He had asked that quite suddenly so that before I knew I had done so, I had spoken.
'My father-in-law arranged it,' I said.
'Your father-in-law? Who was that?'
'Old Tom, the bandman. He was also the tailor in Sligo.'
'In the town, you mean?'
'No, in the asylum itself.'
'You were in the asylum then where your father-in-law worked?'
'Yes.' 'I see.'
'I think my mother was also there, but I can't remember.' 'Working there?'
'No.'
'A patient?'
'I can't remember. I honestly can't.'
Oh, I knew he was longing then to ask me more, but to give him his due, he did not. Too good a fisherman maybe. When you see the salmon leaping, you will not catch one. Might as well go home.
'I certainly don't want you to be fearful,' he said, a little out of the blue. 'No, no. That is not my intention. I must say, Roseanne, we hold you in some regard here, we do.'
'I don't think that is merited,' I said, blushing and suddenly ashamed. Violently ashamed. It was as if some wood and leaves were suddenly cleared from a spring, and the head of water blossomed up. Painful, painful shame.
'Oh yes,' he said, not aware I think of my distress. He was perhaps plamasing me, flannelling me, as my father would have said. To enter me into some subject, where he could begin. A door into whatever he needed to understand. A part of me yearned to help him. Give him welcome. But. The rats of shame bursting through the wall I have constructed with infinite care over the years and milling about in my lap, was what it felt like. That was my job to hide it then, hide those wretched rats.
Why did I feel that dark shame after all these years? Why still in me, that dark dark shame?
Well, well.
Now we had a few mysteries in our laps. But the most pressing soon became again our poverty, which my father could not fathom.
One evening of the winter returning home from school I met up with my father along the river road. It wasn't like the joyful meetings of childhood, but I would be proud to say even now that I do believe it brightened something in my father to see me. It lightened him, dark, deep dark, though that Sligo evening was. I hope that doesn't seem like boasting.
'Now, dear,' he said. 'We'll walk arm in arm home, unless you're afraid to be seen with your father.'
'No,' I said, surprised. 'I am not afraid.'
'Well,' he said. 'I know what it is to be fifteen. Like a fella out on a headland in the blazing wind.'
But I didn't really understand what he meant. It was so cold I fancied there was frost on the stuff he put in his hair to flatten it.
Then we were coming idly, easily up our street. Up along the houses in front of us, one of the doors opened, and a man stepped down onto the pavement, and raised his brown trilby hat to the mask of a face that was just visible in the door. It was my mother's face and our own door.
'Well, Jaysus,' said my father, 'there's Mr Fine himself coming out of our house. I wonder what he was looking for. I wonder does he have rats?'
Mr Fine came towards us. He was a tall, loping man, a great gentleman of the town, with a kind, soft face like a man who had been out in a sunny wind – like the man on the headland maybe.
'Good day, Mr Fine,' said my father. 'How's everything going
on?'
'Just splendidly, yes, indeed,' said Mr Fine. 'How are you both? We were terrible shocked and anxious when we heard about the poor burned girls. That was a most terrible occasion,
Mr Clear.'
'Jaysus, it was,' said my father, and Mr Fine pressed on past us. 'I suppose I shouldn't say Jaysus to him,' my father said.
'Why?' I said.
'Ah, just him being Jewish and all,' he said.
'Don't they have Jesus?' I said, in my deep ignorance.
'I don't know,' he said. 'Fr Gaunt I don't doubt will say the Jews killed Jesus. But, you know, Roseanne, they were troubled times.'
We were quiet then as we reached our door and my father drew out his old key and turned it in the lock and we entered the tiny hall. I knew there was something troubling him now after the speech about Jesus. I was old enough to know that people make a little speech sometimes that is not what is in their thoughts, but is a sort of message of those thoughts all the same.
It was late in the evening just before it was time to go to bed that my father finally mentioned Mr Fine.
'So,' he said, as my mother shovelled ashes over the last few bits of turf, so they would burn slowly through the night, and be beautiful eggs of red sparks in the morning when she would winnow the ashes from them again. 'We met Mr Fine this evening, coming home. We thought for a minute he might have been calling here?'
My mother straightened herself and stood there with the fire-shovel. She stayed so still and so silent she might have been posing for an artist.
'He wasn't calling here,' she said.
'It's just that we thought we saw your face in the door, and he was lifting his hat – to your face like.'
My mother's eyes looked down at the fire. She had only made half a job of the ashes but she didn't look inclined to finish the job. She burst into strange, aching tears, tears that sounded like they had come up from her body somewhere, seeped through her like an awful damp. I was so shocked my body began to tingle in a queer uncomfortable way.
'I don't know,' he said, miserably. 'Maybe we were looking at the wrong door.'
'You know well you weren't,' she said, this time quite differently. 'You know well. Oh, oh,' she said, 'that I had never allowed you to take me from my home, to this cold cruel country, to this filthy rain, this filthy people.'
My father's reaction was to blanch like a boiling potato. This was more than my mother had said for a year. This was a letter, this was a newspaper of her thoughts. For my father I think it was like reading of yet another atrocity. Worse than rebels the age of boys, worse than burning girls.
'Cissy,' he said, so gently it went almost unheard. But I heard
it. 'Cissy.'
'A cheap scarf that would shame an Indian to be selling,' she said.
'What?'
'You can't blame me,' she said, nearly shouting. 'You can't blame me! I have nothing!'
My father leapt up, because my mother had inadvertently struck herself on the leg with the shovel.
'Cissy!' he cried.
She had opened a little inch of herself and there were a few jewels of dark blood glistering there. 'Oh Christ, oh Christ,' she said.
The next evening my father went to see Mr Fine in his grocery shop. When he came back his face was pallid, he looked exhausted. I was already upset because my mother, perhaps suspecting something, had gone out herself into the dark, I knew not where. She had been one minute in the scullery banging about, and the next she was gone.
'Gone out?' said my father. 'Dear me, dear me. She put on her coat in this terrible cold?'
'She did,' I said. 'Shall we go out to look for her?'
'Yes, we must, we must,' said my father, but he stayed sitting where he was. The saddle of his motorbike was just beside him, but he didn't put a hand on it. He let it be.
'What did Mr Fine say?' I asked. 'Why did you go to see
him?'
'Well, Mr Fine is a very fine man, that he is. He was most concerned, apologetic. She told him it was all above board. All agreed. I wonder how she could say that. Get the words into her mouth and say them?'
'I don't understand, Dadda.'
'It's the why we've had so little to be eating,' he said. 'She's after making a purchase on Mr Fine's loan, and every week naturally he comes for his money, and every week I suppose she gives him the most of what I give her. All those rats, dark corners, all those hours of poor Bob scratching through miseries, and the days of queer hunger we have endured, all for – a clock.'