The Secret Scripture by Sebastian Barry Page A

inspiration: 'It's a scarf.'
    'What did you say, Joe?' she said, as if lost in a mysterious deafness.
    'For your head, for your neck, as you like,' he said. Beginning to churn, it was obvious to me, with that desperate feeling that grows in the belly of the giver of the wrong present. He was having to explain the obvious, always an unpleasant task.
    'Oh,' she said, staring at it now in her lap. 'Oh.'
    'I hope you like it,' he said, which I suppose was presenting his own neck for the axe.
    'Oh,' she said, 'oh.' But what class of an oh it was, or what the oh signified, neither of us knew.

chapter seven
    Dr Grene's Commonplace Book
    Very distressed to discover, quite by accident, that Bet has decided not to attend the specialist to whom she had been referred last year (was it a year ago already, or am I dreaming? Was it this year?). By the tin of Complan last night I happened to find, temporarily forgotten, her diary. Now, of course it was wrong, unethical, wrong, wrong, but I opened it, just from the tiny passion of the husband disliked. To see what she had written in it. No, no, just to see her writing, something as intimate and private as that. Maybe not even to read the words. Just to look at the black ink of her biro for a brief moment. And there it was, just a few weeks ago, an entry bold as brass, but of course, meant only for herself: 'Rang clinic, cancelled appointments.'
    Why?
    This was the follow-up for her dizzy spell, I was vaguely aware, in fact when she told me she had been given the referral, I was so comforted I put the entire matter from my mind. I was in two minds. First, alarmed that she had done so, and secondly, perfectly aware that I only knew because I had violated her privacy – a further violation of herself, as I knew she would see it. And she would be right.
    What to do?
    So I was distracted all night. My usual solution to the problem, distraction. Possibly. But I think, with good reason.
    Somewhere in the small hours I grew mysteriously furious, really really angry, with her, and wanted to storm up the stairs and have it out with her. What did she think she was doing? The bloody foolishness of it!
    Thank God I did not. That would have solved nothing. But very real worries assail me. The swelling in her legs could well be due to clotting, and if the clot should climb into the lungs or the heart, she will drop dead. Is this what she wants? Now yet again I discover I do not have the language, the lingo, to talk to her about this, or about anything. We have neglected the tiny sentences of life and now the big ones are beyond our reach.
    I had meant to spend the evening devising some non-devious way to question Roseanne McNulty in such a manner as to get a result. It strikes me that if I cannot speak helpfully to my own wife about her health, I have little chance with Roseanne. But maybe it is easier with a stranger, one can be the 'expert', and not the great human fool that tries to lead a life. On the plus side, I am fairly confident in my assessment of most of the other patients. They are in the main open books and their distress is self-evident. Although I cannot shed myself of the feeling of being the perpetual invader. Roseanne however confounds me.
    I had wanted to consult my edition of Barthus on Pathologies of Secrecy, which of course is a marvellous book, if I would only find time to read it again. I suppose I could have gone into my study and looked at it, but I was trembling. I was nearly apoplectic, if that is still a real condition in the modern world. So in the upshot I neither read my Barthus nor resolved Bet's recklessness. I am exhausted.
     
    Roseanne's Testimony of Herself
    Some weeks later it must have been, I was with my father on a particular job.
    Rats start to breed with a vengeance in early spring, so late winter is a good time to go get them, when they have not expanded in numbers for a while, and the weather is not too murderous to the rat-catcher. I suppose looking back it