Under the Rose

by Julia O'Faolain

  ‘Je t’assure, ma chérie!’ He was balding, transparent, furious and frail. When the waiter came to say there’s no more sturgeon, Paul gleamed. Pollution! exulted the gleam. Dying seas! Après moi le déluge!

  ‘They can only live in one near-saltless sea in Russia.’

  ‘No,’ Rose argued foolishly. ‘In the US they raise them in pools. I’ve seen them.’

  He pretended not to hear. The waiter said there was sturgeon for one.

  ‘The lady will have it.’

  ‘No, I’m on a diet!’

  His disappointment reproached her. But why had he chosen a place where the guest’s menu showed no prices so that, for all she knew, the slimmer’s salad was the dearest dish? Meals with him had been jinxed since, in his wealthy days, his cook gave her fish-poisoning. Rose had guessed the food was off but Paul, his mind on some cosmic threat, could not be alerted and, from sheer frustration, she’d found herself nibbling the fish. After that she swore not to see him again and would not have but for the blow which fell, freakishly, out of a clear – no, out of a murky sky.

  What had happened was that towards the fag-end of the Cold War some secret-service people, enraged by Paul’s even-handed editorials, cooked up a charge that he was a disinformer paid by the KGB, and to back this up got a double agent at the old Soviet embassy to offer royalties for articles of his which had appeared in Russia. The money was handed over in a plain envelope in a public place, the transaction filmed and Paul stitched up.

  In retrospect, this justified his contempt for Western paranoia!

  ‘Westerners’, he used to scoff, ‘think the Russians engage in industrial espionage, but why would they? The Japanese do it for them! Do you know how many of them work in Western labs? They sell what they learn to the Soviets.’

  Mocking! Knowing! Like some slick cartoon-figure – Speedy Gonzalez or the Roadrunner – he got so far ahead of himself that, smashing – SPLAT! – into a trap even an innocent could detect, he ended in gaol. Yet Rose knew that his puncturings of pedestrian thinking were performed not for the KGB but for private demons of his own.

  Hearing him now expound the notion of randomness, she wondered if he saw it as an absolution. ‘On the microscale …’ he said, ‘patterns, darling, do not exist!’

  So how could Roadrunners foresee a trap?

  Or was it the macro-scale? No, Paul did see patterns there. Big. Macro! Those he watched – not the small. Her mind slid back to when she was pregnant by the poor-but-promising violinist who had hoped to keep her, the baby and the violin. A folly. They would – as she had told him, citing Swift – have been reduced to eating the baby. An abortion – legal even then in Switzerland – was the sensible move.

  ‘All right,’ he said at last, ‘ask your friend Paul for the money. It’s peanuts to him.’ So she had both men to dinner in her tiny flat. But Paul talked all evening about some macro matter and neither she nor her lover could get through to him about the micro fish inside her which they needed to abort. Selectively deaf, he left early.

  ‘That violinist, What’s-his-name,’ he told her years later, ‘was all wrong for you.’

  ‘I know. We both did. We told you we wanted to separate but couldn’t because …’

  His eye mottled as if reflecting clouds.

  ‘All wrong.’

  ‘We needed money to …’

  ‘Such things are never a matter of money.’

  She wondered if he thought that still, now that his lawyers had cleaned him out.

  ‘Please see him,’ a mutual friend had begged Rose. ‘He’s convinced people avoid him. The publicity was devastating.’

  Remorsefully, she took his hand. It was the colour of the sturgeon.

  *

  They had first met when Rose was twenty in Southern California, at the sort of party where distinctions blur. Incense stunned taste-buds; orchids were tumid and guests’ names a puzzle until she guessed that they belonged to second-generation Hollywood: sons of movie moguls who had made their mark in Europe in the thirties, then fled here from the war. Some Slavic surnames slithered like centipedes. Others were haunted by lopped syllables.

  Paul told her, ‘I don’t belong here.’

  Indeed he seemed to lack a skin – unless it was the others who had an extra one? Gleaming, as if through clingwrap, they smiled past her.

  ‘They’re not interested in us,’ he told her.

  Perhaps she had been invited for him? To put him at ease? In Paris, where it turned out that they both lived, this was often her role. She worked in fashion and was in L.A. to show a collection. Paul had come to wind up a legacy.

  ‘It’s my first visit,’ he told her, ‘since I was six. Forty years ago!’ Later he said, ‘These people write memoirs about the parents they loathed. It helps pay their shrinks.’

  ‘What about you?’

  His reproving kiss set the tone for a friendship which, in Paris, would flourish in a jokey way. He became her Pygmalion, correcting her French and grooming her mind – when they met, which wasn’t often. Her relations with the violinist had grown difficult and she preferred not to talk about them. Besides, Paul was nobody’s idea of a confidant. He was a man for whom a kiss would present itself as a metaphor or semiotic bleep. A gag, joke or echo. Or so it seemed to her.

  She was impressed by him though. He was an eccentric mandarin, boiling with revolutionary ire which was stimulating at a time when it was widely held that intelligence, like the heart, was on the Left. Subversion was the fashion and Paul was generous, hospitable and rich, read four languages and had a court of clever young men, one of whom would eventually marry Rose.

  This led to awkwardness when Paul said he had been in love with her all along, but had refrained, through delicacy, from pressing his suit.

  In fact he had pressed it, but she had taken it for a joke. He called her his ‘wild Irish Rose’ and she, playing along, had, he now claimed, raised his hopes.

  Hopes? How? Surely, she asked, he remembered her lover the violinist? The dinner in her flat? But Paul had interpreted what he saw in ways to suit himself.

  ‘I thought you were living with him like a sister. To save on rent. I knew you were both admirable and poor!’

  And the abortion they’d needed? Their request for a loan?

  He didn’t remember any of that. ‘I thought you were shy and Irish. I thought you were a virgin.’

  It turned out that, when he was small, his Irish nanny, shocked by his parents’ morals, had consoled him with tales of pure colleens. ‘When you’re big we’ll find you one’, she’d promised.

  Nanny Brady had had a ‘boy’ back in Ireland who was waiting for her to put together a dowry and come home and marry him.

  ‘He waited years. And both, she somehow made clear to me, were keeping themselves pure. Why would I think this odder than the rest of what went on in our canyon off Sunset Boulevard?’

  ‘When you were six?’

  ‘Earlier. I was ejected at six. Sent to my grandparents in Paris. Cast out.’

  ‘From Eden?’

  ‘A celluloid Eden.’

  It was a sad little tale. Paul’s father whose movies charmed millions also charmed his son who, at four and five, lived for the few, short minutes each morning when he was allowed in with the breakfast trolley to snuggle up to a dazzling Dad who would then disappear for the rest of the day. Naturally, this radiant absence ignited the child’s fancy more than the humdrum presence of his mother and Nanny Brady.

  One day, when both were out, he made for his father’s room where he hid in the closet. There, amid vacant suits, tie-racks and leathery smells, his father seemed already half present and Paul waited happily to surprise him. The wait was a long one. Paul drowsed off and some time later was awoken in pitch darkness by frightening noises. Failing to find the closet light, he stumbled out and into the bedroom where he beheld his naked father doing something dreadful to a groaning lady. Paul got hysterics. Secretaries rushed in. Scandal sheets got wind of
the thing and his parents’ marriage came to an acrimonious end.

  ‘And they blamed you?’

  ‘My mother did. I don’t know whether he cared. I never saw him again.’

  His father had other wives, but no more sons, so Paul remained his heir. Maybe then, suggested Rose, he should be reconciled with his memory?

  ‘Ah, ma chérie!’ Squeezing her arm. ‘You have a good heart. Good! Generous! Just like Nanny Brady!’

  This nanny, despite an alarmed disapproval of films – ‘trash’ – once took him to see one. It featured Irish peasants whose strengths were the opposite of those animating his father’s jaunty movies and equally jaunty life. At this time nanny herself hadn’t seen Ireland for years. As the man and woman on screen struggled over barnacled rocks to get seaweed to fertilize their little fields, her tears began to flow and, to hide them, she took Paul in her arms. He had never felt so needed. The feeling quickened his understanding and there and then, he told Rose, he became a man.

  ‘Don’t cry, nanny,’ he whispered while she sniffled in shame: ‘I’m not really, Paul. It’s just … Oh, I’m sorry; pay me no mind!’ Then she hugged him until he too began to cry, while the pair on screen laboured to fill their creels, and sea spray spun rainbows which could have come from his and nanny’s tears.

  ‘She was seeing the life she had exchanged’, Paul explained, ‘for a life among our fake Louis XV furniture. Louis XV was all the rage just then because of one of my father’s studio’s successes: a smash hit whizzing with sword-play. Thinking back,’ he said, ‘I see that she must have been quite young – younger than you are now, chérie. I lost track of her when he gave us both our walking papers.’ Paul’s morose smile conferred a connection with all this on Rose. A bond and obligation.

  His was a name one could see in lights just about anywhere. Like Fox, Pathé, Rank, Warner, Gaumont, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer or Disney, its syllables pulsed glamour: bright dustings which the silver screen had been trickling into a drab world for the better part of a century. Once, high in the Andes, Rose saw the name glint in an Indian mud village.

  ‘I’ll bet your nanny had just decided not to go back to her boy in Ireland after all. That’s why she was crying.’

  For Paul, this, if true, was one more reason to blame his father’s industry’s false values. Its pampering dreams.

  ‘Man of Aran was the film!’ Rose realized. ‘Was that the bit of Ireland you saw? Aran? No wonder she didn’t want to go home.’

  *

  ‘Paul’, Yves liked to explain, ‘can’t forgive himself for accepting his Dad’s dosh – le pognon de papa. It explains everything about him. His politics. The lot!’

  He would then point out how, like Zeus descending, the father had created a seminal scatter. And how the son, as though dreams were dynamite, had laboured to disable them. Just as the Nobel family had funded their Peace Prize with money from explosives, so Paul put his into a magazine dedicated to defusing the soft illusions of our time.

  A fanatic! Just look, Yves invited, at Paul’s face furled in the ruff of his coat collar! See those white lashes and black-bullet eyes! Black and white as a bag of gobstoppers! ‘He wears pin-stripe suits as though wrapping himself in writing paper. Or news sheets! Why? Because his Dad was a king of the silent cinema! Paul went back to the medium which his old man’s medium displaced! Symbolic parricide!’

  Yves should know. Paul, a father-figure to the men who had worked on his magazine, still hoped to revive it. Coming out of gaol with his ideas of eight years ago intact, he could not accept that the political scene had changed as much as Yves said it had. The magazine, Yves had had to insist, even if Paul could fund it, had no place in the new order. Its staff had dispersed. ‘And,’ Yves broke it to him, ‘we’ve all taken new jobs.’ Symbolic parricide!

  ‘Remember the riddle,’ asked Yves cruelly, ‘that asks “what’s black and white and red all over”? Answer: “our old mag”. Who’s going to read it today?’ Sometimes, Yves could overstate his case. Uncomfortably. Like a man with a bad conscience.

  Paul, fighting back by fax and phone call, would not take no for an answer. He was this way with women too, as Rose knew, for she was one of several whom he courted doggedly. For years he had been urging her to leave Yves for him who was a worthier man. She must, he was confident, see this if she would weigh the facts.

  ‘Do you’, she had marvelled once, ‘think women are weathercocks?’

  ‘No, no, my dear. I admire women. And your loyalty does you credit. But Yves is not the right man for you, whereas I …’ And he proceeded, without shame or pride, to lay out his arguments: his superior understanding of her, his age – Yves was ‘a mere boy’– equable temperament, income – until he lost it – idealism and knowledge of the world … ‘I’m speaking’, he said, ‘for your sake.’ He was perfectly coherent, believing as he did in the revolt of reason, the end of cant and the coming of a Golden Age.

  Amused, she had once copied out the old quote about the heart having reasons which reason cannot comprehend and sent it to him: a mistake, for he took it to mean that her reasons were weak.

  ‘I’ll make a bargain with you,’ she’d offered then. ‘I’ll help you find the sweet colleen that your nanny promised.’

  She tried, though Yves made fun of her efforts to procure a Mademoiselle O’Morphy for Paul – who seemed oddly ready to play Louis XV. So perhaps his Dad’s taste for bandy-legged furniture had affected him after all? And perhaps some similar lure had dazzled Rose? The shine of Paul’s high-mindedness? Of his having perhaps really been an agent loyal to a fading dream of the Left.

  ‘You romanticize each other!’ Yves accused.

  *

  In the end, though the women she found liked Paul, they didn’t like him enough – while he, susceptible to them all, kept breaking his heart, an organ she thought of as perennially in splints.

  What did he lack? One could only guess that turning his back on the cinema – his father’s creation – had disabled him. The rest of us speeded our pulse to its rhythms; it was our lingua franca, a thesaurus of codes and humours which Paul refused to learn. Ironies passed him by. Refusing to use its spyhole, he had no idea how people lived and got things wrong – with Shiobhan, for instance, who shared a tiny flat, every bit of which could be metamorphosed into something else. Part of the kitchen became a shower. Beds slid into walls. Bicycles hung from the ceiling.

  Into this one day a florist’s delivery boy, acting at Paul’s behest – ‘Send her flowers,’ Rose had coached – attempted to deliver a flower arrangement with an eagle’s wingspan: a bouquet such as might be delivered to a prima donna on a first night. Had there been a first night? If so, its commemoration was tropical. There were lilies with spotted tongues, reported Shiobhan, bird-of-paradise flowers, ‘and some willowy thing which caught in the banisters’.

  With difficulty this was manœuvred up her staircase – she lived on the sixth floor. Through her door, however, it would not go. Nor was there room to leave it on the landing, so she – in whose budget this made a sizeable dent – had to tip the boy for bringing the thing up, then tip him again to take it away.

  ‘Too wide for my aperture!’ she told Rose with ribald wrath and put an end to the courtship. She was trying to stretch a grant for mature students and her life had no space for complications.

  ‘He’s too old-fashioned,’ was her verdict on Paul. ‘A nineteenth-century man!’

  *

  Add to that his stubbornness – over, for instance, paying for today’s lunch.

  ‘I wish you’d let me!’

  Sad-eyed headshake. ‘Darling, you repay me by your mere presence.’

  ‘But I want to pay. Give me pleasure. Please?’

  ‘No, no.’ His martyred look.

  Rose was starving. The ‘slimmers’ salad’ had turned out to consist of rocket leaves plus one sculpted radish. If let pay she could, even now, order a substantial sweet. A Tarte Tatin or – a man nearby was guzzling one – a
Grand Marnier soufflé. Its fumes tantalized her. Hypoglaecemic hunger blurred her mind. She felt a migraine coming on. There was a queue waiting for a free table.

  ‘Perhaps we should go then? As neither of us seems to be eating much? I think the waiters …’

  ‘Oh never mind them!’ He lit a cigarette. His smoking, which gave her nausea, had got out of hand in prison, so how complain? ‘I reserved this table,’ he stated firmly. ‘It’s ours.’

  If she could get away from him she could buy something in the street to stave off the migraine. Some quick, sugary fix. Nougat. Baclava. But – she glanced covertly at her watch – he was staring at her with a reflection of her own need. He was an old, needy friend who had requests to make. Stoical, she batted away smoke.

  She reproached herself. Hunger, the threatening migraine, and their joint obstinacy over the bill were pretexts for refusing him; yet he was a man without self, a last, gallant, monkish struggler for Liberal hopes born here in France and now almost universally dashed. All he asked was support. Friendship. Yes, but how did he define that?

  He laughed abruptly, ‘Remember the poem: “Just for a handful of silver he left us …” and what you wrote to me in gaol? You wrote that Yves had betrayed us spiritually. What’s the next line? “Just for a riband to stick in his coat.”’

  *

  Her head swam. Had her thoughts leaked? She mustn’t get into this argument.

  ‘Spiritual,’ Paul gloated. ‘That nailed him. You know he’s refusing to restart the magazine …’

  The maître d’hôtel was definitely eyeing their table.

  ‘If we’re not leaving we’ll have to order something. I’, she resolved ‘will have a coffee.’ That couldn’t cost much, could it? Wolfishly, she chewed the sugar lumps which came with it and, energized, found herself marvelling yet again at Paul’s persistence. He seemed to brim with expectancy and she could tell that not only he but she was about to be presented with a bill – an emotional one. ‘Irishwomen’, he repeated, ‘are good.’