But the silence that was on my mother was the profoundest of all. She might have been a creature underwater, or rather, when I was with her, it could have been so for both of us, because she never spoke, but moved slowly and ponderously like a swimming creature.

My father made his valiant efforts to stir her, and showed her every attention he could. His wages from his new work were small, but small as they were, he hoped they might do, especially in those hard dark years when the civil war was over, and the country was struggling to get off its knees. But I think in those days the whole world was aching with catastrophes, great wheels of history were turning not turned by man at all, but by the hand of some inexplicable agent. My father gave her what he earned, hoping she might parcel and divide the few pounds, and get us through. But something, inexplicable as the enormous forces of history, but a tiny matter since it only affected us, seemed to hold sway, and there was often almost nothing to eat in the house. My mother might bang about in the pantry at supper time, as if about to produce a meal, then come back out into the little sitting room and sit herself down, while my father, all scrubbed and ready after his work, and with a whole night ahead of him – for rats are best molested in the dark – and myself looked at her, with the realisation slowly dawning that there was nothing forthcoming. Then my father slowly shook his head, and maybe mentally tightened his belt, but hardly dared ask her what was amiss. In the face of her troubles, we were beginning to starve!

But nothing could penetrate her silence. Christmas came, and my father and myself plotted to get our hands on something that would please her. He had spotted a scarf for sale near the Cafe Cairo, in a little everything shop, and every week he kept back a halfpenny or so, so he could gather the necessary like a mouse hoards grain. Please remember that my mother was very beautiful, though perhaps not so beautiful now, as her silence had found an echo in some bleak thin cloth that seemed to be pulled over the skin of her face. She was like a painting with its varnish darkening, obscuring the beauty of the work. Because her lovely green eyes were dying in their lights, something of her essential self was vanishing also. But still in her general outline any artist would have been content with her I think, if Sligo had had artists, which I doubt if it had, unless it was fellas painting the faces of the Jacksons, the Middletons and the Pollexfens, who were the better people in the town.

My father was not obliged to work on Christmas eve, and it was our delight to go to the service, given by the minister Mr Ellis in his neat old church. My mother came with us silently, small like a monk in her shabby outdoor coat. I remember the scene so well, the small church lit with candles, and the Protestant people of the parish, poor and not poor and wealthy enough, gathered there, the men in their dark gaberdines, the women if they could manage it with a dash of fur about the neck, but mostly, the sombre green tones of those days. The light of the candles pierced everywhere, into the lines of my father's face as he sat beside me, into the stones of the church, into the voice of the minister as he spoke his words in that mysterious and stirring English of the bible, in through my own breastbone, right into my young heart, piercing me fiercely there, so that I wanted to cry out, but cry out what I could not say. Cry out against my father's fate, my mother's silence, but also, cry out in praise of something, the beauty of my mother that was going but still there. I felt as if my mother and my father were in my care, and that it was by some action of my own that they would be rescued. For some reason this plumped me up with sudden joy, a feeling so scarce in that time, so that when the local voices began to sing some forgotten hymn, I began to flush with weird happiness, and then in the sparkling dark, to cry, long full hot tears of treacherous relief.

And I cried there, and I suppose little good it did anyone. The smell of the wet clothes all about me, the coughing of the church-goers. What would I give to put them back in that church, back in that Christmas time, put everything back that time soon took away, as time must, the shillings back in the pockets of the people, the bodies back in the long johns and the mittens, everything, everything back, so we might be balanced there, kneeling and sitting on the mahogany planks, if not eternally then again for those moments, that very inch of the material of time, the lines of my father's face accepting the glimmering light, his face slowly slowly turning to both my mother and me, and smiling, smiling in easy, ordinary kindness.

The next morning my father produced for me a beautiful segment of what I learned later was called costume jewellery. All girls going out in Sligo liked to sport a bit of 'magpie' glitter. I like other girls dreamed of the fabled magpie's nest, where brooches and bracelets and earrings would be found, a nest of lovely plunder. I took my father's gift and opened its silvercoloured pin and pinned it on my cardigan, showed it proudly to the piano and the motorbike.

Then my father handed my mother the great something wrapped in good shop paper, the sort that in older days she would have saved and folded and put in a drawer. She opened the packet quietly, and gazed on the speckled scarf folded itself within, and raised her face and asked:

'Why, Joe?'

My father had not the least idea what she meant. Was it the pattern was wrong? Had he failed in the task of buying a scarf in some manner he would not be aware of, for who would tell him, the rat-catcher, about women's fashions?

'Why? I don't know, Cissy. I don't know,' he said, valiantly. Then, suddenly, he added, as if on an inspiration: 'It's a scarf.'

'What did you say, Joe?' she said, as if lost in a mysterious deafness.

'For your head, for your neck, as you like,' he said. Beginning to churn, it was obvious to me, with that desperate feeling that grows in the belly of the giver of the wrong present. He was having to explain the obvious, always an unpleasant task.

'Oh,' she said, staring at it now in her lap. 'Oh.'

'I hope you like it,' he said, which I suppose was presenting his own neck for the axe.

'Oh,' she said, 'oh.' But what class of an oh it was, or what the oh signified, neither of us knew.

chapter seven

Dr Grene's Commonplace Book

Very distressed to discover, quite by accident, that Bet has decided not to attend the specialist to whom she had been referred last year (was it a year ago already, or am I dreaming? Was it this year?). By the tin of Complan last night I happened to find, temporarily forgotten, her diary. Now, of course it was wrong, unethical, wrong, wrong, but I opened it, just from the tiny passion of the husband disliked. To see what she had written in it. No, no, just to see her writing, something as intimate and private as that. Maybe not even to read the words. Just to look at the black ink of her biro for a brief moment. And there it was, just a few weeks ago, an entry bold as brass, but of course, meant only for herself: 'Rang clinic, cancelled appointments.'

Why?

This was the follow-up for her dizzy spell, I was vaguely aware, in fact when she told me she had been given the referral, I was so comforted I put the entire matter from my mind. I was in two minds. First, alarmed that she had done so, and secondly, perfectly aware that I only knew because I had violated her privacy – a further violation of herself, as I knew she would see it. And she would be right.

What to do?

So I was distracted all night. My usual solution to the problem, distraction. Possibly. But I think, with good reason.