Under the Rose Read online

  He had been twice to bed, started to sleep, funked it and returned here. Catastrophe was tearing up his sky and panic circled: black as crows. Keeping it at bay, he topped up his whiskey and, from habit, hid the bottle behind a fern. Outside, the dawn-chorus made a seething churr. He was alone by choice, wanting neither minders nor commiseration.

  ‘You were plucky,’ he told a likeness of Kate, smiling in an old-time summer dress. ‘But you cheated on me! Became an invalid! Querulous! If you were alive now we’d be fighting!’

  Two nights ago she, contrary to what statistics had led him to expect, had died. He had counted on going first. She had always been here till now, hadn’t she? Even when this spoiled his plans! The thought startled him and his crossed leg pulsed. ‘Kate!’ he mourned, amazed. For years he, not she, had been the adventurer.

  ‘I know you resented that,’ he told a snapshot in which a child’s head bobbed past her face. ‘But you were happy at first. And later wasn’t so bad, surely?’ He scrutinized snaps taken in restaurants and on boating holidays on the River Barrow. ‘Was it?’ Helpless, he brushed a hand across dapplings from awnings and other people’s menus. Cobweb grudges, forgotten tiffs. ‘Damn it, Kate, did you put bad photos of yourself here to torment me? That could make me hate you!’

  Spying the whiskey bottle behind its plant, he reflected that hating her would be a relief – then that she might have planned the relief.

  His checked hand reached the bottle and poured more anyway. Nobody to stop him now! If she’d died twenty years ago he’d have remarried. Maybe even fifteen? Now – he was ninety. Had she planned that? Wryly, he raised the glass.

  ‘To you then, old sparring partner and last witness to our golden youth!’

  Losing her was radical surgery. Like losing half his brain. Like their retreat, years ago, to this manageable cottage. In the background to several snaps, their old house made a first, phantom appearance as a patch in a field, its roomy shape pegged out with string. Pacing the patch, strode Kate. Expansive, laughing, planning a future now behind them, she waved optimistic arms.

  ‘Shit!’

  He banged his head against the wall. More exploding stars! Watch it, Liam! You’re not the man you were!

  A civil-rights lawyer who had become a media figure in his prime, an activist who had brought cases to Strasbourg and The Hague, he had let her take over the private sector of their lives. This included religion. A mistake? Religion here was never quite private and their arrangements on that score jarred.

  The requiem mass which was to have comforted her would set his teeth on edge. It was a swindle that the Faith, having brought him woe – sexual and political – when he was young, should now pay no dividends. None. He had said so to the Parish Priest, a near-friend. Running into each other on the seafront, or watching blown tulips reveal black hearts in the breezy park, the two sometimes enjoyed a bicker about the off-chance of an afterlife: a mild one since neither would change his bias. Liam was past ninety and the PP was no chicken either.

  Brace up, Liam! The things to hold onto were those you’d lived by. Solidarity. The Social Contract. Pluck. Confronting a mottled mirror, he acknowledged the charge reflected back. Funerals here were manifestoes. His conduct at Kate’s must, rallied the mirror, bolster those who had helped him fight the Church when it was riding roughshod over people here. You couldn’t let them down by slinking back for its last vain comforts. How often had he heard bigots gloat that some Liberal had ‘died screaming for a priest’?

  They’d relish saying it of him all right! Addicts of discipline and bondage, the Holy Joes would get a buzz from seeing Liam dragged off by psychogenic demons. Toasted on funk’s pitchforks! Turned on its spit! Tasty dreams! In the real world, they’d settle for seeing him back in the fold – and why gratify them? Could Kate have wanted to? She who, in the vigour of her teens, had marched at Republican funerals, singing: ‘Tho’ cowards mock and traitors sneer / We’ll keep the red flag flying here’? Hair blowing, cheeks bright as the flag! Sweet, hopeful Kate!

  On the other hand, how refuse her her Mass? Anyway how many of the old guard were left to see whether Liam stood firm? Frail now and rigid in the set of their ways! He ticked them off on his fingers: a professor emeritus, some early proponents of Family Planning, secular schools and divorce, a few journalists whose rights he had defended, his successor’s successor at Civil Liberties: a barrister long retired. Who else? Half a score of widows confirmed the actuarial statistics which had played him false. Would they make it to Kate’s funeral? Not long ago, he had drawn a cluster of circles which she mistook at first for a rose. It was a map showing the radius within which each of their contemporaries and near-contemporaries was now confined. Those who still drove kept to their neighbourhoods. Those who did not might venture to the end of a bus route. Not all the circles touched.

  The Mass, though, would be accessible to most, being in the heart of town, in Trinity College chapel: a case of an ill wind bringing good, since the choice of venue – made when he, Kate and the twentieth century were a mutinous sixty – had lost pizzazz. Ecumenicism was now commonplace and the old Protestant stronghold had Catholic chaplains. The Holy Joes had him surrounded. For two pins he’d call off the ceremony – but how do that to Kate?

  ‘For Christ’s sake, Liam!’ He raged at himself. ‘There is no Kate! Hold onto your marbles! She’s gone!’ He poured his savourless whiskey into a fern.

  *

  Anger, a buffer against worse, had made him insult the PP when he came yesterday to condole. Priests, Liam had hissed, were like crows. They battened on death. Then he recited a poem which he remembered too late having recited to him before. Never mind! Rhymes kept unstable thoughts corralled.

  There were twa corbies sat in a tree,

  Willoughby, oh Willoughby.

  The tane unto the t’ither say

  ‘Where shall we gang and dine this day?

  In beyond yon aul fell dyke

  I wot there lies a new-slain knight …’

  Liam wasn’t dead yet but here was the first corby come to scavenge his soul in what the priest must think was a weak moment. If he did, he thought wrong. When asked about the Mass, Liam said he might call it off. He’d see when his daughter got here. Ha, he thought, the cavalry was coming. Her generation believed in nothing. Kitty was tough – Kate’s influence! The two had ganged up on him from the first, saying he was all for freedom outside the house and patriarchy within! How they’d laugh – he could just hear them! – at his seeing himself as slain when the dead one was Kate!

  Ah but – the thought stunned him – the living are also dying.

  ‘Naebody kens that he lies there,

  But his hawk and his hound and his lady fair.

  His hound is to the hunting gane,

  His hawk to bring the wild fowl hame,

  His lady’s ta’en anither mate

  Sae we may mak’ our dinner swate.’

  Kate’s remains had gone – as would his – to medical research. It felt odd not to have a corpse.

  ‘You’ll need some ritual,’ said the PP. ‘To say goodbye. Kate liked rituals. I used to bring her communion,’ he reminded, ‘after she became bedridden. Your housekeeper prepared things. You must have known.’

  Liam remembered a table covered with lace. Water. Other props. Of course he’d known! He had kept away while she made her last communions just as, to please his wife, Jaurès, the great French Socialist, let their daughter make her first one – to the shock of comrades for whom fraternizing with clerics was a major betrayal.

  A weakness?

  Liam sighed and the PP echoed the sigh. Many Irish people, mused the priest, went to Mass so as not to upset their relatives. ‘It was the opposite with Kate. Her religion meant a lot to her.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I know.’ The PP made his claim calmly.

  His lady’s ta’en anither mate thought Liam and called the priest a carrion crow. ‘The way the corbies took
communion’, he ranted, ‘was to eat the knight’s flesh. Tear him apart!’

  Suddenly tired, he must have dropped off then for when he awoke the PP had let himself out. Liam felt ashamed. ‘Tear him apart,’ he murmured, but couldn’t remember what that referred to. The word ‘ritual’ stayed with him though. It floated about in his head.

  *

  ‘I’m not doing it for Him!’ he told his daughter, Kitty, who now arrived off a plane delayed by fog. As though her brain too were fogged she stared at him in puzzlement.

  ‘HIM’, Liam tilted his eyes aloft. ‘I mean HIM.’ He shook an instructive fist heavenward, only to see her gaze ambushed by a light-fixture. She – Kate could have told him who to blame – was indifferent to religion and always nagging him about the wiring in the house.

  ‘Who’s “him”?’

  ‘God!’ More fist-shaking. ‘Bugger HIM. I don’t believe in HIM! I’ll be doing it for HER.’

  ‘Doing what?’ Living in England had made her very foreign.

  ‘Taking’, he marvelled at himself, ‘communion at your mother’s Requiem Mass. I’ll do it for her. For Kate. She’d have done it for me.’ His bombshell failed to distract Kitty from the fixture in the ceiling. Wires wavered from it like the legs of a frantic spider. He couldn’t remember how it had got that way. Had someone yanked off the bulb? His temper, lately, had grown hard to control.

  ‘I’m calling an electrician.’

  Liam, on getting no argument from Kitty, started one with himself. Holy Joes aside, the prime witnesses to his planned treachery would be the betrayed: those who had dared confront a Church which controlled jobs, votes and patronage. With surprising courage, vulnerable men – rural librarians and the like – had, starting back in the bleak and hungry ’40s, joined his shoe-string campaigns to challenge the collusion between dodgy oligarchs and a despotic clergy. Old now, many campaigners were probably poor and surely lonely. Not pliable enough to be popular, they were unlikely to be liked. Honesty thwarted could turn to quibbling and brave men grow sour. He wondered if they tore out light bulbs?

  Startling Kitty, he whispered: ‘They can put their communion up their arses.’ Luxuriating in blasphemy: ‘Bloody corbies! God-and-man-eating cannibals!’

  *

  He had grown strange. Her mother had warned her, phoning long distance with reports of his refusal to take his salt-substitute or turn off his electric blanket. ‘He’ll burn us down,’ she’d worried. ‘Or spill tea into it and electrocute himself! Stubborn,’ she’d lamented. ‘Touchy as a tinderbox. He’s going at the top!’

  Kitty reproached herself. She had not seen that these fears – transcendent, fussy, entertained for years – were justified at last. Poor mother! Poor prophetic Kate!

  Sedated now, he was dreaming of her as a bride. ‘Slim as a silver birch!’ he praised her in his sleep. True, wondered Kitty, or borrowed from those Gaelic vision-poems where a girl’s nakedness on some rough mountainside dazzles freaked-out men?

  ‘Kate,’ whimpered the sleeper. ‘Kate!’ His tone rang changes on that double-dealing syllable.

  Saliva, bubbling on his lip, drew from a jumble in Kitty’s memory the Gaelic word for snail: seilmide. When she was maybe four, he and she used to feed cherry blossom to snails. White and bubbly, the petals were consumed with brio as the surprisingly deft creatures folded them into themselves like origami artists.

  Kitty wiped away Liam’s spittle. Had she chosen to forget the tame snails, so as to feel free to poison the ones in her London garden, a thing she now did regularly and without qualms? She grew rucola there and basil and that heart-stopping flower, the blue morning glory, which looks like fragments of sky but shrivels in the sun. The snails got the young plants if you didn’t get them first.

  *

  She drove him out the country to take tea in a favourite inn. Sir Walter Scott had stayed here and a letter, testifying to this, was framed in a glass case. Across from it, iridescent in a larger one, was a stuffed trout.

  Liam buttered a scone and smiled at the waitress who returned his smile as women always had. ‘Women’, he remarked, watching as she moved off in a delicate drift of body odour, ‘are the Trojan mare! Mère.’ In his mouth the French word seethed breezily. He cocked a comical eye at Kitty and bit into the scone. ‘They don’t like to be outsiders, you see. That’s dangerous.’

  The drive had perked him up. He loved these mountains, had rambled all over them and could attach stories to places which, to Kitty, were hardly places at all. It was late September. Bracken had turned bronze. Rowan leaves were an airborne yellow and a low, pallid sun, bleaching out the car mirror, made it hard to drive. Dark, little lakes gleamed like wet iron and Liam who, in his youth, had studied Celtic poetry, listed the foods on which, according to the old poets, hermits, mad exiled kings and other Wild Men of the Woods had managed to survive.

  He paused as though a thought had stung him. Could it be fear that some wild man, slipping inside his own skull, had scrambled his clever lawyer’s mind?

  ‘He’s not himself,’ Kate had mourned on Kitty’s visits. The self Liam was losing had been such a model of clarity and grace that his undoing appalled them. He had been their light of lights and even now Kitty could not quite face the thought that he was failing. Now and again though, the process seemed so advanced as to make her wonder whether it might be less painful if speeded up? A release for him – who struggled so laboriously to slow it down.

  ‘Yew and rowan-berries,’ she heard him drone like a child unsure of his lesson – not the clever child Liam must have been but a slow-witted changeling, ‘haws, was it,’ he floundered, ‘and hazel-nuts, mast, acorns, pignuts … sloes …’

  It was an exercise of the will.

  ‘Whortleberries … dillisk, salmon, badger fat, wood-sorrel, honey …’ He faltered, ‘… eels … Did I say venison? Porpoise steak …’ His face was all focus: a knot, a noose. Its lines tautened as he grasped after two receding worlds: the Celtic one and that of the Twenties when he, and other Republicans had gone on the run like any wild man of the woods. They’d hardly have lived on berries though. Local sympathizers must, she guessed, have provided potatoes and bastable bread spread with salty butter. ‘Trout?’ he remembered, and his mouth gasped with strain as if he had been hooked.

  Now, though, tea and the stop in the inn had once again revived him. The old Liam, back and brave as bunting, was going through one of his routines. He had always been a bit of a showman.

  ‘In what way,’ Kitty asked encouragingly, ‘are women Trojan horses?’

  ‘Not horses,’ he corrected her. ‘Mares! Fillies! They conform. That’s why. Anywhere and everywhere. Here, for instance, they go to the Church and, behold, it catches them. It gets inside them. It’s as if Greeks inside the wooden horse inside the walls of Troy were to breathe in drugged fumes. They’d become Trojans, collaborate …’

  Twinkling at her over his tea cup. The old teasing Liam. Back for how long? As with an unreliable lover, she feared letting down her defences. But wouldn’t it be cruel not to? Yes-and-no? Kitty was a professional interpreter. She worked with three languages and liked to joke that her mind was inured to plurality and that the tight trio she, Kate and Liam had made when she was growing up had led to this. Her mother, going further, had blamed it for the rockiness of Kitty’s marriage, an on-off arrangement which was currently on hold.

  ‘We were too close,’ Kate used to say. ‘We made you old before your time.’

  And it was true that Liam had modelled rebellious charm for her before she was eight. How could the boys she met later compete? Add to this that the house had been full of young men about whom she knew too much too soon: his clients. One was a gaol bird and a bomber. Surprisingly domestic, he helped Kate in the kitchen and taught Kitty to ride a bike, running behind her, with one hand on the saddle. This, unfairly, made her suspicious later of helpful men.

  ‘A penny for them?’

  Liam’s blue, amused eyes held hers. ‘We’,
he repeated, ‘send our women into the Church and it slips inside their heads!’ She recognized an old idea, dredged from some spilled filing system in his brain.

  ‘You sent me to school to nuns.’ She had once resented this. ‘Was I a Trojan filly? A hostage? Would you have lost credibility if we’d found a secular school? Or were there none in those days?’

  Liam smiled helplessly.

  He had lost the thread. That happened now. Poor Liam! She gripped his knee. ‘Darling!’ she comforted.

  But he reared back with a small whinnying laugh. ‘I know what you’re thinking!’ he accused. ‘Liam, you’re thinking, it’s been nice knowing you. But now you’re gone! Your mind’s gone.’

  ‘It’s not gone. You were very sharp just now about how the Church captured me and my mother.’

  ‘Oh, they didn’t capture you the way they did her’.

  ‘They didn’t capture her either.’ Kitty wanted to be fair. ‘She was open to doubt. They don’t like that.’

  ‘True enough.’ He seemed cheered.

  ‘She was never a bigot.’

  ‘So you think we should go ahead with the Mass?’

  ‘Why not?’

  *

  A mash of red-raspberry faces lined the pews which were at right angles to the altar. Stick-limbed old survivors tottered up the nave to condole with Liam and remind him of themselves. Some had fought beside him, seventy years ago, in the Troubles or, later, in Civil Liberties. They had seen the notices Kitty had put in national and provincial papers and travelled, in some cases, across Ireland, to this shrunken reunion. A straight-backed Liam stood dandified and dazed. Ready, Kitty guessed, to fly to bits if the shell of his suit had not held in his Humpty Dumpty self. The suit had been a sore point with her mother.

  ‘Riddled with tobacco burns!’ had been her refrain. ‘For God’s sake throw it out!’

  He wouldn’t though. And his tailor was dead. So Kitty’s help was enlisted. She had scoured London for the sort of multi-buttoned, rigidly interlined suits which he recognized as ‘good’ and which might well have repelled small bullets. His sartorial tastes were based on some Edwardian image of the British Empire which he had chosen to emulate, as athletes will an opponent’s form. Nowadays, Japanese businessman seemed in pursuit of a modern approximation of it, for she kept running across them up and down Jermyn Street and in Burberries and Loeb.