Under the Rose

by Julia O'Faolain

  ‘Red Cross my big toe,’ said Adie. ‘That one’s an ikey lass! Charity, you might tell her, begins at home. If you lie down and make a door mat of yourself you’ll be trodden on. Stand up for your rights!’

  ‘Oh,’ said Gwennie, ‘I couldn’t.’

  In February – three months after the bricklayer had asked Gwennie to the dance – Adie had occasion to go to the cinema alone. Frankenstein which she couldn’t bear to miss was showing locally. Gwennie was not off and Adie, returning by dark from the bus stop, was pursued by monsters. Scuttling from street lamp to street lamp, she clawed at walls which, in places, yielded beneath her fingers with the suspect pliancy of moss. The stretch of road past the doctor’s gate was particularly dark. Protruding stucco erections and fanciful battlements reared; ancient cedars concealed the sky. Beyond them was the sea. On the curve of road below, a line of cars, packed tight like scales on a snake, harboured lovers. Adie, hastening in the dark past the doctor’s gate, heard a half smothered, wholly familiar laugh. She whipped round, plunged back. Heedless of doubt, she grabbed the woman’s arm and pulled her into the lamplight. It was Gwennie. With the bricklayer. ‘You … you!’ Hysteria choked her. Gwennie wrenched her arm free and ran in. A door creaked shut. The bricklayer disappeared. Adie, who had wasted her ammunition on skirmishes, was foiled of the major battle, disarmed before the true betrayal. She turned away, groping. Below her the closed cars crouched in their ranks. ‘Sluts!’ she muttered at them. ‘Whores!’ She plunged and stumbled, almost fell down the hill, beyond the trees, to where the bay opened wide to the moonlight. ‘Underhand …’ she groaned. ‘Hypocrite!’ The words, not quite released, fell back in her throat with the loneliness of a sleeper’s moan. ‘Trailing round lanes …!’ she spat. Down here, in gardens heavy with winter greenery, artificial pagodas and summer houses shone in a light which ignored the small village house further below, shadowed by the hill’s shoulder and dank with its drainings. Leaves clattered. The sea sucked. With head hunched into her shoulders, Adie fled the empty openness of the night and at a swift lope made for the consoling limits of her own kitchen.

  Alone there, later, while the sign-painter snored, she sat like Niobe and pondered. On the sly! All these months Gwennie had had nights off that she had not confessed. Red Cross indeed! Adie laughed sourly and caught a hateful glimpse of her own derision in the glass. Gulled! Gulled! That two-faced, simpering trollop had deceived her! She had been rationed! Two nights a week for her and how many for the bricklayer? All the sweetness to herself had been a sop thrown to stick in her gullet. To shut her up! Three for him or four? Five maybe? Maybe she was off every night! At the suspicion Adie went rigid with pain. What would she not have done for Gwennie! Nights blank as the bay she had just passed stretched despairingly in front of her. After such treachery whom could she ever trust? Adie, who had never smashed a possession deliberately or hardly even wept if not at the movies, sat stifling with unvented misery until, in the small hours of the morning, she dozed off in her chair.

  At nine she was ringing the doctor’s bell. He came to the door himself. Gwennie had taken the children to the dentist. Adie told him she wanted her niece back. She needed her in the tearooms. He said, coldly, that he thought he had gathered that the girl herself was eager to stay. Seeing his inquisitive stare, Adie tried to settle wisps of hair which she had not combed since the morning before. Her breath catching, she said, ‘Gwennie is under age.’

  ‘But she tells me’, he said, ‘that her father is her legal guardian.’

  Adie broke down at this proof of a fresh conspiracy. ‘Oh,’ she sobbed. ‘To think that I … after all, all…. Brought her back from death’s door! Where’s me handkerchief? Oh the hussy…. The snake! Asp in my bosom…. Oh!’

  The doctor sat her down, gave her a glass of something, tried to soothe, talked of the understanding we must all have for the young and how Mat Mullen was a decent young man. At this Adie collected her dignity and walked out of the house. They were all against her. There was no trust.

  That morning she denounced Mat Mullen to an officer of the bricklayers’ union.

  *

  For weeks she did not see Gwennie whose guilty conscience, no doubt of it, was keeping her embuttressed in the doctor’s house up the hill. She heard from Mrs Kelly however that Mat had been given his marching orders and that, as this meant he couldn’t work any more in the Republic, he was going to buy a ticket for the other side. Then news came that Gwennie too had given notice. It seemed she would wait for Mat to get a job before joining him. She had written to her father in London and had got an answer. Meanwhile, the two were observed courting on the hill roads where cedars and ilexes lent concealment even in January. By the winter twilight Adie saw them in every couple that passed up or down the road or stood at lookout points above the bay: unidentifiable match-stick figures, pausing by parapets like migrant birds. When business took her to Dun Laoghaire Harbour, she swerved towards the wooden departure pier, to scrutinize the spray-blown, pink-nosed travellers who queued, moving their bundles with intent patience. Gold-braided harbour officials ushered striding gentlemen ahead, and relatives waved despondently from behind a parapet. Gwennie’s underhand countenance snuffled beneath every umbrella. Then Adie heard that Mat had indeed gone, that Gwennie had a cold, had pleurisy, had been moved to hospital with TB meningitis. The doctor came and drove Adie in, weeping all the way, in his own car.

  At ten that morning, Adie sat, alone among the marble tables of the Ice Cream Parlour, and held a handkerchief to her lips. She had been there an hour when Mrs Kelly, lean and mangey after her delivery, came in to help her home.

  ‘I couldn’t face back alone,’ Adie told her. ‘I’ve been to the hospital. They wouldn’t let me see her.’ She sobbed. ‘First her mother and now her! And those two men off in England! Her father and the other one! Leaving it all to me. Such a responsibility! Doctor Flynn says there’s a new Wonder Drug they could try on her. It costs hundreds of pounds but they’d try it on her as an experiment. Free! How do I know what to say? Maybe they’re using her as a guinea pig? What do doctors care for the poor? Have a sundae. No? Ah do! As we’re here. I didn’t know where else to go. Have a Melancholy Baby. To think she used to love coming here!’ Aunt Adie sobbed again lengthily. She dabbed her face. ‘I suppose I’ll be alone at her funeral,’ she groaned. ‘Like I was at her mother’s. If she dies. He wouldn’t tell me what the chances were. A buttoned-up old puss-in-boots that doctor. On and on about how they do their best and the state of medical science and a lot of jawbreakers!’ Aunt Adie fell silent, sighed, blew her nose and drew a corner of an envelope from her handbag. Letters protruded: P-R-U-D-E-N…. Seeing Mrs Kelly lean forward, she pushed it back and clamped shut, first the bag, and then her mouth as though it contained a frog which she was afraid might jump out. The frog kicked the inside of her cheeks so that they trembled, and Adie opened her mouth with a pop.

  ‘I went in’, she gasped, ‘and paid up the back payments of the life insurance anyway. I’d stopped paying them for a while there when she looked so healthy.’

  She turned in her chair to call the waitress and ordered a Melancholy Baby for herself and another for Mrs Kelly. The two women spooned silently into their sundaes.

  ‘God help us but it’s a queer world we live in,’ Mrs Kelly said, through a spoonful of marshmallow.

  ‘Eat up,’ Aunt Adie said. ‘We may as well enjoy it while we’re in it.’

  Oh My Monsters!

  It’s freakish! Appalling! I can’t bear to think about it!

  Thoughts forward.

  To whom or what? Oh, to whom but Kiki. Yes, unknown to you, Kiki, I’m on my way. The train has pulled out of Paris-Lyon. Goodbye. Goodbye. The rural womb awaits. Merde! Now I’ve depressed myself and there’s no one to cheer me. Minutes ago, a man stuck his head in the compartment door, paused, withdrew himself. Mustn’t have liked what he saw. So here I’m on my own till Dijon with nary a buffer between me and me. Nothing but a litre of
cognac and Nembutal in the little malachite box given me by – never mind whom. Every item I possess has a name attached, so better not start the attributing game. What will I do then? Sing? Count sheep? Make up a limerick? A lady who loved to get laid – what rhymes with that? Well, there’s ‘renegade’: that’s me, ever ready to join a new army, sew fresh colours on my faded sleeve. My armies, Kiki, are my men and – since I too have my honour – I join one at a time and keep step with the current paymaster. Yessir! I’m loyal while I last, the perfect batwoman, quick to absorb new tastes and learn to shop within the confines of almost any budget. References aplenty. Premier prix de souplesse: I can operate in French, British and American, upper to lower – well, better say lower-middle – class arenas. Parfaitement, Kiki, and don’t think apologies are intended. Either now or when we meet.

  Look, if I take my style and world view from my current man and he his from his current job, whose integrity is weaker? Is it better to adapt for love or money? To embrace the values of the Rand Corp., the Quai d’Orsay or the Faculté de Philo of the University of Grenoble? Or to embrace Rand etc. values through and in the person of a man?

  I’ve no idea.

  Truly. You see, Kiki, currently, I’m valueless, being manless, demobbed, out of uniform and with no reference points. The last ones turned out unreliable for the man was mad: a most disconcerting event. I wonder can you tell how disconcerting? No? Look, it was as though some executive were suddenly to learn that the corporation for which he worked did not exist, had been – say – a project cooked up by some well-funded psychologists eager to study executives’ behaviour. After months – or years – of diligence on his part, they tell him ‘it wasn’t real’, give him a golden handshake and let him go. Where does that leave him?

  I wouldn’t know. I’ve lost my criteria.

  (She lost her what? Oh some little thing she had removed. Probably one of those feminine ‘ops’ so common after thirty.)

  Jokes, Kiki, are getting unfunny. I’m in one, you see: the reason I never knew he was mad was that I thought he was being funny. Funny-haha, you know, but instead he was funny-peculiar. Doesn’t it just kill you, Kiki. No, but it may me.

  I wonder will you be glad or under strain when I turn up? I should, of course, have written – but some things are hard to get down on paper. I meant to. Really. I kept, keep, writing to you in my head.

  ‘Dear’ – goes my head-letter – ‘Kiki, I do think about you. I mayn’t write but I talk to you in my mind all the time. Well, “mind” is a word which makes me blush. I feel shame about using it of the place in which I spend my days and nights. It’s a cerebral slum, a louche blue-movie house …’

  Dear Kiki, the truth is I have no mind. That’s why I can’t answer your concerned and reasonable letters. You always said I hadn’t. Remember? ‘Anne-Marie’, you said, ‘is alive from her waist down. As for her head …’ You shrugged your hump. Your hump gave you prestige. It was something the rest of us didn’t have. It put you out of the running for the marriage-market and, by extension, out of our sex. Your extra protuberance made a man of you. You were, even before Jacques, Papa and Gerard died, the true chef de famille.

  We’re in open country now: bare, frozen fields. The train zips over them, quick as a fly-zipper. A nip of brandy forward. I need support.

  ‘I hope’, your last letter says, ‘this marriage is not going to be another mistake. Tell me about Sam.’

  Damn you, Kiki, you’ve made yourself my conscience. Do you know what the result has been? No, but I’ll tell you. This time when we meet you’re going to be told. It has meant that I’ve always left the job to you. Kiki has had the conscience, Anne-Marie the cunt-science. Oh weep tears of sperm and lubricant! I live in my cunt! You can’t begin to imagine what it feels like, can you? Can’t and wouldn’t try. But this isn’t a joke. Mentally I’m wound around, head between my own legs, eyes and brain swaddled in a monotonous cuntscape.

  Apologia and quota of self-pity: another thing you can’t imagine is what it’s like to have to adjust to no longer trading on charm. At my age.

  A hump-shrug here. I know. I know. Plain women have no patience with this plea, even take it for a kind of boast. You called me ‘the dumb beauty’ – but have you ever wondered why are dumb beauties dumb? Sister, the first reason is because they have no reason not to be and the second that the brain tuned to pleasure functions differently. Essential parts atrophy. Comes the day when it can only cope with dream. I think that’s happened to mine, Kiki. When I’m woken up I panic. When I lose a man …

  Over the last few years I’ve lost several. I’ll tell you about one. Not Sam. A Greek who was very desirable, very grand and wanted to marry me. He changed his mind because I never emptied the ash-trays. It was a silly mistake but, you see, I wasn’t tuned to the practical side of things. He was a sexually thrilling man. When we were together I could think of nothing but that and imagined that neither could he. We used to stay in bed all day, smoking; the ash from our cigarettes kept piling up and whenever a breeze blew in would sift around the room. It fell on our bed and he laughed and said we were like lovers in Pompeii and must make sure the lava would find us in the attitude of love. So we made love over and over while the curtains billowed in from the balconies like swollen sails or bridal veils and the ash circulated. It was June. We were staying at the Crillon. The weather was showery and, outside, the Place de la Concorde was all hazy and bright: a Renoir canvas. He kept telling me he loved me and wanted his mother to meet me. Then we’d ring for room-service and have food sent up with more cigarettes. When his mother did come the place was like a disaster-area: mascara on the sheets, my hair a bird’s nest, pairs of tights telescoped all over the floor. The flowers he had bought me had gone rank and there were apple-cores everywhere. She stood there looking astounded and all I could do was laugh. It was really a gasp – but I had no chance to explain. Terrible memory. Forget. Suppress. She would probably not have approved of me anyway so what the hell. Mothers never do. Neither do best friends, councils of responsible kin, etc., etc. That brigade has broken more of my engagements than I care to remember. They’re the Fates, the Furies. I know once they’re there I’m out. Sometimes they’ve offered me money. Sometimes I’ve had to accept it. Well what do you do if you’re turfed off a cruise in Crete or Reykjavik?

  It’s – try and understand this, Kiki – the impinging, the crash-landing of one sort of reality on another. And does this make sense to you: when really grubby moments like that engulf me, I think of you. Maybe you’re my stake in the world of family-values?

  That world is constantly threatening to withdraw my residence-permit. Others’ mothers issue those. Matrons. Sweet and ruthless. Marsha’s the first who’s ever liked me. I knew her before I did Sam. She introduced us.

  ‘Hey Anne-Marie,’ she said last week, ‘I can’t tell you what a kick it gives me that you’re marrying Sam. I mean we get on so well! Now I know pleasing your mother-in-law is not the prime aim in marriage, but’, endearing laugh, endearing shrug, ‘if it happens it’s a bonus.’

  Wait, Kiki, you’ll see the irony of that later.

  Marsha’s from New York, boozy, a hairdresser’s blonde and likes a good giggle. Also she’s loaded.

  Vulgar Anne-Marie! Vulgaire! I love that word: the first strongly charged one I learned. It’s so dated now! Its frank snobbery is, I suppose, vulgar in our devious days. I like your use of it: robust like the special corsets you get from your supplier in Annecy who claims his stock hasn’t varied in forty years. But, darling, I’m really not vulgar, not even venal. I guy myself when I think of you but actually I’m disinterested. I’ll do nothing for money. Not a thing. Oh – and maybe that’s what worries you most? I imagine you worrying. You adjust your poultice, sip your gargle, spit it out and worry. Who is this man I’m marrying now? This Sam?

  Sam? He’s hard to pin down. Supply your own idea of ‘attractive’. He’s mine. He has that deadpan American humour which I don’t always get. He�
�ll say things like this: ‘Know something, Anne-Marie? You’re a double-nut! Why? Because you want to marry me and I – I’m telling you this up front – am a certified nut. Marsha had to smuggle me out of the States. They wanted to put my ass in the booby-trap. You thought I was dodging the draft, didn’t you? Well what I was dodging was the nut-house. That means that for me to want to marry you is rational. A normal is an asset to a nut but the normal who marries a nut is behaving in an irrational manner, hence nuttier than the nut!’

  We laughed. Christ, Kiki, I thought he was joking! More deadpan Yankee humour. Irony and all. Ha! More irony: your relief at hearing I was getting married again. I have your letter in my bag. It has grown soft as tissue from being carried there.

  ‘I had begun to despair’, it says, ‘of your ever settling down to a normal life … wondering how responsible we might be for the way you turned out. I suppose, since you were the youngest, we did spoil you and by spoil’, you elucidate, ‘I mean “damage”!’

  Oh Kiki, did you? How much? And how can I tell?

  Several hours yet to Chambéry. Rows of poplars slide past, leafless, rasping the sky. I root in my over-night case for a Valium. The case is in sealskin, carries the creams and colours of my identikit and is known to vulgar Parisiens as a baise-en-ville.

  I thought of phoning you – but long-distance calls upset you. I imagined you in bed – it was 6 a.m. when I got the idea – and having to grope down two flights of uncarpeted stairs to the phone in the hall. Later, you would have been watching coffee on the kitchen stove. I saw it boil over, spattering onto the white enamel as you ran to take my call. After that you would go out to feed the hens and loose the dogs, slopping through muck in Wellingtons which you would have to drag off, cursing genteel curses in the doorway then rushing to stop the phone’s brash peal.