It was of course grief that saw the angel. I know that now. I was thinking I was quite over Bet, Bet was a safe memory, but it was only just beginning. Grief is about two years long, they say, it is a platitude out of manuals for grievers. But we are in mourning for our mothers before even we are born.
I will tell her. Just as soon as I can find the words. Just as soon as we reach that part of the story.
Today I drove back to Sligo. At the top of the town I passed the municipal graveyard, and wondered what time had done to the concrete temple and the acres of graves. I dropped in on Percy after all, and thanked him for helping me. I don't know if he was surprised. When I told him what had happened he certainly looked at me gobsmacked for a few moments. Then he got up from behind his desk. I was standing by the door, not having been sure whether fully to enter, or half to stay outside, so as not to disturb him. 'My dear man,' he said.
I don't know, I thought he was going to embrace me. I smiled like a boy, that's what it felt like, and I gave a laugh of happiness. It was only then really that it hit me. I am content to report that at the centre of it all, given everything, the nature of her history and mine, there was a very simple emotion.
I wanted to tell him that I thought it wasn't so much a question of whether she had written the truth about herself, or told the truth, or believed what she wrote and said was true, or even whether they were true things in themselves. The important thing seemed to me that the person who wrote and spoke was admirable, living, and complete. I wanted to tell him, to confess in a way, that from a psychiatric point of view I had totally failed to 'help' her, to prise open the locked lids of the past. But then, my original intention was not to help, but to assess her. All the time I might have helped her, all those years she was here, I had more or less left her alone. I wanted to tell him, she has helped herself, she has spoken to, listened to, herself. It is a victory. And that, in the matter of her father, in the upshot I preferred Roseanne's untruth to Fr Gaunt's truth, because the former radiated health. That moreover I believed that if the wonderful Amurdat Singh had not summoned me, I probably would never have practised psychiatry, and did not believe that I had ever been a good psychiatrist, whatever about a good man. That Roseanne had instructed me in the mystery of human silence and the efficacy of a withdrawal from the task of questioning. But I wasn't able to say these things.
Then he made a remark that might have been offensive, but actually I think represented an aper^u on his part, of which he was quite proud, and for which I was quite grateful, in the circumstances.
'You will be retiring soon,' he said, 'and yet, in many ways, you are just starting out.'
Then I thanked Percy again and went back to the car and drove out to Strandhill. I sort of knew the road from
Roseanne's account, and went there as if I had been before. When I reached the C-of-I church, obediently where it was supposed to be, I got out and looked about me. There was Knocknarea as she had often described it, rearing up as if fleeing away into the past, the remote and unknowable past. Below was Sligo Bay, with Rosses over to the right, and Ben Bulben where Willie Lavelle was killed, and I saw the bollards still on the strand leading out to Coney island. It was just a little place heaped up, a few fields and houses. I almost couldn't say it in my mind, that is where I was born. Somewhere there at the edge of things, appropriately enough, as Roseanne had always lived on the edges of our known world, and John Kane too. I was born on the edges of things, and even now, as the guardian of the mentally ill, I have by instinct pitched my tent in a similar place. Beyond the island, distantly, was the faithful figure of the Metal Man, eternally pointing.
To my left was the little village, I would say not much changed, but there are of course many more houses in Strandhill than there would have been in Roseanne's day. Nevertheless I could make out below the facade of an old hotel near the beach, and the great mound of sand that gave this place its simple name, and even I fancied the front of what looked like a humble dancehall.
It seems it was a well-chosen day, because as I drove down to the seaside, noting the cannon and the innocuous water, I saw there were men at work on the dancehall. It looked like they were readying it for demolition. There was an architect's sign that said there were going to be apartments built in due course. The hall itself looked almost ridiculously small, the hump of corrugated iron behind, the front itself that must indeed have once been a seaside dwelling. The flag was gone that once would have said the name, but in later years someone had affixed five iron letters to the front, now all greyed and rusted: P-L-A-Z-A. It was extraordinary for me to think of all the vanished history of this place. To think of Eneas McNulty walking here in his burned uniform, of Tom going in with his instruments, of the cars coming out from Sligo along the glistening strand, and the strains of music leaking out into the untrustworthy Irish summer air, and maybe straying even as far as the ancient ears of Queen Maeve. Certainly the ears of listening Roseanne, in her own buried exile.
It was more difficult to locate her hut. I found I had already passed the spot where it must have been, because I was able to find the fine wall of the big house across from it, and the gate where Jack's wife had humiliated Roseanne. At first I thought it was all just brambles and ruin, but the old stone chimney was still almost intact, though covered in lichen and climbing weeds. The rooms where Roseanne had lived out her sentence of living death were no more.
I walked in the ruined gap of the little gate and stood on the scruffy grass. There was nothing to see but in my mind's eye I could see everything, because she had supplied the ancient cinema of this place. Nothing except a neglected rose bush among the brambles, with a few last vivid blooms. Despite my reading of Bet's books, I found that I didn't know the name of it. But hadn't Roseanne mentioned it? Something, something…For the life of me, I couldn't remember what she had written. But I pushed forward through the thorns and weeds, thinking I might take a few blooms of it back to Roscommon as a souvenir. All the blooms were uniform, a neat tight-curled rose, except on one branch, whose roses were different, bright and open. I could feel the brambles tearing at my legs, and pulling at my jacket like beggars, but suddenly I knew what I was doing. I carefully peeled off a sprig as recommended in the books in the chapters on propagation, and slipped it in my pocket, feeling almost guilty, as if I were stealing something that didn't belong to me.
About Sebastian Barry
Sebastian Barry was born in Dublin in 1955. His play, The Steward of Christendom, first produced in 1995, won many awards and has been seen around the world. His novel, The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty, appeared in 1998. He lives in Wicklow with his wife and three children.
