But actually I do Tom a disservice talking like this. Because his own first cousin owned the Sligo Champion and was a TD in what they used to call the real first Dail, that is to say the Dail after the Treaty. And Jack always said – I used to hear him telling a new acquaintance – that he was a cousin of that dark-hearted person Edward Carson, who opted out of the Free State like a rat leaving a sinking ship, or what he hoped and prayed was a sinking ship. Tom told me his own people had been butter importers in Sligo, or was it exporters, and had had ships, just like the Jacksons and the Pollexfens. And that the Oliver in his name, Thomas Oliver McNulty, was there because they had lost their lands in the time of Cromwell when an Oliver McNulty had refused to become a Protestant. He said this with a wary eye on me, to see how I would take it, being a Protestant myself I suppose. I was a Protestant, but maybe not the right kind of Protestant. Jack liked the big-house Protestants and he had it in his head that he was sort of Catholic gentry. I don't think he thought much of the great Presbyterian tradition in Ireland. Working-class. That was the dread phrase.
'That fella is working-class through and through,' was one of Jack's put downs. Because he had been in Africa he also had strange phrases like 'Act the white man.' And 'hamma-hamma'. Because he had seen a thousand drunken nights, another phrase was 'Keep the party clean.' If he thought someone was untrustworthy, that person was 'a casual pack of buggers'.
Red hair, auburn really, combed back. Quite severe features, very serious about the eyes. Oh yes, Clark Gable or better still Gary Cooper. Gorgeous.
I am looking for my mother in these memories, and I cannot find her. She has simply disappeared.
chapter fourteen
Dr Grene's Commonplace Book
Driving into work this morning I passed a previously unnoticed hillside of windmills. I may not have noticed them before because they just weren't there, but if so I certainly missed their erection, which must have taken quite a long time. They were simply suddenly there. Bet always said I did not have my mind on the world at all. One day I came in from the rain, sat on the couch, and a few minutes later, happening to touch my hair, asked, 'Why is my head wet?' Bet loved to tell that story, or used to, when there was someone to tell it to.
But there were the windmills, suddenly. It is a hill – more of a mountain I suppose, if we have such things in Ireland -called Labanacallach, and there is a wood also, called Nugent's Wood, going up to the frostline. Who Nugent was or why he planted a wood is anyone's guess, or at least there would be only old codgers who know these things. I was driving along in my Toyota, feeling quite wretched, with the same drumming recrimination going on in my stupid head, when I saw the windmills silverly turning, as one might say, and my heart lifted like a quail from the very bog. It lifted. They were so beautiful. I thought of windmills in paintings, the strange emotions still attaching even to their memory. Don Quixote maybe. How sorry I always used to feel when I saw a ruined mill long ago. Magical buildings. These modern versions of course are not quite the same thing. And of course they are strongly objected to. But they are beautiful. They made me optimistic, like I could still achieve something.
I had woken in the night with an appalling sense of shame and disquiet. If I could itemise the attributes of my grief, and print them in a journal, I might do the world a general service. I suspect it is hard to remember grief, and it is certainly invisible. But it is a wailing of the soul nonetheless and I must never again underestimate its acidic force in others. If nothing else I will hoard this new knowledge in the hope that when it passes I may still retain its clinical anatomy. Thank God for those windmills.
But in the small hours of the night I awoke. I think it was that mysterious knocking again, whose source I still don't know. It is Bet beseeching me to remember her. She needn't worry. I looked over what I had written about Roseanne Clear but all I saw, all that registered, was those stupid words I had written about Saddam Hussein. I suppose it is as well I am a man of no importance, which keeps my views, especially when they are inappropriate and embarrassing, private.
When the late Pope died I had also odd emotions then. I was deeply moved by the death of a man who had not been helpful to those of my patients who are religious, but also gay, or God help them, women. While he lived it seemed the apogee of existence was just what he was himself. But in his death he was magnificent, brave. In his death he became more democratic maybe, because death includes everything, likes everything human -can't get enough of it. Death be not proud. Well yes, but death is mighty and dreadful. The Pope made short work of it.
Too much thinking on death. Yet it is the music of our time. As the millennium passed fools like myself thought we were about to taste a century of peace. Clinton and his cigar was so much greater a man than Bush and his rifle.
The more I look at Fr Gaunt's deposition, the more I seem to believe it. It is because he writes well in a sort of classical way, no doubt taking his syntax and his skills from his training in Maynooth. He has a very Latinate style it seems to me, of the kind I remember distantly from struggling with Cicero at school in Cornwall. His desire, almost his anxiety in psychiatric terms, to tell the story illuminates it.
He is unburdening himself, as he might a sin. Certainly his text is far from sacred. But he does not flinch. He is staunch. He is fearless. Fr Gaunt conscientiously details it all.
As a rule, a policeman in Ireland was never stationed near his own home town, one presumes so that there would be no question of favour to people among whom he had grown up. Roseanne's father was actually one of the few exceptions to this rule, as he had been born and bred in Collooney, not so far, and certainly not far enough, from Sligo town itself. So he knew the district in a way that was perhaps not healthy for himself. It was possible for people to take more personally his presence in the town, in particular after the bringing in of the auxiliary police, made up of officers who had fought in World War One, and the Black and Tans, men and officers from the same site of carnage. This was in answer to the various 'outrages' of the war of independence, consisting mostly of the ambushing and shooting of soldiers and police – the crown forces as they used to say.
Her father it seems had the capacity therefore to be very aware of things happening in the town. Perhaps he was able to pick up information casually in a manner not open to a stranger. People might be more inclined to include him in gossip and rumour at the public house in the evening. Certainly her father had an enormous capacity for alcohol, being able like a docker to down fifteen pints of porter in a night and steer himself home afterwards. Apparently his daughter Roseanne would wait, anxiously no doubt, for his tread as he turned into their street, when she would gather him into the house.