Under the Rose Page 10

  I suppose they were happy for a while. Cuddahy’s faith in Emily was unmeasured. She was his idea of an English officer’s lady and he was humble before her. She was the real thing and he – well, he must make up by delicacy and honour what he lacked in quarterings. Her tantrums, her inefficiency, her coldness and discontent only reinforced this notion of her. So did her disappointment at having to live in Ireland. The Major understood nostalgia. Experience with her first husband had turned her against colonials, and Cuddahy’s scruples made Catholicism odious to her. She made no friends among the Anglo-Irish, who weren’t Cuddahy’s sort anyhow. It may have been from shyness that she snubbed his Catholic friends. Having met such obduracy in her husband, what might she expect from them?

  When the children were born he baptized them secretly with the connivance of the nurse. ‘Protestants often find us dishonourable,’ he told my mother when confessing this. ‘Maybe we are. I’ve been a rotter with Emily.’ Yet not to baptize the children was to deny them salvation. So what choice had he? With each birth a fresh betrayal increased his wife’s moral ascendancy over himself and the rift between her and has Catholic neighbours.

  ‘I won’t have him brought up to call his mother a concubine,’ she screamed when Cuddahy talked of sending the elder child to catechism class. There was no way of regularizing the marriage. Cuddahy remained a stickler and suffered. He never achieved the suppleness of a full-time gentleman or Catholic.

  Meanwhile, Emily, who throve on courtship, again found herself restless in marriage. She confided with melancholy flirtatiousness in all the men she met that Cuddahy maltreated her, beat her – the same stories which had hardened him against her first husband. They may have been true. Emily invited beating. Who knows what dreams she had dreamed during the years Cuddahy had kept her waiting? There was apparently some solid distinction in her own background and she took badly to the thin times when they were living on debts and the residue of his unfortunately invested pension. Denying their poverty, they rented larger and more pretentious houses than she could keep up or he afford. From visits to play with their children I remember neglected tennis courts, mildewed orchards, hairy shrubberies. Slatternly, unsupervised maids fed us remnants of foie gras or cornflakes and water when I stayed to tea. Emily was usually resting behind closed shutters in a part of the house we were not permitted to approach. Her relatives, angry at her second marriage, neglected her and, after that Christmas flight, she did not try to contact them again. She sketched, taught herself Italian, played the lute. Cuddahy admired everything she did. Her framed sketches hung all over their rented houses. He presented one to my mother with some ceremony. She was, he considered, a genius with the lute, and he once attempted to patent some invention of hers, the precise nature of which I have forgotten. With unhappy tenderness he lapped her in shawls and brushed her long hair, losing his temper only when she declared Catholicism a ‘religion for servants’.

  The war, coinciding with his victory over the children’s education, put an end to strife. Within months Cuddahy had a second promotion. As a lieutenant-colonel he was able to rent a Jacobean mansion for her in Tipperary. It had an ornamental lake and some impressive furniture. The drains, we heard, were bad but Emily would not notice a thing like that. She, like Cuddahy, lived largely in her fancy. It was what they had in common although checked in him by considerable competence in his own field. Emily in her mansion, at last satisfied with the setting of her life, felt equipped to meet people on her own terms. Unfortunately, there was no longer anyone to meet. It was too late for her to start in with the Irish, and English people were prevented from coming over by the war. She had no friends.

  My mother called on her once when bicycling in Tipperary. Coming in from the pale, fizzing out-of-doors, the mansion seemed mildewed to her, shadowy and full of old paintings, woodworm and rats: ‘You could hear them pounding in the attics.’ The children were away at school and Emily so uncommunicative that, after drinking the tea slopped out for her by a skivvy, my mother fled.

  Cuddahy stopped in with us occasionally at the end of a leave. ‘How’s Emily?’ we asked. ‘Grand, grand,’ he told us. ‘In tip-top form. She enjoys the country. She’s a woman of great inner resource.’ They were getting on better. Cuddahy’s affluent noisy visits must have provided all the company Emily needed. She was cold – ‘spiritual’, Cuddahy called it, when confiding in my mother. ‘My wife’s spirituality is hard on a man of my temperament.’ After the birth of their youngest child he had said: ‘Emily has grown more spiritual. I suppose it’s natural in women? It makes me feel a brute.’ He was such a compact little dynamo! The conversion of his unharnessed energies into desire might have daunted someone hardier than she. Seeing him less, she liked him better. One day he came to us boiling with pleasure: ‘Emily’s becoming a Catholic.’ A padre attached to his regiment was instructing her by correspondence. ‘I wouldn’t let her consult one of those Tipperary bumpkins,’ Cuddahy told us. ‘I didn’t want some bally overbearing Mohawk threatening her with hell-fire and brimstone and frightening her off…. Emily’s a spiritual woman. It will have to be handled with delicacy.’ Cuddahy wept a little. ‘I’ve prayed for this’, he told my mother, ‘for twenty years.’ We congratulated him warmly. ‘You’re on the homestretch now,’ my mother told him, a little tearful herself. ‘Your troubles are behind you.’ Cuddahy gripped her hands in his and thanked her for ‘her loyalty and friendship in good times and bad’. We drank toasts to him and to Emily and by the time he left were a little squiffy with emotion.

  But what, we wondered, about the marriage? Would Emily be expected to return to her first husband to whom she must still be married in the eyes of God? My mother asked her confessor. He lost her in technicalities. ‘Depending on circumstances’, he summed up, ‘and the opinion of the priest involved, I would say he’d advise your friend to live henceforth in chastity with his wife like brother and sister….’

  *

  Cuddahy, who had had a good war, was shortly to become a brigadier and with the signing of the armistice was offered a coveted post with the allied command in Germany. He refused. Emily could not have joined him at once and he felt she needed him now. Leaving the army he retired to Tipperary and, hearing no more of him for eighteen months, we imagined him happy in his obsolete, briar-ridden estate, instructing Emily in the mysteries of religion and perhaps making an occasional foray out to renew acquaintance with the country of his boyhood. We told each other that when we saw him next he would have absorbed some languor from that lush country of shadowy fields and greasy rivers. Cuddahy put out to pasture, like animals released from their function or driving animus, should have grown torpid, amiable and fat. We were wrong, of course.

  The letter asking my mother to put him up for a few nights did not tell us much but as soon as we saw him we saw how wrong we had been. Either Cuddahy’s aching nerve had been imperfectly removed or else the ghost of an ache persisted to torment him still.

  He had come to town on Legion business. He was in charge of the Tipperary section of the British Legion. Didn’t we know? ‘That’s the trouble,’ he sighed and fumed. ‘People don’t know! We’re forgotten! We need a publicity campaign. The indifference in this country is worse than the hate! They don’t care about the Irish veterans. Let ’em starve. Let ’em die! Who cares?’ He began to instruct us, pulling papers out of a Gladstone bag, explaining this activity which perpetuated his love of the army and loyalty to ‘my men’, the one-time Irish volunteers, now veterans of an alien army living on small pittances in ‘Tip’. Returned like himself to their birthplace, they were outsiders still. Their army memories, even their voices subtly altered by exile, seemed treacherous to the solid shopkeepers whose teenage sons stoned the Legion hall yearly, trampling the red cloth flowers that are sold to raise funds for disabled men on Poppy Day. Above all, claimed Cuddahy, they were forgotten and discriminated against by London headquarters in the allocation of Legion funds. He was coming to Dublin to enlist the suppor
t of regional authority in a campaign to help the Irish veterans. ‘Where would the British army have been without them at the Somme and El Alamein? The most gallant fighting men….’ The Brigadier steamed with all his old enthusiasm.

  And Emily, we asked? How was Emily? Emily was happy, happier than she had ever been. ‘I reproach myself,’ he told my mother. ‘I insisted too much in the old days. I tried to ram Catholicism down her throat. If I hadn’t she might have converted long ago. She has found serenity and fulfilment in her religion,’ he told us. ‘It has brought her peace of spirit.’

  ‘Still reproaching himself!’ said my mother when Cuddahy had gone out on his Legion business. ‘Well, at least it’s brought him peace,’ she said. ‘It’s a wonder she never did turn before,’ said Brian. ‘I should have thought she had just the sensibility that makes for the more gooey sort of convert. I’ll bet she has a devotion to the nine Fridays and the child saint of Lisieux.’ My mother disapproved of this sort of talk. ‘I can see’, she conceded, ‘that all those years alone would turn her in on herself. Well, the ways of the Lord’, she hastened to add, ‘are many. And I am glad for both their sakes.’

  Cuddahy returned from lunching with a British Legion man in a considerably shaken condition. His humanitarian arguments and proposals had been scarcely considered before being dismissed by the official. ‘A little tinpot bureaucrat,’ gasped Cuddahy, ‘without the imagination to see beyond the tip of his nose.’ The reception was unlooked for, unbelievable. Cuddahy was overcome. ‘I’m not a bally nobody, a bally ass. Forgive me, I’m a bit upset.’ He shuffled the pages he had not been allowed to show. ‘I have experience,’ he pleaded. ‘I know the situation. I know the men. Helped some of them out of my own pocket. And then that little clerk, that bumph-eater – excuse me, excuse me – that self-important, snivelling little paper pundit who’s probably never seen any active service at all – oh I know the type! – tells me it’s impossible. “Why, sir?” I ask him. “Why?” And do you know all he could say! “Figures!”’ Cuddahy spat the word out like an obscenity. ‘“Figures, Cuddahy,” says he. “These are the figures! We can’t trifle with figures!” “Yessir!” I told him. “Yessir, three bags full, sir, those are your figures, but tell me”’, Cuddahy grasped Brian’s arm above the elbow, staring into his eyes as though they belonged to the tinpot bureaucrat himself. Brian craned backwards from the Brigadier’s mad gaze. Cuddahy’s zeal was excessive: where it should have persuaded, it repelled. ‘“Tell me, sir,”’ said Cuddahy, and his body, a taut arc, capped Brian’s retreating chest in a curiously amorous pose, ‘“tell me, sir, do you know what a man, a man, sir, with appetites, not a cipher, can buy today with such figures? You are starving men to a mean and dwindling death who faced a gallant one in two wars! Do you know what your pension is worth, sir, to these men? It’s worth blankety-blank-blank! Excuse me, sir, but that’s what it’s worth!” He released Brian. ‘“Cuddahy,” he told me, “Cuddahy, we simply administrate!” Administrate; pfah! A shivering little rotter!’

  The Brigadier stared vacantly at the floor. He began putting his papers away. There was not much to say to him. My parents were worried by his excitement, for although he was only forty-seven he could sometimes look livid and terrifyingly old. Yet to ask him to take things easy would have been to question his indispensability to his men. He left that evening for Tipperary. At Westland Row Station, the old-fashioned Gladstone bag, too big for a brief-case, too small for regular luggage, gave him an odd wanderer’s air.

  He must have handled the Legion authorities more roughly even than he had admitted, for some days after returning to Tipperary he rang my father up in great agitation. He had been suspended from his functions as head of the Tipperary section. Could my father do something about it? Pull a string of some sort, calm the chap down? ‘It’s not for my sake,’ Cuddahy explained simply, ‘it’s for the men. They need me.’

  My father invited the Legion official to lunch. He was a calm, pipe-sucking, mild-and-bitter Englishman who agreed to reinstate Cuddahy on the strength of a sob-story and incautious promises of good behaviour. ‘He gets rather carried away, doesn’t he?’ he remarked of Cuddahy. ‘Hasn’t any sense of limits at all really.’ He gave my father to understand that he had had to deal with a lot of crackpots in the Legion. ‘Idealism and authority are hard habits to lose,’ he remarked. ‘Bad in civilian life.’ Cuddahy, he told my father, had overspent his Legion kitty for the next three years. ‘On a lot of deserving cases, of course, but we can’t work the miracle of the loaves and the fishes, you know. Figures are tougher even than a brigadier, what!’ After brandy and the usual Irish discovery of common friendships, he relaxed further, saying of the retired officers with whom he worked: ‘In their heyday none of the old buggers would have tolerated half the nonsense from subordinates that I get from them! They’re all full of cock-eyed schemes and all would have you know, sir, that they’re practical men….’ The official grinned. ‘They probably were, too, in their delimited sphere – we hope. Let them out and they’re dangerous. Your friend, for instance, has no sense of the possible….’

  *

  A year went by without Cuddahy or his wife again emerging from their remote late entrancement. Beyond the dank vistas of Tipperary they pursued their purpose with passion, embattled and in concord at the last. It was a common friend from Cashel who told us of Emily’s quarrels with the local clergy and of how she was ardently seconded in them by the Brigadier. Our gossip aroused curiosity by hints and denials before skirling off into a series of what seemed unlikely tales. The parish priest had preached against Emily. Emily had been to see the Bishop. She accused the parish priest of heresy and had written to monsignori she knew in Rome. But what did she want? Probable details stood out, islands among the fantasy. Emily, it seemed, had given a dance in her great mansion to raise funds for the insolvent Legion and the parish priest had forbidden people to attend. That we could believe. ‘Then that’s why she went to complain to the Bishop?’ Our gossip shook his head. ‘There’s more to it than that. She’s a dangerous woman,’ he said. ‘I’d go so far as to say that they’re a dangerous pair!’ Poor Cuddahy, we thought with amusement. There was no quiet port for him. My father wrote him a jocular postcard about treading delicately in the provinces. A curious letter arrived in reply. What surprised us was the S.A.G. – Saint Anthony Guard – dear to schoolchildren and to servant maids, written on the flap. My mother claimed the printing wasn’t Cuddahy’s but must have been done by Emily. ‘Probably the postmistress,’ said my father. ‘Forward all available information on Matt Talbot,’ directed the letter; ‘am doing monograph for Tipperary Courier.’ That was normal enough. Matt Talbot is or was Ireland’s most recent candidate for canonization. A blackleg worker who wore chains around his middle even when on the job, he would appeal neither to unions nor to efficiency experts and perhaps, accordingly, has never been seriously pushed as a worker saint. From time to time, however, his cause is taken up. We sent a Catholic Truth Society pamphlet to Cuddahy. Two months later the tragedy happened. We, particularly of course my mother, were deeply involved and upset, and there has been so much talk by now that it is hard to reconstruct what actually did happen. I shall give only the facts that seem reliable.

  Emily apparently had a devotion to Matt Talbot even before her reception into the Church. She wrote and put to music little prayers to him and began a biography. So far so good. It kept her busy. She noticed that Talbot had performed no first-class miracles and that therefore one of the essential conditions for canonization was lacking. She started hoping for a miracle to attribute to him. There is great discordance about the rest of the story but everyone agrees that she had a quarrel with the wife of a veteran afflicted with an incurable disease whom she attempted to heal by the imposition of a relic. The man got better, then abruptly worse and died. The widow accused Emily of frightening him to death. Emily claimed that her cure would have worked if not interrupted, while the priest, already offended at Emily’s rec
eiving religious instruction from an army chaplain rather than himself, supported the widow and blamed Emily publicly in his Sunday sermon. From here things degenerated quickly. Cuddahy tried to rouse his veterans to boycott the priest’s men’s club. Emily began to commune directly with the spirit of Talbot, and the priest advised several mutual acquaintances who hastened to refer the opinion back to the Brigadier that Emily was suffering from religious mania and was a danger to herself and to the parish. ‘Neither one of them’, said the priest of the Cuddahys, ‘has a pick of sense.’ It threw him off stroke to have the Big House inhabited by Catholics. ‘Busybodies,’ he said. The Protestant gentry had kept to themselves.

  Cuddahy would naturally not accept criticism of Emily, yet he too must have seen that she was growing odd. The village had witnessed several manifestations of her eccentricity and he may have seen others more alarming, for the two of them began to live in strict confinement, emerging only on Sundays to drive to mass in the next parish. It was rumoured that he kept her under sedation. She was, the servants said, more often in bed than out of it. ‘She’s daft,’ the villagers guessed, ‘and he’s afraid of what she might do next!’