Son. As little I know about my own son. The son of Roseanne Clear.
'An old book,' he said.
'Yes.'
'Whose name is that, Mrs McNulty, Joe Clear?'
Dr Grene now had a perplexed look on his face, a very deep thinking look, like a young boy figuring out an arithmetic problem. If he had had a pencil he might have licked the lead.
He had shaved his beard and was no longer hiding his face, so I felt suddenly I owed him something.
'My father,' I said.
'He was an educated man then?'
'He was indeed. He was a minister's son. From Collooney.'
'Collooney,' he said. 'Collooney suffered so in the troubles in the twenties,' he said. 'I am glad somehow that one time there was a man there that read the Religio Medici.'
The way he said the last two words slowly I knew he had never encountered the book before.
Dr Grene opened the book further, passing by the introduction, and hunting mildly for the beginning of the book, as a person does.
'"To the reader. Certainly that man were greedy of life, who should desire to live when all the world were at an end…"'
Dr Grene gave a strange little laugh, not a true laugh at all, but a sort of miniature cry. Then he laid the book back where he had found it.
'I see,' he said, though I had said nothing. Perhaps he was talking to the old bearded face in the book, or to the book itself. Seventy-six, Thomas Browne was when he died, a youngster compared to me. He died on his birthday, as sometimes happens, if rarely. I suppose Dr Grene is about sixty or so. I had never seen him quite so solemn as this today. He is hardly a man for jests and jokes, but he sometimes has a curious lightness carried about with him. Compared to poor John Kane, with all his sins, his supposed rapes and wrong doing in the asylum, Dr Grene is like an angel. Perhaps compared to many, I can no longer say. If Dr Grene feels himself washed up on this terrible shore of the asylum, if he feels himself in any way yesterday's man, as the saying goes, for me he is tomorrow and tomorrow. Such were my thoughts as I looked at him, trying to untie the knot of his new mood.
Dr Grene crossed to the little chair by the window where I like to sit when the weather is a little warmer. Otherwise there is a chill that seems to penetrate the window-glass. Below the window there is the yard, the high wall, and the endless fields. Roscommon town I am told is over the horizon, and it may be.
There is a river that moves between the fields that in the summer takes the light and uses my window as a signal, signalling to what or who or where I do not know. The riverlight plays in the glass. So naturally I like to sit there. At any rate, Dr Grene put his weight into it, always a cause for slight alarm, for it is a mere dress chair, one of those nice little chairs that country women liked to have in their bedrooms for their dress, even if it was the only nice object in the house. How it got to this room God only knows, and He perhaps hardly.
'Can you remember, Mrs McNulty, what it was – I mean, the events leading up to your presence in the Sligo asylum? You remember me saying I could find no proper record of the matter? I have searched again since and certainly have found nothing further. I am afraid the history of your presence here and in Sligo is no more. But I will continue to look, and I have sent to Sligo just on the off chance they have something. Can you remember anything about the matter?'
'I don't think I remember. The Leitrim Hotel they called it. I do remember that.'
'What?'
'They called the asylum in Sligo the Leitrim Hotel.' 'Did they? I never knew that. Why so? Oh,' he said, nearly laughing, nearly, 'because – yes.' 'Half of Leitrim was said to be in it.' 'Poor Leitrim.'
'Yes.'
'That is an odd word, Leitrim. I wonder what it means? I suppose it is Irish. Of course it is.'
I smiled at him. He was like a boy that has banged his knee and now the pain was subsiding. The cheerfulness of a boy after pain and tears.
Then he sank back again somehow, blackening deeper into himself, like a mole in the earth. I answered him largely to raise him back again.
'I do remember terrible dark things, and loss, and noise, but it is like one of those terrible dark pictures that hang in churches, God knows why, because you cannot see a thing in them.'
'Mrs McNulty, that is a beautiful description of traumatic memory.'
'Is it?'
'Yes, it is.'
Then he sat there in his own version of silence for a long while. He sat so long he was almost an inmate of the room! As if he lived there himself, as if he had nowhere to go to, nothing to do, no one to attend.
He sat in the chill light. The river, drowned in its own water, and drowned a second time in the rains of February, was not in a position to throw its light. The window-glass was severely itself. Only the still grass of winter far below lent it a slight besmirch of green. His eyes, now much clearer somehow and more distinct without the beard, were looking forwards as if at an object about a yard away, that stare that faces have in portraits. I sat on the bed and without the slightest embarrassment watched him, because he wasn't watching me at all. He was looking into that strange place, the middle distance, the most mysterious, human, and rich of all distances. And from his eyes came slowly tears, immaculate human tears, before the world touches them. River, window and eyes.
'What is the matter, Dr Grene?' I said.
'Oh,' he said.
I rose and moved towards him. You would have done the same yourself. It is an ancient matter. Something propels you towards sudden grief, or perhaps also sometimes repels. You move away. I moved towards it, I couldn't help it.
'Please do not mind me if I stand near you,' I said. 'I have had my bath yesterday. I am not foul-smelling.'
'What?' he said, absolutely surprised, but minutely. 'What?'
I stood by him and held out my right hand and placed it on his shoulder, actually a little behind the shoulder on his back. I had this unbidden memory of my father sitting on his bed, holding my mother, and patting her back almost childishly. I didn't dare pat Dr Grene, but just rested my old hand there.
'What is the matter?' I said.
'Oh,' he said. 'Oh. My wife has died.'
'Your wife?'
'Yes,' he said, 'yes. Her breathing deserted her. She choked, she choked – she suffocated.' 'Oh, my poor man,' I said.
'Yes,' he said. 'Yes.'
Then I knew something about Dr Grene. I had opened my mouth to tell him something about myself, by grace of his lost beard, and out of his own mouth had issued this news, this huge information.
With infinite sadness and very quietly, he added: 'It is also my birthday.'
Now here is a story of general stupidity in me. You might not credit the level of it.
I was wanting greatly to speak to my father and my father was dead. I had been a couple of times to his grave in the Presbyterian yard, but I thought I could not find him there. Maybe his bones did not contain him, maybe his signal and his self was elsewhere.
It was the useful gloom of a December afternoon, dark by four. I knew well that the old gates up in the other cemetery would be open, but how easy it would be to slip in those gates in the dark and be there among the graves with no one to note me. I was sure, I was hoping if my father was to be found anywhere, something of him might remain there, some old twist of bushes and paths and buried things that might constitute a sort of ancient radio that would carry a signal of him.