Under the Rose (4 page)

Who did attend the trial and visit her afterwards was the glass-eyed man. ‘All Ireland is with you,’ he said, ‘all true Irish Socialist Republicans.’ Was this a joke? Did the eye gleam with irony? Or had he meant that her act was public property, whether she liked this or not, and despite the fact that her victim had not been Dizzy’s target at all?
That
was to have been a building and there was to have been a telephone warning to avoid loss of life. Maggy thought this ridiculous. A war was a war and everyone knew how those warnings went wrong. The police delayed acting so as to rouse public feeling against the bombers – for how much anger could be generated if explosions hurt nobody, going off with the mild
bang of a firework display? Property owners would be indignant, but the police needed wider support than theirs. Yes, the police were undoubtedly the culprits. They bent rules. Detective Inspector Coffee had been bending rules when he told the nerve-shot Sean that he’d put the word about in Irish pubs that Sean was an informer unless he became one. An old police trick! It had landed men in a ditch with a bullet in the neck before now. How many had Detective Inspector Coffee nudged that way? How many more would he? None, because Maggy had got him with Dizzy’s bomb.

‘For personal reasons,’ she told Glass Eye.

‘It’s
what
you did that counts.’

What she had done astounded her. She had been like one of those mothers who find the sudden strength to lift lorries and liberate their child. Unthinkingly, almost in a trance, she had phoned the number given her by Rosheen and asked for an appointment. She had information of interest, she promised, and evidence to back it up. Could she bring it round at once? Where she’d got the number? Oh, please, she didn’t want to say this on the phone. ‘
They
may be listening, watching. Maybe I’m paranoid but I’ve got caught up in something terrifying. By chance.’

Her genuinely shaky voice convinced him and he proved more guileless than she could have believed for she had gone to the meeting fearful of being frisked by attendant heavies. But no. There were no preliminaries. She got straight to the man himself.

‘Detective Inspector Coffee?’

He was the sandy-haired chap all right. Perhaps he had recognized her voice on the phone? She handed him a bag. There were documents on top of the device which was primed to go off when touched.

‘I brought you papers. You’ll see what they are. I’m afraid I’m a bit rattled. Nausea. Could I find a loo?’

He showed her the way, then walked back into his room. She
was two flights down the stairs, when she heard the explosion. Oddly – she had expected her fake nausea to become real – she felt nothing but elation. There were shattering noises, shouts, a bell. She thought: that’s put an end to his smile, his assurance, his smug, salary-drawing, legal murder. The word registered then and, seeing him in her mind’s eye blown apart, she began to sweat. The smell was pungent when she reached the outer door where a policeman stopped her.

‘You’ll demand political status?’ asked the glass-eyed man. ‘Go on hunger strike until they grant it.’

‘Political?’

He was impatient, the visit nearly over. A group in another wing of the prison were all set to strike. He was planning publicity which would have more impact if she joined in. ‘Listen, love,’ he said, ‘you’re political or what are you?’

Political? The notion exhilarated. Old songs. Solidarity. We shall overcome. In gaol, as in church, that sort of language seemed to work. On a snap decision, she agreed and, in after-image, the gleam of his eye pinned her to the definition. As she grew weaker, her weathercock mind froze at North-North-East. The strike gave purpose to her days and, like the falling sparrow’s, her pain became a usable statistic. ‘Get involved,’ commanded an ad in the
Irish News
which the glass-eyed man brought on a subsequent visit. ‘
They
did.’ A list of hunger-strikers included Maggy’s name.

Her mind was flickering. Sharp-edged scenes faltered and she wondered whether thin people like herself had less stamina than others. It was too soon, surely, to be so weak? She had a fantasy – some of the time it was a conviction – that her lover from San Francisco had come and that they had done together all the things she – no: he – had always wanted to do. Like a drowning person’s flash vision of a lifetime, a whole erotic frieze unrolled with convincing brilliance in her mind. Sensory deprivation was supposed to make you hallucinate, she remembered, but confused this false prison visitor
with real ones. His eyes gleamed like glass. ‘Sentient,’ he had said of himself and ‘cold’ of her, but her memory of him was bright like ice and cold. She
was
cold. It was part of her condition. And her mouth was dry. In her fantasy – or reality? – he offered her an icicle to suck.

‘Don’t talk,’ said someone, ‘save your saliva.’

Now her lover was lying naked and wounded beside her and offered her his wounds to moisten her lips, but they too were dry and not as food and drink to her at all.

Vitamins and hormones were being used up.

This was the prison doctor talking now. He had checked her blood and urine and felt it his duty to warn her that irreversible effects could occur.

‘Jaundice,’ warned the doctor.

‘Golden, gilded skin,’ said her lover. ‘Here,’ he presented her with a golden potato chip. ‘Eat this for me.’

‘Eat,’ said the screw.

‘Do yourself a favour,’ said the doctor.

Maggy put the chip in her mouth. It was dry. She couldn’t swallow it. It revived her nausea.

Diego? He hasn’t been in touch? Well, but that’s his way, isn’t it? He can just drop out of sight, then come back later, bubbling with good humour and gifts. He’s so good-natured one has to forgive him. Of course he trades on that. I did see him recently, as it happens. Mmm. About two weeks ago and a funny thing happened then – funny things do when one is with him, don’t you find? Or maybe it’s he who makes them seem funny because he enjoys a laugh so much. He was giving me a lift home to have dinner with his wife and Mercedes, the little girl. Yes, she’s ten now and bright as a button, a bit spoilt I’m afraid. Well, you’d expect Diego to spoil a daughter, wouldn’t you? Of course he’s in love with her and I must say she is a lovely creature. What was I going to tell you? Oh, about the supermarket. Well, Marie had asked him to stop and pick up some mangoes – you’ve never met
her
, have you? Am I putting my foot in it? Sorry. I know you’re much older friends of Diego’s than I am – but that’s just the trouble, isn’t it? You belong to the days when he was with Michèle and he has never felt able to present friends from those years to Marie. It’s his delicacy. Another husband wouldn’t give a damn. Hard on old friends. But you know what he says: ‘How can I tell my wife “Here are my friends, X and Y, whom I’ve known for ten years but never brought home until now”?’ In a way you can see his point. He neglected Marie awfully during all that time. Excluded her from his social life. You’d be a reminder of his bad behaviour. It would be different if they’d gone through with the divorce. His good nature prevented that. He couldn’t bring himself to leave her and now he can’t
bring himself to leave Michèle, and so someone’s always getting the short end of the stick.

I was telling you about the mangoes. Well, we went into the market to get them and it was one of those places in the
banlieue
where they weren’t used to selling exotic fruit. Nobody knew the price and a girl was sent off with the ones Diego had picked to try and find the manager. Then she got waylaid or went to the phone and didn’t come back. The woman at the check-out shouted on the intercom,
‘Où sont les mangues de Monsieur?’
At this, Diego began to fall about laughing and then everyone in the shop began to see the thing as a gag. They began shouting at each other: ‘His what?’ – ‘His mangoes!’ – ‘Lost his mangoes, has he? Oh that must be painful!’ – ‘What? Mangoes? Oh, unmentionable!’ And so forth. It was pretty mindless and any other customer might have been annoyed, but not Diego. He was delighted. ‘They come from my country,’ he told the girl and when he did I noticed that he
looks
like a mango: reddish and yellowish and a touch wizened. ‘I’m half Red Indian,’ he told her and it was obvious that if his mangoes hadn’t turned up just then in a great burst of hilarity, he would have started getting off with her. He has a great way with him and he knows how to take the French. He keeps just that little touch of foreignness while speaking very racy Parisian and knowing everything there is to know about life here. They love that. He loves their ways and that makes them able to feel they can love his.

When we got back into the car, he started telling me of how once, years ago, when he first met Michèle, he was walking through the old Halles market, with her on one arm and Marie on the other, on their way to dine at an oyster bar, and one of those hefty lorry-drivers who used to bring in loads of produce began pointing at tiny Diego walking between these two splendid,
plantureuses
women – they looked like assemblages of melons, according to Diego – and, pretending to wipe his brow, raised his cap and roared: ‘What a constitution!’
Quelle santé!
It
was like the mango joke. Diego attracts such comments. When he told me the story, I got the idea that
that
could have been what started off his affaire with Michèle.

Because dear old Diego
is
a bit of a
macho
, isn’t he, in the nicest possible way? ‘
Moi, j’aime la femme
,’ he says. Awfully Latin! It sounds impossible in English. I mean you can’t say it really: ‘I love woman’ sounds absurd. And if you say ‘women’ in the plural it sounds cheap. But what he means is the essence of woman, something he sees in every woman, even in his mother and, of course, especially in little Mercedes, right from the moment she was born. ‘She was a woman,’ he’ll tell you – well, he probably
has
told you. He talks about her all the time. ‘From the moment she was born she was a woman, a coquette, a flirt.’

As I was saying, he has spoilt her a bit – I tell a lie, he has spoilt her a great deal. In fact something happened later that evening which pointed up the dangers of this and was really quite upsetting. I don’t know whether Diego will draw the lesson from it.

You haven’t met Mercedes either, have you? You’d really have to see her to understand. You see, in a way, Diego is right. She
is
remarkably bright and perfectly bilingual because of his having always spoken Spanish to her. She
is
like a coquettish little princess stepped out of a canvas by Goya or Velázquez. This is partly because of her clothes which come from boutiques on the Faubourg Saint Honoré. Ridiculous clothes: hand-tucked muslin, silk, embroidered suede. I don’t know who they were intended for, but Diego buys them. He buys her exactly the same sort of thing as he used to buy Michèle, and there is Marie in her denims with a daughter wearing a mink jacket at the age of ten. I don’t know whether she approves or not. Their relationship is odd. Well, most marriages seem that way to me. What do I know of yours, for instance? Married people always strike me as treating each other a bit like bonsai trees. They nip and clip and train
each other into odd, accommodating shapes, then sometimes complain about the result. Or one partner can go to endless lengths of patience with the other and then be obdurate about some trifling thing. It’s a mystery. I watch with interest. I think you’re all a dying species but fun to watch – like some product of a very ancient, constricting, complex civilization. Perhaps that’s why I’m a gossip? As a feminist, I am in the same position as the Jesuits who watched and noted down the ways of the old Amerindians while planning to destroy them.

Diego claims sometimes to be part Amerindian. Maybe he is. Some of them used to cut out their victims’ hearts with stone knives, used they not? I’m not sure whether
he
may not have blood on his hands. Metaphorical blood. After all, he’s a member of the oligarchy of that repressive regime. It’s true that he has been twenty-five years in Paris, reads the left-wing press and has picked up a radical vocabulary – but where does his money come from? Well, one doesn’t probe but one can’t help wondering. Another complexity. The troubling thing about sexists and members of old, blood-sodden castes is that they can be so delicate in their sensibilities and this does throw one. I keep meeting people like that here in Paris. It seems to draw them as honey draws wasps. Am I being the Protestant spinster now? Forthright and angular and killing the thing I love as I lean over it with my frosty breath? In delighted disapproval? In disapproving delight. I mustn’t kill this little story which I’m working my way round to telling you. It’s about Mercedes and Michèle’s dog. Yes, but first, have you got the background clear in your minds? Diego is so jokey and jolly and often – to be frank – drunk, that you mightn’t.
Your
dealings with him were always social, weren’t they? You’d meet in some smart night club or restaurant and, I suppose, dance till dawn with money no object and champagne flowing. That’s how I imagine it – how Diego’s led me to imagine it. Am I wrong? No? Good. Well, but, you see, that’s only one side of Diego: the Don Diego swaggering
side. There’s also the plainer homebody. Did you know that Diego is simply the Spanish for James? I didn’t either. Think of him as ‘Jim’ or ‘Jacques’ coming home in the dishwater-dawn light from those evenings to the surburban house where he’d parked Marie and the child.

Marie’s
my
friend, by the way. I knew her before I did him. She had gone back to university to study law and we met in a feminist student group. Well, what would you have her do all those years while he used the house as a launching pad for his flights of jollification? He brought home the minimum cash – just like any working-class male taking half the budget for his pleasures. She could have left. She didn’t.
There’s
an area of motives which one cannot hope to map.
He
could have left and didn’t. There’s one I
can
map for you. He met Michèle through Marie. In those days she had prettier friends. I do occasionally wonder whether
I
was chosen as being unthreatening? No, no need to protest. I’m trying for accuracy. I like to take hold of as many elements in a situation as I can and I’ve admitted that Diego/Jim fascinates me. He is the Male Chauvinist Pig or Phallocrat seen close up, as I rarely get a chance to see the beast, and I do see his charm. It is his weapon and, when I say I see it, I really mean that I feel him seeing the woman in me. Men don’t, very often. That’s what I mean about Diego’s
amour pour la femme
being non-sexist or sexist in such an all-embracing way that it gets close to universal love. He loves half humanity, half the human race, regardless of age, looks or health. Of course he is
also
a sex-snob and wants to be seen with a girl who does him credit – Michèle. That’s the social side of him. But he responds to femininity wherever he finds it: in his mother, an old beggar woman, me. He’s inescapably kind.

Why didn’t he divorce, you ask? Kindness again. Really. He had fallen in love with Michèle: a tempestuous passion, I gather. They were swept off by it simultaneously, like a pair of flint stones knocking sparks off each other, like two
salamanders sizzling in unison – he tells me about it when Marie’s in the kitchen. He has to tell someone. It was his big experience and he made a mess of it and is still shocked at himself, yet can’t see how he could have done other than he did. What he did was this: he proposed marriage to Michèle, was accepted and, brimful of bliss, looked at poor, blissless Marie and thought how lonely she must be and that he must do something for her. Now here is the part that touches me. He didn’t think in terms of money, as most men would have. He thought in terms of love. He wanted her to have someone to love when he had gone off with Michèle and decided that
he
had better be the one to provide her with a love-object. Can you guess the next move? He made her pregnant. The noble sexist wanted to leave her with a child. Imagine Michèle’s fury. She thought that he had got cold feet about marrying
her
and had cooked up this pretext for backing out. He assured her that he did very much want to marry her but that now he must stay with Marie until the baby was born so that it should be legitimate.

The baby, of course, was Mercedes and he fell in love with
her
at first sight, at first sound, at first touch. He was totally potty about her, obsessed and
at the same time
he was painfully in love with an estranged and furious Michèle on whom he showered guilty, cajoling gifts, spoiling and courting her and putting up with every caprice in an effort to earn back the total love which he had forfeited – she kept telling him – by his sexual treachery.

Those were the years when you knew him – the champagne and dancing years. He and Michèle had not got married and so their relationship became one long, festive courtship and she, from what he says, responded as someone who’s fussed over for years might well be tempted to respond: she became a bit of a bitch. She brought boys home to the flat where he kept her like a queen, stood him up, tormented him and then, between lovers, just often enough to keep him hot for her,
became as loving and playful as they had been in the early days. She was his
princesse lointaine,
radiant with the gleam of loss and old hope and he was romantic about her and probably happier than he admits with the arrangement which kept his loins on fire and fixed his wandering attention on her in whom he was able to find all women: the wife she should have become, the fickle tormentor she had become, his wronged great love and familiar old friend, his Donna Elvira and his spendthrift, nightclub succubus. She was all women except one and that one, to be sure, was Mercedes, the little girl who was growing up in an empty, half-furnished suburban house with a mother who was busy getting her law degree and a father who swept in from time to time with presents from Hamleys and Fouquets and organdie dresses and teddy bears twice her size which made her cry. Every penny he had went on Michèle and Mercedes. I remember that house when it hadn’t a lamp or a table because Marie was damned if she’d spend
her
money on it and he was so rarely there that he never noticed what it did or didn’t have apart from the Aladdin’s Cave nursery in which Mercedes was happy while she was small. Later, at the ages of six and seven and eight, as she began to invite in her friends, she began to colonize the rest of the house and, as she did, he began to furnish it for her. Michèle’s share of his budget shrank as Mercedes’s grew. Shares in his time fluctuated too. He spent more of it at home; friends like you began to see less of him and Michèle had to start finding herself new escorts, not from bitchery but from need. But he would never abandon her completely. He had wasted her marriageable years and now he felt towards her the guilt he had once felt towards Marie. But what can he do? He’s not Christ. He cannot divide up and distribute his body and blood.

He was telling me all this that night on the drive out from Paris and he got so upset that at one stage he stopped the car and walked into a hotel where we had a drink. This made us
late for dinner, but Marie, of course, never complains. Who did complain was Mercedes. It was past her bed-time and she was irritable and sleepy when we arrived. She had waited up because she wanted to have a mango and, besides, Diego had promised her some small present. Right away she started being whingey and angry with me whom she blamed for keeping her Daddy late. Diego was amused, as he is by all Mercedes’s caprices, and kept saying, ‘She’s jealous, you know!’ As though that were something to be proud of! ‘She’s very possessive.’