Sebastian Barry - The Secret Scripture

Down in the courtyard, now again today in deep frost, despite John Kane's snowdrops, I am sure the old apple tree is feeling the terrible cold. It must be a hundred years old, that tree. Many many moons ago I used to go down there when I was let. There is a wooden seat that circles the tree like in an old English village, something in an old English story. The village green. But it's just a narrow suntrap down there when there is sun, that warms the old tree into life in the springtime. Then come the mighty blossoms. But not yet I am sure, and if it has dared to put out a few buds, the frost will leave them blackened, and it will have to start again.

There used to be a little kitchenmaid down there that threw the crumbs from the great cuttings of bread that went on in the kitchen, out onto a makeshift bird table. That used to bring the blue-tits, the green-tits, and all the ravening finches you would think of Roscommon. I suppose she is long gone. I suppose the apple tree will outlast everyone.

That old apple tree would make a philosopher of a blackbird. Apple blossom is quieter than the cherry, but it is still overwhelming, heartening. It used to make me cry in the spring. It always came eventually, frost or no frost. I would love to see it again. The frost could only delay the old tree, never defeat it. But who would carry me down there?

When milk comes frozen home in pail, And Dick the shepherd blows his nail.

Old Tom, my father-in-law, had a wonderful garden at his bungalow in Sligo. He was a mighty man for the winter vegetables. I remember him saying that frost improved the winter cabbages and lettuces. He was a demon for growing vegetables all the year round, which apparently is quite possible if you know how to do it. Like most things.

Old Tom McNulty. To this day I don't know if he was enemy or friend. To this day I am in two minds about any of them, Jack – no, no, maybe I can with justice curse Fr Gaunt, and that old woman the mother of Tom and Jack, the real Mrs McNulty as you might say. On the other hand, I don't really know. At least Mrs McNulty was always openly hostile, whereas Jack and Fr Gaunt always presented themselves as friends. Oh, it is a vexing mystery.

Now I am having a bad thought, for doesn't Dr Grene also present himself as a friend? After a manner of speaking, a professional friend maybe. Friend or enemy, no one has the monopoly on truth. Not even myself, and that is also a vexing and worrying thought.

It was very difficult to hear him say so casually that my father was in the police. I do not think he should say that. I have heard that asserted before but I do not remember where or by who. It is a lie, and not a very pretty one. Such lies in the old days could get you shot, and there was a sort of fashion of shooting one time in Ireland, for instance the famous seventy-seven that were shot by the new government. And the executed men were in the main former comrades. John Lavelle was very lucky to escape that, and not make seventy-eight. I am sure on the other hand that there were secret murders, secret shootings, that no one ever recorded or remembers. Sad, cold, wretched deaths of boys on mountainsides and the like, of the sort I saw myself, or the results of at least, as happened to John's brother Willie.

It was a true relief after all that just to wear my waitress's uniform in the Cafe Cairo. The cafe served everyone in Sligo without criticism. It was owned by a Quaker family, and we were told to turn no one from the doors. So you might see a poor lonely pensioner drinking tea, and taking from his lap, thinking he was not seen, a few morsels of cheese brought in with him in his pocket. I remember that man very well, and thinking him so old in his old brown suit. He was probably only seventy! The presence of these more unwashed characters however did not at all dissuade the dames of Sligo from coming in for a natter. Indeed they were like veritable hens in a yard, the way they sat in at the tables, the chat and gossip rising from them like dust from a desert caravan of camels. Some of them were wonderful bright women that we, I mean the platoon of waitresses, loved, and loved to see coming in every day, and who we served gladly. Some were battleaxes as you might expect. But all shades and stripes of quality came in there, it was really my university, I learned so much there, bringing the tea, and being polite, and it might have been the start of a good life, I don't know.

I suppose I might have got the job in the usual way, seen a notice in the window, gone in and somehow made it known that, unpromising as I looked, I was a Presbyterian, and so suited to the job (openhearted as the Quaker owners were, there were no Catholic girls employed there, unless it was Chrissie, who had been a Catholic, but was raised in the Charter School as a Protestant). But it came about in a different way.

After my father died, my mother, already a silent person, probably in the terms of this institution declined even further. One morning waking at home I had gone down to make her her tea, and coming back up found no one in her bed. It was a terrible shock, and I ran downstairs calling her, and looking everywhere, out in the street, everywhere. Then I happened to look out the scullery window and saw her, curled up like a sheepdog under my father's mouldering motorbike. Oh yes, I brought her back and tucked her up in bed, the sheets I am ashamed to admit grey from her lying there unwashed. I was so saddened and upset, I walked out of Sligo that day and all the way to Rosses Point, where the nicest beach was, thinking I might wander about the golf course there, with little lakes of lonely birds, and beautiful sudden views of distant mansions by the water, as if they had gone down to the water's edge to drink (of course it was the salt sea, but at any rate). And I did walk there, coming along first by the cottages of the Rosses, with Coney island across the flow of the Garravoge, and the wonderful, calming figure of the Metal Man, in his old blue iron clothes, and his black hat, pointing eternally into the deep water, to tell the ships coming up where to go. He was a statue on a rock, but so wonderful a method to indicate deep water surely had never been devised before or since. I was told once his brother is in a little park in Dalkey by the sea in Dublin, doing what task I do not know.

Beyond Coney and the Metal Man of course lies the country of Strandhill, the lesser beach, which was the scene of my own suffering later.

When I got to the strand at Rosses Point, there was that fierce little wind blowing, and although there was a number of black cars parked behind the dunes, the owners must have been sitting in them, because there was no one out on the broad strand itself. Only those buffeting cohorts of the wind. But in the distance there was one figure, a woman in a billowing white dress as I soon saw, pushing in a haphazard way a big black perambulator. As I got nearer to her I heard her calling, her words dimming and then growing just as the wind wished. Finally I reached her, and even in the chill weather of that Irish June, she was sweating.

'Oh, my dear, my dear,' she said, looking very like the rabbit in Alice in Wonderland, 'I cannot find her, I cannot find her.'

'Who can't you find, ma'am?' I said, deciding by her accent that she must be a toff of some kind, and likely needing to be called ma'am.

'My daughter, my little daughter,' she said, with a strange screaming tone. 'I fell asleep in the dune, in a lovely suntrap, and my little one playing about just beside me, but when I woke, she was gone. She is only two years old. Oh, my Lord, my Lord.'

'She is not in the pram?' I said, on an inspiration.

'No, she is not, she is walking. Her brother is in the pram, soundly sleeping! My daughter Winnie is walking. Winnie, Winnie!'

And she seemed suddenly to run quite away from me, as if giving up all thought I might be able to help, after my great ignorance on the topic of the perambulator.