On the other hand, I was thinking, as I drove, it was unlikely I would find the time to go to England. And I was wondering to myself, what in the name of God are you doing anyway, William? You know you are not going to recommend putting her back in the community. She will have to be transferred somewhere (note: not Nazareth House in Sligo, and not Sligo Psychiatric Hospital, all things considered) because she is surely too old now for anything else. So why was I pursuing it? Well, the truth is, it has been a great comfort. Also, there has been something about it that I have found almost irresistible. I think I must classify the whole impulse as a form of grieving. Grieving for Bet, and for the nature of lives in general. For the lot of human creatures generally. But, I was thinking, England is a step too far, though I must say I would like to find out the truth of Roseanne's child, or no child, having come this far. But the work load at the present time is much too great (I am trying to write down a version of my active thoughts in the car, never an easy thing), and maybe, since the most crucial and important parts of life seem after all to have the characters of sleeping dogs, I should let them lie. It is all old history and what would it serve now to dig it up? And then the real thought struck me. That I have been looking at this from all the wrong angles. Because if there is a record of this child, would it not be a great comfort to Roseanne to know this, even if the person is uncontactable – to know 'before she dies' that she put someone safely into the world after all? Or would this be just further mental mayhem and trauma? Would she want to be in touch with this person, and would this person – oh, the proverbial Pandora's box. Well, well, I have no time anyway, I was thinking. But I will lay this quest down reluctantly.

Then I parked my car as usual and went into the hospital. I took an account of the day from the day nurse and among other things she told me that Roseanne Clear's breathing had worsened and they had been even afraid to move her down to the medical ward, she was so delicately balanced between life and death, but they had managed it under Dr Wynn's supervision, and she was on an oxygen mask. The lungs need a 98 per cent function to have sufficient exchange of gases properly to aerate the blood, and she has only about 74 per cent, such is the congestion. Although at the end of the day she is 'just another patient' I have to say this was very worrying and discommoding. I hurried to the ward nearby as if she might be already perished and was unaccountably very relieved to find her alive, if unconscious and with an unpleasant sound to her breathing.

After a while sitting there I began to feel very idle, because there would be papers to attend to in my office. So I went in there and attacked the pile. At the bottom of the forms and letters was a package, a sheaf of papers in a large used envelope, in fact an envelope I had opened a few days ago and thrown in my waste-paper basket. Someone had fished it out again and put in these pages. They were written in blue biro, in a very neat small hand that required me to put my reading glasses on, something of course that I try not to do, out of mere vanity.

It didn't take long to realise that it was an account of

Roseanne's life, written it would seem by herself. I was absolutely amazed. I was instantly but rather strangely glad I had not pressed my advantage that day when she told me she had had a child. Because here was everything anyway, without the sense that I had forced her to 'betray' herself, using all the wiles and tricks of my training. I knew I wouldn't have time to read it properly until I was in my house that night (yesterday), but already I could see she offered information freely, in such strong contrast to her spoken answers to me. But also, where had it come from? And who had put it on my table, certainly not herself, surely? I was honour bound to suspect John Kane, as he was the person most usually in her room. Or one of the nurses. Of course, with all the kerfuffle today in her room, it might have been anybody. I called through to the nurses' room and asked if anyone knew anything about it. Doran, a reasonably able and pleasant man, said he would ask around. Where was John Kane? I asked. Doran said Kane was home at his little flat in the old stableyard behind the institution (also due to be knocked down shortly). He said John Kane had been feeling poorly and after a morning's work, had asked to be let go to lie down. Dr Wynn had excused him readily. John Kane of course is not a well man.

I read Roseanne's account of things like a scholar of her life, making a mental concordance of facts and events.

The first feeling I had reading it was privilege. How strange to think of her secretly writing it, like a monk in a scriptorium, all the while I was endeavouring to assess her, and getting virtually nowhere. The sense that she might be addressing it to me overwhelmed me.

It differs from Fr Gaunt's history in many ways, not least the long account of her father and his experiences. For a woman who knows no one virtually and has spent the last sixty-odd years of her life in a place like the hospital, she seems at times to me to be a surprising celebrator of life and people. Many mysteries remain. But I have tried to orchestrate the little that I know and have fallen on names I recognise with gratitude. Sean Keane who figured in Percy Quinn's records seems to have been a son of John Lavelle. Furthermore it seems he was to some degree brain-damaged. There is one person I know who I can ask about this, because my suspicion is that our John Kane is the same man. There is a story here of a strange loyalty and protection. His father asked him to look after Roseanne, and he seems to have done his utmost to do so.

Who took Roseanne's baby though is not really answered, and the fact remains that the evidence is against her about her father's work. If this is wrong, then other things she writes may also be 'wrong'. It cannot be taken at face value, but maybe no more than Fr Gaunt, who was obviously sane to such a degree it makes sanity almost undesirable.

I think I certainly can surmise that she was falsely accused in the matter of John Lavelle, unless I am reading her wrong, although I recognise that in the mores of the time, the morass, I almost wrote, just to have been seen with him in that way, just the suspicion, was crime enough. Morality has its own civil wars, with its own victims in their own time and place. But once she became pregnant she was utterly doomed. A married woman who had never been married. She could never have won that one.

I write all this, and immediately have some niggling concerns. The use of the word 'wrong' for instance. What is wrong about her account if she sincerely believes it? Is not most history written in a sort of wayward sincerity? I suspect so. In her account, she relates a very sincere and even touching account of how her father sought to show her that all things from hammers to feathers fall equally. She seems to have been about twelve when it happens (now I am forced to look again at her manuscript, because I may be rewriting). Yes, about twelve. And then the dire events at the graveyard, and then the rat-catching, and eventually, when she is about fifteen (blast it, must check again), her father's death. But Fr Gaunt has him being murdered by the rebels, the first attempt in the very round tower Roseanne so fondly remembers, his mouth stuffed with feathers and him beaten by mallets or hammers, which in terms of post-traumatic stress, sounds like what really happened, and suggests that Roseanne for survival's sake has sanitised it completely, even moving the event back to a time of relative innocence. But this in my experience seems an enormous and unusual transference, all things considered. Then there is the fact that the man that Fr Gaunt suggests Roseanne should marry, Joe Brady, the inheritor of her father's job at the graveyard, is presented in Roseanne's account as an attempted rapist, a passage that reads very 'strangely' to me. And not only that, but Fr Gaunt in passing mentions the name on the gravestone where the guns were buried as the same name, though he must have known. Then of course, I am thinking, Fr Gaunt, while maybe sincere in his great desire to have her committed, was also subject to mere error of memory, and he may have found the name floating in his head, and wrongly given it as the name on the grave. The one thing that is fatal in the reading of impromptu history is a wrongful desire for accuracy. There is no such thing.