Under the Rose

by Julia O'Faolain

  ‘Mother of Chri-i-ist …’

  ‘How was your First Communion?’ Maggy asked Dizzy. ‘Did you experience ecstasy?’

  ‘I don’t think anyone mentioned the word. I thought of it more as a way of joining the club. As a convert, you know.’

  ‘Sta-a-a-r of the … Fuck!’ Rosheen had dropped the shampoo. Now they would all get glass splinters in their feet.

  ‘Didn’t you notice the prayers?’ Maggy wondered. ‘May thy wounds be to me food and drink by which I may be nourished, inebriated and overjoyed! Surely you remember that? And: Thou alone will ever be my hope, my riches, my delight, my pleasure, my joy … My fragrance, my sweet savour? It goes on.’

  ‘Do you think bloody Rosheen’s cut herself? It’s a responsibility having her around. I didn’t think you were pious, Maggy. More toast?’

  ‘I saw it all’, said Maggy, ‘as a promise of what I’d find outside the convent: men like Christs who’d provide all that.’

  ‘I do think semiology is the wrong thing for you, Maggy. You should put your energies into something practical.’

  ‘Dizzy, you’re a treat! You’ve been trying to de-Anglicize yourself since the day we met, but your officer-class genes are too much for you.’

  This was going too far. Dizzy, hurt, had to be sweetened by a gift of liqueur jam for which Maggy had to go all the way to Harrods. The trip made her late and when she got back to the flat Dizzy had left for the local pub. Maggy, joining her there, found her chatting to a man who sometimes dropped in after work. He was a sandy-haired chap who probably worked in an insurance office. Dizzy imagined him as starved for life and in search of anecdotes. ‘I drop into an Irish pub in Camden,’ he would tell his wife who would be wearing an apron covered with Campari ads. Dizzy, nourishing this imagined saga, had tried to get Rosheen to sing while he was in the pub, though it was always too early and the ambience wasn’t right. ‘It is an IRA pub, you know,’ she had told him, slipping in and out of Irishness as though it were stage make-up.

  ‘I believe less and less in democracy,’ she was saying when Maggy arrived. ‘Hullo, Maggy. What’re you having? Don’t you agree that democracy is a con? Do you know who said “the people have no right to do wrong”? Also “there are rights which a minority may justly uphold in arms against a majority”? Bet you don’t.’

  The man in the belted mac and sandy hair had nothing to say to this. Dizzy, however, could carry on two ends of a conversation.

  ‘You might say,’ she supplied, ‘that the people have a right to decide for themselves. But “the people” are people like that gutless wonder, Sean. They never initiate change, so …’

  Maggy left for the loo. Through its window she saw Sean and Rosheen embracing in the damp and empty garden of the pub. Both seemed to be crying. It might, however, be rain on their cheeks. She went back to the lounge.

  ‘Saw it in Malaya,’ the macintoshed man was saying. ‘Bulk of the people were loyal. Just a few agitators. You’ve got to string ’em up right at the start. Cut off the gangrened limb. Else you’ll have chaos.’

  ‘But I’, said Dizzy, ‘was speaking on behalf of the agitators, the leaven, the heroes!’

  ‘Oh,’ the man moved his glass away from hers. ‘I could hardly go along with that.’

  Rosheen stood at the door of the lounge and beckoned Maggy behind Dizzy’s back. She put a finger on her lips.

  ‘I’m going.’ Maggy got up.

  *

  Rosheen rushed Maggy down a corridor. ‘Let’s get out of here. That man’s in the Special Branch. A detective. He’s looking for Sean.’

  ‘Why … but then Dizzy …?’

  ‘Dizzy’s an eejit, doesn’t know whether she’s coming or going.’

  ‘You think Dizzy’s an eejit?’ Maggy couldn’t have been more astonished if a worm had stood erect on its tail and spoken.

  ‘You know she is, Maggy! She’s in way over her head. Wait till I tell you.’ Rosheen’s eyes were red, but she spoke lucidly. ‘It’s Sean they’re after. They want him to turn informer and if he doesn’t, they’ll spread the word that he has. Then the IRA will get him. And you know what they do to informers.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ Maggy asked, but it was likely enough. She remembered Mairéad’s description of the nerve-shot Sean. He was the very stuff of which the police could hope to make an informer. His family had a record. Had he one himself? ‘Is he political?’ she asked.

  ‘No, but they could nail him. They can nail anyone.’

  ‘But what does he know? I mean what information has he?’

  ‘That’s the trouble,’ Rosheen told her. ‘He doesn’t know much at all. But in self-defence he’ll have to shop someone and the only one he can think of is Dizzy.’

  ‘Dizzy?’

  ‘You see she’s not real IRA: only on the fringe, expendable. Sean thinks they mightn’t mind about her. The IRA, I mean. And naturally he hates her.’ Rosheen blushed and added quickly, ‘This is killing him. He’s passing blood again. Both sides have their eye on him now. He’s been seen talking to that detective, so if anything at all happens in the next few weeks, it’ll be blemt on Sean. I think he’s a dead man.’ Rosheen spoke numbly. ‘If one lot doesn’t get him, the others will.’

  ‘And what is Dizzy up to? I mean what could he tell them?’

  Rosheen turned stunned eyes on Maggy, who saw that there was no turning her into an Emerald Pimpernel. Dizzy, having stumbled onto territory which Rosheen knew better, might be revealed as an eejit and a play-actress but Rosheen herself, helpless as a heifer who has somehow strayed onto the centre divider of a highway, could only wait and wonder whether the traffic of events might be miraculously diverted before it mowed her down. ‘What do they get expendable people like her to do?’ she asked. ‘Plant bombs.’

  *

  Dizzy, when faced with the question, reacted violently: ‘Maggy, are you working for the Special Branch? Shit, I should have known! All that pretence at being apathetic – or’, her eyes narrowed, ‘is it Rosheen who’s been talking? I always thought Sean had the stuff of a stool pigeon.’ She went on like this until Maggy cut her short with the news that who was in the Special Branch was Dizzy’s drinking companion whose phone number Maggy – thanks to Rosheen – was in a position to let her have.

  ‘It’s a Scotland Yard number. Check if you like,’ she said, astounded at the way Dizzy’s authority had crumbled. It was like the emperor’s clothes: an illusion, nothing but RADA vowels, that officer-class demeanour, thought Maggy, who now felt powerful and practical herself. Rosheen, like one of those creatures in folk tales who hand the heroine some magic tool, had made Maggy potent.

  In return, the helper must herself be helped. Maggy remembered Rosheen’s telephone colloquies with Sean seeping, regularly as bedtime stories, under her own bedroom door and that Rosheen’s renunciatory voice had quavered like a captive bird’s as she hid among the heavy coats in Dizzy’s front hall. Now she must be allowed to unleash her precarious passion in peace.

  ‘You’re a security risk, you must see that,’ said Maggy to Dizzy, making short work of her protests. ‘So you’d better let me pick up your bomb. Never mind why I want to. That’s my concern. Motives’, she told her, ‘are irrelevant to history. If I do this for the IRA, I shall be IRA. Wasn’t that your own calculation?’

  This bit of rhetoric proved truer than foreseen, for a number of squat, tough-faced, under-nourished-looking people turned up at her trial and had to be cleared from the public gallery where they created a disturbance and gave clenched-fist salutes. They seemed to have co-opted her act, and her lawyer brought along copies of excitable weekly papers which described it in terms she could not follow because their references were rancorous and obscure. One was called An Phoblacht, another The Starry Plough and there was a sad daily from Belfast full of ads for money-lenders, in memoriam columns and, for her, a bleak fraternity. Dizzy did not come and neither did Rosheen.

  Who did attend the trial and visit her afterwards w
as the glass-eyed man. ‘All Ireland is with you,’ he said, ‘all true Irish Socialist Republicans.’ Was this a joke? Did the eye gleam with irony? Or had he meant that her act was public property, whether she liked this or not, and despite the fact that her victim had not been Dizzy’s target at all? That was to have been a building and there was to have been a telephone warning to avoid loss of life. Maggy thought this ridiculous. A war was a war and everyone knew how those warnings went wrong. The police delayed acting so as to rouse public feeling against the bombers – for how much anger could be generated if explosions hurt nobody, going off with the mild bang of a firework display? Property owners would be indignant, but the police needed wider support than theirs. Yes, the police were undoubtedly the culprits. They bent rules. Detective Inspector Coffee had been bending rules when he told the nerve-shot Sean that he’d put the word about in Irish pubs that Sean was an informer unless he became one. An old police trick! It had landed men in a ditch with a bullet in the neck before now. How many had Detective Inspector Coffee nudged that way? How many more would he? None, because Maggy had got him with Dizzy’s bomb.

  ‘For personal reasons,’ she told Glass Eye.

  ‘It’s what you did that counts.’

  What she had done astounded her. She had been like one of those mothers who find the sudden strength to lift lorries and liberate their child. Unthinkingly, almost in a trance, she had phoned the number given her by Rosheen and asked for an appointment. She had information of interest, she promised, and evidence to back it up. Could she bring it round at once? Where she’d got the number? Oh, please, she didn’t want to say this on the phone. ‘They may be listening, watching. Maybe I’m paranoid but I’ve got caught up in something terrifying. By chance.’

  Her genuinely shaky voice convinced him and he proved more guileless than she could have believed for she had gone to the meeting fearful of being frisked by attendant heavies. But no. There were no preliminaries. She got straight to the man himself.

  ‘Detective Inspector Coffee?’

  He was the sandy-haired chap all right. Perhaps he had recognized her voice on the phone? She handed him a bag. There were documents on top of the device which was primed to go off when touched.

  ‘I brought you papers. You’ll see what they are. I’m afraid I’m a bit rattled. Nausea. Could I find a loo?’

  He showed her the way, then walked back into his room. She was two flights down the stairs, when she heard the explosion. Oddly – she had expected her fake nausea to become real – she felt nothing but elation. There were shattering noises, shouts, a bell. She thought: that’s put an end to his smile, his assurance, his smug, salary-drawing, legal murder. The word registered then and, seeing him in her mind’s eye blown apart, she began to sweat. The smell was pungent when she reached the outer door where a policeman stopped her.

  ‘You’ll demand political status?’ asked the glass-eyed man. ‘Go on hunger strike until they grant it.’

  ‘Political?’

  He was impatient, the visit nearly over. A group in another wing of the prison were all set to strike. He was planning publicity which would have more impact if she joined in. ‘Listen, love,’ he said, ‘you’re political or what are you?’

  Political? The notion exhilarated. Old songs. Solidarity. We shall overcome. In gaol, as in church, that sort of language seemed to work. On a snap decision, she agreed and, in after-image, the gleam of his eye pinned her to the definition. As she grew weaker, her weathercock mind froze at North-North-East. The strike gave purpose to her days and, like the falling sparrow’s, her pain became a usable statistic. ‘Get involved,’ commanded an ad in the Irish News which the glass-eyed man brought on a subsequent visit. ‘They did.’ A list of hunger-strikers included Maggy’s name.

  Her mind was flickering. Sharp-edged scenes faltered and she wondered whether thin people like herself had less stamina than others. It was too soon, surely, to be so weak? She had a fantasy – some of the time it was a conviction – that her lover from San Francisco had come and that they had done together all the things she – no: he – had always wanted to do. Like a drowning person’s flash vision of a lifetime, a whole erotic frieze unrolled with convincing brilliance in her mind. Sensory deprivation was supposed to make you hallucinate, she remembered, but confused this false prison visitor with real ones. His eyes gleamed like glass. ‘Sentient,’ he had said of himself and ‘cold’ of her, but her memory of him was bright like ice and cold. She was cold. It was part of her condition. And her mouth was dry. In her fantasy – or reality? – he offered her an icicle to suck.

  ‘Don’t talk,’ said someone, ‘save your saliva.’

  Now her lover was lying naked and wounded beside her and offered her his wounds to moisten her lips, but they too were dry and not as food and drink to her at all.

  Vitamins and hormones were being used up.

  This was the prison doctor talking now. He had checked her blood and urine and felt it his duty to warn her that irreversible effects could occur.

  ‘Jaundice,’ warned the doctor.

  ‘Golden, gilded skin,’ said her lover. ‘Here,’ he presented her with a golden potato chip. ‘Eat this for me.’

  ‘Eat,’ said the screw.

  ‘Do yourself a favour,’ said the doctor.

  Maggy put the chip in her mouth. It was dry. She couldn’t swallow it. It revived her nausea.

  Diego

  Diego? He hasn’t been in touch? Well, but that’s his way, isn’t it? He can just drop out of sight, then come back later, bubbling with good humour and gifts. He’s so good-natured one has to forgive him. Of course he trades on that. I did see him recently, as it happens. Mmm. About two weeks ago and a funny thing happened then – funny things do when one is with him, don’t you find? Or maybe it’s he who makes them seem funny because he enjoys a laugh so much. He was giving me a lift home to have dinner with his wife and Mercedes, the little girl. Yes, she’s ten now and bright as a button, a bit spoilt I’m afraid. Well, you’d expect Diego to spoil a daughter, wouldn’t you? Of course he’s in love with her and I must say she is a lovely creature. What was I going to tell you? Oh, about the supermarket. Well, Marie had asked him to stop and pick up some mangoes – you’ve never met her, have you? Am I putting my foot in it? Sorry. I know you’re much older friends of Diego’s than I am – but that’s just the trouble, isn’t it? You belong to the days when he was with Michèle and he has never felt able to present friends from those years to Marie. It’s his delicacy. Another husband wouldn’t give a damn. Hard on old friends. But you know what he says: ‘How can I tell my wife “Here are my friends, X and Y, whom I’ve known for ten years but never brought home until now”?’ In a way you can see his point. He neglected Marie awfully during all that time. Excluded her from his social life. You’d be a reminder of his bad behaviour. It would be different if they’d gone through with the divorce. His good nature prevented that. He couldn’t bring himself to leave her and now he can’t bring himself to leave Michèle, and so someone’s always getting the short end of the stick.

  I was telling you about the mangoes. Well, we went into the market to get them and it was one of those places in the banlieue where they weren’t used to selling exotic fruit. Nobody knew the price and a girl was sent off with the ones Diego had picked to try and find the manager. Then she got waylaid or went to the phone and didn’t come back. The woman at the check-out shouted on the intercom, ‘Où sont les mangues de Monsieur?’ At this, Diego began to fall about laughing and then everyone in the shop began to see the thing as a gag. They began shouting at each other: ‘His what?’ – ‘His mangoes!’ – ‘Lost his mangoes, has he? Oh that must be painful!’ – ‘What? Mangoes? Oh, unmentionable!’ And so forth. It was pretty mindless and any other customer might have been annoyed, but not Diego. He was delighted. ‘They come from my country,’ he told the girl and when he did I noticed that he looks like a mango: reddish and yellowish and a touch wizened. ‘I’m half Red Indian,
’ he told her and it was obvious that if his mangoes hadn’t turned up just then in a great burst of hilarity, he would have started getting off with her. He has a great way with him and he knows how to take the French. He keeps just that little touch of foreignness while speaking very racy Parisian and knowing everything there is to know about life here. They love that. He loves their ways and that makes them able to feel they can love his.

  When we got back into the car, he started telling me of how once, years ago, when he first met Michèle, he was walking through the old Halles market, with her on one arm and Marie on the other, on their way to dine at an oyster bar, and one of those hefty lorry-drivers who used to bring in loads of produce began pointing at tiny Diego walking between these two splendid, plantureuses women – they looked like assemblages of melons, according to Diego – and, pretending to wipe his brow, raised his cap and roared: ‘What a constitution!’ Quelle santé! It was like the mango joke. Diego attracts such comments. When he told me the story, I got the idea that that could have been what started off his affaire with Michèle.

  Because dear old Diego is a bit of a macho, isn’t he, in the nicest possible way? ‘Moi, j’aime la femme,’ he says. Awfully Latin! It sounds impossible in English. I mean you can’t say it really: ‘I love woman’ sounds absurd. And if you say ‘women’ in the plural it sounds cheap. But what he means is the essence of woman, something he sees in every woman, even in his mother and, of course, especially in little Mercedes, right from the moment she was born. ‘She was a woman,’ he’ll tell you – well, he probably has told you. He talks about her all the time. ‘From the moment she was born she was a woman, a coquette, a flirt.’

  As I was saying, he has spoilt her a bit – I tell a lie, he has spoilt her a great deal. In fact something happened later that evening which pointed up the dangers of this and was really quite upsetting. I don’t know whether Diego will draw the lesson from it.