The Secret Scripture

by Sebastian Barry

  ‘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 170

  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 171

  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 172

  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 Dáil itself, according to Tom.

  ‘There’s things you can say with impunity in Dáil Éireann 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 173

  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.’

  174

  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.

  John Lavelle wasn’t just another fella. He wasn’t just a bowsie in the street making a remark behind my back, he was an important person because he had known my father and things about my father. Two deaths and more linked us, you might say, the death of his brother and the death of my father. We should have been enemies but somehow we were not. I wasn’t against him, even if I wasn’t for him either. To this day I don’t really understand it. I rarely saw him and yet he loomed in my dreams. In my dreams he was always being shot and dying, like his brother had in real waking life. I often saw him dying in dreams. Held his hand and the like. Sisterly. I never did speak about that to Tom though. I didn’t like to. How would I begin? Tom loved me, or he loved what he knew of me, what he saw of me. Now I don’t want to say something untoward, but he always complimented me on my rear end. That’s the truth.

  ‘When I feel blue,’ he said once, ‘I think of your backside.’

  Not very romantic, but in another way, very romantic. Men are not really humans at all, no, I mean, they have different priorities. Mind you, I don’t know what women’s priorities are 175

  either, at least, I know what they are and never did feel them. I did have a shocking desire for Tom myself. The whole lot of him. I don’t know. He made me dizzy on a constant basis. There’s some things you really can’t get enough of. Chocolate you can get enough of. But some things. I liked his company, in all guises of company. I liked drinking cups of tea with him. I liked kissing his ears. Maybe I was never a proper woman. God forgive me. Maybe the biggest error I made was I always felt the equal of him. I felt, it was me and him, like Bonnie and Clyde, who just that time in America were going round killing people and generally what, expressing their love in curious ways. All right, so why did I go up to Maeve’s cairn that very Sunday following? I don’t know. Because John Lavelle asked me? No. I know it was a wretched thing to do, a mistake. Why does the salmon go home to the Garravoge, when it has all the sea to roam over?

  Dr Grene’s Commonplace Book

  Every year in the early days we went religiously to Bundoran for our holiday. People now laugh at Bundoran, they think it the prime example of the ancient Irish holiday, damp B&Bs, foul rain, bad food and all. But we liked all that, me and Bet. We laughed at it too, but affectionately, like you might laugh at a mad great-aunt. We loved going there – we fled there, you might say, to refresh ourselves at the altar of Bundoran. The sunlight is a great reader of faces. Going back to the same place year after year made a sort of clock of Bet’s face. Every year there was a new story, the next picture in the sequence. I should have photographed her every year in the same place at the same time. She was always growling and worried about growing old, she spotted every new line on her face 176

  just the minute it appeared, like a sleepy dog suddenly wakes when a stranger’s foot is distantly heard broaching the boundaries of a property. Her only extravagance was those jars of night cream she invested in, in her war against those lines. She was a deeply intelligent person, she knew great swathes of Shakespeare from her schooldays, when one of those unsung, inspired teachers had got a hold of her, and tried to make a teacher of her too. But she wasn’t looking at wrinkles with her intelligence, it was something more primal, ancient. For myself, hand on heart, those things never bothered me. It is one of the graces of married life that for some magical reason we always look the same to each other. Even our friends never seem to grow old. What a boon that is, and never suspected by me when I was young. But I suppose, otherwise, what would we do? There has never been a person in an old people’s home that hasn’t looked around dubiously at the other inhabitants. They are the old ones, they are the club that no one wants to join. But we are never old to ourselves. That is because at close of day the ship we sail in is the soul, not the body. Oh, and I write that, the biggest agnostic in Ireland. As usual I don’t have words for what I mean. I am trying to say I loved Bet, yes, soul to soul, and the lines and wrinkles were part of some other story, her own harrowing reading of her own life. Nor would I underestimate the pain it caused her. By her own estimation a plain woman, she did not wish to be a plain old woman. However I would also question her plainness. There were times when her face shimmered and flashed with its own beauty. There was the moment we stood side by side in the church, and I looked down at her face just the second before she said ‘I do,’ and then heard her say it, and then out of her face flew this extraordinary light, flooding up at me. It was love. You do not expect to see love like that. I did not anyhow. So why did I have to betray her in Bundoran of all places? I went there innocently enough, without her, but for a con177 ference in that new hotel on the strand. It was a psychiatric gathering, right enough. Our topic as it happened was geriatric psychosis, dementia, all that. I was presenting a paper on versions of memory, the absolute fascist certainty of memory, the bullying oppression of memory. I suppose it was a sort of middle-aged nonsense, but at the time I thought it quite radical, revolutionary. It was received at the conference as a type of throwing caution to the wind. As a type of indiscretion of the mind. So perhaps it wasn’t remarkable that it was followed by an indiscretion of the body.

  Poor Martha. Four fine boys she had at home, and a husband who was one of the most gifted junior counsels of his generation. A remote, troubled man, but, I am sure, a worthy. It was dreadfully simple. We drank too much wine together, we wandered back to the corridor of unimpressive rooms, we had a sudden desire towards each other, I kissed her, we fumbled in the dark, she never even took her knickers off, God help us, she came under my hand, that seemed to be the end of it. It was a throwback, a surrender, a retreat to adolescence, when such fumblings seemed heroic and poetic.

  Martha went home and told her good husband. I don’t suppose she meant to, or wanted to. I think what she really wanted was for it not to have happened. The world is not full of betrayers, it is full of people with decent motives and a full desire to do right by those who know them and love them. This is a little-known truth, but I think it is a truth nonetheless. Empirically, from all the years of my work, I would attest to that. I know it is a miraculous conclusion, but there it is. We like to characterise humanity as savage, lustful, and basic, but that is to make strangers of everyone. We are not wolves, but lambs astonished in the margins of the fields by sunlight and summer. She lost her world, Martha. And I lost mine. No doubt it was well deserved. Whatever her husband suffered was not, and whatever Bet suffered I know for a certainty was not. 178

  Because faithfulness is not a human question, but a divine one.

  There I go again.

  And I wonder what Fr Gaunt would have made of that? Fr Gaunt, so assiduous, so devoted to revealing Roseanne, her nature, her incriminating story.

  The deposition is in the other room, and I am too tired to go and get it. I will see how much of it I can write down from memory. The events at the cemetery I have itemised. Then independence came, the imperial police were disbanded, increasing I must suppose the fears of Roseanne’s father, then

  . . . I suppose, time passed. The sense of vulnerability decreased, increased? And Roseanne’s father got a job in the selfsame cemetery. As this job was in the gift of the town council, it is difficult to understand why so tainted a man was given such a sinecure, unless it was a job so lowly they thought it was a just humiliation. Indeed in due course he lost this job and was given the job of rat-catcher in Sligo, surely
the ultimate insult to such a man. Fr Gaunt writes with possible wryness,

  ‘As he had hunted down his fellow countrymen like rats, it might be said he was qualified for the job.’ (Or words to that effect). But memories are both long and short in Ireland, like anywhere there are such wars. The civil war that followed caused further mayhem to the kindly instincts of young men in Sligo. Eventually time was found to turn attention to Roseanne’s father, and his end was curious and protracted. One night as he came home he was abducted on the corner of his street. He was drunk as was his custom, and his daughter was waiting as was hers. And I do think, and it is really clear from Fr Gaunt’s account, that Roseanne adored her curious father. At any rate he was taken by a number of men and 179

  dragged off into the cemetery. She followed. Fr Gaunt thinks the plan was to take him up to the top of the round tower there in the graveyard and fling him out of the window at the top, or some such strategy.

  His mouth was stuffed with white feathers no doubt to characterise his former work, though God knows I cannot see wherein his cowardice lay, misguided though he may have been in many respects. Then alas he was beaten with hammers, and an effort made to push him out the little window at the top of the tower. Roseanne herself was below looking up. Awful noises no doubt of horror from the small room at the top. And they did get him half way out the window, except his belly was too rounded by the years of beer, and would not admit him out into the night air. The hammers had not really killed him either, and as he roared, the feathers burst from his mouth. In a desperate rage they pulled him back in, and one of the men flung the bloody hammers out the window. And the feathers flew up and the hammers fell down, striking Roseanne as she stood gazing up a blow to the head, knocking her out cold.

  Their less than theatrical solution to the question of his execution was to hang him in a derelict house nearby. I do not think in the atmosphere of the times he would have been much missed. No doubt he had acted against his own people. They were young men trying to avenge a great wrong, and young men are excitable and sometimes clumsy. No, not much missed, such a man.