The Secret Scripture Read Free Page B

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.
    Which necessity will also bring me to a task long avoided, which is to establish what circumstances brought in some of the patients, and whether indeed, as was tragically true in some cases, they were sectioned for social rather than medical reasons. Because I am not so great a fool as to think that all the 'lunatics' in here are mad, or ever were, or were before they came here and learned a sort of viral madness. These people are perceived by the all-knowing public at large, or let us say public opinion as it is mirrored in the newspapers, as deserving of 'freedom' and 'release'. Which may be very true, but creatures so long kennelled and confined find freedom and release very problematic attainments, like those eastern European countries after communism. And similarly there is a weird reluctance in me to see anyone go. Why is that? The anxiety of the zoo keeper? Can my polar bears do as well at the pole? I suppose this is a reductive thought. Well, we will see.
    In particular I will have to approach my old friend Mrs McNulty, who is not only the oldest person in this place, but in Roscommon itself, perhaps even Ireland. She was old when I got here thirty years ago, although at that time with the energy of, I don't know what, a force of nature. She is a formidable person and though long periods have gone by when I have not seen her, or only tangentially, I am always aware of her, and try to ask after her. I am afraid she is rather a touchstone for me. She has been a fixture, and not only represents the institution, but also, in a curious way, my own history, my own life. 'The star to every wandering bark,' as Shakespeare has it. My marriage troubles with poor Bet, my spirits lowering, plummeting, betimes, my feeling of not getting on, my this, my that – my companionable stupidity, I suppose. While things have ineluctably changed, she has remained the same, if grown of course weaker and slighter as the years go on. Is she a hundred now? She used to play the piano down in the recreation room, really very expert songs, jazz tunes of the twenties and thirties.
    I don't know how she knew them. But she used to sit there, with her long silver hair flowing freely down her back, in one of those awful hospital gowns, but looking like a queen, and though she was seventy then, very striking in the face. Really quite beautiful still, and God knows what she must have looked like when she was young. Extraordinary, a sort of manifestation of something unusual and maybe alien in this provincial world. When a mild rheumatism – she wouldn't allow the word, she called it 'a reluctance' in her fingers – set in in later years, she stopped playing the piano. She might have played almost as well, but almost as well didn't suit her. So we lost the sound of Mrs McNulty playing jazz.
    As a matter of record, that piano, assailed by woodworm, was later thrown out on a skip with an enormous unmusical clang.
    So now I will have to go in and tackle her about this and that. I am unaccountably nervous about it. Why should I be nervous? I think it is because she is so senior to me, and if given to great silences, an extremely agreeable presence, like the company of an older colleague that one reveres. I think that is it. Maybe it is because I have a suspicion she likes me, just as much as I like her. Though why she does I don't know. I have harboured a curiosity about her, but I have never delved into her life, though perhaps as a professional psychiatrist that should be a black mark against me. Nevertheless, there it is, she likes me. Yet I would not trouble that liking, the condition of it I mean, for the world. So I must tread carefully.
     
    Roseanne's Testimony of Herself
    How I would like to say that I loved my father so much