Well, I didn’t think that needed answering, it was him had wanted to commit her to the asylum, and anyway I couldn’t have answered it even if I had wanted to. I didn’t know how my mother was. I suppose that was evil of me not to know. But I didn’t. I hoped she was all right, but I didn’t know if she was. I thought I knew where she was, but I didn’t know how she was. My poor beautiful mad ruined mother.
And of course I started to cry. Not for myself strangely enough, though I am sure I could have, with capital and interest, but no, not for myself. For my mother? Who can really itemise the cause of our human tears?
But Fr Gaunt wasn’t interested in my stupid crying.
‘Em, Jack here wishes to represent a certain family angle on things, isn’t that correct, Jack?’
‘Well,’ said Jack. ‘We want to keep the party clean. We want to act the white man here. Everything has a solution, no matter 212
how knotted it has become. I believe this to be true. Often in Nigeria there have been problems that seemed insurmountable, but with a certain flair of application . . . Bridges over rivers that change their course every year. That sort of thing. Engineering has to meet all these problems.’
I stood there patiently enough and listened to Jack. Actually it probably qualified as the longest speech he had ever made to me, or at least in my presence, or my vague direction anyhow. He was looking very shaven, spruce, clean, his leather collar up, his hat set at a perfect angle. I knew from Tom that he had been drinking spectacularly for a few weeks past, but he didn’t look at all unwell. He was engaged to be married to his Galway girl, and that, said Tom, had put him in a bit of a manly panic. He was going to marry her and bring her out to Africa with him. Tom had shown me pictures of Jack’s bungalow in Nigeria, and Jack with groups of men, both white and black. Indeed I had been intrigued, enchanted maybe was the word, to see Jack in his nice open shirt and white trousers, with a cane, and in one picture there was a black man, maybe an official also, though not in an open shirt, but a full black suit, with waistcoat, and stiff collar and tie, in what degree of heat I did not know, but looking quite cool and confident. Then there was a picture of Jack with a crowd of nearly naked men, dark dark dark black, the lads maybe that had dug the canals there that Jack was building, long straight canals Tom had said, going off upcountry to bring the longed-for water to distant farms. Jack, the saviour of Nigeria, the bringer of water, the builder of bridges.
‘Yes,’ said Fr Gaunt. ‘I am sure it is all fixable. I am sure it is. If we put our heads together.’
I had a not very relaxed vision of my head put near Fr Gaunt’s severely cropped head and Jack’s elegantly hatted head, but it dissolved in the floating motes of the sunlight that pierced the room.
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‘I love my husband,’ I said, so suddenly it nearly made me jump. Why I said it to those two emissaries of the future puzzles me even now. Two men less likely to say it to, with any good result, I could not think of. It was like shaking the hands of the two poor soldiers requisitioned to attend to my execution. That was how it felt as soon as the words were out.
‘Well,’ said Fr Gaunt, almost eagerly, now that the subject was broached. ‘That is all history now.’
I made a few little grunts then of consonants and vowels, my brain not really sure what words to use, but then got out the word:
‘What?’
‘I need some time in which to find the boundaries of this problem,’ said Fr Gaunt. ‘In that time I want you, Roseanne, to remain where you are, here in this hut, and when I am able to bring things to a resolution, I will be better able to inform you of your position, and then make arrangements for the future.’
‘Tom has put the matter in Fr Gaunt’s hands, Roseanne,’
said Jack. ‘He has the authority to speak in the matter.’
‘Yes,’ said Fr Gaunt. ‘That is so.’
‘I want to be with my husband,’ I said, since it was true, and the only thing I could say without anger. Because rising up greater than the feeling of abject grief was a new anger, a sort of hungry wild anger, like a wolf in a fold of sheep.
‘You should have thought of that before,’ said Fr Gaunt, with a matching succinctness. ‘A married woman –’
But he stopped. He either did not know what to say next, or did and chose not to, or did not want to, or could not bring himself to say the words. Jack actually cleared his throat like he was in a film at the Gaiety cinema, and shook his head, as if his hair were wet and needed shaking. Fr Gaunt looked suddenly grievously, gravely embarrassed, just as he had that night long ago when Willie Lavelle’s body lay so barely, so ruined, in my father’s temple. I suspected what he was thinking. This was the 214
second time I had brought him into a situation that caused him what? Displeasure, disquiet. Displeasure and disquiet at the nature of woman? Who knows? But suddenly I was looking at him with eyes of unexpected contempt. If my gaze had been made of flames it would have turned him to cinders. I knew his power, which in that situation was absolute, and it seemed to me in that moment that I knew his nature. Small, self-believing to every border, north, south, east, and west, and lethal.
‘Well,’ said Fr Gaunt, ‘I think we have done our business here, Jack. You must stay where you are, Roseanne, get your groceries from the shop every week, and be content with your own company. You have nothing to fear, except your own self.’
I stood there. I am content to say that caught as I was, without rescuers as I was in that moment, there was a fierce, dark fury moving through me, wave upon wave, like the sea itself, that was bizarrely a comfort. My face maybe showing only a shadow of it, as faces will.
The two dark-suited men went out into the sunlight. Dark suits, dark coats, dark hats trying to lighten in the flood of seaside blues, yellows, greens. Rage, dark rage, lightened by nothing.
But a raging woman all alone in a tin hut is a small thing, as I said before.
The real comfort is that the history of the world contains so much grief that my small griefs are edged out, and are only cinders at the borders of the fire. I am saying this again because I want it to be true.
Though one mind at a pitch of suffering seems also to fill the world. But this is an illusion.
I had seen, with my own eyes, much worse things than had befallen me. With my own eyes. And yet that night, alone and 215
unfathomably angry, I screamed and screamed in the hut as if I was the only hurting dog in the whole world, no doubt causing horror and disquiet to any passing person. I screamed and I squawked. I beat my breast till there were bruises there the next morning so that my breast looked like a map of hell, a map of nowhere, or as if the words of Jack McNulty and Fr Gaunt had actually burned me.
And whatever my life had been up to that day, it was another life after that. And that is the gospel truth.
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PA RT T H R E E
chapter eighteen
Unfathomable. Fathoms. I wonder is that the difficulty, that my memories and my imaginings are lying deeply in the same place? Or one on top of the other like layers of shells and sand in a piece of limestone, so that they have both become the same element, and I cannot distinguish one from the other with any ease, unless it is from close, close looking? Which is why I am so afraid to speak to Dr Grene, lest I give him only imaginings.
Imaginings. A nice sort of a word for catastrophe and delusion.
Years and years they left me there, because it takes years to sort out what they were trying to sort out, Jack and Fr Gaunt and no doubt others, for the saving of Tom McNulty. Was it as much as six, seven, even eight? I cannot remember.
When I wrote those words a few minutes ago, I put down my biro and placed my forehead in my hands, and thought a while, trying to fathom those years. Difficult, difficult. What was true, what was not true? What road did I take, what road refuse? Poor ground, false ground. I think an account before God must, must contain only truth. There is no human agency I need to bamboozle. God knows the t
rue story before I write it, so can easily catch me out in falsehood. I must carefully winnow out one from the other. If I have a soul remaining, and perhaps I do not, it will depend on it. I think it must be possible that souls are rescinded in hard cases, cancelled at some office in the halls of heaven. That you arrive at the gates of 219
heaven already at the wrong address, before St Peter says a word.
But it is all so dark, so difficult. I am only frightened because I don’t know how to proceed. Roseanne, you must leap a few ditches now. You must find the strength in your old corpse to leap.
Is it possible I spent all those years in that hut without event, collecting my groceries every week, saying nothing to no one? I think it is. I am trying to be certain. Without event, I say, and yet I knew that war had begun in Europe, just like those days when I was a little girl. And yet I saw no army uniforms now. The hut was like the centre of a huge clock, the turning of the year in Strandhill, the roaring of the cars going by on Saturday night, the kids with their buckets, the starlings all winter, the darkening and brightening mountain, the heather with its snow of tiny flowers, what a comfort, and myself trying to do my bit with the roses on the front porch, tending them, clipping them back ready for the off, and watching them day by day in the strengthening year plump out their bulbs; ‘Souvenir de St Anne’s’ they were, now I think of it, a rose bred in a Dublin garden out of that famous rose bred by Josephine in memory of Napoleon’s love for her, ‘Souvenir de Malmaison’. Now, dear reader, I am calling you God for a moment, and God, dear dear God, I am trying to remember. Forgive me, forgive me if I am not remembering right. I would rather remember aright than just to remember things so they will stand in my favour. That luxury is not allowed to me.
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When Fr Gaunt finally came back to me, he did so alone. I suppose a priest is always alone in some sense. Never a creature to lie at his side. And he looked older suddenly, less the bright prospect, I could see he was losing his hair just at the temples, it was drifting back, a little tide that would not be coming in again. It was high summer and he looked very hot in his woollen clothes. He ordered his clothes from the clerical outfitters in Marlborough Street in Dublin – how I knew that I do not know now. These clothes were quite new, oddly stylish, the soutane like something a woman might wear at a pinch to a formal dance, if in another colour, and shorter. I was tending to my roses as he came in the little gate, surprising me, giving me a fright really, because no one for a long, long time had made that noise on the latch except myself, creeping out late at night to walk on the dunes and the marshy ground, which was now dry and springy from a few weeks of comparative heat. I think I was presentable, unlike later, I had a scissors to cut my own hair in front of Tom’s little shaving mirror, and my dress was clean, with that lovely stiffness in the cotton from being dried on a bush.
He carried a little leather case with him, scuffed and dented here and there from long and assiduous use. Really this man might have qualified as an old friend, I had known and had dealings with him so long. He was certainly qualified to write quite an intimate history of my life, since he had been witness to certain curious parts of it.
‘Roseanne,’ he began, with just exactly the same tone as he had used those years before, indeed as if this was a mere continuance of that conversation. There was no hello, how are you, or hesitancy. In fact he had the demeanour of a doctor with serious news to impart, not even the friendly alertness of Dr Grene when he has to make yet another gentle assault on my ‘secrets’. Can I say I disliked him? I don’t think so. Nor though did I understand him. What gave him pleasure in life, what sustained 221
him. He did give my roses a glance as he went up the little steps and on into the dark hut.
I wiped my fingers on the wood of the steps, just to get the green juice off them, and followed him in.
Was it not an extraordinary meekness in me to stay in that hut at his bidding? I am almost ashamed to think it might be so. Should I not have raged at him that time before, rushed at his throat and the throat of Jack, got my teeth on his jutting Adam’s apple and ripped out his voice? Berated them, shouted at them? But to what end? Only rage, useless rage expending itself on the white dust of a Strandhill road.
‘I haven’t anything to offer you, Father,’ I said. ‘Unless you will take a glass of Beecham’s powders?’
‘Why would I drink a glass of stomach powders, Roseanne?’
‘Well, it says on the packet, a refreshing summer drink. That’s why I bought it.’
‘It is for those who have overindulged,’ he said. ‘But thank you.’
‘Well, you are welcome, Father.’
Then he sat down just where he had sat before and indeed I had not seen any reason to move the chair from where it stood. The sunlight had followed us both into the room and lay about us in dusty bushels.
‘I see you are keeping well,’ he said.
‘Oh, yes.’
‘Of course, I have had my spies keep an eye on you.’ He said this without any trace of guilt. Spies.
‘Oh,’ I said. ‘I did not notice them.’
‘Well, naturally,’ he said.
Then he opened the case on his lap, the lid obscuring the contents. He took out a sheaf of papers, very neat and clean, the top one containing I could see a very impressive-looking design or seal.
‘I have been successful,’ he said, ‘in my efforts to free Tom.’
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‘Excuse me?’ I said.
‘If you had followed my advice, Roseanne, some years ago, and put your faith in the true religion, if you had behaved with the beautiful decorum of a Catholic wife, you would not be facing these difficulties. But I do appreciate that you are not entirely responsible. Nymphomania is of course by definition a madness. An affliction possibly, but primarily a madness, with its roots possibly in a physical cause. Rome has agreed with this estimate, in fact the department of the Curia that deals with these thankfully rare cases not only agreed, but also posited the same theory. So you may rest assured that your case was seen to with all the thoroughness and fairness of minds well-informed, disinterested, and with no bad intention of any kind.’
I looked at him. Neat, black, clean, strange. Another human creature in the lair of a human creature. His words sombre, measured, at ease. No trace of excitement, victory, nothing only his usual careful, measured tones.
‘I don’t understand,’ I said, nor did I, though I think I knew, all the same.
‘Your marriage is deemed null, Roseanne.’
As I did not speak, after a full half minute, he said, ‘It never happened. It does not exist. Tom is free to marry another, as if he had never been married. Which as I say he never was.’
‘This is what you have been doing these last years?’
‘Yes, yes,’ he said, with some impatience. ‘It is a monumentally complex undertaking. Something like this is never granted lightly. Deep deep thought at Rome, and my own bishop of course. Weighing everything, sifting through everything, my own deposition, Tom’s own words, the elder Mrs McNulty who of course has experience of the troubles of women, in her work. Jack of course is away in India at the war, or else he might have made his contribution. The courts sit in careful judgement. No stone unturned.’
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I was still staring at him.
‘You may rest assured every possibility of justice has been afforded to you.’
‘I want my husband to come here.’
‘You have no husband, Roseanne. You are not in a state of matrimony.’
‘I am divorced?’
‘It is not a divorce,’ he said, suddenly with vehemence, as if he found the word disgusting in my mouth. ‘There is no divorce in the Catholic church. The marriage never existed. By reason of insanity at the time of the contract.’
‘Insanity?’
‘Yes.’
‘How do you reckon that?’ I asked after a moment, and with difficulty, words now becoming awkward and thick in my mouth.<
br />
‘We do not believe your indiscretions are confined to one instance, an instance you will remember I was witness to with my own eyes. It was not thought probable that that instance did not have a history, given of course your own position visà-vis your early years, not to mention of course the condition of your mother, which we may assume was hereditary. Madness, Roseanne, has many flowers, rising from the same stem. The blooms of madness, from the same root, may be variously displayed. In your mother’s case an extreme retreat into herself, in your case, a pernicious and chronic nymphomania.’
‘I don’t know what that word means.’
‘It means,’ he said, and yes, with a trace of fright now in his eyes, because he had used the word once and maybe thought I had accepted it. But he knew I spoke the truth and he was suddenly afraid now. ‘It means a madness manifest in the desire to have irregular relations with others.’
‘What?’ I said. The explanation was as mystifying as the word.
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‘You know what it is.’
‘I don’t,’ I said, and I did not.
I had shouted the last words, and indeed he had shouted his. He put the papers swiftly back into the case, closed it with a snap, and stood up. For some reason I noticed how polished his shoes were, with that little skirt of road dust on them from when he had no doubt reluctantly left his car and approached my house.
‘I will not explain it to you further,’ he said, almost in a paroxysm of annoyance and anger. ‘I have tried to make your position clear. I believe I have done so. You understand your position?’
‘What is that word you used?’ I shouted.
‘Relations!’ he shouted, ‘Relations! Congress, sexual congress!’
‘But,’ I said, and before God this was the truth, ‘I never had relations with another besides Tom.’
‘Of course, you may take refuge in an atrocious lie, if you choose that.’
‘You may ask John Lavelle. He will not fail me.’