The Secret Scripture (21 page)

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

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

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

'Bet?' I said.

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

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

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

Emptiness. Of course emptiness.

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

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

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

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

Roseanne's Testimony of Herself

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

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

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

'You wouldn't miss the west?'

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

'Yes?'

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

'What?' I said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'Crowd of bowsies,' Tom would say.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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