Under the Rose Read online

  Maggy ducked from his grasp, ran and, miraculously missing the rest of the traffic, made it to the opposite footpath.

  ‘What’s chasing you?’ A girl of about her own age was staring inquisitively at her. ‘You’re from the Passion Convent, aren’t you? I know the uniform. I may be coming next term.’

  ‘You?’ Maggy was alert for mockery. ‘You’re a Protestant.’

  ‘Not really. My parents are, vaguely, I suppose – but how did you know?’

  Maggy shrugged. ‘It’s obvious.’

  ‘How? I’d better find out, hadn’t I?’ the girl argued. ‘If I’m coming to your school?’

  ‘You wouldn’t be let come like that.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Look at your skirt.’ Maggy spoke reluctantly. She was still unsure that she was not being laughed at. ‘And you’ve no stockings on! Then there’s your hair …’ She gave up. The girl was hardly a girl at all. Protestants almost seemed to belong to another sex. Their skirts were as short as Highlanders’ kilts and their legs marbled and blue from exposure. ‘Don’t you feel the cold?’ she asked. Maybe Protestants didn’t.

  ‘No. I’m hardy. Do you wear vests and things? I despise vests and woolly knickers!’

  The intimacy of this was offensive but Maggy’s indignation had been so used up in the last ten minutes that her responses were unguarded.

  ‘I do too but I’m made to wear them,’ she said and felt suddenly bound to the person to whom she had made such a private admission.

  ‘My name’s Dizzy,’ said Dizzy. ‘Is that your friend over there? I think she’s signalling.’

  ‘She’s odd.’ Maggy disassociated herself from the embarrassing Rosheen, who was indeed waving and rising and replunging to her knees. ‘Don’t mind her,’ she begged. ‘It’s best to pay her no attention.’

  ‘She’s praying, isn’t she? That’s marvellous.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘She doesn’t give a damn. Catholicism interests me,’ Dizzy confided. ‘I think Catholics are more Irish, don’t you?’

  ‘More Irish than whom?’

  ‘Us.’

  ‘You?’

  ‘We are Irish, you know,’ Dizzy argued. ‘My family has been here since the time of Elizabeth the First. They’re mentioned in heaps of chronicles.’

  That, to Maggy’s mind, only showed how foreign they were. The chronicles would have been written by the invaders. But she didn’t mention this. What interested her about Dizzy was not her likeness to herself but her difference. It was clear that she lacked the layers of doubt and caution which swaddled Maggy’s brain as thickly as the unmentionable vests and bloomers did her body.

  ‘I found it!’ Rosheen had arrived, all pant and spittle. She waved the medal excitedly. ‘Saint Anthony answered my prayer. I knew he would. Isn’t he great?’ Rosheen always spoke of saints as though they were as close to her as her dormitory mates. ‘Do you know where I found it? You’ll never believe me: in my shoe.’

  ‘This is Rosheen O’Dowd,’ said Maggy formally. ‘I’m Magdalen Mary Cashin and you’re …?’ She was chary of the ridiculous name.

  ‘Dizzy,’ said Dizzy. ‘Desdemona FitzDesmond actually, but it’s a mouthful, isn’t it? So, Dizzy.’

  ‘We’re orphans,’ Maggy thought to say.

  ‘What luck,’ said Dizzy. ‘Wait till you meet my sow of a mother. She leads poor Daddy a dreadful dance. Drink, lovers, debts,’ she boasted. ‘Family life isn’t all roses, I can tell you.’

  The orphans were interested and impressed.

  *

  ‘Here’s your tea.’ The screw had brought a fresh tray. ‘You’d be well advised to have it. As well start as you plan to finish and, believe me, they all eat in the end! Chips this evening,’ she said.

  Maggy smelled and imagined the pith of their insides and the crisply gilded shells. An ideal potato chip, big as a blimp, filled her mind’s sky. The door closed; a rattle of keys receded down the corridor. Heels thumped. Teeth in other cells would be sinking through crisp-soft chips. Tongues would be propelling the chewed stuff down throats. If the din of metal were to let up she would surely hear soft munching. Her own saliva tasted salty. Or was it sweat? Did they count the chips put in her tray? Wouldn’t put it past them. Tell us is she weakening. Keep count. They’d never. Wouldn’t they just? Besides, to eat even one would surely make her feel worse.

  There was no political status in England. No political prisoners at all. So why insist on treatment you couldn’t get? They had made this point laboriously to her, then given up trying to talk sense to someone who wouldn’t listen. People had died recently from forced feeding so they were chary of starting that. They followed the Home Secretary’s Guidelines and what happened next was no skin off their noses. The country had enough troubles without worrying about the bloody Irish. Always whining and drinking, or else refusing to eat and blaming the poor old UK for all their woes. They had their own country now but did that stop them? Not on your nelly, it didn’t. They were still over here in their droves taking work when a lot of English people couldn’t find it. Rowdy, noisy. Oh forget it. When you saw all the black and brown faces, you almost came to like the Paddies if only they’d stop making a nuisance of themselves.

  A man had come to see her, a small man with a glass eye whom she’d seen twice in Dizzy’s flat. He was from the IRA. He winked his real eye while the glass one stared at her. He had claimed to be a relative, managing somehow to get visiting privileges. She must play along with his story, winked the eye. Was she demanding political status? Good.

  ‘They’ll deny it but we have to keep asking. It’s the principle of the thing.’

  There had been a confusion about him as though he didn’t know whom to distrust most: her, himself, or the screws. His dead eye kept vigil and it occurred to her that one half of his face mistrusted the other.

  Impossible to get comfortable. Her body felt as if enclosed in an orthopaedic cast. She had a sense of plaster oozing up her nose and felt tears on her cheeks but didn’t know why she was crying, unless from frustration at the way she had boxed herself in like a beetle in a matchbox. She was boxed in by her ballady story. It didn’t fit her, was inaccurate but couldn’t be adjusted, making its point with the simple speed of a traffic light or the informative symbol on a lavatory door. She was in a prison within a prison: the cast. Slogans were scrawled on it: graffiti. She was a public convenience promenading promises to blow, suck, bomb the Brits, logos, addresses of abortion clinics, racial taunts. ‘Wipe out all Paddies and nignogs now!’ shrieked one slogan cut deep into her plaster cast inside which she wasn’t sure she was. Maybe she’d wiped herself out?

  She had committed a murder. Performed an execution. Saved a man’s life.

  Depending on how you looked at it. Who had? Maggy the merciful murderess.

  Her story was this: she had been an orphan, her mother probably a whore. Brought up by nuns, she had lost her faith, found another, fought for it and been imprisoned. This was inexact but serviceable. If they made a ballad about it, Rosheen could sing it in a Camden pub.

  When she was very small the nuns told Maggy that she had forty mothers: their forty selves. An aunt, visiting from Liverpool, was indignant.

  ‘Frustrated old biddies!’ These, she asserted, were mock mothers. ‘You have your own,’ she said. ‘What are they trying to do? Kill her off? What do they know of the world?’ she asked. ‘Cheek.’

  ‘What world?’ Maggy wondered. She was maybe four.

  ‘Now don’t you be cheeky,’ said the aunt.

  On what must have been a later visit the aunt reported the mother to be dead. Maggy remembered eating an egg which must have been provided for consolation.

  ‘I’ll bet they’ll say it’s for the best,’ raged the aunt and began painting her face in a small portable mirror. ‘You didn’t love her at all, did you?’ she interrogated, moistening her eyelash brush with spit. ‘I told her not to send you here. She’d have kept you by her if she could. Ch
ildren’, the aunt said, ‘have no hearts.’

  The aunt too must have died for she didn’t come back – and indeed maybe ‘aunt’ and ‘mother’ were one and the same? Maggy, when she grew older, guessed herself to be illegitimate, as there had never been any mention of a father. And so it proved when eventually she came to London and applied for a birth certificate to Somerset House.

  ‘You don’t know your luck. No beastly heritage to shuck off!’

  Dizzy had come to the nuns’ school to spite her mother who favoured agnosticism, raw fruit, fresh air and idleness for girls.

  ‘Not that it matters where she goes to school!’ The mother was mollified by the smallness of the nuns’ fee. ‘Nobody of my blood ever worked,’ she said. ‘Dizzy will marry young.’ She spoke without force for she was to die of diabetes when Dizzy was fourteen. After that Dizzy’s father became very vague and did not protest when she became a Catholic. Thus fortified, she was allowed by the nuns to invite Maggy home for weekends.

  They spent these talking about what they took to be sex and dressing up in colonial gear which they found in the attic. Much of it was mildewed and so stiff that it seemed it must have been hewn rather than tailored. There were pith helmets and old-fashioned jodhpurs shaped like hearts. Dizzy’s father had served in Africa, although she herself had been born after his return to Ireland when her mother was forty-four.

  ‘I’m a child of the Change,’ she relished the phrase. ‘I’m not like them.’

  Who she wanted to be like was the bulk of the local population, and, on Poppy Day, she hauled down the Union Jack which her father had raised. He was apologetic but this only annoyed her the more for she felt that he ought to have known his own mind. Dizzy was eager for order and when she became a Catholic fussed unfashionably about hats in church and fish on Fridays.

  On leaving school, Maggy won a scholarship to an American university. Coming back, after eight years there, she met Dizzy again in London. This was a Dizzy who seemed to have lost much of her nerve for she blushed when Maggy asked: ‘Did you know I was in love with you when we were in our teens?’

  This was a requiem for someone no longer discernible in Dizzy, whom Maggy recalled as pale and volatile as the fizz on soda water. Dizzy had had fly-away hair worn in a halo as delicate as a dandelion clock. Her skin might have been blanched in the dusk of her secretive house. Agile and seeming boyish to Maggy who knew no boys, she swung up trees like a monkey so that one could see all the way up her skirt. She was Maggy’s anti-self. Once, in a spirit of scientific inquiry, they showed each other their private parts. Later, Dizzy discovered this to be a sin or at least the occasion of one.

  ‘You knew,’ she accused. ‘You should have told me.’

  Maggy was disappointed to find freedom so fragile and each felt let down.

  Now Dizzy’s skin was opaque, thickish. She had lost her charm, but Maggy, although she might not have liked her if they’d just met for the first time, was responsive to memory. She felt linked by a bond she could not gauge to this woman who had first alerted her to the possibility of frankness. Dizzy had provided a model of mannish virtue at a time when Maggy knew no men and now Maggy, who had lost and left a man in America, found herself eager for support. Dizzy could still act with vigour. Look at the way she had rescued Rosheen.

  The two – Maggy had heard the story from each separately – had not met for years when one night, a little over a year ago, they sat opposite each other on the North London underground. Rosheen’s eyes were red; she had just run out of the house after being kicked in the stomach by Sean. For want of anywhere to go, she was heading for a late-night cinema.

  ‘Leave him,’ said Dizzy, ‘you can stay in my flat.’

  ‘I love him,’ Rosheen told her. ‘He needs me. He can’t cope by himself. Poor Sean! He’s gentle most of the time and when he’s not, it’s not his fault. He’s sick, you see. His mother warned me: Mairéad. It’s his nerves. Ulcers. Anyway we’re married.’

  ‘All the more reason’, Dizzy told her, ‘to get out while you can. Are you going to have kids with a chap like that? You should call the police,’ she lectured.

  ‘I couldn’t.’ Rosheen was an underdog to the marrow.

  ‘I could.’ Dizzy had Anglo-Irish assurance. ‘Just let him come looking for you.’ She herded Rosheen home to her flat and the husband, when he presented himself, was duly given the bum’s rush. He took to ambushing Rosheen, who went back to him twice but had to slink back to Dizzy after some days with black eyes and other more secret ailments.

  ‘You’re like a cat that goes out on the tiles,’ Dizzy told her. ‘You need an interest. You should come to political rallies with me.’

  When Maggy arrived in London and agreed to move in with the two, Rosheen was working as an usherette in a theatre where Dizzy was stage manager. The plays put on by the group were revolutionary and much of Dizzy’s conversation echoed their scripts.

  ‘You have a slave mind,’ she said without malice to Maggy, who claimed she was too busy finishing a thesis to have time for politics. Dizzy did not ask the subject of the thesis – it was semiology – nor show any interest in the years Maggy had spent in America. Having gathered that there had been some sort of man trouble, she preferred to know no more. To Rosheen, who showed more curiosity, Maggy remarked that her situation was much like Rosheen’s own.

  ‘Convalescing?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘This is a good place to do it,’ said Rosheen. ‘Though I sometimes think I won’t be able to stand it. Sean keeps ringing me up. Crying. And I’m in dread that I’ll break down and go back to him. I miss him at night something awful.’

  ‘So why …’

  ‘Ah sure it’d never be any good.’

  ‘Is that what Dizzy tells you?’

  ‘Yes. But sure I know myself that when a relationship has gone bad there’s no mending it.’

  ‘Relationship’ would be Dizzy’s word. But Maggy wasn’t going to interfere. Rosheen she remembered from their childhood as unmodulated and unskinned: an emotional bomb liable to go off unpredictably. Better let Dizzy handle her. She herself was trying to finish her thesis before her money ran out. She spent her days at the British Museum, coming home as late as 9 p.m. Often a gust of talk would roar into the hallway as she pushed open the door. ‘Bourgeois crapology,’ she’d hear, or: ‘It’s bloody not within the competence of the minister. Listen, I know the 1937 constitution by heart. D’ya want to bet?’ The voices would be Irish, fierce and drunk. Maggy would slip into the kitchen, get herself food as noiselessly as she could manage and withdraw into her room. Towards the evening’s end, Rosheen’s voice invariably reached her, singing some wailing song and Maggy would have wagered any money that the grief throbbing through it had not a thing to do with politics.

  Sometimes, the phone in the hall would ring and Rosheen would have it off the hook before the third peal. It was outside Maggy’s bedroom door and she could hear Rosheen whisper to it, her furtive voice muffled by the coats which hung next to it and under which she seemed to plunge her head to hide perhaps from Dizzy.

  ‘You’re drunk,’ she’d start. ‘You are. Sean, you’re not to ring here, I told you. I suppose they’ve just shut the pub … it’s not that, no … even if you were cold stone sober I’d say the same … Listen, why don’t you go to bed and sleep it off? Have you eaten anything? What about your ulcer? Listen, go and get a glass of milk somewhere … you can … I can’t … it’s not that. I do. I do know my own mind but … She’s not a dyke, Sean … You know as well as I do it’d never work … If only you’d take the cure … Well it’s a vicious circle then, isn’t it? … Please, Sean, ah don’t be that way, Sean … I do but … ah Sean …’

  Sooner or later there would be the click of the phone. Rosheen would stand for a while among the coats, then open the door to go into the front room. Later, she would be singing again, this time something subdued like one of the hymns which they had sung together in school. This tended to put
a damper on the party and the guests would clatter out shortly afterwards.

  Next day smells of stale beer and ash pervaded the flat, and Rosheen’s voice, raised in the shower, pierced through the slap of water to reach a half-sleeping Maggy.

  Mo-o-other of Christ,

  Sta-a-ar of the sea,

  Pra-a-ay for the wanderer,

  Pray for me.

  ‘You missed a good evening,’ Dizzy reproached. ‘I don’t know why you can’t be sociable. Mix. There were interesting, committed people there. One was a fellow who escaped from Long Kesh.’

  ‘I have reading to do.’

  ‘Piffle! Do you good to get away from your books. Live. Open yourself to new experiences.’

  The man Maggy had lived with in San Francisco had made similar reproaches. Books, he said, made Maggy egocentric. Squirrelling away ideas, she was trying to cream the world’s mind. His was a sentient generation, he told her, but she reminded him of the joke about the guy caught committing necrophilia whose defence was that he’d taken the corpse to be a live Englishwoman.

  ‘Irish.’

  Irish, English – what was the difference? It was her coldness which had challenged him. He was a man who relished difficulty. Beneath her cold crust he’d counted on finding lava and instead what he’d found inside was colder still: like eating baked Alaska. Maggy, feeling that she was in violation of some emotional equivalent of the Trade Descriptions Act, blamed everything on her First Communion. She’d been rejected by her maker, she explained, thrown on the reject heap and inhibited since. This mollified her lover and they took an affectionate leave of each other. Now, in wintry London, where men like him were as rare as humming birds, she groaned with afterclaps of lust.

  Well, if her thaw was untimely, the fault was her own.

  What was really too bad was that Rosheen, who had passed the First Communion test with flying colours, should be unable to consummate her punctual passions. She was slurping out feeling now, steaming and singing in the shower while the other two ate breakfast.