Sebastian Barry - The Secret Scripture

'You're an elected man?'

'No, no,' he said. 'On the roads. Council work. Digging and the like.'

'That's good. It's work.'

'It is work. Work's hard to find. Even in America I'm told. You working yourself?'

'Cafe Cairo,' I said. 'Waitress.'

'Good for you. I'll come see you when I get back to Sligo.' 'Ah, do, yeh,' I said, suddenly uneasy with myself, and embarrassed, I knew not why hardly.

John Kane brings me my soup just now.

'This bloody job will kill me,' he says. 'I'd rather be a mole-catcher in Connaght.'

All the while with his unfortunate gobbling of the throat.

'But there are no moles in Connaght,' I said.

'In none of Ireland. Isn't it the perfect job for an old man? Them bloody stairs.'

And off he went.

The mother's bungalow was nice enough but it smelt of boiling lamb – in my vivid state of alarm, I might have said sacrificial lamb. Somewhere down the back of the house you sensed pots boiling, curly kale, cabbage, from Old Tom's garden, and a lamb, boiling, boiling, spewing its distinctive mild, damp smell into the corridors. That was my impression. I was only near that bungalow twice in my whole life and both times felt like dying just to be near it. In those days, the odour of cooking meat turned my stomach. But boiling meat took the biscuit. Why, I don't know, since my mother relished all forms of meat, even offal and innards that would frighten a surgeon. She would dine quite happily on a lamb's heart.

I was brought by Tom into the front sitting room. I felt like a farm animal in there, I felt like the cow and the calf and the pig must have felt in times past, when they'd be led into a cottage at night. People and animals slept in the same house one time in Ireland. That's why many a country kitchen still has a sloping floor, sloping down from the fire and the hag's bed and the upper bedroom, so obviously the shit and the piss of the animals couldn't flow that way. Human-wards. But I felt like that, awkward, bumping into the furniture in a fashion I never would have normally. The why of it was that I shouldn't have been there. I wasn't meant to be. It even took God by surprise that I was, I'd say.

She had her few chairs and a sofa covered in a dark, dark red velvet, and they were so old and lumpy it was like things had died in them under the velvet and had become cushions of a kind. And everywhere the stench of that lamb. I don't mean to write stench, I don't mean to describe all this in a bad way. God forgive me.

She gave me a very gentle look. It surprised me. But her voice was not so nice as her look. I think, at this distance, she was probably trying to be kind, to get off on the right foot. She was a tiny woman with what they used to call a widow's peak in her hair. She was dressed entirely in black, a miniature dress of black something, that material with the suspicious shine on it, like the elbows of a priest's jacket. Indeed she had a very beautiful gold cross about her neck. I knew she was the seamstress in the asylum up the town, just as her husband Old Tom was the tailor. Yes, yes, they had met there over the cutting table.

'She looked like an angel in the window-light,' said Old Tom to me once. I don't know apropos of what, or where. Maybe in the earlier, brighter times. His thoughts I think tended to meander. He was an immensely self-satisfied man, as I suppose he had the perfect right to be. But she didn't look like an angel now.

'You have no lap,' she said, staring now sternly at my legs.

'I have no what?' I said.

'No lap, no lap.'

'For to be sitting babies on,' said Tom helpfully, but it didn't help me at all.

'Oh,' I said.

There was a curious skein of whiteness on her features, like a sprinkle of halfhearted snow on a roadside. Perhaps it was a powder she used. The sunlight that the day outside virtually dumped into the room had betrayed it.

I must be careful to write of her fairly.

Then Old Tom sat me down on one of the lumpy chairs. Each arm had a little mat with flowers worked into it in simple threads. It was bare, neat work. Mrs McNulty put herself on the couch, where beside her rose a little mound of books, which I detected to be her scrapbooks. For the moment she left them severely alone, like a chocolate addict torturing herself near a chocolate bar. Old Tom pulled up a wooden chair in front of me. He was as jolly as you would like. In his hands he clasped a little flute or piccolo, and without further ado he began to play an Irish tune on it, with his famous mastery. Then he stopped, and laughed, and played another one.

'How are you on the cello?' he said. 'Do you like it?'

Of course piccolos and cellos were never played by him in the band, and it was as if, instead of conversation, he was talking to me through these more exotic instruments. But what he was trying to say eluded me. We had often spoken at the Plaza, but these exchanges seemed worthless here. I might as well have never met him in my life. It was very strange.

Mrs McNulty made a huh noise, and got up, and drifted away from the room. It might have meant anything, that noise, and I was hoping it was just a characteristic ejaculation, as the old novels used to say. Old Tom got through a little more of his repertoire, then he got up also, and left the room. Then Tom left the room. He didn't even look back at me.

So I sat in the room. It was just me and the room and the echo of Old Tom's music and the other echo that Mrs McNulty had left behind her, something quite as enigmatic as a scrap of O'Carolan.

Tom came back eventually and came over and helped me to my feet. He didn't say anything, just widened his face a moment, as if to say, Well, there you are, what can you do.

We walked out onto the Strandhill Road where the bungalow was just one of four or five similar properties on an acre each. There was something half-done about that road, half-finished, and something very much half-done about meeting Mrs McNulty.

'Did she not like me?' I said.

'Well, well, she is concerned about your own mother. Well, she might be said to take a professional interest in that. But it isn't the main thing. No. And I thought it might be. But no. The mother is very religious,' said Tom. 'That's the real difficulty.'

'Oh,' I said, linking his arm. He smiled at me gently enough, and we were trotting along fairly nicely, approaching all the while the older narrower streets of the town's edge.

'Ah, yes,' he said. 'She would like you to talk to Fr Gaunt, if that would be possible.'

'For what?' I said. So she was a friend of Fr Gaunt, I thought, oh God.

'You know,' he said. 'All the what's-it and to-do of these things. Yes. Decree of bloody Ne temere, you know, and all that. Bugger now, I couldn't care if you were a Hindu, but, you see, it's the Presbyterian angle, you know. Oh, Jesus, I don't think she ever had a Protestant before set foot in her house, that's for sure and certain. By Jesus.'

'But me, does she like me at all?'

'I don't know,' he said, 'she didn't say that at all. It was like a committee meeting in the scullery, formal, you know.'

Tom had not asked me to marry him or anything and yet I knew all this talk was something to do with marrying. I suddenly myself didn't want to marry him, or anyone, or be asked. I was in my early twenties and those times you were an old maid by twenty-five, you wouldn't get a hunchback to marry you then. There were far more girls than men in Ireland those times. Women were wiser and went off to America and England double-quick, before their boots were sunk and stuck for good in the mire of Ireland. America was crying out for women, we were as good an export as gold to America. Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds went, every blessed year. Lovely women, round women, small, ugly, strong, exhausted, youthful, ancient, every damn category. Freedom I suppose they were after, following their instincts. They'd rather be maids in America than old maids in bloody Ireland. I suddenly had a strong, a fervent, almost a violent wish to join them. It was the smell of that lamb was in my clothes, and only a sea-voyage across the Atlantic I thought would shift it.