Orchid & the Wasp

by Caoilinn Hughes

  ‘No,’ Guthrie said, catching his breath.

  ‘… or is it just the ravenous mutilated soldiers in the trenches of my–’

  ‘It’s twelve,’ Jarleth said.

  ‘–cooch.’

  ‘Will we lunch first so?’ Sive said.

  Gael asked, ‘Is there a restaurant at IMMA?’

  ‘There’d be something …’ Sive sounded encouraging.

  ‘I’m not hungry,’ Guthrie said.

  ‘Nor am I. Not for cafeteria giblets.’ Jarleth lifted his jumper to get his phone from his shirt pocket (passport-blue linen, nicely offset against the darker cashmere). Gael and Guthrie leaned in to look-see the new model. They’d been getting their father’s cast-off phones since ’98. This one would be Gael’s, because thereafter she planned to be generous. Such chattels would be Guthrie’s one hope, come secondary school in September.

  Jarleth had time for technology. He consorted with people at Google, and it was one of the few things besides food, durable clothes and holidays about which he was prodigal. Dell’s revenue last year equated to six percent of GDP. More to the point (he’d recently explained), depreciation comes off your tax bill. The Samsung SGH-S105 was a silver flip phone with a colour screen, a camera and flash and polyphonic ringtones. It would be the most valuable cast-off yet. Jarleth phoned his PA (on a Saturday) to ask was there somewhere to eat near Kilmainham. He hung up and she called back a minute later with the verdict.

  ‘The consultant chef? What use are Michelin stars if it’s not the Magi making the grub? No no no. No gimmicks. Give Prendergast’s a call and say we’ll be in shortly. Thanks, Ann.’ … for two? Her voice came through faintly. ‘Four,’ Jarleth said, then hung up. As he drove, he looked at Sive, regularly. Her chin rested on her fingertips and she seemed to be reading between the double yellow lines by the roadside. ‘Pop-up restaurants!’ Jarleth said, conspiratorially, but she didn’t hear. The windscreen wipers automatically came on and weather whistled through the car’s clefts and cavities. He gripped the wheel as though they were gliding on black ice. He wouldn’t repeat himself. After catching Gael’s eye in the rearview mirror, he adjusted it so they wouldn’t catch again.

  They were sat at the special guest table. The cloistered, white-clothed mafia table had been generally unoccupied since the Irish brotherhood – na fir maith – were forced to close the government tab back in ’97, when one of its very coked-up boys let the cat out of the hotel window, instigating the Moriarty Tribunal. (The coke and the pussy and the hotel room had been paid for by the public purse. Nonetheless, the trial was ongoing and most of its members had since found employment in finance. A helicopter to the races was the new working weekend.)

  Guthrie only ordered a starter – a vegetarian one at that – which annoyed Jarleth considerably. It wasn’t like Guthrie to be deliberately cantankerous, so Gael could only assume that something had gone on at the hospital. One of their Conversations. None of them said anything meaningful through the main course (Wicklow venison in spiced wine sauce with duck fat roast potatoes for Jarleth; seared scallops over black pudding with colcannon for Sive; and Jerusalem artichoke and pearl barley risotto, chanterelles, hazelnut and truffle pesto for Gael, which she found to be absolutely and utterly disgusting).

  ‘Should’ve gone for the fermented carrot jus,’ she said, pushing the bowl away, but no one laughed. They seemed to be done with laughing and she was done with trying to dispel tension. Maybe what was festering was like a cold sore that would express just in time for the family portrait. The restaurant was in a historic Victorian building, all wooden cabinets and wine shelves and bacon bars hanging from the ceiling, and if they’d only been seated in the busy section, at any of the tables by the bar running down the centre, their problems might have been less conspicuous. But, as it was, despite her seeming engaged, the only conversational batons that Sive caught were logistical. The thing was, this wasn’t new; she got like this – or something like it – when her work was going well, when something worthwhile was coming to pass.

  ‘I’m home very late on Monday,’ Jarleth said, ‘then I’m in London the following week.’

  ‘That’s fine, love. I’m in Dusseldorf on Thursday week, but it’s only two nights. To conduct Così fan tutte with Valery Gergiev–’

  ‘Well, that won’t do. We can’t both be away on school nights. You’ll have to take the kids with you.’

  ‘Not at all. There’s Carla … or Sarah-Jane … would happily stay the night. It’s easier for her to get to Inchicore from ours–’

  ‘The kids haven’t seen Dusseldorf, have you? Gael?’

  Sive finally drew her eyes from a painting to the left of their table, just behind Gael, who kept feeling as though her mother was looking at her, but now she knew it was at something past her.

  ‘Where’s Dusseldorf ?’ Guthrie asked, spooning ice cubes from his water glass.

  A waiter took their plates away and the head chef came to greet them and to congratulate Sive on the Beethoven concert in January. He and the wife had seen a matinee, and it was ‘just a relief, truth be told, to hear a classic. In the theatre, what you really want is Shakespeare. In the orchestra, what you really want is Beethoven.’ The man had a gentle manner and an onion sheen all over.

  ‘It’s actually pronounced Bait-hoven,’ Gael explained, ‘not thoven because hoven means “farms”. Ludwig of the beetroot farms. And it’s van Beethoven because that’s his whole surname. Like if your name’s de Lacy and someone said, “I love Lacy’s cooking”, for centuries after your death, you’d be mad. It’s the same.’ Gael knew this from Sive, who’d tried to find a diplomatic way to correct the orchestra’s pronunciation.

  ‘Well,’ the chef chuckled forcedly, ‘you’re your mother’s daughter.’

  Something flickered across Jarleth’s face that wasn’t straight anger. Sive’s gaze travelled past Gael again.

  ‘Did you like the cooking, at least?’ the chef asked.

  Gael tightened her ponytail, to buy herself time. All she could think was that his first comment had been wrong too. In the wine shop, what you really want is the merlot … was the equivalent she was concocting to illustrate the point.

  ‘Excuse her insolence,’ Jarleth interjected. ‘She’s … coming of age.’

  ‘Oh,’ the chef said, with surprising calm. ‘Iron is what you want, then. Try to get plenty of red meat this week.’

  Gael felt her head tuck backward, as from a badminton shuttlecock that travels far faster than might be assumed. ‘Thanks.’

  Jarleth tongued inside his lower lip to free venison from his bottom teeth. ‘Has Curragh dried up enough yet to take out the horses?’

  ‘Stephen’s onto it for the season,’ the chef said. ‘I’m out there less and less, truth be told–’

  ‘It was a bowl of soup last week, according to whatshisname … Magnier …’

  They blathered a bit, until it got to the stage that Jarleth was keeping the chef from the kitchen, testing the confines of a conventional job. By asking where the loo was, Guthrie gave the chef an out. Then Jarleth spotted someone in the restaurant and he, too, took leave of the table. With the plates cleared, wine spills on the tablecloth and abandoned napkins, it looked like the end of an ill-advised wedding.

  ‘He changed the music to György Kurtág,’ Sive said quietly. ‘Isn’t that lovely?’

  Gael listened, picking crumbs from her lap. The music was frustratingly quiet and delicate and then, after almost nothing, it bellowed, glaring and cautionary, as though a composer had been asked to invent the nuclear alarm. ‘Bit intense for a restaurant.’

  ‘That’s what makes it lovely. It’s only twelve minutes.’ They savoured one of them then, until something that sounded like a twig breaking made them start. ‘Trust Frederick to challenge his patrons’ senses.’

  Another of Sive’s admirers, Frederick was the owner. He must have known something about her, for her gaze now was back behind Gael. Gael turned her chair to see what
behind her was so fascinating. Almost the very moment she did so, as the image hit her retina and flipped, she said, ‘Mum?’

  They stared at the painting together, while Gael searched for her wording. The pencil-drawn backs of two nude women. Their rippling bodies of a piece; interlinked like an edgeless jigsaw. A watercolour, with pastels and white – chalk, perhaps – shading the headless figures. A navy blue moonlit sky. The bodies pale. Their headlessness not grotesque, but necessary. Both were seated and one body was falling into the other and always would be, and Gael watched the grip she had of her lover’s forearm. The hand too large. The forearm sturdy. Gael felt it. How one figure braced the other’s limb like a flagstaff on the moon. There was no time for the right words. They didn’t exist. ‘He doesn’t love you like that. He’s cheated and cheated.’ Gael sucked her teeth so they hurt. So the pain occurred to her as merely physical. Gael turned back around to her mother and saw the white shading of her eyelids as chalk. ‘It’s like it’s … a gap. It’s … as if–’

  ‘There’s no gap,’ Sive said, her mouth loose. An open purse to help oneself to.

  ‘Yes there is.’ Gael gripped her mother’s long, slender forearm, hung by her side. ‘You have to go.’

  Guthrie had returned and was lowering into his chair one millimetre at a time. As though an infant were sleeping, he said, ‘Is it the music?’

  Sive turned to him gratefully. ‘May his voice never break.’ She smiled and held out her arms and he didn’t hesitate to interlock with her and to stay there and to admit the absence of his head.

  Something was very, very wrong here.

  By the bar, Jarleth was talking with Frederick. Gael lifted her hand and Frederick waved back with some reservation. Could they tell? Gael didn’t look to her father’s eyes, only his smooth lips. If she tilted her ear, just so, she could catch bits of their conversation. ‘The hammer price … one-ten … original … sales record … labels … back … not an investment, in this case …’ Jarleth had taken out his cheque book (‘twenty per cent …’) and whatever he showed Frederick must have been enough to settle some bet. Fred’s whole body dropped an inch in the pained relief of the worst being over. Jarleth put his hand on Frederick’s shoulder and squeezed it, just as he’d clutched Sive’s thigh. With the same possession. Why was he marching over, then, to Gael? Why was his face so wild with erudition? Why was she standing up, in fear? Stumbling …

  ‘Dad?’

  And then he passed her and, with the handling you see in movies, when a man takes a woman up against a wall, Jarleth took the painting off it. He said, in a granular timbre, to Sive, ‘I want to take you home with me. And this is how. There is where you’ve been. Here’s your portal. I want you in my house. I want you in our bedroom. I want you downstairs. The way you were absorbed in this, it’s already gone. But when I bring it home … you’ll be coming with it.’

  Guthrie was pale and Gael’s fists were ready and Sive was saying, ‘Yes.’

  ‘We have to get out of here,’ Gael said.

  ‘Gather your things.’

  Gael took all their coats into her arms, and her mother’s bag.

  Frederick called out as they left, ‘Sive, pet,’ his moustache a comic frown. He pronounced her name: Soyov. ‘Figures in Moonlight, it’s called,’ he said. ‘Louis le Brocquy. 1944.’

  She pressed her hands to her chest and said, ‘I love his early ones … Forty-four?’

  Frederick nodded minutely. ‘Nothing neutral about it.’

  Sive shook her head. And they were gone.

  III

  April 2008

  The kitchen floor of the Foess household had been tiled with eggshells; its walls papered with prescriptions, none of whose medicines lessened their mother’s hurt.

  How long had passed, since Jarleth left? The clock had been stopped and progress seemed immeasurable. But the children’s bodies extended to make up for their parents’ withdrawal, as cork expands to stopper the bottle and prolong its contents’ life span. Guthrie was sixteen now; Gael seventeen.

  Sive had known, of course, long before Gael’s restaurant outburst. But she was a pillar of forbearance. She held up. The years phased on, ever more unseasonable, eroding their home. The London office suddenly couldn’t do without Jarleth. He began to commute. In late 2007, he stopped commuting. He was gone. The months since had seemed endless.

  As if to censor the contrast between their mood and hers, the children barely spoke. They became fluent in the language of shoulders. They learned to move light-footed in the kitchen; Guthrie revelling all the while in this courtesy of woe, as if other states of being were insincere. He was Melpomene – tragic mask at the ready. Gael played along, to a point. How does one expedite a coma? She held her tongue while non-stop noise played through her headphones: a hunger striker hooked up to an IV line beneath her clothes.

  They were advised by relatives to make themselves scarce: To Give Yer Mother a Wide Berth. To Be Loving and Supportive and Patient but Not to Expect Much in the Way of Parenting. Sure That One Never Mollycoddled, Even When She’d a Man to Impress. That Might Have Had Something to Do with It. Aren’t Ye Self-Sufficient Now? We Were Working Ourselves at Sixteen and Aren’t You Seventeen, Gael, and the Leaving Cert Just around the Corner, and Guthrie Only Two Years Behind. No One Would Be Surprised if Ye Grow Up Quick. Ye Might Be Wise to Do the Same.

  Sive’s will to live now seemed gossamer-sheer, fickle as a whim. She’d become a muted rendition of herself. It was true; she’d always been what busybody misogynists bitterly described as a ‘hard woman,’ the very oxymoron embodied. But gossips have no register for nuance. There’s refusing to applaud when a Ryanair plane lands and there’s neglecting to congratulate your son for coming Highly Commended in the regional watercolour championships for under-eighteens. Not all coldnesses are equivalent: a person’s spirit can freeze at almost any temperature.

  In the worst months – when Gael had taken up residence on friends’ sofas, leaving Guthrie to ensure that no razors or ropes or Sibelius records lay within reach – their mother would forget to open the curtains or to switch on the central heating or to eat or to visit her father after he’d suffered another minor stroke in the Mystery Rose Residence, as if the fact that he wouldn’t know her from Eve had suddenly become relevant. She began to resemble a bass clef, arched and draped in a wide black shawl. Her fingers were willowy wands, but she’d forgotten the motions to get them to work. She changed her clothes only when her son delivered half-ironed piles of laundry to the foot of her bed. Guthrie’s homeopathic method was to heap all the clothes in a tower, vaguely folded, and to press the iron down on the upper item, hoping the whiff of heat from above would flatten out the whole stack. She refused to open a score. She was on temporary leave from the orchestra. Guthrie was worried dizzy she’d be elbowed out of her job.

  ‘What if she’s not ready to go back for the summer round? What if the stand-in conductor gets to do the tour? What if he gets good reviews and the players prefer him and they make some kind of petition to the musical director and–’

  ‘Stop it, Guth. The guy’s a breathing metronome. Mum’s a composers’ necromancer,’ Gael said.

  ‘A what?’

  When they gently knocked on her door to see if she was alive, she would say: ‘Never underestimate what can be slept off. Pull the blinds and leave me be.’

  Gael imagined her mother’s heart to be caked in kettle limescale grunge and was fairly confident that some solution would scour her right again, this year or the next. There was that bottle of red – Settlesoul – on the mantelpiece, still unopened, which Gael had bought for her, for its name. Well, she’d stolen it from Tesco but it served them right. Gael foresaw her mother succumbing to cobwebs like a dust-stuck tuning fork.

  She observed Sive one day: standing at the living room bay window, one hand bracing the sill, the other pressing a Maldives travel brochure, sopping with weather, against her thigh. Sive had been out wandering in a downpour and hadn�
��t bothered to towel off. It seemed to mark a new phase: a willingness to go out, to look outward, Gael had hoped. Though, the pane of glass returned a self-portrait in a crestfallen mirror. A sneeze. When Gael said, Bless you, Sive startled. Her hair appeared as a whitewashed black, ashed with age. She wore it in a graceful loose French twist, but most of it had fallen down behind her ears and it dripped like a convent tap.

  ‘You frightened me,’ she said. ‘Why aren’t you at school?’

  ‘I don’t really go anymore.’

  ‘Oh.’ She stared blearily at Gael’s chest, as though there were something written there. ‘Will they let you do the exams?’

  Gael nodded.

  ‘But you’ll fail?’

  ‘No.’

  Sive wiped her nose red with her damp shawl. One would have wanted measuring tape just then to prove she was a tall woman. ‘If you say so, Gael. Only, don’t have me visited by social services. The mind is custody enough.’

  Her mother turned window-ward again and, after a long while, said that she had been trying to convince herself that the rain water wasn’t labouring down the panes. That it was the other way around: gravity working to draw everything down, angling for its loot. She could hardly bear to watch it. It’s a dreadful torture to remember that nature is there, permitting us to play some trifling part, as if it mattered, she said. A second-cornet part. The third violin section droning two-four tonic. ‘You’d rather just be a mechanism altogether, rid of the idea that we perceive anything or participate in some culture. Meaning. Do you believe in anything, Gael? Any organized idea?’

  ‘No.’ She felt how dry her lips were. This weather. ‘No idée fixe,’ she added, but her mother didn’t hear.

  ‘Not even in family?’

  The strangest sensation pulsed through Gael’s centre at this rare communication. She felt that her mother was sizing her up, as a species, that she might suddenly announce a figure she had come to: see? What use is that? It’s nothing personal. Gael wondered if either of them had ever heard just what the other had intended to say. ‘Not really,’ Gael said. ‘Not in the way you mean.’