The Secret Scripture

While writing her testimony, Roseanne mentions that she is “not an entirely childless person” but had a child that “went to Nazareth” (137). In this version of her testimony, she recalls that she didn’t meet Tom in Café Cairo but at Strandhill’s beach, where she and the other pretty girls who worked at the café sunned themselves “in the steaming heat of August” (138).

Tom McNulty’s Band played at the beach. Tom played trumpet and clarinet. Father Gaunt was there to impose the Dancehall Act, which demanded that young people not touch while dancing. Tom had released a recording entitled “Tom McNulty’s Ragtime Band.”

At first, Roseanne regarded Tom as the “great man [she] had never spoken to” at the café, except to take his order for tea (140). Presently, it makes her happy to write about Tom and the sea. One day, at that beach, Roseanne plunged into the ocean and nearly drowned. The current pulled her further and further out. She thought that her fate would be “as woeful as [her] father’s,” then Tom McNulty rescued her (143). Tom had already won a medal, given to him by the mayor of Sligo, for saving an old woman from drowning. After saving Roseanne, Tom noted that he recognized her as “the lass from the Café Cairo” (144). Jack gathered Roseanne’s clothes and a “towel was put around her shoulders” (144).

Roseanne now recalls all that she remembers about Tom—his musical influences and his time in the British Merchant Navy. She thinks about how he resembled Gary Cooper. She realizes that, when thinking about her mother, she has more difficulty recalling her memories. 

John Kane brings Roseanne’s soup, complaining that his job will eventually kill him, and that he ought to go off and become a mole-catcher in Connaght [sic] instead. After all, there are no moles in Connaght, which would, therefore, make it the ideal job for an old man.

Roseanne goes back to writing her testimony and thinks back to her mother-in-law’s bungalow. The smell of cooking meat turned Roseanne’s stomach at the time, which was strange, given that Cissy loved all types of meats. She even dined “quite happily on a lamb’s heart” (158).

Tom brought Roseanne into his Mrs. McNulty’s sitting room, where there were “few chairs and a sofa covered in a dark, dark red velvet [so] lumpy it was like things had died in them under the velvet and had become cushions of a kind” (158). Worse, Roseanne couldn’t escape “the stench of that lamb” (158). Mrs. McNulty was a tiny woman with a widow’s peak, dressed “entirely in black” (159). She was trying to be nice, but remarked that Roseanne had no lap for sitting babies on. As Roseanne recounts these details, she remembers that she “must be careful to write of [Mrs. McNulty] fairly” (159).

Old Tom sat down in a wooden chair in front of Roseanne and began to play “an Irish tune” with “a little flute or piccolo” (160). It seemed to Roseanne that he was trying to talk to her through the instrument. Mr. McNulty uttered huh. She then rose and left the room. Old and Young Tom soon followed her before the latter reentered, helped Roseanne to her feet, and led her out onto the Strandhill Road. Roseanne recalls how there was something “half-done about that road” just as there was “something very much half-done about meeting Mrs. McNulty” (161).

Roseanne asked Tom if he thought Mrs. McNulty liked him. Tom suspected that his mother was concerned about Roseanne being Presbyterian and had asked that she go talk to Father Gaunt regarding the Decree of Ne Temere—a guideline for marrying Catholics. Tom hadn’t yet proposed, but Roseanne sensed that he would. Roseanne was in her early-twenties. She wavered between enjoying her freedom and knowing that, by the time a woman was in her mid-twenties, she was regarded as an old maid. She thought of all the Irish women fleeing to America and thought that she, too, could join them. She wouldn’t, though; she loved Tom.