Under the Rose Page 4

  You haven’t met Mercedes either, have you? You’d really have to see her to understand. You see, in a way, Diego is right. She is remarkably bright and perfectly bilingual because of his having always spoken Spanish to her. She is like a coquettish little princess stepped out of a canvas by Goya or Velázquez. This is partly because of her clothes which come from boutiques on the Faubourg Saint Honoré. Ridiculous clothes: hand-tucked muslin, silk, embroidered suede. I don’t know who they were intended for, but Diego buys them. He buys her exactly the same sort of thing as he used to buy Michèle, and there is Marie in her denims with a daughter wearing a mink jacket at the age of ten. I don’t know whether she approves or not. Their relationship is odd. Well, most marriages seem that way to me. What do I know of yours, for instance? Married people always strike me as treating each other a bit like bonsai trees. They nip and clip and train each other into odd, accommodating shapes, then sometimes complain about the result. Or one partner can go to endless lengths of patience with the other and then be obdurate about some trifling thing. It’s a mystery. I watch with interest. I think you’re all a dying species but fun to watch – like some product of a very ancient, constricting, complex civilization. Perhaps that’s why I’m a gossip? As a feminist, I am in the same position as the Jesuits who watched and noted down the ways of the old Amerindians while planning to destroy them.

  Diego claims sometimes to be part Amerindian. Maybe he is. Some of them used to cut out their victims’ hearts with stone knives, used they not? I’m not sure whether he may not have blood on his hands. Metaphorical blood. After all, he’s a member of the oligarchy of that repressive regime. It’s true that he has been twenty-five years in Paris, reads the left-wing press and has picked up a radical vocabulary – but where does his money come from? Well, one doesn’t probe but one can’t help wondering. Another complexity. The troubling thing about sexists and members of old, blood-sodden castes is that they can be so delicate in their sensibilities and this does throw one. I keep meeting people like that here in Paris. It seems to draw them as honey draws wasps. Am I being the Protestant spinster now? Forthright and angular and killing the thing I love as I lean over it with my frosty breath? In delighted disapproval? In disapproving delight. I mustn’t kill this little story which I’m working my way round to telling you. It’s about Mercedes and Michèle’s dog. Yes, but first, have you got the background clear in your minds? Diego is so jokey and jolly and often – to be frank – drunk, that you mightn’t. Your dealings with him were always social, weren’t they? You’d meet in some smart night club or restaurant and, I suppose, dance till dawn with money no object and champagne flowing. That’s how I imagine it – how Diego’s led me to imagine it. Am I wrong? No? Good. Well, but, you see, that’s only one side of Diego: the Don Diego swaggering side. There’s also the plainer homebody. Did you know that Diego is simply the Spanish for James? I didn’t either. Think of him as ‘Jim’ or ‘Jacques’ coming home in the dishwater-dawn light from those evenings to the surburban house where he’d parked Marie and the child.

  Marie’s my friend, by the way. I knew her before I did him. She had gone back to university to study law and we met in a feminist student group. Well, what would you have her do all those years while he used the house as a launching pad for his flights of jollification? He brought home the minimum cash – just like any working-class male taking half the budget for his pleasures. She could have left. She didn’t. There’s an area of motives which one cannot hope to map. He could have left and didn’t. There’s one I can map for you. He met Michèle through Marie. In those days she had prettier friends. I do occasionally wonder whether I was chosen as being unthreatening? No, no need to protest. I’m trying for accuracy. I like to take hold of as many elements in a situation as I can and I’ve admitted that Diego/Jim fascinates me. He is the Male Chauvinist Pig or Phallocrat seen close up, as I rarely get a chance to see the beast, and I do see his charm. It is his weapon and, when I say I see it, I really mean that I feel him seeing the woman in me. Men don’t, very often. That’s what I mean about Diego’s amour pour la femme being non-sexist or sexist in such an all-embracing way that it gets close to universal love. He loves half humanity, half the human race, regardless of age, looks or health. Of course he is also a sex-snob and wants to be seen with a girl who does him credit – Michèle. That’s the social side of him. But he responds to femininity wherever he finds it: in his mother, an old beggar woman, me. He’s inescapably kind.

  Why didn’t he divorce, you ask? Kindness again. Really. He had fallen in love with Michèle: a tempestuous passion, I gather. They were swept off by it simultaneously, like a pair of flint stones knocking sparks off each other, like two salamanders sizzling in unison – he tells me about it when Marie’s in the kitchen. He has to tell someone. It was his big experience and he made a mess of it and is still shocked at himself, yet can’t see how he could have done other than he did. What he did was this: he proposed marriage to Michèle, was accepted and, brimful of bliss, looked at poor, blissless Marie and thought how lonely she must be and that he must do something for her. Now here is the part that touches me. He didn’t think in terms of money, as most men would have. He thought in terms of love. He wanted her to have someone to love when he had gone off with Michèle and decided that he had better be the one to provide her with a love-object. Can you guess the next move? He made her pregnant. The noble sexist wanted to leave her with a child. Imagine Michèle’s fury. She thought that he had got cold feet about marrying her and had cooked up this pretext for backing out. He assured her that he did very much want to marry her but that now he must stay with Marie until the baby was born so that it should be legitimate.

  The baby, of course, was Mercedes and he fell in love with her at first sight, at first sound, at first touch. He was totally potty about her, obsessed and at the same time he was painfully in love with an estranged and furious Michèle on whom he showered guilty, cajoling gifts, spoiling and courting her and putting up with every caprice in an effort to earn back the total love which he had forfeited – she kept telling him – by his sexual treachery.

  Those were the years when you knew him – the champagne and dancing years. He and Michèle had not got married and so their relationship became one long, festive courtship and she, from what he says, responded as someone who’s fussed over for years might well be tempted to respond: she became a bit of a bitch. She brought boys home to the flat where he kept her like a queen, stood him up, tormented him and then, between lovers, just often enough to keep him hot for her, became as loving and playful as they had been in the early days. She was his princesse lointaine, radiant with the gleam of loss and old hope and he was romantic about her and probably happier than he admits with the arrangement which kept his loins on fire and fixed his wandering attention on her in whom he was able to find all women: the wife she should have become, the fickle tormentor she had become, his wronged great love and familiar old friend, his Donna Elvira and his spendthrift, nightclub succubus. She was all women except one and that one, to be sure, was Mercedes, the little girl who was growing up in an empty, half-furnished suburban house with a mother who was busy getting her law degree and a father who swept in from time to time with presents from Hamleys and Fouquets and organdie dresses and teddy bears twice her size which made her cry. Every penny he had went on Michèle and Mercedes. I remember that house when it hadn’t a lamp or a table because Marie was damned if she’d spend her money on it and he was so rarely there that he never noticed what it did or didn’t have apart from the Aladdin’s Cave nursery in which Mercedes was happy while she was small. Later, at the ages of six and seven and eight, as she began to invite in her friends, she began to colonize the rest of the house and, as she did, he began to furnish it for her. Michèle’s share of his budget shrank as Mercedes’s grew. Shares in his time fluctuated too. He spent more of it at home; friends like you began to see less of him and Michèle had to start finding herself new escorts, not from bitcher
y but from need. But he would never abandon her completely. He had wasted her marriageable years and now he felt towards her the guilt he had once felt towards Marie. But what can he do? He’s not Christ. He cannot divide up and distribute his body and blood.

  He was telling me all this that night on the drive out from Paris and he got so upset that at one stage he stopped the car and walked into a hotel where we had a drink. This made us late for dinner, but Marie, of course, never complains. Who did complain was Mercedes. It was past her bed-time and she was irritable and sleepy when we arrived. She had waited up because she wanted to have a mango and, besides, Diego had promised her some small present. Right away she started being whingey and angry with me whom she blamed for keeping her Daddy late. Diego was amused, as he is by all Mercedes’s caprices, and kept saying, ‘She’s jealous, you know!’ As though that were something to be proud of! ‘She’s very possessive.’

  There was a dog in the house, Michèle’s silver poodle – perhaps you know it? – Rinaldino, a rather highly-strung creature which Marie and Mercedes had been told was mine. Michèle had asked Diego to keep it for her because she was going on a cruise and it pines if left in a kennel. Diego can never say ‘no’ to Michèle, and so a story was concocted about my flat being painted and how I had had to move to a hotel where I couldn’t take my new dog. All this because of Diego’s not wanting his wife to know that she was being asked to house his mistress’s dog. Surprisingly, the plan had worked up to now and Rinaldino had been three weeks at Diego’s. Mercedes was mad about him and everyone had been pleased about that. This evening, however, she suddenly announced that from now on the dog was hers. She wasn’t giving him back. She just wasn’t. So there. The dog loved her, she claimed and, besides, she had told her friends it was hers and didn’t want to be made to look a liar. She said all this in her grown-up way: half playful, half testing and I couldn’t help having the old-fashioned notion that what she really wanted, deep down, was to be told ‘no’. That used to be said, remember, when we were children. It was thought that children needed to know the limits of their possibilities.

  Anyway, she kept on and Diego wouldn’t contradict her and neither did Marie. I kept my mouth shut. It’s not my business if Diego spoils his daughter as he spoils his mistress so, even though the dog was supposed to be mine, I didn’t react when Mercedes started clamouring for a promise that Dino, as she had rechristened Rinaldino, should never leave. She would not go to bed till she got it, she said. It was obvious that she was trying to provoke me, but I pretended not to notice. Poor child, it’s not her fault if she is the way she is.

  ‘Dino likes me better than he likes you,’ she told me.

  ‘Why wouldn’t he like you?’ I asked. ‘You’re a good girl, aren’t you?’

  ‘He likes me whether I’m good or not. He likes me even when I hurt him.’

  I can’t remember what I said to that and doubt if it mattered. She had taken against me and the next thing she did was to start twisting the dog’s ears.

  ‘See,’ she said. ‘Even when I do this, he likes me. He likes me because he’s mine. I’m his Mummy.’

  Then she began to cuddle the animal in that way that children do if they’re not stopped. She tied a napkin under its chin, half choking it, and held it as if it were a baby, bending its spine and pretending to rock it to sleep.

  ‘Mine, mine, mine,’ she crooned.

  I had an odd sensation as I watched. What struck me was that in a way the dog was Michèle’s baby, her substitute for the family she might have had if Mercedes had not been born. And now, here was Mercedes trying to steal even that from her. I found myself wondering whether some instinct was making her do it. An intuition? The thought was absurd but I let myself play with it to keep my mind off what the brat was doing to little Rinaldino. The French are insensitive about animals and Marie seemed indifferent. She often goes into a sort of passive trance when Diego is around and he, of course, has no feeling for creatures at all. Maybe I was showing my discomfort in spite of myself? I can’t be sure. Anyway, the little beast – I’m talking about Mercedes – began to pull Rinaldino’s whiskers and it was all I could do to keep myself from slapping her. I was on the point of warning her that she might get bitten when she gave a shriek and threw the dog violently across the room. For a moment I thought she might have broken its back, but no, it got up and scuttled under the sofa. That, it turned out, was good canine thinking.

  It had bitten her cheek. Not deeply, but it had drawn blood.

  Well, the scene after that was beyond description, unbelievable. It literally took my breath away: hysteria, screams, foot-stamping, hand-wringing – all the things you think real people never do, they did. And no initiative at all. I had to take charge and clean the child’s cheek and put disinfectant on it. You’d think I’d cut off her head from the way she carried on. Diego was crying. Marie was tight-lipped and kept clenching her fists as though she was about to explode.

  ‘Look,’ I told them, ‘it’s a scratch. It’s nothing. She’d have got worse from a bramble bush. Just look,’ I kept insisting.

  But they wouldn’t. Not really. They kept exclaiming and averting their faces and clapping their hands over their eyes. They wanted their drama and were working each other up, so that when Mercedes shouted, ‘I want the dog killed. Right now. It doesn’t like me. It doesn’t love me. It must be killed!’ I realized that the adults were half ready to go along with the idea. Diego was completely out of his mind.

  ‘Supposing it has rabies?’ he whispered to me.

  ‘It’s been inoculated,’ I told him.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Of course I am. It’s on its name tag. Look. With the date.’

  ‘I want it killed now! Here. Now. It doesn’t love me. It’s a bad dog,’ screamed Mercedes.

  ‘It’s my dog,’ I told her. ‘You can’t kill my dog.’

  She began to kick me then. Hard. I still have bruised shins. She carried on as if she had rabies herself and her mother had to pull her off me and take her to bed.

  ‘I want it killed!’ She was screaming and scratching and biting as they went through the door. Later, I heard her still at it in her bedroom.

  Diego looked distraught. He said he had heard of dogs which were rabid in spite of having been inoculated. Was I sure it had been inoculated? What did a name tag prove after all? It struck me then that he had either forgotten that the dog was not mine or was trying to persuade himself that it was. We were alone together now but he avoided mentioning Michèle’s name. Maybe he felt that some sin of his was coming to the fore and demanding a blood sacrifice? He kept pouring whiskey and drinking it down fast. At one point he went into the kitchen and looked at the rack of knives.

  Well, you can never tell how much that sort of thing is theatre, can you? I mean that theatre can spill into life if people work themselves up enough. Maybe he was seeing himself as an Amerindian priest? I don’t mind telling you that I began to get scared. The thing was taking on odd dimensions as he got drunker and guiltier and the screams ebbed and started up again in the bedroom. Rinaldino, very sensibly, stayed right where he was under the sofa and that affected me more than anything. After all, dogs do pick up bad vibrations, don’t they? Anyway, the outcome was that when Diego went into the lavatory I phoned a taxi, took the dog and left. I was convinced that by now he wasn’t seeing the dog as a dog at all and that if I hadn’t got it out of the house he would have ended up killing it – or worse.

  Marie wouldn’t have interfered. Even if she’d been standing beside him she wouldn’t. I’m sure of that. They’re extraordinary that way. I keep thinking of them now. Each is so intelligent and kind and – I want to say ‘ordinary’, when they’re on their own. Normal? But let a scene start and you’d think you were dealing with members of the House of Atreus. Marie’s passivity has started to seem sinister to me. I’ve started dreaming of that evening and it’s become deformed in my memory. Sometimes it seems to me that she was the silent puppet
-mistress pulling the strings and that even I was one of the puppets. Even the dog. Well, certainly the dog. Maybe it’s self-referential to bring myself in? But I’ve started worrying whether Marie as well as Mercedes see me as an intrusive female. ‘She’s jealous,’ Diego told me that evening and laughed. He could have meant his wife. Could he? I’m only his confidante but Marie might dislike that, mightn’t she? It’s very unhealthy on my part to dwell on the thing and it would be absurd for me to have a crush on a man like Diego and I hope nobody thinks this is the case. In my more sober moments I know that any bad feeling that came my way that evening was really directed through me at Michèle. I was her stand-in. After all, I’d pretended to own her dog. But somehow, emotion sticks. I feel a little as though mud had been thrown at me and that I can’t quite clean it off.

  Dies Irae

  ‘… your hair?’

  ‘By myself.’ A fib. But to say ‘at Fulvio’s’ would draw sneers from Leftish friends (‘Ha! Consorting with Black Florence, is that it?’) and a governessy nosiness from Black Florentines themselves: ‘So you’ve found your way there? Isn’t Fulvio a pet? And … have you discovered yet where to buy the best chocolate in all Florence? My dear, let me…. My grandaunt’s cook whom she brought from Vienna when….’ And off one would be in danger of being led to some den where there would be time, while each sweet was hand-wrapped, to ruminate on how these were probably going to be less good than the obvious commercial brand. ‘The best chocolate in all Florence …!’ Another myth. Black Florentines live by myth. It gives matter to their conversation and a breathless impulse. ‘What!’ the next B(lack) F(lorentine) would cry, ‘you didn’t let Bibi take you to that dreadful little confectioner where the cat sleeps on the chocolates! The poor thing is quite doddery! Bibi feels obliged to help her out with a small income, so any sale he can promote is to his good. D’ailleurs c’est un mythomane! Surtout, never buy any of Bibi’s wine. Not classico! Can’t blame him, poor chap. He’s a dear really. Just crackers!’ B–F–s speak as little Italian as possible. They were occupied for long periods by an army of English nannies.