Sebastian Barry - The Secret Scripture

And I cried there, and I suppose little good it did anyone. The smell of the wet clothes all about me, the coughing of the church-goers. What would I give to put them back in that church, back in that Christmas time, put everything back that time soon took away, as time must, the shillings back in the pockets of the people, the bodies back in the long johns and the mittens, everything, everything back, so we might be balanced there, kneeling and sitting on the mahogany planks, if not eternally then again for those moments, that very inch of the material of time, the lines of my father's face accepting the glimmering light, his face slowly slowly turning to both my mother and me, and smiling, smiling in easy, ordinary kindness.

The next morning my father produced for me a beautiful segment of what I learned later was called costume jewellery. All girls going out in Sligo liked to sport a bit of 'magpie' glitter. I like other girls dreamed of the fabled magpie's nest, where brooches and bracelets and earrings would be found, a nest of lovely plunder. I took my father's gift and opened its silvercoloured pin and pinned it on my cardigan, showed it proudly to the piano and the motorbike.

Then my father handed my mother the great something wrapped in good shop paper, the sort that in older days she would have saved and folded and put in a drawer. She opened the packet quietly, and gazed on the speckled scarf folded itself within, and raised her face and asked:

'Why, Joe?'

My father had not the least idea what she meant. Was it the pattern was wrong? Had he failed in the task of buying a scarf in some manner he would not be aware of, for who would tell him, the rat-catcher, about women's fashions?

'Why? I don't know, Cissy. I don't know,' he said, valiantly. Then, suddenly, he added, as if on an inspiration: 'It's a scarf.'

'What did you say, Joe?' she said, as if lost in a mysterious deafness.

'For your head, for your neck, as you like,' he said. Beginning to churn, it was obvious to me, with that desperate feeling that grows in the belly of the giver of the wrong present. He was having to explain the obvious, always an unpleasant task.

'Oh,' she said, staring at it now in her lap. 'Oh.'

'I hope you like it,' he said, which I suppose was presenting his own neck for the axe.

'Oh,' she said, 'oh.' But what class of an oh it was, or what the oh signified, neither of us knew.

Dr Grene's Commonplace Book

Very distressed to discover, quite by accident, that Bet has decided not to attend the specialist to whom she had been referred last year (was it a year ago already, or am I dreaming? Was it this year?). By the tin of Complan last night I happened to find, temporarily forgotten, her diary. Now, of course it was wrong, unethical, wrong, wrong, but I opened it, just from the tiny passion of the husband disliked. To see what she had written in it. No, no, just to see her writing, something as intimate and private as that. Maybe not even to read the words. Just to look at the black ink of her biro for a brief moment. And there it was, just a few weeks ago, an entry bold as brass, but of course, meant only for herself: 'Rang clinic, cancelled appointments.'

Why?

This was the follow-up for her dizzy spell, I was vaguely aware, in fact when she told me she had been given the referral, I was so comforted I put the entire matter from my mind. I was in two minds. First, alarmed that she had done so, and secondly, perfectly aware that I only knew because I had violated her privacy – a further violation of herself, as I knew she would see it. And she would be right.

What to do?

So I was distracted all night. My usual solution to the problem, distraction. Possibly. But I think, with good reason.

Somewhere in the small hours I grew mysteriously furious, really really angry, with her, and wanted to storm up the stairs and have it out with her. What did she think she was doing? The bloody foolishness of it!

Thank God I did not. That would have solved nothing. But very real worries assail me. The swelling in her legs could well be due to clotting, and if the clot should climb into the lungs or the heart, she will drop dead. Is this what she wants? Now yet again I discover I do not have the language, the lingo, to talk to her about this, or about anything. We have neglected the tiny sentences of life and now the big ones are beyond our reach.

I had meant to spend the evening devising some non-devious way to question Roseanne McNulty in such a manner as to get a result. It strikes me that if I cannot speak helpfully to my own wife about her health, I have little chance with Roseanne. But maybe it is easier with a stranger, one can be the 'expert', and not the great human fool that tries to lead a life. On the plus side, I am fairly confident in my assessment of most of the other patients. They are in the main open books and their distress is self-evident. Although I cannot shed myself of the feeling of being the perpetual invader. Roseanne however confounds me.

I had wanted to consult my edition of Barthus on Pathologies of Secrecy, which of course is a marvellous book, if I would only find time to read it again. I suppose I could have gone into my study and looked at it, but I was trembling. I was nearly apoplectic, if that is still a real condition in the modern world. So in the upshot I neither read my Barthus nor resolved Bet's recklessness. I am exhausted.

Roseanne's Testimony of Herself

Some weeks later it must have been, I was with my father on a particular job.

Rats start to breed with a vengeance in early spring, so late winter is a good time to go get them, when they have not expanded in numbers for a while, and the weather is not too murderous to the rat-catcher. I suppose looking back it was a queer thing to bring a young girl on the trail of rodents, but I did take a great interest in it, especially after my father read me the manual, which presented the task as one highly skilled, even verging on the vocational and the magical.

He had been working a few nights already in the Protestant orphanage, a strange place in its own right, rats or no rats. It was already about two hundred years old, and my father knew old stories attached to the place, and I do not think it was a very good idea to be an orphan in centuries gone by, judging by what he said. Perhaps in those days it was a decent place enough. He intended to work from the roof down, which was the proper way to do it, ridding the place of rats floor by floor. The upper attics had been cleared, and the top floor, and there were three floors to do, where the orphan girls actually lived, about two hundred of them in their nice canvaslike pinnies, which they wore in their beds.

'They've a bed each these times, Roseanne, yes,' said my father. 'But in the times of your grandfather, or maybe it was his grandfather, but anyway, things were very different. Your grandfather, or perhaps your grandfather's grandfather, used to tell a terrible tale about this place. He came in here, inspector of buildings he was, and had been commissioned by the government in Dublin at the time, because there had been an outcry against the practices in these places, an outcry. He came in here,' and we were standing out in the ancient courtyard at the time, in a rather murky light, with two cages of rats full as you like, and Bob the dog looking very pleased with himself, having chased the rats through the very walls, which were seven or eight feet thick in places, with cavities galore, 'say maybe in one of those big rooms up there,' and he pointed up the gloomy stones of the building to the second floor, 'and there was what looked to him like an acre of beds, and on each bed was babies, maybe twenty of them, newborn or nearly, lying side by side, and he came in there with the ould nurse, as manky now as you like, as you can imagine, and he surveys the sea of babies, and he notices that there was no glass in some of the windows, not like now, and just a little fire in the huge grate, not enough to warm anything, and indeed holes in the ceiling also with the cold drear winter wind howling in, and he exclaims, "My God, woman," or however they might speak in those times, "my God, woman, but these children are not being cared for, by God," he says, "they are not even clothed," and sure enough, Roseanne, they had barely a scrap of clothing between them. And the old woman says, like it was the most reasonable and ordinary thing in the world, "But sure, Mister, aren't they lying in here to die." And he realised that these arrangements were meant, and it was a way to be rid of the sickly or surplus babies. And that was a great scandal in those days, for a while, I suppose.'