Under the Rose

by Julia O'Faolain

  Mrs Kelly sighed, soaked cake in her tea and spooned it between her gums. ‘I suppose I’ll lose another tooth with this baby! If I was you, Adie, I’d insure the girl.’ Chewing, her lips, bunched in an interrupted kiss, moved across her face like a fish form on sand. ‘Death is an expense! Like birth!’ She paused to watch a tick eddy and descend into the grave of Adie’s chin. ‘But you have money. You should take out a life insurance on her.’ She put an undunked piece of cake in her mouth and drank tea through it. ‘I’m eating for two,’ she remarked, ‘three maybe! When I was a girl we were warned never to kiss consumptives….’ she considered her teacup, ‘and never to drink from anything they …’

  ‘If that’s what’s worrying you,’ Adie snapped, ‘I keep hers apart! It’d do my business no good,’ she added, ‘to have you blabbing all around the village….’

  Mrs Kelly bridled. ‘Is it me….’

  Adie wasn’t listening. She was remembering former plans for launching into the pastry business. She saw a van gaily painted by the sign-painter carrying AUNT ADIE’S HOMEMADE CAKES AND PASTRIES to the four corners of the county. She and, yes, Gwennie in fur coats eating Melancholy Babies in the Ice Cream Parlour. Though Gwennie’s health…. Insurance? She’d see. The gay van blackened mournfully. Adie picked up her old tabby cat and stroked its snoring head.

  ‘I always slept with me Mammy,’ Gwennie had told her on her first night. And with horror: ‘Oh, don’t make me sleep alone.’

  Adie imagined the anaemic pair cuddled in a cocoon of obstinacy and disease. She shoved the cat off her lap. Sleep with her in a germy bed indeed!

  ‘You’re not serious!’ she had scolded. ‘It’s four years since your Mammy died. You didn’t sleep with anyone in the convent, did you? Well, did you? Can’t you answer me?’

  The girl’s closed air made Adie’s voice sharpen. What was the use of having affection to give if you came up against sullenness? Gwennie looked underhand: a convent Miss. ‘Well,’ Adie chivvied. ‘Well? Did you share a bed with anyone?’

  Gwennie, a nerve of memory jabbed, let out a shrill giggle. ‘The nuns ada creased us! One time,’ she gabbled in a jet of loquacity, ‘Sister Teresa-of-the-Little-Flower caught two girls in the one bed and kicked them the length of the dorm. They could hardly sit down for a week! She wore men’s boots. Mary – she was one of the two girls – said if she ever got a chance when she’d left the place, she’d come back and bust her nose in.’

  Gwennie stopped as suddenly as she had begun. Her expression – practised perhaps to deceive the eyes of nuns – as moon-innocent as before.

  ‘Oh!’ said Adie and then: ‘If you need anything you can call me. I’ll leave my door open.’

  ‘Okeydoke!’

  Later, hearing a window bang in Gwennie’s room, Adie came in and found her bundled like a hedgehog: head and all beneath a bristle of blankets. Uncovering the face, she stared a while in puzzlement and with a nagging though indefinite twinge at the vulnerably prominent eyelids: convex and blue-veined like marbles.

  *

  Adie put Gwennie to work in the tearoom and let her keep half the tips – generously, for she was a disastrous waitress. The nuns had discouraged baths and saved soap for the convent laundry, so now Gwennie plunged black-bordered nails in plates of white pudding and tomatoes that she plonked before customers. With a bang. And a sputter. Then pounded downstairs with the heft of a mare in foal.

  ‘My Lord!’ Mrs Kelly said.

  ‘She’ll grow out of it,’ Adie excused her.

  Waste energy leaped from the girl. ‘Ow!’ she screamed. ‘Whoops! I’ve banged my funnybone! Drat it! Holy Smoke! Whee! Here comes the bride Forty inches wide! I’ll never make it with this tray! Look out all! I’m going to slip! Oy! Ow! Saved it!’ There was an imbalance about her, an air of risk as she zoomed about like an unguided motor boat. Groans and giggles preceded her as regularly as the engine’s throb. But she also made faces at herself in the tearoom mirror; dodged the Goldflake ad printed across its glass, dragging a steel comb through hair which leaped, crackled and came out in handfuls of knots like rutting spiders which she saved to make a bun. She longed to put up her hair, to wear a wide swishing skirt and be grown up. Coiled inside the uncomfortable schoolgirl a woman writhed, about to burst out with the lopsided force of leaves ripping their bud. Half shadowed by the convent still, she alternated:

  I’d like to get you

  On a slow boat to China

  All to myself alo-o-one.

  with:

  Come Holy Ghost send down those beams

  Which sweetly flow in silent streams

  From thy great home abo-o-ove.

  ‘I don’t care who sends it,’ Mrs Kelly observed, ‘a bit of silence would be a relief allright.’

  ‘Think of living with fifty like that!’ Aunt Adie sighed. ‘Those nuns must have been tough babies.’

  ‘Brides of Christ!’ said Kelly acidly. ‘I’d rather have fifty like that any day and no man! Nuns have it easy!’

  ‘Well, no one can say her health hasn’t picked up’, said Adie, ‘since she’s been with me. I brought her back from death’s door!’ She was sorry now that she’d taken out the life insurance. It was only a waste and after the first quarter she let the payments lapse. ‘I’m more than a mother to that girl,’ she told everyone. ‘It’s great to have a bit of youth round the house!’ She bought Gwennie nylons – irregulars – for wearing in the tearoom, a plastic nail-brush and semi-heeled shoes.

  Gwennie crossed her legs like a stocking advertisement.

  ‘Jeez!’ she screamed, ‘if the nuns could see me now!’

  ‘Do you miss the convent?’ Adie asked.

  ‘That dump!’

  ‘Where would you like best to live?’

  ‘Here. Always.’

  Adie melted. ‘Listen,’ she said. ‘We’ll go to town tomorrow to the Royal. They’re showing The Girl He Left Behind Him.’

  Gwennie hugged her. The two enjoyed such outings enormously and were seen to giggle ridiculously on the bus. Gwennie was open-mouthed at the promise of her own uncommitment. She bought The Girl’s Crystal and Maeve’s Own Weekly with her tips and imagined that because nothing had happened to her yet anything might. Airy as a pingpong ball tossed on a jet of spray, she affected Adie with her excitement.

  ‘More than a mother really, I feel like a sister to her,’ Adie said, ‘or a girl friend.’ At one swoop she was fulfilling the roles she had mismanaged until now. The sign-painter was not included on any of these trips which began in complicity as the pair sneaked past Mrs Kelly’s hovel. Adie had dropped her old companion, who was suffering from morning sickness and depressed her with complaints.

  ‘That one would put years on you,’ said she to Gwennie, ‘she’d cry this year for next year.’

  *

  In the autumn, when tourists fell off and there was nothing for Gwennie to do in the tearoom, Adie found her a place as nursemaid with a doctor’s family who lived a mile up the hill. She was to sleep in so as to be on hand in case the children needed her at night and this, as Adie told her, was to her advantage because it meant she would be spending the winter in a heated house and would have the doctor to keep an eye on her in case she had a relapse. Meanwhile better not mention the consumption. What people didn’t know needn’t trouble them. Gwennie was to have Sunday afternoons and two evenings a week off to spend with Adie, and the two kissed lightly when the doctor came to pick her up with her suitcase. She would be round for supper three nights later.

  But she was hardly out the door before Adie began to regret her. It was four months now since the day she had gone to meet her off the bus and she could hardly remember what she had done with herself before the girl’s arrival. The autumn fogs had started and clung like grey stoppers at every window. No customers came. Adie mooched round the house, considered pocketing her pride and calling on the neglected Mrs Kelly, then bit the nose off the sign-painter when he told her she was like a hen that has lost its ch
ick.

  At three on the day Gwennie was due for supper, Adie was making scones; by six she had cooked a big juicy fry and was beginning to watch the hill road. By seven all the water in the kettle had boiled away and she was in a rage. ‘Ha!’ said she as she filled it up again. ‘All the trouble I went to! Fat thanks I get!’ She put it back on the fire and stared at her waiting table. ‘Selfishness of the young!’ She sighed with jealousy.

  Gwennie arrived at seven-thirty. ‘I had to wash me hair,’ she explained.

  ‘Very dainty!’ sneered her aunt. ‘You never used to bother! Whom are you trying to please?’

  ‘It’ll be no time’, said the sign-painter, comfortably filling his mouth with sausage, ‘till she’ll have a young man. She’s getting to be a fine girl. She’ll be walking out in no time.’

  ‘Ha!’ cried his wife. ‘She’d have to be weak in the head to look crooked at a man after what she’s seen around her. Little good husbands did for me or her mother or Mrs Kelly.’

  ‘Maybe not! Aha! But ye all wanted one! And so will she! I see there’s a young fellow working up at your place these nights!’ He winked at Gwennie.

  She told them the doctor was having a second garage built.

  ‘That’s a bricklayer,’ said the sign-painter. ‘Moonlighting! And it’s not all bricklayer’s work he’s doing there either. I was passing the house the other night and seen where he put in a window and door. He could be put out of the union for that. Doing a carpenter’s job. Maybe you should give him the tip to be careful.’ He grinned at his niece. ‘Help you get acquainted.’

  ‘Don’t either of you bother your heads,’ Aunt Adie advised. ‘What good did unions ever do you?’ she asked her husband. ‘We’da been in a nice pass if we’da been depending on you and unions! God help the women that rely on men! Did jez see where Mrs Kelly’s hubby was taken off with a perforated ulcer? Roaring! I suppose she’ll be around here begging louder than ever now. All she gets is the Outdoor Relief. She ran through the dole months ago. It doesn’t do you good to think of the troubles of the world. Give us a song Gwennie.’

  Gwennie sang I love the dear silver that shines in your hair and the rest of the evening passed off amiably.

  Her next evening off, however, she was so late that when she arrived Adie and the sign-painter were sitting down to supper. She came in the door still panting.

  ‘Oho!’ the sign-painter grinned. ‘I was just saying to myself, ’tis out courting with the bricklayer you were! We’re no company for a young girl. His name’, he informed her, ‘is Mat Mullen.’

  A rush of distress swept through Aunt Adie and shook her chin as she gobbled fried apple and sausage. She glanced sideways at the sign-painter with hatred.

  With mild moon eyes and hanging adenoidal jaw, Gwennie explained that she had been to Mrs Kelly’s with some leftover pudding that the doctor’s wife had told her she might take. ‘They had a big party last night and there was lashings of creamy stuff that wouldn’t keep,’ she told Adie. ‘I knew the Kellys would be glad of it. You never saw such misery,’ she went on, ‘the poor kids sitting around on the floor. And it’d make your hands itch to wipe the snot off their noses.’

  ‘How come,’ said Adie, ‘you didn’t think to offer me the pudding?’

  Gwennie gave her a look of surprise. ‘It was only leftovers.’

  ‘Only leftovers! Very uppity we are these days. Was there sherry in the trifle?’

  ‘Honest to God, Adie, you’re making a mountain …’ begged the sign-painter.

  ‘You shut up,’ Adie told him. ‘Well, was there?’ She knew she sounded wrong, and was upset by this and felt that somewhere underneath she wasn’t wrong at all but wronged and must dig to the truth and justify herself with it. ‘Well?’ she harangued.

  ‘I dunno,’ Gwennie sounded sullen.

  ‘But you gave it to those little fairies of starving brats! Sure that will sicken them. They’ll have colic all night and be raising the roof….’ Adie flailed about for the right words, flinging wrong ones from her with contempt. She saw Gwennie and the sign-painter exchange a glance which seared her. To think of them ganging up on her! She would have liked to embrace Gwennie but the girl’s sour puss checked her. It was too late now – or too soon. ‘Giving presents to strangers,’ she resumed painfully. ‘Lady Bountiful no less! And what about your own’, she paused, ‘family? That did so much for you? Brought you back from death’s door when you were good for nothing but a sanatorium? Took you into this house and found you work! Is this your thanks?’ The girl’s sullenness enraged her now. The hangdog look called out for punishment. Gwennie’s glance slid crookedly away from her own. Adie wanted to shake or slap her. Anything to get through to her so that she could take her in her arms again. Coddle, restore and love her. My own baby, she thought and groaned: ‘More fool me!’ She could feel spittle bubbling at the corners of her mouth. Her eyes strained, swollen in their sockets. ‘I’m an ugly old woman and youth is selfish! Well, it’s nothing to me…. Why should I care?’ Gwennie wasn’t listening. ‘Are you listening?’ she hissed.

  The sign-painter walked across the room and closed the door after him. That was as much disapproval as he ever showed.

  ‘Yes, ma’am.’

  At the ‘ma’am’ Aunt Adie’s rage collapsed.

  ‘Sure all I want is your good,’ she wheedled. ‘Sure aren’t you more than a daughter to me? Who else have I? Who else have you? To think that the one time you had a chance to give something, you preferred….’ She was on the right track now. ‘Not that it’s the thing itself I care about but the thought….’ She paused, losing the thread. Gwennie was listening attentively now. ‘Don’t tell me either that that doctor’s wife hasn’t given you other presents that you’re hiding from me. As if I’d ask you for them! Oh, I’m not the fool I may look! That Limerick lace blouse she used to wear to church – didn’t she give you that? Dare you say she didn’t? I haven’t seen it on her this long time. Maybe you’re waiting to give that to Mrs Kelly too? Or to wear it yourself for your … bricklayer?’

  ‘I swear to God,’ Gwennie began, ‘she never….’

  Aunt Adie raised a hand.

  ‘Don’t perjure yourself!’

  *

  The next time Gwennie came she brought the blouse. Adie took it casually. ‘Very nice fit,’ she said, trying it on. ‘It’ll look snappy with my black suit. She used to have gloves to match,’ she remembered. ‘Why don’t you ask her for them? One’s no good without the other.’

  ‘Oh I couldn’t ask her,’ Gwennie began to whimper.

  Adie turned back to the mirror. ‘Sure she doesn’t know what she has. Spoilt rotten that kind of woman is!’

  Pale hair, pale lace confronted her in the glass, cold as spray and remote as an old snap. She knew she was crumbling away Gwennie’s affection. As she ruffled the flounces on her chest the glass buttons danced.

  ‘I’ll wear it to mass,’ she said. ‘In the bus.’

  Gwennie’s hand flew to her nouth. ‘She’ll see you!’

  ‘So what?’ said Aunt Adie. ‘So what? It’s mine, isn’t it?’

  In her blurred vision the lace thickened consistency, became a caul of lard on the sloping shoulder of a leg of lamb.

  ‘So what?’ asked the lump of grey cold meat in the mirror, ‘so what?’

  Gwennie wept.

  *

  Within a week the doctor’s wife found a dozen purloined objects in Gwennie’s suitcase. She questioned the girl curiously. None were of value: a few steel butter knives, some napkins, an embroidered pillowcase.

  ‘What could you possibly want with these, Gwennie?’ she wondered. ‘They’re hardly saleable you know!’

  Gwennie got hysterical and the doctor had to give her a sedative. He agreed with his wife that the girl was a bit unstable and probably unfit to be left in charge of children. When Gwennie and the children wept over this decision they agreed, doubtfully, to give her a second chance.

  ‘Robby and Clare adore her
.’ Gwennie overheard the doctor’s wife say. ‘I suppose that’s what matters. One can’t apply one’s own standards to these people.’

  Gwennie retailed all this to Aunt Adie who only laughed. ‘You don’t need them! What do you care?’ she said. ‘Next year we’ll start the pastry business and then you’ll be your own boss. You won’t call the queen your cousin. We’ll show them!’

  She was not sorry that Gwennie should have fallen out of favour at the big house. With its wood of foreign trees imported by the doctor’s grandfather, it filled her with hatred and suspicion. Its view plummeted into the bay beyond the roofs of the village. Its name was haughtily foreign: Bella Vista. Behind high walls topped with broken glass, it sprawled outlandishly and was kin only to a few neighbouring mansions: Khyber Pass, Miramare, Saint Juan les Pins, where old colonels and retired British civil servants with jaundiced skin chewed the cud of memories as snuffy, no doubt, and as alien as the smell from the eucalyptus leaves which stuck in the gutters and were floated down the hill to the village – a smell which reminded Adie of sick rooms and antiseptic. She cursed herself for ever getting Gwennie the job in that house, cursed it for making the girl independent and for giving her notions. She began to watch sourly on the nights Gwennie was not off and Mat Mullen, the foxy-haired, moonlighting bricklayer, strode up the hill with shouldered hod. He was about twenty-two, with an impudent blue eye and, Gwennie had told her, the mistress sent her out to him with cups of tea and Guinness. Had that one no sense? Or was it deliberate? Adie questioned Gwennie to know did she like him but the girl had grown sly. Ah, she said, he thought too much of himself. How did she know that? Ah, she just did. The secret burst from her:

  ‘He asked me to a dance. In the Town Hall.’

  ‘And you said?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I should just think so! The cheek!’

  ‘Ah,’ regretfully, ‘I hadn’t a decent dress.’

  Adie contained herself. Next day she went to see the doctor and reproached him for not keeping a sufficiently close eye on Gwennie, an innocent girl. Things improved. The garage was finished and Gwennie, more solicitous than before, bought her aunt presents with her wages and accompanied her twice a week to the movies and Ice Cream Parlour. Adie grumbled because it couldn’t be more often but Gwennie said the doctor’s wife was too busy with Red Cross work.