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.
Somewhere in the small hours I grew mysteriously furious, really really angry, with her, and wanted to storm up the stairs and have it out with her. What did she think she was doing? The bloody foolishness of it!
Thank God I did not. That would have solved nothing. But very real worries assail me. The swelling in her legs could well be due to clotting, and if the clot should climb into the lungs or the heart, she will drop dead. Is this what she wants? Now yet again I discover I do not have the language, the lingo, to talk to her about this, or about anything. We have neglected the tiny sentences of life and now the big ones are beyond our reach.
I had meant to spend the evening devising some non-devious way to question Roseanne McNulty in such a manner as to get a result. It strikes me that if I cannot speak helpfully to my own wife about her health, I have little chance with Roseanne. But maybe it is easier with a stranger, one can be the 'expert', and not the great human fool that tries to lead a life. On the plus side, I am fairly confident in my assessment of most of the other patients. They are in the main open books and their distress is self-evident. Although I cannot shed myself of the feeling of being the perpetual invader. Roseanne however confounds me.
I had wanted to consult my edition of Barthus on Pathologies of Secrecy, which of course is a marvellous book, if I would only find time to read it again. I suppose I could have gone into my study and looked at it, but I was trembling. I was nearly apoplectic, if that is still a real condition in the modern world. So in the upshot I neither read my Barthus nor resolved Bet's recklessness. I am exhausted.