'Em, Jack here wishes to represent a certain family angle on things, isn't that correct, Jack?'
'Well,' said Jack. 'We want to keep the party clean. We want to act the white man here. Everything has a solution, no matter how knotted it has become. I believe this to be true. Often in Nigeria there have been problems that seemed insurmountable, but with a certain flair of application…Bridges over rivers that change their course every year. That sort of thing. Engineering has to meet all these problems.'
I stood there patiently enough and listened to Jack. Actually it probably qualified as the longest speech he had ever made to me, or at least in my presence, or my vague direction anyhow. He was looking very shaven, spruce, clean, his leather collar up, his hat set at a perfect angle. I knew from Tom that he had been drinking spectacularly for a few weeks past, but he didn't look at all unwell. He was engaged to be married to his Galway girl, and that, said Tom, had put him in a bit of a manly panic. He was going to marry her and bring her out to Africa with him. Tom had shown me pictures of Jack's bungalow in Nigeria, and Jack with groups of men, both white and black. Indeed I had been intrigued, enchanted maybe was the word, to see Jack in his nice open shirt and white trousers, with a cane, and in one picture there was a black man, maybe an official also, though not in an open shirt, but a full black suit, with waistcoat, and stiff collar and tie, in what degree of heat I did not know, but looking quite cool and confident. Then there was a picture of Jack with a crowd of nearly naked men, dark dark dark black, the lads maybe that had dug the canals there that Jack was building, long straight canals Tom had said, going off upcountry to bring the longed-for water to distant farms. Jack, the saviour of Nigeria, the bringer of water, the builder of bridges.
'Yes,' said Fr Gaunt. 'I am sure it is all fixable. I am sure it is. If we put our heads together.'
I had a not very relaxed vision of my head put near Fr Gaunt's severely cropped head and Jack's elegantly hatted head, but it dissolved in the floating motes of the sunlight that pierced the room.
'I love my husband,' I said, so suddenly it nearly made me jump. Why I said it to those two emissaries of the future puzzles me even now. Two men less likely to say it to, with any good result, I could not think of. It was like shaking the hands of the two poor soldiers requisitioned to attend to my execution. That was how it felt as soon as the words were out.
'Well,' said Fr Gaunt, almost eagerly, now that the subject was broached. 'That is all history now.'
I made a few little grunts then of consonants and vowels, my brain not really sure what words to use, but then got out the word:
'What?'
'I need some time in which to find the boundaries of this problem,' said Fr Gaunt. 'In that time I want you, Roseanne, to remain where you are, here in this hut, and when I am able to bring things to a resolution, I will be better able to inform you of your position, and then make arrangements for the future.'
'Tom has put the matter in Fr Gaunt's hands, Roseanne,' said Jack. 'He has the authority to speak in the matter.'
'Yes,' said Fr Gaunt. 'That is so.'
'I want to be with my husband,' I said, since it was true, and the only thing I could say without anger. Because rising up greater than the feeling of abject grief was a new anger, a sort of hungry wild anger, like a wolf in a fold of sheep.
'You should have thought of that before,' said Fr Gaunt, with a matching succinctness. 'A married woman -'
But he stopped. He either did not know what to say next, or did and chose not to, or did not want to, or could not bring himself to say the words. Jack actually cleared his throat like he was in a film at the Gaiety cinema, and shook his head, as if his hair were wet and needed shaking. Fr Gaunt looked suddenly grievously, gravely embarrassed, just as he had that night long ago when Willie Lavelle's body lay so barely, so ruined, in my father's temple. I suspected what he was thinking. This was the second time I had brought him into a situation that caused him what? Displeasure, disquiet. Displeasure and disquiet at the nature of woman? Who knows? But suddenly I was looking at him with eyes of unexpected contempt. If my gaze had been made of flames it would have turned him to cinders. I knew his power, which in that situation was absolute, and it seemed to me in that moment that I knew his nature. Small, self-believing to every border, north, south, east, and west, and lethal.
'Well,' said Fr Gaunt, 'I think we have done our business here, Jack. You must stay where you are, Roseanne, get your groceries from the shop every week, and be content with your own company. You have nothing to fear, except your own self.'
I stood there. I am content to say that caught as I was, without rescuers as I was in that moment, there was a fierce, dark fury moving through me, wave upon wave, like the sea itself, that was bizarrely a comfort. My face maybe showing only a shadow of it, as faces will.
The two dark-suited men went out into the sunlight. Dark suits, dark coats, dark hats trying to lighten in the flood of seaside blues, yellows, greens.
Rage, dark rage, lightened by nothing.
But a raging woman all alone in a tin hut is a small thing, as I said before.
The real comfort is that the history of the world contains so much grief that my small griefs are edged out, and are only cinders at the borders of the fire. I am saying this again because I want it to be true.
Though one mind at a pitch of suffering seems also to fill the world. But this is an illusion.
I had seen, with my own eyes, much worse things than had befallen me. With my own eyes. And yet that night, alone and unfathomably angry, I screamed and screamed in the hut as if I was the only hurting dog in the whole world, no doubt causing horror and disquiet to any passing person. I screamed and I squawked. I beat my breast till there were bruises there the next morning so that my breast looked like a map of hell, a map of nowhere, or as if the words of Jack McNulty and Fr Gaunt had actually burned me.
And whatever my life had been up to that day, it was another life after that. And that is the gospel truth.
PART THREE
chapter eighteen
Unfathomable. Fathoms. I wonder is that the difficulty, that my memories and my imaginings are lying deeply in the same place? Or one on top of the other like layers of shells and sand in a piece of limestone, so that they have both become the same element, and I cannot distinguish one from the other with any ease, unless it is from close, close looking?
Which is why I am so afraid to speak to Dr Grene, lest I give him only imaginings.
Imaginings. A nice sort of a word for catastrophe and delusion.
Years and years they left me there, because it takes years to sort out what they were trying to sort out, Jack and Fr Gaunt and no doubt others, for the saving of Tom McNulty. Was it as much as six, seven, even eight? I cannot remember.
When I wrote those words a few minutes ago, I put down my biro and placed my forehead in my hands, and thought a while, trying to fathom those years. Difficult, difficult. What was true, what was not true? What road did I take, what road refuse? Poor ground, false ground. I think an account before God must, must contain only truth. There is no human agency I need to bamboozle. God knows the true story before I write it, so can easily catch me out in falsehood. I must carefully winnow out one from the other. If I have a soul remaining, and perhaps I do not, it will depend on it. I think it must be possible that souls are rescinded in hard cases, cancelled at some office in the halls of heaven. That you arrive at the gates of heaven already at the wrong address, before St Peter says a word.