Sebastian Barry - The Secret Scripture

'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.

'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?'

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 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 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 pissed 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.