My father's happiness. It was a precious gift in itself, as perhaps my mother's anxiety was a perpetual spanner thrown into her works. For my mother never made miniature legends of her life, and was singularly without stories, though I am sure there were things there to tell as good as my father's.
It is funny, but it strikes me that a person without anecdotes that they nurse while they live, and that survive them, are more likely to be utterly lost not only to history but the family following them. Of course this is the fate of most souls, reducing entire lives, no matter how vivid and wonderful, to those sad black names on withering family trees, with half a date dangling after and a question mark.
My father's happiness not only redeemed him, but drove him to stories, and keeps him even now alive in me, like a second more patient and more pleasing soul within my poor soul.
Perhaps his happiness was curiously unfounded. But cannot a man make himself as happy as he can in the strange long reaches of a life? I think it is legitimate. After all the world is indeed beautiful and if we were any other creature than man we might be continuously happy in it.
The principal room in our little house, while already of narrow dimensions, we shared with two large objects, viz. the aforementioned motorbike which had to be kept out of the rain. It lived in our living room a quiet life as one might say, my father being able from his chair idly to run a chamois leather over the chrome when he wished. The other object which I want to mention is the little cottage upright piano, which had been bequeathed him by a grateful widower, as my father had dug a hole for this man's wife at no charge, because the circumstances of the bereaved family had been straitened. So one summer night, soon after the burial, the piano had arrived on a donkey and cart, and was carried in with smiles and embarrassed happiness by the widower and his two sons, and placed in our tiny room. The piano had possibly never been worth a great sum, but it had a most beautiful tone for all that, and had never been played before it reached us, in as much as one could surmise that history from the state of the keys, which were pristine. There were scenes painted on the side panels, of places which were not Sligo as such, most likely being scenes of an imaginary Italy or the like, but might have been all the same, being of mountains and rivers, with shepherds and shepherdesses standing about with their patient sheep. My father, having grown up in his own father's ministry, was able to play this lovely instrument, and his delight as I have said was in the old operettas of the previous century. He considered Balfe a genius. As there was room for me beside him on the stool I soon by grace of my love for him and my own great joy in his ability began to pick up the rudiments of playing, and slowly progressed to some real accomplishment, without in any way feeling it was an effort or a trial.
Then I could play for him as he stood out in the centre of the floor, such as it was, with his hand idly perchance on the seat of his motorbike, the other hand in his jacket like an Irish Napoleon, and sing with utmost perfection, or so it seemed to me, 'Marble Halls', or the other gems of his repertoire – and, for that matter, those little songs called Neapolitan, which of course were not as I thought in memory of Napoleon, but songs invented in the streets of Naples – songs now in exile in Sligo! His voice entered my head as a sort of honey, that lingered there potently, buzzingly, banishing all the fears of childhood. As the voice rose up, so did all of him, arms, whiskers, one foot swinging a little over the old carpet with its pattern of repeating dogs, his eyes brimming with a strange merriment. Even Napoleon might not have scorned him as a man of elevated qualities. At such moments he exhibited a most beautiful timbre in the quieter passages of songs that to this day I have never heard outmatched. Many fine singers made their way to Sligo when I was a young woman and sang in the halls under the rain, and for a few of the more popular sort I even played piano accompaniment, chopping out the notes and chords for them, more of a hindrance than a help to them perhaps. But none seemed to me to equal the strange privacy of my father's voice.
And a man who can make himself merry in the face of those coming disasters that assailed him, as disasters do so many, without grace or favour, is a true hero.
chapter two
Dr Grene's Commonplace Book
(Senior Psychiatrist, Roscommon Regional Mental Hospital)
This building is in a terrible condition, how terrible we were not completely aware until the surveyor's report. The three brave men who climbed into the ancient roof report many timbers on the verge of collapse, as if the very head and crown of the institution were mirroring the condition of many of the poor inmates beneath. For inmates I should write patients. But as the place was constructed in the late eighteenth century as a charitable institution for the 'healthful asylum and superior correction of wounded seats of thought' the word inmate does always spring to mind. How healthful and how superior can only now be guessed. Actually in the mid nineteenth century there was a period of great enlightenment in the asylums, under the revolutionary ideas of various doctors, when strait jackets were used sparingly, a good diet was deemed wise, and plenty of exercise and stimulation of thought. Which was a great advance on the practice of Bedlam with its roaring beasts in chains on the floors. Somehow it all got worse again afterwards, and no sensitive person would choose to be the historian of the Irish asylums in the first part of the last century, with its clitori-dectomies, immersions, and injections. The last century being 'my' century, since I was fifty-five when it turned, and it is difficult wholly to give one's heart and attention to a new century at that age. Or so I found. And find. Nearly sixty-five now, alas.
With the building showing its age so forcefully, we will be obliged to leave it. The department says the new building will start almost immediately, which may be true or may be cant of a sort. But how can we go till we are assured of a new building, and indeed, more philosophically, how can we prise many of the patients out of here, when their very DNA has probably melded with the mortar of the building? There are those fifty ancient women in the central block, so old that age has become something eternal, continuous, so bedridden and encrusted with sores that to move them would be a sort of violation.
I suppose I am resisting the thought of going in my mind, the way any sensible person does when a move is mooted. No doubt we will manage with all the usual mayhem and trauma.
Similarly the attendants and nurses have become as much part of the building as the bats in the roof and the rats in the cellars. Which are both legion I understand, though I am thankful to say I have only seen rats the one time, when the east wing went on fire, and I saw the dark black shapes running from the lower doors, out into the farmer's corn meadows beyond the hedges. The light from the fires threw a glare of a weird marmalade colour into their backs as they fled. I am sure when they heard the firemen give the all clear, they snuck back in in the new darkness.
So, we are to go sometime. I am obliged therefore under the new laws to assess whatever of the patients can be put back into the community (whatever that is, O Lord), and exactly what category of patient each other patient is. Many of them will be shocked even by new decor, modern plaster walls, good insulation and heating. The very moaning of the wind in the corridors, even on still days – how is that? possibly a vacuum created by heat and cold in different areas of the hospital – will be missed as the tiny background music of their dreams and 'madnesses'. I am sure. Those poor old boys in black suits made by the hospital tailor long ago, who are not so much mad as homeless and ancient, and who live along the rooms of the oldest west wing, like soldiers of some forgotten Peninsular or Indian War, will not know themselves outside this lost ground of Roscommon.