Under the Rose Page 5

  Sneers at their taste are well grounded. Though not about Fulvio. I’ve forgotten who recommended him to me. I must have been a student at the time for I remember my terror lest I be unable to pay his bill. Yet I never went to another hairdresser in Florence afterwards and, as the carovita sends prices spiralling, his have remained steady. (At least for me. Cocking an ear to those he charges tourists, I suspect him of making new customers pay for the old.) He is a good hairdresser, though it is less this that draws me back to him than the pleasurable femininity one puts on with his lavender pinafores. Anonymous in one of these, I agree to be an odalisque. His voice, mirrors and tuberoses are peremptory and, while hands and feet lie at anchor in the grip of his manicurists, I find my will receding; my mind drowses; Fulvio has taken over. Above our heads, heavy vaulting weaves vaguely – the stone roots of his old palazzo – burying us in a reckless vacancy. Delicate-featured apprentices hover and my blood, slowing to the indolent pace of the cosseted old Florentines around me, purrs and contentedly restores itself. All my defences are down. Which is why this morning’s incident was so upsetting.

  Maria was brushing my hair. She is the prettiest and palest of the apprentices, weak-chinned, long-nosed, sweet and brittle-looking with a heron’s legs. Today she brushed longer than necessary. Fulvio came up. ‘Is Maria busy?’ he asked. ‘Yes,’ said one of the master hairdressers, ‘yes, I have a job for her.’ ‘Because’, Fulvio said, ‘the principessa is coming.’ Maria tore at my hair. ‘The principessa makes Maria vomit,’ said a manicurist. ‘She makes her sick for the rest of the day.’ Maria tore on and Fulvio said nothing to this. Instead, he fingered the gold chain which descends from his left lapel to the right back trouser pocket, where he keeps a pair of gold scissors inscribed with his name and the date of some aestheticians’ banquet held in the ’30s. He smiled at me. ‘It is more pleasant to work on the signora,’ he said. ‘The signora is beautiful no matter what one does to her. She doesn’t really need us at all. But I don’t’, he turned his smile on Maria, ‘pay you to do only what you like.’ ‘Do you pay her for getting sick?’ the manicurist asked. Fulvio moved off to work on a customer in the jabbing manner which suggests he is building up a picture lock by lock. ‘I can hardly turn the principessa away,’ he called, still smiling. ‘Can I now? I run a shop, not a club.’ ‘You could,’ threw back one of the cherubic male hairdressers. ‘What’s so unfair’, said an apprentice, ‘is that she always wants Maria. Every time….’

  Maria had begun giving me a friction and I could hear no more. I could see, however, that she was not taking part in this discussion at all. Her face in the mirror floated calmly above my own, and she might have seemed impassive but for the harsh knuckles she was grinding into my skull. When Beppe came to set my hair he kept Maria on to pass him the rollers. She was still with us when an odd pantomime figure strode into the looking glass and began to twirl within its fanciful stucco frame. ‘Good morning, principessa. Make yourself comfortable,’ invited Fulvio. ‘Maria will be with you presently.’ But the figure continued to plunge about in its tall felt boots, over-long greatcoat and soiled pink turban. ‘Io sono puntua-a-ale!’ piped the principessa since this was she. ‘I am on ti-i-ime!’ She intoned the words to a nursery-rhyme rhythm, half mocking, half whining. Maria kept her face resolutely focused on the basket of coloured rollers. ‘Two red,’ demanded Beppe, ‘one green. Old witch,’ he whispered to Maria. ‘I’d refuse if I were you. The sight of her is enough. A maid servant wouldn’t do it, why should you?’ He jerked his head towards Fulvio. ‘Snobby old sod,’ he whispered out of the corner of his mouth, ‘let him look after her himself if it means that much to him to have her here. A blue one for the bottom please.’

  I strained to catch a glimpse of the principessa’s face, astonished at the licence her presence unleashed in this formal establishment. But she had twirled off again. She had, I had noticed, a foreign accent. Could that be the matter? Could she have lice perhaps? Surely not! I found myself shuddering, caught in the general excited distaste. Her costume was like something out of Delacroix – an Eastern merchant’s redolent of unwholesome travels. ‘I am being kept wai-i-iting!’ carolled the principessa coyly, ‘although I telephoned!’ Beppe put me under the dryer and I heard no more.

  Minutes later, I felt curious enough to squirm out again on the pretext that I had to make a phone call. The principessa had taken off the turban. She was near bald. Wisps of cobweb hair clung like spiders to her pink scalp. Her face was ancient and livid. A manicurist held one outstretched foot: a yellowish grey appendage, like those of dead saints miraculously preserved and exposed in crypts. Maria was sulkily stirring something which she showed to the old woman as I passed. It must have been unsatisfactory for she was still tinkering with it when I returned, and it was another ten minutes before I saw her start to massage her customer’s pate. The old woman’s mouth kept going all the time but of course I could hear nothing. The staff were by now in stitches of laughter which they concealed by turning their heads or grinning on one side of their faces like glove puppets. By the time I came out from under my dryer their mood had changed. The princess was under the steamer, and now they talked with open anger, insisting that Maria had done enough for one day and that someone else should finish the old woman off. ‘But she always asks for Maria,’ objected the manicurist. ‘Maria,’ called the principessa at that moment from under her steamer, ‘Maria!’ ‘What do you want?’ asked an apprentice irritably. ‘I want Maria.’ ‘Maria is busy.’ ‘Which Maria do you want?’ another girl asked cunningly, ‘we have three Marias you know!’ The old woman subsided.

  Beppe came to comb me out. ‘Who is she?’ I asked. ‘A White Russian,’ he said, ‘filthy rich and mean as an ant. She never pays.’ ‘You mean she never tips?’ He laughed, ‘Macchè! She never pays! Not a lira. It’s not just for Maria’s sake that we’re angry, though that’s unfair enough. Why should we have her here? Is she pretty? Does she pay? Is she poor? There’s no reason,’ he concluded harshly. ‘Signor Fulvio è grullo! He’s a fool! Your hair came out well,’ he ended professionally, ‘those uncombed styles suit you.’

  ‘Everything suits the signora,’ smiled Fulvio coming up. ‘She has good bones,’ he flattered, ‘fine skin. That’s beauty. You have to admit it when you see beauty! When we see a painting,’ he went on in a louder voice, haranguing the salon, ‘we admire it, so why not a beautiful woman who is a gift of nature and’, he bowed at Beppe, ‘of art?’ Beneath him, as he bowed, the gold scissors chain bellied with the pendulous delicacy of an udder. When he straightened, it subsided. He was a trim little man.

  ‘Beauty!’ I recognized the old woman’s accent although what she had released was less a word than a sob. ‘Beauty!’ she repeated. She had come out from the steamer and was standing behind us. On her scalp, the sparse few hairs, now dampened, stood out like feelers on some pale primitive fish. ‘I was never beautiful,’ she said in a haggard voice, ‘but now I sometimes stare in the mirror’ – she moved over beside me to the glass – ‘like this!’ Her eyes fixed their image and she went on in a voice which the departure of its earlier querulous and mocking note had left disturbingly intimate, ‘And I say: can this, this be Nadia?’ She stared at us, then back at her own image. ‘It’s horrible,’ she muttered, ‘appalling!’ She paused for a moment, her widening orbs fastened to their own reflection. The girls held their breath.

  Fulvio tried a little laugh. ‘Principessa! It comes to us all!’

  ‘Yes,’ she said eagerly. ‘I wasn’t beautiful, but I was not like this! I wish I had a photograph, Fulvio, to show you. Just to….’ She trailed off.

  ‘All of us,’ said Fulvio consolingly.

  ‘No!’ She wouldn’t have such. ‘You, Fulvio, may be in your sixties.’ (Could he? Perhaps.) ‘I am eighty-six, eighty-six…. These young things come to you, Fulvio, and you work on them but I …’ She seemed to try to collect herself, giving him the fossil of a worldly smile from teeth whose newness was bleak among the ma
rshes of her flesh. ‘I….’ Again she foundered. Closed, her receding mouth was gentle, blindly soft as perhaps a fish muzzle. ‘I can’t bear a wig now. The itch…. Fulvio…. Oh, what an old wreck!’ She was crying. The deepened wrinkles drew stars and goose’s footprints across the lost face.

  ‘We’ll try something else.’

  She was not listening. ‘Older,’ she murmured, ‘every day! Fulvio! And when you know what it means….’

  ‘It doesn’t matter….’

  ‘OOhh!’

  ‘But principessa,’ Fulvio spoke with ardour. ‘It comes to us all! Truly,’ he pleaded, ‘princess!’ The word was magic to him. He would have performed feats to restore the poor hag to the image that went with it, to energize her blue and sluggish blood.

  ‘Ahh!’ She was unconsoled.

  ‘Every mother’s son of us,’ he assured her. ‘Earlier than we think! We’re in the same boat. From the beginning. From adolescence. Cells in our brains – I was reading only the other day – begin to decay, to die. You envy the signora!’ (He was preparing to sacrifice me. Let him. Poor woman, I thought, poor wretch, do what you can for her, say what you like. I tried to signal my complaisance but Fulvio was staring at me as though at some creature in a pet shop which he had decided not to buy.) ‘Her beauty’, he said, ‘is fading already. Not obviously perhaps but I can see. The expert detects what will be plain to all in a year or so. Look at the dry parts of her face.’ He bent towards my reflection in the mirror. ‘See,’ he invited. He pointed to the corners of my eyes and I could feel them cringe, crinkling into the folds he wished to find. ‘Crows’ feet,’ he cried. I tried to smile through this but what appeared was not unlike the old woman’s nervous simper of some minutes before. Old hag, I thought suddenly, just because she’s some sort of a princess! ‘There’s a pout line,’ shouted Fulvio, ‘by her mouth. Laughter, pleasure – it takes its toll!’

  ‘Signor Fulvio!’ Beppe giggled in embarrassment.

  ‘Oh,’ the principessa’s groan was gentler now. ‘The signora has time before her.’

  ‘Phuitt!’ Fulvio dismissed it. (I’ll get up, I thought. I’ll leave now. But they were standing around me. It would look like pique.) ‘Her bones’, he reneged on his earlier compliment, ‘won’t save her. Do we admire skeletons? Thin women wear worse. All this talk of carbohydrates now. It used to be calories. Pupupuh! I say to them. Our generation, princess’ – gallantly – ‘had more sense!’

  I stood up. ‘I’m going, Fulvio.’

  He stepped aside. ‘Eh? Ah, you’re finished? Well, your hair looks very nice, signora. An excellent job, successful! You’re not … no hard feelings, eh?’

  I walked out to the hall. Blushing and shrugging, Beppe followed me. He helped me off with the lavender pinafore and accepted his tip. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘Signor Fulvio is a bit, well … he has Russian blood himself, like the principessa. It…. Oh, one must make allowances and … he’s getting old….’ Realizing that this was the wrong tack, Beppe rushed me to the outer door where he sprayed my hair with a lacquer smelling faintly of incense. Visible even here in the mirrors, Fulvio’s image seemed to be still castigating his own pomps and artifices. The mournful gorgon beside him did not appear consoled. There was a retch from the cloakroom. Maria? From the street I saw them again through the plate-glass window. Fulvio’s hands were upturned, his mouth agape in the traditional gestures of impotence. In the polished marble slab on which gold lettering spelled FULVIO, coiffeur, friseur, parrucchière, I could see the fashionable outline of my lacquered hair.

  Her Trademark

  The captain – fastidious, with a complexion like raspberry fool – had a smile of great sweetness. From teeth that seemed to have been overlaid with a film of honey. A blond patina – nicotine lichen – clung to his fingers. Hair and moustache were ginger still. A golden lad. He brought scope and a festive dash to the management of local affairs, adoring to organize auctions of garden produce or a charity fête with bunting on his lawns. He treated women with gallantry, called them ‘the gentle sex’, and showed for his own a preference to which scandal did not attach. Neighbours, meeting him with his mother on daily walks, noted that, of the two, she – once toasted at the hunt balls of half Leinster – had now the more military demeanour. Her voice wielded authority, her grip vigour, and she was rarely without an instrument for beheading ragweed blossoms, poking pennyleaves from walls or earthing up wasps’ nests.

  He retired early to join her on their small estate which he currycombed with fervour. In shining gumboots, shears in hand, he waded through sway-tipped meadows with two handymen at his beck. Like himself, these fellows liked to build pigeon coops, lay stepping-stones or adjust sundials. Between five and six he went in to drink tea – Indian and China – with his mother. Sometimes they tuned to the news, vaguely sipping the aromas of lost empire. Their own concerns absorbed them and it was a shock to find these also threatened. Prices crept up while pensions lagged. The handymen left one day for factory work in Dublin, and professional gardeners, who seemed to be all one could get now, demanded an alarming wage.

  Eggs, fruit, tomato plants and dung were offered on a hoarding placed at the lodge gate and sold from the front door as he and his mother, with the ingenuity of their kind, staved off decision. Yet, in the end, like a cosily entrenched weed, he had to tear himself up. He ran an ad in the Irish Times: ‘Retired Brit. Officer (Dunkirk, Tripoli), RC, some French, seeks congenial post. Anything considered.’

  The solution that turned up was just the ticket. A devout Catholic with an old soldier’s savvy and organizing ability was the man to guide pilgrimages to Lourdes. The salary was small but the job, being seasonal, allowed him to spend half the year at home with his mother. Then, as he remarked waggishly to her, it would bring him the stir and opportunity for mild military bullying that had been lacking since his retirement.

  His parties did not include charity cases or invalids – the nursing Orders saw to them – but paying pilgrims who visited the shrine from piety or to ask for some Intention and were usually of the better type. Less better than the captain himself, they enjoyed and looked up to him. For his part, he took an interest in them and grew good at guessing the rub or worry that lay behind each trip. Some were offering it up for the conversion of a free-thinking relative or an alcoholic. Others were barren wives. Most frequent were the modest but hopeful women civil servants, female bank clerks or school mistresses who were going to ask the Virgin for the husband it was so hard to find in the rural regions to which they were posted. These were toughish, thirty-fivish, die-hard Dianas and, although the captain was in the position of a fox watching preparations for bloodsports, he had to admire their grit. Through living without men they had become mannish, played poker, drank gin together and talked – deplorably – in an endless and anguished gush, as though each were at pains to reconcile the waiting maiden in herself with the harpy she had been obliged to develop in order to protect her. With awe – recalling how often his mother had been photographed just as she was for Country Life or The Irish Tatler and Sketch – he assisted at their efforts at femininity. Chiffon squares from the Galeries Lafayette wavered on the gaunt masts of their tailor-mades; Rouge Baiser caked off inexpert lips, and the straw hats they bought at the beachwear counter and deposited on their heads for church visiting filled him with such distress that he could have wept for them. He had a flair for clothes himself, having often done wonders with a table-runner and an old topee at houseparty charades, where his impersonations of well known female actresses were certs to bring down the house. Yet, from diffidence, he refrained from advising. A full-scale Pygmalion operation could hardly have been conducted within the scope of their ten-day tour. Anything less, he saw, would merely make matters worse. He would have liked to help these lame dogs find and cross their stile, for he had always been a man of quick sympathy, and was touched by the dual glow of hope with which they greeted France: country of the Virgin and of Aphrodite.

  ‘Our Lady
doesn’t want us to approach her with long faces,’ he would say in their defence if an older woman made a cutting comment. ‘We can worship through joy.’

  After his first season’s guiding, he became as much at home with the pious lingo of his parties as he had once been with military jargon. He took to distributing blessed rosaries and pastilles of dehydrated Lourdes water among veteran friends, pulling them out of his waistcoat pocket at dinners with a feeling that this was akin to showing the flag. He had become convinced of the need for propagating the faith by the irreligion he saw in France. ‘Things look bad on the Continent,’ he told his mother and her neighbours, returning from his pilgrimages with little bulletins as he had once done from the Front. ‘Churches empty!’ One day, as his touring bus was held up by a demonstration on the boulevard Antoine in Paris, he surveyed the crowd through his window. ‘Bally Reds!’ he told his pilgrims. ‘Put on a pretty poor show! Listen: they’re singing two different anthems! Still,’ he peered ardently about, ‘I see a lot of fine looking young chaps out there! Poor Marianne!’ He was glad to get back to Lourdes whose clockwork ceremonies consoled him as did the scale on which it was run. A more efficient army. Still, in the older, ‘native’ part of the town, he could not help noticing a couple of hammers and sickles chalked impertinently on walls. ‘We need counter publicity,’ he told his flock. ‘If we could point to a couple of A1 miracles, it would take those Commies down a peg!’

  Two more guiding seasons rattled by with the brisk monotonous rhythm of the touring buses which told on his ankles and, although his spirit did not waver, his breath grew faintly sour. His health suffered from the food in cheap pensions which he was obliged to substitute regularly for the hotels booked by the agency. This was standard practice. Guides were underpaid and the game without perks would simply not have been worth the candle. He disliked such manœuvres. They, and the expenditure of sympathy required by his interchangeable charges, slowly bled him, so that off-seasons became convalescence periods.