Under the Rose Read online

  To sidestep this, she told him, laughing, that for her the word had drab associations. Her school nuns had reserved it for girls of whom nothing else could be said: dim or daft girls who were made to sit on a special bench.

  ‘With me,’ said Paul humbly. ‘You Irish were goodness itself!’

  This was true. She and the others – Eithne, Dympna and Shiobhan – had revived the serviceable old quality, as you might take out your grandmother’s furs during a cold snap, once he went to gaol. Arranging rotas for prison-visits, they acknowledged relief as relations with him took on frankly charitable status. ‘Poor Paul!’ they exclaimed with safe affection. Briskly. Like four nannies.

  Rose chewed two more sugar lumps and defied the smile which this evoked. Illogical female, signalled the smile. Chooses the slimmer’s salad, then stuffs herself with sugar!

  *

  Escaping to the loo – let him simmer down a bit! – she was confronted by the gaudy curls of Philomena Fogarty bouncing in three mirrors and sparking in the bristles of her brush. ‘Rose!’ yelled Phil boisterously. ‘It is Rose Molloy?’ So Rose said ‘Not Molloy’ and gave her married name. They embraced.

  ‘I thought it was you across the room. Is that your husband?’

  No, said Rose. Then the two, who had a lot to catch up with, began to tell about themselves, while freshening their make-up. They agreed that now they’d met they mustn’t lose touch. Phil’s luncheon companion had had to rush off, so why didn’t Rose come and see her flat which was close by? Well, it wasn’t hers, but … Rose, not listening, tried to remember why she had lost track of Phil and whether there hadn’t been some hushed-up story back in Dublin years ago. Gossip, scandal? Yes. That reminded her that she’d better warn Phil about Paul, so she told some of his story fast.

  ‘He’ll fall for you!’ she warned. ‘An Irish redhead! He can’t resist them.’

  Phil said she kept her hair tinted because fire colours were propitious. She had studied colours. Studied them? Yes. Colours had an influence … But Rose didn’t take this in for they were now heading back to the table where Paul looked less disappointed than Rose had feared at having their private talk curtailed. Have a brandy, he offered recklessly, but Phil said, no, they must come to her flat for some Colomba di Pasqua which Italian friends had dropped off. ‘We’ll partake’, she said, ‘of the dove of peace! Don’t you think that’s a noble ceremony?’ Then, to Rose’s shock, she sat down, leaned towards Paul and said, ‘You mustn’t feel bad about having been in gaol. I was for two years!’

  Rose blushed at this betrayal of her confidence and was sure that the usual restaurant noises had stopped punitively so that everyone could hear. But this was an illusion. And anyway Phil was speaking in a soft Irish voice. A lullaby voice. She murmured: ‘People care less than you think. I was inside for shoplifting. I was twenty-one at the time and had a record. I wanted to be caught.’

  They left the restaurant and stepped, in single-file, along a narrow pavement. Phil led the way, followed by Paul and a dizzy Rose whose headache had begun. She thought of leaving, but felt she must monitor what Phil would say next. Besides, the Italian cake drew her. She craved sweetness as her temples drummed.

  The flat had a nursery look. Posters in primary colours showed smiles and rainbows. A mirror was crisscrossed with stickers saying ‘Refuse to buy ivory!’ and ‘Elephants are social animals which live in herds led by elder females!’

  When Phil went into her kitchen Rose caught Paul’s eye, but he wouldn’t return her grin. Phil brought back a dove-shaped brioche covered with almonds and smelling of vanilla, and Rose gagged herself with greedy mouthfuls. Phil, she remembered now, had been described to her as ‘a nutgreen maid’ and dangerous to know. ‘Bonkers, a way-out activist,’ the man in the embassy had said. ‘She’s no end of trouble.’

  She had an idea that Phil’s troubles had begun about a dozen years after Rose and she had stopped seeing each other. This came about when Rose was asked to leave Miss Moon’s Irish dancing class after the boys refused to be partnered with her, saying she was clumsy and tripped them up. Her mother was indignant but Rose herself was relieved. At the age of seven she hated having to wear green kilts and falling over her feet. She would not, however, go on being friends with someone who had witnessed her disgrace.

  ‘Death in the eyes and the devil in the heels,’ encouraged Miss Moon and tiptapped a jig with her metal-toed shoes so fast that Rose’s eyes were dazzled by her devilishness. Phil was the only one who could keep up with her, but it was hard to see the sprightly seven-year-old in the thick-waisted woman who was now perched on a barstool, wearing odd – propitious? – colours. She returned to her confidences. Prison, she told Paul and Rose, had been a refuge at a time when she could neither stay at home nor go anywhere else. She had planned to be a nun, then, at her farewell dance, an uncle had done something – ‘Well, you could call it attempted rape’ – which made her feel sullied and unworthy to enter the convent. But she didn’t want to stay home either. Thence the shoplifting.

  Rose began to argue that Phil should not have blamed herself, but Paul said, no, no she had been quite right. Compromises were no good. He’d seen that. ‘We in the Left thought we were being practical by accepting them, but in the end we whittled away our principles. An erosion takes place. Hindsight shows that the naive Silone was right and the subtle Togliatti wrong.’

  Phil who, Rose was sure, had no idea who Silone or Togliatti were, nodded vehemently at this and nodded again when Paul said his own life had been a mistake. Rose was horrified and tried to argue but couldn’t. It was partly her headache. But also the other two seemed to have entered some dense element where they were at ease and she wasn’t. A gravity had descended on them and they kept murmuring ‘yes, yes!’ and approving of each other’s most outlandish notions. Phil said she was a healer and Paul said she should cure Rose’s headache. But there was some impediment to this – Rose’s disbelief perhaps? – so, instead, they put her into a taxi and sent her home. Just before she left, she heard Paul agree to help Phil start up a magazine on Spiritual Ecology, a movement designed to encourage people to think more deeply about the planet.

  *

  The video which Dympna sent Rose has news footage of the oilspill which must have appeared on TV. An RTE anchor man talks. Oil-spattered seabirds and indignant locals are featured and then there are shots of a white-faced Paul wearing oilskins and apparently in shock. He doesn’t speak. His mouth forms a small O as if he were about to release an air bubble. Phil, sitting in a studio, denies that he was a member of her group or that violence had ever been part of its plan.

  *

  He would understand that, thinks Rose. Strategy. Sacrificing the one to the many. Wouldn’t he?

  She and Yves have returned from a trip abroad to find Dympna’s letter and video waiting. The last time they saw Paul was some months ago when they invited him and Phil to dinner to celebrate the first issue of Phil’s magazine. It was a convivial, if odd, occasion when Paul formally thanked Yves for advising him not to revive their old journal, then thanked Rose for introducing him to Phil. He seemed dazed with admiration for her and wore a suit of dingy ‘green’ cotton which had not been treated with chemicals likely to cause environmental damage.

  Phil spoke of plans for the magazine, some of which seemed unobjectionable and others demented. She neither discriminated nor made allowance for surprise, and Rose and Yves found themselves being backed into a polite bafflement which grew ticklish when Paul asked Yves to help her get a subsidy.

  ‘Governments have a responsibility,’ said Phil. ‘We have abused the planet so badly that it may not recover. Some of the abuse was spiritual. This country in particular has poisoned its air with evil. The guillotining of Louis XVI, the crimes committed during the Commune need to be exorcized …’

  Paul’s smile did not waver. Was his pliancy due to senility or love? What damage, Rose wondered, had she wrought by introducing him to this mad woman? Yet now Phil w
as talking sensibly about pollution. You could neither dismiss nor trust her. Her mind was a gallimaufry, a promiscuous jumble. Maybe for Paul all untrained minds were? Did he think that of Rose’s? He had said that with the collapse of Marxism a Dark Age of the Mind was on us. Perhaps he was merely adapting to a new norm?

  Rose, in distress, took comfort from knowing that Yves was as upset as she. Gratefully, she reached for his hand and, over the next hours, felt reassured each time they caught each other marvelling with the wistful pity of adults at the simplicity of the ancient young. Phil, who had given up Catholicism, seemed to believe in every other transcendental promise, and Paul applauded her with meek, nodding beatitude. As they left, she insisted on taking a hair from Yves’ head to cure a pain he had complained of in his back.

  ‘I need something with your DNA in it,’ she explained.

  ‘An odd couple,’ said Rose afterwards.

  ‘You’re jealous,’ Yves accused jealously. ‘You loved it when Paul was romanticizing you. Now it’s Phil’s turn. Irish women appeal to him because they come from a country inured to bondage. He yearns to rescue a needy Irishwoman, an Irish Andromeda.’

  ‘What about asking you for a subsidy? A bit of a nerve, no?’

  ‘Oh he’d never mind sacrificing social considerations. He’d sacrifice himself.’

  *

  The RTE video has cruder things to say about Paul: Cold-War insults from the coverage of his earlier trouble to which she does not intend to listen. She turns off the sound and watches his blanched face. It has achieved the simplicity of archetype: hero or villain. No nuance. And it strikes her that he has come into his true reality. And that this is the reality of his father’s hated old medium: the black-and-white newsreel. Now, however, the image shifts, and the boat on which he inexpertly crossed the tanker’s path appears, all sails bellying, proud as a racer, yawing and canting to one side as the wind tugs it forward in a great white cloud of obliterating spray.

  *

  At their dinner some months ago he described a trip he and Phil had just taken to the West of Ireland and how Phil, who had to be with her Greens or her family, left him alone in a hotel for a day or two. It was the off-season. The hotel was empty but for him, and the proprietor and his family had to go to a funeral. ‘Will you be okay alone?’ they asked Paul and gave him the keys. ‘There’s food in the kitchen and drink in the bar. Just note whatever you drink on the slate.’ This easy-going trust enchanted him and he kept repeating the story with astonishment. ‘Just put it on the slate,’ he quoted again and again as if he thought of the words as a formula initiating him into a tribe.

  Man in the Cellar

  Signora,

  Yes: ‘Signora’!

  You will see why we must become more formal. I have a message for you. Take it seriously. IT IS NOT A JOKE.

  Carlo (yours and mine) is at this moment chained to a bedstead in the lower cellar of our house. He can only move about a yard or so. His shouts cannot be heard outside the house and nobody can get into it. The doors and shutters are locked. The keys are in a bucket at the bottom of the backyard well. All you have to do when you get there is turn the crank and pull it up. Inside, on a key-ring, are the keys to the front and cellar doors and a smaller one for the padlocks which fasten Carlo’s chains.

  Relax, Signora. His discomfort is minor. Think of Bangladesh.

  He has food and water for several days. He has air, electric light, warmth and a slop bucket within reach. Unless a fire breaks out – and why should it? – he is safe. It is up to you to release him. You can give him life a second time.

  I can’t.

  It was I who chained him up – to his astonishment and, I may fairly say, frenzy. If I let him loose now, there is a real danger that he might kill me before he comes to his senses. You know what his temper is like. You never taught him to control it. This dilemma has been growing more acute over the last few weeks – I have held him prisoner for a month – and the only solution I can see is for me to send you this letter and leave. Obviously, I do not expect to return and shall tell neither you nor Carlo where I am going.

  The following points should be clarified at once:

  1. Carlo’s employers and colleagues think he has resigned from his job. I sent them a letter to that effect a month ago. I forged his signature.

  2. I have given it out locally that he is in England where my stepfather has offered him a job and where I expect to join him shortly.

  3. For Carlo’s sake, try not to blab the truth about at once. Give him a chance to think up some cover story to save his face. Also: don’t bring anyone else with you when you go to release him. Do you want him to be a laughing-stock?

  4. I regret the mess in which our marriage is ending, and I shall do everything I can to make it easy for Carlo to get an annulment. A divorce would be good enough for me but I know it wouldn’t suit you and may not Carlo. His experience with me may send him quailing back to the ways of Holy Mother Church: Mum’s religion. He may want a Mum-picked, virginal bride next time and girls like that want a church wedding. I have written a page of a longer letter which I intend to leave addressed to you in my bedroom-desk – stating that I never intended our marriage to be permanent, that I entered on it in bad faith and never intended having children by Carlo. I should think any canon lawyer would find all he needed here to invalidate the bond – especially the way they’re handing out annulments these days. You see: I didn’t entirely waste my time at those churchy dinner-parties of yours where your eminent friend, Count C., used to hold forth so interminably. I recall, by the way, with some joyless amusement, the occasion when I asked him wouldn’t it be easy to fake the conditions required for an annulment and you cut in with: ‘But, Una dear, what would be the point? One cannot lie to God.’ I do not say that my page x is all lies but if it were would you object to my lying to God on Carlo’s behalf? Or might you not feel that the lie of a lapsed Protestant was justified by its end? Luckily, you don’t have to reply!

  5. I shall stay on with Carlo for twelve hours after posting this. Posts between Volterra and Florence being what they are, I daren’t stay longer. This means that, at best, he will have been alone only an hour or so when this reaches you and, at worst, a day. It shouldn’t take you more than two hours to drive here.

  By the way: did you notice anything odd about the letters you got from Carlo while you were in Austria? I wrote them.

  Never mind, Signora, I’m on my way.

  I hope you are too. Get into your car or taxi. Yes: take a taxi. You are distraught and we can’t afford an accident at this point – which is why I’m registering this. It tells you all you need to know for now. You will find a fuller explanation of what happened in the letter in my bedroom-desk drawer. That took me some days to write. It is an apologetic [sic], not as formal as I would, in retrospect, have liked, but I have no time to rewrite it. Now that I am finally leaving, I regret the bitterness – the insolence – of its tone. But what do I not regret? And what use is regret? Embittered relationships pollute lives. Better dissolve them and recycle the elements. I am recycling myself. I’m orbiting off. Good-bye, Signora Crispi,

  [signature] Una

  The following pages, sealed in a large foolscap-size envelope addressed to Signora Francesca Crispi did not, as the narrative will show, ever reach her.

  When I think of the satisfaction this letter will give you, I have to stop myself tearing it up. You, I have to remind myself, are a minor figure in all this and your reactions do not matter one way or the other. Besides, I want to write everything out once, sequentially – then I will probably never think of it again. I will manage to muffle as much of it as possible in that private blanket of oblivion that I can feel, almost see in my brain sometimes. I pull it down like a soft, hairy, comforting screen. It is brown, woolly (maybe a memory of a pram-rug in my infancy?), and I summon it when I want to blot out some nasty memory. It always works. One can only use it when one intends getting right away from reminders
or witnesses to the event to be blotted out: which is what I am doing. I’ve done it before. It is surprisingly easy to do when you live in big cities. I can see your disapproval, poor provincial lady! You twitch and tut-tut and nod and shake your head and start in on your repertoire of gesture – like an animal. Half the words you use are meaningless. I used to count them at meals sometimes, the number of meaningless words you used: baby-talk, grunt-words, expletives. Even I speak better Italian than you do most of the time, Signora! If you were forbidden to say uffa, tsts, bah, beh, ma, macchè, magari, thth (tongue wetly parting company with pre-dental palate), toh, totò, caca, pipi, poppò, moh, già, eh, oh, ah, eeh and a few more, you would be at a total loss. You might even lose your reason, like animals whose familiar environment has been abruptly changed for some scientific experiment. I used to imagine I was the scientist doing it to you. It was one of my favourite fantasies: blot uffa, tsts, bah, etc. out of Signora Crispi’s mind and observe results. Subject shows signs of incipient paranoia. Begins to cluck. Prevent clucking. Subject whimpers. Prevent whimpering. Subject reveals withdrawal symptoms, reverts to animal posture, crawls on all fours, barking. Memo: prevent this. Subject stupefied in trance or fit or otherwise. I played this scenario in my head through many a lunch. Tell me where is fancy bred? In frustration, rage or sheer bloody boredom.

  Maybe I should have had some sisterly pity for your frustrations? Even proverbs know that ‘chi dice “ma,” core contento non ha!’ But I was too unhappy myself to worry about you.

  Sudden doubt: could it be that you truly are paranoiac – I’ve wondered on occasion – that you might not release poor Carlo but keep him tied by the legs, the way you had him as a baby? That I’ve given him back to you just as you always wanted him: dependent. You can clean up his caca, give him totò, be la mammina again to your somewhat oversize pezzetino, donnino, piccino-picciò? God, how I hate baby-talk. I take this seriously. It is not inconceivable. I think I’d better send a telegram from Milan to the local police chief, warning him to check on you. I owe it to Carlo. Three days after my first letter reaches you, the telegram will be sent. And another to the family doctor. So watch it, lady.