Under the Rose

by Julia O'Faolain

  The next and last letter in this series was posted six months later in London.

  Carlo,

  This is to let you know that I have engaged a lawyer to start divorce proceedings. He is my mother’s lawyer and his name is Mr Knulty of Penn, Knulty, Moss and Legges of Chancery Lane, London, W.C.2. He will be contacting you. He assures me that the divorce will be unembarrassing and go through rapidly.

  I am afraid you will now stop reading this.

  How can I hold your attention? I’ll try truth: I am not writing just to tell you about Mr Knulty. He will do that himself. I want to hear from or at least of you. If you can’t bear to write yourself, perhaps Giovanna might? Just a few bare facts: your job, your health and where you are.

  I – loathsome pronoun – heard you had left Volterra and were working in Milan. Flight or promotion? If you can’t bear to read this let Giovanna read it and give you its gist. It will be an improvement – any change must be – for us to communicate through third parties. Like old monarchs.

  Facts about me: I have a job now. Before, I was in a clinic for a bit having what is described as a breakdown though it was actually a build-up. I gardened in the clinic – I raised tomato plants and begonias – and when I came out began designing fabrics. I regret not having learned to direct my energies before. It would have been easier on you. You can’t cope with more than a fraction of a woman’s attention. Perhaps no one can.

  Please thank Giovanna for posting me the manuscript which got left on the kitchen table in the skirmish at the end. I don’t know whether any of you read it or whether, if you did, it explained anything. I haven’t wanted to open the thing since getting it back, but I am glad Giovanna kept it from your mother. My leaving it for her was tasteless and pointless. I was … under strain. If Giovanna ever feels able to meet me on one of her trips to England, please tell her I would be happy – no, not that, just tell her I would be eager to see her.

  It all seems long ago now, doesn’t it? I do not feel apologies are relevant. What I did to you was amply compensated by what you tried to do to me when I released you. I am not talking of your physical assault. I’d expected that, which was why I managed to barricade myself in the bathroom and scream for the neighbours. I am talking about your phoning the police and trying to have me committed to an asylum.

  I wonder did you realize that the police didn’t believe a word of your story? The doctor didn’t either. I wonder did you ever discover this or know that they took me away for my own protection and that you were the one whose sanity was in doubt? Did you know that I sent Dottor Pietri a confession? In your interests! That I referred him to the MS on the kitchen table for confirmation? If I hadn’t, you might have had trouble of some sort on your hands. After all, remember the state in which I was found – no, no permanent damage. Not physical anyway. I suppose remembering all this is unpleasant. Perhaps, you won’t read this far? The scandal in a place like Volterra will no doubt outlast us both. But you are in Milan. Do you remember how we longed to move there? And now you’re there alone – or, anyway, not with me. Congratulations. I am truly glad for you.

  As you may not have read the wretched MS, let me tell you one thing that was in it: I am prepared to help you to obtain an annulment of our marriage. I have old letters and a diary which can demonstrate that I entered upon it with the wrong dispositions and that, consequently, it is, in the Church’s eyes, null and void as a contract. I had what they call ‘a mental reservation’. Or so I shall say. To help and convenience you. In fact, Carlo, I took our marriage if anything over-seriously. I did in my own way try to make it work. I suppose you will not see this. My way was not the accepted way, it is true. I was not prepared for a lifetime of guilefully manipulating you. I was not prepared to yield time after time to the superior force of your muscle. I had to fight back, even if I knew I would fail. Failure is bearable. It is the inability to respond at all which dehumanizes. You felt this when I tied you up: outrage, indignation, disbelief that you, a twentieth-century, Western middle-class man of mind and dignity could be subjected to such treatment. But, Carlo, I am not different from you. Being a female doesn’t make me different. ‘Feminine’ strategies are responses to an objective situation: lack of power. There is no ‘natural’ love of subservience in women.

  I remember a wretched little Calabrian in a loudly striped suit and brilliantine who once pestered me for over two hours in the Milan railway station. I was between trains. The only comfortable place to wait was the station café and I couldn’t move away easily because I had my suitcases with me. This caricature papagallo parked himself at the next table and kept up an audible stream of sub-erotic supplication. I felt trapped, publicly contaminated, and threatened to call the management. The wretched man explained that he was lonely, knew no one, craved only a little human contact and added that he had been wandering the city all day getting contempt from everyone. His final appeal was painful: ‘Non sono un cane,’ he said, ‘I am not a dog. I am a person. Sono una persona.’ The shaming thing, I realized as he said it, was that for me, because of his provincial bad taste in clothes and behaviour, he wasn’t quite a person. Obviously the Milanese felt the same. His plea was relevant. I let him sit at my table.

  As I write this I realize that the analogy is imperfect. I never wanted from you the kind of charity I gave the Calabrian. I did want recognition that I was a person. I always knew you were. Putting you in the cellar was not to deny that but to shock you into seeing how precarious personality can be. But I am not trying to write an apologia. Marriage, like topiary, distorts growth. Perhaps it is always a hierarchical relationship? Obsolete? We managed to get out of it physically intact. A lot of it was worth having, perhaps worth the price. You will be hearing from Mr Knulty. Ciao, Carlo, and good luck,

  Una

  Melancholy Baby

  ‘Ah no?’

  ‘God help us!’ Mrs Kelly sometimes greased gossip with pity. ‘Aunt Adie HAS NO WOMB!’

  Neighbours thrilled. ‘You’re not serious!’

  ‘Had it cut out BEFORE her marriage and NEVER TOLD HER HUSBAND!’

  ‘Go on!’

  ‘Cross my heart!’

  ‘And so?’

  ‘The poor man is praying for children to this day and has herself going down making the Nine Fridays for the same Intention! And down my lady goes.’

  ‘Gnawing the altar rails with the best!’

  ‘It’s hard to understand some people!’

  ‘Ha! She can have the fruits of my womb for the asking!’ Mrs Kelly slapped her protuberant belly. ‘To them that have more shall be given! I do have to laugh!’ She took a swig at her pint and guffawed again.

  ‘I hear’, said the postmistress, ‘how she’s taking her niece out of the orphanage at last.’

  *

  Adie lived in a run-down fishing village: a row of grey houses roofed with what might have been shards of solidified winter sea. Hope here was landlocked by the fog which rolled in to settle in the back-yard plots: mild incubators where lettuces grew greasy as seaweed, and buckets, left out to shelter rhubarb stalks, rusted red only to be resilvered by snail tracks. Round the front, owners decorated their posts with shells which had once encased flesh as sluggish as their own. She too was grey: eyes, hair and a dead pellicle of neglected pores which concealed the currents of her blood. But she had energy. When her husband’s trade – he was a sign-painter – was ruined by the advent of neon, she opened a tearoom and succeeded in selling soda bread and blackberry jam to the odd Lancashire mill-worker on holiday or Christian Brother who paused on that shingly beach. At a window prettified by gingham curtains and geraniums she would sit, with her teeth in, smiling out at them as they alighted from bus or bicycle and draw their attention to the sign-painter’s last effort in two-tone Celtic script: AUNT ADIE’S COUNTRY TEAS. The promissory legend followed them through their dip in the savage waters of the Irish Sea and drew them back for Teas: Plain at three bob a head or High (with fry) for seven and six. In a b
ackward, discouraged place, she cornered or created what trade there was and soon was selling cigarettes, chocolate bars, home-made sponge-cakes and lavender pin-cushions to the charmed and hungry Britishers who began to drift in after the war. She had the toughness without the timorousness of her stock. Once, when a GI asked for a room to rest in with his fiancée, she lent him her own and, thrilled by the pound he paid her, begged him to mention her address to friends. He must have forgotten, for no other couple asked for the favour, although she inveigled a number up to look at the view.

  ‘She’s a caution!’ said Mrs Kelly, Aunt Adie’s char.

  ‘Did jez hear what Aunt Adie’s after doing now?’

  ‘That one’s a Godless aul’ rip! If the priest were to hear of it he’d ballyrag her off the altar.’

  Adie continued to knead soda bread with ardent knuckles, and her business boomed. She could do without the esteem of the draggled village women, whose heads were addled by the squalling of their litters, and she was indifferent to the opinions of the ex-sign-painter, who had settled into placid redundance. Yet her vigour, having developed the tearooms to their limits, carried her no further. She thought for a while of launching into the pastry business and even found a bakery ready to act as distributor – but she gave up the idea. (‘Why work my fingers to the bone while himself sits there on his bum?’) Business never became a passion with her. Church-going – another favourite filler for lonely women’s lives – had no resonance in hers. Like the poised claw of a crane, her affective energies remained in suspense.

  Gap-toothed, bravely lipsticked Mrs Kelly was her companion. ‘Friend’ would not be the word. Mrs Kelly’s own illusions had long left her as birds leave a contaminated nest. Her husband had drunk her out of a pub, a house, and the middle class, and now – shiftless mother of five children whom she was raising on the dole, despising and despised by all around her – she took her pleasure in savage gossip. ‘I do have to laugh.’ It was from her that the neighbours first heard of Adie’s niece, Gwennie.

  ‘Four years’, Mrs Kelly shook her head at cronies in the pub, ‘in the orphanage without Adie as much as paying her a visit! She’s only taking her out now because the nuns won’t keep her any longer. The girl’s sixteen.’

  ‘Didn’t the mother die of consumption?’

  ‘Now you’re talking. Adie’s frightened silly of disease and of course the girl herself must be prone!’ Mrs Kelly spoke with allusive refinement. ‘I remember the time when a touch of it in a family was as big a bar to matrimony as madness. Still, that’s no excuse for leaving her to moulder that long in an institution! What is it but a bloody sweat shop? The so-called Sisters of Charity run a laundry out of it! Plenty of unpaid labour!’

  ‘Isn’t the girl’s father alive?’

  ‘In England. Working in a pub. Sends nothing towards the girl’s keep. Or so Adie says. You couldn’t believe daylight outa her!’

  Adie went into town alone to meet the girl’s bus which would leave her off, the nuns had written, at Aston Quay. But the green buses proclaimed only their destination – Dublin – and not their place of departure, so she began to race round in circles, bumping into the general ragtag and badgering inspectors. She wasn’t even sure she would recognize the girl whom she hadn’t seen since she was twelve. And why should she, she thought as another green bus drew in and swept to a halt forty yards down the quay, why (she puffed and ran and puffed) go pelting about like this after other people’s brats? Her sister, God rest her, had married a gom from down the country, a ne’er-do-well. She panted. The girl wasn’t on that bus! Adie had refused to let her sister have a share of their mother’s furniture. ‘Why throw good money after bad?’ she had reasoned at the time. And how right she had been! Her sister’s husband’s brogue had been as thick in his mouth as the dirt was under his nail! A no-good country gawk! Look at her now having to take in his daughter! Who was maybe consumptive! She shuddered, wondering whether she ought to even hug the girl. She had a handkerchief soaked in disinfectant in a plastic container in her purse. ‘I’ll let her kiss me if she wants to,’ she decided, ‘then I’ll pretend to blow my nose.’

  A bus drew in and a raggedy crowd of snot-nosed urchins rushed up yelling ‘porter, porter!’ Adie drew away, wary of germs. A louse, she thought, might jump off one of them or a bedbug. An urchin snatched a case from a passenger and, aiming a kick at a rival, jumped clear of the bus. ‘Taxi, ma’am?’ he yelled at the owner of the case, a girl not much bigger than himself who plunged down the steps, planted one red claw (whose cracked flesh billowed between the joints) on his elbow and with the other landed two noisy slaps on his cheek. ‘Thief!’ she gasped and dragged the suitcase from him. The boy goggled. ‘Hey, you….’ His fist clenched. Aunt Adie recognized her niece, Gwennie.

  ‘I thought I’d die,’ she told Mrs Kelly the next day. ‘I was ready to sink through the ground with mortification. Oh my Godfathers! Only for the bus conductor and the inspector the boys’d have had her clothes off her back! They held them and we had to scuttle off with the suitcase and everyone sniggering at us for a pair of country gawks!’

  ‘Ah! What could she know of the world!’ Mrs Kelly sighed. ‘Four years in a convent!’

  ‘Kind father to her,’ sniffed Adie who had intended telling none of this. ‘We went straight to the Celtic Ice Cream Parlour. I had to sit down. I was shaking like a leaf. Do you know, I ate two Melancholy Babies and she had a Knickerbocker Glory before either of us said one word!’

  These were sundaes and Aunt Adie’s predominant passion. (‘What’s your predominant passion?’ the priest had asked her once at a retreat. ‘Sundaes, father!’) Once a week she closed her tearooms and rode to town – twelve miles in the bus – to revel in them. They cost half a crown apiece, which was almost what she charged in her own establishment for tea with scones and a boiled egg. They were her one extravagance, a trochaic trimeter that evoked the syrupy sundae itself: Méll an Cólly Báby. It drew fizzles of saliva to her lips.

  Confused by the suitcase rumpus, too outraged to even scold this atrocious niece, Adie, with no more than a ‘you can leave your case with the cashier’, plunged her senses in a well of marshmallow and cool cream. Goblets later, notions which had been clashing in the corners of her shattered mind (‘Straight back on the next bus!’ – ‘Ship her to her father in England tonight!’) dissolved and withdrew. She looked at the girl who would not meet her eye. Adie’s descended to long lisle stockings, lumpy with darns. She recalled the price she had been required to pay for six such pairs. Further up, a belt had been dragged tightly across a discoloured gymslip in an effort to give it shape. A poplin tie was punctured by a pin which bore, impaled and bleeding, a nickel emblem of the Sacred Heart. The girl’s hair was wild as overblown furze. A gawk, Adie decided and was depressed. God help us, a poor eedjit. She was not surprised. People from outside County Dublin were half-baked. Though they could be sly enough when it suited their book. Country cute. Pale between spiky lashes, the girl’s eyes reminded Adie suddenly of the untarred roads to nowhere that she had taken four years before when she went down to bury her sister. The country, smothered in mildewed hedges, had stunk of rotted flax, and Gwennie’s freckles struck her then as being the same colour as the little mouldering mounds. The speechless child gave her the willies. Was she a moron, Adie had wondered between shudders at the cold, the lichenous presence of failure and the hens ridden by parasites. Going through her dead sister’s duds had crowned it. There was so little to note: the wedding lines, some badly taken snaps, a few cheap medals. Musty smells, clammy oilcloth, a spray of withered twigs stuck in a bottle convinced her that her sister had put up no fight at all, that the last few months must have been nothing but a spineless drift into death and out of her responsibilities. The accumulations of this foolish life got Adie down properly. There was nothing you would take as a present. The poor trumpery would have been cruel as a souvenir. She couldn’t get out of the place fast enough. ‘The nuns’, she told the child,
‘will teach you Domestic Economy. Then you can come and live with me.’ But she had put off taking her from year to year.

  ‘Well, Miss,’ Adie nodded impatiently at the goblet smeared with remnants of sundae. ‘Did that please you?’

  ‘Oh ma’am,’ said the girl. ‘It’s gorgeous! I didn’t know there was annything like that to eat annyplace.’

  Adie was moved. Contemptuous but moved. The sundaeless dreariness of convent life struck her with a precise pain which was promptly relieved by the knowledge that she, Adie, could now bring happiness to a deprived creature. It was an odd sensation, sad but agreable. Like crying at a movie. Adie was a great crier. She began to cry now and dried her eyes with the disinfectant-soaked handkerchief which stung the tender flesh of her underlids.

  ‘Oh,’ she gasped. ‘Oh!’

  ‘What is it, ma’am?’ Gwennie asked.

  ‘I was thinking of your poor mother,’ Aunt Adie lied. ‘Call me “Aunt Adie”. Everyone does.’ And she smiled bravely in spite of the sting in her eye. She leaned a cheek towards the girl: ‘Kiss me,’ she said recklessly.

  *

  ‘Isn’t that life!’

  Mrs Kelly – bulbously pregnant and terrified of twins – rocked with laughter. ‘Ha! Ha! Ha!’ She flung her head so far back that Adie could see the uvula glisten in the moist vaulting of her mouth. ‘I do have to laugh! Sure, if I had the money to insure against them, I’d be in no need to insure! Ah well,’ she told Adie, ‘you’ve never known the meaning of the word “trouble”! Maybe you’ll learn now! I’d say there was more than meets the eye in the nuns wanting to get shut of Gwennie! At sixteen she was just beginning to be worth pounds and pounds to them! Unless there was something wrong with her health? A delicate girl….’

  ‘She’s not “delicate”!’ Aunt Adie shied before the word ‘TB’ and cantered firmly round it. ‘She was sick. Now she’s cured.’