The Secret Scripture (15 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Roseanne's Testimony of Herself

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

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

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

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

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

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