'And do you hear any other more recent news of Tom?'

'Oh, just that he's thriving, you know. The coming man and all that, you know.'

And he looked at me then, maybe fearing he was upsetting me. But he wasn't really. It was nice to have him there. His leg was very warm against my leg. No, I didn't mind him.

The medical doctor was in to me a while ago. He didn't like the rash on my face, and indeed he found it on my back also. Truth to tell I have been feeling a little tired, and I told him so. It was strange, because usually as the spring got going outside I perked up in myself. I could see in my mind's eye the daffodils ablaze along the avenue and I longed to go out and see them, give them a raise of the old hand in greeting. Such long lurking under the cold wet earth, and then, all their resplendent joy. So that was strange, and I told him so.

He said he didn't like my breathing either, and I said I liked it well enough, and he laughed, and said, 'No, I mean, I don't like that odd little rattle in your chest, I think I will give you some antibiotics.'

Then he gave me real news. He said the whole main body of the hospital had been cleared out, and the two wings up my end were the only ones still going. I asked him if the old dames had been cleared out and he said they had. He said it was a terrible job, because of the bed sores, and the pain. He said I was very wise to keep moving about, and not have the bed sores. I said I had had them when I first went into Sligo and hadn't liked them much. He said, 'I know.'

'Does Dr Grene know of these changes?' I said.

'Oh, yes,' he said, 'he has masterminded the whole thing.'

'And what will happen to the old place now?'

'It will be demolished in due course,' he said. 'And of course you will be put in a nice new place.'

'Oh,' I said.

I was suddenly frantic, because I was thinking of these pages under the floor. How would I gather them and keep them secret if I was to be moved? And where would I be moved to? I was in turmoil now, like that blow hole in the cliff the back of Sligo Bay, when the tide comes in and forces the water into the rock.

'I thought Dr Grene had mentioned all this, or I wouldn't have said anything. You're not to worry.'

'What will happen to the tree below, and the daffodils?

'What?' he said. 'Oh, I don't know. Look, I'll have Dr Grene discuss all this with you. You know. That's his department and I am afraid I have strayed into it, Mrs McNulty.'

I was then too weary to explain yet again, for the millionth time in sixty years and more, that I wasn't Mrs McNulty. That I wasn't anybody, wasn't in fact anybody's wife. I was just Roseanne Clear.

chapter twenty

Dr Grene's Commonplace Book

Catastrophe. The medical doctor Mr Wynn, having gone up to attend Roseanne at my request, has inadvertently let the cat out of the bag vis-a-vis the hospital. I mean, I think I thought she knew, that someone would have told her. If they did, the information flew out of her head. I should have been wiser and prepared her. Mind you, I don't know how I would have broached this, without a similar result. She seemed most distressed that the bedbound old ladies are gone. Actually I feel we have all been moved on much quicker than we wanted, but the new facility in Roscommon town will be ready in a while, and there were complaints in the paper that it might be lying unused. So we bestirred ourselves in a final push. Now all that remain are the people here in Roseanne's block and the men's wing to the west. They are mostly old codgers of one sort and another, in their black hospital clothes. They are also very unhappy to hear of imminent plans, and actually what delays everything now is that there is nowhere for them to go. We cannot put them out on the road, and say, right, lads, off you go. They gather about me like rooks, when I talk to them in the yard where they do a bit of walking about and smoking. These are some of the fellows that were so helpful the night there was a fire in the hospital, many of them carrying old ladies on their backs, down the long stairs, quite amazing, and afterwards making jokes about it being a long time since they went with a girl, and wasn't it nice to do the foxtrot again, and related jests. They are certainly not mentally ill the most of them, they are just the 'detritus' of the system, as I once heard them referred to. One of them that I know well fought in the Congo with the Irish army. A good few of them in fact are ex-army men. I suppose we lack a place like Chelsea barracks, or Les Invalides in Paris. Who would be an old soldier in Ireland?

Roseanne was actually sweating in her bed when I went in to her. It may be a reaction to the antibiotics, but I fancy it is simple fear. This may be a terrible place in a terrible condition, but she is a human creature like the rest of us, and this is her home, God help her. I was surprised to find John Kane there, with his gobble-gobble voice like a turkey, the poor man, and though I was suspicious of him, he actually seemed concerned, old rogue that he may be, and worse.

Truth to tell I am not so sanguine about all this myself, and feel very much hurried and harried, but all the same it must be a good thing to be getting new premises, and ones not streaked with rainwater in some of the rooms, and gashes in the slates of the roof that we could get no one to risk fixing, because I am assured the timbers themselves are going. Yes, yes, it is a deathtrap, the whole building, but at the same time the element of depreciation has been scandalously ignored and never funded, and what could have been maintained has been let go to hell. And a species of hell it most likely appears to the untutored eye. Not Roseanne's eye.

Roseanne did perk up when she saw me, and asked me to go to her table and find a book for her. It was a book called Religio Medici in that very old battered copy I have often noticed as I passed. She said it was her father's favourite book, had she ever told me that, and I said, yes, I thought so. I said I thought she might even have showed me her father's name in it once, yes.

'I am a hundred years old,' she said then, 'and I want you to do something for me.'

'What is it?' I said, wondering at her now, coming back so courageously from her panic, if panic it was, and her voice steady again now, even if her old features were aflame still from the damn rash. She looks like she has jumped through a bonfire and dipped her face to the heat.

'I want you to give this to my child,' she said. 'To my son.'

'Your son?' I said. 'And Roseanne, where is your son?'

'I do not know,' she said, her eyes abruptly clouding, almost fainting away, and then she seemed to shake her mind clear again. 'I do not know. Nazareth.'

'Nazareth is a long way,' I said, humouring her.

'Dr Grene, will you do it?'

'I will, I will,' I said, absolutely certain I would not, would not be able to, considering what I knew from Fr Gaunt's blunt statement in his document. And anyhow, all the sea of time between. Her child would be also an old person now surely, even if living? I suppose I might have asked her, Did you kill your child? I suppose I might have asked her that, if I had been so mad myself. No, that wasn't a question that could be posed nicely, even I think professionally. And anyway, she had given me answers to nothing really. Nothing that could alter my opinion of her status, medically speaking.

Oh, and I was suddenly weary, weary, as if I were all her years and more. Weary, because I could not lift her back into 'life'. I could not do it. I could not even lift myself.

'I think you will,' she said, looking at me acutely. 'I hope so anyhow.'

Then rather incongruously she took the book from my hands and then put it back into them, and nodded her head, as if to say, be sure that you do do it.