Sebastian Barry - The Secret Scripture

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 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.'

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

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?'

'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.

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.