Under the Rose

by Julia O'Faolain

  ‘You stop that, Madge Heron, you …’

  She gave Bernie a shove with her knee that caught her in the stomach and sent her rolling. ‘Beast,’ she thought, ‘but I won’t stop for her! I am a beast, I …’ and again she raised the belt but the child had crawled away and Bernie was on her again.

  ‘You’re out of your mind, Madge Heron!’ She tore the belt from Madge’s hand and, pulling one of Madge’s feet from under her, sent her flat on her face on the grass. Madge lay where she had fallen, not listening to Bernie’s shouting, not listening to the child who was now quieted and snuffling gently to itself a few yards off. ‘I can’t,’ she thought but couldn’t think what it was she couldn’t do. ‘Grass,’ she thought and buried her face in it. ‘Blot it out. Grow over it, let me forget it. Grass, nothing but grass….’

  The Widow’s Boy

  When her husband was reported missing on the Russian front, Nino’s mother bore up and went to work to keep shoes on Nino’s feet and bread in his mouth: two things which his father must have needed sorely at the end. Cardboard boots, if you could believe what you heard now, were what had been issued to Italian troops. Boots of smartly blackened cardboard or, at best, stiffened felt which melted to nothing in the snow. Thin coats. Inadequate rations. Nino imagined his dying father losing his toes and gnawing thirstily at an icicle. The gnawing face was the one in the photo-portrait on his mother’s dressing table because, without it, Nino could not be absolutely sure of how his father used to look.

  For a while he had confused him with Jesus who, in his portrait, was suffering from severe blood-loss. Nino’s grandmother begged Jesus to bring Nino’s father home, but Nino reasoned that a man so afflicted could not be of much assistance – and was proven right when a letter came confirming his father’s death.

  His mother cried then, and so did Nino, though his father was by now a mere smudge in his mind, fading along with Jesus who, said Gianni the cobbler, had been promoted by priests and Fascists to make us toe their line. ‘“Blessed are the poor in spirit,”’ sneered Gianni and added bits of mock-Latin, ‘“for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven!” Thanks Lord, but we’d sooner have the Kingdom of Here. Gratias agamus tibi!’ Maybe it was real Latin? Gianni had been to school to priests, though he was now a Communist and had heard Russian comrades confirm the story of the cardboard boots. The sign swinging over his shop was a golden boot and that too seemed like a confirmation. Nino ran messages for him, picking up worn shoes and delivering mended ones to customers who sometimes gave him a tip. Being a widow’s boy had rewards.

  It had drawbacks too though, and Nino wondered how their life might have been if his mother, instead of losing a husband, had lost a leg or been disfigured just enough for there to be no need to worry about her honour. As it was, she was the prettiest widow around – which was not the advantage you might think. Widows were fair game. Jokes about them made fellows dig each other dreamily in the ribs while lurking in the school bog, taking deep drags at forbidden cigarettes. Girls, it seemed, were different. They were shy and if you went too far with one you had to marry her. But widows wanted it – whatever ‘it’ was. Sad addicts, they longed for what they’d once enjoyed, and when Nino’s father was freezing his arse in the Russian snows, his young wife had surely been suffering the fiery frustrations of passion in her lonely bed.

  When the other kids talked this way their words had such a zing that Nino was ready to join in their secretive snigger and let himself dream of sinking into soft, embracing snow. Glittering, he thought. Gaudy. Like rainbows on ice. Then he remembered his mother looking tired in her cotton pinny and grew confused. He looked at the shoes which she had polished for him last night, after working a ten-hour day. Snow and fire were hazardous, and so, it seemed, was the ‘it’ that everyone wanted. Well, let them find it in some other family, decided Nino, who should have put a stop to all this before.

  ‘Alone, all alone in her mournful bed!’ repeated his best mate, Pippo, who lived in the same palazzo and walked to and from school with him every day. ‘That’s if it was lonely and not occupied by some randy draft-dodger.’

  And though he knew that Nino’s mother lived a hard and blameless life, Pippo let blue cigarette smoke snake insinuatingly from his nostrils. He loved romancing, and his older brothers had given him a taste for smut.

  ‘Shut your face, moron!’ Nino had to say then, though he knew Pippo would enjoy giving him a bloody nose which, sure enough, he did, for he was big for his age and his brothers had trained him to box. The worst of it was that, from then on, Nino’s friends grinned whenever the word ‘widow’ was pronounced. Sometimes it was only the ghost of a grin – or maybe, as they claimed, Nino was imagining things, having grown suspicious and nervy like a scalded cat? What was undeniable was that the word ‘widow’ cropped up everywhere. In church the priest talked of the widow’s mite, and at night in the piazza there was a drunk who sometimes started yelling that Italy had been widowed by the death of Mussolini and whose friends had regularly to make him pipe down. Then a poster for an operetta called The Merry Widow was put up all over town, and it was months before the last copies were overlaid by electoral notices – ‘Vote for La Pirra and De Gasperi!’ – and by ads for films featuring Fabrizio, Toto and the alluring but worn-looking Anna Magnani. Maybe the reason she was so popular in those years was that she looked as if, like so many others, she had seen bad days but managed, pluckily, to survive. She looked like someone’s widow – oh, why did he have to keep thinking of widows?

  And why did he have to have a widowed mother? She was a good one in every other way: neat, sensible and not too strict, and her pasta was never mushy or underdone. Somehow, though, her niceness, like her prettiness, could be turned against her – them. As if it were bait.

  ‘A nice Mamma you’ve got there!’

  You could sift that for smutty meanings and, even if you didn’t, the words twisted in your mind. ‘Nice’ how? In what way?

  The most embarrassing thing happened in, of all places, the English-language class which the school had introduced because the British Institute was lending it a teacher with a prepaid salary. He was Mr Williams, a lanky, long-haired man who read English poems aloud from a book. One was about a boy who worried about his mother. Mr Williams threw back his long hair and recited slowly so that the boys could study his accent.

  ‘James James

  Morrison Morrison

  Weatherby George Dupree

  Took great care of his Mother,

  Though he was only three.’

  The class fidgeted. The poem struck them as odd. Or silly? No: odd.

  ‘James James

  Said to his Mother …’

  Finding that his audience wasn’t with him, Mr Williams switched to a funny, fluting voice:

  ‘“Mother,” he said, said he;

  “You must never go down to the end of the town …”’

  Baffled, the class heard him out as he explained about the English sense of humour. ‘Come on,’ he pleaded jovially. ‘Laugh, chaps! This is a funny poem.’ And read:

  ‘James James

  Morrison’s Mother

  Put on a golden gown,

  James James …’

  As it dawned on them that the joke was about concern for a mother’s good name, the boys grew indignant. Good names were a sore subject and had been so ever since the Fascists said we had tarnished ours by betraying our German allies – only to be told that Fascism was what had tarnished it. Either way, hard feelings were hard to shake off, and of all people the English – who had egged on the betrayal – should be treating us with kid gloves. Instead, here was Mr Williams trampling on sacred values like motherhood and committing oltraggio alia patria. An insult to the nation, a major offence! The class looked ready to riot.

  Then Pippo created a diversion. He explained why, for us, the poem wasn’t funny. ‘Here,’ he told the Englishman, ‘if there’s no father, the son takes his place and if the boy is a widow’s son like Nino h
ere, then …’

  Pippo meant no harm. Intent on enlightening Mr Williams, he forgot his earlier teasing of Nino – who, however, did not. The poem had caught him on the raw and Pippo’s words pricked and prodded at his mortification.

  ‘If Nino’s mother brought men to the house,’ elaborated Pippo, ‘or if she wore a golden gown and went …’

  It was pedagogic. Pippo was enjoying teaching the teacher and Mr Williams enjoying being taught. He smiled encouragingly at Pippo whose response – a raised eyebrow, the ghost of a grin? – caught the tormented Nino’s eye and precipitated his attack. Hurling himself at his friend, Nino hammered his face with his fists. Pippo, after a stunned pause, drew back his own large fist and punched Nino – who was spindly with match-stick legs and wrists – so hard that he fell backwards into a desk. Pippo then leaped on him, blacked one of his eyes and began pulling the noose of his tie so tight that he might have strangled him if Mr Williams had not pulled him off.

  ‘You see,’ Pippo taunted instructively. ‘Widows’ sons end up crazy. They have the worst of all bargains. They’re like cuckolds who don’t even enjoy what’s on offer themselves!’

  Again the maddened Nino lunged, and again Pippo punched him. The bidello or school porter, a big, muscular fellow, had meanwhile been attracted by the noise and in two ticks cleared the room. Pippo was sent to the headmaster and, while the rest of the class went home, Mr Williams loosened Nino’s tie, took him to the bathroom, washed his face and examined him to make sure he wasn’t badly injured. Then he gave him a lift in his car to the nearest chemist’s shop where the chemist, a friendly man, was just pulling down his shutters. He drew the two in, patched Nino up and produced brandy, which Nino took for medicinal reasons and Mr Williams from good fellowship, and the upshot was that the two men took Nino home to his mother who, in gratitude for their concern, invited them to join herself and Nino for a plate of pasta.

  Afterwards Nino, packed off to bed and muzzy from the brandy, heard them singing as the chemist picked out a tune on Nino’s father’s old squeeze-box. Both he and Mr Williams liked opera and were soon talking of coming back on another evening with a guitar. Nino groaned from fear of scandal and of what the neighbours must think. Here was the widow entertaining not one man but two, while her guardian and chaperone – himself – was out of commission. This no one must ever know.

  English class, after this, became a purgatory. Mr Williams’ marked friendliness towards himself was, Nino felt, compromising, but an outright coldness between them could, on the other hand, arouse worse gossip, since it was known – everything was – that Mr Williams and the chemist had been back twice to the house, and that the two had taken Nino and his mother rowing on the Arno, followed by dinner at a trattoria.

  He tried talking to his mother about the dubious propriety of this but she laughed, saying that there was safety in numbers and that the two men were lonely, living as they did in noisy boarding houses where they enjoyed no privacy and were fobbed off with coffee made from toasted barley and sauce made from offal. It was only Christian, she insisted, to make them welcome in her large, pleasant flat in these tough times. Besides, they kicked in something to pay for the food. Then she pinched Nino’s ear playfully and kissed the top of his head. She didn’t take him – or life – seriously at all.

  Some time after this she started travelling around Tuscany, selling cosmetics and doing demonstrations in small towns where ladies came to learn how to apply and remove make-up and to have massages and facials. She did this in profumerie and in the sort of small chemist’s establishment which sold cosmetics as well as drugs. Maybe her friend the chemist had helped her get the job? She would, she explained, sometimes have to be away overnight and so Nino was going to have to stay with his grandmother. Yes, Nino, no arguments please. This was a promotion and we needed the money.

  ‘I don’t want to hear any more of your nonsense and I sincerely hope you’ll give up fighting and settle down to your studies.’

  Nino’s grandmother lived a train-ride outside the city and it would have cost too much for him to travel back and forth to his old school, but luckily it was now the summer vacation and who knew what the autumn would bring? His mother hoped to get a job back in town before long.

  Being with his grandmother wasn’t all bad. It got him away from the treacherous Pippo, into whom he would otherwise have bumped every day in the lift and on their shared stairway. He spent the first weeks of his holiday reading, and his mother came by every Sunday.

  Then he and his grandmother had a tiff. She was stricter than his mother – more old-fashioned – and wouldn’t let him go to the race track with some boys he had met. Nino decided to ask his mother for permission and, as his grandmother had no telephone, went out to ring from a café. There was no answer at first, but as it was still very early in the morning – he had got up specially – and his mother might still be asleep, he let the phone ring and ring. Finally someone picked it up. A man’s voice spoke. It was Mr Williams’. ‘Hullo,’ it said, ‘hullo. Pronto.’

  Nino hung up and left the café. Without thinking, he headed for the station, took the first train which was full of commuters, dodged the ticket collector, and reached the city just about the time his mother usually left for work. When he reached her flat, though, his key didn’t work. Someone inside had drawn the bolt and when he knocked they didn’t open.

  Walking like a sleep-walker – there was, he knew, no sense to what he was doing but he did it anyway as if he was a wind-up toy which someone had set in motion – he went downstairs and round to the back of the house, where he began to shin up the drainpipe which, three floors above, ran past the balcony of their flat. It was a mad thing to do. Useless. What did he want? A scandal? Or to show her that he couldn’t be fooled? Just to show her. Just … No, it was crazy. Foolish! He was on the point of giving up when someone hailed him from the second-floor balcony. It was Pippo.

  ‘Hullo. What are you doing?’

  ‘I forgot my key,’ Nino lied.

  It was months since their fight and Nino found that he wasn’t angry with Pippo any more. He was angry with her! Let Pippo see her, he thought furiously. Let everyone! Maybe that would teach her!

  ‘I thought you were a burglar.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Come in the front door,’ invited Pippo. ‘I’ll let you in and you can climb up from here. We have a stepladder.’

  Nino, not knowing what to say, let himself drop into the yard, then, reluctantly, went round to the front and slowly up the stairs to Pippo’s flat. This, he told himself, was a bad mistake. Maybe everyone in the palazzo knew already, and if they didn’t, what was the point of his letting them know? Pippo must know. Maybe he, Nino, was peculiarly half-witted and lacking in common sense? Maybe he should turn around and take the train back to his grandmother’s? By the time he reached Pippo’s door he was crying and had smeared dirt from the drainpipe all over his face, though he didn’t know this until Pippo commented on it.

  ‘Your mother’s not in,’ said Pippo. ‘The couple is, though. I think she lets them have the flat when she’s away.’

  ‘What …’ But he couldn’t bring himself to ask. What couple? Who?

  ‘Don’t feel bad about it,’ said Pippo unexpectedly. ‘I think it’s just from friendship. Not for money or anything. I don’t think that. Nobody does. Your Mamma’s just lonely. She likes the bit of music and their company.’

  By now he had pushed Nino out onto the balcony and up the stepladder, so that he could see in the window to his own sitting room where Mr Williams and the chemist were naked as truth itself and lying in each other’s arms.

  Will You Please Go Now

  Lost among the demonstrators was a rain-sodden dog. Up and down it ran, rubbing against anonymous trousers and collecting the odd kick. It was a well-fed animal with a leather collar but was quickly taking on the characteristics of the stray: that festive cringe and the way such dogs hoop their spines in panic while they wag their s
habby tails.

  ‘Here boy! Come – ugh, he’s all muddy. Down, sir, get away! Scram! Tss!’

  People threw chocolate wrappers and potato-crisp packets which the dog acknowledged from an old habit of optimism while knowing the things were no good. It was tired and its teeth showed in a dampish pant as though it were laughing at its own dilemma.

  Jenny Middleton, a mother of two, recognized the crowd’s mood from children’s parties.

  ‘Don’t tease him,’ she said sharply to a dark-skinned young man who had taken the animal’s forepaws in his hands and was forcing it to dance. The dog’s dazed gash of teeth was like a reflection of the man’s laugh. ‘Here,’ she said, more gently, ‘let me see his tag. There’s a loudspeaker system. It shouldn’t be hard to find his owner.’

  ‘I’ll take him,’ said the man at once, as though, like the dog, he had been obedience-trained and only awaited direction. ‘I will ask them to announce that he has been found.’ Off he hared on his errand, like a boy-scout eager for merit. One hand on the dog’s collar, he sliced through the crowd behind a nimbly raised shoulder. ‘I’ll be back,’ he called to Jenny, turning to impress this on her with a sharp glance from yellowish, slightly bloodshot eyes.

  He was the sort of man whom she would have avoided in an empty street – and, to be sure, she might have been wrong. He was friendly. Everyone at the rally was. Strangers cracked jokes and a group carrying an embroidered trade-union banner kept up a confident, comic patter. The one thing she wasn’t sure she liked were the radical tunes which a bald old man was playing on his accordion. They seemed to her divisive, having nothing to do with the rally’s purpose. When the musician’s mate brought round the hat, she refused to contribute. ‘Sorry,’ she told him when he shook it in front of her. ‘I’ve no change.’ Turning, she was caught by the ambush of the dusky young man’s grin. He was back, breathing hard and shaking rain from his hair.