Under the Rose Page 25

  ‘Of what?’

  ‘That Jim and Martin …’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Never mind. Excuse me. Must talk to Gary.’ He could hear him down below saying goodbye to the neighbour. A car door slammed. Tom tumbled downstairs and out to where Gary’s face, gleaming in his car window, vanished, then gleamed again in the blink of a revolving sign. ‘Did Jim and Martin plan to raise money for Rafael?’ Tom asked.

  ‘Tom, you don’t want to know. OK?’ Gary patted Tom’s hand, removed it from his window pane and drove off.

  Tom stumped indoors. Back in his own quarters on the ground floor, he looked glumly at his video collection. There was no way he’d get to sleep now. Why did they keep things from him? What was their opinion of him anyway? Reading the video titles like mantras, he tried to calm down. Four Feathers, Oliver Twist, Superman Two, Silence of the Lambs … Violence was coming all right. Great Expectations. Funny how much, even as a boy, he’d liked nineteenth-century English stories! That century had been a manly time for the English. Their prime. Elena had been trying to work on him. She wanted him to see her as in some way Mom’s heir.

  Really hungry now – he’d eaten nothing since the yoghurt – he opened his office fridge which was empty except for a can of tuna. He was starting to wolf it when there was a knock on his door. It was Elena to ask about locking up. She saw the tuna.

  ‘Oh Tom, you’re hungry! You hated those fajitas! I could …’

  ‘Hungry? No, no. I was just tidying. Throwing this out.’

  He threw it in the garbage. Rafael’s family was always making him do this.

  ‘I’ll take that out, then lock the doors. You go to sleep. We’ve disturbed you enough.’

  ‘No, no, please, don’t bother.’

  ‘It’s no bother,’ she picked up the bag.

  Arguing, he followed her through the dojo. He had half a notion that he might discreetly recover that tuna since the office garbage-bag would have nothing worse in it than paper. But she evaded him playfully and seemed to be in high spirits. He remembered that she had drunk several beers.

  Pausing to wave at the dragon-and-knight pictures, she said, ‘Know what Rafael says, Tom? He says you’re “in thrall” – that’s his word – “to the dragon of memory”! That it’s like in some old story about someone who’s asleep and guarded by a dragon!’ She nodded at a lively monster with a scarlet trim to its jaws and scales sprouting green as grass. ‘This made no sense to me, so one time I asked your Mom what she made of it – and she began to cry.’ Elena shook her head a few times, shrugged, then smiled, it seemed to Tom, a little sourly and added, ‘Of course Rafael wants to rescue you!’

  Tom didn’t understand any of this and had a feeling that he didn’t want to either, so he gave up on the tuna and, after saying goodnight to Elena, returned to his room.

  Later, hearing her go upstairs, he put on a video, then fell asleep in front of it. Woken by hunger, he decided to go to an all-night store, only to find, on trying the outer doors, that she had taken away the keys.

  *

  Upstairs the rhythm of sleeping breath had changed the place; the temperature was warm and the air musky. Padding about in stocking feet, he told himself that Elena must surely have left the keys somewhere obvious. Having switched on a light in the kitchen and found no keys there, he followed its slanting gleam into the dining room which smelled of Mexican cloth – that cheesy memory of sheep – a whiff which he remembered sometimes getting from Rafael.

  There was a rebozo on the table but no keys. Groping, his fingers alighted on flesh and someone gave a tiny scream. It was Juana who turned out to have left the bed she had been sharing with Elena, then fallen asleep in here. In explanation, she showed him the photo-romance she had been reading before turning out the light. Pointing and grimacing, she laughed at her own lack of English.

  ‘Elena took my keys.’

  ‘I sorry. No understand!’ A breathy gabble of Spanish.

  The whispers were too loud. Tom, who wanted her to look for his keys in Elena’s room, led her downstairs in the hope of explaining his predicament by showing her the locked front door.

  A prompt, submissive smile told him she’d got the wrong idea. Of course! The photo-romance still in her hand showed a picture of an evil seducer.

  ‘Not that!’ Waving agitated hands, he tried to shoo away her misapprehension. Poor girl! She saw men as predators!

  She quailed, clearly thinking him angry, so he tried to look well-disposed but not predatory. ‘It’s all right, Juana. Don’t worry. It’s just that I need my keys. To get out. See.’ Carefully avoiding eye-contact, he made a show of trying and failing to open the front door. But now her misapprehension changed. Panic clouded her. Was he putting her out? No, no. He smiled reassurance – but this too was open to misunderstanding.

  ‘Keys?’ He mimed the act of sliding one into a lock. ‘Llaves? Get it? No?’ Frustrated, he flung himself onto the sofa in front of the video where Scrooge – he must have put him on earlier – was embracing Tiny Tim.

  ‘A!’ she cried, ‘que rico!’ And, joining him, cuddled close and took his hand in hers.

  He snatched it away then, as she quailed, became remorseful and led her back up to where a startled Elena awoke, rubbed her eyes and shot him an unwarrantedly knowing look.

  ‘Elena,’ he tried to keep exasperation out of his voice, ‘Juana keeps getting the wrong end of the stick. Will you please tell her that I’m not putting her out, but that I don’t want to sleep with her either?’ The voice sounded querulous. He tried to soften it. ‘Listen,’ he soothed. Yes, that was better. ‘Listen, you can both stay here as long as you choose. OK?’

  ‘Oh Tom, do you mean it?’

  ‘I … oh well I guess so!’

  He went back down to find his TV screen curdling furiously. Turning it off, he realized that they might want to stay for months! Years even! Could he back out? He couldn’t. He had, moreover, forgotten to ask for the keys. Could he go up and ask for them? No, he could not do that either. The girls would be in bed again by now. He’d embarrass them – and Juana might again get the wrong end of the stick. Yet he was hungrier than ever and his windows, since he’d had the place soundproofed, didn’t open. Sitting on his couch, he could only laugh to think of Rafael in prison, Jim in hospital and himself locked in his own house and dreaming of food. Gary might say he’d always kept himself locked in and on a diet! Well, maybe so.

  Upstairs was now silent, so he tiptoed back up, opened the fridge and took out Juana’s last remaining cakes which were by now a little crumbly and reminded him of boyhood greeds. Bright and smeary like First Grade crayons and dripping with lipids! Thoughtfully, he chewed, then swallowed one, two, and finally four with the help of a can of Dos Xs beer which was in the fridge too, then went down to his bed where he dreamed recklessly that Juana was lying beside him, only to find her turning into Rafael who had the same black, brilliant eyes but was in better shape and had the grace of a healthy feline. The crumbs on Tom’s lips were sweet and he imagined a prison-hungry Rafael asking if he might lick them, and himself saying ‘Sure!’ Rafael said, ‘Hombre, I’m weak with longing for pan Mexicano!’ Then, somehow Tom had him in his arms. Why not, he thought and, feeling himself start to wake up, pulled the dream back over him like a slipping comforter. Why not? Why not stay under here with the smell of vanilla and strawberry and Rafael’s smooth, hard body and fresh, athlete’s sweat? Because before we know it, hombre, pop goes the weasel. The DNA boys aren’t moving fast enough, so we’d better be our own Merlin the Magicians – if and while we can! Tomorrow, he thought, mañana, I’ll visit Jim. Then dozed again, with an eager, dreamy hunger, in Rafael’s arms.

  Later, in a deeper, more unruly dream, he thought he heard himself say one day in class,

  ‘Somebody should teach those guys! Blow them away! Wham!’

  Had he? Had he said that? To Rafael? Egged him on? Played Lucifer? He had. He had.

  Rum and Coke


  I expect at any minute to hear from the nursing home where my wife is due to go into labour. They thought I was making her nervous, which is why they asked me to leave. I can’t blame them. After all, what could they know of our – what? Anomalies? So now I sit by the phone, thinking of the boy – we know it’s to be a boy – and of how he’ll be called Frank in memory of my father: Senator Leary, whose death, to quote the obituaries, was such a sore loss to his country. Soon there will be a new Frank Leary to take his place. Symmetry and pietas. He’d have liked that.

  He laid out his principles for me on the day, not long after my nineteenth birthday, when I took up my duties as summer barman at the Moriarty Castle Hotel. He’d got me the job. The Knights sometimes held functions there, indeed were holding one that weekend, which was why he drove me down. My mother came in her own car and stopped off for lunch. She was en route to Galway where the League to Save the Unborn Child (SUC) had organized a rally. She’s one of their officers.

  While she settled my father into his room I introduced myself to the head barman, who said he’d show me the ropes in the lull after lunch. Then back came my parents and my father asked me to pour him a drink: coke and rum. That surprised me because of his being a teetotaller. He grinned and so did my mother: a benedictory, parental grin. Declan’s an adult now was what it decreed; then he made his speech. You could sum it up to sound like hypocrisy – until you remembered about that being the tribute vice pays to virtue. Anyway, his principle was simple – although its workings turn out not to be! He said he wanted me, during his stay at the castle, to do what trusted barmen around the country had been doing for years: slip a sizeable snort of rum into his Coca Cola but charge whoever was standing drinks for the coke only. Later, he would drop by and pay the difference. The common interest came before that of the individual. And he, a man in the public eye, must neither alienate voters nor weaken his own influence for good. What the eye didn’t see didn’t matter.

  ‘But father, surely drinking wouldn’t alienate many Irish people?’

  ‘As a politician I can’t afford to alienate any. For the sake of the causes I support.’

  As this was one of the times when the Right-to-Lifers were making a push to stop creeping Liberalism, I guessed he meant them. ‘But what’, I objected, ‘about your conscience?’

  ‘That’, he cut me off, ‘is between me and my God.’ Then he said again about the general good coming first. ‘Abide by that rule and you can do what you like. Obedience’, he smiled, ‘makes for freedom!’ And raised an eyebrow.

  I laughed.

  He believed in having a sense of humour. The obituaries quoted him on how disarming it could be. It was, he liked to say, a tempering mechanism. Also: that conservatives must strive to surprise and dazzle so as to steal the opposition’s fire.

  It’s been odd reading about this clever, shifty man. To be sure, some of the reminiscences went back to his school days – and how could he have stayed the same? Ironically, though, change was a bogy of his. One writer described him as ‘a man whose unwavering aim was to preserve on our island a state faithful to the more orthodox teachings of the Roman Catholic Church’. To do this, as he told me in the Moriarty Castle bar, you had to fight unethical innovation. Unchristian practices. Unseemly publications. You needed counter-seductions. Wit and paradox. Nonchalance. Panache.

  No one denied he had that. Too much? Maybe. Maybe he ended up seducing and bamboozling himself? I certainly can’t be trusted to judge. He was fifty-seven but looked younger, in a Cary Grant sort of way: silver wings to his hair, white teeth, big frame, flat belly. He had a good tailor and could, as the saying goes, charm the birds off the trees – or, discreetly, pull birds. I was proud of him but apprehensive as to what he expected of me – or believed in really. My eldest brother has for years been a missionary in Ecuador, and it would be a mistake to suppose this pleased my father. According to him, most missionaries nowadays were crypto-Communists. Indeed, now that the official Communists had collapsed, they were the last Communists. Priests – which may sound odd from a militant layman – were dangerously gullible and monks worse. He’d sent me and my two brothers to school to the Benedictines with advice to take what they taught us with a pinch of salt. He wanted us to have a grounding in religion, yes, but also to be able to take the world on at its own game. And for this, the Benedictines, he was sorry to say, were insufficiently robust. They were considered classier than the Jesuits, but lacked the nous to spike their coke with rum. Or their red lemonade with whiskey, which I should also be prepared to serve. Likewise tonic with vodka. Doubleness was all. I guessed that the job as barman was meant to sharpen me – and was happy about this. I had been reading Stendhal and thought of Moriarty Castle in terms of his great houses where raw young men learn amatory wit. My second brother was in Australia. As an uncle of ours put it, he and my father were too alike, and two cocks in one barnyard upset the pecking order. My sisters were married, so on whom could my father’s hopes focus if not on me? I might have resented this if I had been surer of it. As it was, I was desperate to impress him.

  *

  I’ve rung the nursing home again. They’re to let me know just as soon as I’m needed – and are undoubtedly being patient because of whose son I am. In this city, you are never anonymous, so may as well reap the benefits, since there are drawbacks too. It’s odd: I haven’t thought so much about him for months. Not since the last panegyric was read and folded away. Maybe when the new Frank Leary is hogging attention I’ll forget the old one? Come to think of it, I’ll be the ‘old’ Leary then. Old, worldly and not quite twenty-one! Maybe, God help me, I’ll burst out in my fifties!

  *

  The drawbacks? Well with women for a start. Feminists. His name was a red rag to them, so I could never take things on their own terms. Every choice meant being with or against him and I always chose to be ‘with’. I had – I admit – a girlish admiration for his manliness and saw women as rivals.

  Away from home though – I spent three summers abroad, learning modern languages – all this changed and by my second week in Italy, when I was fifteen, I was sharing a tent with a Danish girl. The tent was a tiny thing and dyed bright orange so that hunters would not shoot in our direction. I loved that: colour of flame and folly! I was over the moon to be out from under my Irish camouflage. Our parents, of course, thought we were in a hostel, but we simply moved out and after that I swear it was the difficulty of communicating – we talked pidgin Italian to each other – which made it easy to be together. I conclude that the answer to that old conundrum as to which language Adam and Eve spoke in Paradise may be ‘none’. Not being able to ask questions eliminates the tripwires of shyness, class, and wondering whether what you feel for each other is love or lust. As for the one about using ‘artificial contraceptives’, Vinca was on the pill and had a container with a dial which clicked forward a notch each time she took one. Streamlined and sage, it made me glad I couldn’t tell her of the preserved foetus which my mother’s colleagues toted to their lectures on the ills the flesh is heir to. Silence was golden in our Umbrian olive grove – and we left chatter to the crickets.

  But to return to Moriarty Castle: as I wasn’t yet, strictly speaking, on the staff, my father asked if it would be all right for me to sit down to lunch with my mother and himself. Later, such privilege would be off limits, like the swimming pool and the nine-hole golf course. Teasingly, he made me try a rum and coke.

  Then my mother left and, as he and I strolled back through the lobby, he introduced me to the receptionist, a Miss Sheehy.

  ‘This is my son, Declan,’ he told her and she gave me a funny look. I told myself that I was imagining it and took her hand in a forthright grip. She was one of those slim, quivery girls who shy like deer and have a curtain of dark hair for hiding behind. I guessed her to be my age or maybe a bit older. More importantly, she was a beauty. My Stendhalian summer partner? Why not?

  Later, after the barman had shown me how to mix drink
s, I came back to the lobby. She was still on duty.

  ‘How does it feel to be the son of a famous father?’

  This annoyed me, so I countered with ‘How does it feel to be a knockout beauty?’

  That got a blush. I walked off regretting the balkiness of words. With Vinca and her summery successors I had rejoiced in their absence. Maybe it was auricular – Christ, there’s a word! – confession which poisoned them for me? All that talk of ‘bad’ thoughts. Maybe, I should become an explorer and live in the Amazon jungle: steamy heat, warm mud, bare-breasted Indian girls and, above all, no chat! I kept thinking of Miss Sheehy though. That hair had a tremulous life to it. Like seaweed. Now I’d got myself uselessly excited and should maybe take a run around the tennis courts – unless they were off limits too. I wondered: was Miss Sheehy? As it happened, I had no time to find out because carloads of Knights started arriving and soon the bar was abuzz and I was kept busy. I wondered whether the castle chapel was off-limits to staff too? This seemed unlikely, so maybe I’d be able to watch them next day at their mumbo jumbo, robing and disrobing, in imitation of the Crusaders donning armour to fight the forces of darkness and fornication. I wasn’t sure how close my father’s connection with them was. They favour confidentiality and infiltration and he might be their man in the senate. He didn’t appear in the bar.

  I finished work after midnight. There was no sign of Miss Sheehy. I fell on my bed and slept.

  I was awoken before daylight. My mother wanted me on the ’phone. Or rather, it turned out, she wanted my father. There was some decision to do with the rally which only he could take. Neither she nor the other Pro-Life ladies took decisions. They were there to make it look as though women were opposing the feminists but were puppets really. She apologized for waking me but said she’d been ringing him since last night.

  ‘Your father’s not answering his ’phone,’ she told me. ‘It’s off the hook. I think maybe he knocked it off inadvertently and now he’ll miss all his calls.’