Under the Rose (3 page)

The two – Maggy had heard the story from each separately – had not met for years when one night, a little over a year ago, they sat opposite each other on the North London underground. Rosheen’s eyes were red; she had just run out of the house after being kicked in the stomach by Sean. For want of anywhere to go, she was heading for a late-night cinema.

‘Leave him,’ said Dizzy, ‘you can stay in my flat.’

‘I love him,’ Rosheen told her. ‘He needs me. He can’t cope by himself. Poor Sean! He’s gentle most of the time and when he’s not, it’s not his fault. He’s sick, you see. His mother warned me: Mairéad. It’s his nerves. Ulcers. Anyway we’re married.’

‘All the more reason’, Dizzy told her, ‘to get out while you can. Are you going to have kids with a chap like that? You should call the police,’ she lectured.

‘I couldn’t.’ Rosheen was an underdog to the marrow.

‘I could.’ Dizzy had Anglo-Irish assurance. ‘Just let him
come looking for you.’ She herded Rosheen home to her flat and the husband, when he presented himself, was duly given the bum’s rush. He took to ambushing Rosheen, who went back to him twice but had to slink back to Dizzy after some days with black eyes and other more secret ailments.

‘You’re like a cat that goes out on the tiles,’ Dizzy told her. ‘You need an interest. You should come to political rallies with me.’

When Maggy arrived in London and agreed to move in with the two, Rosheen was working as an usherette in a theatre where Dizzy was stage manager. The plays put on by the group were revolutionary and much of Dizzy’s conversation echoed their scripts.

‘You have a slave mind,’ she said without malice to Maggy, who claimed she was too busy finishing a thesis to have time for politics. Dizzy did not ask the subject of the thesis – it was semiology – nor show any interest in the years Maggy had spent in America. Having gathered that there had been some sort of man trouble, she preferred to know no more. To Rosheen, who showed more curiosity, Maggy remarked that her situation was much like Rosheen’s own.

‘Convalescing?’

‘Yes.’

‘This is a good place to do it,’ said Rosheen. ‘Though I sometimes think I won’t be able to stand it. Sean keeps ringing me up. Crying. And I’m in dread that I’ll break down and go back to him. I miss him at night something awful.’

‘So why …’

‘Ah sure it’d never be any good.’

‘Is that what Dizzy tells you?’

‘Yes. But sure I know myself that when a relationship has gone bad there’s no mending it.’

‘Relationship’ would be Dizzy’s word. But Maggy wasn’t going to interfere. Rosheen she remembered from their childhood as unmodulated and unskinned: an emotional bomb
liable to go off unpredictably. Better let Dizzy handle her. She herself was trying to finish her thesis before her money ran out. She spent her days at the British Museum, coming home as late as 9 p.m. Often a gust of talk would roar into the hallway as she pushed open the door. ‘Bourgeois crapology,’ she’d hear, or: ‘It’s bloody
not
within the competence of the minister. Listen, I know the 1937 constitution by heart. D’ya want to bet?’ The voices would be Irish, fierce and drunk. Maggy would slip into the kitchen, get herself food as noiselessly as she could manage and withdraw into her room. Towards the evening’s end, Rosheen’s voice invariably reached her, singing some wailing song and Maggy would have wagered any money that the grief throbbing through it had not a thing to do with politics.

Sometimes, the phone in the hall would ring and Rosheen would have it off the hook before the third peal. It was outside Maggy’s bedroom door and she could hear Rosheen whisper to it, her furtive voice muffled by the coats which hung next to it and under which she seemed to plunge her head to hide perhaps from Dizzy.

‘You’re drunk,’ she’d start. ‘You are. Sean, you’re not to ring here, I told you. I suppose they’ve just shut the pub … it’s not that, no … even if you were cold stone sober I’d say the same … Listen, why don’t you go to bed and sleep it off? Have you eaten anything? What about your ulcer? Listen, go and get a glass of milk somewhere … you can … I can’t … it’s not that. I do. I do know my own mind but … She’s not a dyke, Sean … You know as well as I do it’d never work … If only you’d take the cure … Well it’s a vicious circle then, isn’t it? … Please, Sean, ah don’t be that way, Sean … I do but … ah Sean …’

Sooner or later there would be the click of the phone. Rosheen would stand for a while among the coats, then open the door to go into the front room. Later, she would be singing again, this time something subdued like one of the hymns
which they had sung together in school. This tended to put a damper on the party and the guests would clatter out shortly afterwards.

Next day smells of stale beer and ash pervaded the flat, and Rosheen’s voice, raised in the shower, pierced through the slap of water to reach a half-sleeping Maggy.

‘You missed a good evening,’ Dizzy reproached. ‘I don’t know why you can’t be sociable. Mix. There were interesting, committed people there. One was a fellow who escaped from Long Kesh.’

‘I have reading to do.’

‘Piffle! Do you good to get away from your books. Live. Open yourself to new experiences.’

The man Maggy had lived with in San Francisco had made similar reproaches. Books, he said, made Maggy egocentric. Squirrelling away ideas, she was trying to cream the world’s mind. His was a sentient generation, he told her, but she reminded him of the joke about the guy caught committing necrophilia whose defence was that he’d taken the corpse to be a live Englishwoman.

‘Irish.’

Irish, English – what was the difference? It was her coldness which had challenged him. He was a man who relished difficulty. Beneath her cold crust he’d counted on finding lava and instead what he’d found inside was colder still: like eating baked Alaska. Maggy, feeling that she was in violation of some emotional equivalent of the Trade Descriptions Act, blamed everything on her First Communion. She’d been rejected by her maker, she explained, thrown on the reject
heap and inhibited since. This mollified her lover and they took an affectionate leave of each other. Now, in wintry London, where men like him were as rare as humming birds, she groaned with afterclaps of lust.

Well, if her thaw was untimely, the fault was her own.

What was really too bad was that Rosheen, who had passed the First Communion test with flying colours, should be unable to consummate her punctual passions. She was slurping out feeling now, steaming and singing in the shower while the other two ate breakfast.

‘Mother of Chri-i-ist …’

‘How was your First Communion?’ Maggy asked Dizzy. ‘Did you experience ecstasy?’

‘I don’t think anyone mentioned the word. I thought of it more as a way of joining the club. As a convert, you know.’

‘Sta-a-a-r of the
… Fuck!’ Rosheen had dropped the shampoo. Now they would all get glass splinters in their feet.

‘Didn’t you notice the prayers?’ Maggy wondered.
‘May thy wounds be to me food and drink by which I may be nourished, inebriated and overjoyed!
Surely you remember that? And:
Thou alone will ever be my hope, my riches, my delight, my pleasure, my joy … My fragrance, my sweet savour?
It goes on.’

‘Do you think bloody Rosheen’s cut herself? It’s a responsibility having her around. I didn’t think you were pious, Maggy. More toast?’

‘I saw it all’, said Maggy, ‘as a promise of what I’d find outside the convent: men like Christs who’d provide all that.’

‘I do think semiology is the wrong thing for you, Maggy. You should put your energies into something practical.’

‘Dizzy, you’re a treat! You’ve been trying to de-Anglicize yourself since the day we met, but your officer-class genes are too much for you.’

This was going too far. Dizzy, hurt, had to be sweetened by a gift of liqueur jam for which Maggy had to go all the way to Harrods. The trip made her late and when she got back to the
flat Dizzy had left for the local pub. Maggy, joining her there, found her chatting to a man who sometimes dropped in after work. He was a sandy-haired chap who probably worked in an insurance office. Dizzy imagined him as starved for life and in search of anecdotes. ‘I drop into an Irish pub in Camden,’ he would tell his wife who would be wearing an apron covered with Campari ads. Dizzy, nourishing this imagined saga, had tried to get Rosheen to sing while he was in the pub, though it was always too early and the ambience wasn’t right. ‘It
is
an IRA pub, you know,’ she had told him, slipping in and out of Irishness as though it were stage make-up.

‘I believe less and less in democracy,’ she was saying when Maggy arrived. ‘Hullo, Maggy. What’re you having? Don’t you agree that democracy is a con? Do you know who said “the people have no right to do wrong”? Also “there are rights which a minority may justly uphold in arms against a majority”? Bet you don’t.’

The man in the belted mac and sandy hair had nothing to say to this. Dizzy, however, could carry on two ends of a conversation.

‘You might say,’ she supplied, ‘that the people have a right to decide for themselves. But “the people” are people like that gutless wonder, Sean.
They
never initiate change, so …’

Maggy left for the loo. Through its window she saw Sean and Rosheen embracing in the damp and empty garden of the pub. Both seemed to be crying. It might, however, be rain on their cheeks. She went back to the lounge.

‘Saw it in Malaya,’ the macintoshed man was saying. ‘Bulk of the people were loyal. Just a few agitators. You’ve got to string ’em up right at the start. Cut off the gangrened limb. Else you’ll have chaos.’

‘But I’, said Dizzy, ‘was speaking
on behalf
of the agitators, the leaven, the heroes!’

‘Oh,’ the man moved his glass away from hers. ‘I could hardly go along with that.’

Rosheen stood at the door of the lounge and beckoned Maggy behind Dizzy’s back. She put a finger on her lips.

‘I’m going.’ Maggy got up.

Rosheen rushed Maggy down a corridor. ‘Let’s get out of here. That man’s in the Special Branch. A detective. He’s looking for Sean.’

‘Why … but then Dizzy …?’

‘Dizzy’s an eejit, doesn’t know whether she’s coming or going.’

‘You think Dizzy’s an eejit?’ Maggy couldn’t have been more astonished if a worm had stood erect on its tail and spoken.

‘You know she is, Maggy! She’s in way over her head. Wait till I tell you.’ Rosheen’s eyes were red, but she spoke lucidly. ‘It’s Sean they’re after. They want him to turn informer and if he doesn’t, they’ll spread the word that he
has
. Then the IRA will get him. And you know what
they
do to informers.’

‘Are you sure?’ Maggy asked, but it was likely enough. She remembered Mairéad’s description of the nerve-shot Sean. He was the very stuff of which the police could hope to make an informer. His family had a record. Had he one himself? ‘Is he political?’ she asked.

‘No, but they could nail him. They can nail anyone.’

‘But what does he
know
? I mean what information has he?’

‘That’s the trouble,’ Rosheen told her. ‘He doesn’t know much at all. But in self-defence he’ll have to shop someone and the only one he can think of is Dizzy.’

‘Dizzy?’

‘You see she’s not real IRA: only on the fringe, expendable. Sean thinks they mightn’t mind about her. The IRA, I mean. And naturally
he
hates her.’ Rosheen blushed and added quickly, ‘This is killing him. He’s passing blood again. Both
sides have their eye on him now. He’s been seen talking to that detective, so if anything at all happens in the next few weeks, it’ll be blemt on Sean. I think he’s a dead man.’ Rosheen spoke numbly. ‘If one lot doesn’t get him, the others will.’

‘And what
is
Dizzy up to? I mean what could he tell them?’

Rosheen turned stunned eyes on Maggy, who saw that there was no turning
her
into an Emerald Pimpernel. Dizzy, having stumbled onto territory which Rosheen knew better, might be revealed as an eejit and a play-actress but Rosheen herself, helpless as a heifer who has somehow strayed onto the centre divider of a highway, could only wait and wonder whether the traffic of events might be miraculously diverted before it mowed her down. ‘What do they get expendable people like her to do?’ she asked. ‘Plant bombs.’

Dizzy, when faced with the question, reacted violently: ‘Maggy, are you working for the Special Branch? Shit, I should have known! All that pretence at being apathetic – or’, her eyes narrowed, ‘is it Rosheen who’s been talking? I always thought Sean had the stuff of a stool pigeon.’ She went on like this until Maggy cut her short with the news that who
was
in the Special Branch was Dizzy’s drinking companion whose phone number Maggy – thanks to Rosheen – was in a position to let her have.

‘It’s a Scotland Yard number. Check if you like,’ she said, astounded at the way Dizzy’s authority had crumbled. It was like the emperor’s clothes: an illusion, nothing but RADA vowels, that officer-class demeanour, thought Maggy, who now felt powerful and practical herself. Rosheen, like one of those creatures in folk tales who hand the heroine some magic tool, had made Maggy potent.

In return, the helper must herself be helped. Maggy remembered Rosheen’s telephone colloquies with Sean
seeping, regularly as bedtime stories, under her own bedroom door and that Rosheen’s renunciatory voice had quavered like a captive bird’s as she hid among the heavy coats in Dizzy’s front hall. Now she must be allowed to unleash her precarious passion in peace.

‘You’re
a security risk, you must see that,’ said Maggy to Dizzy, making short work of her protests. ‘So you’d better let me pick up your bomb. Never mind why I want to. That’s my concern. Motives’, she told her, ‘are irrelevant to history. If I do this for the IRA, I shall be IRA. Wasn’t that your own calculation?’

This bit of rhetoric proved truer than foreseen, for a number of squat, tough-faced, under-nourished-looking people turned up at her trial and had to be cleared from the public gallery where they created a disturbance and gave clenched-fist salutes. They seemed to have co-opted her act, and her lawyer brought along copies of excitable weekly papers which described it in terms she could not follow because their references were rancorous and obscure. One was called
An Phoblacht,
another
The Starry Plough
and there was a sad daily from Belfast full of ads for money-lenders, in memoriam columns and, for her, a bleak fraternity. Dizzy did not come and neither did Rosheen.