Under the Rose

by Julia O'Faolain

  ‘We … I …’ Maisie strangled.

  ‘You’re excited! Shy! I understand! Bridal nerves! I’ll keep the others away!’ The door closed.

  The captain opened his eyes again to see Maisie rush to it, lock it, unlock it and sit miserably in an armchair. ‘I hate that woman!’ she hissed.

  ‘A monster,’ the captain agreed timidly.

  ‘We’ll straighten things out,’ she told him. ‘It’s ridiculous! Maybe one day it’ll seem funny! Old cat!’ She began to cry. ‘This is nervous! I’m sorry. It’s … just that I’m never going to hear the end of this! Never! Oh!’ She buried her face in a cushion.

  ‘Maybe I should go after her,’ she said into her cushion. ‘At once. But they’d all be at me! I couldn’t face them this minute. In the morning,’ she promised. ‘We’ll straighten it out!’ She wept.

  The captain stared unhappily about him. Charity towards one’s neighbour began by leaving them alone. Don’t rush in. Give her time to pick up the shreds. Poor girl! Tough furrow! Sisters like harpies! Hyenas! Think of them sucking the marrow from each others’ bones for years while he’d been in Egypt, Burma…. Locked up together like inmates of some female reformatory! He could just see their house in Sligo! Grey – Connemara stone – with a bumpy tennis-court – no man to roll it – wind-bent trees, fringes of nettle and dock. His eye skidded off the bidet where stockings had been stretched, rose to observe flies and lees of dust in the ceiling lamp. He felt depressed. Squashed somehow. Normal enough after an attack. Drains one. But why the attack? Old age? Ha! No such thing! The wardrobe looked like a pair of upright coffins with claw feet. All the better to trail you with. He would be glad to get out of here.

  ‘I have always tried to be d-d-dignified!’ From behind the cushion.

  Poor child! ‘Now, now!’ He comforted. ‘This could happen to a bishop. Go on,’ he advised. ‘Cry! It’ll do you good.’ But as she did he added: ‘What would you say to a walk?’

  ‘Now?’ She looked at her watch. ‘It’s 4 a.m.’

  ‘Why not? We won’t sleep after the tea. Fresh air! Clean the cobwebs out of our heads. This is Paris. All sorts of things go on! Let’s do a little reconnoitring.’

  ‘And your head?’

  ‘Best thing in the world for it. If you’re game we’ll slip out on the QT.’

  They found a taxi rank and the captain, remembering something he had been told about being able to get a meal at any hour at Les Halles, asked the driver to take them there. ‘Some modest place,’ he directed. ‘We didn’t get much of a meal last night,’ he told Maisie restively. ‘We can go for a stroll afterwards and see the dawn maybe over Paris.’

  The restaurant was shiny and noisy. Nobody looked at Maisie’s red eyes. Over white wine and oysters she grew febrile.

  ‘God!’ she groaned. ‘In this city one could be alone or choose one’s company.’ She watched a well-dressed woman who was eating a large meal alone with a book. A bottle of wine in front of her was three-quarters full. ‘People don’t stare and tattle and pity each other’s failures…. Oh, what do I know about it? Maybe they do!’ She lowered her eyes and ate.

  ‘Couldn’t you take a job?’ the captain asked. ‘Break out as it were? Go to Dublin or London….’ Shocked at his own indiscretion, he let his voice trail vaguely away. ‘Lots of women are secretaries, aren’t they?’ he murmured.

  ‘I’m forty,’ said Maisie. ‘And I have had no experience.’

  At the baldness of that he quivered. The unusual hour, the place, the wine after quinine perhaps, above all her frankness stirred him. The captain had rarely probed beneath the patina of conversational formula. What Maisie had shown of her private self troubled him.

  ‘My dear,’ he laid down knife and fork, wiped his lips and leaned towards her, ‘you could come and live with me! Why not? We can work out a modus vivendi. That is, if you would not greatly object. I would respect your privacy…. You could depend on that!’

  She looked up. ‘You mean …?’

  ‘Yes, yes!’ He smiled in triumph at his own initiative, in assent to the warmth of solidarity, the possibilities that fanned out like fireworks once one removed the lid – the lid of what? The wine danced like a centipede in his throat.

  ‘Marry you?’

  ‘Why not? Why not? Absolutely…. That is to say….’ He put down his glass. ‘In a sense.’

  ‘Because of Mrs O’Keefe? The fuss?’

  ‘Why not,’ he insisted bravely. ‘We would be marrying to protect each other. From the others.’

  ‘Oh you are kind! You want to save my face…. We could simply let them go on assuming what they do. For a while.’

  ‘No, no, I want you to take the idea seriously! Now that we have it. Unless it strikes you as ludicrous! I think we are compatible!’ Over that hurdle, he smiled with his old charm.

  ‘Oh!’ she cried. ‘No! I mean not at all, but, really, I don’t know what to think!’ Her colour was as high suddenly as the rouge of women at other tables.

  He looked at his watch. ‘We have three hours,’ he told her shyly, ‘until we face them.’

  ‘Three hours….’

  ‘And we needn’t tell them the truth even then!’

  They laughed, astounded at themselves, and he filled up their glasses. They ate their next course in silence. An old man with a heavily painted face sat weeping in one corner over a plate of choucroute. Their glances shied away from him, back to each other, down to their plates. Workers from the market came in on a gust of cold air smelling of mushrooms and wet dungarees, straw, sooty brick, the night. At the cheese Maisie asked: ‘Why would you let yourself be rushed into marrying me?’ There was coquetry in her tone now. Her eyes were bright. The captain felt he had restored her nerve.

  His own wavered forthwith. He patted her hand and an aviary of doubts were flushed up to be shot down like clay pigeons in his head. Pim, pam, poum! They soared again like phoenixes. A wife? Him with a …? But she was discreet. If any woman was. If, if. The gentle particle furred his inner ear. She was making up now, powdering, toning down her triumphant flush, reddening her lips. She smiled at a flower seller passing their table. He bought her a gardenia and she pinned it on. Bending to smell it with the movement of a cat about to lick its own chest, she said:

  ‘My second gardenia! The first was – oh a long time ago – from a young …’

  ‘Maisie, don’t!’ The captain stopped her. ‘Don’t tell me now!’

  He was astonished by his own agitation. Felt like cavalry surprised in the Russian steppe, congealed in mid-stream by sudden ice. He must break out of this!

  ‘My dear,’ he began. He had cards to be put on the table which he had chested all his life. ‘Shall we have a liqueur?’ As she smiled he guessed she was remembering that recalcitrant Irish swains drink to give themselves courage to make love to their women. Her bosom was swelling; the mounds on either side of the cleft nuzzled the edges of her dress. Had his offer done all this? Turned her into a Juno? He felt himself shrivel. His limbs folded with the dry movement of a scissors. Yet…. She would be a splendid businesswoman. They could run a chicken farm together – battery system – they would give up the pilgrimages…. Tossing down his drink, he began, ‘Maisie, do you know my name? Being called “captain” unnerves me and I have something to tell you.’

  She laughed a full-throated peal. ‘Can I unnerve you – Edwin?’

  This time the coquetry was open. He felt the stiffening in his bones. What did she expect? He glanced at her big moving chest, her voracious mouth.

  ‘You sound ominous!’ she teased, her eyes rolling above the rim of her brandy glass. Self-sufficient now as planets; like searchlights, like drills they bored into him. Her lips sipped the fiery liquid. Multimouthed animalities stirred beneath her skin. Perspiration glittered around her nose.

  ‘Maisie, I….’ He eluded her grin.

  She stretched out her hand. ‘You are jumpy!’ she exclaimed. ‘Are you worried?’ Gently: ‘You are no more bound tha
n before you know!’

  He grasped the hand. ‘Please try to understand’, he gabbled, ‘that I have to tell you this at once. Now! To avoid … ambiguities. Out of consideration for both of us. I am fifty-four. I have lived too long alone to fancy myself able to contract for more. Maisie,’ he held her hand in both of his, ‘I am suggesting a … a union of souls, of affection, not…. The Church has provision for such limited marriages. In special circumstances.’ He could feel her hand go limp between his. He did not dare lift his glance to her face. ‘I think we could make a go of it – if you were to agree. There is so much left. So much of life apart from that side of things. Companionship,’ he begged, ‘mutual respect, affection. We would collaborate on the farm. You would be mistress in your own house. It’s a nice place, Maisie. You would be your own woman…. I think we could help each other….’ He stole a glance at her, fell silent, let go her hand.

  She was looking through the windows to where artichoke crates had been piled high as the door and at the sky where daylight was unemphatically seeping through, like milk soaking a black cloth. Having delivered himself, he began to feel for her. He guessed her to be reviewing – perhaps closing a final lid on – a vivid hope chest, resigning herself perhaps to the soundness – and damn it, he guaranteed that – the safety of second best. He stretched out a hand. She did not see it. Poor girl! Was she mortified by the eagerness she had displayed?

  ‘Maisie,’ he whispered, ‘you needn’t say anything now. Let me know later. If … we don’t have to meet again. I had’, he pleaded, ‘to tell you while I could….’

  Or had she understood at all?

  She did not look at him again until she had finished her brandy. Her features had contracted. ‘Perhaps we’d better be getting back,’ she said.

  They walked. Buildings were emerging from the night. Tramps slept on gratings along the pavement, kept alive by a minimal flutter of warmth or the memory of warmth on air unconsidered and exhaled by surrounding houses.

  ‘How do they survive? They must be perished!’

  ‘Would you like my coat?’

  ‘Who’s the invalid?’

  In the middle of the Pont Neuf, she stopped. ‘I am going to give you my answer now,’ she began. ‘I know you to be considerate, kind….’

  ‘Oh,’ he cried sadly. ‘This means I’ve been … that you’re going to say “no”!’

  ‘No! It’s “yes”! Yes, Edwin!’

  He took her hands. He was touched and would have liked to say something festive, even tender to her. But he did not dare. Instead, he seized her by the waist and rushed her across the bridge in a kind of dance, an access of exuberance that always accompanied (and saved him from dealing with) feelings of a powerful or uncertain nature. ‘I’m so glad, Maisie,’ he told her breathlessly as they paused on the other side. ‘Old Mrs O’Keefe is right you know! This – for me – is a miracle! A gift. Loneliness you know….’

  She gave him her little smile. ‘The Virgin left her trademark on her gift, didn’t she?’ she observed. Then, quickly, putting her hand on his sleeve. ‘But I’m glad too,’ she said. ‘Truly.’

  He seized the hand. ‘That’s right!’ he cried. ‘The Virgin! You’ve hit the nail on the head! Oh you understand things! I’m sure we shall get on like a house on fire! You’ll see!’

  They quickened their pace. It was late and she had to finish their packing.

  In a Small Circus

  For moments tight smiles hovered on the solicitor’s lips, then expanded thinly as though on the wires of an abacus. ‘Desmond Lynch,’ the solicitor introduced himself, and thrust a hand across his desk. Jittery! Sean was not surprised. The late Father Tim Cronin had been Lynch’s cousin.

  ‘And you are Sean Dunne. Sean, how are you? A sad occasion.’

  ‘Yes.’ Guardedly.

  ‘Sit down. Sit down.’

  Leaning back and away from each other, the two made reticent probes. Hadn’t they, each wondered, met before? Neither could quite say when. Maybe when Sean, then still in short pants, had earned tips by carrying fishing tackle to and from the landing stage? Above on the lake? Fifteen years ago, could it be?

  ‘I’m afraid it could.’

  ‘Back in the slow old days,’ said Lynch.

  ‘Yes.’

  In Sean’s memory a rowboat scored the lake’s shine with a wake like a kite’s tail. Bottles of lemonade, towed through those waters, stayed cool even on the hottest days, for the lake was fed by mountain streams. Churning past peat and stones, these jinked from silver to amber, leaving a gauze of froth on reeds and sedge. For years Father Tim had been the parish priest in the valley, and Lynch had spent almost all his weekends in a lakeside cottage now rented to Germans.

  ‘Tim Cronin and I were close,’ said Lynch. ‘Poor Tim! He was a good man!’ As though startled by what he’d said, he began to talk about the will and about how, lest unforeseen claims be made against the estate, the bulk of the money could not be paid out just yet. This, he explained, was normal practice. No need for concern! He shook his head, and this time his smile lingered. Did he think Sean still needed reassurance? Sean did. He felt numb: the news gagged him. This legacy, he told himself with shamed eagerness, could change his life. Money! His mind reeled, then raced, working out that there’d be more than enough to get a phone hooked up, employ a boy full time and put his market garden on a sustainable footing! Maybe buy a refrigerated van?

  ‘Sustainable’ had been the bank manager’s word, last year, when refusing Sean’s request for a loan. ‘I’d like to be more positive,’ the man had said, ‘but it’s out of my hands.’ A business, he had explained, must look sustainable before he could advise the bank to invest. Sean’s didn’t.

  ‘My bosses like to allow no margin for error.’

  ‘Hard men!’ Sean had tried to make a joke of it, but the manager didn’t return his grin.

  Now though … In a way, Sean was just as glad there were drawbacks. They made his luck look less odd – the way silver linings weren’t odd when there were clouds. Well, there were plenty of those! Scads! Poor Father Tim had had a bad time at the end. It was what had given him his stroke. Massive and sudden, this had cut him down from one day to the next! A man who had never been ill! Though wasn’t it queer that he’d had time … queer – the word tripped Sean, but he swept it aside, marvelling instead at the surprise legacy: his big chance. Manna! Come to think of it, wasn’t there a lot more money coming than he’d just mentally disposed of? There was! Yes! Jesus! What would he do with the surplus? And so what if people said it was tainted and that there was a stigma attached! He didn’t care. Or rather, yes, he cared greatly about poor Father Tim, but not … Confusion, spreading, like ink in water, darkened his mind. It could become chronic, he told himself. It could recur like one of those freak pains that are put down to wind or allergy, signals of some hidden trouble that needs to be addressed.

  As if pinpointing this, his suit, unworn in years, was painfully tight. The bus-ride into town had left it wrinkled; the waistband was cutting into his stomach, and his feelings were haywire. Sorrow for his dead – should he call him benefactor? – was snagged in awkwardness. He hadn’t attended the funeral, so wearing the penitential, dark suit today was his tribute.

  He wished now that he had gone to the funeral. Paid his respects. Who had, he wondered? Mr Lynch must surely have, but probably nobody else from around here. It was held in Dublin. Father Cronin had been retired from parish work some time ago and put to teaching in a Dublin school. Just as well, people had murmured later, when rumours began to leak.

  Sean was anxious about publicity. Would there be more, he asked, hoping the question didn’t sound ungrateful, then saw that it did. Hot as metal, a flush burned his cheeks.

  ‘Have some decency!’ he told himself. ‘Keep your gob shut!’ Aloud he attempted to withdraw the query but heard his voice blab out of control, making things worse. ‘I … it’s not the publicity itself, but …’ He had no idea how to ask for the enli
ghtenment he craved.

  ‘Well that’s not my province. However …’ The solicitor glanced out the window, then back at Sean and paused. The will, he said at last, would have to be published in the newspaper. There was no getting around that. It was the law. When Sean asked how the case would be if he said no to the legacy, Mr Lynch noted that a refusal would not make the matter less public.

  ‘It might make it more so!’

  Mr Lynch’s spectacles shone, and when he dipped his head to stare over them, his gaze doubled. ‘Four eyes’, thought Sean idly. A refusal, said the lawyer, would excite comment. Busying himself with papers, he imposed another pause.

  This one had a suppressed hum. It was sly: the sort you got in towns like this, in out-of-season pubs while drinkers stared into the black of their pints and dreamed up slanders. Jokes. Hurtful gossip about – never mind about what! With luck, Lynch was thinking less of slanders than of how to fend them off. That surely must be a lawyer’s job, and he looked just the man to do it. Judging by this office – the glass! The pale wood! The space! – he’d got his hands on some of the money now pouring into the county thanks to the tourist boom and grants to big farmers. Sean had seen none of it. But once he got going with his market garden – an idea of Father Cronin’s – he could sell with profit to those who had. Not all of Cronin’s enthusiasms had been in step with the times, but this one was shrewd. Almost four years ago, while here on a flying visit, he had dropped off a stack of seed catalogues along with samples and advice that had proven spot-on.

  ‘Your farm’s too small for livestock,’ he’d told Sean. ‘That’s why your Dad could never make a go of it. But have you thought of draining the lower field and putting up polythene tunnels? There are markets now for fresh vegetables.’

  How had he known that? He wasn’t even living here any more! He was alert. That was how! Concerned. Interested! A lovely, lively man! And look what thanks he got. Poor Father Tim! He’d put himself out for people – and come a cropper. But he’d been right about the markets. Customers were ready to fork out and pay fancy prices for novelties: lamb’s lettuce and wild rocket. Chicory, artichokes, mangetout and fennel. Endive and radicchio. Baby marrows. Anything out of the ordinary. The plants thrived in the raised beds of rich mud which Sean had reclaimed from the lake, and already he was sending deliveries to three towns. By bus. With a van he’d be able to go further afield. Posh restaurants were springing up like mushrooms.