Under the Rose (28 page)

The doctor, when he came, quickly changed my mood.

‘It’s serious,’ he warned. ‘He’s had a stroke. I’m going to call a helicopter and fly him to Galway.’

He told us to stay in the room while he went to make arrangements. For moments we sat in silence. Miss Sheehy was as pale as paper. My father’s eyes were closed now and his face was grey.

‘How long have you – been with him?’

‘Three years.’

‘So why the quarrel now?’ He would not, I was sure, have
misled her with false promises. He would never leave my mother. A Senator! A militant Catholic layman! Never in this life!

‘I’m pregnant,’ she blurted and began to cry.

‘Don’t cry!’ I could have slapped her. Hysteria, I thought. Then: could he be such a fool? ‘You mean you didn’t use anything?’ Condoning the use of artificial contraceptives led, said the League to Save the Unborn Child, to condoning abortion. Changing our legislation would open the sluice gates. I knew the arguments by heart. But what about the principle of what the eye didn’t see?
Her
eyes were getting scandalously red. ‘Don’t cry,’ I urged. ‘The doctor will be back in a moment.’

‘And he’ll take him away. To Galway. Listen,’ she clutched my arm, ‘I must see him, get news of him. But he’ll be in intensive care. I won’t be let in. Only relatives will be. Will you help me?’

Red-eyed, feverish mistress! Outcast, beautiful Miss Sheehy. I kissed her and it was she who slapped me! Ah well, some outlet was needed. The doctor may have heard the slap for he gave us a look as he came in the door. Two paramedics were with him and in no time had my father on a stretcher. We followed them down the familiar corridors and out to the lawn where the helicopter was waiting. They loaded him on. Blades rotated; wind moulded our clothes to our bodies; then up it whirred into a misty dawn, turning silver, then grey, then fading to a speck.

I thought of ‘the rapture’, the bodily whisking of people up to heaven in which certain Protestants believe – ex-President Reagan for one was, I’d read in some magazine, expecting to be whisked aloft. Holus bolus, body and bones! It was an inappropriate thought. But then what was appropriate? Maybe I was in shock?

Miss Sheehy’s hand was in mine. Would I help her see him, she begged, or at least keep in touch? Yes, I said, yes. I’d be leaving for the hospital as soon as I could explain things to
the management here. I’d phone her this evening.

‘I have this weekend off,’ she told me.

Ah, I thought: they planned to spend it together. Poor father! Poor Miss Sheehy!

‘What’s your first name?’ I asked.

She said it was Artemis. Her parents had wanted her to be a huntress, not a victim. I made no comment.

I’ve had a call from my mother. From the nursing home. No need for me, she says, to worry. First babies are often slow to arrive. She should know: a mother of five and a four-time grandmother. My sisters have been dutifully breeding. She’s in her element and hasn’t been in such good spirits since my father’s death.

He never regained consciousness. When Artemis came in on the Friday evening, I disssuaded her from seeing him, arguing – truthfully – that he’d have hated to be seen with drips and needles stuck all over him.

She acquiesced, noting, with an unreadable little smile, that she was used to
not
doing things – not writing to him ever, nor ringing him up. Not at his office. Not at home. Nowhere. She always had to wait for him to make the contact. I looked appalled and she said defiantly, ‘When we were together, it was pure delight. Like wartime furloughs. Utterly without ordinary moments. We met sometimes on a friend’s barge on the Shannon, once on a yacht in Spain, once in a flat in Istanbul. Never for long. But he was so happy at being able to do what he never ordinarily did …’

Christ, I thought, he’d raised negativity to a mystique! He was a one-man cult and had brainwashed her good and
proper. I suddenly realized that I disliked him deeply and had, unknown to myself, done so for years. No wonder my brothers had fled to Australia and Ecuador.

By now I had spent three days in the hospital with my mother – the stroke had happened on the Wednesday morning. There was nothing to do but wait, talk to doctors about their scans, filter their pessimism back to her, hold her hand. The staff, predictably, was assiduous, so I had a lot of help.

‘Such a fine man,’ I would hear them murmuring prayerfully to her in corridors and guest areas. ‘What a tragedy!’ Sometimes they went with her to the chapel. One of the nurses was a member of the League to Save the Unborn Child. She, she told my mother, rarely questioned the will of God but found it hard to see a clean-living teetotaller like my father struck down when the town was full of drunks whose blood-pressure seemed not to give them a moment’s trouble. ‘God forgive me, I’m a desperate rebel!’ boasted this docile mouse, trembling under her blue, submissive veil.

These conversations, I admit, gave my mother a lot more consolation than I could provide. Communicating with her has never been my forte. She was younger than my father and totally his creature. They were what’s called a fine couple. She’s five feet ten, graceful, blonde-speckled-tastefully-with-grey, dutiful, cheerful, plays tennis and bridge, takes pleasure in her volunteer work for his causes and has never, in my presence, revealed a spark of even the mild brand of rebelliousness favoured by the blue-veiled nurse. None. My sisters’ opinion is that she’s been emotionally lobotomized. By whom?

I went from time to time to look at him. He was semi-paralysed and his face was badly askew: mouth twisted up and down in a vertical, Punch-and-Judy leer. Doubleness had finally branded him. Nobody but me, though, seemed to have had such a thought. At least nobody voiced it, and neither, to be sure, did I. My mother kept putting her hand on his brow, murmuring coaxing endearments and kissing
his convulsed grey face. She hoped something might be getting through. This must have drained her emotionally for, in the evenings, she went back to her hotel and was served a meal in bed.

This left me free to dine
en ville
with Artemis Sheehy, whose weekend was, I reminded myself, available and blank. Despite my advice, she yearned to do precisely what my mother had been doing: put her long-fingered hand on my father’s brow and kiss him well.

I decided – in retrospect it is impossible to disentangle my motives – to let her. From hope? Pity? As aversion-therapy? How can I say?

We had by now had a row, or rather we had had another. Our relations from the start had been edgy. Why, I queried on Friday evening, as we sat waiting for the baked Alaska – I had, since she refused to drink with me, had a bottle of claret to myself – why had she let my father cast her as Patient Griselda, while he played the Pillar of the Irish Establishment? A P.I.E., I mocked, that was what he was, a po-faced Pie! An escapee from the novels of Zola and nineteenth-century operetta! Old hat! Self-serving! A canting humbug! My jealousy revenged itself on his charm – I now thought of it as smarm – and on his unassailable advantage in the minds of my mother and Artemis: his poignantly stricken state. The new-felled Knight!

‘Can you’, I harried, ‘deny that he is – was a hypocrite?’

What could she do, in all decency, but throw down her napkin and leave? I, waiting for the bill, had to let her go – and, anyway, knew I had her on a string. I was her only connection with him and so could let her stew. Greedy from anger – and satisfying one appetite in lieu of another – when the baked Alaska arrived with the bill, I ate her portion as well as my own. It struck me, as I walked morosely back to my hotel, that I was beginning to act like him. Ruthless and masterful. I hated myself. Still – I licked the last of the baked Alaska
from my lips – it would be pointless to forgo my advantage by capitulating too soon.

Sure enough, she rang me next morning. Triumphant – but hiding it – I was sweetness itself. And contrite. She must, I begged, see how hard it was for me to hold my mother’s hand by day and hers in the evening? I was painfully torn – as no doubt my father too had been. Instinctively, I was blending my image with his: an anticipation of what was to happen when obituaries appeared with photographs of his young self, looking, as was universally noted, disturbingly like me. But, to go back to my conversation with Artemis, I now made a peace-offering, which was that if she really wanted me to, I would take her to see him this evening, after my mother had left the hospital.

She accepted and, as I had tried to dissuade her, could hardly blame me for the shock. His skewed mouth dribbled. There were tubes in his nose. He looked worse than dead. He looked like an ancient, malicious changeling put together from that grey stuff with which wasps build their nests. Or ectoplasm or papier mâché made from old, pulped bibles. These conceits swarmed through my head as I watched, then, from pity, ceased to watch her.

She was devastated, disgusted, guilty: a mirror of myself. Did she also feel that hot rush of feeling which, for days now, had been distracting and perhaps healing me? The urge to fuck, which is a pro-life remedy for death-fears? People get it in wartime and, notoriously, in graveyards and during blackouts and other foreshadowings of mortality. I let her look her fill. I even left her alone lest, like my mother, she wish to kiss him. I don’t know whether she did.

I waited in the hospital-green corridor, not hurrying her adieux which, whether she knew it or not, were what they were. He, the doctors had told me, would be a wreck if he lived but was unlikely to last the weekend. I hadn’t told her this, but guessed she knew. Then I took her on a drive along
the coast, next for a long, twilit walk along a stretch of it, and finally to a small seaside hotel, where we spent the night comforting each other and conjuring away ghosts.

My father died that night, which was just as well for all concerned, especially her. If he had lived, what would she have done? Gone to somewhere like Liverpool to have her child, then given it out for adoption? Or raised it in resentful solitude on the income he would feel frightened – if compos mentis – into coughing up? Taken an ‘abortion flight’ to London? Instead, once we had faced my mother with the
fait
accompli
of our runaway marriage – registry office in London, followed by a conciliatory Church ceremony back home – Artemis became part of the household which, for three years, she had been forbidden to phone. Sometimes, she tells me, she used, in her loneliness, to dial the number anyway then listen, silently, to our irritably convivial voices.

‘Hullo! Speak up. Who is it? Press Button B! Oh it’s the heavy breather again! What do you want, Heavy Breather? If you’re a burglar, we’re all at home so there’s no point trying to break in!’

Now she
is
in and the noses of my sisters’ children – none of them Learies – are put out of joint by the glorious prospect of Frank Junior’s birth. Any minute now my mother will phone with news of my new brother’s entry under false colours into the Leary clan. Brother-masquerading-as-son, he will be born under the true Leary sign of duplicitous duality.

And I? Well, I’m in Law School and active in the Student Union. People ask whether I’ll go into politics and my fear is that I may find myself turning into a carbon copy of my father. I am, after all, living by his principles and can’t see quite how to break out. Drinking claret instead of rum in coke seems an inadequate gesture, and my support for Family Planning, Abortion and Divorce has been hailed by some of his cronies as the sort of forward-looking thinking to which he himself might well have subscribed had he lived. Times have changed,
they say, and we must march to the European Community’s tune if we want subsidies for our farmers. After all, providing the option to use contraception, etc., obliges nobody to avail themselves of it. And anyone who does can repent later. God is good and there’s no point being simple-minded. So, they would have me think, opposing the letter of my father’s laws is a way of being true to their spirit.

Maybe. It’s hard to tell. Double-think is the order of the day.

Of course I rejoice in Artemis’s love, though here too a shiver of doubt torments me: does she see him in me? Am I two people for her? To be sure, it’s foolish to probe! We’re happy and … there’s the phone! Alleluia! Where are my car keys? Frank Junior must be on his way.

Liam sat, glassed-in, on a half landing crammed with photographs. It was easy to heat, which was why he came here when he couldn't sleep. Lately he had been feeling the cold.

Images of himself gleamed mockingly but could, if he twitched his head, be dissolved in light-smears or made to explode, milkily, like stars.

‘Sap!' he told a young Liam. ‘What was there to smirk about?' Kate had mounted bouquets of snaps in which she – why had he not noticed? – was often less than present: half-hidden under hats or bleached-out as if too easily reconciled to mortality. The solid one was himself who had seized his days with a will visible even in creased press cuttings. Cocky and convivial, the past selves could be guises donned by some mild devil to abash him. Flicking whiskey at them, he managed to exorcize the Liam who was accepting a decoration from the country's ex-president and an award from someone he could no longer place. OLD POLEMICIST HONOURED bragged a headline. GREAT MAVERICK RECONCILED AT LAST. Black-tied, white-tied, tweedy in a sequence of Herbie Johnson hats, alone, on podia and at play, the personae zoomed in and out of focus. Liam at the races. Liam on a yacht. Some wore whites as though for cricket, a game no Irishman of his stripe would have played. That ban was now obsolete. By humiliating the old masters, West Indian bowlers had freed the sport and its metaphors.

‘You had a grand innings!' a recent visitor had exclaimed. ‘Close to a century!' Liam, loath to be sent off to some Pavilion in the Sky, pressed an imaginary stop-button. Rewind. Replay.
But replays were nightmares and Kate featured in them all.

‘Was I such a bastard to you?' he cajoled one of her half-averted faces. It was bent over a picnic basket, counting hard-boiled eggs. ‘Neglectful? Selfish?' The face would not look up.

‘I could kill you for dying,' he told her. His watch hands pointed to four.

He had been twice to bed, started to sleep, funked it and returned here. Catastrophe was tearing up his sky and panic circled: black as crows. Keeping it at bay, he topped up his whiskey and, from habit, hid the bottle behind a fern. Outside, the dawn-chorus made a seething churr. He was alone by choice, wanting neither minders nor commiseration.

‘You were plucky,' he told a likeness of Kate, smiling in an old-time summer dress. ‘But you cheated on me! Became an invalid! Querulous! If you were alive now we'd be fighting!'

Two nights ago she, contrary to what statistics had led him to expect, had died. He had counted on going first. She had always been here till now, hadn't she? Even when this spoiled his plans! The thought startled him and his crossed leg pulsed. ‘Kate!' he mourned, amazed. For years he, not she, had been the adventurer.

‘I know you resented that,' he told a snapshot in which a child's head bobbed past her face. ‘But you were happy at first. And later wasn't so bad, surely?' He scrutinized snaps taken in restaurants and on boating holidays on the River Barrow. ‘
Was
it?' Helpless, he brushed a hand across dapplings from awnings and other people's menus. Cobweb grudges, forgotten tiffs. ‘Damn it, Kate, did you put bad photos of yourself here to torment me? That could make me hate you!'

Spying the whiskey bottle behind its plant, he reflected that hating her would be a relief – then that she might have planned the relief.

His checked hand reached the bottle and poured more anyway. Nobody to stop him now! If she'd died twenty years
ago he'd have remarried. Maybe even fifteen? Now – he was ninety. Had she planned
that
? Wryly, he raised the glass.

‘To you then, old sparring partner and last witness to our golden youth!'

Losing her was radical surgery. Like losing half his brain. Like their retreat, years ago, to this manageable cottage. In the background to several snaps, their old house made a first, phantom appearance as a patch in a field, its roomy shape pegged out with string. Pacing the patch, strode Kate. Expansive, laughing, planning a future now behind them, she waved optimistic arms.

‘Shit!'

He banged his head against the wall. More exploding stars! Watch it, Liam! You're not the man you were!

A civil-rights lawyer who had become a media figure in his prime, an activist who had brought cases to Strasbourg and The Hague, he had let her take over the private sector of their lives. This included religion. A mistake? Religion here was never quite private and their arrangements on that score jarred.

The requiem mass which was to have comforted her would set his teeth on edge. It was a swindle that the Faith, having brought him woe – sexual and political – when he was young, should now pay no dividends. None. He had said so to the Parish Priest, a near-friend. Running into each other on the seafront, or watching blown tulips reveal black hearts in the breezy park, the two sometimes enjoyed a bicker about the off-chance of an afterlife: a mild one since neither would change his bias. Liam was past ninety and the PP was no chicken either.

Brace up, Liam! The things to hold onto were those you'd lived by. Solidarity. The Social Contract. Pluck. Confronting a mottled mirror, he acknowledged the charge reflected back. Funerals here were manifestoes. His conduct at Kate's must, rallied the mirror, bolster those who had helped him fight the Church when it was riding roughshod over people here. You couldn't let
them
down by slinking back for its last vain
comforts. How often had he heard bigots gloat that some Liberal had ‘died screaming for a priest'?

They'd relish saying it of him all right! Addicts of discipline and bondage, the Holy Joes would get a buzz from seeing Liam dragged off by psychogenic demons. Toasted on funk's pitchforks! Turned on its spit! Tasty dreams! In the real world, they'd settle for seeing him back in the fold – and why gratify them? Could Kate have wanted to? She who, in the vigour of her teens, had marched at Republican funerals, singing: ‘Tho' cowards mock and traitors sneer / We'll keep the red flag flying here'? Hair blowing, cheeks bright as the flag! Sweet, hopeful Kate!

On the other hand, how refuse her her Mass? Anyway how many of the old guard were left to see whether Liam stood firm? Frail now and rigid in the set of their ways! He ticked them off on his fingers: a professor emeritus, some early proponents of Family Planning, secular schools and divorce, a few journalists whose rights he had defended, his successor's successor at Civil Liberties: a barrister long retired. Who else? Half a score of widows confirmed the actuarial statistics which had played him false. Would they make it to Kate's funeral? Not long ago, he had drawn a cluster of circles which she mistook at first for a rose. It was a map showing the radius within which each of their contemporaries and near-contemporaries was now confined. Those who still drove kept to their neighbourhoods. Those who did not might venture to the end of a bus route. Not all the circles touched.

The Mass, though, would be accessible to most, being in the heart of town, in Trinity College chapel: a case of an ill wind bringing good, since the choice of venue – made when he, Kate and the twentieth century were a mutinous sixty – had lost pizzazz. Ecumenicism was now commonplace and the old Protestant stronghold had Catholic chaplains. The Holy Joes had him surrounded. For two pins he'd call off the ceremony – but how do that to Kate?

‘For Christ's sake, Liam!' He raged at himself. ‘There is no Kate! Hold onto your marbles! She's gone!' He poured his savourless whiskey into a fern.

Anger, a buffer against worse, had made him insult the PP when he came yesterday to condole. Priests, Liam had hissed, were like crows. They battened on death. Then he recited a poem which he remembered too late having recited to him before. Never mind! Rhymes kept unstable thoughts corralled.

Liam wasn't dead yet but here was the first corby come to scavenge his soul in what the priest must think was a weak moment. If he did, he thought wrong. When asked about the Mass, Liam said he might call it off. He'd see when his daughter got here. Ha, he thought, the cavalry was coming. Her generation believed in nothing. Kitty was tough – Kate's influence! The two had ganged up on him from the first, saying he was all for freedom outside the house and patriarchy within! How they'd laugh – he could just hear them! – at his seeing himself as slain when the dead one was Kate!

Ah but – the thought stunned him – the living are also dying.

Kate's remains had gone – as would his – to medical research. It felt odd not to have a corpse.

‘You'll need some ritual,' said the PP. ‘To say goodbye. Kate liked rituals. I used to bring her communion,' he reminded, ‘after she became bedridden. Your housekeeper prepared things. You must have known.'

Liam remembered a table covered with lace. Water. Other props. Of course he'd known! He had kept away while she made her last communions just as, to please
his
wife, Jaurès, the great French Socialist, let their daughter make her first one – to the shock of comrades for whom fraternizing with clerics was a major betrayal.

A weakness?

Liam sighed and the PP echoed the sigh. Many Irish people, mused the priest, went to Mass so as not to upset their relatives. ‘It was the opposite with Kate. Her religion meant a lot to her.'

‘How do you know?'

‘I know.' The PP made his claim calmly.

His lady's ta'en anither mate thought Liam and called the priest a carrion crow. ‘The way the corbies took communion', he ranted, ‘was to eat the knight's flesh. Tear him apart!'

Suddenly tired, he must have dropped off then for when he awoke the PP had let himself out. Liam felt ashamed. ‘Tear him apart,' he murmured, but couldn't remember what that referred to. The word ‘ritual' stayed with him though. It floated about in his head.

‘I'm not doing it for Him!' he told his daughter, Kitty, who now arrived off a plane delayed by fog. As though her brain
too were fogged she stared at him in puzzlement.

‘HIM', Liam tilted his eyes aloft. ‘I mean HIM.' He shook an instructive fist heavenward, only to see her gaze ambushed by a light-fixture. She – Kate could have told him who to blame – was indifferent to religion and always nagging him about the wiring in the house.

‘Who's “him”?'

‘God!' More fist-shaking. ‘Bugger HIM. I don't believe in HIM! I'll be doing it for HER.'

‘Doing what?' Living in England had made her very foreign.

‘Taking', he marvelled at himself, ‘communion at your mother's Requiem Mass. I'll do it for her. For Kate. She'd have done it for me.' His bombshell failed to distract Kitty from the fixture in the ceiling. Wires wavered from it like the legs of a frantic spider. He couldn't remember how it had got that way. Had someone yanked off the bulb? His temper, lately, had grown hard to control.

‘I'm calling an electrician.'

Liam, on getting no argument from Kitty, started one with himself. Holy Joes aside, the prime witnesses to his planned treachery would be the betrayed: those who had dared confront a Church which controlled jobs, votes and patronage. With surprising courage, vulnerable men – rural librarians and the like – had, starting back in the bleak and hungry '40s, joined his shoe-string campaigns to challenge the collusion between dodgy oligarchs and a despotic clergy. Old now, many campaigners were probably poor and surely lonely. Not pliable enough to be popular, they were unlikely to be liked. Honesty thwarted could turn to quibbling and brave men grow sour. He wondered if they tore out light bulbs?

Startling Kitty, he whispered: ‘They can put their communion up their arses.' Luxuriating in blasphemy: ‘Bloody corbies! God-and-man-eating cannibals!'

He had grown strange. Her mother had warned her, phoning long distance with reports of his refusal to take his salt-substitute or turn off his electric blanket. ‘He'll burn us down,' she'd worried. ‘Or spill tea into it and electrocute himself! Stubborn,' she'd lamented. ‘Touchy as a tinderbox. He's going at the top!'

Kitty reproached herself. She had not seen that these fears – transcendent, fussy, entertained for years – were justified at last. Poor mother! Poor prophetic Kate!

Sedated now, he was dreaming of her as a bride. ‘Slim as a silver birch!' he praised her in his sleep. True, wondered Kitty, or borrowed from those Gaelic vision-poems where a girl's nakedness on some rough mountainside dazzles freaked-out men?

‘Kate,' whimpered the sleeper. ‘Kate!' His tone rang changes on that double-dealing syllable.

Saliva, bubbling on his lip, drew from a jumble in Kitty's memory the Gaelic word for snail:
seilmide
. When she was maybe four, he and she used to feed cherry blossom to snails. White and bubbly, the petals were consumed with
brio
as the surprisingly deft creatures folded them into themselves like origami artists.

Kitty wiped away Liam's spittle. Had she chosen to forget the tame snails, so as to feel free to poison the ones in her London garden, a thing she now did regularly and without qualms? She grew rucola there and basil and that heart-stopping flower, the blue morning glory, which looks like fragments of sky but shrivels in the sun. The snails got the young plants if you didn't get them first.