'While the war raged, we were obliged to send him a letter, with his death sentence in it, and he was lucky when the war was over we let it go.'
'He was lucky?' I said, the words gushing up in fury from my throat. 'The unluckiest man that ever was born in Ireland. The poor man lies dead over in the other yard! You sent him a letter? Don't you know the hard life he had of it? The dark fate of him? Oh, I knew there was another thing I did not know of. You, you, you killed him. You killed him, John Lavelle!'
Now this John Lavelle was silent. The sort of discolouring, excited look went out of his face. He spoke suddenly very normally, even nicely. For some reason I cannot fathom still, I knew my words were untrue. I am proud I could understand that much. Whatever this young man had done in his life, he had not killed my father.
'Well,' he said. 'I am sorry your father is dead. Of course I am. Don't you know they shot my comrades? They took them out without mercy and shot them, Irishmen killing their own.'
It was as if his sudden change were a sort of catching cold, and I caught it.
'I am sorry about that,' I said. Why did I suddenly feel silly and awkward? 'I am sorry about everything. I never brought in the soldiers. I never did. But I don't even care if you think I did. I don't even care if you shoot me down dead. I loved my father. And now your comrades are dead and my father is dead. I never said a word to no one but the priest, and he had no chance to speak on the way. Don't you see, the soldiers were following you? Do you think no one else saw you? This town has eyes. This town can see out secrets, no bother.'
He was staring at me then with his eyes the tainted strange colour of seaweed. The seaweed of his island was in his eyes. Maybe there was seaweed slugging about in the wombs of the women there, people half gone back to the sea, like the first little thrumming creatures in creation, if I am to believe what I read. Oh, he cleared his eyes of everything then, and he stared at me, and for the first time I saw what was also hiding in John Lavelle, a sort of kindness. How much of such kindness the war had covered over with corpses and curses I do not know.
'Will you show me my brother's grave?' he said, in the same tones as another might have said, I love you.
'I will, if I can find it.'
So I went over to the book in question and scanned down the names. There was my father's beautiful blue copperplate writing, the hand of a proper scribe, though he was none such. And among the Ls I found him, Willie, Willie Lavelle. Then I noted the numbers of reference, and as if I was my father himself, and not a girl of sixteen that had nearly been knocked down and raped, I walked past the still inert lump of Joe Brady, and John Lavelle, and out among the avenues, and brought John Lavelle to his brother, so that he might say goodbye.
Then maybe John Lavelle went to America for it was a long while before anyone heard anything about him.
John Lavelle went to America and I went to a place called the Cafe Cairo – which wasn't quite as far.
chapter eleven
John Kane came out today with an extraordinary statement. He said the snowdrops were early this year. You would not expect such a man to notice snowdrops. He said that in the top garden where only the workers at the asylum are allowed to go, he saw a crocus in bloom. He said all this in a very nice way, standing in the middle of the room with the mop. In fact he came in to mop the floor, told me about these miracles, and then went off, forgetting actually to mop. Distracted I must surmise by his own sudden attack of poetry. This goes to prove yet again that few people stick to the articles of their characters, and will keep breaking away from them. At the same time he has been the same stranger to the washbasin and his flies were open as is mostly the case. Some day a small animal will notice his open flies and go in and live there, like a hedgehog in the inviting damp hollow of an ash tree.
I write this calmly although at this moment I am anything but calm.
Dr Grene was here for an hour in the afternoon. I was quite shocked by his ashen face, and he was to my added astonishment wearing the dark suit of the mourner, as he had just attended his wife's removal and burial. He referred to her as Bet, which must be a shorter form of Betty, which is a short form for what name? I cannot remember. Perhaps Elisabeth. He said there were forty-four mourners, he had counted them. I had the thought that there would be fewer for me, fewer, few, or none, unless Dr Grene himself attended my interment. But what does it matter? I could see the grief in the very lines of his face and where he had shaved his beard there was a violent-looking red rash, which he kept touching gingerly. I told him there he might be better not bothering with the likes of me on such a day, but he didn't answer that.
'I have unexpectedly found some additional material,' he said. 'I don't know whether it will help us, as it pertains to matters in the long ago. As they say.'
As who say? The people he is accustomed to seeing? The old people of his youth? When was Dr Grene young? I suppose in the fifties and sixties of the last century. When Queen Elizabeth was young and England was old.
'It was a little deposition someone had made many years ago, I don't know if it belonged to this institution or in fact went back to your time in Sligo Mental Hospital, and had been transferred here with you. It has at least raised the hope in me that the original is there. This copy was in a very poor state, typed but very faint as one might expect. And a great part of it missing. Something from an Egyptian tomb indeed. It referred to your father being in the Royal Irish Constabulary, which is not a phrase I had seen for many a long year, and the circumstances of his death – of his murder as one might say. I was very distressed to read about it. I don't know, but I felt I should see you today, despite my own – challenges at the moment. It seemed so vivid, so recent, perhaps because I am just at the moment susceptible to, to grief and griefs. That might be the why. I was very upset, Roseanne. In the chief part because I did not know.'
His words hung in the room the way such words do hang. 'It must be someone else's document,' I said.
'Oh?' he said.
'Yes,' I said. 'You may have been upset unnecessarily. On my account at least.'
'This wasn't the fate of your father?'
'No.'
'He was not in the police?'
'No.'
'Oh, well, I am relieved to hear it. But it had your name attached, Roseanne McNulty.'
'You call me Mrs McNulty, but there is another story attached to that, I really should be called by my maiden name.'
'But you were married, no?'
'Yes, I was married to Tom McNulty.'
'He died?' 'No, no.'
But I wasn't able in that moment to add anything.
'The document said your father was an RIC man in Sligo during the height of the troubles in the twenties, and was tragically killed by the IRA. I must confess I am still a little musty on that whole period. It seemed to us at school so much a series of dire errors and – it is such a belligerent history. Even the Second World War seemed to us – I don't know what it seemed to us. Ancient History? And yet I was born during the war. Wasn't your father's name Joseph, Joseph
Clear?'
But I was gripped by some unpleasant feeling, I don't know if you have ever had it, as if someone has stopped up your body with putty. When I closed my gums on the feeling I could have sworn I was actually biting through putty. I stared at Dr Grene in panic.
'What is the matter, Roseanne? I have upset you? I am so sorry.'
'Perhaps', I said, at last able to get words through the putty, 'that is your job, Dr Grene?'
'To upset you? No, no. My job is to help you. In this instance, to assess you. It has actually been put upon me as a duty. There is all sorts of legislation nowadays. I would be more than happy to leave you alone – I mean not alone, but be, to leave you be, and talk of other things, or talk of nothing, which I am beginning to think is the healthiest topic of all.'