It was a terrible idea. I hadn’t a clue what I was going to do when I got to St Agnes’s and now I was going to have an audience. No word came from my companion, who was happily devouring the most foul-smelling packet of crisps, which threatened to pollute the entire bus.
I looked out the window at the rolling countryside. It was a dazzlingly bright day and every colour seemed to leap forth. I overheard someone say that Ireland would be a beautiful country if they could just put a roof on it. I had to agree. We were heading west and the coach had just pulled into some one-horse town for a toilet break and for Martha to procure these stinking crisps. I decided on a can of fizzy orange, which I was already regretting as now I needed the toilet.
‘We might not even find anything. You need to adjust your expectations slightly. Usually in these kinds of situations, the information doesn’t just drop into your hands.’ I was irritable and not very good at hiding it.
Finding the manuscript was my only focus now. I told myself that if I didn’t find it, then all of this was for nothing. My career would be in tatters but so, more importantly, would be my reputation. I had staked my professional standing on that one letter from Abe Rosenbach, which still hadn’t even been verified properly. But then again, didn’t all the books I’d read about the most successful book collectors, like Rostenberg and Stern in the US, or the Sinai Sisters from Scotland, point to the power of instinct and gut feelings?
‘Don’t worry, Henry. Something I could never be accused of is having great expectations.’
I smiled. ‘I see what you did there.’
‘It’s on my course.’
She blushed slightly and it was all I could do not to brush her fringe away from her eyes. I had to distract myself.
‘Do you know anything about this place?’ I asked her.
‘The asylum? Not really. But that’s the idea, isn’t it? To keep these places hidden in the shadows.’
‘And the women. Conveniently.’
She turned her body towards me, as though she wanted me to go on and I decided this trip would be a lot less complicated if I could keep our minds centred on the issue at hand.
‘I’ve been researching other women who were sectioned around that time. Did you know James Joyce’s daughter, Lucia, was sectioned in 1932?’
She shook her head.
‘Women were institutionalised by the men in their family for all sorts of reasons, but it was said she was diagnosed with schizophrenia. Apparently she was treated by Carl Jung at one point.’
‘How long did they keep her there?’
‘Her whole life. Almost fifty years.’
‘Jesus!’
We sat in silence for a while, the gravity of what we were investigating becoming more real.
‘She was a dancer. Before, you know. In Paris. There are some books that claim she became mentally unstable after her break-up with Beckett, but I suppose we’ll never know. Her nephew burned all of her letters.’
Had the same fate befallen Opaline? Perhaps I’d never find the real truth.
‘There are some scholars who suggest she may have even written a novel, but it’s never been found.’
‘What if it doesn’t want to be found?’
‘Of course it wants to be found. What kind of question is that? I mean, if we’re assuming that inanimate objects have wants, which is a pretty bonkers assumption.’
She frowned, then looked out of the window. When she turned around she looked properly annoyed.
‘So that’s all it’s about for you? Getting the glory—’
‘No, it’s more than that. It’s about adding to our knowledge of history, rediscovering lost treasures so we can study them and, well, it’s our cultural inheritance. It belongs to us.’
‘But why should you get to decide what gets found and what remains lost?’
‘What?’
I couldn’t understand where this line of questioning was coming from or why it felt like we were arguing about it. She knew what my profession entailed. And she was the one who’d suggested coming along.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said eventually.
‘Eh, it clearly does. You “found” the book that you think was written by Opaline.’
‘I didn’t find it. It was … given to me.’
I looked at her askance.
‘I don’t want to talk about it.’
Neither did I. It was the main reason I had agreed to let her come with me – the lure of seeing this book at the end. Although why she wanted to come here at all was a mystery to me. Conversation was clearly at an end, so I did what all sensible people do when embarking on a long bus journey; I pretended to sleep so I wouldn’t have to look at her.
‘Henry.’
It would have helped greatly if she didn’t say my name with that Irish accent of hers.
‘Yes?’
‘We’re here.’
The bus chugged and rattled to a halt at what passed for a bus stop around here – a hard shoulder with a statue of the Virgin Mary inexplicably keeping watch. The engine made a whining noise as it pulled off again, leaving us in a cloud of dust.
‘Is this it?’ I asked, as I strained to look up the laneway beyond the wrought-iron gates.
‘Looks like it,’ Martha replied, pointing to the small sign that said Saint Agnes’s.
‘You’re a natural.’
She gave me a withering look. I had to stop being such a dickhead. Was it possible I was just jealous? Who was Logan anyway? I dragged my thoughts back to the present. The laneway was lined with pine trees that had overgrown and merged into one thick, dark wall. As we walked along the curving drive, the building itself loomed into view around the corner. It was a dark grey block of a thing, hunkered down into the land. It could have passed for a stark kind of monastery, if it weren’t for the bars on the windows.
I stopped walking.
‘What is it?’ she asked.
‘It’s just so … real.’
I’d never had a sensation like it. As though something heavy was pressing on my chest. It was one thing reading about these things on paper, but being here was entirely different. I hoped that my hunch was wrong and that Opaline had not been incarcerated here. Martha put her hand on my arm, as though to steady me and I came back to my senses. There were three old doorbells outside and it didn’t look as though any of them worked. I pushed the buttons and waited.
‘Have you thought about what you’re going to say?’
‘I’m going to ask if Opaline Carlisle was a, um, resident here.’
Martha shook her head, making it clear that this approach was utterly useless.
‘You don’t know much about Catholic Ireland, do you?’
‘In what sense?’
‘These kinds of places, they’re not exactly known for offering up information.’
I decided to knock firmly on the door. After several minutes, there was still no answer.
‘Right.’ I smacked the palms of my hands together. The universal signal to leave. ‘Let’s go home.’
‘But we came all this way!’
‘Yes, and now we’re leaving,’ I said. ‘What time is the next bus back to Dublin?’