'I'm going out to the garden to see if there's any news,' she would say, at almost any time, because she had roses going the whole length of the year.
She was waiting for whatever God, whatever secret magician, decided things for roses to do His stuff. I am afraid I showed scant interest in all that. Mea culpa. I tried to, but couldn't locate that passion in me. I should have been out there with her, with the gloves and the secateurs, like someone geared for miniature battle.
Little sins of omission that loom large now. You could go mad.
Anyway for my sanity I am writing here. I am sixty-five years old. Past the Beatles song. By some accounts this is young. But when a man wakes on his fortieth birthday he may safely say he has no youth ahead of him. I suppose this is infinitely petty and ridiculous. A healthy person might be content with life as a quality in itself, and look to the passing of the years, and the gaining of age, and then great age, with interest. But I am miserable before the task. When Bet died I looked in the mirror for the first time in many years. I mean, I had glanced every morning in the mirror, trimmed my beard and the like, but had not looked in it at myself. I was amazed at what I saw. I did not know myself. My hair was thinning all about the crown, and was grey as a badger, whereas I had imagined myself to have retained my old colour. The lines in my face were like the folds in a bit of leather that has been outside in the rain for a long time. I was utterly dismayed, utterly shocked. I had not realised it while Bet lived, the simple fact. I was old. I didn't know what to do. So I searched out my old razor and shaved my beard.
Sixty-five. In a few years I will retire. It is not just this building is reaching its point of ultimate depreciation. Retire. To do what? Knock about Roscommon town? Yet there is Roseanne McNulty at a hundred. If she were English the queen would have sent her a letter. Does Mary McAleese send cards to the Irish centenarians? But I am sure, like the rest of the world, Mary McAleese does not know Roseanne exists.
Actually I did not mean to write anything about myself here. What I meant to write about was Roseanne.
For there is a mystery there. I suspect that somewhere in the distant past, in just such an institution as this, she suffered in some way at the hands of her 'nurses'. This would not be unusual in these old histories. Her suffering in the realm of real life, in the so-called outside world, was no doubt even greater. I have attempted a series of cautious questions, of the sort that would not scare her or drive her into silence. She is quite capable, and always has been, of playful and even fanciful talk. Myself and Bet used to be like that, years ago. At our ease – but no, let me leave all that alone. But I wonder is Bet lonely where she lies now? How odd it was at last to ring the funeral directors whose unwished-for premises I had passed in the car so many times, with the posh entrance, the yard of hearses at the back, the quiet efficient phrases, the numbers, the tea, the sandwiches, the grave documents, the service, the removal, the this and the that of death. Then just this morning the discreet bill, the things itemised, the coffin I chose in a sudden fit of meanness, and deeply regretted at the funeral. What I bought to bury my wife.
Every nuance of her, every turn of the head, every moment of tenderness between us, every gift, every surprise, every joke, every outing, holidays in Bundoran and later Benidorm, every kind word, helpful sentence, it all gathered together like a sea, the sea of Bet, and rose up from the depths of our history, the seabed of all we were, in a great wave, and crashed down on the greying shore of myself, engulfed me, and would that it had washed me away for good.
Oh, dear. Again I have strayed. But this has been the pattern of the recent weeks.
Roseanne. Old lady. The cailleach of the stories. So ancient, and yet, one of those faces that is so thin she bears the look of her youth yet, what she was. Oh, she is shrunken as she must be, when the woman washes her no doubt she is skin and bone, everything that was once beautiful and fruitful about her empty and sere. Can I say, Bet was spared that? It is worthless talking about what we have been spared by death. Death grins at that I am sure. Death of all creation knows the value of life.
I would like from sheer curiosity to find an old photograph of Roseanne when she was young. She must have been a beauty in her day. But photographs there are none.
At first I could find out nothing about her. In fact it is safe to say I expected there would be little trace of her in the records, given her great age. What did I know about her? After all I had spoken with her now and then for as many as two dozen years! So few facts. That she was someone called once Mrs McNulty, that she had no known relatives still in touch with her or other contacts, no one had visited her ever in the hospital, and perhaps I had a vague sense that she had been transferred here from Sligo, but maybe forty years ago or more. How I knew this I do not know, unless I had seen once some document that said so, when I was young and came here first from England. Naturally Bet wanted to be near her family and I knew from my father that I had Irish connections, so I was more than content to come here.
Accident, mere accident, everything. How surprised and pleased I had been, flattered, to receive a letter seemingly out of the blue from the then registrar here, Mr Amurdat Singh, offering me a junior post. How he had got my name I didn't know, and I was only a few months out of college, jobless, and desperate to marry Bet. And a job in Ireland, the very thing she had wanted. It was like a miracle. The Arabs say that everything is already written in the book of life, and our job is merely to fulfil the narrative already there, invisible, unknown. I thought Mr Singh had perhaps attended the same college as me, but it wasn't so, he had trained himself in Ireland, under one of the old imperial networks, still persisting long after both Irish and Indian independence, in the way of these things. I don't know if someone had given him my name, and why would they, when I must confess my degree wasn't exactly glittering, if adequate. But nonetheless the miraculous letter came, and I responded joyfully, youthfully and joyfully. I suppose you might say I had not seen Roscommon. But if it was a backwater, it was a backwater beloved by Bet. We had every chance to be happy here.
Amurdat Singh, God rest him, was a sort of saint. Perhaps because of his race he didn't flourish in Ireland as he might have. He deserved to be made Chief Psychiatrist of Ireland. His hospital while he lived was a true haven, and he had radical and exciting views. Jung and R. D. Laing were his gods, and they made a potent mix. Sadly he died a relatively young man, possibly even took his own life. I think on balance I am still glad that he sent for me, however mysteriously.
Of course when I arrived Roseanne Clear had already been here the best part of twenty years, or certainly under the care of the psychiatric services (let me not write 'so-called').
How that door bangs. As if I were five again and at home in our vanished house in Padstow, I am afraid to go and see what makes that sound. I am sure it is just a door, perhaps the door into the spare bedroom that Bet scorned, as being on the same floor as me.
I have sent to Sligo Mental Hospital to see if they have anything about her. They may not. Meantime I found here the remnant of some sort of deposition, mostly eaten away by mice and crawling with silverfish, like some ancient scroll of the desert. A little apocryphal gospel as may be. I don't know who wrote it, except that it was an educated sort of effort, though I do not think a doctor wrote it. It was faintly typed, probably from an old-fashioned carbon, that crinkly blue paper put in under the top copy in a typewriter. I am hoping that Sligo might have the original.