Under the Rose (30 page)

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 dreamed 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?

‘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 had 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.

‘A bird never flew on wan wing.’ The brogue, eroded in England, renascent on his return, warmed like a marching tune. ‘Have the other half of that.’ He nodded at Hennessy’s glass.

‘A small one, so.’

Condon rapped on the wood. ‘Same again, Mihail,’ he told the bar-curate confidentially.

‘Your wife’s in poor health?’ Hennessy commented.

Condon sighed. ‘The Change.’

‘Ah,’ said Hennessy with distaste.

‘Shshsh.’ Condon put a finger to his lips. There were voices in the public bar.

‘Bloody Gyppos …’ An Anglo-Irish roar. ‘Regular circus. At least the Yids can fight.’

‘… died in the frost,’ cried a carrying female version of the same. ‘I’ve started more under glass.’

‘Well, here’s to old Terry then. Chin-chin and
mort aux vaches
.’

‘What’d you join, Terry? French Foreign Legion?’

‘No, we’re …’

‘Make mine a Bloody Mary.’

Condon dug an elbow into Hennessy’s side. ‘Tell me,’ he whispered in agitation, ‘why am I whispering? Why do fellows like that roar and you and me lower our voices in public? It’s our country, isn’t it?’

Hennessy shrugged. ‘Rowdies,’ he said contemptuously.

But that wasn’t it. Hennessy hadn’t lived with the English the way Condon had and couldn’t know. It was all arrogance: the roars, the titters. All and always. Condon knew. Wasn’t he married to one? Old Hennessy was looking at him oddly. A soapy customer. Don’t trust. Think, quickly now, of something soothing. Right. His knight’s costume tonight in the bedroom pier-glass. Spurs, epaulets, his own patrician nose: mark of an ancient race. The image, fondly dandled, shivered and broke the way images do. Ho-old it. Patrician all right. A good jaw. Fine feathers – ah no, no. More to it than that. The
spirit
of the Order was imbuing him. Mind over matter. Condon believed in that order of things. Like the Communion wafer keeping fasting saints alive over periods of months. He was a reasoning man – trained in the law – but not narrow, acknowledged super-rational phenomena. More things, Horatio – how did it go? Membership in an ancient religious Order
must
entail an infusion of grace. Tonight was the ceremony to swear in new members. Condon being one. An important, significant moment for him, as he tried to explain to Elsie. But she was spiritually undeveloped.

‘A sort of masonry then?’ she’d asked when he’d told her how all the really influential Dublin businessmen … Certainly NOT or, anyway, not only. Why, the Order dated back nine hundred years. But the English cared only for their own pageantry: Chelsea pensioners, their bull-faced queen. Circuses! Ha! He hated their pomps, had been personally colonized but had thrown off the yoke, his character forming in recoil. Did he
know
, he wondered now as often, how thoroughly he
had thrown it off? Did she? He saw himself, two hours ago, coming down the stairs, waiting, one flight up, knee arched, for her admiration. She was in the kitchen.

‘Elsie.’

‘What?’

‘Come here.’

‘Come here yourself. I’m not a dog.’

‘I want to show you something.’ That spoiled the surprise but she wouldn’t come if he didn’t beg. ‘Please, Elsie.’ He thought he might be getting pins and needles. Hand on the pommel of his sword, he waited.

‘Huwwy then, because the oven …’ She bustled into the hall, wiping her hands on a cloth. A lively, heavily painted woman in her forties, sagging here and there but still ten times quicker than himself in her movements. ‘Ho!’ she checked and roared. ‘Tito Gobbi, no less! Or is it Wichard Tucker. You’re not going
out
in it?’

Envy!

He walked down the stairs, minding his cloak. ‘What’s for dinner?’

‘Steak and kidney pie.’

‘My ulcer!’

‘You haven’t a nerve in your body. How could you have an ulcer?’

Her cooking still undermined him – the first thing he had dared notice when he’d attended those parties of hers in Scunthorpe. He’d been a filler-in then: the extra bachelor asked to balance the table. The tight velvet of her evening trousers had drawn his attention and the display of Sheffield plate. It was on his own sideboard now. (‘Mr Condon likes his gwub,’ she’d noted.) The ‘w’ she put in ‘Patrick’ when she began to use his name impressed him. He thought for a while it might be upper-class. (‘I sweat bwicks when Patwick tells a joke!’) It was a relief as well as a disappointment when she turned out to be a housekeeper who had married her
ageing employer. When the old man died within a year of marriage, Condon rallied round. Mourning enhanced her attractiveness but sat lightly on her. She was quick – giddy, he thought now – and he couldn’t keep up with her, seemed to get heavier when he tried. Even her things turned hostile. He remembered the day her electric lawn-mower ran off with him. Weeping with rage, he had struggled to hold it as it plunged down the area slope and crashed through the kitchen window – with himself skidding behind: Handy Andy, Paddy-the-Irishman! The servants were in stitches. He didn’t dare ask her not to mention it, could still hear her tell the story – how many times? – to neighbours over summer drinks on the wretched lawn: ‘And away it wan with pooah Patwick!’ They had neighed, hawhawed, choked themselves. He hated them. Buggers to a man. Bloody snobs in their blazers with heraldic thingamybobs on the pockets. Always telling him off. (‘In England, people don’t say “bloody”!’ ‘“Bugger” is rather a strong term over here, old man!’ So well it might be!) What he’d put up with! And if you
didn’t
put up with it you had no sense of humour. Well, their day was done. India, Ghana, Cyprus, even Rhodesia … Little Ireland had shown the way. Let England quake! The West’s awake! The West, the East – which of them cared for England now?

‘Ah Jesus, that stuff’s out of date,’ Patrick’s cousin told him when he came back to live in Ireland. ‘Our economy is linked to England’s. Let the dead bury the dead! And isn’t your wife English?’

Her!
He looked at her scraping out the remnants of pastry from the dish. Greedy! But she kept her figure. People admired her. ‘A damn fine woman,’ they told Patrick who was half pleased and half not. He had never forgiven her evasion of his embrace in the car coming from the church ceremony and the way she had lingered in the hotel bar before making for their bedroom. He had lingered too but, damn it, that was understandable.
He
was chaste, whereas she – decadent
product of a decadent country. Bloomy and scented like a hot-house flower warmed by the trade winds of the Empire.

‘Why are you looking at me like that?’

‘I was thinking’, Patrick said, ‘we Irish are a spiritual people! All that about the Celt having one foot in the grave, you know? Well, the older I get, the truer I know it to be.’

She hooted.

‘I suppose you don’t want pudding?’

‘What?’

‘Apple charlotte.’

He held out his plate. ‘No cream?’

‘Oh Patwick! Your waist bulge!’

‘I
want
cream.’

He scattered sugar on the brown cliffs of his charlotte. Brown, crumbly hills and crags such as the Knights must have defended against Turks and Saracens. The Irish branch to which Patrick belonged, lacking aristocratic quarterings, had a merely subsidiary connection, but Patrick managed to forget this and anyway
she
would never know. He took and ate the last brown bastion of charlotte from his plate.

She was fidgeting with hers. Afraid of carbohydrates. Her contaminated beauty excited him and sometimes, when she was asleep beside him, he would lean over and, between the ball and finger and thumb, fold the wrinkles into uglier grooves. Smoothing them, he could almost restore her to her peak, a time when men used to look after her and draw, with final cocks of the head in his direction, interrogation marks in the air: how, their wonder grilled him, had
she
come to marry
him?
How? Mmpp! Small mystery there when you came down to brass tacks. Widow’s nerves. She wanted a man. Anything – he lambasted himself – in trousers.
Much
more to the point was the question: why had
he
married her? He was a man given to self-query. Pious practices – meditation, examination of conscience – imposed by the various rules he had embraced had revealed to Condon the riches of
his own mind. It was theatre to him who had rarely been to a theatre if not to see a panto at Christmas. The first plushy swish of the curtain – he kept his thoughts sealed off in social moments lest one surface and reveal itself – the first dip into that accurately spotlit darkness, when he had a spell of privacy, was as stimulating as sex. How, today’s Mind demanded of yesterday’s, had it made itself up? Why? What if it had it to do over again? Any regrets? Any guidelines for the future? Doppel-ganging Condons stalked his own mental boards.
Why had he married
was a favoured theme to ponder on drives down the arteries of Ireland – frequent since Elsie, despite his work being in Dublin, had insisted on buying a ‘gentleman’s residence’ in County Meath. ‘Why?’ he would ask himself, as the tyres slipped and spun through wintery silt or swerved from a panicky rabbit. ‘Why? Why? – Ah, sure I suppose I was a bit of a fool! Yes.’ Marriage had looked like a ladder up. It had proved a snake. ‘A bit of a fool in those days, God help us.’ Better to marry than to burn – but what if you burned within marriage?

Condon still awoke sweating from nightmare re-enactments of that First Night. ‘Saint Joseph,’ he still muttered, as he fought off the dream, ‘Patron of Happy Families, let me not lose respect for her!’ (‘Patwick’, she used to say, ‘is a tewwible old Puwitan! Of course that makes things such fun for him! It’s being Iwish!’) He had gone to complain and confess to an English priest who reassured him. It was all natural, an image of Divine Love. Condon knew better, but let himself be swayed. Hours after she had said good night he, stiffened by a half-bottle of port from her former husband’s stock, would mount the stairs, stumble briefly about in the bathroom and, in a gurgle of receding water, in darkness and with a great devastation of springs, land on the bed of his legal paramour. (‘Patwick! You make me feel like Euwo-o-opa!’) So let her. Who’d turned whom into an animal? If this is natural, natural let it be! Her cries were smothered, her protests unheeded.
The swine revenged themselves on Circe: multiplied, enormous, he snuffled, dug, burrowed, and skewered (‘Patwick, you might
shave
!’) flattening, tearing, crushing, mauling, then rolling away to the other end of the bed to remark, ‘I see the hedge needs clipping. Have to see to it. Sloppy!’ For his spirit refused to follow where his flesh engaged. He felt embarrassed afterwards, preferred not to breakfast with her and took to slipping out to a hotel where he was able, as a bonus, to eat all he wanted without hearing remarks about calories.

Tonight he would be taking a vow of Conjugal Chastity, promising ‘to possess his vessel in sanctification and honour’. (Ha! Put a stop to
her
gallop!) Formerly, Knights’ wives had been required to join in the oath – imagine Elsie: a heretic – but that practice had been abolished. Fully professed Knights took vows of celibacy.

Condon had long concluded that Elsie’s appeal for himself had lain in her Protestantism. Bred to think it perilous, he had invested her and it with a risky phosphorescence. Which had waned. Naturally enough. Marooned, the buoyant Medusa clogs to the consistency of gelatine, and what had Protestantism turned out to be but a set of rules and checks? More etiquette than religion. Elsie got the two mixed up. He doubted that she saw a qualitative difference between adultery and failure to stand up when a woman came into the room.

‘A bahbawwian,’ she’d start in, the minute some poor decent slob like Hennessy was well out the door. ‘The man’s a bahbawwian! You’ve buwwied me among the beastly Hottentots!’