he appeared around the house in his coat and hat, looking like a half-drowned mariner.

'Jesus, Mary and Joseph,' he said. 'Roseanne.'

'You have to get her to go away,' said Mrs McNulty.

'Come on, Roseanne,' said Old Tom, 'come on, come back out the gate.'

I did obediently as I was told. His voice was friendly. He was nodding his head as he drove me backwards.

'Go on,' he said, 'go on,' like I was a calf in the wrong part of the field.

'Go on.'

Then I was out on the pavement again. The wind drove along the street like a gang of invisible lorries, roaring and piercing.

'Go on,' said Old Tom.

'Where?' I said, with utmost desperation.

'Go back,' he said. 'Go back.'

'I need you to help me.'

'There's no one to help you.'

'Ask Tom to help me, please.'

'Tom can't help you, girl. Tom's getting married. You know? Tom can't help you.' Married? My God. 'But what will I do?' 'Go back the road,' he said. 'Go on.'

I didn't go back the road at his bidding but because I had no other choice.

My thought was, if I could reach the hut again, I could dry myself, and rest, and think of another plan. But only to get out of the rain and the wind, and be able to think.

Tom marrying again. No, not again, for the first time.

If I had had him in front of me then, I might have killed him with whatever implement I could find. I might have torn a stone from a wall, a stick from a fence, and battered him, and killed him.

For bringing me with love into such wretched danger.

I don't think I was walking then but sort of heaving myself along. The little girl was still behind the window-glass as I passed, still with her doll, still waiting for the storm to abate, so she could go outside and play. This time for some reason she didn't wave.

They say that we come from apes and maybe it is the residing animal in us that knows things deep down that we almost don't realise we know. There was something, some clock or engine, beginning to stir in me, and my whole instinct was to hurry my steps, to hurry my steps, and find somewhere quiet and sheltered where I could try and understand that engine. There was an urgency in it, and a smell to it, some strange noise rose from me, and was whipped away by the wind. Now I was out on the tarmacadam road to Strandhill, green fields and stone walls around me, and the visible rain striking the surface of the road and leaping about with a sort of anger. It was like I had music in my belly, strong driving drumming music, the 'Black Bottom Stomp' gone over the edge, the piano player going wilder and wilder at the keys.

The road took a slow turn and then the bay began to be visible below. Who did I have to help me? No one. Where was the world? How was it I had managed to live in the world with no one? How was it that the inhabitants of the few houses along the way didn't rush out to me, to hurry me into their houses, to hold me in their arms? A savage sense entered me, of being of such small account in the world that I wasn't to be helped, that priest and woman and man had put out an edict that I wasn't to be helped, I was to be left to the elements, just as I was, a walking animal, forsaken.

Maybe it was then that some part of me leapt away from myself, something fled from my brain, I don't know.

Refuge. A forlorn being seeks refuge. I had the fire covered in ashes in my hut, and all it would need would be the ashes knocked off the turves, and more turves added, and soon I would have a decent fire. And I could peel off my old coat and my dress and my slip and my shoes and dry myself exultant in the dry room, laughing, victorious, having gained a victory over storms and families. I had a simple stew in a covered pot and I would eat that, and then when I was dry and fed, into the bed with me, and I would lie there looking out on Knocknarea, poor old Queen Maeve above in her own stone bed, feeling maybe the worst of the storm so high up, and I would look at my belly as I liked to do, and see the elbows and the knees poking out and disappearing as my baby stretched and stirred. I had about six miles to go before I reached this longed-for safety. I could see from the cut of the land that if I went out on the beach as the motorcars used to do at low tide, I would take a good two miles from the journey. I noted even in my distress that the tide was at its lowest ebb, though it was hard to make this out with the armies and legions of rain that lashed across it. So I cut down from the high road along a steep boreen, not minding the rough stones too much, contented in my mind I was shortening my way, and indeed so numb in my feet and legs I think I no longer felt much pain there. The pain was all in my stomach, the pain was all about my child, and I was fear-somely anxious to gain my advantage. Beautiful once, but beauty ended.

Down on the sand all was like a dance, as if the Plaza itself had expanded to fill Sligo Bay. The rain was like huge skirts, swirling and lifting, with hammering pillars of legs driving down, the whole of the strand and the sea between Strandhill and Rosses blanked out by a million brushstrokes of grey and grey. I thought then that it was not so sensible to have taken to the sand, or at least, I was cursed by a change in the gear of the weather, an infinite swelling and belling of the storm, tearing at me and my stomach, my little creature of elbows and knees.

Then I was starting to slosh through shallow runs of water and knew I was not on a proper course. The sand that the cars favoured as they roared out to the dance sat higher than the rest, and on a summer's night was dry. I feared I was heading towards the channel of the Garravoge, a disaster unimaginable, and now I didn't know which way to turn. Where was the mountain, where was the bulge of the land? Where was Strandhill and where was Coney?

Suddenly in front of me loomed a monster – no, it wasn't a monster, it was a cone of carved stones, it was one of the bollards that were set up in a line to show the way to the island, along the best sand, the last sand to be covered as the tide came in. A thing the tide was beginning to do, I knew, because I could hear, inside the roaring of the storm, the other galloping sound of the sea, as it rushed in eagerly to take the empty places in its arms. But I reached the bollard and held onto its stones for a few moments, trying to calm myself, at least a mite encouraged to have found it. Unless I had turned myself around completely, I judged the river would be over to my right, and Strandhill somewhere to my left. At the top of the bollard was a rusty metal arrow, pointing to the island.

Fearsomely in the storm the Metal Man would be standing on his rock, pointing to deep water, pointing, pointing. He would have no time to help the likes of me.

I knew I had to keep going, if I stayed where I was the tide would simply gather in, cover the sand at my feet, and slowly slowly rise up the bollard. I did not dare go back towards the shore, where there might be a rising flood. But at high tide most of the bollards were covered, and there would be no safety here. It would be the realm of currents and fishes. I put the bollard at my back, taking a course from the arrow, and stepped forward into the storm, praying I could keep enough of a straight line from that compass, and reach Coney.

A swathe of blue angry light was cut into the storm, like a slice of mad cake, and suddenly I saw the great prow of Ben Bulben looming, like a liner that was going to run me down. No, no, it was miles away. But it was also where I had supposed it to be, and then I was able to gain the next bollard. Oh, I sent my heart to the Metal Man in gratitude. Now I could see indistinctly but distinctly enough the mound of Coney island ahead. I forged on towards it. As I moved from the next bollard I felt that water gush from me and briefly warm my legs. With another hundred aching strides I had reached the first rocks, and the black seaweed, and drove myself up the sloping path. Without that break in the storm I don't know what I would have done, except drowned in the hurrying sea. Because now the storm closed about me again like a room of utter madness, walls of water and ceiling of banging fire, it seemed, and I lay in a nest of boulders, panting, and half expired.

I awoke. The storm was still howling roundabout. I hardly knew who I was. I remember searching in my mind even for words. In my sleep or whatever state it was, I had heaved my back up against a mossy rock, I don't know why. The storm was howling, with enormous drenching drifts of rain. I was lying so still I had the mad thought that I was dead. But I was far from dead. Every so often, minutes or hours I couldn't tell, something took a hold of me, like I was being squeezed from the crown of my head to my toes. It was so painful it seemed to have crept beyond pain, I don't know how other to describe it. I pulled myself onto all fours, again not exactly deciding to, but responding to a will unknown. Looking now wildly forwards, I thought in the cascading sheets of rain I saw a person standing, watching me. Then the storm seemed to blot the figure out. I screamed out to whoever it was, screamed and screamed. Then another shock of pain gripped me, as if someone had cleaved my backbone with an axe. Who was it watching me in the rain? Not someone who was going to approach and help. More hours passed. I felt the tide recede again from the island, felt it in my veins. The storm burned down from the heavens. Or rather, I was on fire in all that wetness. My stomach was like a bread oven, gathering in heat. No, no, it could not have been. The time of human clocks flew away, the coming and going of the pain was the new marker of time. Did the pain come closer and closer now? Less time between? Had night fallen secretly to darken the storm? Was I blind? Now there was suddenness, arrival, blood. I looked down between my legs. I felt I had my arms outstretched like wings, ready to catch something falling from the sky. But it wasn't falling from the sky, it was falling down through me. My blood fell on the soaking heather and cried out to God to help me, His striving animal. The voice of my blood cried out. No, no, that was only madness, madness. Between my legs was only coals, a ring of coals burning so redly nothing could live if it passed through it. In that second of madness then was the crown of a little head, and in another second a shoulder, all smeared in skin and blood. There was a face, there was a breast, there was a belly and two legs, and even the storm seemed to draw its breath in silence, there was a silence, I looked, I took up the little creature, it drew out after it a vivid cord, I lifted the baby to my face and, again without real thought, bit the cord, the storm swelled up and howled and howled, and my child also swelled, seemed to form himself in the lashing dark, gathered his first diamond of air, and howled out in miniature, called out tinily, to the island, to Sligo, to me, to me.

When I awoke again, the storm had cleared away like a savage dress sweeping out of the room of Sligo. Where was the little creature? There was the blood and the skin and cord and the placenta. I started to my feet. I was as dizzy and weak as a newborn foal myself. Where was my baby? Such a wild feeling of panic and loss poured into me. I looked about with the frantic longing and fiery head of any mother, human or animal. I parted the low sprigs and plants of heather, I searched about me in circles. I called out for help. The sky was big and blue all the way to heaven.

How long had the storm been gone? I didn't know.

I fell back down, striking a hip against the rock. There was still a steady twine of blood coming out of me, dark blood, warm and dark. I lay there, staring out at the world like a woman who had been shot in the head, the peaceful beach, the sandbirds dipping and striking with their long beaks along the receding tideline. 'Please help me,' I kept saying, but there seemed to be no one to hear me except those birds. Weren't there a few houses on the island, hiding here and there from the wind? Could someone not come and help me find my baby? Could someone not come?

As I lay there a strange sharp hurting feeling came into my breast, it was the milk coming into them, I thought. I had the milk now, ready. Where, where was my baby to drink it?

Then down the winding road to the strand I saw a white van moving. I knew immediately it was an ambulance, because even so far away I could hear its siren in the stillness. It reached the sand and surged forward, taking its course, just as I had in the storm, from bollard to bollard. I stood again and waved my arms, like the shipwrecked sailor does when at last he sees the far-off ship to rescue him. But it wasn't me that needed rescue, it was that tiny person vanished from the space he should have occupied. When the men came up to me with their stretcher, I asked them to tell me where my baby was, I begged them.

'We don't know, ma'am,' one said, with perfect manners. 'What are you doing out here on Coney having a baby? It's no place to have a baby, now, that's for sure.'

'But where is it, where is my baby?'

'Was the tide in high, ma'am, and washed it away, God bless the poor mite?'

'No, no, I had him in my arms, and slept, and kept him close, and warm. I knew he could be warm beside me. Look, I had him here, in my breast, look, the buttons are undone, I had him safe and warm.'

'All right,' said another. 'All right. Do calm yourself. There's still bleeding,' he said to his colleague. 'We'll have to try and stop that.'

'You mightn't stop it,' said the man.

'We'll get her to Sligo quick.'

And they loaded me into the back. But were we abandoning my child? I didn't know. I scrabbled at the door when it closed.

'Look everywhere,' I said. 'There was a child. There was.'

Oh, then when they started the engine, it was like falling through floors, I swooned away.

Now I begin to encounter difficulties. Now the roads seem to take two courses through the forest, and the forest is so deep in snow there is only whiteness.

Someone took my child. The ambulance brought me to the hospital. For days I know I was still bleeding inside, and they did not expect me to live. These things I remember. I remember they did an operation on me because I know I stopped bleeding and that I lived. I remember Fr Gaunt coming in and telling me that I was going to be taken care of, that he knew where he could put me for my own safety, and that I would like the place, and that I wasn't to worry. I asked again and again about my child and each time he just said the word 'Nazareth'. I didn't know what he meant. I was so weak I think I must have done what the prisoner will do with his jailer, I looked for Fr Gaunt to help me. I may have asked him for his help. I certainly wept a great deal and I have even a memory of him holding me while I wept. Was there anyone else there? I can't remember. Soon I saw the two towers of the asylum looming above me and I was given forth to hell.

I cried out that I wanted to see my mother, but they said, 'You cannot see her, no one can see her, she is beyond seeing.'

Now memory falters. Yes. It shudders, like a motor trying to start at the turn of the crank, but failing. Phut, phut, phut. Oh, is that Old Tom and Mrs McNulty in the darkness there, in a dark room as may be, and myself there also, and are they measuring me with their linen tapes, for an asylum smock, not saying anything, except the measurements, the bust, the waist, the hips? Like they had measured all the other inmates as they came in, for a smock, and all the inmates as they went out, for a shroud?

Now memory stops. It is entirely absent. I don't even remember suffering, misery. It is not there. I remember Eneas coming in his army uniform one night, charming the staff into seeing me. He had a major's uniform on that day and I knew he was only a private soldier but he confessed to me that he had gone and borrowed his brother Jack's and very well he looked in it, with the epaulettes. He told me to dress myself quickly, that he had my baby outside and he was going to free me. We were going to go away together into another land. I had no dress to put on except the rags I had already, I knew I was filthy and lice-ridden, there was blood dried on me all over, and through the dark corridor we crept, Eneas and I, and he creaked open the great door of the asylum, and we went out under the old towers and across the gravel, me not minding the sharp stones at all, and he gathered the baby from the high pram where it had waited for us, a lovely baby boy he was, and he took the bundle in his arms, and led me on across the lawn with my bleeding feet, and we had to cross a little fresh river at the bottom of the slope. He crossed over and walked up onto a beautiful green meadow with lofty grass. The moon was speckling the water of the river, my old owl was calling, and as I stepped into the river my dress dissolved and the water cleaned me. I stepped out the other side from the rushes and Eneas looked at me, I know in my heart I was beautiful again, and he handed me my baby and I felt the milk come into my breast. And Eneas and I and our child stood in the meadow in the moonlight and there was a line of enormous green trees being stirred gently by a warm summer wind. And Eneas took off his useless uniform, it was that warm, and we stood there as content as ever people were, and we were the first and last people on the earth.

A memory so clear, so wonderful, so beyond the bounds of possibility. I know it.

My head is as clear as a glass.

If you are reading this, then the mouse, the woodworm and the beetle must have spared these jotters.

What can I tell you further? I once lived among humankind, and found them in their generality to be cruel and cold, and yet could mention the names of three or four that were like angels.

I suppose we measure the importance of our days by those few angels we spy among us, and yet aren't like them.

If our suffering is great on account of that, yet at close of day the gift of life is something immense. Something larger than old Sligo mountains, something difficult but oddly bright, that makes equal in their fall the hammers and the feathers.

And like the impulse that drives the old maid to make a garden, with a meagre rose and a straggling daffodil, gives a hint of some coming paradise.

All that remains of me now is a rumour of beauty.

chapter twenty-one

Dr Grene's Commonplace Book

Well, I finally made my trip over to Sligo, having found a gap in all these preparations for leaving the hospital. Such a short journey really, and yet I have rarely made it over the years. Beautiful spring day. Yet even on such a day, Sligo Mental Hospital looked so gloomy, with its unpromising twin towers. It is a vast building. In common parlance it is called the Leitrim Hotel, as Roseanne explained to me, since half of Leitrim is said to be in it. But that no doubt is just a regional prejudice.

Considering I was once so friendly with Percy Quinn I suppose it is strange that we have not really kept in touch, with so few miles between us. Some friendships though, even strong and interesting ones, seem to have quite a short term, and cannot be prolonged. Nevertheless Percy, with his receding hair and a new plumpness I didn't remember, was exceedingly cordial when I found his office, which occupies one of the towers. I don't know much about his reputation, how progressive he is, or to what degree he sits back and lets things take their course, as I am afraid I have often been guilty of myself, I do believe. Not that I would confess this anywhere but here, but I am sure St Peter is taking notes against me.

'I was very sorry to hear about your loss,' he said. 'I was intending to come over for the service, but I just could not make it that day.'

'Oh, that's fine, don't worry,' I said. 'Thank you.' Then I didn't know what to say. 'It went off very well.'

'I don't think I knew your wife, did I?'

'No, no, I'm sure not. After your time.'

'Well, so you're on the hunt?' he said.

'Well, I've been trying to assess the patient I wrote to you about, Roseanne Clear, for various reasons, and as she is very unforthcoming I have had to try and be a bit devious, and go round the back of the houses, as it were.'

'I've been digging a bit for you,' he said. 'Found a few things. Actually, it began to intrigue me. I suppose everyone has mysteries in their lives. Look, will I call Maggie and get her to bring us up some tea?'

'No, that's fine,' I said. 'Not for me anyway. Perhaps yourself?'

'No, no,' he said briskly. 'First thing that might interest you. There are RIC police records remaining. They were in the town hall, would you believe. The name you gave me was Joseph Clear, wasn't it? And yes, there was a record of that name, in the nineteen-tens or twenties I think it was.'

I was disappointed, I must confess. I think I hoped that Roseanne's denial would have proven correct. But there it was.

'I suppose that was the same man,' said Percy.

'It's not a very common name.'

'No. And then I was looking again at what we had besides the very quaint account of that Fr Gaunt fella, which I re-read. You were concerned that she had killed her child, wasn't that

it?'

'Well, not concerned as such. Trying to establish the truth of it, because she denies it.'

'Oh? That's interesting. What does she say about it?'

'I asked her what became of the baby, since Fr Gaunt had mentioned it, and it was no doubt the crowning reason she was committed here, and she said the child was in Nazareth, which didn't make a whole lot of sense.'

'Yes, well, I think I know what she is trying to say. The orphanage here in Sligo was called Nazareth House. It doesn't have orphans any more, it's mostly an old persons' home now, but I try to refer people there if I can, rather than… You know.' 'Oh, I see, well, that fits all right.'

'Yes, it does. And, I must say, it would have been very unfair, unlawful even, of Fr Gaunt, to suggest something so terrible if he knew it to be untrue. I am searching in my mind for an interpretation of his words. I can only conclude that he meant killed it spiritually. In those days of course the illegitimate child was thought to carry the sin of his mother. This may have been what our enterprising cleric meant. Let us be generous in retrospect. That is, if it turned out she didn't kill the child of course.'

'Do you think I could go over to Nazareth House and ask them if they have any records?'

'Well, I think you could. They used to be very closed of course, about these matters, unless you knew how to prise them open. Their instinct I am sure is still to secrecy, but like many of these institutions, they have been assailed in recent times with accusations of one sort and another. There are many Nazareth Houses, and some of them have been accused of rather terrible cruelty in the past. So you may find them more helpful than you might have expected. And they're used to dealing with me. I find them always very helpful. Nuns, of course. They were a mendicant order originally. A noble concept, really.'

Then he said nothing for a bit. He was 'cogitating' as Bet used to say.

'There was another thing,' he said. 'In the interests of openness on my own part I think I can tell you. Unfortunately it was part of our confidential records. Internal inquiries, you know, that sort of thing.'

'Oh, yes?' I said, gingerly enough.

'Yes. In regard to your patient. There was a man here called Sean Keane, an orderly, a bit funny in the head himself apparently, to use layman's terms for a moment, who made a complaint against another orderly. Now, this of course is long ago, in the late fifties even, I didn't even recognise the name of the man keeping the notes, Richardson was his name. Sean Keane accused this other man Brady of menacing and I fear molesting your patient over quite a long period. She is described as a person of 'quite exceptional beauty', if you don't mind. You know, William, I could tell even from the scurry of the writing, that the notemaker was reluctant to write any of this. Not much has changed, I hear you say.'

But I had said nothing. I nodded to encourage him.

'Anyway, I think it was decided at this point to move your patient to Roscommon, and let the dust settle over the matter.'

'What happened to the alleged molester?'

'Well, that was rather tragic, because he stayed here till retirement, I could trace his presence quite plainly right to the end of the seventies. But, you know.'

'I do know. It is all very difficult.'

'Yes,' said Percy. 'The boat is always in the middle of a storm and one tries not to rock it further.'

'Yes,' I said.

'Not too surprisingly also, Sean Keane disappears with Roseanne Clear from the records, so they must have let him go. Richardson no doubt opting for peace of a sort.'

The two of us sat there then, contemplating this, maybe both of us wondering if indeed anything much had changed.

'Her mother died in here. Did you know that? 1941.'

'No.'

'Oh, yes. Severely deranged.' 'That's very interesting. I'd no idea.' 'It's funny that our hospitals are so close and we never see each other,' he said then.

'I was just thinking that as I drove over.'

'Well, such is life.'

'Such is life,' I said.

'I am very glad you came over today,' he said. 'We should try and make a habit of it.'

'Thank you for looking into this for me. I'm really grateful, Percy.'

'All right,' he said. 'Look, I'll give Nazareth House a ring and tell them to expect you, and who you are, and whatnot. All right?'

'Thank you, Percy.'

We shook hands warmly, but not all that warmly, I thought. There was a hesitation in both of us. Life, indeed.

The part of Nazareth House I was directed into was new, but still seemed to have acquired a certain institutional grimness, if not as grim as the old asylum. When I was a very young man I thought places for the sick and mad should be made very bright and attractive, given a sort of festiveness to alleviate our human miseries. But maybe these places are like animals and cannot change their spots and stripes no more than leopards and tigers. The keeper of records was a nun, like me in advanced middle age if not old age, wearing her relaxed modern gear. I had half expected wimples and robes. She said good Percy had already rung and given her details of names and dates and that she had some information for me. 'News', she called it.

'But you will have to go to England if you really want to pursue this,' she said. 'England?' I said.

'Yes,' she said, with her unplaceable country accent which I placed nonetheless as maybe Monaghan, or even further north. 'There is a reference here all right, but all the documents relating to these names are in our house in Bexhill-on-Sea.'

'What are they doing over there, Sister?'

'Well, I don't know, but as you are aware these are old matters, and you may find out more in England.'

'But is the child still alive? Was there a child that came here?'

'There is a reference against the name, and it was the particular case of one of our sisters in Bexhill, Sr Declan, who was from here of course. She is dead now, may she rest in peace. Of course, Dr Grene, she was a McNulty. Did you know old Mrs McNulty was with us here in old age? Yes. She was ninety when she died. I have her records in front of me, God rest her. God rest them both.'

'Is it possible for you to telephone them?'

'No, no, these matters are not matters for the phone.'

'It was Mrs McNulty's daughter that was a nun in England?'

'That's exactly it. She was a great friend of the order. She had a bit to leave and she left it to us. She was a very great lady and I remember her well. A tiny little woman with the kindest face you ever saw, and always trying to do the good thing by everybody.'

'Well, I am sure,' I said.

'Oh, yes. She wanted to take the veil herself but couldn't do it while her husband was alive, and then didn't he live till he was ninety-six, and then of course there were the sons. They mightn't have liked it. Do you mind me asking if you are a Catholic, Dr Grene? I think by your accent you're English.'

'I am a Catholic, yes,' I said, easily, without embarrassment.

'Then you will know how odd we are,' said the little nun.

I drove back here in a strange state of mind. I thought how curious it was how people leave a few traces as they go, that can be looked at and puzzled over, but whether ever properly understood, I doubted. It seemed Roseanne had indeed suffered greatly, as I had feared. How terrible to lose her child, however that had happened, and then to be subjected to the attentions of some miserable bastard who looked on her merely as an opportunity for his pleasure. I could suspect also that having been parted from her baby, or having lost it, or even killed it if Fr Gaunt is accurate after all, she might also have finally been parted from her wits. Such traumas might very well have brought on quite a radical psychosis. She would have been well nigh a sitting duck for any unpleasant element among the staff, with her 'exceptional beauty'. God help her. I thought of the sere old lady in the room here in Roscommon. Professional man though I am, I confess to feeling very sorry for her. And retrospectively, rather guilty. Yes. Because for one thing I would probably have been inclined to do the same as Richardson.

On the other hand, I was thinking, as I drove, it was unlikely I would find the time to go to England. And I was wondering to myself, what in the name of God are you doing anyway, William? You know you are not going to recommend putting her back in the community. She will have to be transferred somewhere (note: not Nazareth House in Sligo, and not Sligo Psychiatric Hospital, all things considered) because she is surely too old now for anything else. So why was I pursuing it? Well, the truth is, it has been a great comfort. Also, there has been something about it that I have found almost irresistible. I think I must classify the whole impulse as a form of grieving. Grieving for Bet, and for the nature of lives in general. For the lot of human creatures generally. But, I was thinking, England is a step too far, though I must say I would like to find out the truth of Roseanne's child, or no child, having come this far. But the work load at the present time is much too great (I am trying to write down a version of my active thoughts in the car, never an easy thing), and maybe, since the most crucial and important parts of life seem after all to have the characters of sleeping dogs, I should let them lie. It is all old history and what would it serve now to dig it up? And then the real thought struck me. That I have been looking at this from all the wrong angles. Because if there is a record of this child, would it not be a great comfort to Roseanne to know this, even if the person is uncontactable – to know 'before she dies' that she put someone safely into the world after all? Or would this be just further mental mayhem and trauma? Would she want to be in touch with this person, and would this person – oh, the proverbial Pandora's box. Well, well, I have no time anyway, I was thinking. But I will lay this quest down reluctantly.

Then I parked my car as usual and went into the hospital. I took an account of the day from the day nurse and among other things she told me that Roseanne Clear's breathing had worsened and they had been even afraid to move her down to the medical ward, she was so delicately balanced between life and death, but they had managed it under Dr Wynn's supervision, and she was on an oxygen mask. The lungs need a 98 per cent function to have sufficient exchange of gases properly to aerate the blood, and she has only about 74 per cent, such is the congestion. Although at the end of the day she is 'just another patient' I have to say this was very worrying and discommoding. I hurried to the ward nearby as if she might be already perished and was unaccountably very relieved to find her alive, if unconscious and with an unpleasant sound to her breathing.

After a while sitting there I began to feel very idle, because there would be papers to attend to in my office. So I went in there and attacked the pile. At the bottom of the forms and letters was a package, a sheaf of papers in a large used envelope, in fact an envelope I had opened a few days ago and thrown in my waste-paper basket. Someone had fished it out again and put in these pages. They were written in blue biro, in a very neat small hand that required me to put my reading glasses on, something of course that I try not to do, out of mere vanity.

It didn't take long to realise that it was an account of

Roseanne's life, written it would seem by herself. I was absolutely amazed. I was instantly but rather strangely glad I had not pressed my advantage that day when she told me she had had a child. Because here was everything anyway, without the sense that I had forced her to 'betray' herself, using all the wiles and tricks of my training. I knew I wouldn't have time to read it properly until I was in my house that night (yesterday), but already I could see she offered information freely, in such strong contrast to her spoken answers to me. But also, where had it come from? And who had put it on my table, certainly not herself, surely? I was honour bound to suspect John Kane, as he was the person most usually in her room. Or one of the nurses. Of course, with all the kerfuffle today in her room, it might have been anybody. I called through to the nurses' room and asked if anyone knew anything about it. Doran, a reasonably able and pleasant man, said he would ask around. Where was John Kane? I asked. Doran said Kane was home at his little flat in the old stableyard behind the institution (also due to be knocked down shortly). He said John Kane had been feeling poorly and after a morning's work, had asked to be let go to lie down. Dr Wynn had excused him readily. John Kane of course is not a well man.

I read Roseanne's account of things like a scholar of her life, making a mental concordance of facts and events.

The first feeling I had reading it was privilege. How strange to think of her secretly writing it, like a monk in a scriptorium, all the while I was endeavouring to assess her, and getting virtually nowhere. The sense that she might be addressing it to me overwhelmed me.

It differs from Fr Gaunt's history in many ways, not least the long account of her father and his experiences. For a woman who knows no one virtually and has spent the last sixty-odd years of her life in a place like the hospital, she seems at times to me to be a surprising celebrator of life and people. Many mysteries remain. But I have tried to orchestrate the little that I know and have fallen on names I recognise with gratitude. Sean Keane who figured in Percy Quinn's records seems to have been a son of John Lavelle. Furthermore it seems he was to some degree brain-damaged. There is one person I know who I can ask about this, because my suspicion is that our John Kane is the same man. There is a story here of a strange loyalty and protection. His father asked him to look after Roseanne, and he seems to have done his utmost to do so.

Who took Roseanne's baby though is not really answered, and the fact remains that the evidence is against her about her father's work. If this is wrong, then other things she writes may also be 'wrong'. It cannot be taken at face value, but maybe no more than Fr Gaunt, who was obviously sane to such a degree it makes sanity almost undesirable.

I think I certainly can surmise that she was falsely accused in the matter of John Lavelle, unless I am reading her wrong, although I recognise that in the mores of the time, the morass, I almost wrote, just to have been seen with him in that way, just the suspicion, was crime enough. Morality has its own civil wars, with its own victims in their own time and place. But once she became pregnant she was utterly doomed. A married woman who had never been married. She could never have won that one.

I write all this, and immediately have some niggling concerns. The use of the word 'wrong' for instance. What is wrong about her account if she sincerely believes it? Is not most history written in a sort of wayward sincerity? I suspect so. In her account, she relates a very sincere and even touching account of how her father sought to show her that all things from hammers to feathers fall equally. She seems to have been about twelve when it happens (now I am forced to look again at her manuscript, because I may be rewriting). Yes, about twelve. And then the dire events at the graveyard, and then the rat-catching, and eventually, when she is about fifteen (blast it, must check again), her father's death. But Fr Gaunt has him being murdered by the rebels, the first attempt in the very round tower Roseanne so fondly remembers, his mouth stuffed with feathers and him beaten by mallets or hammers, which in terms of post-traumatic stress, sounds like what really happened, and suggests that Roseanne for survival's sake has sanitised it completely, even moving the event back to a time of relative innocence. But this in my experience seems an enormous and unusual transference, all things considered. Then there is the fact that the man that Fr Gaunt suggests Roseanne should marry, Joe Brady, the inheritor of her father's job at the graveyard, is presented in Roseanne's account as an attempted rapist, a passage that reads very 'strangely' to me. And not only that, but Fr Gaunt in passing mentions the name on the gravestone where the guns were buried as the same name, though he must have known. Then of course, I am thinking, Fr Gaunt, while maybe sincere in his great desire to have her committed, was also subject to mere error of memory, and he may have found the name floating in his head, and wrongly given it as the name on the grave. The one thing that is fatal in the reading of impromptu history is a wrongful desire for accuracy. There is no such thing.

So, as if to prove this, I have just gone back to Fr Gaunt's actual account, which I summarised here rather than transposed, and I find to my absolute astonishment and even shame that in his account of the events in the tower, he doesn't actually say Roseanne's father's mouth was stuffed with feathers, just that he was beaten by hammers. For some reason, in the gap between reading his account and summarising, my own brain must have supplied this detail, stealing it from Roseanne I would like to think, except at that point of course I hadn't read her account. At this juncture I find myself in the wildest, woolliest jungles of Laing himself. It is almost a disgusting thought to me that I might have intuited this detail out of the aether, and supplied it unconsciously, anticipating a story that I had not yet read. For this implies all sorts of horrible sixties theory about the circular and backward natures of time, and I do not subscribe to that. We have enough problems with linear narrative and true memory. Nevertheless I must conclude that to a large degree, both Roseanne and Fr Gaunt were being as truthful as they could be, given the vagaries and tricks of the human mind. Roseanne's 'sins' as a self-historian are 'sins of omission'. Her father showed her the nature of gravity at the tower, and some years later an attempt was made to kill her father in the tower, both of which events she witnessed, but would not record the second. So that my first inclination to identify her memory as a traumatic one, with details transposed and corrupted, and the ages changed, was even if unlikely, actually too simple. Then there was of course my own weird interpolation – oh dear, oh dear. Of course, of course, it is just possible that years and years ago she told me about the hammers and feathers as an anecdote, and I simply forgot all about it. And that reading about the tower in Fr Gaunt's deposition brought them into my mind. And indeed, even as I posit this, even as I 'invent' it, I actually seem to have a vague memory of it. Disastrous! But leaving that aside, there is something good in this conclusion. I may say before God (of all people, I hear myself say) that I believe they have written not so much wrongful histories, or even competing histories, but both in their human way quite truthful, and that from both of them can be implied useful truths above and beyond the actual verity of the 'facts'. I am beginning to think there is no factual truth, although I can hear Bet say in my ear, 'Really, William?'

I have decided anyhow on the strength of reading her account to make the journey to England. She seems to have addressed her story almost to me, or at times at least to me, as her friend perhaps, and I feel it not only my duty but my great desire to follow this to the end, and see what the terminus is. I cannot imagine that I will achieve very much by this, as Dr Wynn does not expect her to regain consciousness, 'very sad news' he called it, and asked me had she any family I needed to contact. Of course I was able to say, no. I did not think so. Not a soul living that could fall under that heading, except this mysterious child. And that is a further reason to go to England, on the very unlikely chance that there is someone to notify in the event of the death of this person some might deem a nobody, but to me has assumed the proportions of a friend, and is a sort of justification of my work here, such as it has been, and my choice of this profession, such as it is.

I must never forget that in my moment of deepest travail she crossed the room and put her hand on my shoulder, an utterly simple gesture perhaps, but more graceful and helpful to me than the gift of a kingdom. By such a gesture she sought to heal me, supposedly the healer. As I do not seem able much to heal, then maybe I can simply be a responsible witness to the miracle of the ordinary soul.

I am profoundly grateful that I did not use Fr Gaunt's account to question her with, aggressively or subtly, whichever, and that I followed my own instincts. I see now it would have been an assault on her memory. Similarly her own account should not be used as an instrument of further probing.

My main thought is, let her be.

Soon I was ready to go, but before I did, I decided to write a note to John Kane, in case words written down had a better chance to penetrate him.

Dear John (I wrote), it has come to my notice some acts of kindness performed by you in respect of our patient Roseanne Clear, formerly Mrs McNulty. I think I know who your own father was, John, I think he was the patriot John Lavelle? and I would very much like to ask you a few questions when I return from England, where I hope to discover more about Roseanne Clear's child. Perhaps we can compare notes? Sincerely, etc.

I hoped this made sense to him. I put in the word patriot to take any possible note of threat out of it. Perhaps I was completely wrong and he would gaze at it as the work of a lunatic. It hardly made sense to me, but off I went anyhow.

The cheapest flight was Dublin to Gatwick, so I found myself driving the five hours eastward. But I think it would surprise Roseanne that there is now an airport in Sligo, that I saw on a website, right in Strandhill. But the little planes only fly to Manchester.

I took with me my passport, naturally, also whatever documents I have in relation to Roseanne, the various histories, and a note from the nun in Sligo. I was well aware how famously or infamously secretive these old institutions can be, no more than ourselves, a mixture of worry, lost power, perhaps even concern. That the truth may not always be desirable, that one thing leads to another thing, that facts not only lead forward to resolution, but backwards into the shadows, and sometimes into the various little hells we make for each other. So despite the nice nun, who anyway had not offered to phone Bexhill, or otherwise intervene, and despite the championing by Percy, I fully expected to be stonewalled or otherwise frustrated.

Of course, I also took with me Roseanne's copy of Religio Medici, just in case. Now I must confess I risked my father's turning in his grave, and on the airplane I opened the book, took out the letter boldly, and opened it, just in case it would be of some help. I don't know why I thought it might be. Perhaps there was a baser motive, mere nosiness and curiosity.

I was very surprised to find it was a letter from Jack McNulty. I looked at the date it was posted again and realised he must have been an old man himself when he wrote it. The wandering spideriness of the handwriting certainly suggested as much. The address was given as King James Hospital, Swansea. I have the letter here before me so I may as well enter it here, so as to have a copy.

Dear Roseanne,

I am lying here in hospital in Swansea and alas I am assailed by a cancer of the colon. I am writing to you because I have made enquiries about you and have been informed reliably I hope that you are still alive. I have been given my own marching orders and I suppose it is God's will but it is not likely I will be among the living much longer. I must say I have taken an interest in life and have enjoyed the visit as they say but when your number's called you must go. I do not know if you are aware I went soldiering in the war, I served in India near the Khyber Pass with the Gurkha Rifles I am proud to say, though I saw no Germans or Japanese or the like. Nevertheless if the mosquitoes had been on the German side we would have lost the war. I am writing to you because when a person is told he is going many things pass through his mind. For instance, the fact that my wife Mai after struggling with the alcohol died at the age of fifty-three. Though she led me a merry dance betimes I never for a moment regretted marrying her, as I adored her. Nevertheless I suppose she was an arrogant, wounding woman to some, to you

in particular. This is why I am writing. It is greatly on my conscience what happened all those years ago, and I wanted to write and tell you that. There is no need, indeed I believe no likelihood, that you will forgive me, but I am writing to you in order to tell you that I regret it enormously, and hardly know what to make of it as an event in all our lives. I suppose it is all long long ago, but not so long ago that it does not seem like yesterday, and is often in my thoughts and in my dreams. I wanted to tell you that Tom married again and had children, but maybe you will not want to hear this. Tom died about ten years ago of a stomach complaint, he died in Roscommon General Hospital, his second wife by then also having died. We never spoke of you though we saw each other often, and yet I felt it was always there unspoken between us when we met. The truth is, it was something in his life that changed him forever, he was forever just a different man after that, never again the easy-going old Tom we knew.

Maybe you will say, proper order, I don't know. Maybe you would be right. I want to say a few words now about my mother, who as you may know was the chief instrument in all that time of difficulty. I want to tell you things about her that I could only tell you as a dying man, and maybe only like this, faceless, behind the cover of a letter. Because it is also true that she treated your -1 was going to write 'case' but you know what I mean – with uncharacteristic hardness.

About twenty years ago when she was dying herself, she told me the story of her birth. It was sometimes whispered in Sligo that she was illegitimate, though you may not have heard this whisper. As it happens, she was adopted, her real mother having died young, and her family, being wealthy, and not approving the marriage in the first place, then contriving to give her away. Her mother was a Presbyterian woman called Lizzie Finn. Her real father was an army officer, and it seems she was given to his batman, a Catholic of

course, to be reared as his own. It is a shadowy story, but I saw with my own eyes the marriage certificate of her parents in Christ Church some years after she died. How relieved she would have been to know they were married I can't say. Perhaps in heaven these are small matters.

Before Tom died, he also had occasion to tell me his secret, which in some ways is more pertinent to you, and may make you wonder why she did not show more compassion to you. For he confessed to me that he and I only shared a mother, his own father being other than Old Tom, though who he was he did not know, though he tried to find out, not least from my mother. My mother never shared this with anyone and brought the man's name to her grave. We must remember that my mother was only sixteen when I was born, and not much older when brother Tom came (or half-brother I should say).

Why am I telling you all this? Because of course it might explain if not excuse her enormous desire that Tom should not endure so confused a life as hers, and was a slave to her own ideas of rectitude, as only a person who thinks they have fallen can be.

Eneas? In the sixties I traced him through the War Office to an hotel on the Isle of Dogs in London. I went there one evening, was told he was out, and to come back the next day. The following morning when I approached the dosshouse, I found it a smouldering ruin. Perhaps alarmed at the news that there was someone from Sligo to see him, thinking it was his old enemies and he was to be assassinated, even after all those years, he may have burned the hotel himself, to cover his tracks. Or maybe some men had been shadowing me as I searched for him, and did the poor man in. Whatever happened, I could never pick up his trail again. He disappeared utterly. I suppose he is dead and may he rest in peace.

This is my letter and maybe it is of no good to you. It is all greatly on my conscience. Roseanne, the truth is, Tom did love you but failed in his love. I am afraid we were all more than a little in love with you. Forgive us if you can. Goodbye.

Respectfully and sincerely,

Jack

By any mark a strange and unexpected letter. There were things in it that I didn't quite understand. Suddenly of course I hoped and prayed that it was the damp had closed the letter again, and that she might once have opened it. Certainly, she had kept it, unless she had put it unopened in the book and forgotten it. Maybe it was the only letter she had ever received. Christ. I was certainly very pensive as the plane set down in Gatwick.

Bexhill is only about fifty miles from Gatwick in that part of England so English it is almost something else, unnameable. The names reek of candyfloss and old battles. Brighton, Hastings. It is on the coast that ironically holds the sites of a million childhood holidays, though I do not think the orphans of long ago would concur. Looking up flights on the internet, and directions for Bexhill, I found a discussion site, contributed to by survivors of those days. The raw pain flared up from the words. Two girls were drowned there in the sea in the fifties, the other girls trying to form a human chain to save them, while the nuns prayed bizarrely on the beach. It is like a painting stolen from the museum of inexplicable cruelty. I confess I wondered about Mrs McNulty's daughter, and confess also that for some reason I hoped she was not among those praying nuns. If Roseanne's child had ended up there in the forties…These were my muddled thoughts as I took the train from Victoria.

It seems I am fated to record the dismaying bleakness of institutions. It is a constant, unwaveringly. Nazareth House Bexhill was no exception. Their stories seem to be in the very mortar like those ancient seashells, the very redness of the bricks. You could never wash them out, I thought. The very silence of the place suggested other silences. I rang at the front door feeling suddenly very small and strange, as if I were myself an orphan arriving there. Soon the door was opened, I stated my business to the woman, a lay person, and I was led up the long hallway, with its darkly shining linoleum, and items of solid mahogany furniture, one of them graced by an Italian statue of St Joseph. I know it was St Joseph because his name was on the plinth. The woman stopped at a door, and smiled, I smiled, and I entered the room.

It was a sort of little dining room, at least the table had plates of sandwiches and cakes, and a setting for one, with a teacup ready. I hardly knew what to do, so sat down, wondering if I was in the right place, or the right person in the right place. But soon a tall smiling nun glided in, and filled my cup from a ceramic pot. It had I noticed a picture of the Bexhill seafront on it.

'Thank you, Sister,' I said, for I knew not what else to say.

'I'm sure you are very hungry after your journey,' she said.

'Well, I am, thank you,' I said.

'Sr Miriam will see you afterwards.'

So I ate in some bemusement and when I was finished – the nun seemed to have a sixth sense for this, because no one person could have cleared that spread – I was led deeper into the convent and shown eventually into a smaller room.

It was a room of the usual filing cabinets. I immediately had a sense of hush and history. I suspected there were some things in these cabinets that people would need lawyers to get at, if even then. And presiding over this was a neat, doughy-faced nun.

'Sr Miriam?' I said.

'Yes,' she said. 'You are Dr Grene.'

'I am,' I said.

'And you have come I believe to consult certain records?' 'Yes, I have some documents with me also, that may help us identify…'

'I received a call from Sligo and I've been able to make a start before you came.'

'Oh, I see, she did ring then, I thought she said…'

'This file has a dual reference,' she said, opening a slim folder. 'The child you are seeking did not stay with us long.'

I almost said, Thank God, but managed to keep the words in my head only.

'Although the file pertains to quite a long time ago, I understand the mother is still alive, and of course, the child himself…' 'So there was a child, is a child?'

'Oh yes, most certifiably,' she said, smiling broadly. Though I cannot place Irish accents, I inevitably have a go, and was thinking maybe Kerry, or certainly the west. Her slightly official use of words I supposed came from long acquaintance with these records. I must say she was an appealing person, very polite, and seemed intelligent.

'You are with me so far?' she said.

'Oh, yes.'

'There is a birth certificate,' she said. 'There is also the name of the people to whom the child was given in adoption. This latter party however would never have seen the former document, or only briefly. Enough to know the child was Irish, healthy, and Catholic.'

'That sounds sensible,' I said, rather stupidly I thought, as I heard the words come out. I was actually a little in awe of this woman, there was something formidable about her.

'The thing that gave the community a certain desire to find a good home for the child was of course its relationship to Sr Declan, God rest her. As a young woman I remember her well. She was a lovely west of Ireland person, an enormous credit to her mother and to us. She was in fact in her day the finest mendicant nun in Bexhill. That was a very great achievement. And the orphans in general loved her. Loved her.'

There was gentle but clear emphasis here.

'You might want to come out later and see her little grave?' said Sr Miriam.

'Oh, I would be delighted…'

'Yes. We recognise here at Bexhill that things were very different in the forties, and personally I think it is impossible to travel back in time adequately to appreciate those differences. Even Dr Who himself might find it hard.' She smiled again.

'There is a great truth in that,' I said, immediately sounding pompous even to myself. 'In the arena of mental health. God forbid. But at the same time, one must…'

'Do what one can?'

'Yes.'

'To make reparation and undo hurts?'

I was very surprised to hear her say so.

'Yes,' I said, flustered by her unexpected honesty.

'I agree,' she said, and like a cool-handed poker player, laid two documents before me on the desk. 'This is the birth certificate. This is the adoption paper.'

I leaned forward, taking out my reading glasses, and looked at the pages. I think for a moment my heart stopped and the blood was suspended in my body. Just for a moment those thousand rivers and streams of blood ceased to flow. Then flowed again, with an almost violent sensation of force and movement.

The child's name was William Clear, born of Roseanne Clear, waitress. The father was given as Eneas McNulty, soldier. The child was given to Mr and Mrs Grene of Padstow, Cornwall, in 1945.

I sat there before Sr Miriam in a daze.

'Well?' she said quite gently. 'So, you didn't know?'

'No, no, of course not – I am here on official – to help and aid an old lady in my care -'

'We thought you might know. We didn't know if you knew.'

'I didn't know.'

'There are other things here, notes of conversations between Sr Declan and a Sean Keane in the seventies? Do you know anything about that?'

'No.'

'Mr Keane was anxious to find you and Sr Declan was able to oblige him. Did he ever find you?' 'I don't know. No. Yes.'

'You are very confused and of course that is understandable. It is like the tsunami, no? Something sweeping over you. Carrying people and things with it.'

'Sister, excuse me, I think I am going to be sick. Those cakes…'

'Oh, yes, of course,' she said. 'Just go through there.'

When I was sufficiently able, there was the bizarre experience of looking at my 'aunt's' grave. Then I left that place and made my way back to London.

I wished, I wished and I longed for Bet to be still alive so I could tell her, that was my first thought.

But every subsequent thought I had, I shook my head at it. The other passengers must have thought I had Parkinson's. No, no, it was impossible. There was no door in my head where the information could go in.

That old lady, whom I had been barely aware of for years, and yet who had taken such a grip on my imagination in these recent times, that old lady, with her oddness, her histories, her disputed deeds, and yes, her friendship, was my mother.

I hurried back, hurried home as one might say. The hours of the journey didn't bring me much clarity. I was homing though, hurrying, fearful suddenly that she would be dead before I got there. I could not explain to anyone that feeling. Pure feeling, nothing else. Feeling without thought. Just to get there, to keep going and get there. I rushed across Ireland, driving I am sure with certifiable stupidity. I parked clumsily in the carpark of my hospital, and without as much as a greeting to my staff, strode on into the ward where I hoped and prayed she still was. There was a curtain drawn about her bed, although there was no one else in the room. I thought, oh, yes, of course this is the conclusion, she is dead. I looked round the curtain only to see her face quite awake and alive, turning now a few degrees, quizzically to look at me.

'Dr Grene,' she said. 'Where have you been? I'm back from the dead, apparently.'

I tried to tell her, there and then. But I hadn't the words. I will have to wait for the words, I thought.

She seemed to sense something, as I lingered at the gap in the curtain. People know more instinctively than they know in their conscious brain (perhaps medically a dubious notion but there it is).

'So, Doctor,' she said. 'Have you assessed me?'

'What?'

'Have you made your assessment?' 'Oh, yes. I think so.' 'And what is the verdict?' 'You are blameless.'

'Blameless? I hardly think that is given to any mortal being.' 'Blameless. Wrongly committed. I apologise. I apologise on behalf of my profession. I apologise on behalf of myself, as someone who did not bestir himself, and look into everything earlier. That it took the demolition of the hospital to do it. And I know my apology is useless and disgusting to you.' Weak as she was, she laughed.

'But', she said, 'that is not true. They showed me the brochure for the new hospital. I suppose you will let me stay there for a while?'

'It is entirely your decision. You are a free woman.'

'I was not always a free woman. I thank you for my freedom.'

'It is my privilege to pronounce it,' I said, suddenly very odd and formal, but she took it in her stride.

'Can you step back to the bed?' she said.

I did so. I didn't know what she intended. But she just lifted my hand, and shook it.

'I wonder will you allow me to forgive you?' she said.

'My God, yes,' I said.

There was a short silence then, just enough of a silence for the breath of a dozen thoughts to blow through my brain.

'Well, I do,' she said.

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

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

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

I should also memorialise a box of Cuban cigars by John

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

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

Dear Doctor Green,

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

Faithfully,

Seanin Keane Lavelle (John Kane)

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

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

chapter twenty-two

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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