'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.'

'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 Pierre-point 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, 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, open-heartedly, 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?

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 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 sexuality. 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 above-mentioned 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.