The Secret Scripture (16 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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