chapter four

Later John Kane lumbered in, muttering and pushing his brush, a person I have come to accept in the way of things here, which, if they can't be changed, must be endured.

I noted with a small degree of dread that his flies were open. His trousers are decked with a series of clumsy-looking buttons. He is a little man but at the same time he is all brawn and braces. There is something wrong with his tongue, because he is obliged to swallow every few moments with strange hardship. His face has a veil of dark-blue veins in it, like a soldier's face that has been too near a cannon mouth when it exploded. In the gossip of this place he has a very poor reputation.

'I can't see how you want all them books, missus, since you have no spectacles to read them.'

Then he swallowed again, swallowed.

I can see perfectly without spectacles but I did not say this. He was referring to the three volumes in my possession, my father's copy of Religio Medici, The Hounds of Hell, and Mr Whitman's Leaves of Grass.

All three brown and yellow with thumbing.

But conversation with John Kane can lead anywhere, like those conversations with boys when I was a young girl of twelve or so, a gaggle of them at the corner of our road, standing in the rain indifferently, and saying things to me, in soft voices – at first in soft voices. In here, among the shadows and the distant cries, the greatest virtue is silence.

Those that feed them do not love them, those that clothe them do not fear for them.

That is a quotation from something, what or where I do not know.

Even gibberish is dangerous, silence is better.

I have been here a long time and in that time have learned the virtue of silence certainly.

Old Tom put me here. I think it was him. It was a favour to him, for he himself worked as tailor in the Sligo Lunatic Asylum. I think he put money in with me, because of this room. Or does Tom my husband pay for me? But he could not still be alive. It is not the first place I was put, the first place was -

But I am not concerned with recrimination. This is a decent place, if not home. If this were home I would go mad!

Oh, I must remind myself to be clear, and be sure I know what I am saying to you. There must be accuracy and rightness now.

This is a good place. This is a good place.

There is a town not far off, I am told. Roscommon town itself. I don't know how far, except it takes half an hour in a fire engine.

This I know because one night many years ago I was roused from my sleep by John Kane. He led me out into the hallway and hurried me down two or three flights of stairs. There was a fire in one of the wings and he was leading me to safety.

Instead of bringing me to the ground floor, he had to cut across through a long dark ward, where the doctors and other staff were also gathered. There was smoke coming up from below, but this place was deemed to be safe. The gloom gradually brightened, or my eyes adjusted to it.

There were maybe fifty beds there, a long thin room with curtains drawn everywhere. Thin ragged curtains. Old, old faces, as old as my own now. I was astonished. They had lain there not too far away from me and I did not know. Old faces that said nothing, lying in stupor, like fifty Russian icons. Who were they? Why, they were your own people. Silent, silent, sleeping towards death, crawling on bleeding knees towards our Lord.

A tribe of onetime girls. I whispered a prayer to hurry their souls to heaven. For I think they crept up there very slow.

I suppose they are all dead now or mostly. I never visited them again. The fire engine came in half an hour. I remember because one of the doctors remarked on it.

These places unlike the world, with none of the things we praise the world for. Where sisters, mothers, grandmothers, spinsters, all forgotten lie.

The human town not so far off, sleeping and waking, sleeping and waking, forgetting its lost women there, in long rows.

Half an hour. Fire brought me in to see them. Never again.

Those that feed them do not love them.

'Do you want this?' says John Kane in my ear.

'What is it?'

He was holding it in the palm of his hand. Half the shell of a bird's egg, blue like the veins in his face.

'Oh, yes, thank you,' I said. It was something I had picked up in the gardens many years before. It had sat in the window niche and he had never referred to it before. But it had lain there, blue and perfect and never ageing. Yet an old thing. Many many generations of birds ago.

'That is a robin's egg maybe,' he said.

'Maybe,' I said.

'Or a lark.'

'Yes.'

'I will put it back anyhow,' he said, swallowing again, as if his tongue were hardened at the root, his throat bulging for a moment.

'I don't know where all the dust comes from,' he said. 'I sweep it every day and there is always dust, by God there is, ancient dust. Not new dust, never new dust.'

'No,' I said, 'No. Forgive me.'

He straightened a moment and looked at me.

'What is your name?' he said.

'I don't know,' I said, in a sudden panic. I have known him for decades. Why was he asking me this question? 'You don't know your own name?' 'I know it. I forget it.' 'Why do you sound frightened?' 'I don't know.'

'There is no need,' he said, and taking the dust into his dustpan neatly, began to leave the room. 'Anyhow, I know your name.'

I started to cry, not like a child, but like the old old woman I am, slow, slight tears that no one sees, no one dries.

Next thing my father knew, the civil war was upon us.

I write this to stop my tears. I stab the words into the page with my biro, as if pinning myself there.

Before the civil war there was another war against the country being ruled from England but that was not much fought in

Sligo.

I am quoting my husband's brother Jack when I write this, or at least I hear Jack's voice in the sentences. Jack's vanished voice. Neutral. Jack, like my mother, was master of the neutral tone, if not of neutrality. For Jack eventually donned an English uniform and fought against Hitler in that later war – I nearly said, that real war. He was a brother also of Eneas McNulty.

The three brothers, Jack, Tom and Eneas. Oh, yes.

In the west of Ireland by the way Eneas is three syllables, En-ee-as. In Cork I fear it is two, and sounds more like a person's backside than anything else.

But the civil war was definitely fought in Sligo, and all along the western seaboard, with fierce application.

The Free Staters had accepted the treaty with England. The Irregulars so-called had baulked at it like horses at a broken bridge in the darkness. Because left out of the whole matter was the North of the country, and it seemed to them that what had been accepted was an Ireland without a head, a body lopped off at the shoulders. That was Carson's crowd in the North that kept them linked to England.

It always puzzled me that one of Jack's proudest boasts was that he was a cousin of Carson. But that is by the way.

There was a lot of hatred in Ireland in those times. I was fourteen, a girl trying to bloom up into the world. Fumes of hatred all about.

Dear Fr Gaunt. I suppose I may say so. Never did so sincere and honest a man cause maiden so much distress. For I don't suppose for a moment he acted out of ill intent. Yet he moi-dered me, as the country people used to say. And in a time previous to that he moidered my father.

I have said he was a little man, by which I mean, the crown of his head was at an equal level to my own. Bustling, spare and neat, in his black clothes and his hair cropped tight like a condemned man.

The question breaks in on my thoughts: what does Dr Grene mean, he must assess me? So that I might go out into the world? Where is that world?