Sebastian Barry - The Secret Scripture

I awoke in the small hours, nudged into wakefulness by little sounds of Tom in the room. There was a huge moon over Knocknarea, the cairn visible as if in the very sunlight. I was still caught in a dream, and just for a moment thought I saw a figure atop the cairn, in black clothes, with a great fold of bright wings behind him. But of course it was far too far away for that.

'Are you awake, pet?' said Tom, and when I looked at him, he was struggling out of his braces.

'You have blood on your face,' I said, sitting up.

'I have blood all over my blessed shirt,' he said, 'although you can barely see, what with the blue.'

'My God,' I said, 'whatever happened, Tom?'

'Nothing at all. We had a bit of resistance from the guards in Sligo. We were marching as good as gold, when out from Quay Street comes a fierce little muster of lads, fellas brought in from Collooney I suppose, because they were not regular Sligo guards. And one of them gave me such a swipe with a stick, I tell you, it hurt like the bejaysus. And the General starts roaring at them, and the guards roaring back, "You have no permit to march in Sligo!" And the General the head of the same guards only a few years ago. Well. There was such shouting and frothing about generally. So we were very glad to get out to the hall, let me tell you. And didn't we have a great time then. Such a crowd you never saw.'

By this time he had his nice striped pyjamas on and then he went to the washstand basin and vigorously flung water at his face, and wiped it off in the towel, and then threw himself into the bed beside me.

'What did you do?' he said. 'You ought to have come. It was great.'

'I went walking,' I said.

'Oh ho,' he said, 'did you? And why not?'

Then he put his left arm under my hand and held me close to him, and after a while, between the blood and moonlight, we went to sleep.

Dr Grene's Commonplace Book

There was absolute panic in the building yesterday. I must say I was almost encouraged by the level of response, because so often in the past there has been what felt like a cloud of inaction hanging over these old roofs. But the young lady who had been found upset and bloodstained had then disappeared. The ward nurse was terrified, because her sister had just been in, and given her a gift of a nice new dressing-gown. Nurse had noted the belt made of the same light material as the gown, but had not had the heart to remove it straight away. So she was tearing about the wards, asking everyone had they seen the poor unfortunate woman, and generally making the ancient patients stir for the first time in many years. In the end it was discovered not that she had hanged herself, but that she had gone down to front office in her dressing-gown, and signed herself out, as she has the perfect right to do under the new legislation. And had gone down to the main road and hitched a lift to the town, and from there boarded a bus to Leitrim, all of this still in the gown. It was like a magic coat, carrying her back to Leitrim. Her husband rang last night to tell us, and he was a very angry voice at the other end of the phone. He said the hospital was supposed to be a place of refuge. The head nurse spoke to him, and was very submissive, not in the style of the old matrons we used to have here. I don't know what resolution this will have, but it struck me as having all the qualities of a rescue. I wish the poor woman well and I am sorry we were of so little use to her, quite the opposite. And I am very glad the nurse's panic was unfounded.

This morning I went up to Mrs McNulty's – no, no, Roseanne's – room quite light-hearted. Of course, the position of the young woman is still perilous, but I am old enough now to put a premium on mere life.

The room had a little bit of sideways spring sunlight, that seemed to have crept in through the window-glass with an almost apologetic delicacy. A little square beam of it sat across Roseanne's face. Yes, she is very old. Sunlight as always the most brutal measurer of age, but also, the most faithful painter. I thought of the line from T. S. Eliot that we learned at school in England,

My life is like a feather on the back of my hand, Waiting for the death wind.

It is spoken by Simeon, the man who wished to live long enough to see the newborn Messiah. I do not think Roseanne is waiting for that. I thought also of those self-portraits of Rembrandt van Rijn, so faithfully faithless to the idea of our own looks that we carry as an antidote against remorse. How we decide not to allow the fact that our skin is dropping down our jaws and coming away underneath our chins like plaster detaching from its laths in an old-fashioned ceiling.

Her skin is so thin you can see the veins and whatnot, like roads, rivers, towns, and monuments on a map. Something stretched for purposes of writing on it. No monk however would have risked the nib of a pen on such thin parchment. And again I thought, how beautiful she must have been, if she is so oddly beautiful now at one hundred years old. Good bones, as my father used to say, as if, growing old himself and those he knew growing old around him, he knew the value of them.

She has a rash on one side of her face though, quite red and 'angry' as they say, and I thought her tongue was rather in the way of her talking in some way, like it was a little swollen at the root. I must get the medical doctor Mr Wynn to have a look at her. She may well need an antibiotic.

Whether she caught my mood or what, I don't know, she was very responsive, even revealing. She was at her ease in a curious way. Maybe it was happiness. I know she absolutely delights in the improvement of the weather, in the turning of the year. She puts a lot of faith in those daffodils along the avenue, planted there by some old grandee when this place was a great house and estate, in those old vanished days. With fearful delicacy on my own part, trying to take my cue from the sunlight, I finally broached the subject of her child. I say 'finally' as if I have successfully broached a thousand other subjects, or have been leading up to the child. But I had not. But the whole matter has been much on my mind, because of course, if what Fr Gaunt wrote is true, then the whole question of her state of mind and her long presence here and in Sligo is decidedly and probably permanently vexed. Speaking of Sligo, I have written again to ask if I may visit there sometime soon, and talk to the administrator, who it turns out is an old acquaintance, a man called Percival Quinn, I think the only Percy I have ever heard of in the present era, let alone met. It was he apparently who made the extra effort to dig out Fr Gaunt's deposition, and there may well be other files there that even Percy feels can't be communicated, but I don't know. We are like MI5 sometimes in this our profession of psychiatry. All information becomes sensitive, worrying, and vulnerable, even sometimes I think the mere time of day. However, I will follow my instincts.

Tonight there is total calm in the house. It is almost as eerie as the knocking was. But I am grateful. Human, alone, ageing, and grateful. Would it be out of place to write here, to write here directly to you, Bet, to say, I love you still, and am grateful?

Roseanne was so vulnerable, so admirable, so open in my meeting with her, I knew I could have asked her anything, pursued any topic, and probably got the truth, or what she believes is the truth. Well I knew it, my advantage, and if I had pressed it, I would have gained a great deal but, maybe, lost something. Today was the day she might have told me everything, and today was the day I opted myself for her silence, her privacy. Because it strikes me there is something greater than judgement. I think it is called mercy.

Roseanne's Testimony of Herself

Dr Grene came in, very upbeat, drew up his chair like he certainly meant business. I was so taken aback that I actually engaged in a certain amount of conversation.