Under the Rose

by Julia O'Faolain

  Liam refused to wear the new clothes. Perhaps he missed the dirt in the old ones? Its anointing heft? Embracing him this morning, Kitty had sensed a flinching inside the resilient old cloth. Tired by their outing, he had regressed since into a combative confusion.

  ‘Kate!’ he’d greeted her at breakfast and had to be reminded that Kate was dead. He’d cried then, though his mouth now was shut against grief. Anger, summoned to see him through the ceremony, boiled over before it began. When the Taoiseach’s stand-in, his chest a compressed rainbow of decorations, came to pay his respects, the mouth risked unclenching to ask, ‘Is that one of the shits we fought in ’22?’

  ‘No,’ soothed Kitty, ‘no, love, he’s from your side.’

  She wasn’t sure of this. Liam, a purist, had lambasted both sides after the Civil War and pilloried all trimming when old friends came to terms with power. Today, mindful perhaps of the Trojan horse, he was in but not of this church and, ignoring its drill, provoked disarray in the congregation as he, the chief mourner, stood attentive to some inner command which forbade him to bow his head, genuflect or in any way acknowledge the ceremony.

  He softened, however, on seeing his own Parish Priest serve the mass. This had not been provided for and the PP had come off his own bat. ‘For Kate,’ Liam whispered to Kitty who, in her foreign ignorance, might fail to appreciate the tribute.

  Suddenly, regretting his rudeness to Kate’s old friend, he plopped to his knees at the wrong moment, hid his face in his hands and threw those taking their cue from him into chaos.

  *

  Afterwards, two Trinity chaplains came to talk to him. No doubt – the thought wavered on the edge of his mind – they expected to be slipped an envelope containing a cheque. But Kitty hadn’t thought to get one ready and he no longer handled money. Its instability worried him. Just recently, he had gone to his old barber for a haircut and, as he was having his shoulders brushed, proffered a shilling. The barber laughed, said his charge was five pounds then, perhaps disarmed by Liam’s amazement, accepted the offer. Liam, foxily, guessed he was getting a bargain – though, to be sure, the man might send round later for his proper payment to Kate? Perhaps the chaplains would too? No! For Kate was … she was … Liam could not confront the poisonous fact and the two young men backed off before the turmoil in his face.

  *

  As Kitty was leaving – she had work waiting in Strasbourg – Liam, enlivened by several goodbye whiskies, told of a rearguard skirmish with the Holy Joes. It had occurred in a nursing home where, though he had registered as an agnostic, a priest tried to browbeat him into taking the sacraments.

  Liam’s riposte had been to drawl: ‘Well, my dear fellow, I can accommodate you if it gives you pleasure!’ This, he claimed, had sent the bully scuttling like a scalded cat.

  *

  He rang her in Strasbourg to say he wished he was with her and Kate. Unsure what this meant, she promised a visit as soon as she was free.

  ‘I’m hitting the bottle.’

  ‘I’ll be over soon.’

  Her husband, when she rang to say she couldn’t come home yet because of Liam, warned, ‘You can’t pay him back, you know. You’d better start resigning yourself. You can’t give him life.’

  *

  Returning to Dublin now was like stepping into childhood. Liam, barricaded like a zoo creature in winter, had holed up in an overheated space which evoked for Kitty the hide-outs she had enjoyed making when she was five. Its fug recalled the smell of stored ground sheets, and its dust-tufts mimicked woolly toys. The housekeeper, counting on Liam’s short-sightedness, had grown slack.

  Interfering was tricky though. Last year, neighbours had told Kitty of seeing Liam fed porridge for dinner while good food went upstairs on a tray to the more alert Kate. The housekeeper was playing them up. Liam, when asked about this, had wept: ‘Poor Kate! Running the house was her pride and now she can’t.’ Rather than complain and shame her, he preferred to eat the penitential porridge.

  ‘Was I a bad husband?’ he asked Kitty who supposed he must be trying to make up for this.

  *

  He had a woman. The fact leaked from him as all facts or fictions – the barrier between them was down – now did. ‘She’s nobody,’ he told Kitty. ‘Just someone to talk to. I have to have that. I don’t even find her attractive, but, well …’ Smiling. Faithless. Grasping at bright straws. Weaving them, hopefully, into corn dollies.

  ‘She’ – once or twice he said ‘you’ – ‘takes me on drives which end up in churches.’

  ‘Ah? The Trojan mare?’

  ‘Last week we lit a candle for Kate. They were saying mass.’

  ‘It’s your soul she’s after then, not your body?’

  ‘Cruel!’ His memento-mori face tried for jauntiness. ‘Well, you can’t have me to live, can you, with your fly-by-night profession! Triple-tongued fly-by-night!’ he teased. ‘There’s no relying on you! Where are you off to next?’

  ‘Strasbourg for the meeting of the European Parliament.’

  ‘See!’

  *

  He was terrified of death. ‘I want’, he confided, ‘to live and live.’ Terrified too of relinquishing his self-esteem by ‘crawling’ to a God in whom he didn’t believe. ‘Why do people believe?’ he wondered. Then: ‘Ah, I know you’ll say from fear: phobophobia. They want immortality.’ And his face twisted because he wanted it too.

  *

  On her next visits, he was a man dancing with an imaginary partner. A sly mime indicated the high-backed, winged armchair in which, he claimed, her mother sat in judgement on him. ‘Don’t you start,’ he warned. ‘I hear it all from her!’

  This, if a joke, was out of control.

  ‘Psst!’ he whispered. ‘She’s showing disapproval.’

  Courting it, he drank but wouldn’t eat, threw out his pills, felt up a woman visitor, fired his housekeeper who was cramping his style and behaved as though he hoped to rouse his wife to show herself. Like believers defying their God! Or old lags wooing a gaol-sentence to get them through a cold snap. Spilled wine drew maps on Kate’s Wilton carpet and, more than once, the gas had to be turned off by neighbours whose advice he ignored. After midnight, their letters warned Kitty, he stuffed great wads of cash into his pockets and set forth on stumbling walks through slick streets infested with muggers.

  ‘Things have changed here’, cautioned the letters ‘from when you were a girl! Even the churchyards are full of junkies shooting it up!’

  Liam too seemed to be seeking some siren thrill as he breasted the darkness, his pockets enticingly bulging with four-and-five-hundred-pound bait.

  Splotched and spidery letters from him described a shrunken – then, unexpectedly, an expanding world.

  Two angels – or were they demons? – were struggling over him. An old friend and neighbour, Emir, engaged in what he snootily dismissed as ‘good works’, hoped to enlist his support. ‘Therapeutic?’ wondered one letter touchily. ‘For my own good?’ But Emir’s causes were the very ones he had himself promoted for years. And who was the other demon/angel? The one who had taken him into churches was, it seemed, a nurse. Used to older men, she maybe liked him for himself ‘though I suppose she’s too young for me’. Clearly he hoped not and that it was not his soul which concerned her. She was persuading him to return to the bosom of Mother Church. Any bosom, clearly, had its appeal but Emir, though more congenial, was not offering hers.

  The nurse – Kitty imagined her as starched, busty and hung with the sort of fetishes to which gentlemen of Liam’s vintage were susceptible – came regularly to tea. The letter stopped there. Liam had forgotten to finish it or perhaps been overcome by the impropriety of his hopes.

  *

  More urgent letters came from neighbours. Even in Kate’s day, they revealed, Liam’s mind had been wobbly. Kate had covered up but something should now be done. There had been ‘incidents’. Near-scandals. No new housekeeper could be expected to cope.

  Kitty d
reamed she was watching a washing machine in which a foetally-folded Liam, compact as a snail, was hurtled around. She could see him through the glass window but, in her dream, could not open this. White sprays of suds or saliva foamed over his head. Did ‘do something’ mean have him locked up? Put in a nursing or rest ‘home’? He would not go willingly. While she wondered about this, there came a call to say he had caught pneumonia, been admitted to hospital and might not live.

  She was in California where it was 2 a.m. and the telephone bell, pulsing through alien warmth, jerked her from sleep. Outside, spotlights focused on orchids whose opulence might or might not be real, and night-scented blooms evoked funerals.

  However, when next she saw him, Liam, though still in hospital, was out of immediate danger.

  ‘The Corbies are conspiring,’ he greeted her. ‘Caw caw!’ His eyes were half-closed and a brown mole, which had been repeatedly removed, had overgrown one lid. After a while, he tried to sing an old school-yard rhyme: ‘Cowardy, cowardy custard, Stick your head in the mustard!’

  Mustard-keen priests had, it seemed, persuaded him to be reconciled and take the sacraments. Or was it the nurse? Emir, dropping in for a visit, said that the fact had been reported in an evening paper.

  ‘A feather in their caps!’ She shrugged. ‘Sure what does it matter now?’

  It did to Liam who whimpered that he had perhaps betrayed … he couldn’t say who. ‘Am I – was I a shit?’ His mind meandered in a frightened past. ‘Cowardy Custard,’ he croaked guiltily.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Emir rallied him. ‘It’s all right, love.’ She spoke as if to a child.

  Kitty couldn’t. Unable to discount or count on him, she went, fleetingly, half-blind. Colours and contours melted as if she were adapting to a reversible reality in which, later this evening on reaching his house, she might find his old spry self smiling at the door.

  *

  It smelled of him. It was a cage within which his memory paced and strove. Trajectories of flung objects – a wall smeared with coffee, a trail of dried food – were his spoor.

  *

  ‘He wants to die,’ Emir whispered next day. ‘He told me so.’

  The two were sitting with a somnolent Liam who had been placed in an invalid chair. Lifting his overgrown eyelid, he scratched it weakly and asked Kitty, ‘Why are you blaming me? Your face is all blame. A Gorgon’s!’

  ‘No, love,’ soothed Emir. ‘She’s worried for you. It’s Kitty. Don’t you know her?’

  ‘Why can’t you give me something?’ he asked. ‘Wouldn’t it be better for me to die now – and for you too?’

  You never knew what he meant.

  ‘Kiss him,’ Emir whispered. ‘Say something.’

  But to Kitty this wasn’t Liam and she felt her face freeze. She was unresponsive and stone-stiff: a Gorgon which has seen itself.

  ‘I’ll leave you together.’ Emir tiptoed out.

  Liam opened an eye. ‘You’ll die too,’ he told Kitty with malice. ‘You’ll succumb.’

  ‘We all will, darling,’ she tried to soothe.

  ‘You’re punishing me.’ His face contracted venomously. ‘The survival instinct is a torment. Why did you inflict it on us?’

  She marvelled. For whom did he take her now?

  He mumbled and his bald skull fell forward as though his neck could not support it. Confronting her, it was flecked with age-spots like the rot on yellow apples.

  Earlier, two nurses, lifting him to the chair, had held him by the armpits and, for moments, his whole self had hung like a bag on a wire. Vulnerable. Pitiable. Limp. She couldn’t bear it. Slipping an arm around his neck, she felt for the pillow. Her fingers closed on it. Would he let her help him, now they were alone? Let her snuff out that remnant of breath which tormented but hardly animated him? No. He was a struggler. Even against his interests, resistance would be fierce. Yet the old Liam would have wanted to be freed from this cruel cartoon of himself. He surely would have. Was what was left of him content to be the cartoon?

  But now, touched off perhaps by her closeness, energy began seeping perceptibly through him. The bowed head jerked up showing a face suffused with relish. His chapped mouth, lizard grey on the outside, was strangely red within. As if slit with a knife, it was the colour of leeches and looked ready to bleed. ‘Ah,’ murmured the mouth, ‘it’s you. You, you, you! I feel your magic. Give me your hand.’ And greedily, it began to rush along her arm, covering it with a ripple of nipping kisses. Like its colours, its touch was alternately lizardy and leechlike. ‘I betray everyone,’ said the mouth, interrupting its rush. ‘I want us both to betray them. I want to run away with you, you – who …’ Abruptly, perhaps because of Kitty’s lack of response, doubt began to seize him. Again, he managed to jerk his head upwards, his eyes narrowed and his face hardened. ‘Who are you?’ he challenged. You’ve sneaked in here. You’re not who I – who’s betraying who?’

  ‘Liam, nobody’s betraying. Everything’s all right. I promise.’

  ‘No, no! We’re sunk in treachery. Treachechechechery! Who are you? Who? Who? Are you Kate?’

  ‘Yes,’ she told him, ‘yes. But it’s all right, Liam.’ Her arm was still around his neck. Her breath mingled with his.

  ‘So what about the other one then? You can’t be in agreement. Where’s she gone?’ Twitching. Eyes boiling. Mouth twisting. ‘Life’, he told her, ‘is a mess. It’s a messmessmess! Where’s she gone?’

  ‘I’m her too.’ Kitty held the pillow experimentally with two hands. She needed three, one to hold his head. ‘I’m here,’ she told him. ‘And I’m Kitty as well. We all love you Liam. Nobody disapproves. Nobody.’

  ‘A treachechecherous mess! Telling on me, all of you! Going behind my back! Trinities of women …’

  She soothed him and he asked: ‘Are you God?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said helplessly. ‘I’m God.’

  ‘You made a fine mess,’ he told her. ‘Life’s a …’

  ‘Don’t worry about it now.’

  ‘How can I not worry? You should know! What can we do but worry? Are we getting an afterlife, yes or no? Not that I believe in you. Are you a woman then?’

  ‘I’m whatever you want.’

  ‘Another bloody metaphor! Is that it? Like cricket! Like fair play!’ The leech-lips protruded, red with derision, in the grey, lizardy expanse. ‘Not that fair play and you have much in common!’

  Kitty took her hands from the pillow. ‘You always knew that,’ she told Liam. ‘Which was why you went your own way!’

  ‘I did, didn’t I?’ He was awash with pride. ‘Bugger you, I said. Man made you, not the other way round. That’s why you never promised fair play. Not you! “The last shall be first” was your motto. Treacherous. Like me. Buried in treachechech … Egh!’

  His hands plucked at his dressing gown and his throat seemed to close. Was he dying?

  ‘Liam!’ She rang for the nurse. ‘Liam, love, try some water. Here. Open your mouth, can you? Swallow. Please. Listen. You’re not treacherous. You were never treacherous. You just loved too many people. And we all love you back. We love you, Liam. There, you’re better now. That’s better, isn’t it? Let me give you a kiss.’

  And she put her lips to the protuberant, raw, frightened mouth which was pursed and reaching for them with the naive, greedy optimism of a child.

  Tomorrow she’d try with the pillow. Or a plastic bag? Would Emir help, she wondered. Might it be dangerous to ask her?

  The Knight

  ‘A drop for the inner man.’

  ‘For the Road.’

  Condon budged a heel and his spur tinkled. He knocked an elbow against the wooden partition. The snug must have been all of five feet by two. Drinks were served through a hatch. It would not have done to be seen drinking in full regalia in the public bar.

  ‘Like sitting in your coffin,’ Condon said gloomily.

  ‘Or in a confessional.’

  It was embarrassing, Condon felt. Here was Hennessy who ha
d driven four miles to fetch him to the Meeting so that Elsie might have the car for her own use all week-end. The least she might have done was ask the man in for a drink – ‘A wee wisheen,’ thought Condon with Celtic graciousness – and a chat. She could have made that effort. God knew. In common courtesy. Hennessy had got him into the Knights. But no: she’d had to pick tonight to have one of her tantrums. He’d been afraid to let Hennessy as much as see her! Bitch! Angrily, he blew down his nose.

  He was a choleric man with a face of a bright meaty red, rubbery as a pomegranate rind, a face which looked healthy enough on the bicycling priests who abounded in his family but on him wore a congested gleam. It had a fissile look and may have felt that way too, judging by Condon’s habit of keeping himself hemmed in. He had certainly bound himself by a remarkable number of controls: starched collar, irksome marriage, rules of all the secular sodalities open to him – most recently the Knights – even, for a while, the British army which must have been purgatory. He had been in it for – in his own words – ‘a sorrowful decade’ and, on being demobbed, married an Englishwoman in whom he detected and trounced beliefs and snobberies beneath which he had groaned during his years of service. He was currently a Franciscan tertiary, a member of two parish sodalities, of the – secretive – Opus Dei and of a blatant association of Catholic laymen recently founded in Zurich with the aim of countering creeping radicalism within the Church. Each group imposed duties on members: buttressings so welcomed by Condon that one might have supposed him intent on containing some centrifugal passion liable to blow him up like a bomb if he failed to keep it hedged. Other members looked on his zeal with a dose of suspicion. He was aware of this and made efforts at levity. He made one now.