Under the Rose

by Julia O'Faolain

  Weren’t the best people ‘mad’, Kiki? All the risking saints and poets? Not that I want to risk. Only to be happy. Though trying too hard for that may be risky too? Like grabbing some frail, untenable flower – say a water-lily – in one’s fist. Lethal. Funny: promises frighten me. I think it’s because our childhood was all promise. At least that’s how I remember it. I wonder: are our memories the same? Mine are parrot-bright with the sun blazing off the Alps at the end of our orchard, fruit clotting, fireflies swooping, curtains of honey being shaken from its wax in our cellars and, ‘for the orphans’, endless name-day and birthday parties. We were twice orphaned. First your mother died, then mine: Papa’s second wife. The aunts couldn’t make it up to us enough. Couldn’t cosset us enough. And to me all those parties seemed an endlessly renewed celebration of some happiness to come: promises. Even the summer storms on the Alps, the red and green lightning flashes on the white peaks – can you still see them from the dining-room window? – like the flames on our birthday candles, had to be heralding something marvellous. Do you remember that we felt that? And how when we were getting a little older and had begun to see that all the rituals ever led up to was indigestion and a stack of smeary washing-up, one or other of us would have hysterics, throw a tantrum, weep, scream or insult the aunts? From the time I was twelve and the rest of you were in your late teens or early twenties, all the birthdays ended like that. It was expected: a kind of release. When one of us threw down her hand at bridge or her chair to rush weeping from the room, the rest felt spared. Until the next time when we would start hoping all over again. I wonder: do you remember it all differently? You may. You were hunchbacked and didn’t expect to leave. When the others stopped hoping, you may have felt pleased. When I left you didn’t mind. I was the youngest and you had plenty of company without me. Besides, it was recognized that Anne-Marie was ‘flighty’ and the flighty take flight. Now, oddly, you are turning your attention to me again. Old devious Kiki, leaning back on your hump in our parents’ old bed and scheming away to get me to take Jean-Luc. I know why of course. Money. I got my mother’s. She was much richer than yours was and when my brother, Jacques, died all her money came to me. You got the house and land. They were Papa’s. But you have no cash. If I would take Jean-Luc off your hands it would help. So you are at work on me, trying to teleguide me through some layer of my own forgetfulness. I feel you tuning subliminal messages to me. Maybe that’s what’s bringing me back to you when maybe I should have gone looking for Sam? Mad Sam. Poor, sweet Sam.

  It’s not because I’m afraid of him that I didn’t go to him when I left Dirk and Rosemary’s. I mean I was that too but the disturbing, frightening thing was that I hadn’t noticed his madness! In eight months. I kept wondering about those months as I sat in Dirk and Rosemary’s drawing-room. I kept remembering jokes which had perhaps not been jokes at all but sheer lunacy: moans perhaps, sick grunts with no meaning except the purely arbitrary ones supplied by me. Where had Sam’s mind been? How much was intact? When had he been sane? When not? Was sleeping with him like sleeping with a sexy Great Dane who happened to be attached to a human mistress? An unadulterated, mindless fuck? Bestiality? Oh God, I muttered and was reminded of one of Sam’s jokes which was calling God and his heavenly brains’ trust ‘Joe & Co.’ (from Jove? Jahve?).

  ‘Joe and Co. are having themselves a ball,’ he’d say when things went wrong. He imagined them up there as malign and only minimally powerful. Impish, they enjoyed sending nasty surprises of a minor sort. Right now they certainly were having themselves a ball.

  ‘Go damn yourselves, Joe and Co.!’ I screamed.

  Rosemary came in. ‘Something wrong?’

  ‘No.’

  She went back to the kitchen.

  Kiki, I wonder about my own sanity.

  You see everything that Sam said made sense to me. Sound sense, even a sort of super-sense. Even all that stuff about Joe & Co. was a sign that Sam, poor, bright, suffering Sam, knew – must have – about the lousy hand he’d been dealt. He knew he was a nut – which makes him that much the less of one, doesn’t it? I mean he was lucid and sadly generous – he warned me, after all, though he was in love with me. I’m pretty sure of that. And all’s fair when you’re in love. Yet he did give me a fair chance to back out. As much as he dared. As much as a sane man in love would.

  But why did he love me? Did he recognize some congenial folly in me?

  I have known freaks before. I told you. I’m not going to go into that. Only far enough to say that I seem to attract them and now wonder why. Like calling to like?

  Or they attract me? Maybe. The thing is I hate the social game, the mean commerce of it, and when I see a man refuse to play I’m attracted. Meaning? Oh nothing subtle. Just the old, sleazy double-thinks, the mild moral sag you meet every day in successful men and which successful men don’t a bit mind revealing to women like me. They take off their attitudes as they might their clothes and don’t suppose we’ll notice contradictions. We do though. They’re the very things to which we’re alert. When you take your values from your men, as women do – as I find myself doing simply because my dealings with the world, society or what-have-you are usually through a man – then you’d like to think they’re decent values and when they’re not you notice. It’s not, for God’s sake, that I’m a prig – that would be a laugh, wouldn’t it? – but, well, I do object to phoniness doing a smelly striptease under my nose and then asking me to admire its imperial vestments. But Sam, you see, was different. Unphony. Honest. Mad.

  Oh I don’t know. His jokes, now that I think back, weren’t all that funny. He was usually smashed or stoned when he clowned. I suppose he was a bit childish. Once, for instance, he ordered ketchup in a very chichi inn outside Paris: the sort of place that has bits of saddlery on the wall and a rosette in the Michelin Guide. They’d never heard of ketchup.

  ‘I want some,’ Sam insisted. ‘In a bottle. Appellation contrôlée.’ Then he snatched up a carving knife and threatened the waiter. ‘Ketchup’, he told him, ‘is part of my cultural heritage. Do you despise it?’

  The waiter said he didn’t.

  Then Sam charged into the kitchen to interrogate the chef. I stayed where I was until the manageress begged me to intervene. If Sam hadn’t looked so strong they would have thrown him out. But he did. The inn was in the country. No time to call the police. When I reached the kitchen, Sam was prodding the chef in the belly with the point of his knife. ‘Where do you think they get the blood for Spaghetti Westerns?’ he was asking him. ‘Not here.’ Another prod. ‘Ketchup …’

  Now I know the chef was right to be afraid and the thing was less funny than I thought. Oh Kiki, maybe you’re right and I never did grow up!

  ‘After all,’ said Rosemary coming in to poke up the fire and justify herself, ‘you are older than Sam, Anne-Marie!’ She went off.

  Meaning? That I was over-the-hill. Should be pleased with what I could get! A fine stud like Sam. What’s a bit of wife-battery in a deal like that? Or did she just mean ‘old enough to know better’? Probably.

  ‘Where’s Sam?’ I asked when we were at table.

  ‘At his mother’s,’ Dirk told me. ‘You’ll have to hide,’ he advised. ‘He’s dangerous.’

  ‘He attacked her once,’ Rosemary told me. ‘His mother. With a knife. You can’t blame her for not telling you.’

  She was spooning cassoulet into our plates and looking pleased, as conventional women often do when they get a thrill at second hand. ‘I really admire Marsha,’ she said excitedly. ‘She’s been through it with Sam.’

  Oh God, I thought, don’t let her tell me more. Don’t let her. But already she was swallowing down her cassoulet and wiping her mouth, all agog. She opened it. ‘He …’ she began.

  ‘He’s been through her,’ I said to shut her up. I stared angrily at her. She was fatly pregnant and smug. ‘The uterus’, I went on fast and loudly, ‘forms a creature on the model of the object loved by the mother. This opini
on was put forward by the British biologist, Harvey, some time in the sixteen-fifties. Do you suppose Sam’s mother loved a circus-freak? Or a murderer or butcher perhaps?’ I waved my glass, spilling some reddish drops on the cloth. I rubbed salt into them conscientiously. ‘She may always have longed to be attacked with a knife, you see?’

  Dirk and Rosemary looked as though they’d eaten something bad.

  ‘I’m in love with Sam.’ I began to cry.

  Dirk left the table. Rosemary put the cassoulet back on the stove.

  She put a hand on my arm. Rosemary’s not a toucher. She was making an effort. ‘Sam’s a friend of ours, Anne-Marie,’ she said gently. ‘We like him. We have for years. He’s OK most of the time.’

  ‘Yes. I’m sorry. It’s not you,’ I accused myself. ‘It’s me.’ I was crying into my wine. I had poured more into my glass and was now drinking a ghastly mixture of Kir, Côtes du Rhône and tears.

  ‘Look,’ said Rosemary, ‘you’d better go to bed.’

  She took the glass from me and led me to a small bedroom, pulled off my shoes and left me lying on a revolving bed. I suppose she went back down to call Dirk to eat the rest of his cassoulet.

  I tried to remember what I’d said and she’d said before we had begun to argue, but I couldn’t. I knew I’d mentioned you and that she’d been relieved to find I had somewhere to go.

  ‘A trip to the country’, she said approvingly, ‘would be just the thing. You can’t go back to Sam’s place.’

  Oh Kiki!

  ‘Now’, you wrote, ‘that you’re going to have a home again!’

  You’ve put the evil eye on me.

  Sam, Sam, Sam, Sam!

  The trouble is most men don’t appeal to me at all. I don’t see them! When I find one who does I think: Maybe he’s the last!

  I’m drinking again. The train funnels down the diagonal from Paris to Chambéry, and as it does I find myself taking more and more little swigs. Hine. I feel its glow in my throat, chest and deep in my old, cold, ardent, widowed belly. Inner caresses, consolings, comforts. Kiki, I wish you drank. I often think of the thinness of your life and wonder do people whose pleasures are few get more and extra enjoyment from them? An intenser, richer yield? Unlikely. Inequality reigns here too.

  I try to remember what pleasures you have enjoyed since growing up. Do you still go to Chambéry to eat the cakes for which it is famous? Reminding yourself that this, at least, is, though a minor pleasure, the very best of its kind?

  ‘I know’, says your fingered and furry letter, ‘you have had abortions. Whatever you thought your reasons were, I feel one contributing cause was the fact that we made you into a baby for life. And how can a baby have a baby? Mind you, to have one might be the best thing for you. If you were to take Jean-Luc …’

  ‘You have’, you write, ‘had abortions …’

  Have you an image to put with that firmly used word? I have.

  I asked Sam would he like us to have a baby.

  ‘Ten,’ he said, ‘or five. I’m in favour of the decimal system. So French! Or point one of one.’

  ‘Shut up!’ I said. ‘I’ve seen a fractured baby. Well: foetus.’

  ‘How much of it?’

  ‘Never mind.’

  ‘Which parts?’

  ‘No!’

  ‘I’m interested.’

  ‘For Christ’s sake, Sam!’

  ‘I’m only talking. You did it.’

  ‘You have’, I conceded, ‘a point.’

  ‘Decimal point.’

  ‘You’re sick.’

  And of course he was. Merde! Bugger Joe & Co.! I took several Valium, not counting the number. And got to sleep.

  I dreamed of an abortionist I used to know and visited twice as a client. He kept embryos in glass bottles in his garden as people keep pottery elves. It was an isolated garden and he kept some live iguanas there too in a kind of chicken run. Unlike you, Kiki, who deal with things fearlessly in the abstract, he liked to stare head-on at what he was doing. Perhaps that was where he put his pride.

  ‘Don’t you know’, you said, turning up suddenly in my dream, ‘that you’re Jean-Luc’s mother? You had a premature baby when you were sixteen and we never told you. It was smaller than these pottery elves. We were able to make you believe you had been bedridden for months with TB, then deliver you under an anaesthetic and pretend the baby was Lucette’s. She had a husband, you see. Now if you were to take charge …’

  ‘Who’s the father then?’

  ‘Ah,’ you said, ‘a touch of incest. Men’, you said, ‘are scarce around our house. Read the Bible and you’ll see how they managed. It was a way of keeping patrimonies intact. Read about Lot’s daughters.’

  ‘You’re mad,’ I shrieked.

  ‘It means’, you said, ‘that you owe us the money you took out of the family.’

  ‘Mad!’

  ‘Not me,’ you said. ‘You’re the one. Disgraced the family. You gave birth to an iguana.’

  ‘Are you all right?’

  Someone was rattling my bedroom door. Dirk, my host. I’d locked it.

  ‘Yes,’ I shouted, ‘a nightmare. Sorry.’

  ‘For God’s sake,’ he said, ‘do you always scream like that?’

  He stumped off, muttering. I took some more Valium.

  At breakfast he said, ‘Look, I’m sorry, Anne-Marie, but Rosemary needs her sleep. She’s pregnant, you know. I’m afraid you’re in need of care. You look as though you might be having a breakdown. Haven’t you got any family you can go to? Anyway you can’t stay here. Sam might come looking for you.’

  Later, when we were in his car driving to Paris, he asked me where I wanted to go.

  I said I might go and see Marsha.

  For minutes Dirk seemed to concentrate on his driving. Then: ‘Look,’ he said, ‘I think I’d better warn you. Marsha’s a bit of a bitch. She wants to get remarried, you see, and it would facilitate this if Sam were in good hands: yours. To put it brutally, she’s looking for an unpaid nurse. Don’t believe what she tells you. Sam’s incurable. Schizoid. He can be sound as a bell for months but he always reverts. It can happen any time. I know this. I’m sorry, Anne-Marie,’ he said. ‘You’ve got to face it.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Where?’ he asked when we reached the city.

  ‘My things are in Sam’s flat.’

  ‘I’ll get them. You wait,’ he said. He parked the car two streets away from the apartment building and took my keys. ‘Read the paper,’ he advised. ‘I’ll be as quick as I can. If I overlook some stuff, Marsha can send it on later. When you have an address.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  He was back in less than half an hour with my cases. ‘No sign of Sam,’ he said as he put them in the boot. ‘I packed everything feminine-looking,’ he explained. ‘Not very tidily, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Thanks,’ I said again.

  ‘Where now?’

  ‘Take me to the Gare de Lyon.’ I knew he wanted to be rid of me. ‘I have relatives in Savoy,’ I reassured him.

  ‘Well,’ he said when he dropped me off, ‘if there’s anything you want … you know.’ Vaguely and looking relieved.

  ‘That’s OK.’

  When he left I found a phone and rang Marsha. I wasn’t sure what I was going to say but she was responsible for what had happened.

  ‘Marsha, this is Anne-Marie. Do you know what happened yesterday?’

  I was still hoping she’d have some explanation or antidote. ‘Do you?’ I asked.

  Her voice rushed down the wire and I knew it was all no good. She was crying and on the booze. ‘I haven’t been fair to you,’ she was sobbing.

  ‘Is he curable?’

  ‘Can you come over? Where are you, Anne-Marie?’

  ‘Is he?’

  ‘What, dear?’

  ‘Curable?’

  More sobs. She kept saying my name. ‘Listen,’ she said, ‘there was a terrible scene here last night and the police came. He attacked one of
them. They took him away. I don’t know where. I have a lawyer trying to find out … listen, Anne-Marie, we must meet. Can’t you come now?’

  ‘You didn’t answer my question.’

  ‘I’m a mother,’ Marsha sobbed. ‘A mother,’ she repeated. It sounded like the responses to a litany of reproach. But I hadn’t reproached her. ‘Can’t you understand?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I can. I do.’ I put down the phone.

  I went to the station buffet and had a cognac.

  ‘Marsha’, Dirk had warned me, ‘is as tough as old nails. Very calculating.’

  I had a second cognac. Was Sam Sam, I wondered? Did the man I thought I was in love with exist and what did I owe him? I mean if he’s not responsible for himself, how can I be? I’ve had my heart smashed up before, Kiki, like a pulverized elbow. I’ve found people change in my grasp like the Old Man of the Sea. I haven’t the strength to go through that again. I put the glass on the counter, went to the ticket office and bought a single for Chambéry.

  A one-way single to solitude. Oh Jesus! Oh Joe!

  Time out for a drink. Finished the Hine. Last lovely drops still hot on my mouth. Dijon out there. Closer now to you than to Sam, Kiki.

  No!

  Kiki, I’m not coming back. I know. I know what you’d say but you’re not going to get a chance. Besides: you don’t even know I’d set out, do you? Glad I never rang now. Preordained: Joe & Co. at their more short-term benevolent. Always means they’ve something bloody up their dodgy sleeves. Never mind. Defy the bastards! I’m going back.

  I’m not normal. OK? I never thought I was. I was just too belly-crawlingly humble: persuading myself that the majority, because a majority, must be right. You belong to it, Kiki, and Jean-Louis and Rosemary and Dirk and Marsha and all the mothers and parents of all the lovers and the lovers when they stop loving and the mad when they’re sane. Joe & Co. I’m not sure of. I think they’re schizoid. But Sam and I are nuts and I’m the better nut because I choose nuttiness. I’ll stand by mad Sam.

  My own monster.

  Look: you don’t need me and neither does Jean-Luc. My bit of money would only buy you a dose of smothering gentility. That’s all. We can’t talk, Kiki. I’ve been trying to talk to you all the way from bloody Paris, all across this uptight, sour, canny, old, tired, knowing, horrible hexagon of a country where everything you can say’s been said and the best things, down to the cheese and wine, are fermentings of crushed other things. I’m going off to be mad. I know it’s a bit negative, a bit limited but, Kiki, I’m only me. I’d be no good looking after you – we’d brain each other – or bringing meals-on-wheels to the aged. I’m good for Sam though and he’s sometimes good for me and … oh fuck, why try to talk?