Under the Rose Read online

  ‘De mortuis’, he told Breen, ‘nil nisi bonum.’

  ‘That’s it,’ said the sergeant. ‘Nil nisi bonum! A pity we can’t manage that for the living? Here you are home. Someone will come for you when the Dubliners get in. In the morning, maybe around ten. Will that be all right?’

  Sean said it would. Getting out of the car, he started up his own pathway.

  ‘Oh, I’ll forget my head yet,’ the Sergeant called after him. ‘I meant to tell you two other things.’ He lowered his voice. ‘One is that the fellow accusing Father Cronin isn’t suing him personally. Oh no! He’s suing the diocese for negligence. That’s what they do now. Go where the money is. That’s what all these buckos are after! Thousands they want in compensation. Millions if you add it all up. No wonder Father Mac is worried. The other thing is this. One of St Fiachra’s School yearbooks has a photo of the bloke when he was fourteen, which is when the abuse allegedly took place. He was the image of yourself at the same age.’

  ‘Of me?’ Sean stared. ‘What am I to make of that?’

  ‘No idea,’ Breen told him. ‘Not the foggiest. I just thought it best if you heard it from me and not one of the nosyparkers from Dublin. It might unsettle you coming from them.’

  *

  Sean’s mother was in bed. Her arthritis had flared up, so he brought her tea and listened to complaints about her medication’s side effects and general inadequacy. She didn’t ask where he had spent the morning. Then, very gingerly he removed the tray. Touching her painfully stretched skin and distorted bones was like handling a bag of eggs.

  Taking a plateful of dinner with him – it was warmed-over stew – he went outside and, when he’d eaten it, used his licked fork to prick out a tray of rocket seedlings. The tines were just the right size for disentangling the fine, white, thready roots. Next, using his fingers, he pressed the sooty compost around each stem. As always, he relished feeling the grain of it ooze soothingly under his nails. He had read somewhere that humans shared genes with plants, and was reminded of a picture Father Tim had had on his wall showing a naked girl turning into a tree. Already her fingers were leaves; the whole of her was as pale and frail as seedling roots, and Father Tim had told a story explaining what had made this happen. Sean couldn’t remember it. Some spell no doubt. Some enchantment.

  As though the memory had caught him off guard, restraint peeled away and he began to shake. He had, he saw now, been holding himself in and down since the sergeant’s shadow fell on him this morning. He hadn’t allowed himself to think, even less to feel and now that he did, tears started to flow and he cried as he hadn’t done since he’d cried for his dead father. That, of course, was when Cronin had taken him in his arms. Was that what those bastards meant by ‘abuse’? Or was fear of the word – or of some addictive reality? – the reason why Cronin had only kissed and cuddled Sean that one time? He had soothed and stroked and held him tenderly – then stopped. Why had he stopped? And never done it again? Why? Was it Sean’s fault? Sean had wondered about that, but hadn’t liked to ask. How could he ask? He couldn’t. His life and Cronin’s were hedged in, blocked and braked like – like an arthritic’s. By now tears were pouring down his cheeks. They were running into his mouth and ears.

  ‘I think I’m jealous’, he said aloud, ‘of the abuse-victim. I am! I’m jealous of the bastard!’ Hearing his words, he laughed in shock and covered his face with his hands. It was true though. That was the real shock.

  *

  Lynch stood up and came round his desk. It was time for Sean to leave.

  ‘He told me’, said Lynch, ‘that you wrote him a great letter. When he was going through the dark night. Sensitive. Private. A bit mad, but comforting. Naturally I never saw it. But did you know that it was after he got it that he changed his will? He wanted to open things up for you, make your life a bit easier. Ah, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to make you cry.’

  It’s a Long Way to Tipperary

  For years our garden was full of memorials of Captain Cuddahy and his weekend visits. A bird-house, our swing, successive rustic arbours as well as an abortive millrace and wheel were devised and knocked together on days when he fled to us from the sulks and furies of his wife. They are fallen memorials now, for even while he was hammering them in, the damp Irish air began to corrode the nails, spoiling his most skilful creations. Not that he cared. ‘Play the game for the game’s sake,’ was one of his many mottoes. ‘Play for your side and not for yourself,’ he would go on if he got started at all, for he talked for talk’s sake too. ‘No loitering! Hand me the mallet. All hands on the job. A bit of elbow-grease to the fore. Fire away, chaps. When is a door not a door? When it’s ajar! Full marks! Go to the top of the class.’ There was no reason to stop. He was an unharnessed dynamo, eagerly offering his energy.

  I don’t know whether he bullied my father into the garden carpentry or whether it was a dodge of my father’s – like his way of using us as buffers – for keeping the Captain at arm’s length. After an hour or so of sawing, my father would usually sneak off to write letters or perhaps just to lie down, while my brother and I engaged the Captain in croquet or clock-golf. In between shots Cuddahy shadow-boxed, conjured his handkerchief out of our ears, harangued us with the relentlessness of an ack-ack gun. ‘Brian, you chump! Golly what a clot! Your sister can lick you with one hand tied behind her! Yoicks, a dirty swipe, Jenny! Eye on the ball, Brian! Don’t bend your knee. That’s right! Keep the step! Now you have it and don’t forget! Wizard shot! A1.’ The Captain was the only person we knew who actually used the English slang we read in our comic books and to us it had a Martian glamour. We never tried it with our school friends but preserved it for him, marshalling our ritual stock of cries whenever my mother told us he was expected. ‘Cooee!’ Brian would scream, ‘the Captain’s coming. I say! How ripping!’ He was by far our favourite person. ‘’Ands up!’ the Captain would greet Brian and leap over my mother’s sofa cocking a bright new water-pistol or some other unsuitable present. ‘Yer ducats or yer life, yer sweetheart or yer wife!’ His stage accents were always either Cockney or Tipperary. His natural delivery was a more refined blend of the two. He had known my father when my father was a boy and he a young man in ‘Tip’ and his assumption of the old accent was no doubt a plucking at the common chord of memory, a reminder of the link which must have seemed at times rather thin.

  When I first remember him, the Captain had just returned from twenty years abroad with the British army. He had been in Flanders and India, fighting Germans and guarding the Empire at a time when my father’s generation of Irishmen was promoting a revolution against it. The Captain, who had joined the British army in 1914 when it was the only army to join and been loyal all these years to a cherished memory of ‘home’, was confused to find ‘home’ hostile. He must have met countrymen who regarded him as a renegade, one who, in the words of the song, ‘took the Saxon shilling/And left poor Ireland in her hour of sorest need’. This sort of language upset the Captain. It was the sort he liked to use himself. He clung to those people who, like my father, had known him in his youth and must see him as the true and honourable Irishman he was. It wasn’t much of a basis for friendship. Hence, I suppose, his unease, his air of always being in a hurry. ‘Must get cracking, must get cracking,’ he would say the minute lunch was over, and rush off to dig a lazy-bed or mend the seesaw.

  If it was any comfort to him, my brother’s and my admiration was unlimited. I can remember him with a clarity I cannot achieve for anyone else, not even for my school crushes of that time. He was in civvies then but only recently and unresignedly so. Tailored, perky, small – though this only became clear when we grew up – tanned, wrinkled, jerky, chattery, given to making faces, he promoted us during mealtimes, addressing asides to us in the middle of adult conversations and making us feel involved. I can’t decide whether he liked children or whether this different and additional audience, permitting him to keep up a second spate of talk, simply satisfied a need to disburse
noise.

  Adoring him we assumed he adored us and never wondered why the father of several children living quite close should spend so much time away from them. Three or four times though, on returning from some errand, I remember coming on him as alone with my mother he paced the laurel walk or drooped with uncharacteristic abandon in an armchair. Unanimated, the wrinkles of his face shocked me. Into my mother’s ear he was pouring monologues. Always about his wife. ‘Emily,’ I heard him sigh at her, soughing and echoing the syllables like a monotonous, single-cry bird. ‘What Emily would like…. How I failed Emily….’ After a first pause of distress I remember rushing in, seized with some of his own nervousness, to interrupt all this. ‘Captain Cuddahy, Mummy, guess what!’ Twitched into action, he turned towards me the face of the familiar merry marionette.

  In the years when we met the Captain oftenest, we met his family least, so I suppose relations between him and Emily must have been at their nether point. An Englishwoman he had met on the way to India, Emily had pretensions – ‘notions’ said my mother – and Cuddahy, hoping to make the money she wanted, had taken his pension in a lump sum and invested it in some small business in the Irish Free State. This effort to graft himself financially on to his old roots failed and he and Emily lived by expedients until the Second World War mercifully broke out and he could join up again. Whenever a glimpse was caught of her, Emily tended to be draped in a cashmere shawl and feeling slightly unwell. Her children were notorious cissies – the boys had long curls – and we were not surprised that the Captain preferred to play with us. Clearly, he was permitted no influence over them.

  It was at this time that Emily made two or three efforts to run away. She took the children with her and disappeared to stay with English relatives. Once she did this at Christmas and the Captain spent the entire vacation with us. The frenzy with which he helped stir the pudding, folded napkins into hats, and newspapers into boats, birds or bishops’ mitres must have driven my father and mother half mad. Even we were getting to know his stories by heart. They were worked-out tales, good for any audience and judged sufficiently well turned to be repeated for the benefit of any guests who might drop in. I suppose the Captain regarded this as singing for his supper.

  There was nothing exotic about his memories. He clearly had not often looked out of the mess-room window or beyond the clubs and cafés where his cronies yarned. He was however – and why should he conceal this from us? – a bit of an outsider himself. Much of the British soldier’s morale and mores did jibe with his Catholicism, but much did not, and many anecdotes hung on a difficult reconciliation of loyalties. A Tipperary tailor’s son who had left home to join the army, he had found home waiting for him again among the thousands of Irish recruits and volunteers. These were underdogs; and he too, although in the Second World War he was to become a brigadier, must have known that he was never regarded as a gentleman. This prevented his conforming utterly. More intelligent than he might have been without his underdog’s itch, he was progressive, as he saw it, in the treatment of his men. ‘Fine, plucky fellows! A gallant bunch! I talk to them as man to man. “If there’s anything you don’t like, Murphy, you come to me,” I tell them.’

  We had heard this an endless number of times before Brian chose to make his remark. I don’t think he meant anything by it. He said afterwards that he was just being argumentative and at fourteen he was certainly a contrary enough chatterbox for this to be true. ‘“Come to me,”’ the Captain was quoting himself on the start of a long breath when Brian piped up. ‘Like Christ,’ he cut in. ‘“Come unto me all ye that suffer and ye shall be comforted!” A fat lot of good that would do any private soldier’, he remarked, ‘if the sergeant was down on him!’ Cuddahy’s face congealed. His open mouth might have just launched a soap bubble. My mother grew upset and there was one of those family rows in which the adults’ embarrassment drives them to exaggerate and the children feel the presence of first-degree crime. I have forgotten what punishment Brian got but it overshadowed the holidays. Blasphemy and disloyalty were invoked. Brian wept and explained desperately, ‘I didn’t mean that!’ His lean big boy’s face grew blotchy and swollen and distressed me because I felt he was too old to cry. (This would have been the Captain’s teaching. Only funks and namby-pambies wept.) Mother told us that Cuddahy was very hurt and that it had been dreadful of us not to be kinder on a Christmas when he couldn’t see his own children. ‘You’re a mean pair,’ she said. ‘Look at the presents he brought you. Don’t you know he’s poor?’ The Captain came up to Brian’s room to make peace. He was shy but very manly, cracking jokes, calling Brian ‘old chap’, ‘brick’, and giving him a staunch, open, straightforward hand to grasp. Brian wept again, and I who was a year and a half younger than Brian but prouder and more cynical began to turn against the Captain and his code.

  *

  He was no longer poor when he came to see us next, but we were. The war had begun, hitting my father’s business and bringing promotion to Cuddahy who had joined up and was now a major. He could not wear his uniform in the Irish Free State but showed us photographs of himself in battle dress. The presents he brought for my parents had an air of largesse: a case of whiskey, white flour, and tea which was short in Ireland. He seemed to have forgotten Brian’s blunder and talked happily about the Irish boys who had volunteered ‘to fight the Jerries’. ‘All the Irish need is discipline. They’ve got natural pluck and gallantry. It’s interesting too how their religion keeps them up to the mark. Gives them standards of honour you can’t expect in recruits from English factory towns, what!’ From the pimply, country boys who were pouring across the Channel to enlist for want of the training to do anything else he was constructing a myth, a comforting myth.

  He still had troubles, and the private sessions with my mother were resumed. Emily had come back. Her smart relatives had snubbed her when she arrived on their doorstep a few days before Christmas. She was dissatisfied with the rooms they gave her and with the quality of their sympathy. Moneyless, incapable of looking after herself, she returned after a few weeks to Cuddahy. But the humiliation had soured her. She had always refused to send the children to school, insisting that they were delicate and she would teach them herself. To this Cuddahy had acquiesced. Now, however, the eldest boy was thirteen, boisterously healthy, and ignorant as a squirrel. He must, the Major insisted, go to school. Very well, said Emily, a Protestant school. Never! Certainly! No! They fought every day of the Major’s leave until in the end he packed the boy’s bags himself, took him off in the train with him and parked him in a monastic boarding school, leaving instructions that he was not to be allowed to see his mother or any Protestant relatives. Emily screamed, sulked, scratched, bit and wept. The boy wept too and refused at the end to shake his father’s hand or say good-bye. He was clearly going to be miserable and Cuddahy could see that he would be unmercifully teased by the other boys, for he had had no time to buy him the correct uniform or even take him to a barber. The boy’s averted face on the school steps was shadowed by the girlish curls in which Emily took such pride. Cuddahy turned his straight back to the school and set off for the railway station, half throttled with remorse. ‘I had a lump’, he told us, ‘in my throat.’

  ‘Emily …’ he whispered to my mother as they walked the tennis court which he and my father had begun and which thanks to the war they would never get round to finishing. ‘Emily hates me!’ He loved her. Strongly. Wretchedly. It was months since she had let him touch her. ‘No!’ said my mother, ‘no!’ ‘She hates my religion,’ said the Major. ‘She hates the Church because for three years it kept me from marrying her. In the end, I married her in spite of it, but she still hates it.’ The words came briskly. Clearly these were notions he had gone over and over in his head. ‘She wants to be revenged on it.’ He sighed. ‘Maybe I made her suffer more than I knew. How can I blame her?’ Later in the evening he sang ‘By Jingo’ and ‘Your Old Kit Bag’ for Brian and talked animatedly about the Jerries and Ities. We wer
e growing older, however, and resentful at not being in the war, so his gusto only left us feeling depressed. He took the night mail-boat for Holyhead and his regiment. We talked of him for several days and my mother told me all she knew about Emily.

  *

  Cuddahy had met her on a boat bound for India when he was twenty-five and still a lieutenant. She was pale, not pretty, said my mother, but appealing with immense eyes and a good bust. Very feminine. A kitten. Cuddahy had been through the Great War, but a serious view of schoolboy honour and Catholicism must, my mother guessed, have left little leeway for experience with women. He walked the deck with Emily. They confided. He probably wrapped her frequently in those shawls she still wore when I knew her. He would have taken care not to touch her skin for he was a man of honour and she was married. Being only an imitation English gentleman, Cuddahy was simpler than his models and had nothing of the cad in him. She told him she was unhappy. She had been home to England to have a baby but had miscarried. Now she was returning to her husband who beat her. She played with the fringes of her shawl and turned sad eyes on the Lieutenant. ‘There doesn’t seem to be any reason to go back to him,’ she sighed. Cuddahy looked sternly over the water, reflecting that as a Catholic he was not free to marry her. ‘Go back to your husband, woman!’ he said. Or so he told my mother later. The boat was a long time getting to India. Afterwards they wrote. Cuddahy began going to confession with unusual frequency. Wherever his regiment was sent he would seek out the English-speaking priests and try them one by one. ‘Father, I am in love with a married woman whose husband maltreats her….’ ‘My son,’ he was told, ‘do not trifle with the sixth commandment.’ Catholicism was at loggerheads with Chivalry, and to Cuddahy, already suffering on the horns of bisected patriotism, the clash was agonizing. Emily wrote imploring letters and he wrote painfully back. For three years he exhorted her to mind her conjugal duties and forsake the mad notions she had dangled before him. Priests whom he continued to consult, offered no comfort, but his confessions kept her image fresh. The shudderings of her shoulders above the Indian Ocean vibrated plaintively on the nerve of memory. At last he formally begged her to leave her husband. She came and they were married outside the Church. Cuddahy – good, plain, loyal and limited Cuddahy – was now a renegade Catholic as well as a renegade Irishman.