Sebastian Barry - The Secret Scripture

I write this calmly although at this moment I am anything but calm.

Dr Grene was here for an hour in the afternoon. I was quite shocked by his ashen face, and he was to my added astonishment wearing the dark suit of the mourner, as he had just attended his wife's removal and burial. He referred to her as Bet, which must be a shorter form of Betty, which is a short form for what name? I cannot remember. Perhaps Elisabeth. He said there were forty-four mourners, he had counted them. I had the thought that there would be fewer for me, fewer, few, or none, unless Dr Grene himself attended my interment. But what does it matter? I could see the grief in the very lines of his face and where he had shaved his beard there was a violent-looking red rash, which he kept touching gingerly. I told him there he might be better not bothering with the likes of me on such a day, but he didn't answer that.

'I have unexpectedly found some additional material,' he said. 'I don't know whether it will help us, as it pertains to matters in the long ago. As they say.'

As who say? The people he is accustomed to seeing? The old people of his youth? When was Dr Grene young? I suppose in the fifties and sixties of the last century. When Queen Elizabeth was young and England was old.

'It was a little deposition someone had made many years ago, I don't know if it belonged to this institution or in fact went back to your time in Sligo Mental Hospital, and had been transferred here with you. It has at least raised the hope in me that the original is there. This copy was in a very poor state, typed but very faint as one might expect. And a great part of it missing. Something from an Egyptian tomb indeed. It referred to your father being in the Royal Irish Constabulary, which is not a phrase I had seen for many a long year, and the circumstances of his death – of his murder as one might say. I was very distressed to read about it. I don't know, but I felt I should see you today, despite my own – challenges at the moment. It seemed so vivid, so recent, perhaps because I am just at the moment susceptible to, to grief and griefs. That might be the why. I was very upset, Roseanne. In the chief part because I did not know.'

His words hung in the room the way such words do hang. 'It must be someone else's document,' I said.

'Oh?' he said.

'Yes,' I said. 'You may have been upset unnecessarily. On my account at least.'

'This wasn't the fate of your father?'

'No.'

'He was not in the police?'

'No.'

'Oh, well, I am relieved to hear it. But it had your name attached, Roseanne McNulty.'

'You call me Mrs McNulty, but there is another story attached to that, I really should be called by my maiden name.'

'But you were married, no?'

'Yes, I was married to Tom McNulty.'

'He died?' 'No, no.'

But I wasn't able in that moment to add anything.

'The document said your father was an RIC man in Sligo during the height of the troubles in the twenties, and was tragically killed by the IRA. I must confess I am still a little musty on that whole period. It seemed to us at school so much a series of dire errors and – it is such a belligerent history. Even the Second World War seemed to us – I don't know what it seemed to us. Ancient History? And yet I was born during the war. Wasn't your father's name Joseph, Joseph

Clear?'

But I was gripped by some unpleasant feeling, I don't know if you have ever had it, as if someone has stopped up your body with putty. When I closed my gums on the feeling I could have sworn I was actually biting through putty. I stared at Dr Grene in panic.

'What is the matter, Roseanne? I have upset you? I am so sorry.'

'Perhaps', I said, at last able to get words through the putty, 'that is your job, Dr Grene?'

'To upset you? No, no. My job is to help you. In this instance, to assess you. It has actually been put upon me as a duty. There is all sorts of legislation nowadays. I would be more than happy to leave you alone – I mean not alone, but be, to leave you be, and talk of other things, or talk of nothing, which I am beginning to think is the healthiest topic of all.'

'My maiden name was Clear,' I said suddenly.

'That is what I thought. I read it, didn't I, in that little book?' he said. 'That is of course a very rare name. Joe Clear. There can't have been too many of that name. There cannot be too many Clears in Ireland. I wonder is it a form of Clare, or connected to Cape Clear, or what?'

He was speaking in oddly agonised tones, with that perplexed look again as of a young boy overwhelmed at school.

'I think it is a Protestant name and maybe comes out of England long ago.'

'Do you think? Of course, McNulty is a common enough name. You might find McNultys everywhere.'

'It is an old Sligo name. My husband told me they were the last recorded cannibal tribe in Ireland. It is written somewhere that they ate their enemies.'

'Oh my.'

'Yes. Myself, I didn't eat meat at that time. The smell of meat made me feel faint, though I cooked it every day for him. So my husband liked to tell people that I was the last recorded vegetarian cannibal in Ireland.'

'He was droll, your husband.'

Oh, oh, oh, shallow rocks again. I buttoned my lip as quick as I could. I did not want to rehearse all that now.

'Well, well,' he said, stirring to go at last, 'I might bring up that document I mentioned tomorrow or the next day, it might interest you to look it over.'

'I cannot read as well as I used to. I read Thomas Browne, but then I know the writing off by heart mostly.'

'We should get you a pair of reading glasses, Mrs McNulty -or should I say Ms Clear?

'I am as happy without them.'

'Very well.'

Then for some reason he laughed, one of those little tinkling laughs that people laugh when a private thought has amused them, and occurs before they have the power to stop it.

'Oh no,' he said, although I had said nothing, 'excuse me -nothing, nothing.'

And off he went, nodding. He raised his right hand at the door and actually waved, like I was a passenger on a ship.

Was it before or after that John Kane came in to talk about the snowdrops? I can't remember.

No, I remember. John Kane did come back in, but it was to mop the floor. He had evidently, somehow or other, realised he had not yet mopped my floor. After all, he is also now becoming elderly, the elderly fetching for the elderly. Not that he fetches. As he swept in under my bed he happened to bring out in the bristles of his brush a spoon. It was not clean but smeared with soup, and I must have knocked it from the tray. He gave me a very brief dark look, slapped my face lightly, and left.

How does good history become bad history by and by?

Dr Grene's Commonplace Book

'Certainly that man were greedy of life, who should desire to live when all the world were at an end…'

She is only two weeks buried. Bet. It is so difficult even to write the name. Sometimes here in the house now alone at night I hear some little banging somewhere, probably a sound I have unconsciously heard a million times, a door in the house that touches against its frame in the draught, and I don't know, I look fearfully up the dark corridor and wonder if it is Bet. It is a terrible and odd thing to be haunted by your wife.

Of course, I am not. It is one of the many strange fruits in the cornucopia of grief.

How difficult it is to live. I would almost say all my world is at an end. How often I must have listened blithely and with professional distance to some poor soul tortured by depression, a sickness that might have had its origin in just such a catastrophe as has hit me.

I feel so bereft I am almost inclined to admire any instance of simple strength of mind, all health of mind. I watched the images of Saddam Hussein, 'President of Iraq' as he still called himself, being hanged, and scoured his face for signs of suffering and pain. He looked confused but strong, almost serene. He had such contempt for his captors even as they taunted him. He did not believe maybe they had the strength to finish his term of life. To complete his story. Or he thought if he could find strength within himself, he would complete his own story with an admirable flourish. He looked so bedraggled and astray when they took him from the hidey hole months before. His jacket and shirt were always immaculate in court. Who washed them, brushed them, ironed them? What handmaiden? What does his story look like seen with the eyes of a friend, an admirer, a fellow townsperson? I envied him the evident peace of his mind as he went to his death. They did not show mercy to Saddam, who himself had shown no mercy to his enemies. He looked serene.