Under the Rose

by Julia O'Faolain

  ‘I’ll give it to you at the pond, this afternoon,’ she promised worryingly.

  Teresa didn’t dare argue.

  *

  Colonel Williams did things in style. Two small boys with brooms were keeping the ice clear of slush, and Mike Lacy had been set to mind the barbecue. Carefully pricked wartime sausages, made mostly of bread-crumbs and lard, squirted sizzles of grease into the charcoal. Anglo-Irish ladies sailed by on skates bought on foreign holidays before the war. This, noted Mrs Dunne, had been one of the villages of the Pale. Even the Lacies were of English stock, having come over, generations back, to serve in a mansion which had now disappeared. Colonel Williams lived in its dower house, which would no doubt be torn down one day too. His sort and their habitats were doomed.

  ‘The big-house people had their good side.’ Mrs Dunne surveyed the pretty scene. ‘Liked to make a show. “Showing the flag,” they called it. But at home’ – she lowered her voice – ‘they’d live on the smell of a sausage. We had a maid who’d worked for them, and she was as thin as a lath. They starved her and themselves. Half an egg they’d give her for Sunday breakfast! Imagine.’

  She spoke briskly while fastening her borrowed skates. Greta, Mrs Dunne was relieved to see, hadn’t come. Neither had Bunty Malahide, for whom Teresa was anxiously looking out, refusing to be distracted until Colonel Williams begged her to help with the sausages. There was hot wine as well, which was to be kept from the younger fry. Teresa surreptitiously drank the better part of a glass before deciding she didn’t like it.

  Her mother skated towards her, showing signs of agitation. ‘Greta’s just come and gone,’ she whispered. ‘The Colonel cut her dead. I tried to talk to her, but she rushed off in a state. There was something bad, too – for Germany – on the one-o’clock news. Somebody should be with her. Help me off with my skates. No. Better go ask Father Creedon to look after her. I saw him coming up the field. Quick! Take the toboggan and head him off. Ask him to hold the fort until I come.’

  So off whizzed Teresa to intercept the priest and, having sent him on his errand of mercy, trudged back up the slope to the barbecue, where the Colonel was discussing the incident with Bunty Malahide. What could one do, he shrugged, but set an example? War was war, and it was a damn shame the Irish hadn’t joined this one. They were natural fighters. A crying shame! Still, better not spoil today’s merriment. He lowered his voice, and Teresa heard no more. He was a straight-backed man who, when walking around his property, carried a long, swooping, metal-tipped tool for rooting up weeds. You had, he told Bunty, to take a stand. Stick to your guns! What? Bunty kept nodding her head.

  ‘Yes,’ she sighed. ‘Yes.’

  Teresa, who was keeping an eye on her, saw with surprise that Bunty’s sardonic look was gone. She and the Colonel stood in a small bubble of intimacy. Of course, they were two of a kind and maybe lonely. Maybe they found us as alien as we did them? The thought was unwelcome. She had to admit, though, that Bunty looked pinker and younger than usual. Her eyes sparkled, and Teresa remembered people saying that Bunty would have been a beauty, but for her lip. For a moment she even had a look of Mother Fidelia.

  Behind Bunty, Mrs Dunne now moved into Teresa’s field of vision as she cut across the field, slipping in the soft snow. She was trying to catch up with Father Creedon and Greta, who had taken the path.

  ‘Can’t run with the hare and hunt with the hounds!’ said Colonel Williams who was obviously upset.

  ‘Just look at that!’ Bunty waved towards the dip in the field where Father Creedon was trying to hold up the stumbling Greta. His black suit glowed against the snow and, as they watched, she lurched and he caught her in his arms.

  Bunty shaded her eyes with her hand. ‘He’s getting a feel in! Well, good for Greta. Better her than the nuns! She’d like a bun in her oven! A gift from Holy Ireland to take home to Germany when the war ends! That reminds me, I’ve got your poem here,’ she called to Teresa. ‘I’ve added another bit. Do you want to hear?’

  ‘No!’

  ‘It’s quite racy! Listen …’

  But she got no further, for Teresa – or was it Mike Lacy, who had been at the wine? – now shook the barbecue, so that the sausages fell onto the coals and the sudden fatty blaze had to be dealt with by the Colonel. When things were restored, Teresa dusted off the salvageable sausages and threaded them on a spit while Mike laid out a ring of fresh ones.

  The way he was standing, they looked like penises sprouting at belly level from his old black suit. Or the spokes of a monstrance. ‘Exposition,’ thought Teresa, and was shocked at the effect Bunty Malahide had on her thoughts. Might this be irreversable? A lasting contamination? And could it have leaked from her mind to Mother Fidelia’s? Removing a split sausage from her spit, she saw that a piece of smouldering coal had got stuck inside it. Giddily, she became aware of Bunty’s voice rabbiting on in her head and, mingling with it, like wireless interference, a line from a prayer: ‘Cleanse my lips, O Lord, with a live coal.’

  ‘Here. Have a sausage.’ She pinched the fatty meat tight over the coal, handed it to Bunty, and watched with a thrill of horror as the harelip closed jauntily on the burning mouthful.

  Under the Rose

  Dan said – to be sure, there was only his word for this; but who would invent such a thing? – that, in their teens, his brother and he had ravaged their sister on the parsonage kitchen table. Their father was a parson, and when the rape took place the household was at Evensong. Dan described a fume of dust motes sliced by thin, surgical light, a gleam of pinkish copper pans and, under his nose, the pith of the deal table. Outside the door, his sister’s dog had howled. But the truth was, said Dan, that she herself did not resist much. She’d been fifteen, and the unapologetic Dan was now twenty. It had, he claimed, been a liberation for all three.

  ‘The Bible’s full of it,’ he’d wind up. ‘Incest!’

  The story was for married women only. Dan specialized in unhappy wives. Mal mariées. He sang a song about them in French, easing open the tight, alien vowels and letting the slur of his voice widen their scope: ma-uhl mah-urrr-ee-yeh. It was a Limerick voice, and those who resisted its charm said that the further Dan Lydon got from Limerick the broader his accent grew. The resistant tended to be men; women always liked Dan. To hear him lilt, ‘My lo-hove is lo-ike a r-red, r-red r-ro-ose’ was, as respected matrons would tell you, like listening to grand opera. His vibrancy fired them. It kindled and dazzled like those beams you saw in paintings of the Holy Ghost, and his breath had a pulse to it, even when all he was ordering was the same again, please, and a packet of fags. Words, moving in his mouth like oysters, put town-dwellers in mind of rural forebears and of the damp, reticent lure of the countryside.

  The parsonage of Dan’s youth lay in grasslands watered by the River Shannon, flat country shadowed by those cloud formations known as mackerel backs and mares’ tails – arrangements as chameleon as himself. He was a bright-haired, smiling boy, who first reached Dublin in 1943, a time when the Japanese minister rode with a local hunt and the German one did not always get the cold shoulder. Dan’s allegiance was to the noble Soviets, but he was alive too to sexual raciness blown in like pollen from the war-zones. Change fizzed; neutrality opened fields of choice, and values had rarely been shiftier.

  ‘So where is your sister now?’

  Mrs Connors did and did not believe his story. ‘Tea?’ she offered. Tea was his hour. Husbands tended to be at work. Mr Connors was a civil servant.

  Dan took his tea. ‘She had to be married off,’ he admitted. ‘She has a sweet little boy.’

  Mrs Connors dared: ‘Yours?’

  ‘Or my brother’s? I’d like there to be one I knew was mine.’ His eyes held hers. Putting down the cup, he turned her wrist over, slid back the sleeve, and traced the artery with a finger. ‘The blue-veined child!’ he murmured. ‘Don’t you think children conceived in passion are special? Fruits of wilfulness! Surely they become poets? Or Napoleons?’

&
nbsp; Phyllis Connors was sure Napoleon’s family had been legitimate. On her honeymoon, before the war, she had visited Corsica. ‘Their mother was addressed as Madame Mère.’

  ‘Was that the model Connors held up to you? “Madame Mère”!’ Dan teased. ‘On your honeymoon! What a clever cuss!’

  The teasing could seem brotherly; but Dan’s brotherliness was alarming. Indeed, Phyllis’s offer to be a sister to him had touched off the nonsense – what else could it be? – about incest.

  Nonsense or not, it unsettled her.

  He was predatory. A known idler. Wolfed her sandwiches as though he had had no lunch – and maybe he hadn’t? The parson had washed his hands of him. But Dan had a new spiritual father in a poet who had stopped the university kicking him out. Dan’s enthusiasm for poetry – he was, he said, writing it full-time – so captivated the poet that he had persuaded the provost to waive mundane requirements and ensure that the boy’s scholarship (paid by a fund for sons of needy parsons) be renewed. Surely, urged Dan’s advocate, the alma mater of Burke and Sam Beckett could be flexible with men of stellar promise? Talents did not mature at the speed of seed-potatoes, and Ireland’s best known export was fractious writers. Let’s try to keep this one at home.

  The poet, who ran a magazine, needed someone to do the legwork and, when need be, plug gaps with pieces entitled Where the Red Flag Flies, A Future for Cottage Industries? or Folk Memories of West Clare. Dan could knock these off at speed and the connection gave him prestige with the undergraduates at whose verse-readings he starred.

  It was at one of these that Phyllis Connors had first heard him recite. The verse had not been his. That, he explained, must stay sub rosa. Did she know that Jack Yeats, the painter, kept a rose on his easel when painting his mad, marvellous pictures of horse-dealers, fiddlers and fairs? Art in progress was safest under the rose.

  After tea, Dan talked of procreation and of how men in tropical lands like Ecuador thought sex incomplete without it. That was the earth’s wisdom speaking through them. RCs – look at their Madonnas – had the same instincts. Dan, the parson’s son, defended the Pope whose church had inherited the carnal wit of the ancients. ‘The sower went out to sow his seed….’

  Talk like this unnerved Phyllis, who was childless and unsure what was being offered. What farmer, asked Dan, would scatter with an empty hand? ‘Your women are your fields,’ he quoted, from the Koran. ‘Go freely into your fields!’ Then he extolled the beauty of pregnant women – bloomy as June meadows – and recited a poem about changelings: ‘Come away, O human child …’

  Phyllis, thinking him a child himself, might have surrendered to the giddiest request. But Dan made none. Instead he went home to his lodgings, leaving her to gorge her needs on the last of the sandwiches.

  He came back, though, for her house was near the poet’s, and after drudging with galleys would drop by to cup hands, sculpt air, praise her hips, and eat healthy amounts of whatever was for tea. Refreshed, he liked to intone poems about forest gods and fairyfolk. ‘And if any gaze on our rushing band’, he chanted, ‘We come between him and the deed of his hand, We come between him and the hope of his heart.’

  Why did he not come after what he implied was the hope of his own heart? Wondering made her think of him more than she might otherwise have done, and so did seeing him in The Singing Kettle, eating doughnuts with the poet’s wife. Peering through trickles in a steamy window, she thought she saw the word ‘love’ on his lips. Or was it ‘dove’? His motto, ‘Let the doves settle!’ meant ‘Take things as they come.’

  Phyllis decided that some doves needed to be snared.

  *

  Soon she was pregnant, and when she went into the Hatch Street Nursing Home to give birth, Dan brought her a reproduction of Piero della Francesca’s Madonna del Parto, with the pale slash where the Virgin, easing her gown off her round belly, shows underlinen more intimate than skin. His finger on Phyllis’s stomach sketched an identical white curve. He teased the nurses, relished the fertility all about, and was happy as a mouse in cheese.

  It turned out that the poet’s wife was here, too, and for the same reason. Her room was on another floor, so Dan yoyoed up and down. Sometimes he brought gifts which had to be divided: fruit, for instance, from the poet, who still used Dan to run errands. Or books, review copies from the magazine. When a nurse let drop that the poet’s wife had the same Piero Madonna on her side table, Phyllis wrapped hers in a nappy and put it in the trash. If there had been a fireplace, she would have burned it, as she had been trained to do with unwanted religious objects.

  Her baby received her husband’s first name, and the poet’s baby the poet’s. Dan – though neither couple asked him to be godfather – presented both infants with christening mugs. One had been his and the other his brother’s, and both were made of antique Dublin silver. Early Georgian. The official godfathers, fearing odious comparisons, returned their purchases to Weirs Jewellers and bought cutlery. Phyllis wondered if Dan’s brother knew what had happened to his mug. Though the war was now over, he was still overseas with the British Army.

  ‘He’ll not be back,’ Dan assured her, and revealed that the parsonage had been a dour and penurious place. Its congregation had dwindled since the RC natives took over the country in ’21, and attendance some Sundays amounted to less than six. Pride had throttled Dan’s widowed father, who did menial work behind the scenes and made his children collect firewood, polish silver, and dine on boiled offal.

  ‘He wouldn’t want the mug,’ said Dan. ‘Too many bad memories!’ The brothers had left as soon as they could, and getting their sister pregnant had been a parting gift. ‘If we hadn’t, she’d still be Daddy’s slave.’

  *

  Some years went by, and Dan was a student still, of a type known to Dubliners as ‘chronic’, one of a ragged brigade who, recoiling from a jobless job market, harked back to the tribally condoned wandering scholars of long ago. This connection was often all that raised the chronics above tramps or paupers, and the lifeline was frail.

  But out of the blue, opportunity came Dan’s way. The poet, who had to go into hospital, asked him to bring out an issue of the magazine bearing on its masthead the words ‘Guest Editor: Daniel Lydon’. Here was challenge! Dan toyed excitedly with the notion of publishing his secret poetry, which he yearned, yet feared, to display. These urges warred in him until, having read and reread it, he saw that it had gone dead, leaking virtue like batteries kept too long in a drawer. Stewing over this, he fell behind with the magazine and had to ghostwrite several pieces to pad the thing out. As part of this process, he decided to publish photographs of A Changing Ireland. Hydrofoils, reapers-and-binders, ballpoint pens and other such innovations were shown next to Neolithic barrows. The Knights of Columbanus in full fig appeared cheek by jowl with an electric band. Portraits of ‘the last Gaelic storyteller’ and some ‘future Irishmen’ rounded out the theme. The future Irishmen, three small boys with their heads arranged like the leaves of a shamrock, were recognizably his nephew and the recipients of his christening mugs – and what leaped to the eye was their resemblance to himself. The caption ‘Changelings’ drove the scandal home.

  The poet, convalescing in his hospital bed after an operation for a gentleman’s complaint, told his wife, in an insufficiently discreet hiss, that he had paid Dan to do his leg work, not to get his leg over. Reference was made to ‘cuckoo’s eggs’, and it was not long before echoes of this reached the ear of Mr Connors, the proverbial quiet man whom it is dangerous to arouse. Connors, who had done a bit of hacking in his bachelor days, had a riding crop. Taking this to the student lodgings where Dan lived, he used it to tap smartly on his door.

  When Dan opened this, Connors raised the crop. Dan yelled, and his neighbour, a fellow-Communist, who was on the Varsity boxing team, came hurtling to the rescue. Assuming the row to be political and Connors a member of the Blue Shirts only reinforced his zeal. Shoving ensued; Connors fell downstairs; gawkers gathered, and the
upshot was that an ambulance was called and the opinion bandied that the victim had broken his back. Some genuine Blue Shirts were meanwhile rustled up. Men whose finest hours had been spent fighting for Franco, singing hymns to Cristo Re and beating the sin out of Reds, they were spoiling for a scrap, and if it had not been for Dan’s friend spiriting him out the back they might have sent him to join Mr Connors – who, as it would turn out, had not been injured, after all, and was fit as a fiddle in a couple of weeks. Dan, however, had by then prudently boarded the ferry to Holyhead, taking with him, like a subsidiary passport, the issue of the magazine bearing his name as ‘guest editor’. It got him work with the BBC, which, in those days of live programming, needed men with a gift of the gab and was friendly to Celts. Louis MacNeice and Dylan Thomas were role-models, liquid stimulants in high favour, and Dan was recruited straight off the boat.

  *

  So ran reports reaching Dublin. Pithy myths, these acquired an envious tinge as Dan’s success was magnified, along with the sums he was earning for doing what he had formerly done for free: talking, singing and gargling verse. Others too were soon dreaming of jobs in a London whose airwaves vapoured with gold. Hadn’t Dubliners a known talent for transubstantiating eloquence into currency? And couldn’t every one of us talk at least as well as Dan Lydon?

  Declan Connors doubted it. Despite himself, he’d caught snatches of what nobody had the indecency to quote quite to his face: a saga featuring Dan as dispenser of sweet anointings to women. These, Connors understood, had needed preparation. Persuasion had been required, and Dan’s boldness at it had grown legendary, as an athlete’s prowess does with fans. The gossips relished Dan’s gall, the airy way he could woo without promise or commitment – arguing, say, that in a war’s wake more kids were needed and that his companion’s quickened pulse was nature urging her to increase the supply. Nature! What a let-out! Any man who could sell a line like that in Holy Ireland could sell heaters in hell.