‘You do not keep up with your paramours,’ he said, quite nastily. ‘John Lavelle is dead.’
‘How can he be dead?’
‘He went back into the fold of the IRA, thinking we would be weakened by this German war, shot a policeman, and was justly hanged. The Irish government brought Albert Pierrepoint himself over from England to do the work, so you can be sure it was done well.’
Oh, John, John, foolish John Lavelle. God rest and forgive him. I will admit I had often wondered about him, where he was, what he was doing. Had he gone back to America? To be a cowboy, a train-robber, a Jesse James? He had shot a policeman. An Irish policeman in an Irish state. That was a terrible act. And yet he had done me the great grace of keeping away, 225
he had not haunted me again as I had feared he might, he had kept himself away, he had not sought to trouble me again, having no doubt a true understanding of the trouble he had brought me on Knocknarea. That had been his promise, and he had kept it. After the priests had gone, he had gripped my hand, and promised me. He had honoured his promise. Honour. I did not think this other man in front of me now had as much.
Fr Gaunt wanted to move past me now, to get to the narrow door and out and away. For a moment I blocked his path. I blocked it. I knew I would have the strength if I willed it to kill him, I felt it in that moment. I knew I could snatch at something, a chair or anything close to hand, and bring it down on his head. And as true as my declaration to him was, this was also true. I would have if not happily, at least gladly, openheartedly, fiercely, finely, murdered him. I don’t know why I did not.
‘You are menacing me, Roseanne. Step back away from the door, there’s a good woman.’
‘A good woman? You say that?’
‘It is an expression,’ he said.
But I stepped out of his way. I knew, I knew any proper, decent life was over. The word of a man like that was like a death sentence. I felt all about me the whole hinterland of Strandhill speaking against me, the whole town of Sligo murmuring against me. I had known it all along, but it is a very different matter to know your sentence, and then to hear it spoken by your judge. Perhaps they would come out and burn me in my hut for a witch. Truest of all things, there was no one to help me, no one to stand at my side.
Fr Gaunt removed himself neatly from the dreaded house. The fallen woman. The mad woman. Freedom for Tom, my lovely Tom. And what for me?
226
Dr Grene’s Commonplace Book
Absolute stillness again in the house last night. It is as if, having called out to me one last time, she will never need to call out to me again. This thought brought me out of fear, and into quite a different state. A sort of pride that after all I had love in me, buried in the mess. And that maybe she also. I listened again not out of fear, but a sort of sombre longing. But knowing nothing again would be asked or answered. A strange state. Happiness I suppose. It didn’t last, but like I would a vulnerable patient in the throes of grief, I asked myself to note it, remember it, give it passionate credence when other darker feelings assail me again. It is very difficult to be a hero without an audience, although, in a sense, we are each the hero of a peculiar, half-ruined film called our life. Now there is a remark that will not bear much scrutiny, I fear.
What is that passage in the bible about the angel that sits inside us? Something similar. I can’t remember. I think it is only the angel, the part of us unbesmirched maybe, that is such a connoisseur of happiness. He would want to be, because he tastes little enough of it. And yet . . . Enough.
Angels. A sorry subject for a psychiatrist. But now I am old, and have tasted grief that in the first days I thought might murder me, flay me, hang me, so I say, if only in the privacy of this book, why not? I am mortally sick of the rational mind. What creature does that look like? The celestial pedant? I have been reading through Fr Gaunt’s deposition again. I wonder if such all-knowing, stern-minded, and entirely unforgiving priests still exist? I suppose they do, but in private as it were. Maybe it was because de Valera’s parentage was so insecure or mysterious that he took especial comfort in the confidence of the clergy. He certainly enshrined them in his 227
constitution, but it is also true that he resisted the final demand of the archbishop of that day actually to make the Catholic church an established church. Thank God he didn’t go so far, but he went far enough, far further than perhaps he ought. He was a leader wrestling with angels and demons, sometimes in the same body. Having been in the IRA in the war of independence, then the IRA as it was represented by the anti-Treaty forces, and indeed imprisoned after the civil war, he found when he came to power in the thirties that his erstwhile comrades, who rejected both the Treaty and him for good measure, needed to be suppressed with the utmost force. This must have caused him enormous grief, and troubled his dreams, as it would anyone’s. Fr Gaunt itemises the fate of a man called John Lavelle, who figured in Roseanne’s life, who in the end was hanged by de Valera at the outbreak of World War Two, quite without mercy. Others of his comrades were flogged, and I did not know there was judicial flogging in Ireland, not to mention hanging. Fr Gaunt says it was thirty-six lashes of a cat-o’-ninetails, but that sounds much too harsh. But for de Valera it must have been like whipping and hanging his sons, or the sons or heirs of the companions of his youth. Which must have constituted another sort of disruption in him. It is a wonder the country ever recovered from these early miseries and traumas, and de Valera is to be greatly pitied that he was met with these necessary horrors. Perhaps here we can also trace the origin of the strange criminality of the last generation of politicians in Ireland, not to mention so many priests being found to have moved across the innocence of our children with the harrows and ploughshares of abuse. The absolute power of such as Fr Gaunt leading as day does to night to absolute corruption. I had the unworthy thought that maybe de Valera’s great desire to avoid the Second World War was not because he feared the enemy within, feared to split his new country, but that it actually constituted a further effort to expunge sexual228 ity. A sort of extension of the intentions of the clergy. In that instance, if this is not too obvious and crude, male sexuality. I am so tired at this moment that I do not know whether what I am writing is banal. Later I can tear it out. This man Lavelle, for all that he may have shared a prison yard with Dev long ago, and was hanged on Dev’s watch, as you might say, was no angel. According to Fr Gaunt, he brought his captive policeman into the hills behind Sligo, put a hood over his head, and held a gun to his temple. He kept spinning the barrel and pulling the trigger. I should think the poor garda was soon in a state of terror. Lavelle was trying to find out when the wages were brought into the barracks, because he had a desire to rob the very pay of the police. It seems an esoteric crime. But the garda for whatever reason, courage or ignorance, would not or could not answer. Lavelle clicked away with the gun. Some of his accomplices had also kidnapped the garda’s wife and daughter, and were holding them in a derelict house in the town, and Lavelle kept telling him that they would be killed if he did not answer. But truth to tell the poor man mustn’t have known too much. Eventually Lavelle shot him. This all came out because one of his companions turned State’s evidence, and got away with the abovementioned flogging. But the war had begun and de Valera was terrified the IRA would become strong again and he knew that they were already in contact with the Germans. And if Dev had a second religion its name was neutrality, he defended that to the last ounce of his sense. So he could not spare Lavelle. In all honesty I cannot say he was any great loss.
I write this as if I were a holy man in a beehive hut on Skellig. Of course I am not. It behoves us I suppose to admit we are all brother and sister to these modern sins. And civil war is an evil that befalls all souls equally.
Although there was nothing in my training that allowed me to talk of sins.
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Fr Gaunt tells all this in his document in I think a sort of massive Ciceronian effort to implicate, no, perhaps that’s not th
e right word, somehow to wrap Roseanne in some of the same knotted wool, to catch her up in it. Fr Gaunt spared no ink in that direction. It really is a remarkable piece of work, clerical, thorough, and convincing. It is like a forest fire, burning away all traces of her, traversing her narrative and turning everything to ashes and cinders. A tiny, obscure, forgotten Hiroshima. There is a sort of anxiety throughout the document, an anxiety that expresses itself sometimes in excessive, or I should say unexpected, detail. Fr Gaunt is almost clinical in his anatomising of Roseanne’s sexuality. It is exceedingly strange of course to read about this Roseanne of old, when the bearer of the same name is one hundred years old and in my care. I don’t know if really it is privileged information. It feels sometimes highly voyeuristic, morally questionable to read it. Partly because Fr Gaunt’s own morality is of an old-fashioned kind. He betrays at every stroke an intense hatred if not of women, then of the sexuality of women, or sexuality in general. For him it is the devil’s cloak and hood, whereas for me, it is a sort of saving grace of being alive. I am no enemy of Mr Sigmund Freud. It is also crystal clear that he regards her Protestantism as a simple, primal evil in itself. His anger that she would not let herself be made a Catholic at his request is absolute, long before she married her Catholic husband, and likewise remained what she was. This in itself for Fr Gaunt is a real perversion.
So he believes from very early on that she is, if not evil, then stubborn, difficult, perhaps mysterious. He does not ever pretend to understand her, but he certainly claims a hold on her history. She has laid herself open to the eyes of the town, she has flaunted her beauty by, it must be said, merely being beautiful. It is as if she has tempted all of male Sligo, and then, having snared this Tom McNulty, a rising man in the new country, 230
she chooses to abase herself before a wild creature like John Lavelle, whom Fr Gaunt describes as a ‘savage man from the darkest corner of Mayo’.
Then, having done such a thing, and having been duly offered assistance by Fr Gaunt, this assistance is rejected. You can feel his new fury here. Fury. She is put to live in an iron hut in Strandhill, where again she is like a magnet to the lusts of Sligo. Most terrible of all, Fr Gaunt having secured from Rome an annulment of her marriage, Roseanne then becomes mysteriously pregnant, and bears a child. Bears a child, says Fr Gaunt, and in a savage line of his own, containing only three words, he writes: ‘And kills it.’
If I had read those words years ago, with the authority of a priest behind them, I would myself have been obliged to commit her. 231
chapter nineteen
Roseanne’s Testimony of Herself
John Kane is becoming more mysterious by the minute. He does not speak at all now, but this morning offered what I think was a smile. It was certainly an odd, broken-sided effort. The left side of his face seems to have fallen a little. When he was going out he managed to give the loose floorboard another whack with his shoes. I wonder does he do it to signal to me that he knows there’s something there. He can’t think it is of any value anyhow, or it is not in his nature to look under floorboards. I was trying to remember as I stood by the window watching him how long I have known him. It seems like my acquaintance with him stretches into the very ashy distant times of childhood, but that is not correct. It is a long long time anyway. He has been wearing the same blue denim coat for about thirty years I should say. Which is a match for my own threadbare wardrobe. My dressing-gown shamed me in the windowlight, because there I could see how splashed and blotched the front of it is. My instinct was to retreat from the light, but having got so far from the bed, I couldn’t give up my advantage. I wanted to ask him about the progress of the spring outside, now that he has revealed himself a botanist, or the nearest thing I have to it. White, yellow, blue is the sequence. Snowdrops, daffodils and bluebells, and as the daffodils come on the snowdrops are beginning to die away. I wonder why that is. I wonder why anything is.
Then I became quite dizzy at the window and felt a sort of lurching in my limbs, like my joints wanted to fold me over. I lifted my arms and tried to balance myself against the wall. To 232
give John Kane his due, he was not yet out into the corridor, and came back in and helped me into bed, though it is not his task. He was quite gentle and was still smiling. I looked up into his face. He has hair on his face not quite a beard, more like the patchy heather on bogland. His eyes are quite blue. Then I realised he wasn’t truly smiling, but that his mouth is caught somehow, he can’t seem to move it easily. I wanted to ask him about it, but didn’t want to embarrass or upset him. I suppose that was stupid of me.
It was not so long after Fr Gaunt’s ‘visit’ that I was wandering over the further dunes of Strandhill beach on a crisp, moonlit night. Since he had come to see me I had felt very confined in the iron hut, as if his presence were somehow still in the room. I waited with no trace of patience every night for darkness, which at least gave me the liberty of the dunes and the marshland. I had no desire to be seen by anyone, or talk to anyone. Sometimes out walking I would be in such a peculiar state of mind that I would rush home at the merest hint of another person. Indeed, there were times I used to fancy I actually saw people that possibly weren’t there, little tricks of the marram grass or whatnot, the rise of a marsh bird – in particular I seemed to be ‘haunted’ by a figure that sometimes appeared, seemed to appear, at the far edges of where I was, in what might have been a black suit, and what might have been a brown hat, but even when I gathered my courage and walked towards him, the few times I thought I saw him, he instantly disappeared. But such matters were the nature of those days. I remember this night in particular because it is probably the single most peculiar thing I ever witnessed, having seen a few peculiar things in my time.
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I have to be very careful with these ‘memories’ because I realise there are a few vivid remembrances from this troubled time that I know in my heart cannot have happened. But I don’t think this night is one of them, improbable though it was.
It is a measure of my shame that instead of climbing to the top of the hill of sand itself, which I had previously loved to do, though it was at the risk of bumping into, even stumbling over, the courting couples, I had walked out right to the edge of everything, where a deep narrow river poured into the sea, and in the daytime was a sort of luncheonette for seabirds. I stood on the sand. The tide was out a way, and it was all perfectly quiet. Far off to the right of Knocknarea, some twisting little road entertained the lights of an unseen motorcar, appearing and disappearing. But it was too far away to hear it. There was no wind and the sky was enormous and that enamel blue the moonlight makes. It was very easy to suppose that one human creature was the least important element there. The sea stood off in acre after acre of private, dreamy water. Then in the distance, that tiny growling. I actually looked behind me, thinking there might be a rabid dog or some such on the beach. But no, the sound was coming from far off to the right of me. I looked towards it, all along the empty beach, to the small lights of the few buildings on the strand about an eighth of a mile away. There I saw a sort of line of piercing yellow light begin to grow on the horizon, a horizon half land and half sea.
I thought God was coming to cancel me out just as surely as Fr Gaunt had. I don’t know why I thought that, except, I felt that guilty.
The thin glimmering line grew and grew. The noise also increased, and under my bare feet I thought I felt the sand tremble, tremble deep under me, as if something were rising up through the ground. The lights widened and grew taller, 234
and then it was roaring, gathering and gathering, and then it was what looked like the edge of a flying carpet of monsters, and then that noise had grown into the noise of an enormous waterfall, and I was looking up, indeed like a mad woman, certainly feeling as mad as a hatter, and fuller and fuller, bigger and bigger, came the noise and the lights, till I could see the round bellies of individual parts of it, and metal noses, and gigantic whirrings, and it was airplanes, dozens of them,
maybe hundreds, all animal-like in the moonlight, but bizarrely, with the little thin windows visible at the front, and perhaps it was really madness, but I thought I could see little heads and faces, and it was all in formation as they say, grim, catastrophic, like something at the end of the world. And because the airplanes were all together, their noise was increased truly to biblical proportions, something out of Revelation, and the sky was filled with it over my head, metal, light and ruckus, and they poured over me, flying so close to the water that the power of the engines sucked up the water, tore the water up in torn sheets, that fell back to the surface with a swishing of snakes, and I could feel the airplanes pull at me, pull at the beach, trying to tear us from our places, trying to pull the brains out of my skull, the eyes out of my sockets, and then they were pouring over me, line after line, were there fifty, a hundred, a hundred and fifty? – for full minutes pouring over, and then beginning to draw away further, leaving a huge vacuum it seemed in the sky, leaving a silence almost more painful than the noise, as if those mysterious airplanes had taken the oxygen out of the Sligo air. And off they went, rattling and ravelling the Irish coast.
Some days later I was out on my porch, fussing over my roses. It was an activity that even in my distress brought a tincture of 235
comfort. But then it is clear to me that any effort at gardening, even a haphazard, stop-go one such as mine was, is an effort to drag to earth the colours and the importances of heaven. It was cold that day and there were goosebumps raised along my bare arms. The very existences of the roses, not yet seen, furled so tightly and mysteriously in their green buds, was making me almost dizzy.
I looked back over my right shoulder because I heard someone moving along the road. Someone or something, it might have been an old donkey scuffling along, to judge by the noises. I didn’t really want to be seen by man nor beast, even though there was such comfort in my roses. Maybe this year there would be a new look to them, not quite ‘St Anne’s’ or ‘ Malmaison’, but becoming slowly Sligo, ‘Souvenir de Sligo’, a memory of Sligo. But it wasn’t a donkey, it was a man, a very strange man, I thought, because his hair was cut tight to his head in a sort of frizz, like a Negro jazzman, and his suit of clothes was a strange dark ashen colour. No, it wasn’t a suit of clothes, more of a uniform of some kind. Even his face looked queerly blue. And to my astonishment I saw that it was Jack. Of course, that would explain the uniform, and him off in India wasn’t it, fighting in the king’s name – but if he was off in India what in the world was he doing in Strandhill, No-Man’s-Land that it was? And then it seemed suddenly colder than the mere cold of the treacherous Irish seaside day, and there seemed to be goosebumps added to my goosebumps. Wasn’t this odd