The Secret Scripture

by Sebastian Barry

‘But there’s no new clock in the house,’ I said. ‘Is there, Dadda?’

  ‘I don’t know. Mr Fine says so. Not that he sold her the clock. He only sells carrots and cabbages. But she showed him the clock here one day, when you and me were out. A very nice clock, he said. Made in New York. With a Toronto chime.’

  ‘What is that?’ I said.

  And as I spoke my mother appeared in the door behind my father. She was holding in her hands a square porcelain object, with its elegant dial, and around it someone, no doubt in New York, had painted little flowers.

  ‘I don’t have it ticking,’ she said, in a small voice, like a fearless child, ‘for fear.’

  My father stood up.

  ‘Where did you buy it, Cissy? Where did you buy such a thing?’

  ‘In Grace’s of the Weir.’

  ‘Grace’s of the Weir?’ he said, incredulously. ‘I have never even been into that shop. I would be afraid to go into it, in case they charged me for entering.’

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  She stood there, shrinking in her unhappiness.

  ‘It is made by Ansonia,’ she said, ‘in New York.’

  ‘Can we take it back, Cissy?’ he said. ‘Let’s take it back to Grace’s and see where we are then. We cannot go on making payments to Fine. They will never give you what you gave them for it, but they might give you something on it, and maybe we can close the debt with Mr Fine. I am sure he will oblige me if he can.’

  ‘I never even heard it tick or chime,’ she said.

  ‘Well, turn the key in it and have it tick. And when it strikes the hour it will chime.’

  ‘I can’t,’ she said, ‘for they will find it then. They will follow the sound and find it.’

  ‘Who, Cissy? Us, is it? I think we have done all the finding now.’

  ‘No, no,’ said my mother, ‘the rats. The rats will find it.’

  My mother looked up at him with an eerie glow in her face, like a conspirator.

  ‘We will be better to smash it,’ she said.

  ‘No,’ said my father as desperate as you like.

  ‘No, it would be better. To smash it. To smash Southampton and all. And Sligo. And you. I’ll raise it up now, Joe, and bring it down upon the earth like this,’ and indeed she did raise it up, and indeed she did throw it down on the thin damp cake of concrete on the floor, ‘there, all promises retrieved, all hurts healed, all losses restored!’

  The clock lay in its porcelain pieces there, some little ratchet loosened, and for the first and last time in our house, the Ansonia clock chimed with its Toronto chime.

  It was soon after this, so soon, that I have to report, my father was found dead.

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  To this day I don’t know what killed him exactly, but I have puzzled it over these eighty years and more. I have given you the run of the thread, and where has it led me? I have lain all the facts before you.

  Surely the matter of the clock was too small a thing to kill a man?

  Surely the dead boys was a dark thing, but dark enough to darken my father forever?

  The girls also, yes, that was a dark matter, bright though they were as they fell.

  It was my father’s fate to have those things befall him. He was just as anyone else, and anything, clock or heart, he had a breaking point.

  It was in the next street in a derelict cottage, where he was working to rid it of rats, at the behest of the neighbours to right and left of the empty house, that he hanged himself. Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh.

  Do you know the grief of it? I hope not. The grief that does not age, that does not go away with time, like most griefs and human matters. That is the grief that is always there, swinging a little in a derelict house, my father, my father. I cry out for him.

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  chapter nine

  I suppose I must add the few unpleasant things that befell my father after death, when he was no more than a big pudding of blood and past events. It is possible to love a person more than oneself, and yet as a child, or nearly woman, to have such a thought, when your father is carried into the house for the inevitable wake . . . Not that we hoped to have many to wake him.

  His motorbike was put out into the little yard by Mr Pine our neighbour, a cold-eyed carpenter who yet put himself immediately to assist us. I need not tell you it was never brought in again but was left to fetch for itself as best it could in the outdoors.

  In its place was set the long penny-halfpenny coffin with my father’s large nose poking up. Because he had hanged himself, his face was covered in a white paint as thick as a clockface, work done by Silvester’s funeral directors. The street then crowded in and if we had few pipes and pots of tea and not a drop of whiskey to offer, nevertheless I was astonished by the ease and merriment of the people there, and the obvious regret they showed for the passing of my father. The Presbyterian minister Mr Ellis came in and also Fr Gaunt, and in the way of supposed enemies or rivals in Ireland, they shared a witticism in the corner for a few moments. Then in the early morning we were left alone, and my mother and myself slept – or I slept. I wept and wept and I slept at length. But grief like that is a good grief.

  When I came down in the morning from the loft where my narrow bed was kept, there was a different class of grief. I went over to my father and for a moment could not work out what 87

  I was seeing. There was something wrong with his eyes at any rate. When I peered close I saw what it was. Someone had pierced each eyeball with a tiny black arrow. The arrows pointed upwards. I knew immediately what they were. They were the black metal hands from my mother’s Ansonia clock. I plucked them out again like thorns, like bee-stings. A thorn to find a witch, a sting to find a love is an old country saying. They were not tokens of love. I do not know what they were tokens of. This was the last sorrow of my father. He was buried in the small Presbyterian yard with a goodly show of his

  ‘friends’ – friends I hardly knew he had. People who he had rid of rats, or in the old high days, buried people for. Or people who cherished him for the human soul he had exhibited to the world. Who liked his ways. There were many I could not put names to. Fr Gaunt, while the Presbyterian minister of course did the ceremony, stood beside me almost as a friend and spoke a few names, as if that was what I wanted. This name and that name, that I forgot as soon as he spoke them. But there was also a man there called Joe Brady, that had taken my father’s job at the cemetery at the invitation of Fr Gaunt, a queer fattish man with burning eyes. I don’t know why he was there, and wasn’t sure even in my grief if I wanted him there, but you can’t keep anyone back from a funeral. Mourners are like Canute’s sea. I was content to think he was paying his respects.

  My head was aflame with the deep, dark pulse of grief, that beats like a physical pain, like a rat got into your brains, a rat on fire.

  Dr Grene’s Commonplace Book

  Tremendously busy attending to all the arrangements at the hospital and not much time to write here. I have missed the 88

  odd intimacy of it. As I characteristically have probably a poor sense of myself, that is to say, a rather miserable sense of my own slightness as a person, as a soul, keeping this book has somehow helped me, but how I can’t say. It is hardly a therapy. But it is at least a sign of ongoing inner life. Or so I hope and pray.

  Perhaps with some justification. Last night coming home as weary as I have ever been, cursing everything, the dreadful potholes in these Roscommon roads, the lousy suspension in my car, the broken light in the porch that meant I banged my arm against the concrete pillar, I entered the hallway, really in a rather foul mood, prepared to curse everything there also, if given half a chance.

  But Bet was standing on the landing above. I don’t know if she had been there already, before I came in, maybe so, because she was at the little window, looking out across the tangle of town gardens and the haphazard premises of light industry. There was moonlight on her, and she was smiling. I think she was. Some enormous lightness got a hold of me. It was like the
first time I thought I loved her, when she was young and slight as a watercolour, a mere gesture of bones and features, beautiful and perfect in my eyes, when I pledged myself to her, to make her happy, to adore her, to hold her in my arms – the strange, maybe stupid compact of all lovers. She turned about from the moonlight and looked at me, and to my astonishment she started to come down the stairs. She was wearing an ordinary print dress, a summer dress, and as she descended the stairs she brought the moonlight with her, the moonlight and other lights. And when she got to the halldoor, she leaned up and kissed me, yes, yes, fool that I am I was crying, but as quietly and with as much dignity as I could muster, wanting to match her grace for grace, even if it was beyond me. And then she brought me into the front room among all the bric-a-brac of our lives and she held me and she kissed me again, and in a 89

  passion that eventually tore the top of my head off, she pulled me against herself in a most gentle, fierce and concentrated way, kissing and kissing, and then all our little play of love we had enacted so many thousands of times in former years, and afterwards we lay there on the Axminster carpet like slain animals.

  Roseanne’s Testimony of Herself

  I have had all my head filled with my father and hardly a word for the nuns at school.

  And now I must report I must leave them to the darks of history, without itemising them, interesting women though they were. Towards us poorer girls they were savage, but we allowed that. We screamed and we wept when we were beaten, and watched the solicitous kindnesses shown towards the richer girls of the town with immaculate envy. There is a moment in the history of every beaten child when his mind parts with hopes of dignity – pushes off hope like a boat without a rower, and lets it go as it will on the stream, and resigns himself to the tally stick of pain.

  This is a ferocious truth, because a child knows no better. A child is never the author of his own history. I suppose this is well known.

  But savage as they were, though they wielded sticks against us with every ounce of energy in their bodies, to drive out the devils of lust and the shoals of ignorance that teemed in us, they were interesting women enough. But I must let them go. My story hurries me on.

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  I think all we can offer heaven is human honesty. I mean, at the gates of St Peter. Hopefully it might be like salt to kingdoms without salt, spices to dark Northern countries. A few grams in the bag of the soul, offered as we seek entry. What heavenly honesty is like I cannot say. But I say this to steel myself to my task.

  I thought once that beauty was my best possession. Perhaps in heaven it might have been. But in these earthly fields it was not.

  To be alone, but to be pierced through with a kingly joy, now and then, as I believe I am, is a great possession indeed. As I sit here at this table marked and scored by a dozen generations maybe of inmates, patients, angels, whatever we are, I must report to you this sensation of some gold essence striking into me, blood deep. Not contentment, but a prayer as wild and dangerous as a lion’s roar.

  I tell you this, you.

  Dear reader. God keep you, God keep you.

  Or should I really go around those nuns? Perhaps I can linger a moment with such savagery and modesty mixed. No, no, I will go around them. Although many times in later years I had a dream of them coming to rescue me, like a herd of lotus blossoms with their white headdresses, pouring down Sligo Main Street, nothing of the sort of course ever happened. And I don’t know why I thought there was a basis for such a dream, as I don’t remember any instance of favour while I was among them. And of course, as my history would have it, I was gone from them entirely then by age sixteen.

  Memories that I have of Fr Gaunt are always curiously precise and full, lit brightly, his face clear and intense. As I sit here writing away, I can actually see him behind my eyes, in this 91

  instance on the day he came to me with his own version of rescue. I knew I had to leave school immediately on my father’s death, because my mother’s wits were now in an attic of her head which had neither door nor stair, or at least none that I could find. If we were to eat, I must find work of any kind. Fr Gaunt arrived one day in his accustomed sleek soutane –

  I do not mean this critically – and as it was raining with that special Sligo rain that has made bogland of a thousand ancient farms, he was also covered in a sleek dark-grey coat of similar shiny material. Perhaps the skin of his face was also made of it, anciently, in his mother’s womb. He carried a highly ecclesiastical umbrella, like something real and austere, that said its prayers at night in the hatstand.

  I let him in and sat him in the parlour. My father’s piano still remained, itself as animate as the umbrella, standing there against the wall, as if actively remembering my father somewhere in the brainways of its strings and keys.

  ‘Thank you, Roseanne,’ said Fr Gaunt, as I handed him a cup of tea I had heroically made out of a farthing of tea sadly already used three times. But I hoped it had one last squeeze of essence in it, come all the way from China after all, in Jackson’s tea ship. We got our tea from the corner, not from the great emporium of Blackwood’s, where the toffs shopped, so maybe it wasn’t the best tea to begin with. But Fr Gaunt sipped it politely.

  ‘Have you a drop of milk?’ he said, kindly, kindly.

  ‘No, Father.’

  ‘No matter, no matter,’ he said, regretfully enough. ‘Now, Roseanne, you and I have things to talk about, things to talk about.’

  ‘Oh, Father?’

  ‘What will you do now, Roseanne, now that your poor father is gone?’

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  ‘I will leave school, Father, and get a job in the town.’

  ‘Will you be advised by me?’

  ‘Oh?’ I said.

  He drank his tea for a few moments and smiled his priestly smiles, a little repertoire indeed. I know even at this distance that he was trying to do his duty, to be kind, to be helpful. I know this.

  ‘You have, Roseanne, various aspects to yourself, certain obvious gifts if I may say so, of . . .’

  Just for the moment he didn’t say what. I sensed that the what of this was something not completely delicate. He was looking in his arsenal of sentences for the correct sentences. He was certainly in no way being unpleasant, nor seeking to be. In fact I think he would have died before he would have offered anything unpleasant.

  ‘Beauty,’ he said.

  I looked at him.

  ‘The gift of beauty. Roseanne, I think without too much trouble I could – of course bearing in mind the opinion of your mother, and even yourself, although I must still account you almost a child, if I may so, and in grave, gravest need of advice, if I may say – but what was I saying? Oh, yes, that I think here in the town I could find you very quickly, very smartly, easily and in the nicest manner possible, a husband. Of course, there would be certain things to do first.’

  Fr Gaunt was as they say warming to his theme. The more he spoke the easier the words came, all nice and milky and honey-touched. Like many a man in authority, he was sublimely happy as long as he was presenting his ideas, and as long as his ideas were meeting with agreement.

  ‘I don’t think . . .’ I said, trying to roll back this great boulder of good sense he was pushing on my head – it felt like.

  ‘Before you say anything about this, I know you are only sixteen, and it might not be the usual thing to marry so young, 93

  but on the other hand, I have in mind a very suitable man, who I think would have a great regard for you, maybe already has, and is in steady employ, and would be in a position therefore to support you – and your mother of course.’

  ‘I can support us,’ I said, ‘I am sure I can,’ I said, and less sure of anything in my life I had never been.

  ‘You may know this man already, he is Joe Brady that now holds your father’s former job at the cemetery, a very steady, pleasant, kind man, who lost his own wife two years ago, and will be quite content to marry again. In life we must look for a certain symmetry
of things, and as your father once held –

  Hmm. And he has no children and I am sure . . .’

  Indeed and I knew Joe Brady, the man who had taken my father’s job, and come to see him buried. Joe Brady as far as I knew or could tell was about fifty years of age.

  ‘You’d have me marry an old man?’ I said, in my innocence. Because, since he was offering such magnanimous charity, I could hardly expect a man under thirty I suppose. If I wanted a man.

  ‘Roseanne, you are a very lovely young girl, and as such I am afraid, going about the town, a mournful temptation, not only to the boys of Sligo but also, the men, and as such and in every way conceivable, to have you married would be a boon and a rightness very complete and attractive in its – rightness.’

  His eloquence had momentarily failed perhaps because he had glanced at my face. I don’t know what my face was showing but it wasn’t agreement.

  ‘And naturally, I would be so pleased, so relieved and delighted to be the agent, the author as one might say, of receiving you into the fold. Which I hope you will see is a politic and indeed marvellous and magical prospect.’

  ‘Fold?’ I said.

  ‘You will be very aware, Roseanne, of the recent upheavals in Ireland, and none of these upheavals favour any of the 94

  Protestant sects. Of course I will be of the opinion that you are in gravest error and your mortal soul is lost if you continue where you are. Nevertheless I can say I pity you, and wish to help you. I can find you a good Catholic husband as I say, and he will not mind your origin eventually, as, as I also have said, you are graced if I may say again with so much beauty. Roseanne, you really are the most beautiful young girl we have ever seen in Sligo.’

  This he said with such simplicity and transparent – I almost said innocence, but something like innocence – he spoke so nicely I smiled despite myself. It was like getting a compliment from an old lady of distinction in the Sligo Street, a Pollexfen or a Middleton or the like, in her ermine and her nice tweed clothing.

  ‘It is stupid of me to flatter you,’ he said. ‘All I mean is, if you will let me take you under my wing, I can help you, and I want to help you. I must also add that I held your father in the highest regard, despite his embarrassing me, and indeed had real love for him, because he was a straightforward soul.’