Under the Rose Read online

  ‘A bird never flew on wan wing.’ The brogue, eroded in England, renascent on his return, warmed like a marching tune. ‘Have the other half of that.’ He nodded at Hennessy’s glass.

  ‘A small one, so.’

  Condon rapped on the wood. ‘Same again, Mihail,’ he told the bar-curate confidentially.

  ‘Your wife’s in poor health?’ Hennessy commented.

  Condon sighed. ‘The Change.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Hennessy with distaste.

  ‘Shshsh.’ Condon put a finger to his lips. There were voices in the public bar.

  *

  ‘Bloody Gyppos …’ An Anglo-Irish roar. ‘Regular circus. At least the Yids can fight.’

  ‘… died in the frost,’ cried a carrying female version of the same. ‘I’ve started more under glass.’

  ‘Well, here’s to old Terry then. Chin-chin and mort aux vaches.’

  ‘What’d you join, Terry? French Foreign Legion?’

  ‘No, we’re …’

  ‘Make mine a Bloody Mary.’

  Condon dug an elbow into Hennessy’s side. ‘Tell me,’ he whispered in agitation, ‘why am I whispering? Why do fellows like that roar and you and me lower our voices in public? It’s our country, isn’t it?’

  Hennessy shrugged. ‘Rowdies,’ he said contemptuously.

  But that wasn’t it. Hennessy hadn’t lived with the English the way Condon had and couldn’t know. It was all arrogance: the roars, the titters. All and always. Condon knew. Wasn’t he married to one? Old Hennessy was looking at him oddly. A soapy customer. Don’t trust. Think, quickly now, of something soothing. Right. His knight’s costume tonight in the bedroom pier-glass. Spurs, epaulets, his own patrician nose: mark of an ancient race. The image, fondly dandled, shivered and broke the way images do. Ho-old it. Patrician all right. A good jaw. Fine feathers – ah no, no. More to it than that. The spirit of the Order was imbuing him. Mind over matter. Condon believed in that order of things. Like the Communion wafer keeping fasting saints alive over periods of months. He was a reasoning man – trained in the law – but not narrow, acknowledged super-rational phenomena. More things, Horatio – how did it go? Membership in an ancient religious Order must entail an infusion of grace. Tonight was the ceremony to swear in new members. Condon being one. An important, significant moment for him, as he tried to explain to Elsie. But she was spiritually undeveloped.

  ‘A sort of masonry then?’ she’d asked when he’d told her how all the really influential Dublin businessmen … Certainly NOT or, anyway, not only. Why, the Order dated back nine hundred years. But the English cared only for their own pageantry: Chelsea pensioners, their bull-faced queen. Circuses! Ha! He hated their pomps, had been personally colonized but had thrown off the yoke, his character forming in recoil. Did he know, he wondered now as often, how thoroughly he had thrown it off? Did she? He saw himself, two hours ago, coming down the stairs, waiting, one flight up, knee arched, for her admiration. She was in the kitchen.

  ‘Elsie.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Come here.’

  ‘Come here yourself. I’m not a dog.’

  ‘I want to show you something.’ That spoiled the surprise but she wouldn’t come if he didn’t beg. ‘Please, Elsie.’ He thought he might be getting pins and needles. Hand on the pommel of his sword, he waited.

  ‘Huwwy then, because the oven …’ She bustled into the hall, wiping her hands on a cloth. A lively, heavily painted woman in her forties, sagging here and there but still ten times quicker than himself in her movements. ‘Ho!’ she checked and roared. ‘Tito Gobbi, no less! Or is it Wichard Tucker. You’re not going out in it?’

  Envy!

  He walked down the stairs, minding his cloak. ‘What’s for dinner?’

  ‘Steak and kidney pie.’

  ‘My ulcer!’

  ‘You haven’t a nerve in your body. How could you have an ulcer?’

  Her cooking still undermined him – the first thing he had dared notice when he’d attended those parties of hers in Scunthorpe. He’d been a filler-in then: the extra bachelor asked to balance the table. The tight velvet of her evening trousers had drawn his attention and the display of Sheffield plate. It was on his own sideboard now. (‘Mr Condon likes his gwub,’ she’d noted.) The ‘w’ she put in ‘Patrick’ when she began to use his name impressed him. He thought for a while it might be upper-class. (‘I sweat bwicks when Patwick tells a joke!’) It was a relief as well as a disappointment when she turned out to be a housekeeper who had married her ageing employer. When the old man died within a year of marriage, Condon rallied round. Mourning enhanced her attractiveness but sat lightly on her. She was quick – giddy, he thought now – and he couldn’t keep up with her, seemed to get heavier when he tried. Even her things turned hostile. He remembered the day her electric lawn-mower ran off with him. Weeping with rage, he had struggled to hold it as it plunged down the area slope and crashed through the kitchen window – with himself skidding behind: Handy Andy, Paddy-the-Irishman! The servants were in stitches. He didn’t dare ask her not to mention it, could still hear her tell the story – how many times? – to neighbours over summer drinks on the wretched lawn: ‘And away it wan with pooah Patwick!’ They had neighed, hawhawed, choked themselves. He hated them. Buggers to a man. Bloody snobs in their blazers with heraldic thingamybobs on the pockets. Always telling him off. (‘In England, people don’t say “bloody”!’ ‘“Bugger” is rather a strong term over here, old man!’ So well it might be!) What he’d put up with! And if you didn’t put up with it you had no sense of humour. Well, their day was done. India, Ghana, Cyprus, even Rhodesia … Little Ireland had shown the way. Let England quake! The West’s awake! The West, the East – which of them cared for England now?

  ‘Ah Jesus, that stuff’s out of date,’ Patrick’s cousin told him when he came back to live in Ireland. ‘Our economy is linked to England’s. Let the dead bury the dead! And isn’t your wife English?’

  Her! He looked at her scraping out the remnants of pastry from the dish. Greedy! But she kept her figure. People admired her. ‘A damn fine woman,’ they told Patrick who was half pleased and half not. He had never forgiven her evasion of his embrace in the car coming from the church ceremony and the way she had lingered in the hotel bar before making for their bedroom. He had lingered too but, damn it, that was understandable. He was chaste, whereas she – decadent product of a decadent country. Bloomy and scented like a hot-house flower warmed by the trade winds of the Empire.

  ‘Why are you looking at me like that?’

  ‘I was thinking’, Patrick said, ‘we Irish are a spiritual people! All that about the Celt having one foot in the grave, you know? Well, the older I get, the truer I know it to be.’

  She hooted.

  ‘I suppose you don’t want pudding?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Apple charlotte.’

  He held out his plate. ‘No cream?’

  ‘Oh Patwick! Your waist bulge!’

  ‘I want cream.’

  He scattered sugar on the brown cliffs of his charlotte. Brown, crumbly hills and crags such as the Knights must have defended against Turks and Saracens. The Irish branch to which Patrick belonged, lacking aristocratic quarterings, had a merely subsidiary connection, but Patrick managed to forget this and anyway she would never know. He took and ate the last brown bastion of charlotte from his plate.

  She was fidgeting with hers. Afraid of carbohydrates. Her contaminated beauty excited him and sometimes, when she was asleep beside him, he would lean over and, between the ball and finger and thumb, fold the wrinkles into uglier grooves. Smoothing them, he could almost restore her to her peak, a time when men used to look after her and draw, with final cocks of the head in his direction, interrogation marks in the air: how, their wonder grilled him, had she come to marry him? How? Mmpp! Small mystery there when you came down to brass tacks. Widow’s nerves. She wanted a man. Anything – he lambasted himself – in trousers. Much mor
e to the point was the question: why had he married her? He was a man given to self-query. Pious practices – meditation, examination of conscience – imposed by the various rules he had embraced had revealed to Condon the riches of his own mind. It was theatre to him who had rarely been to a theatre if not to see a panto at Christmas. The first plushy swish of the curtain – he kept his thoughts sealed off in social moments lest one surface and reveal itself – the first dip into that accurately spotlit darkness, when he had a spell of privacy, was as stimulating as sex. How, today’s Mind demanded of yesterday’s, had it made itself up? Why? What if it had it to do over again? Any regrets? Any guidelines for the future? Doppel-ganging Condons stalked his own mental boards. Why had he married was a favoured theme to ponder on drives down the arteries of Ireland – frequent since Elsie, despite his work being in Dublin, had insisted on buying a ‘gentleman’s residence’ in County Meath. ‘Why?’ he would ask himself, as the tyres slipped and spun through wintery silt or swerved from a panicky rabbit. ‘Why? Why? – Ah, sure I suppose I was a bit of a fool! Yes.’ Marriage had looked like a ladder up. It had proved a snake. ‘A bit of a fool in those days, God help us.’ Better to marry than to burn – but what if you burned within marriage?

  Condon still awoke sweating from nightmare re-enactments of that First Night. ‘Saint Joseph,’ he still muttered, as he fought off the dream, ‘Patron of Happy Families, let me not lose respect for her!’ (‘Patwick’, she used to say, ‘is a tewwible old Puwitan! Of course that makes things such fun for him! It’s being Iwish!’) He had gone to complain and confess to an English priest who reassured him. It was all natural, an image of Divine Love. Condon knew better, but let himself be swayed. Hours after she had said good night he, stiffened by a half-bottle of port from her former husband’s stock, would mount the stairs, stumble briefly about in the bathroom and, in a gurgle of receding water, in darkness and with a great devastation of springs, land on the bed of his legal paramour. (‘Patwick! You make me feel like Euwo-o-opa!’) So let her. Who’d turned whom into an animal? If this is natural, natural let it be! Her cries were smothered, her protests unheeded. The swine revenged themselves on Circe: multiplied, enormous, he snuffled, dug, burrowed, and skewered (‘Patwick, you might shave!’) flattening, tearing, crushing, mauling, then rolling away to the other end of the bed to remark, ‘I see the hedge needs clipping. Have to see to it. Sloppy!’ For his spirit refused to follow where his flesh engaged. He felt embarrassed afterwards, preferred not to breakfast with her and took to slipping out to a hotel where he was able, as a bonus, to eat all he wanted without hearing remarks about calories.

  Tonight he would be taking a vow of Conjugal Chastity, promising ‘to possess his vessel in sanctification and honour’. (Ha! Put a stop to her gallop!) Formerly, Knights’ wives had been required to join in the oath – imagine Elsie: a heretic – but that practice had been abolished. Fully professed Knights took vows of celibacy.

  Condon had long concluded that Elsie’s appeal for himself had lain in her Protestantism. Bred to think it perilous, he had invested her and it with a risky phosphorescence. Which had waned. Naturally enough. Marooned, the buoyant Medusa clogs to the consistency of gelatine, and what had Protestantism turned out to be but a set of rules and checks? More etiquette than religion. Elsie got the two mixed up. He doubted that she saw a qualitative difference between adultery and failure to stand up when a woman came into the room.

  ‘A bahbawwian,’ she’d start in, the minute some poor decent slob like Hennessy was well out the door. ‘The man’s a bahbawwian! You’ve buwwied me among the beastly Hottentots!’

  His people.

  ‘No, Patwick! They are not fwiendly! It’s all a fwaud! They’re cold and sniggewing and smug! Bahbawwians!’

  Well, there was no arguing with prejudice. And he knew right well what it was she missed in Ireland: smut and men making passes at her. What she’d have liked would be to hobnob with the Ascendancy. Hadn’t she wanted to follow the hunt tomorrow?

  ‘The foliage will be glowious! Amanda’s keeping two places in her jeep. I’d have thought you’d have wanted to see the countwy. You talk enough about Ireland.’

  He didn’t. He hated land untamed by pavements, had a feeling it was cannibalic and out to get him. Explicable: his ancestors had been evicted off it after toiling and starving on it. He’d got his flinty profile from men pared down by a constant blast of misfortune.

  ‘Please, Patwick. I told the Master we’d follow.’

  ‘No.’

  The word ‘Master’ embarrassed him. He hated hunts: the discomfort of Amanda Shand’s jeep rattling his bones over frozen fields and withered heaps of ragweed. Booted and furred, the women would squeal and exchange dirty jokes as they followed the redcoats (‘Pink, Patwick! Please!’) on their bloody pursuit down lanes like river-beds where brass bedsteads served as slatternly gates, and untrimmed brambles clawed.

  ‘I’m spending the night at the club. I can’t make it.’

  She pouted.

  He shrugged.

  She made little enough effort with his friends, so why should he put up with Miss Amanda Shand of Shand House, a trollopy piece, louse-poor but with the Ascendancy style to her still: vowels, pedigree dogs. The dogs she raised for a living, and was reputed to have given up her own bed to an Afghan bitch and litter. But, until the roof fell in on them, those people kept up the pretence. Elsie could have helped consolidate his position – he’d hoped for this – if she’d been the hostess here that she’d been in Scunthorpe. He needed friends. He was a briefless barrister and had been too long abroad. She could have increased his support so easily if she’d turned her charm on his clerical relatives. But no. They didn’t stand up when she came into a room.

  ‘A priest in this country takes precedence over a woman, Elsie.’

  ‘You’ve buwwied me among the beastly Hottentots!’

  And tears. And accusations. Why did he leave her to moulder here? She’d given him the best years of her life. Why shouldn’t she come to his meeting tonight? Even Masons had a women’s night.

  Masons!

  ‘The military monks, to whose Order I have the honour to belong, were celibate. There is no place for women in our ceremonies.’

  More tears. He stayed on guard. In a long war, victory can be short-lived and tears a feint. When she said:

  ‘Don’t you care for me any more?’ he answered,

  ‘I love nobody but Jesus.’

  ‘Oh!’ Her mouth fell open unguardedly and showed her fillings. ‘Jesus!’ she repeated. ‘Jesus!’ She used a little scream and ran out of the room.

  In the old days, she used to flatten him with humour. But then, on her own ground, she’d had a gallery. Without one, Jesus became invincible.

  Patrick, beginning to feel sorry for her, was pouring her a drink, when the doorbell rang. Hennessy. Patrick put down the glass and ran to head him off. He mustn’t come in. A guest would resurrect Elsie who could make him her sounding-board, stooge, straight man and microphone to funnel God knew what bad language and hysteria to the clubs and pubs of half Dublin.

  Condon bundled Hennessy down the stairs and back into his car.

  ‘Right you are,’ Hennessy kept acquiescing. ‘Right, right, Condon. We’ll have a drink in the local. I love pubs. Nice and relaxed. Fine, don’t give it a thought.’

  *

  Voices from the public bar:

  ‘Remember that time the UN took a contingent of Paddies to the Congo? No, dear, not the Irish Guards, the Free State Army. All dressed in bullswool. That’s what they call it, cross my heart. No, of course I don’t know is it from bulls, but it is as thick as asbestos and thorny as a fairy rath. And off they went dressed up to their necks in it to the Congo. Left, right, left, right, or whatever that is in Erse.’

  ‘To the tropics.’

  ‘Must have been cooked to an Irish stew.’

  ‘Ready for the cannibals.’

  ‘Which reminds me, Amanda, where are we din
ing?’

  ‘Not with me, dears, I haven’t a scrap in the place.’

  *

  So Amanda Shand was there. Patrick drank morosely. Hennessy stood up and said he had to go where no one could go for him. Patrick reflected that Hennessy was a bit vulgar sometimes all right. A bit of a Hottentot.

  *

  ‘… hear the one about the two old Dublin biddies discussing the Congo. One says a neighbour’s son has been “caught by the Balloobas” “By the Balloobas, dija say, Mrs?” says her crony. “Oh that musta been terrible painful!”’

  Laughter.

  ‘And the one about …’

  Patrick closed his ears. Hear no, see no, think no evil. Difficult. It wormed its way everywhere, sapped the most doughty resistances.

  He thought of a visit he had made that morning to a clerical cousin confined in a home for mad priests – a disagreeable duty but Patrick had felt obliged. Blood was thicker than water and he had promised his aunt he’d go. He’d come away feeling pained. Weakness flowed like a contagion from Father Fahy. A mild fellow, shut up because of his embarrassing delusions, he thought himself the father of twelve children with a wife expecting a thirteenth.

  ‘I don’t mind the number,’ he had confided to Condon, ‘I’m not superstitious about such matters. As a priest …’ The smile flicked off and on. It was not impressive, for his teeth fitted badly and there were no funds to get inmates new ones. As long as he stayed shut up here, ecclesiastical authority saw little point in throwing good money after bad. ‘Poor Anna is worn out, tense, you know, frayed. She worries about our eldest, Brendan, who’s up in the College of Surgeons and …’ The priest had names and occupations for every member of his imagined brood. ‘You know yourself, Patrick, women …’

  Fahy confided doubts about the Holy Father’s policy with regard to birth-control. ‘Poor Anna is a literal believer,’ he groaned, ‘a simple woman.’ He must have been a bad priest, a shirker. Wasn’t he trying to shift anxieties, which had sifted through the confessional grating, on to Patrick himself, the confessor’s confessor? Distasteful that a priest should imagine a wife for himself with such domestic clarity! How far, one tried to wonder, did the imaginings go? Bad times. Our Blessed Lady had foretold as much in 1917 to the children at Fatima. ‘My Son’, she had said, ‘has drawn back His hand to smite the world. I am holding it back but my arm grows tired.’ It must be numb by now. Well, Patrick was doing his bit, joining the Knights: a warrior against the forces of darkness. War. The language of the Church was heady with it but practice dampeningly meek. St George had been struck off the register of saints.