Under the Rose (13 page)

It turned out that, when he was small, his Irish nanny, shocked by his parents’ morals, had consoled him with tales of pure colleens. ‘When you’re big we’ll find you one’, she’d promised.

Nanny Brady had had a ‘boy’ back in Ireland who was waiting for her to put together a dowry and come home and marry him.

‘He waited years. And both, she somehow made clear to me, were keeping themselves pure. Why would I think this odder than the rest of what went on in our canyon off Sunset Boulevard?’

‘When you were six?’

‘Earlier. I was ejected at six. Sent to my grandparents in Paris. Cast out.’

‘From Eden?’

‘A celluloid Eden.’

It was a sad little tale. Paul’s father whose movies charmed millions also charmed his son who, at four and five, lived for the few, short minutes each morning when he was allowed in with the breakfast trolley to snuggle up to a dazzling Dad who would then disappear for the rest of the day. Naturally, this radiant absence ignited the child’s fancy more than the humdrum presence of his mother and Nanny Brady.

One day, when both were out, he made for his father’s room where he hid in the closet. There, amid vacant suits, tie-racks and leathery smells, his father seemed already half present and Paul waited happily to surprise him. The wait was a long one. Paul drowsed off and some time later was awoken in pitch darkness by frightening noises. Failing to find the closet light, he stumbled out and into the bedroom where he beheld his naked father doing something dreadful to a groaning lady. Paul got hysterics. Secretaries rushed in. Scandal sheets got wind of the thing and his parents’
marriage came to an acrimonious end.

‘And they blamed you?’

‘My mother did. I don’t know whether he cared. I never saw him again.’

His father had other wives, but no more sons, so Paul remained his heir. Maybe then, suggested Rose, he should be reconciled with his memory?

‘Ah,
ma chérie
!’ Squeezing her arm. ‘You have a good heart. Good! Generous! Just like Nanny Brady!’

This nanny, despite an alarmed disapproval of films – ‘trash’ – once took him to see one. It featured Irish peasants whose strengths were the opposite of those animating his father’s jaunty movies and equally jaunty life. At this time nanny herself hadn’t seen Ireland for years. As the man and woman on screen struggled over barnacled rocks to get seaweed to fertilize their little fields, her tears began to flow and, to hide them, she took Paul in her arms. He had never felt so needed. The feeling quickened his understanding and there and then, he told Rose, he became a man.

‘Don’t cry, nanny,’ he whispered while she sniffled in shame: ‘I’m not really, Paul. It’s just … Oh, I’m sorry; pay me no mind!’ Then she hugged him until he too began to cry, while the pair on screen laboured to fill their creels, and sea spray spun rainbows which could have come from his and nanny’s tears.

‘She was seeing the life she had exchanged’, Paul explained, ‘for a life among our fake Louis XV furniture. Louis XV was all the rage just then because of one of my father’s studio’s successes: a smash hit whizzing with sword-play. Thinking back,’ he said, ‘I see that she must have been quite young – younger than you are now,
chérie
. I lost track of her when
he
gave us both our walking papers.’ Paul’s morose smile conferred a connection with all this on Rose. A bond and obligation.

His was a name one could see in lights just about anywhere. Like Fox, Pathé, Rank, Warner, Gaumont,
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer or Disney, its syllables pulsed glamour: bright dustings which the silver screen had been trickling into a drab world for the better part of a century. Once, high in the Andes, Rose saw the name glint in an Indian mud village.

‘I’ll bet your nanny had just decided
not
to go back to her boy in Ireland after all. That’s why she was crying.’

For Paul, this, if true, was one more reason to blame his father’s industry’s false values. Its pampering dreams.

‘
Man of Aran
was the film!’ Rose realized. ‘Was that the bit of Ireland you saw? Aran? No wonder she didn’t want to go home.’

‘Paul’, Yves liked to explain, ‘can’t forgive himself for accepting his Dad’s dosh –
le pognon de papa.
It explains everything about him. His politics. The lot!’

He would then point out how, like Zeus descending, the father had created a seminal scatter. And how the son, as though dreams were dynamite, had laboured to disable them. Just as the Nobel family had funded their Peace Prize with money from explosives, so Paul put his into a magazine dedicated to defusing the soft illusions of our time.

A fanatic! Just look, Yves invited, at Paul’s face furled in the ruff of his coat collar! See those white lashes and black-bullet eyes! Black and white as a bag of gobstoppers! ‘He wears pin-stripe suits as though wrapping himself in writing paper. Or news sheets! Why? Because his Dad was a king of the silent cinema! Paul went back to the medium which his old man’s medium displaced! Symbolic parricide!’

Yves should know. Paul, a father-figure to the men who had worked on his magazine, still hoped to revive it. Coming out of gaol with his ideas of eight years ago intact, he could not accept that the political scene had changed as much as Yves said it had. The magazine, Yves had had to insist,
even if
Paul
could fund it, had no place in the new order. Its staff had dispersed. ‘And,’ Yves broke it to him, ‘we’ve all taken new jobs.’ Symbolic parricide!

‘Remember the riddle,’ asked Yves cruelly, ‘that asks “what’s black and white and red all over”? Answer: “our old mag”. Who’s going to read it today?’ Sometimes, Yves could overstate his case. Uncomfortably. Like a man with a bad conscience.

Paul, fighting back by fax and phone call, would not take no for an answer. He was this way with women too, as Rose knew, for she was one of several whom he courted doggedly. For years he had been urging her to leave Yves for him who was a worthier man. She must, he was confident, see this if she would weigh the facts.

‘Do you’, she had marvelled once, ‘think women are weathercocks?’

‘No, no, my dear. I admire women. And your loyalty does you credit. But Yves is not the right man for you, whereas I …’ And he proceeded, without shame or pride, to lay out his arguments: his superior understanding of her, his age – Yves was ‘a mere boy’– equable temperament, income – until he lost it – idealism and knowledge of the world … ‘I’m speaking’, he said, ‘for your sake.’ He was perfectly coherent, believing as he did in the revolt of reason, the end of cant and the coming of a Golden Age.

Amused, she had once copied out the old quote about the heart having reasons which reason cannot comprehend and sent it to him: a mistake, for he took it to mean that her reasons were weak.

‘I’ll make a bargain with you,’ she’d offered then. ‘I’ll help you find the sweet colleen that your nanny promised.’

She tried, though Yves made fun of her efforts to procure a Mademoiselle O’Morphy for Paul – who seemed oddly ready to play Louis XV. So perhaps his Dad’s taste for bandy-legged furniture had affected him after all? And perhaps some similar
lure had dazzled Rose? The shine of Paul’s high-mindedness? Of his having perhaps really been an agent loyal to a fading dream of the Left.

‘You romanticize each other!’ Yves accused.

In the end, though the women she found
liked
Paul, they didn’t like him enough – while he, susceptible to them all, kept breaking his heart, an organ she thought of as perennially in splints.

What did he lack? One could only guess that turning his back on the cinema – his father’s creation – had disabled him. The rest of us speeded our pulse to its rhythms; it was our lingua franca, a thesaurus of codes and humours which Paul refused to learn. Ironies passed him by. Refusing to use its spyhole, he had no idea how people lived and got things wrong – with Shiobhan, for instance, who shared a tiny flat, every bit of which could be metamorphosed into something else. Part of the kitchen became a shower. Beds slid into walls. Bicycles hung from the ceiling.

Into this one day a florist’s delivery boy, acting at Paul’s behest – ‘Send her flowers,’ Rose had coached – attempted to deliver a flower arrangement with an eagle’s wingspan: a bouquet such as might be delivered to a prima donna on a first night. Had there
been
a first night? If so, its commemoration was tropical. There were lilies with spotted tongues, reported Shiobhan, bird-of-paradise flowers, ‘and some willowy thing which caught in the banisters’.

With difficulty this was manœuvred up her staircase – she lived on the sixth floor. Through her door, however, it would not go. Nor was there room to leave it on the landing, so she – in whose budget this made a sizeable dent – had to tip the boy for bringing the thing up, then tip him again to take it away.

‘Too wide for my aperture!’ she told Rose with ribald wrath and put an end to the courtship. She was trying to stretch a grant for mature students and her life had no space for complications.

‘He’s too old-fashioned,’ was her verdict on Paul. ‘A nineteenth-century man!’

Add to that his stubbornness – over, for instance, paying for today’s lunch.

‘I wish you’d let me!’

Sad-eyed headshake. ‘Darling, you repay me by your mere presence.’

‘But I want to pay. Give
me
pleasure. Please?’

‘No, no.’ His martyred look.

Rose was starving. The ‘slimmers’ salad’ had turned out to consist of rocket leaves plus one sculpted radish. If let pay she could, even now, order a substantial sweet. A Tarte Tatin or – a man nearby was guzzling one – a Grand Marnier soufflé. Its fumes tantalized her. Hypoglaecemic hunger blurred her mind. She felt a migraine coming on. There was a queue waiting for a free table.

‘Perhaps we should go then? As neither of us seems to be eating much? I think the waiters …’

‘Oh never mind them!’ He lit a cigarette. His smoking, which gave her nausea, had got out of hand in prison, so how complain? ‘I reserved this table,’ he stated firmly. ‘It’s ours.’

If she could get away from him she could buy something in the street to stave off the migraine. Some quick, sugary fix. Nougat. Baclava. But – she glanced covertly at her watch – he was staring at her with a reflection of her own need. He was an old, needy friend who had requests to make. Stoical, she batted away smoke.

She reproached herself. Hunger, the threatening migraine,
and their joint obstinacy over the bill were pretexts for refusing him; yet he was a man without self, a last, gallant, monkish struggler for Liberal hopes born here in France and now almost universally dashed. All he asked was support. Friendship. Yes, but how did he define that?

He laughed abruptly, ‘Remember the poem: “Just for a handful of silver he left us …” and what you wrote to me in gaol? You wrote that Yves had betrayed us spiritually. What’s the next line? “Just for a riband to stick in his coat.”’

Her head swam. Had her thoughts leaked? She mustn’t get into this argument.

‘Spiritual,’ Paul gloated. ‘That nailed him. You know he’s refusing to restart the magazine …’

The maître d’hôtel was definitely eyeing their table.

‘If we’re not leaving we’ll have to order something. I’, she resolved ‘will have a coffee.’ That couldn’t cost much, could it? Wolfishly, she chewed the sugar lumps which came with it and, energized, found herself marvelling yet again at Paul’s persistence. He seemed to brim with expectancy and she could tell that not only he but she was about to be presented with a bill – an emotional one. ‘Irishwomen’, he repeated, ‘are good.’

To sidestep this, she told him, laughing, that for her the word had drab associations. Her school nuns had reserved it for girls of whom nothing else could be said: dim or daft girls who were made to sit on a special bench.

‘With me,’ said Paul humbly. ‘You Irish were goodness itself!’

This was true. She and the others – Eithne, Dympna and Shiobhan – had revived the serviceable old quality, as you might take out your grandmother’s furs during a cold snap, once he went to gaol. Arranging rotas for prison-visits, they acknowledged relief as relations with him took on frankly
charitable status. ‘Poor Paul!’ they exclaimed with safe affection. Briskly. Like four nannies.

Rose chewed two more sugar lumps and defied the smile which this evoked. Illogical female, signalled the smile. Chooses the slimmer’s salad, then stuffs herself with sugar!

Escaping to the loo – let him simmer down a bit! – she was confronted by the gaudy curls of Philomena Fogarty bouncing in three mirrors and sparking in the bristles of her brush. ‘Rose!’ yelled Phil boisterously. ‘It
is
Rose Molloy?’ So Rose said ‘Not Molloy’ and gave her married name. They embraced.

‘I thought it was you across the room. Is that your husband?’

No, said Rose. Then the two, who had a lot to catch up with, began to tell about themselves, while freshening their make-up. They agreed that now they’d met they mustn’t lose touch. Phil’s luncheon companion had had to rush off, so why didn’t Rose come and see her flat which was close by? Well, it wasn’t hers, but … Rose, not listening, tried to remember why she had lost track of Phil and whether there hadn’t been some hushed-up story back in Dublin years ago. Gossip, scandal? Yes. That reminded her that she’d better warn Phil about Paul, so she told some of
his
story fast.

‘He’ll fall for you!’ she warned. ‘An Irish redhead! He can’t resist them.’

Phil said she kept her hair tinted because fire colours were propitious. She had studied colours. Studied them? Yes. Colours had an influence … But Rose didn’t take this in for they were now heading back to the table where Paul looked less disappointed than Rose had feared at having their private talk curtailed. Have a brandy, he offered recklessly, but Phil said, no, they must come to her flat for some Colomba
di Pasqua which Italian friends had dropped off. ‘We’ll partake’, she said, ‘of the dove of peace! Don’t you think that’s a noble ceremony?’ Then, to Rose’s shock, she sat down, leaned towards Paul and said, ‘You mustn’t feel bad about having been in gaol.
I
was for two years!’