The Secret Scripture Read Online Free PDF

of.
    'Excuse me?'
    'No, no, please, go on.'
    'At any rate, if I found you to be here without true cause, without medical basis as it were, I would be obliged to try and make other arrangements. I don't wish to upset you. And I don't intend, my dear Roseanne, to throw you out into the cold. No, no, this would be a very carefully orchestrated move, and as I say, subject to an assessment by me. Questions, I would be obliged to question you – to a degree.'
    I was not entirely certain of its origin, but a feeling of sweeping dread spread through me, like I imagine the poison of broken and afflicted atoms spread through people on the far margins of Hiroshima, killing them just as surely as the explosion. Dread like a sickness, a memory of a sickness, the first time in many years I had felt it.
    'Are you all right, Roseanne? Please don't be agitated.'
    'Of course I want freedom, Dr Grene. But it frightens me.'
    'The gaining of freedom', said Dr Grene pleasantly, 'is always accomplished in an atmosphere of uncertainty. In this country at least. Perhaps in all countries.'
    'Murder,' I said.
    'Yes, sometimes,' he said, gently.
    We stopped speaking then and I gazed at the solid rectangle of sunlight in the room. Ancient dust moiled there. 'Freedom, freedom,' he said.
    Somewhere in his dusty voice there was the vague bell of longing. I know nothing of his life outside, of his family. Does he have a wife and children? Mrs Grene somewhere? I don't know. Or do I? He is a brilliant man. He looks like a ferret, but no matter. Any man that can talk about old Greeks and Romans is a man after my father's heart. I like Dr Grene despite his dusty despair because he brings to me always an echo of my father's line of talk, filleted out of Sir Thomas Browne and John Donne.
    'But, we won't begin today. No, no,' he said, rising. 'Certainly not. But it is my duty to set out the facts before you.'
    And he crossed again with a sort of infinite medical patience to the door.
    'You deserve no less, Mrs McNulty.'
    I nodded.
    Mrs McNulty.
    I always think of Tom's mother when I hear that name. I was once also a Mrs McNulty, but never as supremely as she. Never. As she made quite clear a hundred times. Furthermore, why did I give my name ever since as McNulty, when those great efforts were made by everybody to take the name away? I do not know.
    'I was at the zoo last week,' he said suddenly, 'with a friend and his son. I was up in Dublin to collect some books for my wife. About roses. My friend's son is called William, which as you know is my name also.'
    I did not know this!
    'We came to the house of the giraffes. William was very pleased with them, two big, long lady giraffes they were, with soft, long legs, very, very beautiful animals. I think an animal so beautiful I have never seen.'
    Then in the glimmering room I fancied I saw something strange, a tear rising from the corner of his eye, slipping to his cheek and tumbling quickly down, a sort of dark, private crying.
    'So beautiful, so beautiful,' he said.
    His talk had locked me in silence, I know not why. It was not opening, easy, happy talk like my father's, after all. I wanted to listen to him, but I did not want to answer now. That strange responsibility we feel towards others when they speak, to offer them the solace of any answer. Poor humans! And anyway he had not asked a question. He was merely floating there in the room, insubstantial, a living man in the midst of life, dying imperceptibly on his feet, like all of us.

chapter four
    Later John Kane lumbered in, muttering and pushing his brush, a person I have come to accept in the way of things here, which, if they can't be changed, must be endured.
    I noted with a small degree of dread that his flies were open. His trousers are decked with a series of clumsy-looking buttons. He is a little man but at the same time he is all brawn and braces. There is something wrong with his tongue, because he is obliged to swallow every few moments with