Under the Rose Read online

  So I pulled on some clothes, took the lift to the guests’ part of the hotel, and arrived at his door just as Miss Sheehy emerged from it – or rather just as she started to emerge, for when she saw me she ducked back in. That was hard to misinterpret and froze me in my tracks. I mean if she had said ‘Hello Declan’ and that she had been answering a room-service call, I would have believed her. I would have accepted any plausible story because I was thinking of her in terms of my own designs, not his – but, instead, she turned tail on seeing me. For perhaps a minute, I stood transfixed. Then, as I turned to go, out she bobbed again.

  ‘Declan, can you come here, please. Your father wants you.’

  I bolted. Unthinkingly. Or rather what I was thinking was that I didn’t want to know any more of his secrets.

  Back in my room I started making faces at my mirror and told the clown grimacing back that I was a prize ass. Obviously he was ill and she had been answering a room-service call. Why, though, had she bobbed away? Clown, so as to tell him his son was outside. Clown, clown! What would they both think of me now? Worldliness, where were you? I had failed the test! Fallen at the first fence. Could my father, I even wondered, have set the thing up deliberately? I had heard of British Foreign Office candidates being tested like this on country-house weekends.

  I wasn’t surprised by the knock on my door. It was Miss Sheehy to say that, just as I’d guessed, he was ill. Alarmingly so. Her manner had grown agitated and she was asking for my help. ‘He can’t walk and we can’t have the doctor finding him in my room.’

  Her room? I was so flustered that we were at its door before I remembered that, just now, they had been in his. How had he got here?

  She brushed away the question. ‘Look, he’s passed out. We should get a doctor. It could be serious! A heart attack even! But he can’t be found in my room!’ Her voice had an edge of hysteria.

  She opened her door and there he was on the carpet, I saw the urgency then. Jesus, I thought. Christ! As far as I could tell, his pulse was all right. Or was it? I tried, clumsily, to compare it to my own – but it’s hard to take two pulses simultaneously. Miss Sheehy became impatient.

  ‘Take his shoulders,’ she directed. ‘I’ll hold the door. Can you drag him to the lift? Or hoist him on your back?’

  ‘Supposing we’re seen?’

  ‘We’ll say he began to feel ill in your room. Then, when you tried to help him back to his, he fainted. I’m here because you rang the front desk.’

  Good enough, I thought with relief, and gave myself to a frenzy of activity which kept my feelings in check. He was heavy but I’m strong and was able, like pius Aeneas fleeing the wars of Troy, to carry my father down the corridor, into the lift, then down another corridor to his room. By then, she had rung the doctor who was on his way. As I laid him on his bed, she divulged some facts. They had, she admitted, been quarrelling and her invitation to me to enter his room had been a move in the quarrel. When I left, she had rushed off, whereupon he, thinking she’d gone after me, followed her.

  ‘He’s terrified of his family finding out about us.’

  ‘Us?’ I asked stupidly.

  ‘Him and me.’

  You, I wondered dourly, and how many others? I was in a sweat of filial guilt: unfounded, to be sure, but my feelings had run amok. My father’s poor, vulnerable, open eyes stared glassily and saw neither of us. Oh God, I prayed, don’t let him die. Not here. Not for years! Please, God! At the same time I was furious with him. For what about my mother? Did she know – I recalled her tolerance of the rum-and-coke – that as well as trusted barmen ‘up and down the country’, he also had – what? What was Miss Sheehy? His heart’s love or one of a team? A team of floozies? If so, how big? Basketball five? Hockey eleven? She, no doubt, imagined him to be in love with her. Might he be? I felt obscurely flouted, and confused.

  The doctor, when he came, quickly changed my mood.

  ‘It’s serious,’ he warned. ‘He’s had a stroke. I’m going to call a helicopter and fly him to Galway.’

  He told us to stay in the room while he went to make arrangements. For moments we sat in silence. Miss Sheehy was as pale as paper. My father’s eyes were closed now and his face was grey.

  ‘How long have you – been with him?’

  ‘Three years.’

  ‘So why the quarrel now?’ He would not, I was sure, have misled her with false promises. He would never leave my mother. A Senator! A militant Catholic layman! Never in this life!

  ‘I’m pregnant,’ she blurted and began to cry.

  ‘Don’t cry!’ I could have slapped her. Hysteria, I thought. Then: could he be such a fool? ‘You mean you didn’t use anything?’ Condoning the use of artificial contraceptives led, said the League to Save the Unborn Child, to condoning abortion. Changing our legislation would open the sluice gates. I knew the arguments by heart. But what about the principle of what the eye didn’t see? Her eyes were getting scandalously red. ‘Don’t cry,’ I urged. ‘The doctor will be back in a moment.’

  ‘And he’ll take him away. To Galway. Listen,’ she clutched my arm, ‘I must see him, get news of him. But he’ll be in intensive care. I won’t be let in. Only relatives will be. Will you help me?’

  Red-eyed, feverish mistress! Outcast, beautiful Miss Sheehy. I kissed her and it was she who slapped me! Ah well, some outlet was needed. The doctor may have heard the slap for he gave us a look as he came in the door. Two paramedics were with him and in no time had my father on a stretcher. We followed them down the familiar corridors and out to the lawn where the helicopter was waiting. They loaded him on. Blades rotated; wind moulded our clothes to our bodies; then up it whirred into a misty dawn, turning silver, then grey, then fading to a speck.

  I thought of ‘the rapture’, the bodily whisking of people up to heaven in which certain Protestants believe – ex-President Reagan for one was, I’d read in some magazine, expecting to be whisked aloft. Holus bolus, body and bones! It was an inappropriate thought. But then what was appropriate? Maybe I was in shock?

  Miss Sheehy’s hand was in mine. Would I help her see him, she begged, or at least keep in touch? Yes, I said, yes. I’d be leaving for the hospital as soon as I could explain things to the management here. I’d phone her this evening.

  ‘I have this weekend off,’ she told me.

  Ah, I thought: they planned to spend it together. Poor father! Poor Miss Sheehy!

  ‘What’s your first name?’ I asked.

  She said it was Artemis. Her parents had wanted her to be a huntress, not a victim. I made no comment.

  *

  I’ve had a call from my mother. From the nursing home. No need for me, she says, to worry. First babies are often slow to arrive. She should know: a mother of five and a four-time grandmother. My sisters have been dutifully breeding. She’s in her element and hasn’t been in such good spirits since my father’s death.

  *

  He never regained consciousness. When Artemis came in on the Friday evening, I disssuaded her from seeing him, arguing – truthfully – that he’d have hated to be seen with drips and needles stuck all over him.

  She acquiesced, noting, with an unreadable little smile, that she was used to not doing things – not writing to him ever, nor ringing him up. Not at his office. Not at home. Nowhere. She always had to wait for him to make the contact. I looked appalled and she said defiantly, ‘When we were together, it was pure delight. Like wartime furloughs. Utterly without ordinary moments. We met sometimes on a friend’s barge on the Shannon, once on a yacht in Spain, once in a flat in Istanbul. Never for long. But he was so happy at being able to do what he never ordinarily did …’

  Christ, I thought, he’d raised negativity to a mystique! He was a one-man cult and had brainwashed her good and proper. I suddenly realized that I disliked him deeply and had, unknown to myself, done so for years. No wonder my brothers had fled to Australia and Ecuador.

  By now I had spent three days in the hospital with my mother –
the stroke had happened on the Wednesday morning. There was nothing to do but wait, talk to doctors about their scans, filter their pessimism back to her, hold her hand. The staff, predictably, was assiduous, so I had a lot of help.

  ‘Such a fine man,’ I would hear them murmuring prayerfully to her in corridors and guest areas. ‘What a tragedy!’ Sometimes they went with her to the chapel. One of the nurses was a member of the League to Save the Unborn Child. She, she told my mother, rarely questioned the will of God but found it hard to see a clean-living teetotaller like my father struck down when the town was full of drunks whose blood-pressure seemed not to give them a moment’s trouble. ‘God forgive me, I’m a desperate rebel!’ boasted this docile mouse, trembling under her blue, submissive veil.

  These conversations, I admit, gave my mother a lot more consolation than I could provide. Communicating with her has never been my forte. She was younger than my father and totally his creature. They were what’s called a fine couple. She’s five feet ten, graceful, blonde-speckled-tastefully-with-grey, dutiful, cheerful, plays tennis and bridge, takes pleasure in her volunteer work for his causes and has never, in my presence, revealed a spark of even the mild brand of rebelliousness favoured by the blue-veiled nurse. None. My sisters’ opinion is that she’s been emotionally lobotomized. By whom?

  I went from time to time to look at him. He was semi-paralysed and his face was badly askew: mouth twisted up and down in a vertical, Punch-and-Judy leer. Doubleness had finally branded him. Nobody but me, though, seemed to have had such a thought. At least nobody voiced it, and neither, to be sure, did I. My mother kept putting her hand on his brow, murmuring coaxing endearments and kissing his convulsed grey face. She hoped something might be getting through. This must have drained her emotionally for, in the evenings, she went back to her hotel and was served a meal in bed.

  This left me free to dine en ville with Artemis Sheehy, whose weekend was, I reminded myself, available and blank. Despite my advice, she yearned to do precisely what my mother had been doing: put her long-fingered hand on my father’s brow and kiss him well.

  I decided – in retrospect it is impossible to disentangle my motives – to let her. From hope? Pity? As aversion-therapy? How can I say?

  We had by now had a row, or rather we had had another. Our relations from the start had been edgy. Why, I queried on Friday evening, as we sat waiting for the baked Alaska – I had, since she refused to drink with me, had a bottle of claret to myself – why had she let my father cast her as Patient Griselda, while he played the Pillar of the Irish Establishment? A P.I.E., I mocked, that was what he was, a po-faced Pie! An escapee from the novels of Zola and nineteenth-century operetta! Old hat! Self-serving! A canting humbug! My jealousy revenged itself on his charm – I now thought of it as smarm – and on his unassailable advantage in the minds of my mother and Artemis: his poignantly stricken state. The new-felled Knight!

  ‘Can you’, I harried, ‘deny that he is – was a hypocrite?’

  What could she do, in all decency, but throw down her napkin and leave? I, waiting for the bill, had to let her go – and, anyway, knew I had her on a string. I was her only connection with him and so could let her stew. Greedy from anger – and satisfying one appetite in lieu of another – when the baked Alaska arrived with the bill, I ate her portion as well as my own. It struck me, as I walked morosely back to my hotel, that I was beginning to act like him. Ruthless and masterful. I hated myself. Still – I licked the last of the baked Alaska from my lips – it would be pointless to forgo my advantage by capitulating too soon.

  Sure enough, she rang me next morning. Triumphant – but hiding it – I was sweetness itself. And contrite. She must, I begged, see how hard it was for me to hold my mother’s hand by day and hers in the evening? I was painfully torn – as no doubt my father too had been. Instinctively, I was blending my image with his: an anticipation of what was to happen when obituaries appeared with photographs of his young self, looking, as was universally noted, disturbingly like me. But, to go back to my conversation with Artemis, I now made a peace-offering, which was that if she really wanted me to, I would take her to see him this evening, after my mother had left the hospital.

  She accepted and, as I had tried to dissuade her, could hardly blame me for the shock. His skewed mouth dribbled. There were tubes in his nose. He looked worse than dead. He looked like an ancient, malicious changeling put together from that grey stuff with which wasps build their nests. Or ectoplasm or papier mâché made from old, pulped bibles. These conceits swarmed through my head as I watched, then, from pity, ceased to watch her.

  She was devastated, disgusted, guilty: a mirror of myself. Did she also feel that hot rush of feeling which, for days now, had been distracting and perhaps healing me? The urge to fuck, which is a pro-life remedy for death-fears? People get it in wartime and, notoriously, in graveyards and during blackouts and other foreshadowings of mortality. I let her look her fill. I even left her alone lest, like my mother, she wish to kiss him. I don’t know whether she did.

  I waited in the hospital-green corridor, not hurrying her adieux which, whether she knew it or not, were what they were. He, the doctors had told me, would be a wreck if he lived but was unlikely to last the weekend. I hadn’t told her this, but guessed she knew. Then I took her on a drive along the coast, next for a long, twilit walk along a stretch of it, and finally to a small seaside hotel, where we spent the night comforting each other and conjuring away ghosts.

  My father died that night, which was just as well for all concerned, especially her. If he had lived, what would she have done? Gone to somewhere like Liverpool to have her child, then given it out for adoption? Or raised it in resentful solitude on the income he would feel frightened – if compos mentis – into coughing up? Taken an ‘abortion flight’ to London? Instead, once we had faced my mother with the fait accompli of our runaway marriage – registry office in London, followed by a conciliatory Church ceremony back home – Artemis became part of the household which, for three years, she had been forbidden to phone. Sometimes, she tells me, she used, in her loneliness, to dial the number anyway then listen, silently, to our irritably convivial voices.

  ‘Hullo! Speak up. Who is it? Press Button B! Oh it’s the heavy breather again! What do you want, Heavy Breather? If you’re a burglar, we’re all at home so there’s no point trying to break in!’

  Now she is in and the noses of my sisters’ children – none of them Learies – are put out of joint by the glorious prospect of Frank Junior’s birth. Any minute now my mother will phone with news of my new brother’s entry under false colours into the Leary clan. Brother-masquerading-as-son, he will be born under the true Leary sign of duplicitous duality.

  And I? Well, I’m in Law School and active in the Student Union. People ask whether I’ll go into politics and my fear is that I may find myself turning into a carbon copy of my father. I am, after all, living by his principles and can’t see quite how to break out. Drinking claret instead of rum in coke seems an inadequate gesture, and my support for Family Planning, Abortion and Divorce has been hailed by some of his cronies as the sort of forward-looking thinking to which he himself might well have subscribed had he lived. Times have changed, they say, and we must march to the European Community’s tune if we want subsidies for our farmers. After all, providing the option to use contraception, etc., obliges nobody to avail themselves of it. And anyone who does can repent later. God is good and there’s no point being simple-minded. So, they would have me think, opposing the letter of my father’s laws is a way of being true to their spirit.

  Maybe. It’s hard to tell. Double-think is the order of the day.

  Of course I rejoice in Artemis’s love, though here too a shiver of doubt torments me: does she see him in me? Am I two people for her? To be sure, it’s foolish to probe! We’re happy and … there’s the phone! Alleluia! Where are my car keys? Frank Junior must be on his way.

  The Corbies’ Communion

&nb
sp; Liam sat, glassed-in, on a half landing crammed with photographs. It was easy to heat, which was why he came here when he couldn’t sleep. Lately he had been feeling the cold.

  Images of himself gleamed mockingly but could, if he twitched his head, be dissolved in light-smears or made to explode, milkily, like stars.

  ‘Sap!’ he told a young Liam. ‘What was there to smirk about?’ Kate had mounted bouquets of snaps in which she – why had he not noticed? – was often less than present: half-hidden under hats or bleached-out as if too easily reconciled to mortality. The solid one was himself who had seized his days with a will visible even in creased press cuttings. Cocky and convivial, the past selves could be guises donned by some mild devil to abash him. Flicking whiskey at them, he managed to exorcize the Liam who was accepting a decoration from the country’s ex-president and an award from someone he could no longer place. OLD POLEMICIST HONOURED bragged a headline. GREAT MAVERICK RECONCILED AT LAST. Black-tied, white-tied, tweedy in a sequence of Herbie Johnson hats, alone, on podia and at play, the personae zoomed in and out of focus. Liam at the races. Liam on a yacht. Some wore whites as though for cricket, a game no Irishman of his stripe would have played. That ban was now obsolete. By humiliating the old masters, West Indian bowlers had freed the sport and its metaphors.

  ‘You had a grand innings!’ a recent visitor had exclaimed. ‘Close to a century!’ Liam, loath to be sent off to some Pavilion in the Sky, pressed an imaginary stop-button. Rewind. Replay. But replays were nightmares and Kate featured in them all.

  ‘Was I such a bastard to you?’ he cajoled one of her half-averted faces. It was bent over a picnic basket, counting hard-boiled eggs. ‘Neglectful? Selfish?’ The face would not look up.

  ‘I could kill you for dying,’ he told her. His watch hands pointed to four.