Sebastian Barry - The Secret Scripture

It is true that for the last ten years, a whole decade, Bet removed herself to the old maid's room at the top of the house. I sit here in our old bedroom – old in a few senses, as in, for twenty years we shared it, the room has not been decorated for many years, it was where we 'formerly' slept etc., etc. – as I have sat a thousand times – how many nights in ten years, 3,560 nights – and no longer is she just above me, walking the floorboards, making her narrow bed creak as she lay on it. All is perfectly quiet and still, except for that little banging somewhere, as if she is not dead at all, but has immured herself in a cupboard and wants to get out. In the little room above, her bed is still neatly made just as she left it the last morning, I couldn't bear to touch it. Her collection of books on roses occupies the windowsill as always (when we shared a bed, it was rose books on her side, Irish history on mine), propped up by two extravagantly carved Hawaiian bookends in the shape of two shameless maidens. By the bed, her phone on a little chinoiserie table her great-aunt left her. Her great-aunt had died of Alzheimer's, but she had won the table years ago at a card game in her prime, and Bet had been thrilled and touched to get it. In the drawers are her clothes, in the cupboard are her dresses, summer and winter ones, and her shoes, among the pairs are those heeled shoes she used to wear to dinner, that I thought didn't suit her, but at least I never had the lack of grace to say so, that is not among my sins, years ago when we did such things. But it is not that woman I found in the corridor, struggling for breath as her lung collapsed, one last shout in her that brought me clattering up the little stairs, that assails me, so much as that other younger person she was when I fell in love with her, that is the person that haunts me. The perfectly desirable and neat beauty that she was, who went against her father's wishes, and insisted she must marry a penniless student studying the unknown and unpromising science of psychiatry at a hospital in England, whom she had met on a holiday to Scarborough. The sheer accidental nature of things.

There was nothing about me that her father liked, a man who had been one of the subcontractors on the great Shannon hydroelectric scheme, and as such an historical and epic man, supplying gravel from the quarries of Connaght. But she prevailed, and we had our wedding, God help her, her numerous family ranged on one side of the church, and no one on the other side but my adoptive father, enduring the warlike stares from the other side. My parents were Catholic, which might have stood in their favour, except that they were English Catholics, a people in the eyes of my inlaws more Protestant than the Protestants themselves, and at the very least, deeply deeply mysterious, like creatures from some other time, when Henry VIII was wanting to marry. They must have thought Bet was marrying a phantom.

Her greatest wish I should think was that I would remain exactly as I was, and how I regret that that was not to be. It was only for her roses that she wished for change, the strange moment of floral enchantment when the branch of a rose mutates, and shows a 'sport', something new arising from the known rose. A leap in beauty.

'I'm going out to the garden to see if there's any news,' she would say, at almost any time, because she had roses going the whole length of the year.

She was waiting for whatever God, whatever secret magician, decided things for roses to do His stuff. I am afraid I showed scant interest in all that. Mea culpa. I tried to, but couldn't locate that passion in me. I should have been out there with her, with the gloves and the secateurs, like someone geared for miniature battle.

Little sins of omission that loom large now. You could go mad.

Anyway for my sanity I am writing here. I am sixty-five years old. Past the Beatles song. By some accounts this is young. But when a man wakes on his fortieth birthday he may safely say he has no youth ahead of him. I suppose this is infinitely petty and ridiculous. A healthy person might be content with life as a quality in itself, and look to the passing of the years, and the gaining of age, and then great age, with interest. But I am miserable before the task. When Bet died I looked in the mirror for the first time in many years. I mean, I had glanced every morning in the mirror, trimmed my beard and the like, but had not looked in it at myself. I was amazed at what I saw. I did not know myself. My hair was thinning all about the crown, and was grey as a badger, whereas I had imagined myself to have retained my old colour. The lines in my face were like the folds in a bit of leather that has been outside in the rain for a long time. I was utterly dismayed, utterly shocked. I had not realised it while Bet lived, the simple fact. I was old. I didn't know what to do. So I searched out my old razor and shaved my beard.

Sixty-five. In a few years I will retire. It is not just this building is reaching its point of ultimate depreciation. Retire. To do what? Knock about Roscommon town? Yet there is Roseanne McNulty at a hundred. If she were English the queen would have sent her a letter. Does Mary McAleese send cards to the Irish centenarians? But I am sure, like the rest of the world, Mary McAleese does not know Roseanne exists.

Actually I did not mean to write anything about myself here. What I meant to write about was Roseanne.

For there is a mystery there. I suspect that somewhere in the distant past, in just such an institution as this, she suffered in some way at the hands of her 'nurses'. This would not be unusual in these old histories. Her suffering in the realm of real life, in the so-called outside world, was no doubt even greater. I have attempted a series of cautious questions, of the sort that would not scare her or drive her into silence. She is quite capable, and always has been, of playful and even fanciful talk. Myself and Bet used to be like that, years ago. At our ease – but no, let me leave all that alone. But I wonder is Bet lonely where she lies now? How odd it was at last to ring the funeral directors whose unwished-for premises I had passed in the car so many times, with the posh entrance, the yard of hearses at the back, the quiet efficient phrases, the numbers, the tea, the sandwiches, the grave documents, the service, the removal, the this and the that of death. Then just this morning the discreet bill, the things itemised, the coffin I chose in a sudden fit of meanness, and deeply regretted at the funeral. What I bought to bury my wife.

Every nuance of her, every turn of the head, every moment of tenderness between us, every gift, every surprise, every joke, every outing, holidays in Bundoran and later Benidorm, every kind word, helpful sentence, it all gathered together like a sea, the sea of Bet, and rose up from the depths of our history, the seabed of all we were, in a great wave, and crashed down on the greying shore of myself, engulfed me, and would that it had washed me away for good.

Oh, dear. Again I have strayed. But this has been the pattern of the recent weeks.

Roseanne. Old lady. The cailleach of the stories. So ancient, and yet, one of those faces that is so thin she bears the look of her youth yet, what she was. Oh, she is shrunken as she must be, when the woman washes her no doubt she is skin and bone, everything that was once beautiful and fruitful about her empty and sere. Can I say, Bet was spared that? It is worthless talking about what we have been spared by death. Death grins at that I am sure. Death of all creation knows the value of life.

I would like from sheer curiosity to find an old photograph of Roseanne when she was young. She must have been a beauty in her day. But photographs there are none.

At first I could find out nothing about her. In fact it is safe to say I expected there would be little trace of her in the records, given her great age. What did I know about her? After all I had spoken with her now and then for as many as two dozen years! So few facts. That she was someone called once Mrs McNulty, that she had no known relatives still in touch with her or other contacts, no one had visited her ever in the hospital, and perhaps I had a vague sense that she had been transferred here from Sligo, but maybe forty years ago or more. How I knew this I do not know, unless I had seen once some document that said so, when I was young and came here first from England. Naturally Bet wanted to be near her family and I knew from my father that I had Irish connections, so I was more than content to come here.