Under the Rose (6 page)

The captain – fastidious, with a complexion like raspberry fool – had a smile of great sweetness. From teeth that seemed to have been overlaid with a film of honey. A blond patina – nicotine lichen – clung to his fingers. Hair and moustache were ginger still. A golden lad. He brought scope and a festive dash to the management of local affairs, adoring to organize auctions of garden produce or a charity fête with bunting on his lawns. He treated women with gallantry, called them ‘the gentle sex’, and showed for his own a preference to which scandal did not attach. Neighbours, meeting him with his mother on daily walks, noted that, of the two, she – once toasted at the hunt balls of half Leinster – had now the more military demeanour. Her voice wielded authority, her grip vigour, and she was rarely without an instrument for beheading ragweed blossoms, poking pennyleaves from walls or earthing up wasps’ nests.

He retired early to join her on their small estate which he currycombed with fervour. In shining gumboots, shears in hand, he waded through sway-tipped meadows with two handymen at his beck. Like himself, these fellows liked to build pigeon coops, lay stepping-stones or adjust sundials. Between five and six he went in to drink tea – Indian and China – with his mother. Sometimes they tuned to the news, vaguely sipping the aromas of lost empire. Their own concerns absorbed them and it was a shock to find these also threatened. Prices crept up while pensions lagged. The handymen left one day for factory work in Dublin, and professional gardeners, who seemed to be all one could get now, demanded an alarming wage.

Eggs, fruit, tomato plants and dung were offered on a hoarding placed at the lodge gate and sold from the front door as he and his mother, with the ingenuity of their kind, staved off decision. Yet, in the end, like a cosily entrenched weed, he had to tear himself up. He ran an ad in the
Irish Times:
‘Retired Brit. Officer (Dunkirk, Tripoli), RC, some French, seeks congenial post. Anything considered.’

The solution that turned up was just the ticket. A devout Catholic with an old soldier’s savvy and organizing ability was
the
man to guide pilgrimages to Lourdes. The salary was small but the job, being seasonal, allowed him to spend half the year at home with his mother. Then, as he remarked waggishly to her, it would bring him the stir and opportunity for mild military bullying that had been lacking since his retirement.

His parties did not include charity cases or invalids – the nursing Orders saw to them – but paying pilgrims who visited the shrine from piety or to ask for some Intention and were usually of the better type. Less better than the captain himself, they enjoyed and looked up to him. For his part, he took an interest in them and grew good at guessing the rub or worry that lay behind each trip. Some were offering it up for the conversion of a free-thinking relative or an alcoholic. Others were barren wives. Most frequent were the modest but hopeful women civil servants, female bank clerks or school mistresses who were going to ask the Virgin for the husband it was so hard to find in the rural regions to which they were posted. These were toughish, thirty-fivish, die-hard Dianas and, although the captain was in the position of a fox watching preparations for bloodsports, he had to admire their grit. Through living without men they had become mannish, played poker, drank gin together and talked – deplorably – in an endless and anguished gush, as though each were at pains to reconcile the waiting maiden in herself with the harpy she had been obliged to develop in order to protect her. With awe – recalling how often his mother had been photographed
just as she was for
Country Life
or
The Irish Tatler and Sketch
– he assisted at their efforts at femininity. Chiffon squares from the Galeries Lafayette wavered on the gaunt masts of their tailor-mades; Rouge Baiser caked off inexpert lips, and the straw hats they bought at the beachwear counter and deposited on their heads for church visiting filled him with such distress that he could have wept for them. He had a flair for clothes himself, having often done wonders with a table-runner and an old topee at houseparty charades, where his impersonations of well known female actresses were certs to bring down the house. Yet, from diffidence, he refrained from advising. A full-scale Pygmalion operation could hardly have been conducted within the scope of their ten-day tour. Anything less, he saw, would merely make matters worse. He would have liked to help these lame dogs find and cross their stile, for he had always been a man of quick sympathy, and was touched by the dual glow of hope with which they greeted France: country of the Virgin and of Aphrodite.

‘Our Lady doesn’t want us to approach her with long faces,’ he would say in their defence if an older woman made a cutting comment. ‘We can worship through joy.’

After his first season’s guiding, he became as much at home with the pious lingo of his parties as he had once been with military jargon. He took to distributing blessed rosaries and pastilles of dehydrated Lourdes water among veteran friends, pulling them out of his waistcoat pocket at dinners with a feeling that this was akin to showing the flag. He had become convinced of the need for propagating the faith by the irreligion he saw in France. ‘Things look bad on the Continent,’ he told his mother and her neighbours, returning from his pilgrimages with little bulletins as he had once done from the Front. ‘Churches empty!’ One day, as his touring bus was held up by a demonstration on the boulevard Antoine in Paris, he surveyed the crowd through his window. ‘Bally Reds!’ he told his pilgrims. ‘Put on a pretty poor show! Listen: they’re
singing two different anthems! Still,’ he peered ardently about, ‘I see a lot of fine looking young chaps out there! Poor Marianne!’ He was glad to get back to Lourdes whose clockwork ceremonies consoled him as did the scale on which it was run. A more efficient army. Still, in the older, ‘native’ part of the town, he could not help noticing a couple of hammers and sickles chalked impertinently on walls. ‘We need counter publicity,’ he told his flock. ‘If we could point to a couple of A1 miracles, it would take those Commies down a peg!’

Two more guiding seasons rattled by with the brisk monotonous rhythm of the touring buses which told on his ankles and, although his spirit did not waver, his breath grew faintly sour. His health suffered from the food in cheap pensions which he was obliged to substitute regularly for the hotels booked by the agency. This was standard practice. Guides were underpaid and the game without perks would simply not have been worth the candle. He disliked such manœuvres. They, and the expenditure of sympathy required by his interchangeable charges, slowly bled him, so that off-seasons became convalescence periods.

Then his mother began to fail. She withdrew herself so slowly that her death, at the end of his third season, was simply confirmation of a forefelt loss. The house, empty now and more of a problem than ever – since he had only one pension to count on – tormented and distracted him from his mourning so that, feeling guilty, he suffered even more. Yet he could not bear to sell it, although the drains were bad, rewiring urgent, the roof sagged and moss, soft as old silk, was creeping, loop after loop, like a crocheted shawl, over the hump of the gable. He could not afford a caretaker but friends discovered a handsome, deficient young man who, in return for board and lodging, would look after the place. Suddenly shy of his own house, the captain got a job in the next off-season taking skiing parties to Switzerland and for eighteen months was hardly home at all. Now and then it
occurred to him that, with the young man’s help, he could run a chicken farm or take paying guests, save his house and give up the guiding. But each time he thought of it, the young man’s mild, beautiful, mad eyes flashed in front of his vision and he rejected the idea.

The last group on the last pilgrimage of his eighteen-month stint was a small one and the captain got to know them better than usual. Three sisters were the core of the party: the Miss Laceys from Sligo with whom he played bridge and pretended to flirt. He could tell that this was as much masculine attention as they had ever commanded, and they had not reached Lourdes at all before he had sensed, loneliness having quickened his apprehension of such things, that they were going to pray for husbands.

‘Daddy’, Miss Kitty Lacey told him, ‘died last year.’

Frisky as gun dogs at the season’s start, they were emerging from a year’s mourning.

They lived in deep country, he found, in unrelieved idleness: a bickering family which had carried childhood games into pre-middle age. (They still, they admitted, liked to make toffee and had a Christmas tree with secret presents.) They played tennis and croquet and clock golf on the lawn. Dance? They loved to and had given ‘hops’ in the front room, rolling back the carpet and inviting Daddy and a few of his younger friends – until last year. All three belonged to the local tennis and mountaineering clubs and
all three
took continental holidays together. They even played bridge, as now with the captain, sitting at the same table. What man would have the courage to drive a wedge between them? That none had might be guessed from the unwavering hockey-field voices. They were friendly and crossed muscular legs with nonchalance. Maisie was forty, Kitty thirty-five and Jenny, the baby, thirty-two. It was on their passports. Unabused but a trifle neglected like that of nuns, their skin had the firm, unaromatic texture of linen long preserved in drawers. The captain,
who would be free in ten days – after this tour he would have six months in which to tend his estate and decide about his future – watched them with understanding and an occasional stab of horror. (The same sensuous fascination froze him when the post-mistress at home larded his letters with her gummy spittle, rummaging with lubricated finger for the envelope on which a little extra postage must be paid.) The sisters were not identical. The eldest, either more intelligent or merely more resigned, had, visibly, set herself to cultivate inner resources. She had learned French, tutored by an Irish priest who had studied in Belgium, and all through the trip was to be seen, in lounges after dinner, fingering her way down the columns of
France Soir.
The captain, remembering country aunts who had died in maidenly loneliness akin to madness, pitied the Miss Laceys. Kitty and Jenny’s noisy laughter – empty vessels – had a desperate note and he had seen them sidle with provocative demureness around French railway officials who responded with icy courtesy.

‘Wouldn’t you think that trio would have the sense to divide up?’ Mrs O’Keefe, an elderly widow who had been three times to Lourdes – it was the nicest way she knew of taking a holiday – was interested in the Miss Laceys’ predicament.

The captain said something about the Miss Laceys being nice girls.

‘Isn’t that the shame of it!’ she agreed with him. She sighed: ‘Mind you, three at one go is a tall order even for Our Lady of Lourdes! It’d have to be a real miracle!’

On the return journey, a lightning plane strike stranded the party in Paris. A couple of the older ladies dreaded the crossing by boat and as nobody, it turned out, was pressed for time or money, the group voted to spend a few days at the Hôtel de la Gare.

‘Captain! Captain! Maybe we’ll have our miracle now!’ Mrs O’Keefe hissed exultantly up the well of the stairs as he descended for dinner. An expert pilgrim, she got dressed faster than anyone and posted herself on the route to the dining-room, ready to pounce on him. ‘Look! Look!’ She nodded at the bar.

The captain saw the three Miss Laceys sitting on high stools, laughing over gin fizzes with two men. He raised his eyebrows. ‘
Well!
How did that happen?’ The men looked nice chaps, and the sisters were chattering nineteen to the dozen. Miss Kitty Lacey’s laugh ricocheted across the lounge. ‘Ca, ca, ca, ca!’ High and repetitious like the cry of an anxious crow. Maisie, as if to emphasize a lack of hope, was sitting on the edge and turned half away from the others.

Mrs O’Keefe had overheard all. She lowered her voice. ‘They met them’, she muttered, ‘at the tennis tournament at Mount Merrion two years ago. Kitty and Jenny partnered them in the mixed semi-finals. One’s an architect. The other works in a bank. They’re staying in the hotel. English!’

The captain’s mind raced in unison with hers: ‘Catholics?’ he whispered.

Mrs O’Keefe drew back in annoyance. ‘
Captain!
I’m surprised at you! After the present pope’s encouragement of mixed marriages! Anyway, they could turn.’ She leaned forward to his ear. ‘The drawback is’, she whispered, ‘that there’s only
two
!’ Again she withdrew herself, this time to give him one of her fixed-eyed, pursed-lipped, slow and ponderous nods.

‘Ah!’ agreed the captain.

‘We’, she prompted, ‘can invite
one
of them to make up a party after dinner. I’ll get Miss Taylor to play so we’ll only need one to make a fourth.
Maisie
,’ she judged. ‘Then the men can invite the other two out on the tiles.’ She laughed with the innocent vulgarity to which the captain was becoming used in pious women.

The plan worked. Maisie’s sisters took a boisterous, shamefaced leave of her and had not come back with their beaux by the time the bridge party went to bed. It had been a strained little session, for Mrs O’Keefe, frustrated by Maisie’s presence from discussing her sisters’ prospects, was too fidgety to concentrate on cards; Maisie played badly too so that by the end of the evening the pair, who were partners, had lost quite a bit.

‘Poor me,’ Maisie lamented as she paid up.

‘Ah well! Unlucky in cards you know!’ said Miss Taylor abstractedly and was kicked by Mrs O’Keefe.

The captain’s sympathies, repelled by Maisie’s play, returned to her on the boomerang of pity. ‘Well, this has been an agreeable evening indeed!’ He drained his glass. ‘One of the pleasantest on the trip. But all good things and all that. Remember, tomorrow we have to rise early for our tour of the City of Light.’

The ladies lumbered upstairs, slowed by drink and confidences. Walking behind them – he had paused to say something to the concierge – the captain saw Maisie’s box-shaped form tilt towards that of Mrs O’Keefe. ‘Oh super! A regular charmer!’ Mrs O’Keefe’s hiss floated down the stairs to him. ‘Isn’t it funny, now, he never got married!’ He went into his room and locked the door. He polished his shoes, inserted the wooden trees and carefully tied the laces over them. He had a shower, gave himself a friction with eau-de-Cologne and remembered that the golden rule was to keep things from getting personal. Be
nice
as pie but – off parade, off parade. A bit sticky sometimes. He climbed into bed to read a war memoir in which the human element was considered from a safe, abstracting distance.