Under the Rose Page 11

  *

  On an afternoon when Cuddahy had been morosely considering his insolvent account books, he looked out of the window to see the long snout of the county ambulance drive up his briar-clad avenue and the priest get out of it. Inside the vehicle the Brigadier saw the heads of two other men. The priest, having accepted a lift from the local hospital where he had been attending a sick parishioner, was calling to discuss the matter of the men’s club. His own car had broken down the day before and the ambulance happened to have business in the Brigadier’s neighbourhood. None of this was known to Cuddahy and, at the sight of the ambulance and his enemy, he assumed that they had come to certify Emily; his dear suffering Emily who had joined the Church because of him was being persecuted and might even now be taken away from him. He was already overwrought. The skivvy declared later that he had been up all night soothing and fussing with his wife. He had only just got her to sleep.

  Grabbing hold of an old shotgun and rushing to one of the front windows of the house, he began to yell at two of his veterans who were employed weeding the orchard to come to his aid. The men moved rather cautiously towards the house and meanwhile the priest, seeing this wild figure at the window, shouted what he claimed later was a greeting but which the Brigadier took for a threat. Cuddahy pulled the trigger. The gun was luckily not very dangerous at that distance and the priest only suffered superficial skin wounds. Cuddahy fired again, this time on one of his own veterans whom in his excitement he failed to recognize and who, as he was nearer, was more seriously wounded. The Brigadier was quite unaware of what he had done and it was the other veteran who rushed into the house and succeeded in disarming him. ‘Murphy, what are you doing here? Go and see to the mistress,’ Cuddahy yelled as the man took his weapon from him. ‘OK,’ he agreed. ‘Take that and fire if you have to. They’re closing in on us.’

  The ambulance took away the wounded veteran and a little time later a van from the asylum came with two attendants to pick up the Brigadier. Murphy was busy getting a doctor for the priest and no one seems to have wasted much thought on Emily. Whether she observed the incident or not was never established, but it is probable that she did because that night after closing time drinkers returning from the pub saw her wandering along the road very unsuitably dressed for the time of year – it was November. She had on one of the Indian shawls she always wore when resting and under it a thin nightgown and slippers. She was carrying and clanking a set of bicycle chains which had, she thought, belonged to Matt Talbot. She was quite calm and when the doctor and his wife came to pick her up and bring her home she accepted their offer of hot chocolate with amiable politeness. ‘My husband has just joined up again,’ she told them. ‘He left for his regiment this afternoon.’ It was her only reference to him.

  *

  They are both in the asylum now although I doubt if they meet. Emily is totally estranged from reality but poor Cuddahy has sane intervals which must be painful. It appears that the saner periods are the very ones when he is subject to attacks of violence. My father asked the asylum authorities if we, as his closest friends, might have him over for a visit. (The children have all gone out to Rhodesia to join Emily’s relatives who have settled there.) The authorities agreed, insisting, however, on first administering electric shock treatment which calms him down but also badly impairs the memory. He arrived with an attendant and sat sleepily fingering his teacup – we had been told to hide all decanters and bottles, which made us feel rather horrible, as if we were involved in punishing him. He kept smiling vaguely. Did he remember us at all?

  ‘Sugar?’ asked my mother. ‘He takes three,’ the attendant told her. My mother was vexed. She remembered that herself, had wanted Cuddahy to speak. My father waved out of the window. ‘Well, we never finished that tennis court, Cuddahy,’ he remarked. Cuddahy blinked, said nothing. ‘We were interrupted’, said my father, ‘by the war. You joined up … you went back to the army.’ Cuddahy drank some tea and wiped his lips. The attendant watched like a governess. ‘Yes,’ Cuddahy told him, ‘the army. I’m an army man myself. An army man.’ There was a pause. ‘You, sir, I gather, are not?’ he questioned. My father ignored that. He asked Cuddahy instead if he ever went for walks these days around the Tipperary countryside – his attendant had told us that he did. Cuddahy put down his cup carefully. ‘Where, sir?’ ‘Tipperary,’ said my father. The Brigadier screwed up his eyes. ‘Tipperary,’ he said uncertainly, groping in his well of muddied memory, ‘it’s a long way, sir, a long way to Tipperary.’ He smiled contented at having fished up something of consistence. ‘A long way to go!’ He laughed and wiped his lips.

  Legend for a Painting

  A knight rode to a place where a lady was living with a dragon. She was a gently bred creature with a high forehead, and her dress – allowing for her surroundings – was neat. While the dragon slept, the knight had a chance to present himself.

  ‘I have come’, he told the lady, ‘to set you free.’ He pointed at a stout chain linking her to her monstrous companion. It had a greenish tinge, due the knight supposed to some canker oozing from the creature’s flesh.

  Green was the dragon’s colour. Its tail was green; so were its wings, with the exception of the pale pink eyes which were embedded in them and which glowed like water-lilies and expanded when the dragon flew, as eyes do on the spread tails of peacocks. Greenest of all was the dragon’s under-belly which swelled like sod on a fresh grave. It was heaving just now and emitting gurgles. The knight shuddered.

  ‘What,’ the lady wondered, ‘do you mean by “free”?’

  The knight spelled it: ‘F-R-E-E’, although he was unsure whether or not she might be literate. ‘To go!’ he gasped for he was grappling with distress.

  ‘But where?’ the lady insisted. ‘I like it here, you know. Draggie and I’ – the knight feared her grin might be mischievous or even mad – ‘have a perfect symbiotic relationship!’

  The knight guessed at obscenities.

  ‘I clean his scales,’ she said, ‘and he prepares my food. We have no cutlery so he chews it while it cooks in the fire from his throat: a labour-saving device. He can do rabbit stew, braised wood pigeon, even liver Venetian style when we can get a liver.’

  ‘God’s blood!’ the knight managed to swear. His breath had been taken away.

  ‘I don’t know that recipe. Is it good? I can see’, the lady wisely soothed, ‘you don’t approve. But remember that fire scours. His mouth is germ free. Cleaner than mine or your own, which, if I may say so with respect, has been breathing too close. Have you perhaps been chewing wild garlic?’

  The knight crossed himself. ‘You’, he told the lady, ‘must be losing your wits as a result of living with this carnal beast!’ He sprinkled her with a little sacred dust from a pouch that he carried about his person. He had gathered it on the grave of Saint George the Dragon Killer and trusted in its curative properties. ‘God grant’, he prayed, ‘you don’t lose your soul as well. Haven’t you heard that if a single drop of dragon’s blood falls on the mildest man or maid, they grow as carnal as the beast itself? Concupiscent!’ he hissed persuasively. ‘Bloody! Fierce!’

  The lady sighed. ‘Blood does obsess you!’ she remarked. ‘Draggie never bleeds. You needn’t worry. His skin’s prime quality. Very resistant and I care for him well. He may be “carnal” as you say. We’re certainly both carnivores. I take it you’re a vegetarian?’

  The knight glanced at the cankered chain and groaned. ‘You’re mad!’ he ground his teeth. ‘Your sense of values has been perverted. The fact that you can’t see it proves it!’

  ‘A tautology, I think?’ The lady grinned. ‘Why don’t you have a talk with old Draggie when he wakes up? You’ll see how gentle he can be. That might dispel your prejudices.’

  But the knight had heard enough. He neither liked long words nor thought them proper in a woman’s mouth. Deeds not words was the motto emblazoned on his shield, for he liked words that condemned words and this, as the lady could
have told him, revealed inner contradictions likely to lead to trouble in the long run.

  ‘Enough!’ he yelled and, lifting his lance, plunged it several times between the dragon’s scales. He had no difficulty in doing this, for the dragon was a slow-witted, somnolent beast at best and just now deep in a private dragon-dream. Its eyes, when they opened, were iridescent and flamed in the sunlight, turning, when the creature wept, into great, concentric, rainbow wheels of fire. ‘Take that!’ the knight was howling gleefully, ‘and that and that!’

  Blood spurted, gushed, and spattered until his face, his polished armour and the white coat of his charger were veined and flecked like porphyry. The dragon was soon dead but the knight’s rage seemed unstoppable. For minutes, as though battening on its own release, it continued to discharge as he hacked at the unresisting carcass. Butchering, his sword swirled and slammed. His teeth gnashed. Saliva flowed in stringy beardlets from his chin and the lady stared at him with horror. She had been pale before but now her cheeks seemed to have gathered sour, greenish reflections into their brimming hollows.

  Abruptly, she dropped the chain. Its clank, as it hit a stone, interrupted the knight’s frenzy. As though just awakened, he turned dull eyes to her. Questioning.

  ‘Then’, slowly grasping what this meant, ‘you were never his prisoner, after all?’

  The lady pointed at a gold collar encircling the dragon’s neck. It had been concealed by an overlap of scales but had slipped into view during the fight. One end of the chain was fastened to it.

  ‘He was mine,’ she said. ‘But as I told you he was gentle and more a pet than a prisoner.’

  The knight wiped his eyelids which were fringed with red. He looked at his hands.

  ‘Blood!’ he shrieked. ‘Dragon’s blood!’

  ‘Yes,’ she said in a cold, taut voice, ‘you’re bloody. Concupiscent, no doubt? Fierce, certainly! Carnal?’ She kicked the chain, which had broken when she threw it down and, bending, picked up a link that had become detached. ‘I’ll wear this,’ she said bitterly, ‘in token of my servitude. I’m your prisoner now.’ She slipped the gold, green-tinged metal ring on to the third finger of her left hand. It too was stained with blood.

  Man of Aran

  Dublin

  Dear Rose,

  You ask for details. Well, Paul turned up here in a stew after Phil and her Greens left Paris without telling him. They were sick of his wanting to protect her from what he considered ‘bad’ company, when some would say it was the company – Paul included – which needed protecting! Phil, in another age, could have been a great, bossy, troublemaking saint. Or whore. Did you ever come across those porny woodcuts labelled ‘Phyllis riding Aristotle’? They show a whore straddling a frail old man who is down on all fours. Cruel? Well, better to laugh than cry! Paul must be seventy!

  Anyway Phil and Co. were protesting at the pollution of the Gulf Stream and had got together some small boats and hemmed in an oil tanker somewhere near the Aran Islands. There was a stand-off and a few newspapers took notice. Nothing major. The protesters hoped the oil company would lose its cool, while the oilmen were counting on storms to disperse the boats.

  Enter Paul.

  He borrowed a yacht from his rich cousins and reached Aran at the same time as the forecast storm. He then had a row with his cousin’s skipper, insisted on taking the helm – in his youth, it seems, he sailed a bit – and set forth, in bad visibility, to find and persuade Phil to give up her mad enterprise. This was just as the tanker was attempting a getaway which the little boats meant to stop. Phil’s boat was in the lead and Paul sailed right up to her across the bows of the tanker which, having no time to slow, had to swerve so as not to run him down, and hit a submerged rock which tore a hole in it. This led to the spill.

  He has, as you’ll have seen, been vilified and will almost certainly be sued. His old record was mentioned. There is unpleasant coverage on the enclosed video. Whoever introduced him to Phil did a bad day’s work. Write to him. He needs support.

  Love,

  Dympna

  Rose thinks: how sharp Dympna has become! She wouldn’t make rash introductions as Rose did last Easter in Paris. Not that Rose meant to either. As she remembers it, the thing happened almost by itself.

  *

  The occasion was ill-judged. The city had shut down, but shops in the old ghetto were open and Rose, racing to lunch, was relieved to see that she could get some sort of groceries here later: a stroke of luck since she had none laid in. Tins, though labelled in unreadable scripts, showed pictures of recognizable food and she could buy that flat Arab bread, since the bakers seemed to be closed. No baguettes sprouted from under shoppers’ arms, and the restaurant where she was lunching had only matzoes. Squeezing between tables, she saw a basketful on each.

  Paul, rising to kiss her, exclaimed: ‘Ma chérie, ma chérie, you don’t look a day older! After – how long has it been?’

  One reproach? Two? He didn’t let her answer. Afraid he’d be toppled from some high-wire topic! Today it was global calamity. Warily she listened while he hectored her with shy, expectant eyes. Expecting what? In that lean-bean coat he looked like an old-time pedagogue.

  ‘It is good of you to come! But then,’ he coaxed, ‘you are good! Tu es bonne, ma chérie!’

  Unfolding her napkin, she shook her head at this. No! Not good! ‘I remember’, she said, to illustrate this, ‘when this street was sooty and smelled like a bazaar. I came here once with a friend who hoped to sell a violin …’

  ‘So the universe, darling …’ Not listening.

  She was a touch distraite herself. Vintage memories brimmed, starting with the violin on which her lover had played courtly music which mocked their lives. It was curvaceous and reddish and she too had been like that and had needed money for an abortion.

  ‘Which was illegal!’ She laid claim to recklessness: ‘Not to say scandalous!’ And remembered Sephardic women stepping through bead curtains in dim shops to lift the violin from its cradling velvet. Marvelling at its owner’s willingness to sell, they warned him in lowered voices against women who could cost him dear. ‘Muncho,’ they’d said in their queer Spanish. A non-Jewish woman cost muncho!

  ‘Keep your violin, hijito,’ they’d advised, recognizing him as one of their own. ‘A violin will stand to you! Women …’ They shook monitory heads, not caring that she might understand.

  There were women like that here today. Glossy and noisy, they were savouring a taste for North African cooking. Piedsnoirs. Or had that word passed from use? Prosperity had reached the ghetto and this restaurant was too dear for Paul.

  It was her fault he had chosen it. He had rung to say, ‘I heard you were back. People avoid me now,’ and she, in her fluster, proposed meeting straightaway, forgetting about Easter and that restaurants might be closed. Poor Paul! He must have tried ten places before finding a free table.

  ‘I’m not coming,’ had been her husband’s ultimatum. ‘And I don’t want you making rash promises on my behalf. I bet you made some when you thought he’d die in gaol!’

  ‘Yves! You must! If you don’t he’ll pay. He’ll insist.’

  ‘Sorry.’ Yves could be ruthless. ‘You’ll have to work that one out.’

  How? What would the clever Sephardic women have done? Slipped off to arrange things with the cashier? No, that would hurt Paul’s pride. Claim to be dieting so as to save him money? Oh dear! How sticky this lunch was going to be! As Yves had known. His knowingness could be maddening. ‘He’, she had once written in a letter to Paul, who seized on the notion, ‘has betrayed us spiritually.’ A silly remark! It was touched off by Yves’ taking a job with the political party which had pressed to have Paul’s appeal quashed. A naive reaction, as Yves had made her see. He worked for the state and that party had come to power. Were its opponents therefore to strike or starve until the next election? No? Well then?

  Across the room, a pale face floated among the dark ones. Red curls reminded Rose of, might
even belong to – could they? – Philomena Fogarty.

  ‘Aren’t you appalled, ma chérie?’

  Paul wanted a response to some moan about – what? She teased: ‘You bring jeremiads to the ghetto, Paul. That’s coals to Newcastle.’ Had someone said that Phil had become a Green?

  ‘Newcastle?’

  ‘Just a way of speaking.’

  Could he be unaware of the pessimism which he sprayed like a tomcat appropriating territory? Or might he – his fingers had questingly clasped hers – be too optimistic? This was her first real meeting with him since his release, though there had been a welcome-out party. Right afterwards, she and Yves had gone abroad for some months. She had, though, continued to write to Paul. How drop him?

  While he ordered wine, she took back her hand and slid a glance at those red curls. From the age of four, Phil Fogarty had been the star of Miss Moon’s dancing class in South County Dublin. At parties she would toss the ringlets which Rose envied, fluff her skirts, point a toe and sing. Adults adored her. She must be forty now and the hair-colour out of a bottle. Did Greens dye?

  ‘… garbled, as I …’

  She – Phil – was also said to be some sort of healer. With crystals, was it? Or kinesiology?

  ‘… no rigour in their …’

  Like a peg-bag on a shaky clothesline, Paul’s bones jigged. He spoke of chaos theory and randomness. A shoulder jabbed the air. Rose sighed. For years Paul had owned an influential magazine and seen no need to please anyone. Now, like a pet creature released in the wild, he misread signals and reacted to trouble with a martyred spite. The world, he noted, was getting its comeuppance. The Soviet collapse had unbalanced it. And what was worse, thought was dead. A Dark Age of the Mind was upon us.