Under the Rose

by Julia O'Faolain

  ‘The dog will be OK,’ he assured her. ‘The authorities are in control.’

  This confidence in hierarchy amused her. The next thing he said showed that it was selective.

  ‘They’, he nodded furtively at the musicians, ‘come to all rallies. I am thinking maybe they are the police? Musicians, buskers: a good disguise?’ He had a shrill, excited giggle.

  ‘There are plenty of ordinary police here,’ she remarked, wondering whether he was making fun of her. She felt shy at having come here alone in her Burberry hat and mac. The hat was to protect her hair from torch drippings and was sensible gear for a torch-light procession. But then, might not sense be a middle-class trait and mark her out?

  ‘Bobbies’, he said, ‘are not the danger. I am speaking of the undercover police. The Special Branch. They have hidden cameras.’

  ‘Oh.’

  She eased her attention off him and began to read the graffiti on the struts of the bridge beneath which their section of the procession was sheltering. It was raining and there was a delay up front. Rumours or joke-rumours had provided explanations for this. The levity was so sustained as to suggest that many marchers were embarrassed at having taken to the streets. Old jokes scratched in concrete went back to her schooldays: My mother made me a homosexual, she read. Did she? goes the answer, conventionally written in a different hand. If I get her some wool will she make me one too? There was the usual Persian – or was it Arabic – slogan which she had been told meant Stop killings in Iraq! The man beside her could be an Arab. No. More likely an Indian.

  ‘I know them,’ he was saying of the secret police. ‘We know each other. You see I myself come to all rallies. Every one in London.’

  ‘Are you a journalist?’

  ‘No. I come because I am lonely. Only at rallies are people speaking to me.’

  Snap! She saw the trap-click of his strategy close in on her: his victim for the occasion. It was her hat, she thought and watched his eyes coax and flinch. It had singled her out. Damn! A soft-hearted woman, she had learned, reluctantly, that you disappointed people less if you could avoid raising their hopes. Something about him suggested that a rejection would fill him with triumph. He did not want handouts, conversational or otherwise, but must solicit them if he was to savour a refusal.

  A graffito on the wall behind him said: I thought Wanking was a town in China until I discovered Smirnov. Don’t laugh, she warned herself – yet, if she could think of a joke to tell him, mightn’t it get her off his hook? Would Chinese laugh at the Smirnov joke, she wondered. Probably they wouldn’t, nor Indians either. Wankers might. They were solitary and the solitary use jokes to keep people at bay.

  ‘You see,’ he was saying, ‘I am a factory worker but also an intellectual. In my own country I was working for a newspaper but here in the factory I meet nobody to whom I can talk. Intellectuals in London are not inviting working men to their homes. I am starved for exchange of stimulating ideas.’ His eye nailed a magazine she was carrying. ‘You, I see, are an intellectual?’

  ‘Goodness, no.’ But the denial was a matter of style, almost a game which it was cruel to play with someone like him. She had never known an English person who would admit to being an intellectual. In India – Pakistan? – wherever he came from it would be a category which deserved honour and imposed duties. Denying membership must strike him as an effort to shirk such duties towards a fellow member in distress.

  Her attempts to keep seeing things his way were making her nervous and she had twisted her sheaf of flyers and pamphlets into a wad. Am I worrying about him, she wondered, or myself? Perhaps even asking herself such a question was narcissistic? Objectivity too might be a middle-class luxury. How could a man like this afford it? He was a refugee, he was telling her now, a Marxist whose comrades back home were in prison, tortured or dead. Perhaps his party, would take power again soon. Then he would go home and have a position in the new government. Then English intellectuals could meet him as an equal. He said this with what must have been intended as a teasing grin. She hadn’t caught the name of his country and was embarrassed to ask lest it turn out to be unfamiliar. It would have to be a quite small nation, she reasoned, if he was hoping to be in its government. Or had that been a joke?

  ‘We’re moving.’ She was relieved at the diversion.

  The trade-union group started roaring the Red Flag with comic gusto and the procession ambled off. He was holding her elbow. Well, that, she supposed, must be solidarity. The rally was connected with an issue she cared about. She did not normally take to the streets and the etiquette of the occasion was foreign to her.

  ‘Let cowards mock’, came the jovial Greater London bellow from up front, ‘And traitors sneer …’

  ‘I’m as foreign here as he is,’ she decided and bore with the downward tug at her elbow. He was small: a shrivelled man with a face like a tan shoe which hasn’t seen polish in years. Dusky, dusty, a bit scuffed, he could be any age between thirty and forty-five. His fingers, clutching at her elbow bone, made the torch she had bought tilt and shed hot grease on their shoulders. She put up her left hand to steady it.

  ‘You’re married.’ He nodded at her ring. ‘Children?’

  ‘Yes: two. Melanie and Robin. Melanie’s twelve.’

  The embankment was glazed and oozy. Outlines were smudged by a cheesy bloom of mist, and reflections from street-lights smeary in the mud, for it was December and grew dark about four. Across the river, the South Bank complex was visible still. He remarked that you could sit all day in its cafeteria if you wanted and not be expected to buy anything. His room, out in the suburbs, depressed him so much that on Sundays he journeyed in just to be among the gallery- and theatre-goers, although he never visited such places himself.

  ‘But galleries are cheap on Sundays,’ she remonstrated. ‘Maybe even free?’

  He shrugged. Art – bourgeois art – didn’t interest him. It was – he smiled in shame at the confession – the opulence of the cafeteria which he craved. ‘Opulence,’ he said, stressing the wrong syllable so that she guessed that he had never heard the word pronounced. ‘It is warm there,’ he explained. ‘Soft seats. Nice view of the river. Some of the women are wearing scent.’

  On impulse and because it was two weeks to Christmas, she invited him to join her family for lunch on the 25th.

  *

  When the day came, she almost forgot him and had to tell Melanie to lay an extra place just before he was due to arrive. His name – he had phoned to test the firmness of her invitation – was Mr Rao. He called her Mrs Middleton and she found the formality odd after the mateyness of the rally when he had surely called her Jenny? Their procession, headed for Downing Street, had been turned back to circle through darkening streets. Mounted police, came the word, had charged people in front. Several had been trampled. Maimed perhaps? No, that was rumour: a load of old rubbish. Just some Trots trying to provoke an incident. Keep calm. Then someone heard an ambulance. An old working man gibbered with four-letter fury but the banner-bearers were unfazed.

  ‘Can’t believe all you hear, Dad,’ they told him.

  Mr Rao tugged at Jenny’s arm as though he had taken her into custody: the custody of the Revolution. ‘You see,’ he hissed, ‘it is the system you must attack, root and branch, not just one anomaly. There are no anomalies. All are symptoms.’ He was galvanized. Coils of rusty hair reared like antennae off his forehead. ‘Social Democrats’, he shouted, ‘sell the pass. They are running dogs of Capitalism. I could tell you things I have seen …’ Fury restored him and she guessed that he came to rallies to revive a flame in himself which risked being doused by the grind of his working existence. He laughed and his eyes flicked whitely in the glow from the torches as he twitted the young men with the trade-union banner in their split allegiance. A Labour Government was loosing its police on the workers. ‘Aha!’ he hooted at their discomfiture. ‘Do you see? Do you?’ His laughter flew high and quavered like an exotic birdcall through the moist Londo
n night.

  *

  ‘You remember that demo I went to?’ she reminded Melanie. ‘Well, I met him there. He’s a refugee and lonely at Christmas. A political refugee.’

  ‘Sinister?’ inquired her husband who’d come into the kitchen to get ice cubes, ‘with a guerrillero grin and a bandit’s moustache? Did he flirt with you?’

  This sort of banter was irritating when one was trying to degrease a hot roasting pan to make sauce. She’d just remembered too that her mother-in-law, who was staying with them, was on a salt-free diet. Special vegetables should have been prepared. ‘Did you lay the place for him?’ she asked Melanie.

  The girl nodded and rolled back her sleeve to admire the bracelet she’d got for Christmas. Posing, she considered her parents with amusement.

  Jenny’s husband was looking for something in the deep freeze. ‘He did, didn’t he?’ he crowed. ‘He flirted with you?’

  She should have primed him, she realized. James was sensitive enough when things were pointed out to him but slow to imagine that other people might feel differently to the way he did. Mr Rao would be hoping for a serious exchange of ideas between men. Stress serious. He had been impressed when she told him that James, a senior civil servant, was chairman of a national committee on education. But now here was James wearing his sky-blue jogging suit with the greyhound on its chest – a Christmas present – all set to be festive and familial. He was a nimble, boyish man who prided himself on his youthfulness.

  ‘Will Mr Rao disapprove of us?’ he asked puckishly and tossed his lock of grey-blond hair off his forehead.

  ‘Listen, he’s a poor thing.’ Jenny was peeved at being made to say this. ‘Be careful with him, James. Can anyone see the soy sauce? I’ve burnt my hand. Thanks.’ She spread it on the burn then went back to her roasting pan. Melanie, darling, could you do some quick, unsalted carrots for your grandmother? Please.’

  ‘Better do plenty,’ James warned. ‘He may be a vegetarian. Lots of Indians are.’

  ‘God, do you think so? At Christmas.’

  ‘Why not at Christmas? You’d think we celebrated it by drinking the blood of the Lamb.’

  ‘People do,’ said Melanie. ‘Communion. There’s the doorbell.’

  ‘I’ll go. Keep an eye on my pan.’

  In the hall Jenny just missed putting her foot on a model engine which James had bought for five-year-old Robin and himself. An entire Southern Region of bright rails, switches, turntables and sidings was laid out and there was no sign of Robin. Did James dream of being an engine-driver, an aerial bomber or God? Or was it some sexual thing like everything else? Through the Art Nouveau glass of the door, she deduced that the blob in Mr Rao’s purple hand must be daffodils, and wished that there was time to hide her own floral display which must minimize his gift.

  *

  ‘You were mean, horrible, appalling.’

  ‘He is appalling.’

  ‘Shsh! Listen, please, James, be nice. Try. Look, go back now, will you? They’ll know we’re whispering.’

  ‘I’m not whispering.’

  ‘Well you should be. He’ll hear.’

  ‘Jenny, you invited him. Try and control him. He has a chip a mile high on his …’

  ‘Well, allow for it.’

  ‘Why should I?’

  ‘You’re his host.’

  ‘He’s my guest.’

  ‘God! Look, get the plum pud alight and take it in. I’ll get the brandy butter.’

  ‘If he suggests Robin eat this with his fingers, I’ll …’

  ‘Shush, will you? He doesn’t understand children.’

  ‘What does he understand? How to cadge money?’

  ‘He didn’t mean it that way.’

  ‘He bloody did. Thinks the world owes him a living.’

  ‘Well, doesn’t it? Owe everyone I mean.’

  ‘My dear Jenny …’

  ‘Oh, all right. Here.’

  She put a match to the brandy-soaked pudding so that blue flames sprang over its globe making it look like a scorched, transfigured human head. ‘Go on. Take it while it’s alight.’ She pushed her husband in the direction of the dining-room and stood for a moment pulling faces at the impassive blankness of the kitchen fridge. Then she followed with the brandy butter.

  Later, she came back to the kitchen to clean up. Vengefully, she let the men and her mother-in-law cope with each other over the coffee which their guest had at least not refused. He had refused sherry, also wine, also the pudding because it had brandy on it and had seemed to feel that it was his duty to explain why he did so and to point out the relativity of cultural values at the very moment when Robin’s grandmother was telling the child how to eat game politely.

  ‘Only two fingers, Robin,’ she’d been demonstrating daintily, ‘never your whole hand and only pick up a neat bone.’

  ‘We’, Mr Rao scooped up mashed chestnuts with a piece of bread, ‘eat everything with our hands.’ He laughed. ‘There are millions of us.’

  The anarchy of this so undermined Robin’s sense of what might and might not be done on such an extraordinary day as Christmas that he threw mashed chestnuts at his grandmother and had to be exiled from the table. The older Mrs Middleton was unamused. Mr Rao bared his humourless, raking teeth.

  ‘You are strict with your children’, he said, ‘in imparting your class rituals. This is because as a people you still have confidence and prize cohesion. Maybe now you must relax?’

  Nobody chose to discuss this. Doggedly, the family had helped each other to sauce and stuffing and Mr Rao began to use his knife and fork like everyone else. A diffidence in him plucked at Jenny who saw that the incident with Robin had been meant as a joke: a humorous overture to the member of the family whom he had judged least likely to reject him. But Robin himself had been rejected, exiled to his room, and disapproval of Mr Rao hung unvoiced and irrefutable in the air. Seen by daylight, he was younger than she had supposed at the rally. His was a hurt, young face, puffy and unformed with bloodshot eyes and a soft, bluish, twitching mouth. He wanted to plead for Robin but could only talk in his magazine jargon. Perhaps he never spoke to people and knew no ordinary English at all? She imagined him sitting endlessly in the South Bank cafeteria reading political magazines and staring at the river.

  ‘Pedagogical theory, you see …’ he started and James, to deviate him – Robin’s exile had to last at least ten minutes to placate his grandmother, interrupted with some remark about a scheme for facilitating adult education with which he was concerned.

  ‘It’s designed for people who didn’t get a chance to go to university in the first instance,’ said James. ‘We give scholarships to deserving …’

  ‘Could you give me one?’ Mr Rao leaned across the table. ‘Please. Could you? I am needing time to think and that factory work is destroying my brain. Have you worked ever on an assembly line?’

  ‘You may certainly apply,’ James told him. ‘It’s open to all applicants.’

  ‘No.’ Mr Rao spoke excitedly and a small particle of mashed chestnut flew from his mouth and landed on James’s jogging suit. His words, spattering after it, seemed almost as tangible. ‘No, no,’ he denied, nervous with hope. ‘You see I apply before for such things and never get them. Inferior candidates pass me by. Here in England, there is a mode, a ritual, you see. It is like the way you educate your son.’ Mr Rao’s mouth twisted like a spider on a pin. ‘You teach him to give signals,’ he accused. ‘To eat the chicken so – and then his own kind will recognize and reward him. I give the wrong signals so I am always rejected.’ He laughed sadly. ‘Merit is not noted. In intellectual matters this is even more true. Examiners will take a working-class man only if they think he can be absorbed into their class. I cannot.’

  ‘Then perhaps’, said James, ‘you are an unsuitable applicant?’

  ‘But the university’, pleaded Mr Rao, ‘is not a caste system? Not tribal surely? You cannot afford to exclude people with other ways of being than your own.
Even capitalism must innoculate itself with a little of the virus it fears. Intellectual life’ – Mr Rao swung his fork like a pendulum – ‘is a dialectical process. You must violate your rules,’ he begged. ‘Isn’t that how change comes? Even in English law? First someone breaks a bad old law; then a judge condones the breaking and creates a precedent. I have read this. Now you’, Mr Rao pointed his fork at James, ‘must break your bureaucratic rule. Give me a scholarship. Be brave,’ he pleaded. The fork fell with a clatter but Mr Rao was too absorbed to care. ‘Give,’ he repeated, fixing James with feverish eyes as if he hoped to mesmerize him. The eyes, thought Jenny, looked molten and scorched like lumps of caramel when you burned a pudding. The fork was again swinging to and fro and it struck her that Mr Rao might not be above using hypnotism to try and make James acquiesce to his will.

  She leaned over and took the fork from his fingers. He let it go. His energies were focused on James. The eyes were leeches now: animate, obscene. Melanie and her grandmother were collecting plates. They were outside the electric connection between the two men. Murmuring together, they seemed unaware of it. James’s mouth tightened. Mr Rao, Jenny saw, was in for a rocket. But the man was conscious only of his own need. It was naked now. He was frightened, visibly sweating, his nails scratched at the tablecloth. He wiped his face with a napkin.

  ‘Men in lower positions must obey rules,’ he told James. ‘They will not let me through. Only you can make an exception. Is not the spirit of your scheme to let the alienated back into society? I am such a man,’ he said with dramatic intonation. ‘I’, he said proudly, ‘am needy, alienated, hard-working and well read. Do you not believe I am intelligent? I could get references, but my referees’, he laughed his unhappy laugh, ‘are tending to be in gaol: a minister of my country, the rector of my university. Oh, we had an establishment once.’