The Secret Scripture

by Sebastian Barry

  ‘But a Presbyterian soul,’ I said.

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  ‘My mother is Plymouth Brethren.’

  ‘Well,’ he said, for the first time with a taint of animosity,

  ‘never mind.’

  ‘But I must mind my mother. And I will. It is my duty as her daughter.’

  ‘Your mother, Roseanne, is a very sick woman.’

  All right, I had not heard this expressed, and it shocked me to hear it. But, yes, I knew that to be true.

  ‘More than likely,’ he said, ‘you will need to commit her to the asylum, I hope I am not shocking you?’

  Oh, but he was shocking me. When he spoke those fearsome words, my belly churned, my muscles ached in their slings of bones. Without knowing I was going to do it, I suddenly and 95

  inexplicably vomited onto the carpet in front of me. Fr Gaunt drew back his legs with extraordinary quickness, neatness. There on the floor was the remains of the nice toast I had made for my mother and myself for breakfast.

  Fr Gaunt stood up.

  ‘Oh. You will need to clean that up, I expect?’

  ‘I will,’ I said, and bit my tongue on the urge to apologise. I knew somehow I must never apologise to Fr Gaunt, and that from henceforth he would be a force unknown, like a calamity of weather waiting unknown and un-forecast to bedevil a landscape.

  ‘Father, I can’t do what you say. I can’t do it.’

  ‘You will think about it? In your grief you may make poor decisions. I understand this. My own father died five years ago of a cancer, it was a terrible death, and I mourn him still. Remember, Roseanne, grief is two years long. You will not make a good thought for a long time. Be advised by me, let me advise you in loco parentis, do you see, in place of your father let me be your father in this, as a priest ought. We have had so many dealings, he and I, and you, that you are almost in the fold already. It will save your immortal soul, and save you in this valley of sorrows and tears. It will protect you against all the foul tides and accidents of the world.’

  I shook my head. I see myself, behind my eyes, shaking my head.

  Fr Gaunt shook his head also, but in a different way. ‘You will think about it? Think about it, Roseanne, and then we will talk again. It is a moment in your life when you are in the greatest danger. Good day to you, Roseanne. Thank you for the tea. It was lovely. And thank your mother.’

  He went out into the tiny hall and into the street. When he was quite gone, long out of ear shot, and only the smell of his clothes lingered oddly in the room, I said:

  ‘Goodbye, Father.’

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  chapter ten

  Dr Grene today. He has shaved his beard!

  I don’t remember if I mentioned his beard. A beard on a man is only a way of hiding something, his face of course, but also the inner matters, like a hedge around a secret garden, or a cover over a bird cage.

  I would like to say I didn’t know him when he stepped in, because that is what you would expect, but I did know him. I was sitting here writing when I heard his step in the corridor and just managed to get everything hidden in the floor before he knocked and came in, as always not an easy task for an ancient cailleach like myself. A cailleach is the old crone of stories, the wise woman and sometimes a kind of witch. My husband Tom McNulty was the master of such stories, which he told with perfect force mainly because he believed every word of them. Sometime I will tell you about the two-headed dog that he saw on the road to Enniscrone, if you like. How would I know what you like? I am getting used to thinking of you there, somewhere. This cailleach is deluded in the head!

  The old midwife. I am only the midwife to my own old story. It is midwifery enough.

  Dr Grene was very subdued, very quiet, very shiny in the face. He might have rubbed some unguent onto his skin when he shaved it, to spare it some of the shock of the air. He wandered over to the table – I was now sitting on the bed, among the tiny landscapes of the coverlet, I think they are French scenes, there is a man carrying a donkey on his back and other things – and Dr Grene lifted from the table my father’s old copy of Religio Medici and looked at it idly enough. I was surprised when my father died to see that the book was printed in 97

  1869, although I knew he had it always for many years. His name, and the place Southampton, and the date 1888 were of course pencilled onto the flyleaf, but still I hoped maybe the book had been put into his youthful hands by the hands of his own father, my grandfather, a person of course whom I never met. It might have been. So that when I held it in my hands, there was as it were a history of hands surrounding the little volume, the hands of my own people. Because a lone person takes great comfort from her people, in the watches of the night, even the memory of them.

  Because I knew the little book so well, I could guess what Dr Grene was looking at. It was a picture of Sir Thomas Browne, with a beard. Perhaps as he looked at the beard, a very fierce jutting object in a round engraving, he may suddenly have been regretting the loss of his own. Sampson Low, Son, and Marston were the printers. That Son was beautiful. The son of Sampson Low. Who was he, who was he? Did he labour under the whip of his father, or was he treated with gentleness and respect? J. W. Willis Bund supplied the notes. Names, names, all passed away, forgotten, mere birdsong in the bushes of things. If J. W. Willis Bund can pass away forgotten, how much easier for me? We share in that at least.

  Son. As little I know about my own son. The son of

  Roseanne Clear.

  ‘An old book,’ he said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Whose name is that, Mrs McNulty, Joe Clear?’

  Dr Grene now had a perplexed look on his face, a very deep thinking look, like a young boy figuring out an arithmetic problem. If he had had a pencil he might have licked the lead. He had shaved his beard and was no longer hiding his face, so I felt suddenly I owed him something.

  ‘My father,’ I said.

  ‘He was an educated man then?’

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  ‘He was indeed. He was a minister’s son. From Collooney.’

  ‘Collooney,’ he said. ‘Collooney suffered so in the troubles in the twenties,’ he said. ‘I am glad somehow that one time there was a man there that read the Religio Medici.’

  The way he said the last two words slowly I knew he had never encountered the book before.

  Dr Grene opened the book further, passing by the introduction, and hunting mildly for the beginning of the book, as a person does.

  ‘“To the reader. Certainly that man were greedy of life, who should desire to live when all the world were at an end . . .”’

  Dr Grene gave a strange little laugh, not a true laugh at all, but a sort of miniature cry. Then he laid the book back where he had found it.

  ‘I see,’ he said, though I had said nothing. Perhaps he was talking to the old bearded face in the book, or to the book itself. Seventy-six, Thomas Browne was when he died, a youngster compared to me. He died on his birthday, as sometimes happens, if rarely. I suppose Dr Grene is about sixty or so. I had never seen him quite so solemn as this today. He is hardly a man for jests and jokes, but he sometimes has a curious lightness carried about with him. Compared to poor John Kane, with all his sins, his supposed rapes and wrong doing in the asylum, Dr Grene is like an angel. Perhaps compared to many, I can no longer say. If Dr Grene feels himself washed up on this terrible shore of the asylum, if he feels himself in any way yesterday’s man, as the saying goes, for me he is tomorrow and tomorrow. Such were my thoughts as I looked at him, trying to untie the knot of his new mood. Dr Grene crossed to the little chair by the window where I like to sit when the weather is a little warmer. Otherwise there is a chill that seems to penetrate the window-glass. Below the window there is the yard, the high wall, and the endless fields. Roscommon town I am told is over the horizon, and it may be. 99

  There is a river that moves between the fields that in the summer takes the light and uses my window as a signal, signalling to what or who or where I
do not know. The riverlight plays in the glass. So naturally I like to sit there. At any rate, Dr Grene put his weight into it, always a cause for slight alarm, for it is a mere dress chair, one of those nice little chairs that country women liked to have in their bedrooms for their dress, even if it was the only nice object in the house. How it got to this room God only knows, and He perhaps hardly.

  ‘Can you remember, Mrs McNulty, what it was – I mean, the events leading up to your presence in the Sligo asylum? You remember me saying I could find no proper record of the matter? I have searched again since and certainly have found nothing further. I am afraid the history of your presence here and in Sligo is no more. But I will continue to look, and I have sent to Sligo just on the off chance they have something. Can you remember anything about the matter?’

  ‘I don’t think I remember. The Leitrim Hotel they called it. I do remember that.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘They called the asylum in Sligo the Leitrim Hotel.’

  ‘Did they? I never knew that. Why so? Oh,’ he said, nearly laughing, nearly, ‘because – yes.’

  ‘Half of Leitrim was said to be in it.’

  ‘Poor Leitrim.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘That is an odd word, Leitrim. I wonder what it means? I suppose it is Irish. Of course it is.’

  I smiled at him. He was like a boy that has banged his knee and now the pain was subsiding. The cheerfulness of a boy after pain and tears.

  Then he sank back again somehow, blackening deeper into himself, like a mole in the earth. I answered him largely to raise him back again.

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  ‘I do remember terrible dark things, and loss, and noise, but it is like one of those terrible dark pictures that hang in churches, God knows why, because you cannot see a thing in them.’

  ‘Mrs McNulty, that is a beautiful description of traumatic memory.’

  ‘Is it?’

  ‘Yes, it is.’

  Then he sat there in his own version of silence for a long while. He sat so long he was almost an inmate of the room! As if he lived there himself, as if he had nowhere to go to, nothing to do, no one to attend.

  He sat in the chill light. The river, drowned in its own water, and drowned a second time in the rains of February, was not in a position to throw its light. The window-glass was severely itself. Only the still grass of winter far below lent it a slight besmirch of green. His eyes, now much clearer somehow and more distinct without the beard, were looking forwards as if at an object about a yard away, that stare that faces have in portraits. I sat on the bed and without the slightest embarrassment watched him, because he wasn’t watching me at all. He was looking into that strange place, the middle distance, the most mysterious, human, and rich of all distances. And from his eyes came slowly tears, immaculate human tears, before the world touches them. River, window and eyes.

  ‘What is the matter, Dr Grene?’ I said.

  ‘Oh,’ he said.

  I rose and moved towards him. You would have done the same yourself. It is an ancient matter. Something propels you towards sudden grief, or perhaps also sometimes repels. You move away. I moved towards it, I couldn’t help it.

  ‘Please do not mind me if I stand near you,’ I said. ‘I have had my bath yesterday. I am not foul-smelling.’

  ‘What?’ he said, absolutely surprised, but minutely. ‘What?’

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  I stood by him and held out my right hand and placed it on his shoulder, actually a little behind the shoulder on his back. I had this unbidden memory of my father sitting on his bed, holding my mother, and patting her back almost childishly. I didn’t dare pat Dr Grene, but just rested my old hand there.

  ‘What is the matter?’ I said.

  ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Oh. My wife has died.’

  ‘Your wife?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘yes. Her breathing deserted her. She choked, she choked – she suffocated.’

  ‘Oh, my poor man,’ I said.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes.’

  Then I knew something about Dr Grene. I had opened my mouth to tell him something about myself, by grace of his lost beard, and out of his own mouth had issued this news, this huge information.

  With infinite sadness and very quietly, he added: ‘It is also my birthday.’

  Now here is a story of general stupidity in me. You might not credit the level of it.

  I was wanting greatly to speak to my father and my father was dead. I had been a couple of times to his grave in the Presbyterian yard, but I thought I could not find him there. Maybe his bones did not contain him, maybe his signal and his self was elsewhere.

  It was the useful gloom of a December afternoon, dark by four. I knew well that the old gates up in the other cemetery would be open, but how easy it would be to slip in those gates in the dark and be there among the graves with no one to note me. I was sure, I was hoping if my father was to be found anywhere, something of him might remain there, some old twist 102

  of bushes and paths and buried things that might constitute a sort of ancient radio that would carry a signal of him. So I crept in there in my old blue dress and my coat, as thin and slight in those days as a heron, and very like a heron I am sure in that garb, with my gawky face and long neck sticking up from it, an out and out opportunity for the cold. What calm I took from the spreading paths, the quiet stones, the familiar numbers on their iron tags stuck into the ground by each grave, that tallied I knew with the book of graves held for safety in the concrete temple. A yellow light had got stuck in the meagre forest of small trees that covered the general paths, a forest that had been made thin and poor by the very blasts of death. Now I wrapped my coat about me to the collar, and without thinking what I was really doing, without being quite in the present time, penetrated as far as the circular sweep of graves in front of the temple. There were the pillars, the old sharp arch with its faded figures, Greek heroes and the like, of wars and times unknown, and the iron door slightly agape on its heavy hinges, and that longed-for light within of the stove and the lamp that spoke the volume of my father. Without a thought for the present moment, in other words, in great stupidity, I crept forward towards that light, thinking, my heart begging me to advance, to claim again the cherished cowl of light and warmth and talk. The door was open enough for me to go straight in. And nothing had changed. Everything inside also spoke of my father. His kettle was on the rickety hob still beside the grate of guttering coals, his enamel cup, even my own, on the table, the few books and ledgers piled neatly there, and the same footprints on the faded slate floor. My eyes opened and opened, and my face, and I felt absolutely certain that I would soon be in his presence, soon be comforted, advised, restored. Then I felt a sudden and shocking push from behind. I wasn’t expecting such a thing in the refuge of my own father. I 103

  staggered forward a few steps, quite unbalanced, with that nasty lurching feeling in the belly from having to right myself so abruptly. I turned about and there was a strange man in the door. He had a belly on him under a gansey too small for him, that had the shape and look of the crust of a shop-bought loaf. The face was severe with odd hollow cheeks, and the bushy brows of the old, except he probably wasn’t much past fifty. No, no, but I knew this man, of course I did. It was Joe Brady that had replaced my father.

  Hadn’t Fr Gaunt told me? So why had it gone from my mind? What in the name of God was I doing there? You will say it was a madness, an astrayness in the head. He certainly did not have the appearance of a suitor, or anything like it. He looked angry and turned about, his eyes with that unhappy burning look I had noticed in the graveyard. In my longing for my father I had simply not thought about him again since Fr Gaunt brought his request.

  Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, maybe so, but in my experience men are not any better. Terror rose in me from the cold flags of the floor, terror so severe I must confess – and forgive such honesty in an old woman remembering horrors –

  that I helplessly pis
sed in my drawers. Even in the poor light of the temple I am sure he saw that, and whether from this cause or another, he let out a laugh. It was a laugh like a dog’s growl when it fears to be stepped on, a warning laugh if there is such a thing. And don’t they say in books that the laugh of a human person has its origin in an ancient grimacing and growling of the face? So it looked to me that day, proof positive.

  ‘You didn’t want me,’ he said, the first time in his life he had spoken to me, which amazed me, ‘and you preferring to stay the Godless girl you are.’

  He walked forward at me and I don’t know what he intended. But as he moved I thought that indeed something ancient and irresistible was born in him. The silent temple in the silent 104

  yard, the darkness of December, and whatever was in me he wanted. It seemed as he moved forward, his intention changed, humanity cleared from his face, something private and darker than humanity, something before we were given our troublesome souls, stirred in his eyes. I think at this impossible distance that he wanted to kill me, why ever so I do not know. There was a story of this Joe Brady that I had just stepped in on, what huge plot he had plotted with Fr Gaunt I do not know. In seeking to find my father I seemed to have found my murderer. I called out with suddenly found strength of voice. I roared!

  Now in behind him stepped another man. What luck I had that there was another man in that quiet place. Joe Brady by this time had completed the last step to my form, and as if it was what he greatly desired in all the things of the world, he closed his hands about my scrawny neck and pulled me to him. Then I knew somehow without knowing that he was scrabbling about at his flies to release whatever was there, God help me, I was only sixteen and though I knew about birds and bees, I hardly knew aught else, except that certain lads might stir you as you passed them, and you would not know why. At this point in my life I may have been the most innocent girl in Sligo, and I do remember even as I remember here, writing, that my first thought was that he was drawing forth a gun or a knife from his britches, because of course this was the very place I had seen guns drawn and heard them explode. As if in very harmony with that thought, the new man behind Joe Brady indeed had a gun drawn, a big heavy-looking yoke that he brought across the back of Joe Brady’s head with a movement like a man cutting a high bramble with a slashhook. I was aware of all this even as I stood drenched in terror. Joe Brady didn’t go out on the first blow, but he sank to his knees, and in utter disgust and misery I saw his swollen penis between his legs and threw my hands to my eyes. The new man 105