Sebastian Barry - The Secret Scripture

But that was how Dr Grene struck me today, as he sat in silence in my little quarters, his neat form stretched out on the chair, saying nothing, not exactly watching me with his eyes, but watching me with his luck and instincts, like a fisherman beside dark water.

Oh, yes, like a salmon I felt, right enough, and stilled myself in the deep water, very conscious of him, and his rod, and his fly, and his hook.

'Well, Roseanne,' he said at last, 'hmm, I think it's true that -you came here about – how many years ago?'

'It's a long long while.'

'Yes. And you came here I believe from Sligo Mental Hospital.' 'Lunatic Asylum.'

'Yes, yes. An interesting old phrase. The second word after all quite – reassuring. The first a very old word, but its meaning a little dubious and not a nice word any more. Though, for myself, when the moon is full, I often wonder, do I feel – a little strange?'

I looked at Dr Grene and tried to imagine him altered by the moon, more whiskery, a werewolf possibly.

'Such enormous forces,' he said. 'The tides being pulled from shore to shore. Yes, the moon. A very considerable object.'

He stood up now and went to my window. It was so early in this winter day that indeed the moon was prince of all outside. Its light lay in a solemn glister on the windowpanes. Dr Grene nodded as solemnly to himself, looking out on the yard below, where John Kane and others banged the bins betimes and all the other clocklike actions of the hospital – the asylum. The lunatic asylum. The place subject to the forces of the moon.

Dr Grene is one of those men that now and then seem to stroke at phantom cravats, or some item of clothing from some other time. Certainly he might have stroked his beard, but he did not. Did he possess some fancy scarf or suchlike at his neck years ago in his youth? I think he might have. Anyway he stroked this phantom object now, running the fingers of his right hand an inch or two above his mere purple tie, the knot thick like a young rose.

'Oh,' he said, in a strange exclamation. It was a noise that spoke of utter weariness, but I do not think he was weary. It was an early-morning sound, made in my room as if he were on his own. As perhaps to all the intents and purposes of the actual world he was.

'Do you want to consider leaving here? Do you want me to make a consideration of it?'

But I could make no answer to that. Do I want freedom of that kind? Do I know what it is any more? Is this queer room my home? Whatever was the case, I felt again that creeping fear, like the frost on the plants of the summer, that blacken the leaves in that saddening way.

'I wonder how long you were in Sligo? Do you remember the year you entered there?

'No. Sometime during the war,' I said. That I knew.

'The Second World War, you mean?'

'Yes.'

'I was only a baby then,' he said.

Then there was a crisp, cold silence.

'We used to go down to one of the little Cornish bays, my father and mother and myself – this is my earliest memory, it is of no other significance. I remember the absolute chill of the water and, do you know, my nappies heavy with that water, a very vivid memory. The government allowed petrol to hardly anyone, so my father built one of those tandem bikes, welding together two different machines. He took the back position because that was where the power was needed, for those Cornish hills. Little hills, but lethal to the legs. Nice days, in the summer. My father at his ease. Tea that we boiled on the beach in a billycan, like fishermen.' Dr Grene laughed, sharing his laugh with the new light gathering outside to make the morning. 'Maybe that was just after the war.'

I wanted to ask him what his father's profession was, I don't know why, but it seemed too bare a question. Maybe he intended me to ask it, now I think of it. So we would begin to speak of fathers? Maybe he was casting his lure over the dark waters.

'I have not heard good accounts of the old hospital in Sligo, in that time. I am sure it was a horrendous place. I am quite sure it was.'

But I let that lie also.

'It's one of the mysteries of psychiatry that our hospitals in the early part of the century were so bad, so difficult to defend, whereas in the early part of the nineteenth century there was often quite an enlightened attitude to, to well, lunacy, as they called it. There was a sudden understanding that the incarceration, the chaining of people et cetera, was not good, and so an enormous effort was made to – alleviate matters. But I am afraid there was a reversion – something awry, eventually. Do you remember why you were changed from Sligo to here?'

He had asked that quite suddenly so that before I knew I had done so, I had spoken.

'My father-in-law arranged it,' I said.

'Your father-in-law? Who was that?'

'Old Tom, the bandman. He was also the tailor in Sligo.'

'In the town, you mean?'

'No, in the asylum itself.'

'You were in the asylum then where your father-in-law worked?'

'Yes.' 'I see.'

'I think my mother was also there, but I can't remember.' 'Working there?'

'No.'

'A patient?'

'I can't remember. I honestly can't.'

Oh, I knew he was longing then to ask me more, but to give him his due, he did not. Too good a fisherman maybe. When you see the salmon leaping, you will not catch one. Might as well go home.

'I certainly don't want you to be fearful,' he said, a little out of the blue. 'No, no. That is not my intention. I must say, Roseanne, we hold you in some regard here, we do.'

'I don't think that is merited,' I said, blushing and suddenly ashamed. Violently ashamed. It was as if some wood and leaves were suddenly cleared from a spring, and the head of water blossomed up. Painful, painful shame.

'Oh yes,' he said, not aware I think of my distress. He was perhaps plamasing me, flannelling me, as my father would have said. To enter me into some subject, where he could begin. A door into whatever he needed to understand. A part of me yearned to help him. Give him welcome. But. The rats of shame bursting through the wall I have constructed with infinite care over the years and milling about in my lap, was what it felt like. That was my job to hide it then, hide those wretched rats.

Why did I feel that dark shame after all these years? Why still in me, that dark dark shame?

Well, well.

Now we had a few mysteries in our laps. But the most pressing soon became again our poverty, which my father could not fathom.

One evening of the winter returning home from school I met up with my father along the river road. It wasn't like the joyful meetings of childhood, but I would be proud to say even now that I do believe it brightened something in my father to see me. It lightened him, dark, deep dark, though that Sligo evening was. I hope that doesn't seem like boasting.

'Now, dear,' he said. 'We'll walk arm in arm home, unless you're afraid to be seen with your father.'

'No,' I said, surprised. 'I am not afraid.'

'Well,' he said. 'I know what it is to be fifteen. Like a fella out on a headland in the blazing wind.'

But I didn't really understand what he meant. It was so cold I fancied there was frost on the stuff he put in his hair to flatten it.

Then we were coming idly, easily up our street. Up along the houses in front of us, one of the doors opened, and a man stepped down onto the pavement, and raised his brown trilby hat to the mask of a face that was just visible in the door. It was my mother's face and our own door.

'Well, Jaysus,' said my father, 'there's Mr Fine himself coming out of our house. I wonder what he was looking for. I wonder does he have rats?'

Mr Fine came towards us. He was a tall, loping man, a great gentleman of the town, with a kind, soft face like a man who had been out in a sunny wind – like the man on the headland maybe.