Under the Rose

by Julia O'Faolain

  ‘He’s a one-man social service!’ A wag raised his pint. ‘Offers himself up. “Partake ye of my body.” He’d rather be consumed than consume!’

  The wag drained his glass. His preferences ran the other way. So did those of the man next to him, whose tongue wrestled pinkly with ham frilling from a sandwich. All around, males guzzled: women, in this prosperous pub, were outnumbered ten to one. Connors, sipping his whiskey, thought, No wonder Lydon made out. We left him an open field!

  He could no longer regret this, for after ten barren years of marriage, Phyllis had had three children in quick succession. It was as if something in her had been unlocked. He supposed there were jokes about this, too, but he didn’t care. His master passion had turned out to be paternal, and Declan Junior was the apple of his eye. The younger two were girls and, as Phyllis spoiled them, he had to make things up to the boy.

  For a while after the scandal, the couple had felt shy with each other, but had no thoughts of divorce. You couldn’t in Ireland, and it wasn’t what they wanted. They were fond of each other – and, besides, there was Declan, of whom it was said behind Mr Connors’ shrugging back that he used his blood father’s charm to wind his nominal one around his little finger. A seducer ab ovo.

  Small-mindedness! Envy! Anyway, time heals, and when the boy was picked, surprisingly early, for his elementary-school soccer team, and later won ribbons for show jumping, Connors – a sportsman – knew him for his spiritual son. Even if the kid was a Lydon, he was a better one than Dan – whose brother, Connors recalled, had been decorated for gallantry in the war. Skimming the entry on Mendel in the encyclopaedia, he learned that hereditary character was transmitted chancily and, remembering the poltroonish Dan draped over armchairs and cowering during their fight, decided that Declan Junior had nothing of his natural father’s but his looks.

  Connors still took an interest, though, in the news trickling back from London, where Dan’s free-lance was said to be cutting a swath: he had apparently acquired a new patron, a literary pundit who, though married, was partial to a handsome young man. And now Connors noted an odd thing: admiration was ousting envy and Dan’s stature in the saga growing. Needless to say, his news was slow to reach Connors, since nobody who remembered their connection would wish to re-open old wounds. It came in scraps and, by the time he got them, these were as spare and smooth as broken glass licked by recurring tides.

  As Connors heard it, then: Dan’s new benefactor’s marriage, though possibly unconsummated, was harmonious, for his wife had money. The couple were fashionable hosts, and Dan was soon glowing in their orbit – singing ballads, referring to his secret oeuvre, and enlivening their soirées with tales of Irish mores. The pundit’s wife, the story went, was a handsome, angry woman who had hated her father, but having agreed to inherit his money, would make no further concession to men, and slept only with those she could pity or control. As her husband didn’t fit the bill, she had lovers. Dan was soon servicing both her and the husband who, being both jealous and smitten, was in the dark about this.

  Here the story fractures. In one version, she ‘gets preggers’, which so shatters the husband that his violence leads to a miscarriage and Dan’s subsequent flight to Paris. But there was an implausible symmetry to this, as though running dye from the Dublin episode had coloured it; a likelier account has no pregnancy and the jealousy provoked by someone’s indiscretion. Deliberate? Careless? Either way, Connors learned, Dan left England, the marriage collapsed and the husband, previously a rather nerveless knight of the pen – who had, in his own words, ‘failed to grapple with his subjectivity’ – finally did so in a book which raised him several rungs on the literary ladder. This was before the Wolfenden Report; homosexuality was still a painful subject, and the grappling was judged brave. Dan, as midwife to his lover’s best writing, could be said to have done him a good turn.

  Meanwhile, Declan Junior was in his teens, and his mother – noting that if you cut the heart from his name you’d be left with ‘Dan’ – feared leaving him alone with his sisters. An idle fear: girls bored him, and so did poetry, to her relief. Not that Dan himself had yet published a line, but the appelation ‘Poète Irlandais’ clung to him, who had now – wonder of wonders! – married and settled in Paris. The word was that an old Spanish Civil War hero, whose memoirs Dan had been ghost-writing while sleeping with his daughter, had, on catching the pair in flagrante, sat on Dan’s chest and said, ‘Marry her.’ A bad day’s work for the girl, tittered those Dubliners who still remembered Dan. One or two had looked him up on trips abroad and reported that he was doing something nowadays for films. Script-doctoring, was it? And his wife had published poems before their marriage, but none since. Maybe she didn’t want to shame him? Closer friends said the marriage was a good one, and that no forcing had been needed.

  Why should it have been? Marisol was bright, young, had a river of dark hair, and gave Dan the tribal connection he had always coveted. His ravenous charm came from his childhood in that bleak parsonage. Marginal. Clanless. Left behind by the tide. Catholics – whose clan had dispersed his – did not appeal, but the Left did. The Spanish Civil War had been Dan’s boyhood war, and the more romantic for having been lost. Dan loved a negative. What, he would argue, was there to say about success? The surprise was that the Anglo-Saxon ruling classes could still talk and didn’t just beat their smug chests like chimps. If it weren’t for their homosexuals, he claimed, they’d have no art. Art was for those whose reality needed suborning. It burrowed and queried; it … et cetera! Dan could still chatter like a covey of starlings, and the Limerick accent went down a treat in French, being, as people would soon start to say, médiatique.

  Along came the Sixties. The Youth Cult blossomed just as Dan – in his Forties – began losing his hair. Juvenescence glowed in him, though, as in a golden autumn tree. His freshness was a triumph of essence over accident, and he became an acknowledged Youth Expert when he made a film about the graffiti of May ’68. Graffiti, being, like pub-talk, insolent, jubilant, and an end in itself, was right up his street, and he was soon in Hollywood working on a second film. It came to nothing, which confirmed the purity of his response to the ephemeral, and he continued to fly between Paris and California, dressed in light, summery suits, and engaged in optimistic projects, some of which did throw his name onto a screen for a fleeting shimmer.

  One evening in Paris, he came face to face with Connors and Phyllis in a brasserie. They were at different tables, and could have ignored each other. As their last encounter had led to Connors’ departure from the scene in an ambulance and Dan’s from Ireland, this might have seemed wise. Sportingly, however, Dan came over. Shiny and aglow, his forehead – higher than it used to be – damp with sweat. It was a hot night. Hand outstretched. A little self-deprecating. He had heard their news, as they had his, and congratulated Connors on a recent promotion. Family all well? Grand! Great! He was with his. Nodding at a tableful of Spaniards. Laughing at their noise. Then, ruefully, as two of his wrestling children knocked over a sauceboat, he said he’d better go and cope.

  Soon the waiter brought the Connors two glasses of very old cognac with his compliments. They accepted, toasted him and, watching his gipsy table, remembered hearing that ‘the poor bastard’ had saddled himself with a family of idlers whom he had to work overtime to support. Dan’s father-in-law, it seemed, had emphysema. Marisol’s brother yearned to be a pop star, and she herself kept producing children. How many had they? Phyllis counted three, who were dark like their mother and did not look at all like Declan Junior. As she and Connors left, they thanked Dan for the cognac.

  Afterwards, they discussed the encounter half sharply, half shyly. Looking out for each other’s dignity. Not mentioning Declan Junior whom Phyllis, her husband guessed, thought of as having two fathers. Blame could thus be moved about or dissolved in the whirligig of her brain. And she could play peekaboo, too, with romance. He suspected this because – the evening had brought it home to him �
� he, too, had an imaginative connection with Dan and had not liked what he saw in the brasserie. It had depressed him. Spilled gravy and domesticity cut Dan down to size, and a life-sized Dan was a reproach, as the saga figure hadn’t been at all. The connection to that Dan had, somehow, aureoled Connor’s life and added a dimension to his fantasies. For a while, it had even made Phyllis more attractive to him. An adulterous wife was exciting – and he had often wondered whether it could have been that extra zest which had led to his begetting the two girls.

  Water under the bridge, to be sure! The Dan Saga had not stimulated his sex-life for years. What it did do was make him feel more benign than might have been expected of the sober civil servant he was. Broader, and even passionate. It was as if he himself had had a part in Dan’s adventurings. That, of course, made no sense, or rather the sense it made was private and – why not? – poetic. Dan, the unproductive poet, had, like Oscar Wilde, put his genius into his life: a fevering contagion. Or so Connors must have been feeling, unknown to himself. How else explain the gloom provoked by the sighting in the brasserie? Phyllis didn’t seem to feel it. But then women saw what they wanted to see. Connors guessed that for her Dan Lydon was still a figure of romance.

  *

  It was around this time that Declan Junior began to disappoint his parents. A gifted athlete who handled his academic work with ease, he had come through university with flying colours and Connors, convinced that the boy could star in any firmament, had looked forward to seeing him join the diplomatic corps or go in for politics or journalism. Something with scope. Instead, what should their affable, graceful boy do on graduating but take a humdrum job in a bank and announce that he was getting married! Yes. Now. There was no talking him out of it, and it was not a shotgun wedding, either. Indeed, Declan Junior was rather stuffy when asked about this. And when you met the girl you saw that it was unlikely. She was limp-haired, steady and – well, dull. Here was their cuckoo, thought Connors, turning out too tame rather than too wild. If there was a Lydon gene at work, the resemblance was more to the family man he and Phyllis had glimpsed in Paris than to the satyr whose heredity they had feared. Had they worked too hard at stamping out the demon spark?

  That, they learned, was still riskily smouldering in the vicinity of Lydon himself. Connors heard the latest bulletin by a fluke, for he had grown reclusive since Declan’s wedding and more so after the christening, which came an impeccable ten months later. He was, to tell the truth, a touch down in the mouth. Brooding. Had Phyllis, he wondered, been cold with the boy when he was small? Could guilt have made her be? And might there be something, after all, to Freudian guff? Till now Connors had dismissed it, but there was Declan married to a surrogate Mum. Born to be a Mum: she was pregnant again, and had tied her limp hair in a bun. Cartoonish, in orthopedic shoes, she wore a frilly apron and loved to make pastry. Declan was putting on weight! Ah well.

  The latest about Lydon was that, hungry for money, he had agreed to be a beard.

  A what?

  ‘You may well ask,’ said Connors’ source, a man called Breen, who swore him to secrecy. Breen was on leave from the Irish Embassy in Rome, which, said he, was in a turmoil over the thing.

  ‘But what is a …?’

  Breen looked over his shoulder; they’d met in the St Stephen’s Green Club. ‘I can’t tell you here.’

  So Connors brought him home and settled him down with a whiskey, to tell his story before Phyllis came in. She was babysitting Declan III, known as Dickybird, who was at the crawling stage and tiring. His mother needed a rest.

  Breen’s hot spurts of shock revived Connors’ spirits. The Dan Saga thrilled him in an odd, outraged way, much as the whiskey was warming and biting at his mouth. Recklessness, he thought welcomingly, a touch of folly tempered the norms and rules.

  Lydon, said Breen, had been acting as cover for one of the candidates in the upcoming United States election, a married man who was having it off with an actress. Needing to seem above reproach – ‘You know American voters!’ – the candidate had engaged Dan to pretend to be the woman’s lover.

  ‘He was what’s called a beard – travelled with her, took her to parties, et cetera, then left the scene when the candidate had a free moment.’ The beard’s function was to draw suspicion. For the real lover to seem innocent, the beard must suggest the rut. And Dan did. Though he was now fifty, an aura of youth and potency clung to him.

  ‘It’s all in the mind!’ said Breen shrugging.

  Outside the window, someone had turned on a revolving lawn-sprinkler and the family Labrador, a puppy called Muff, was leaping at its spray. That meant that Phyllis and the child were back from their walk.

  Breen said that what Lydon’s wife thought of his job nobody knew. The money must have been good. Or maybe she hadn’t known – until she was kidnapped. Kidnapped? Yes. Hadn’t he said? By mistake. At the Venice Film Festival. By Sardinian kidnappers who got wind of the story but took the wrong woman. ‘The candidate’s rich, and they’d hoped for a big ransom.’ This had happened just three weeks ago.

  Connors was stunned. A changeling, he thought, and felt a breath of shame. Play had turned dangerous, and he felt angry with himself for having relished Lydon’s tomfoolery.

  ‘The Yanks came to us,’ Breen told him, ‘asking us to handle the thing with discretion – after they’d got the actress back to the US. You could say we’re their beard!’ He grew grave, for there was a danger that the kidnappers could panic. ‘Sardinians feed their victims to their pigs, you know. Destroys the evidence. They’re primaeval and inbred! Islanders! No, not like us. More basic! Crude! Their life-way was easy to commercialize just because it was so crude. With them vengeance required blood as real as you’d put in blood sausage. Quantifiable! Material! We, by contrast, are casuists and symbol-jugglers. Closers of eyes …’

  A flick of embarrassment in Breen’s own eye signalled a sudden recognition that this could seem to refer to the story – had he only now remembered it? – of Connors and Dan: a case of eyes closed to lost honour. With professional blandness, he tried to cover his gaffe with an account of the Embassy’s dilemma: on the one hand the papers must not learn of the thing. On the other, the kidnappers must be made to see that there was no money to be had. Breen castigated Lydon, whose sins were catching up with him. His poor wife though …

  Connors tried to remember her face in the Paris brasserie, but could not.

  ‘That louser Lydon!’ Breen, intending perhaps to express solidarity with Connors, threw out words like ‘parasite’ and ‘sociopath!’ When you thought about it, a man like that was worse than the kidnappers. ‘He breaks down the barriers between us and them. He lets in anarchy. He sells the pass.’

  Connors tried to demur, but Breen, warming to his theme, blamed society’s tolerance, for which it – ‘we’ – must now pay. ‘Bastards like that trade on it.’ Someone, he implied, should have dealt with Lydon long ago.

  Connors ignored the reproach. Off on a different tack, his mind was cutting through a tangle of shy, willed confusions. He recognized that what he felt for Dan was love or something closer. Far from being his enemy, Dan was a part of himself. Luminous alter ego? Partner in father- and grandfatherhood? Closing his ears to his companion’s sermon, he looked out to where Phyllis and Dickybird had caught up with the golden Lab, on whose back the child kept trying to climb. Shaken off, he tried again: a rubbery putto, bouncing back like foam. The wild Lydon heritage had skipped a generation and here it was again.

  Excited by the whirling spray, the puppy scampered through its prism while the infant held onto its tail. The child’s hair was as blond as the dog’s, and in the rainbow embrace the two gleamed like fountain statuary. They were Arcadian, anarchic, playful – and propelled by pooled energy.

  ‘It’s a terrible thing to happen,’ Connors conceded. ‘But I wouldn’t blame Lydon. Blame the American candidate or the Italian state. Hypocrisy. Puritanism. Pretence. Lydon’s innocent of all that. Blaming him is
like, I don’t know, blaming that dog out there.’ And he waved his glass of whiskey at the golden scene outside.

  We Might See Sights!

  Under a furze bush one day – they were taking a pee – Madge broke with Rosie Fennel. She was ashamed – which was why she chose such a moment.

  ‘Look, Rose,’ she said, ‘I’m afraid I can’t play with you any more. I might catch something from you. It’s not your fault and I like you still, but … it’s the way your family lives. You see that, don’t you?’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Rosie.

  They both crawled from under the bush and stood up. Rosie had blonde, naturally curly hair, abundant as an aureole and alive with lice. She had a mouthful of bossy teeth and a foamy laugh. Madge had been her friend for three years – since they were ten. Rosie was good gas to play with: game, a tease, a liar. She went bare-legged in winter, to bed, swimming or to the movies at whatever hour she chose, and was free from the rules that plagued Madge who stood before her now, feeling ridiculous in her gym slip, woolly bloomers that – she had just noticed – snapped pink welts on her stomach, and childish-looking pigtails.

  Rosie laughed. ‘Well!’

  ‘Well, good-bye, Rosie.’

  ‘Cheero.’

  Madge ran down the hill, her laced boys’ shoes clattering like hooves. (‘Like a horse!’ said the nuns in school. ‘Hoyden!’ ‘Lice!’ they had said. ‘Aren’t you ashamed? A doctor’s daughter! You should have your head shaved!’)

  Madge ran in her own gate, down the path, up the stairs and burrowed under the bed where she gibbered to herself in the dark for maybe half an hour, scrawling the springs above with her nails, gabbling that she had been awful. Awful! A filthy stinker! She hated herself! And the worst of all was that Rosie hadn’t seemed to mind. But she could never look her in the eye again. Never.