The Secret Scripture by Sebastian Barry

shepherd that knows all the whistles. I know none of them. But we shall see.
    'We shall see, said the rat, as he shook his wooden leg.'
    A saying of Bet's. What does it mean? I don't know. Perhaps it is a phrase from a famous childhood story, yet another famous childhood Irish thing I don't know of, having spent my childhood in England. It is very stupefying to be Irish and have none of the traits or the memories or even a recognisable bloody accent. No one on this earth has ever confused me for an Irishman, and yet that is what I am, as far as I know.
    Bet was silent all week in her room above me, not even playing the BBC World Service, as she usually does. My wife. It completely spooked me.
    I attempted last night a rapprochement with her – if that is how you spell it. There is no doubt in my mind I do love her. Why is my so-called love then no good to her, why does it in fact imperil her? Oh, on reading over my previous entry here, where I seemed to be subtly or not so subtly flattering myself in the matter of compassion, and love – my stomach nearly turned over as I read it – I was so annoyed with myself that I went into the kitchen when I heard her making that awful stuff she drinks at night before she goes to sleep. Complan. A nightmare drink if ever there was one, that tastes of death. I mean, Life-in-Death and Death-in-Life, Coleridge, if I remember right. 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner'. Whose sleeve do I have to grip, to tell my story to? It used to be Bet. Now, sleeveless. And I am sure I gripped her sleeve many a time too many. In my own parlance, 'feasting' on her energy, and giving nothing back. Well, maybe. We had most excellent days. We were the king and queen of coffee in the morning, in the dark of winter, in the early morning sun of summer that came right in our window, right in, to wake us. Ah, yes, small matters. Small matters, that we call sanity, or the cloth that makes sanity. Talking to her in those times made – no, God preserve me from sentimentality. Those days are over. Now we are two foreign countries and we simply have our embassies in the same house. Relations are friendly but strictly diplomatic. There is an underlying sense of rumour, of judgement, of memory, like two peoples that have once committed grave crimes against each other, but in another generation. We are a statelet of the Baltics. Except, blast her, she has never done anything to me. It is atrocity all one way.
    I did not intend to write any of this here. I meant this as a professional, semi- at any rate, account of things, the last days perhaps of this unimportant, lost, essential place. The place I have been for my professional life. The queer temple of my aspirations. I know I am as afraid of having done nothing for the inmates here, of sentimentalising them and thereby failing them, I am as afraid of that as I am certain that I have ruined Bet's life. That 'life', that unwritten narrative of herself, that – I don't know. I did not set out to do it. I prided myself in all honesty on my faithfulness to her, my regard for her, my wellnigh worshipping of her. Perhaps I sentimentalised her also. Pernicious, chronic sentimentalising. Damn it, my pride in her was my pride in myself, and that was a good thing. While I had her good opinion, I had the highest opinion of myself. I lived off it, I strode out each day fuelled by it. How wonderful, how vibrant, how ridiculous. But it was a state I would give the world to retrieve. I know it's not possible. But still. When this world here is demolished so many tiny histories will go with it. It is actually frightening, maybe even terrorising.
    Into the kitchen I went. How welcome a figure I can't say. Not very, probably, my sudden presence endured.
    She wasn't making Complan though, she was dissolving some tablets in a glass, Disprin or the like.
    'Are you all right?' I said. 'Headache?'
    'I'm quite fine,' she said.
    Last January twelvemonth I know she had a little scare, she