Under the Rose (32 page)

‘Maids and matrons,’ he roared. ‘Wedded wives f-f-fu-fuck-ck-cking in the f-f-fields. Cuckoo eggs in every nest. Maybe your own spouses are …’

Condon hit him. Before he knew it his fist had shot out and caught the pink, wettish – he felt it wet on his knuckles – nose. Or was the wetness blood? It was. His knuckles were stained with it. The poet had been put on a couch and his collar loosened.

‘He’s OK. Just a nose-bleed.’

‘Head back, Ian, hold your head back.’

‘No, better not. The blood makes you sick. Indigestible. Spit it out. Get us a glass. Thanks. Mind the carpet now.’

‘Hold his nose over the glass. In, man, in. Poke it in.’

‘Get him to a bathroom.’

‘Good thing it happened on this floor. No scandal. How did he get in?’

‘Gate-crasher.’

A Knight walked up to Condon. ‘Come and wash your hands too. He’s all right, drunk, deserved what he got. Do him a world of good.’

Other voices joined in.

‘What was it he said about … Condon’s wife?’

‘Shush!’ And loudly: ‘Someone should have done it long ago. A foul-mouthed fellow, a gurrier.’

‘A fine lesson for him. A low type. You’re a hard man, Condon. A true Knight, haha!’

Surrounded by his fellows, Condon felt his agitation abate into a lapping tide of excitement. Someone must have given him a brandy because, as the ceremony began, a manservant in cotton gloves, tapped him on the arm to recover the empty glass. He gave it to the man and himself to rituals he had been studying for some weeks. This was to be a brief and worldly affair because of the hour and place. Mass would be celebrated in the Order’s chapel next morning. Would he stay? He had intended to but now was not so sure. The panoply of the differing ranks of Knights and monks confused him. All wore crosses recalling the crusades on which knights had gone leaving wives locked in chastity belts. Or was that myth? Had the first Knights been celibate? And had such contraptions been widely used? Very unsanitary, if so. He had seen one once in a museum. Was it the Cluny museum in Paris? He wasn’t sure, reproached himself for not achieving a prayerful mood.
Oh my God, I am heartily sorry for having offended
thee, and I detest my sins above every other evil
… Did he? He did not! He was glad he had pucked that obscene fellow on the gob. Watch what’s happening. You’ll miss your cue. The oath of conjugal chastity brought back figures crouching in a corner of his brain: Terry-the-nig-killer and Elsie. Niggers for that sort began at Liverpool. No holds barred with wives of nigs or Papists. No holds barred with any wives in profligate England. Adultery winked at. Since Henry the Eighth. Ruin seize thee, ruthless king, Confusion on thy banners wait … That was some other …
Would
she? NO. Ah no, she was forty-four – still dirty-minded, though, had violated his privacy in talk with Amanda Shand. Don’t trust, you can’t trust her. Ah God, his knightly honour was a joke, besmirched in advance. Maybe, at this very …

He made to leap up but a hand pulled him back, recalling him to the time and place. ‘Not yet,’ whispered Hennessy, thinking Condon had mistaken the cues printed on the slips of paper which had been handed out. ‘Not till after the hymn.’

Nigs. Knicks. Patrick sank back on his knees. To think she should spoil a moment of such spiritual significance, dragging his soul down to the level of her own. A stain on one Knight’s honour must affect the Order as a whole. Every man responsible for his woman. He had read in the
National Geographic
about adulteresses somewhere in Africa being impaled per vaginam. Punished whereby they had – but the idea was repugnant. Better punish the lover like in
The Cask of Amontillado
. Brick him up. By God if he came home this night and found them at it! Jesus, let them not, because if they … Please, Jesus. He’d have no choice. But. Universally recognized.
Crime passionnel
. Juries let off the husband. And the heavenly jury?
Veni creator spiritus
… The hymn ended and the Knights rose creakily. Not one was under fifty. Patrick’s head reeled and and whirled. Pounded.

‘Well now, let’s toast our new Knight of Honour and Devotion.’ Hennessy led him off.

There was no slipping away. They drank fast and garrulously. At one point Condon was sick. He threw up with decorum, in the lavatory, unknown to any. He ate a peppermint to sweeten his breath. Coming back, he brought the conversation round to Parnell and Kitty O’Shea.

‘The woman was an adulteress.’

‘But was it fair to punish her lover and the millions who depended on him? The course of Irish history might …’

‘You’re forgetting the scandal! The scandal to the souls of those same millions! How could the Church …’

Rounds of drinks waited, marshalled like skittles. Four brandies had been bought for Patrick. The bar was closing but every man wanted to stand his round. Honour obliged.

Suddenly, Condon said he needed to get home. Urgently. His wife was unwell, subject to giddy spells, and might not hear the phone.

‘Can I borrow your car?’ he asked Hennessy. ‘I’ll get it back to you tomorrow.’

Hennessy gave him the keys.

Patrick took them and rushed out of the hotel, started the car without warming the engine and raced hell-for-leather out of Dublin and into the hedgy embrace of country roads. Here he was forced by an attack of nausea to pull in and found himself, out of the car, weeping in a ditch and embracing a thorn tree. ‘Elsie,’ he groaned, to his own astonishment, ‘Elsie!’ He began to roar and bellow like a bull, filling and emptying his lungs with desolate twanging air. After some minutes he got back into the car, feeling wet and so paralytic with cold he could hardly touch his fingers around the stick-shift. He put on the heater and drove in shivering sobriety back across the mountains, concentrating on the road and reciting prayers to calm his nerves. ‘… disease of desire,’ he whispered mechanically, ‘to possess his vessel in sanctification and honour, not in the disease of desire as do the Gentiles who know not God …’

As he turned into his own winding drive, darkly flanked by rhododendrons, he got a glimpse of Elsie’s lighted window and her silhouette, heavier than he had remembered it, closing the curtains. He rounded the last curve and came on the battered yellow Austin Healey which had been parked earlier in the public-house yard. Standing by its nose – he must have been looking at the motor, for the bonnet was raised – like a moth in the glare of Patrick’s headlights, was a man in a check sports coat: Terry. Patrick drove straight for him, as though following a traffic signal in the man’s gullet. He could see into the pulsing throat and even the flap on the uvula glistening against the dark interior. There was a thump. Patrick’s head hit the headrest behind him. The man fell forward on to the Volkswagen then, on the rebound, into the unbonneted engine of his own car. Heels up, arms flopping, he was carried backwards as the two cars pursued their course into a tree. The Austin Healey buckled, the man’s limbs crunched within the integument of his clothes. Patrick – although he was to prove to be suffering from minor concussion – felt nothing.

Moments later, Elsie found his cloaked figure, bending over the wreckage, howling in the elated, almost musical accents of dogs on a moonlit night. ‘I
did
it. Jesus, I did it.’

That version never got out.

Connections rallied. Witnesses testified that the Englishman had been drinking heavily in the pub. They surmised he must have lost his way and strayed up Condon’s driveway in search of the cross-roads. In all likelihood, he would have neglected to turn on his lights. That Condon should round the bend of his own driveway at an incautious speed was understandable at so late an hour in a gentleman tired after a long drive and eager to get home to his bed. A regrettable accident.

Terry’s friends waked him jovially, pleased with the excuse for a little extra drinking. ‘After all’, said Amanda Shand, ‘he was only a bird of passage.’ The Condons, she has heard, were getting on together as never before. He had taken her for a change of scene to Malta and
she
had sent Amanda a card saying she was ‘having a whale of a time’.

At dusk, Mr Lacy, the keeper, eager for his tea, rang a bell to chase dawdlers home. They were hard to flush out, because the park was dotted with gazebos – ‘follies’ built in the Famine days to provide work – and if you hid in one you could always get out later by climbing the tall iron gates. There were places too, where footholes had been gouged in the perimeter wall.

‘I’ll have yez summonsed!’ Mr Lacy’s peaked cap sliced through the dimness. Authority shone from his brass-buttons. ‘I’ll tell yeer Mammies.’ There was a by-law – but what was a by-law? – forbidding anyone to linger in the locked, possibly perilous park.

Mysterious goings-on had been reported. A girl from Teresa Dunne’s school had fainted when a man did some momentous thing, appearing to her out of a bush. The
gardai
had come, but then the matter was hushed up and the girl cowed into discretion.

‘I’ll tell you what she saw,’ Mrs Malahide offered Teresa. ‘If you like.’ They were in the Malahides’ drawing room, and Teresa, whose mother had sent her over with a cake, was waiting to be given back the plate. You couldn’t trust Mrs Malahide to return it later. She was a bit scatty, a Protestant, and, according to some, ‘a gentlewoman, though no lady’. She would say anything and was, intermittently and dangerously, Teresa’s mother’s friend.

‘Well?’

Teresa was torn. She was reluctant to learn secrets from Mrs Malahide, who would rob them of their versatile glee. Not knowing kept open a shiver of possibilities – but
Mrs Malahide was a belittler. She could shrink the Wars of Troy. ‘Men fighting over a bitch,’ was how she once described those.

‘Don’t mind her,’ people advised. ‘She’s that way because of her lip.’

She had a harelip, without which she would have been a beauty – would have stayed in England and married her own sort rather than poor, decent Jack Malahide. Instead, here she was in an Irish village, cut off by the war and living, said gossips, on ‘the smell of an oil rag’. Teresa herself had seen the grey, scummy broth of sheep’s lung which Mrs Malahide left on the stove for her children’s meal when she and her husband took off for the pub. He, a parson’s son, had served in the colonial service and now made simple toys which people bought because the Emergency had cut off supplies of better ones. Bright and two-dimensional, his hobbyhorses bounded up the village street between the legs of four- and five-year-olds whose sisters held skipping ropes by the snug, beechwood handles he had painstakingly turned on his lathe. He had a marvelling smile and worshipped Mrs Malahide.

‘Poor Jack,’ sighed his cronies. Yet they liked her for her spirit and because, when not blasting the sour grapes of life, she was, said Teresa’s mother, ‘great value’. Mrs Dunne, while deploring her friend’s morals, hailed in her that fine contempt for convention which titillates the Irish.

‘She’s great company,’ she acknowledged, ‘and hasn’t a pick of human respect.’

That was what worried Teresa. For how reconcile the ideals of her school nuns with tolerance of Mrs Malahide, who must be the most brazen thing alive? Lipstick ran up the crack of her harelip, and contamination oozed from her. She had a moustache yellow from chainsmoking, and today – Sunday – her feet lazed in cinders which had spilled past the confines of her fenderless hearth. Drifts of turf-ash had possibly settled in her hair, which was like the plumage of an old hen. Both
hair and ash had orange streaks, like fossil memories of fire.

Scattered on the floor were the
Sunday Pictorial
and
News of the World
, banned English papers which had been smuggled past the Customs inside copies of
The Catholic Herald
. Teresa read the headlines with an affronted eye: SCOUTMASTER FOUND TROUSERLESS … A fold concealed where DECEIVED MISTRESS CHOPS OFF LOVER’S …

To quell the riot in her mind, she told herself that perhaps no more had been chopped off than the lover’s tie. But no: not in that paper, or Bunty Malahide wouldn’t trouble to smuggle it in. Dirt was what she liked. Scandal.
Her
mind was beyond description.

‘Impure,’ the nuns would have said, but the word fell short. Failing to anticipate Mrs Malahide, they had sent Teresa forth into the world, unfit to cope and were perhaps no fitter themselves. Tender rituals absorbed them, and most of last term had been spent planning the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, for which every girl had been required to buy a ten-shilling lily. Those whose families found this a strain might, the nuns conceded, substitute a chrysanthemum. But the concession was reluctant. Each donor was to say ‘O Mary I give thee the lily of my heart! Be thou its guardian forever,’ then present a bloom securely tipped with waterproof paper, lest sap stain her white uniform skirt.

‘You could hardly’, the nuns’ smile was rueful, ‘say “I give thee the chrysanthemum of my heart.”’

‘It was Lacy.’ Mrs Malahide had grown impatient. ‘He exposed himself to her. I don’t know why your mothers don’t tell you the facts of life. Poor bugger’s been sacked. I suppose his family will starve. Do you’ – she drew greedily on a cigarette – ‘take my meaning? We’re not talking about the exposition of the Sacrament!’ On her lips the words sizzled into blasphemy.

Teresa gasped. Outrage released a babyish prickle of tears. Turning to hide this, she was once again assaulted by the
headline CHOPS OFF … What?
That!
What else did they keep harping on Sunday after Sunday in the
News of the World
?

‘Why will Mr Lacy’s family starve?’ She made fast for the periphery of the story.

‘You tell me!’

In exasperation, Mrs Malahide drew on her cigarette, then emptied her lungs:
pfff
! Smoke coiled, and her hare-lip was very visible. ‘It was his penis,’ she told Teresa. ‘He showed it to her. Can you tell me why that would make a girl of her age – nearly your age – faint? How old are you now? Twelve? Thirteen? Haven’t you ever seen your father without his clothes? Or your brother? Well then? It’s a necessary part of nature as you’ll soon discover. I blame those nuns for poisoning your minds. Sick sisters. Why hide things – unless they’re being hypocritical, which I have no doubt they are!’ And Bunty Malahide began to tell how Father Creedon – a man crippled with arthritis – was enjoying the sexual favours of all the nuns in the local convent. Like a cock in a barnyard or a victorious stag. Exciting herself, and possibly forgetting to whom she was talking, she worked up conviction. She always downed a glass or two of Tullamore Dew while reading the Sunday papers.

Teresa was fired by battle-frenzy. The abuse of adult privilege outraged her, and the maligning of the nuns called for punishment. ‘Bear witness to your religion,’ she had been taught two years ago, in confirmation class, but the occasion had not arisen until now. Avenge, O Lord, those slaughtered saints whose bones … The spirit of old wars curdled her blood. She could feel this happen: clots blocking the flow as they did in anatomy charts. Evil was incarnate before her. Her eyes felt squinty, and the air glowed red.

The funny side would strike her later: for Mrs Malahide’s flights of fancy would have been brought down to earth by a single look at Mother Dolours’ dowager’s hump, or at pale
little Mother Crescentia who flew into such passions about ‘men keeping women from the altar’. Quite suddenly, while putting a theorem on the blackboard, this meek nun would swing around, stab the air with chalk, and launch a polemic so ahead of its time that, years later, when the issue became a live one, few of the girls she had harangued would recall her yearning to be a priest. At first, the idea was too odd to shock, and by the time it did Mother Crescentia’s bones would be mouldering in the very graveyard whose soil, if you believed Bunty Malahide, was white with those of strangled babies sired by Father Creedon.

‘Why else’, Bunty wanted to know, ‘would nuns wear those bulky clothes? It’s to hide their pregnancies! Holy Mothers forsooth! You don’t think he goes there to hear confessions?’

‘She needs a gag!’ Teresa told her mother later. She would have cheerfully watched Mrs Malahide burn at the stake. At the very least, the Englishwoman should be forced to eat her own unwholesome words. Instead, magnified by laughter, they mocked Teresa when she rushed off, feeling every bit as assaulted as the girl in the park must have done when confronted by Mr Lacy.

For weeks the memory rampaged on. She had not tried to argue. What would have been the point? Bunty Malahide loved a fight and the one way to hush her would have been to agree with her. Teresa couldn’t. That would have been a betrayal of sweet-cheeked Mother Fidelia, who had made her pupils promise to profess their faith without false diffidence and arm themselves against ridicule. Mother F., an ardent and pretty nun, inflamed her pupils, and for a whole term Teresa had day-dreamed about her, imagining shared heroics and intimacies so private that when the dentist pulled one of her teeth she went without gas lest she babble them out under its influence. For a while, even thinking of Mother F. made her skin tingle.

What could have possessed Mr Lacy? Had he perhaps been taken short and having a pee?

The story of his fall must be true, though, for he was now doing odd jobs in the Dunnes’ garden, where he looked old and bald without his uniform peaked cap. And maybe it was also true that his family was hungry, for one night when Teresa looked out her window, she saw him by moonlight stealing cauliflowers and putting them into a sack. Poor Lacy! She remembered his old threat, ‘I’ll have yez summonsed,’ and it struck her that she could do just that to him. Not that she would! The precariousness of self – he had lost some of his – was too upsetting. Earlier, she had seen him shelter from the rain under the empty sack, and his head had looked no bigger than a fist. Falling asleep, she dreamed that someone had exposed Mother Fidelia’s poor, cropped head. Nuns gave up their crowning glory when they took the veil.

Her mother had had a row with Bunty Malahide over what she’d said to Teresa, and then made it up.

‘How could you?’ reproached Teresa.

But Mrs Dunne said you had to make allowances. Bunty’s life had not gone well. That was why she lived here. The Irish were good-hearted, unlike her own sort, who despised her for marrying down. ‘She’s good-hearted herself,’ argued Mrs Dunne. ‘Look how kind she is to Greta.’

Greta was German and in need of kindness, now that Germany was losing the war. The map pins with which Teresa’s father marked Allied and Axis movements had reversed direction, and the march round and round the sofa, with which he and her brother Pat hailed the theme music before the BBC news, had acquired new swagger. ‘
Léro léro lillubuléro
,’ crowed Pat, lifting high his small, fat knees. Sometimes he banged two spoons together. He was six. ‘
Lillubuléro bullenalà!
’ The tune was Irish, and a lot of our men were fighting with the Allies, so, although we were neutral, and miffed by Mr Churchill’s
threatening to seize our ports, we wanted his side to win. Pat planned to kill Hitler when he grew up.

You tried to hide such thoughts from Greta, though, and even Bunty, who hung out the Union Jack when Englishness welled up in her, refrained from trampling too brutally on Greta’s sore feelings. With victory in sight, she managed – most of the time – to be forbearing.

‘Well, she trampled on
mine
!’ Teresa blushed. The word ‘feelings’ reminded her of Mother F., and her anger at Bunty Malahide mingled with shame over a treason of her own. Queerly, at the height of her crush on the nun, she had felt impelled to write a mocking verse about her and to circulate it among her friends. The risk had excited her, as if she half hoped to be caught. Childishly, the jingle began with the words ‘The dark witch of Loreto’, and, as it went from desk to desk, someone changed ‘witch’ to ‘bitch’. That brought Teresa to her senses, and she snatched back her rhyme. She could be expelled. Girls
had
been for less – for trespassing in the nuns’ part of the convent or spying on the pool where they took sea baths in long, cotton dresses. Disrespect for the ‘brides of Christ’ was a sacrilege, and she spent nervous days wondering if a copy of her jingle had escaped her.

The reality of her fear freed her. She now felt only pity for Mother Fidelia, stuck in her make-believe – which, it occurred to Teresa, was not unlike the games she and her classmates had played when they were small. Using pennyleaves for currency, they had sold field daisies for eggs and brown dockleaf blossoms for tea. Grass became string and rhubarb leaves wrapping paper. What difference was there between that and offering the Virgin the lily of your heart? The ‘brides of Christ’ didn’t even eat in public. If you gave one of them a sweet, she kept it for later. Everything was for later. They did nothing now, which was why it was so unfair of Mrs Malahide to pretend they did.

‘If I were you,’ said Teresa’s mother, ‘I’d talk less about
feelings! Remember how you hurt Greta’s at Christmas?’

How forget? It had been the talk of the village, after a dirndl-skirted Greta, her queenly braids done up in a crown, had given a children’s party. As if Christmas were something on which Germans had a special claim, she had invited all the small local children to celebrate it, and, in the end, most parents had decided to let them go. After all, the woman was not thought to be a Nazi, and she and her non-German husband were desperate to have babies but couldn’t. Let her have ours for an afternoon, said the villagers magnanimously. Jack Malahide supplied a bran tub to be groped in for prizes, and Mrs Dunne sent Teresa to help and to keep an eye on Pat, who was a bit of a handful.

He was also the child whom Greta knew best, so she asked him to start things off by inviting a little girl to dance: a mistake. Pat, when shy, sat on the ground. Plonk. Backside down. There was no budging him.

Greta didn’t understand this. Hunkering down to coax him, she brought the fun to a standstill, and shushed the other children, who became bored. There was – people said afterwards – a German stubbornness to this, and a barren woman’s pedantry. She kept on and on at Pat, while the others fidgeted and pinched each other and a boy grabbed the baby Jesus from the tasteful German crib. It was when someone pulled the plug on the fairy lights and several children began to cry that Teresa lost her head. ‘Pat,’ she cajoled, ‘ask Annie to dance. You’ll never grow up and kill Hitler if you’re afraid of a small girl.’