The Secret Scripture (30 page)

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.

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.