Under the Rose Read online

  ‘Poor Jack,’ sighed his cronies. Yet they liked her for her spirit and because, when not blasting the sour grapes of life, she was, said Teresa’s mother, ‘great value’. Mrs Dunne, while deploring her friend’s morals, hailed in her that fine contempt for convention which titillates the Irish.

  ‘She’s great company,’ she acknowledged, ‘and hasn’t a pick of human respect.’

  That was what worried Teresa. For how reconcile the ideals of her school nuns with tolerance of Mrs Malahide, who must be the most brazen thing alive? Lipstick ran up the crack of her harelip, and contamination oozed from her. She had a moustache yellow from chainsmoking, and today – Sunday – her feet lazed in cinders which had spilled past the confines of her fenderless hearth. Drifts of turf-ash had possibly settled in her hair, which was like the plumage of an old hen. Both hair and ash had orange streaks, like fossil memories of fire.

  Scattered on the floor were the Sunday Pictorial and News of the World, banned English papers which had been smuggled past the Customs inside copies of The Catholic Herald. Teresa read the headlines with an affronted eye: SCOUTMASTER FOUND TROUSERLESS … A fold concealed where DECEIVED MISTRESS CHOPS OFF LOVER’S …

  To quell the riot in her mind, she told herself that perhaps no more had been chopped off than the lover’s tie. But no: not in that paper, or Bunty Malahide wouldn’t trouble to smuggle it in. Dirt was what she liked. Scandal. Her mind was beyond description.

  ‘Impure,’ the nuns would have said, but the word fell short. Failing to anticipate Mrs Malahide, they had sent Teresa forth into the world, unfit to cope and were perhaps no fitter themselves. Tender rituals absorbed them, and most of last term had been spent planning the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, for which every girl had been required to buy a ten-shilling lily. Those whose families found this a strain might, the nuns conceded, substitute a chrysanthemum. But the concession was reluctant. Each donor was to say ‘O Mary I give thee the lily of my heart! Be thou its guardian forever,’ then present a bloom securely tipped with waterproof paper, lest sap stain her white uniform skirt.

  ‘You could hardly’, the nuns’ smile was rueful, ‘say “I give thee the chrysanthemum of my heart.”’

  ‘It was Lacy.’ Mrs Malahide had grown impatient. ‘He exposed himself to her. I don’t know why your mothers don’t tell you the facts of life. Poor bugger’s been sacked. I suppose his family will starve. Do you’ – she drew greedily on a cigarette – ‘take my meaning? We’re not talking about the exposition of the Sacrament!’ On her lips the words sizzled into blasphemy.

  Teresa gasped. Outrage released a babyish prickle of tears. Turning to hide this, she was once again assaulted by the headline CHOPS OFF … What? That! What else did they keep harping on Sunday after Sunday in the News of the World?

  ‘Why will Mr Lacy’s family starve?’ She made fast for the periphery of the story.

  ‘You tell me!’

  In exasperation, Mrs Malahide drew on her cigarette, then emptied her lungs: pfff! Smoke coiled, and her hare-lip was very visible. ‘It was his penis,’ she told Teresa. ‘He showed it to her. Can you tell me why that would make a girl of her age – nearly your age – faint? How old are you now? Twelve? Thirteen? Haven’t you ever seen your father without his clothes? Or your brother? Well then? It’s a necessary part of nature as you’ll soon discover. I blame those nuns for poisoning your minds. Sick sisters. Why hide things – unless they’re being hypocritical, which I have no doubt they are!’ And Bunty Malahide began to tell how Father Creedon – a man crippled with arthritis – was enjoying the sexual favours of all the nuns in the local convent. Like a cock in a barnyard or a victorious stag. Exciting herself, and possibly forgetting to whom she was talking, she worked up conviction. She always downed a glass or two of Tullamore Dew while reading the Sunday papers.

  Teresa was fired by battle-frenzy. The abuse of adult privilege outraged her, and the maligning of the nuns called for punishment. ‘Bear witness to your religion,’ she had been taught two years ago, in confirmation class, but the occasion had not arisen until now. Avenge, O Lord, those slaughtered saints whose bones … The spirit of old wars curdled her blood. She could feel this happen: clots blocking the flow as they did in anatomy charts. Evil was incarnate before her. Her eyes felt squinty, and the air glowed red.

  The funny side would strike her later: for Mrs Malahide’s flights of fancy would have been brought down to earth by a single look at Mother Dolours’ dowager’s hump, or at pale little Mother Crescentia who flew into such passions about ‘men keeping women from the altar’. Quite suddenly, while putting a theorem on the blackboard, this meek nun would swing around, stab the air with chalk, and launch a polemic so ahead of its time that, years later, when the issue became a live one, few of the girls she had harangued would recall her yearning to be a priest. At first, the idea was too odd to shock, and by the time it did Mother Crescentia’s bones would be mouldering in the very graveyard whose soil, if you believed Bunty Malahide, was white with those of strangled babies sired by Father Creedon.

  ‘Why else’, Bunty wanted to know, ‘would nuns wear those bulky clothes? It’s to hide their pregnancies! Holy Mothers forsooth! You don’t think he goes there to hear confessions?’

  ‘She needs a gag!’ Teresa told her mother later. She would have cheerfully watched Mrs Malahide burn at the stake. At the very least, the Englishwoman should be forced to eat her own unwholesome words. Instead, magnified by laughter, they mocked Teresa when she rushed off, feeling every bit as assaulted as the girl in the park must have done when confronted by Mr Lacy.

  For weeks the memory rampaged on. She had not tried to argue. What would have been the point? Bunty Malahide loved a fight and the one way to hush her would have been to agree with her. Teresa couldn’t. That would have been a betrayal of sweet-cheeked Mother Fidelia, who had made her pupils promise to profess their faith without false diffidence and arm themselves against ridicule. Mother F., an ardent and pretty nun, inflamed her pupils, and for a whole term Teresa had day-dreamed about her, imagining shared heroics and intimacies so private that when the dentist pulled one of her teeth she went without gas lest she babble them out under its influence. For a while, even thinking of Mother F. made her skin tingle.

  What could have possessed Mr Lacy? Had he perhaps been taken short and having a pee?

  The story of his fall must be true, though, for he was now doing odd jobs in the Dunnes’ garden, where he looked old and bald without his uniform peaked cap. And maybe it was also true that his family was hungry, for one night when Teresa looked out her window, she saw him by moonlight stealing cauliflowers and putting them into a sack. Poor Lacy! She remembered his old threat, ‘I’ll have yez summonsed,’ and it struck her that she could do just that to him. Not that she would! The precariousness of self – he had lost some of his – was too upsetting. Earlier, she had seen him shelter from the rain under the empty sack, and his head had looked no bigger than a fist. Falling asleep, she dreamed that someone had exposed Mother Fidelia’s poor, cropped head. Nuns gave up their crowning glory when they took the veil.

  *

  Her mother had had a row with Bunty Malahide over what she’d said to Teresa, and then made it up.

  ‘How could you?’ reproached Teresa.

  But Mrs Dunne said you had to make allowances. Bunty’s life had not gone well. That was why she lived here. The Irish were good-hearted, unlike her own sort, who despised her for marrying down. ‘She’s good-hearted herself,’ argued Mrs Dunne. ‘Look how kind she is to Greta.’

  Greta was German and in need of kindness, now that Germany was losing the war. The map pins with which Teresa’s father marked Allied and Axis movements had reversed direction, and the march round and round the sofa, with which he and her brother Pat hailed the theme music before the BBC news, had acquired new swagger. ‘Léro léro lillubuléro,’ crowed Pat, lifting high his small, fat knees. Sometimes he banged two spoons together. He was six. ‘Lillubuléro
bullenalà!’ The tune was Irish, and a lot of our men were fighting with the Allies, so, although we were neutral, and miffed by Mr Churchill’s threatening to seize our ports, we wanted his side to win. Pat planned to kill Hitler when he grew up.

  You tried to hide such thoughts from Greta, though, and even Bunty, who hung out the Union Jack when Englishness welled up in her, refrained from trampling too brutally on Greta’s sore feelings. With victory in sight, she managed – most of the time – to be forbearing.

  ‘Well, she trampled on mine!’ Teresa blushed. The word ‘feelings’ reminded her of Mother F., and her anger at Bunty Malahide mingled with shame over a treason of her own. Queerly, at the height of her crush on the nun, she had felt impelled to write a mocking verse about her and to circulate it among her friends. The risk had excited her, as if she half hoped to be caught. Childishly, the jingle began with the words ‘The dark witch of Loreto’, and, as it went from desk to desk, someone changed ‘witch’ to ‘bitch’. That brought Teresa to her senses, and she snatched back her rhyme. She could be expelled. Girls had been for less – for trespassing in the nuns’ part of the convent or spying on the pool where they took sea baths in long, cotton dresses. Disrespect for the ‘brides of Christ’ was a sacrilege, and she spent nervous days wondering if a copy of her jingle had escaped her.

  The reality of her fear freed her. She now felt only pity for Mother Fidelia, stuck in her make-believe – which, it occurred to Teresa, was not unlike the games she and her classmates had played when they were small. Using pennyleaves for currency, they had sold field daisies for eggs and brown dockleaf blossoms for tea. Grass became string and rhubarb leaves wrapping paper. What difference was there between that and offering the Virgin the lily of your heart? The ‘brides of Christ’ didn’t even eat in public. If you gave one of them a sweet, she kept it for later. Everything was for later. They did nothing now, which was why it was so unfair of Mrs Malahide to pretend they did.

  ‘If I were you,’ said Teresa’s mother, ‘I’d talk less about feelings! Remember how you hurt Greta’s at Christmas?’

  How forget? It had been the talk of the village, after a dirndl-skirted Greta, her queenly braids done up in a crown, had given a children’s party. As if Christmas were something on which Germans had a special claim, she had invited all the small local children to celebrate it, and, in the end, most parents had decided to let them go. After all, the woman was not thought to be a Nazi, and she and her non-German husband were desperate to have babies but couldn’t. Let her have ours for an afternoon, said the villagers magnanimously. Jack Malahide supplied a bran tub to be groped in for prizes, and Mrs Dunne sent Teresa to help and to keep an eye on Pat, who was a bit of a handful.

  He was also the child whom Greta knew best, so she asked him to start things off by inviting a little girl to dance: a mistake. Pat, when shy, sat on the ground. Plonk. Backside down. There was no budging him.

  Greta didn’t understand this. Hunkering down to coax him, she brought the fun to a standstill, and shushed the other children, who became bored. There was – people said afterwards – a German stubbornness to this, and a barren woman’s pedantry. She kept on and on at Pat, while the others fidgeted and pinched each other and a boy grabbed the baby Jesus from the tasteful German crib. It was when someone pulled the plug on the fairy lights and several children began to cry that Teresa lost her head. ‘Pat,’ she cajoled, ‘ask Annie to dance. You’ll never grow up and kill Hitler if you’re afraid of a small girl.’

  At first she didn’t notice her gaffe, much less connect it with what happened next, which was that Greta gave a small scream, rushed to the telephone, and told the village operator that she wanted everyone to leave. Yes. Now. At once! Parents were to fetch their children. The party was over. ‘Take them away! I know now what you tell them behind my back! Oh you Irish are false! Tell the parents. Their children steal Baby Jesus and wish to kill Hitler. You hate me secretly.’

  Helplessly, Teresa tried to restore order while Greta sobbed, Pat still sat on the floor, and the more enterprising small boys pocketed the marzipan crib animals, which had been cooked with sugar-rations contributed by their mothers. Then someone put Heilige Nacht on the gramophone. It was Jack Malahide, who had borrowed the rector’s car – those who had petrol during the big Emergency were expected to help with minor ones – and was now piling children into it to deliver them home. Meanwhile, his wife calmed Greta down and comforted her with whiskey.

  It was only when Teresa heard Bunty say to Greta that Teresa hadn’t meant to upset her that she knew she had. Greta, her flaxen plaits askew, was weeping over the ruins of her crib. Where, she wanted to know, was Baby Jesus? And the marzipan donkey? She looked like a wronged maiden in a tale by the Brothers Grimm.

  *

  Peace was made. But Greta was not the same. Like poor Lacy, she had lost her plumpness and her trust.

  It wasn’t all Teresa’s fault. The Church of Ireland – Protestant, despite the name – let Greta down, depriving her of spiritual comfort, since she, who was also a Protestant, had nowhere else to go. But how attend its services? Its small, embattled, but adamant congregation prayed hard against Germany, called God to its colours, and sang in unwavering chorus ‘Thou who made us mighty, make us mightier yet.’ Since ‘us’ meant Britain, this annoyed the native Irish as much as it did Greta. Patriots marvelled at the old oppressor calling itself ‘Mother of the Free’, and from time to time on a Friday night broke into the church to pee ritually on its floor.

  Friday was payday, when even poor Lacy, defying the confines of his life, was to be heard smashing his own possessions, driving his wife to despair, and chanting in the spirited abandon of drink, ‘Twas there that you whispered tenderly that you loved me, would always be Lily of the Lamplight, my ow-w-w-wn Lily Marlene.’

  This cut Greta to the quick. ‘Even our songs they steal!’ she wailed to her false friends, Mrs Malahide and Mrs Dunne, who consoled her with soft words and hard liquor.

  *

  January was snowy, and Colonel Williams’ pond froze, which gave people a rare chance to bring out their skates. The Colonel offered to supply a barbecue. No invitations were sent, since all were understood to be welcome – all, that is to say, except Greta. Williams, an ex-British officer, would not fraternize with the enemy.

  ‘Will she have the nous to stay away?’ worried Mrs Dunne. ‘I’ve dropped hints, but Greta’s not one to take them.’ Mrs Dunne sighed. Neutrality was tricky.

  Teresa had her own troubles. She had, after some hesitation, suspended her feud with Mrs Malahide so as to borrow her toboggan. It was the only one in the village. Everyone else used old sheets of corrugated iron.

  The Malahide attic was a trove of odd tackle: snow shoes, pith helmets, motoring veils and other aids for facing intemperate conditions. These, like the scaly tail which is kept hidden in the story of the mermaid who marries a fisherman, testified to their owners’ alien nature. The Malahides had lived in places whose foreignness clung to them. Jack Malahide, for instance, had a parasite in his blood which, according to local gossip, could only be caught on the rare occasions when it emerged to walk across his eyeball.

  While rummaging up there for skates for her mother, Teresa had had a shock.

  ‘I found a poem of yours,’ said Bunty Malahide, coming up behind her so suddenly that Teresa nearly let a trunk-lid fall on her own neck. ‘It slipped from your pocket. About a nun. It’s quite funny,’ she congratulated. ‘I must say you’re a dark horse!’ And she proceeded, teasingly, to recite it. ‘I added a verse.’

  This was of course crude. All about nuns with buns in the oven. Father Creedon’s name figured in it and Mother F.’s! Teresa felt sick – the more so because of something which had recently happened in school. ‘I’m disappointed in you!’ the nun had told her hurtfully. ‘You’ve let me down. You’re as silly and lightminded as the rest.’

  What had sparked the thing off was a discussion of the Seniors’ Christmas play. This
was about a pagan who got converted on his wedding day, then found himself in a moral dilemma when fellow-Christians wanted him to be a martyr while his bride claimed that he owed himself to her. It was resolved – predictably if you knew convent plays – by the bride’s own conversion. The thing was in hexameters. Deadly in more ways than one. A kind of trap, Teresa sensed, for girls like herself whom the nuns hoped might have a vocation. To elude this, she asked Mother Fidelia whether the converted bridegroom wasn’t a bit prone to spiritual pride? What about his telling his Christian mentor, who was deploring his reluctance to get himself killed, that the mentor didn’t know what it was like to have a wife? This, as Teresa remarked reasonably, was only a day after his wedding. How much could he know about having a wife himself? After one night?

  Mother F. blushed. Unprecedentedly. And the class dissolved in glee. Teresa, though usually quicker than the rest, was the last to see why. Sex, to be sure! The topic had, she saw with shock, invaded not only the sanctuary of school but the mind of Mother Fidelia. Indignantly, Teresa, too, blushed, and when accused by the nun of letting her down, felt that the shoe was on the other foot. Like it or not, the lily of her heart was festering and likely, as Shakespeare warned, to smell far worse than weeds!

  And now here was Bunty M., source of slime and vulgarity, gleefully reciting Teresa’s embarrassing jingle. Why had she ever written it? To check her own feelings for Mother F.? But there was no time to ponder this. Imagine if Bunty – you couldn’t put anything past her! – were to show it to other people?

  ‘Give it back to me,’ begged Teresa. But Bunty said the poem was now half hers and she wanted to copy it out.