'My maiden name was Clear,' I said suddenly.
'That is what I thought. I read it, didn't I, in that little book?' he said. 'That is of course a very rare name. Joe Clear. There can't have been too many of that name. There cannot be too many Clears in Ireland. I wonder is it a form of Clare, or connected to Cape Clear, or what?'
He was speaking in oddly agonised tones, with that perplexed look again as of a young boy overwhelmed at school.
'I think it is a Protestant name and maybe comes out of England long ago.'
'Do you think? Of course, McNulty is a common enough name. You might find McNultys everywhere.'
'It is an old Sligo name. My husband told me they were the last recorded cannibal tribe in Ireland. It is written somewhere that they ate their enemies.'
'Oh my.'
'Yes. Myself, I didn't eat meat at that time. The smell of meat made me feel faint, though I cooked it every day for him. So my husband liked to tell people that I was the last recorded vegetarian cannibal in Ireland.'
'He was droll, your husband.'
Oh, oh, oh, shallow rocks again. I buttoned my lip as quick as I could. I did not want to rehearse all that now.
'Well, well,' he said, stirring to go at last, 'I might bring up that document I mentioned tomorrow or the next day, it might interest you to look it over.'
'I cannot read as well as I used to. I read Thomas Browne, but then I know the writing off by heart mostly.'
'We should get you a pair of reading glasses, Mrs McNulty -or should I say Ms Clear?
'I am as happy without them.'
'Very well.'
Then for some reason he laughed, one of those little tinkling laughs that people laugh when a private thought has amused them, and occurs before they have the power to stop it.
'Oh no,' he said, although I had said nothing, 'excuse me -nothing, nothing.'
And off he went, nodding. He raised his right hand at the door and actually waved, like I was a passenger on a ship.
Was it before or after that John Kane came in to talk about the snowdrops? I can't remember.
No, I remember. John Kane did come back in, but it was to mop the floor. He had evidently, somehow or other, realised he had not yet mopped my floor. After all, he is also now becoming elderly, the elderly fetching for the elderly. Not that he fetches. As he swept in under my bed he happened to bring out in the bristles of his brush a spoon. It was not clean but smeared with soup, and I must have knocked it from the tray. He gave me a very brief dark look, slapped my face lightly, and left.
How does good history become bad history by and by?
Dr Grene's Commonplace Book
'Certainly that man were greedy of life, who should desire to live when all the world were at an end…'
She is only two weeks buried. Bet. It is so difficult even to write the name. Sometimes here in the house now alone at night I hear some little banging somewhere, probably a sound I have unconsciously heard a million times, a door in the house that touches against its frame in the draught, and I don't know, I look fearfully up the dark corridor and wonder if it is Bet. It is a terrible and odd thing to be haunted by your wife.
Of course, I am not. It is one of the many strange fruits in the cornucopia of grief.
How difficult it is to live. I would almost say all my world is at an end. How often I must have listened blithely and with professional distance to some poor soul tortured by depression, a sickness that might have had its origin in just such a catastrophe as has hit me.
I feel so bereft I am almost inclined to admire any instance of simple strength of mind, all health of mind. I watched the images of Saddam Hussein, 'President of Iraq' as he still called himself, being hanged, and scoured his face for signs of suffering and pain. He looked confused but strong, almost serene. He had such contempt for his captors even as they taunted him. He did not believe maybe they had the strength to finish his term of life. To complete his story. Or he thought if he could find strength within himself, he would complete his own story with an admirable flourish. He looked so bedraggled and astray when they took him from the hidey hole months before. His jacket and shirt were always immaculate in court. Who washed them, brushed them, ironed them? What handmaiden? What does his story look like seen with the eyes of a friend, an admirer, a fellow townsperson? I envied him the evident peace of his mind as he went to his death. They did not show mercy to Saddam, who himself had shown no mercy to his enemies. He looked serene.
It is true that for the last ten years, a whole decade, Bet removed herself to the old maid's room at the top of the house. I sit here in our old bedroom – old in a few senses, as in, for twenty years we shared it, the room has not been decorated for many years, it was where we 'formerly' slept etc., etc. – as I have sat a thousand times – how many nights in ten years, 3,560 nights – and no longer is she just above me, walking the floorboards, making her narrow bed creak as she lay on it. All is perfectly quiet and still, except for that little banging somewhere, as if she is not dead at all, but has immured herself in a cupboard and wants to get out. In the little room above, her bed is still neatly made just as she left it the last morning, I couldn't bear to touch it. Her collection of books on roses occupies the windowsill as always (when we shared a bed, it was rose books on her side, Irish history on mine), propped up by two extravagantly carved Hawaiian bookends in the shape of two shameless maidens. By the bed, her phone on a little chinoiserie table her great-aunt left her. Her great-aunt had died of Alzheimer's, but she had won the table years ago at a card game in her prime, and Bet had been thrilled and touched to get it. In the drawers are her clothes, in the cupboard are her dresses, summer and winter ones, and her shoes, among the pairs are those heeled shoes she used to wear to dinner, that I thought didn't suit her, but at least I never had the lack of grace to say so, that is not among my sins, years ago when we did such things. But it is not that woman I found in the corridor, struggling for breath as her lung collapsed, one last shout in her that brought me clattering up the little stairs, that assails me, so much as that other younger person she was when I fell in love with her, that is the person that haunts me. The perfectly desirable and neat beauty that she was, who went against her father's wishes, and insisted she must marry a penniless student studying the unknown and unpromising science of psychiatry at a hospital in England, whom she had met on a holiday to Scarborough. The sheer accidental nature of things.
There was nothing about me that her father liked, a man who had been one of the subcontractors on the great Shannon hydroelectric scheme, and as such an historical and epic man, supplying gravel from the quarries of Connaght. But she prevailed, and we had our wedding, God help her, her numerous family ranged on one side of the church, and no one on the other side but my adoptive father, enduring the warlike stares from the other side. My parents were Catholic, which might have stood in their favour, except that they were English Catholics, a people in the eyes of my inlaws more Protestant than the Protestants themselves, and at the very least, deeply deeply mysterious, like creatures from some other time, when Henry VIII was wanting to marry. They must have thought Bet was marrying a phantom.
Her greatest wish I should think was that I would remain exactly as I was, and how I regret that that was not to be. It was only for her roses that she wished for change, the strange moment of floral enchantment when the branch of a rose mutates, and shows a 'sport', something new arising from the known rose. A leap in beauty.