No one had seen Egypt I say, but of course Jack had been a sailor in the British Merchant Navy as a lad, and had already travelled to every port of the earth – but of course I didn't know all that. The epic story of Jack – a little epic, an ordinary epic, a local epic, but epic for all that – was unknown to me. All I saw, or began to see, was two spick-and-span brothers coming in for their cups of tea, any Chinese leaf for Tom, and Earl Grey by preference for Jack.
The dark story of their brother Eneas I never knew till long after, if I ever really knew it. Just a scrap of it, a few pages torn from his raggedy book. Can you love a man you only knew – in the Biblical sense – for a night? I do not know. But there was love there, gentle, fierce, proper love. God forgive me.
Dr Grene's Commonplace Book
Mirabile dictu (my having to read Virgil at school did me some good at least, in that it has left me with that phrase), some further documentation has arrived from Sligo Mental Hospital. It is the top copy of the old deposition and their storage arrangements must be better than ours by some measure, because the sheets are quite intact. I must say her story as itemised in the document interested me greatly, offering a sort of landscape to put behind the figure I know in the bed. A sort of human vista of troubles and events, like in a painting by da Vinci or the like, the Mona Lisa itself, with its castle and hills (as I remember it – perhaps there is no castle). As she herself continues unforth-coming, I had also a great frisson of entry to read it, as if I were getting the answers I sought from her, but of this I must be very wary. The written word assumes authority but it may not have it. I must not necessarily let her silence be filled with this, although it is a great temptation, because it is a shortcut, or a way around. The sheets amount to some seventeen closely typed pages and would seem to be offering an account of the events that led up to her, I was going to say incarceration, but I mean of course her sectioning. It is in two parts, the first detailing her earlier life up to her marriage, then the reasons for the annulment of that marriage, if that is the right term of the day. It seems this was followed by a period of tremendous disarray in her life, tremendous, really rather terrible and pitiable. This is all long long ago, in the savage fairytale of life in Ireland in the twenties and thirties, mostly, though the period of her greatest difficulty seems to have occurred actually during the years of the emergency, as de Valera referred to the Second World War.
I do not in all truth and sincerity know how much of it I can present to her. Somehow I doubt, by her reaction the other day, if she will be open to its revelations, which may or may not be revelations to her. If it represents the truth, it is a dreadful and burdening truth. In a place like this we must not concern ourselves too much with moral judgement or even legal judgement. We are like prison chaplains in here, dealing with the remnant human person after the civic powers have had their say. We are trying to ready, to steady the person for what? The axe, the guillotine of sanity? For the long watches of the sentence of living death that being here really is?
The document I was interested if not a little horrified to see was signed by a Fr Aloysius Mary Gaunt, which was a name that rang a bell. I puzzled it over until I suddenly realised who that was, the man who became auxiliary bishop of Dublin in the fifties and sixties, taking from the hemming and hawing of the Irish constitution a clear statement of his powers of moral domination over the city, as did most of his brother clerics. A man who in his every utterance seemed to long for the banishment of women behind the front doors of their homes, and the elevation of manhood into a condition of sublime chastity and sporting prowess. There is something humorous about it now, there was nothing humorous about it then.
This Fr Gaunt as a young curate in Sligo seemed to be very intimate with Roseanne Clear's circumstances. She was it seems the child of a police sergeant in the Royal Irish Constabulary (which I already knew from the damaged section I had found here). De Valera, as a young leader during the war of independence, had declared that any member of the police could be shot if they in any way obstructed the aims of the revolutionary movement. So such individuals, though Irish and for the most part Catholic (Roseanne's father was Presbyterian), and their families lived under constant threat and in real danger. It is all very understandable in a revolutionary period, but I wonder if Roseanne at the age of twelve or so could have seen that. In her eyes what happened must have been genuinely tragic, genuinely bewildering and awful.
I have just looked at my watch and it is seven fifty, the very latest moment I can leave it, to make my rounds at ten past eight. I must flee.
A note to myself: the builders say six weeks and the new building will be completed. This is from the horse's mouth, because I was on site myself, asking them, like a veritable spy, the other day. But enough
chapter thirteen
Roseanne's Testimony of Herself
Curious to relate, it was not in the Cafe Cairo that I 'met' Tom, but in quite another place. It was the sea itself.
It is along the strands of the world that the privilege of possessing children is most blatantly seen. What torment for the spinster and the childless man, to see the various sizes of little demons and angels ranged along the tide line. Like some species of migratory animal. The human animal began as a mere wriggling thing in the ancient seas, struggling out onto land with many regrets. That is what brings us so full of longing to the sea.
I am not an entirely childless person.
That story also belongs to the sea, or the strand anyway.
My child. My child went to Nazareth, that's what they told me. Or, that is what I heard them say. But I was not hearing anything very well, very properly, in that time. They might as well have said Wyoming.
Strandhill's beach is narrow, heaped, endangered, and the hill of sand itself seems to have drawn up its enormous knees to escape the goings on below. There is a long rough promenade where gigs, carts, sidecars, high traps and motorcars used to be parked, the occupants spilling out I am sure always with the same level of human anticipation, the kids barrelling away ahead, the fathers laughing, cursing, the mothers admonishing, panicking – all the to-do and turmoil of normal happiness. Kneelength bathing suits vying in eternity with those wondrous bikinis I have only seen in stray magazines. How I would like to have sported one of them.
And at first no doubt just a few brave houses built on the marsh and acres of blown sand, scotch grass, the land rising and rising until eventually touching on the realm of Knocknarea, where Queen Maeve sleeps in her stony grave. From the top of Knocknarea you can see the beach at Strandhill, but the people are only pins, and anything the size of a child is just a dust mote in your eye.