The Secret Scripture by Sebastian Barry Page A

old enough to know that people make a little speech sometimes that is not what is in their thoughts, but is a sort of message of those thoughts all the same.
    It was late in the evening just before it was time to go to bed that my father finally mentioned Mr Fine.
    'So,' he said, as my mother shovelled ashes over the last few bits of turf, so they would burn slowly through the night, and be beautiful eggs of red sparks in the morning when she would winnow the ashes from them again. 'We met Mr Fine this evening, coming home. We thought for a minute he might have been calling here?'
    My mother straightened herself and stood there with the fire-shovel. She stayed so still and so silent she might have been posing for an artist.
    'He wasn't calling here,' she said.
    'It's just that we thought we saw your face in the door, and he was lifting his hat – to your face like.'
    My mother's eyes looked down at the fire. She had only made half a job of the ashes but she didn't look inclined to finish the job. She burst into strange, aching tears, tears that sounded like they had come up from her body somewhere, seeped through her like an awful damp. I was so shocked my body began to tingle in a queer uncomfortable way.
    'I don't know,' he said, miserably. 'Maybe we were looking at the wrong door.'
    'You know well you weren't,' she said, this time quite differently. 'You know well. Oh, oh,' she said, 'that I had never allowed you to take me from my home, to this cold cruel country, to this filthy rain, this filthy people.'
    My father's reaction was to blanch like a boiling potato. This was more than my mother had said for a year. This was a letter, this was a newspaper of her thoughts. For my father I think it was like reading of yet another atrocity. Worse than rebels the age of boys, worse than burning girls.
    'Cissy,' he said, so gently it went almost unheard. But I heard
    it. 'Cissy.'
    'A cheap scarf that would shame an Indian to be selling,' she said.
    'What?'
    'You can't blame me,' she said, nearly shouting. 'You can't blame me! I have nothing!'
    My father leapt up, because my mother had inadvertently struck herself on the leg with the shovel.
    'Cissy!' he cried.
    She had opened a little inch of herself and there were a few jewels of dark blood glistering there. 'Oh Christ, oh Christ,' she said.
     
    The next evening my father went to see Mr Fine in his grocery shop. When he came back his face was pallid, he looked exhausted. I was already upset because my mother, perhaps suspecting something, had gone out herself into the dark, I knew not where. She had been one minute in the scullery banging about, and the next she was gone.
    'Gone out?' said my father. 'Dear me, dear me. She put on her coat in this terrible cold?'
    'She did,' I said. 'Shall we go out to look for her?'
    'Yes, we must, we must,' said my father, but he stayed sitting where he was. The saddle of his motorbike was just beside him, but he didn't put a hand on it. He let it be.
    'What did Mr Fine say?' I asked. 'Why did you go to see
    him?'
    'Well, Mr Fine is a very fine man, that he is. He was most concerned, apologetic. She told him it was all above board. All agreed. I wonder how she could say that. Get the words into her mouth and say them?'
    'I don't understand, Dadda.'
    'It's the why we've had so little to be eating,' he said. 'She's after making a purchase on Mr Fine's loan, and every week naturally he comes for his money, and every week I suppose she gives him the most of what I give her. All those rats, dark corners, all those hours of poor Bob scratching through miseries, and the days of queer hunger we have endured, all for – a clock.'
    'A clock?'
    'A clock.'
    'But there's no new clock in the house,' I said. 'Is there,
    Dadda?'
    'I don't know. Mr Fine says so. Not that he sold her the clock. He only sells carrots and cabbages. But she showed him the clock here one day, when you and me were out. A very nice clock, he said. Made in New York. With a Toronto