Under the Rose (21 page)

‘Robby and Clare adore her.’ Gwennie overheard the doctor’s wife say. ‘I suppose that’s what matters. One can’t apply one’s own standards to these people.’

Gwennie retailed all this to Aunt Adie who only laughed. ‘You don’t need them! What do you care?’ she said. ‘Next year we’ll start the pastry business and then you’ll be your own boss. You won’t call the queen your cousin. We’ll show them!’

She was not sorry that Gwennie should have fallen out of favour at the big house. With its wood of foreign trees imported by the doctor’s grandfather, it filled her with hatred and suspicion. Its view plummeted into the bay beyond the roofs of the village. Its name was haughtily foreign: Bella Vista. Behind high walls topped with broken glass, it sprawled outlandishly and was kin only to a few neighbouring
mansions: Khyber Pass, Miramare, Saint Juan les Pins, where old colonels and retired British civil servants with jaundiced skin chewed the cud of memories as snuffy, no doubt, and as alien as the smell from the eucalyptus leaves which stuck in the gutters and were floated down the hill to the village – a smell which reminded Adie of sick rooms and antiseptic. She cursed herself for ever getting Gwennie the job in that house, cursed it for making the girl independent and for giving her notions. She began to watch sourly on the nights Gwennie was not off and Mat Mullen, the foxy-haired, moonlighting bricklayer, strode up the hill with shouldered hod. He was about twenty-two, with an impudent blue eye and, Gwennie had told her, the mistress sent her out to him with cups of tea and Guinness. Had that one no sense? Or was it deliberate? Adie questioned Gwennie to know did she like him but the girl had grown sly. Ah, she said, he thought too much of himself. How did she know that? Ah, she just did. The secret burst from her:

‘He asked me to a dance. In the Town Hall.’

‘And you said?’

‘No.’

‘I should just think so! The cheek!’

‘Ah,’ regretfully, ‘I hadn’t a decent dress.’

Adie contained herself. Next day she went to see the doctor and reproached him for not keeping a sufficiently close eye on Gwennie, an innocent girl. Things improved. The garage was finished and Gwennie, more solicitous than before, bought her aunt presents with her wages and accompanied her twice a week to the movies and Ice Cream Parlour. Adie grumbled because it couldn’t be more often but Gwennie said the doctor’s wife was too busy with Red Cross work.

‘Red Cross my big toe,’ said Adie. ‘That one’s an ikey lass! Charity, you might tell her, begins at home. If you lie down and make a door mat of yourself you’ll be trodden on. Stand up for your rights!’

‘Oh,’ said Gwennie, ‘I couldn’t.’

In February – three months after the bricklayer had asked Gwennie to the dance – Adie had occasion to go to the cinema alone.
Frankenstein
which she couldn’t bear to miss was showing locally. Gwennie was not off and Adie, returning by dark from the bus stop, was pursued by monsters. Scuttling from street lamp to street lamp, she clawed at walls which, in places, yielded beneath her fingers with the suspect pliancy of moss. The stretch of road past the doctor’s gate was particularly dark. Protruding stucco erections and fanciful battlements reared; ancient cedars concealed the sky. Beyond them was the sea. On the curve of road below, a line of cars, packed tight like scales on a snake, harboured lovers. Adie, hastening in the dark past the doctor’s gate, heard a half smothered, wholly familiar laugh. She whipped round, plunged back. Heedless of doubt, she grabbed the woman’s arm and pulled her into the lamplight. It was Gwennie. With the bricklayer. ‘You … you!’ Hysteria choked her. Gwennie wrenched her arm free and ran in. A door creaked shut. The bricklayer disappeared. Adie, who had wasted her ammunition on skirmishes, was foiled of the major battle, disarmed before the true betrayal. She turned away, groping. Below her the closed cars crouched in their ranks. ‘Sluts!’ she muttered at them. ‘Whores!’ She plunged and stumbled, almost fell down the hill, beyond the trees, to where the bay opened wide to the moonlight. ‘Underhand …’ she groaned. ‘Hypocrite!’ The words, not quite released, fell back in her throat with the loneliness of a sleeper’s moan. ‘Trailing round lanes …!’ she spat. Down here, in gardens heavy with winter greenery, artificial pagodas and summer houses shone in a light which ignored the small village house further below, shadowed by the hill’s shoulder and dank with its drainings. Leaves clattered. The sea sucked. With head hunched into her shoulders, Adie fled the empty openness of the night and at a swift lope made for the consoling limits of her own kitchen.

Alone there, later, while the sign-painter snored, she sat like Niobe and pondered. On the sly! All these months Gwennie had had nights off that she had not confessed. Red Cross indeed! Adie laughed sourly and caught a hateful glimpse of her own derision in the glass. Gulled! Gulled! That two-faced, simpering trollop had deceived her!
She
had been rationed! Two nights a week for her and how many for the bricklayer? All the sweetness to herself had been a sop thrown to stick in her gullet. To shut her up! Three for him or four?
Five
maybe? Maybe she was off every night! At the suspicion Adie went rigid with pain. What would she not have done for Gwennie! Nights blank as the bay she had just passed stretched despairingly in front of her. After such treachery whom could she ever trust? Adie, who had never smashed a possession deliberately or hardly even wept if not at the movies, sat stifling with unvented misery until, in the small hours of the morning, she dozed off in her chair.

At nine she was ringing the doctor’s bell. He came to the door himself. Gwennie had taken the children to the dentist. Adie told him she wanted her niece back. She needed her in the tearooms. He said, coldly, that he thought he had gathered that the girl herself was eager to stay. Seeing his inquisitive stare, Adie tried to settle wisps of hair which she had not combed since the morning before. Her breath catching, she said, ‘Gwennie is under age.’

‘But she tells me’, he said, ‘that her father is her legal guardian.’

Adie broke down at this proof of a fresh conspiracy. ‘Oh,’ she sobbed. ‘To think that I … after all, all…. Brought her back from death’s door! Where’s me handkerchief? Oh the hussy…. The snake! Asp in my bosom…. Oh!’

The doctor sat her down, gave her a glass of something, tried to soothe, talked of the understanding we must all have for the young and how Mat Mullen was a decent young man. At this Adie collected her dignity and walked out of the house.
They were all against her. There was no trust.

That morning she denounced Mat Mullen to an officer of the bricklayers’ union.

For weeks she did not see Gwennie whose guilty conscience, no doubt of it, was keeping her embuttressed in the doctor’s house up the hill. She heard from Mrs Kelly however that Mat had been given his marching orders and that, as this meant he couldn’t work any more in the Republic, he was going to buy a ticket for the other side. Then news came that Gwennie too had given notice. It seemed she would wait for Mat to get a job before joining him. She had written to her father in London and had got an answer. Meanwhile, the two were observed courting on the hill roads where cedars and ilexes lent concealment even in January. By the winter twilight Adie saw them in every couple that passed up or down the road or stood at lookout points above the bay: unidentifiable match-stick figures, pausing by parapets like migrant birds. When business took her to Dun Laoghaire Harbour, she swerved towards the wooden departure pier, to scrutinize the spray-blown, pink-nosed travellers who queued, moving their bundles with intent patience. Gold-braided harbour officials ushered striding gentlemen ahead, and relatives waved despondently from behind a parapet. Gwennie’s underhand countenance snuffled beneath every umbrella. Then Adie heard that Mat had indeed gone, that Gwennie had a cold, had pleurisy, had been moved to hospital with TB meningitis. The doctor came and drove Adie in, weeping all the way, in his own car.

At ten that morning, Adie sat, alone among the marble tables of the Ice Cream Parlour, and held a handkerchief to her lips. She had been there an hour when Mrs Kelly, lean and mangey after her delivery, came in to help her home.

‘I couldn’t face back alone,’ Adie told her. ‘I’ve been to the hospital. They wouldn’t let me see her.’ She sobbed. ‘First her mother and now her! And those two men off in England! Her father and the other one! Leaving it all to me. Such a responsibility! Doctor Flynn says there’s a new Wonder Drug they could try on her. It costs hundreds of pounds but they’d try it on her as an experiment. Free! How do I know what to say? Maybe they’re using her as a guinea pig? What do doctors care for the poor? Have a sundae. No? Ah do! As we’re here. I didn’t know where else to go. Have a Melancholy Baby. To think she used to love coming here!’ Aunt Adie sobbed again lengthily. She dabbed her face. ‘I suppose I’ll be alone at her funeral,’ she groaned. ‘Like I was at her mother’s. If she dies. He wouldn’t tell me what the chances were. A buttoned-up old puss-in-boots that doctor. On and on about how they do their best and the state of medical science and a lot of jawbreakers!’ Aunt Adie fell silent, sighed, blew her nose and drew a corner of an envelope from her handbag. Letters protruded: P-R-U-D-E-N…. Seeing Mrs Kelly lean forward, she pushed it back and clamped shut, first the bag, and then her mouth as though it contained a frog which she was afraid might jump out. The frog kicked the inside of her cheeks so that they trembled, and Adie opened her mouth with a pop.

‘I went in’, she gasped, ‘and paid up the back payments of the life insurance anyway. I’d stopped paying them for a while there when she looked so healthy.’

She turned in her chair to call the waitress and ordered a Melancholy Baby for herself and another for Mrs Kelly. The two women spooned silently into their sundaes.

‘God help us but it’s a queer world we live in,’ Mrs Kelly said, through a spoonful of marshmallow.

‘Eat up,’ Aunt Adie said. ‘We may as well enjoy it while we’re in it.’

It’s freakish! Appalling! I can’t bear to think about it!

Thoughts forward.

To whom or what? Oh, to whom but Kiki. Yes, unknown to you, Kiki, I’m on my way. The train has pulled out of Paris-Lyon. Goodbye. Goodbye. The rural womb awaits.
Merde!
Now I’ve depressed myself and there’s no one to cheer me. Minutes ago, a man stuck his head in the compartment door, paused, withdrew himself. Mustn’t have liked what he saw. So here I’m on my own till Dijon with nary a buffer between me and me. Nothing but a litre of cognac and Nembutal in the little malachite box given me by – never mind whom. Every item I possess has a name attached, so better not start the attributing game. What will I do then? Sing? Count sheep? Make up a limerick? A lady who loved to get laid – what rhymes with that? Well, there’s ‘renegade’: that’s me, ever ready to join a new army, sew fresh colours on my faded sleeve. My armies, Kiki, are my men and – since I too have my honour – I join one at a time and keep step with the current paymaster. Yessir! I’m loyal while I last, the perfect batwoman, quick to absorb new tastes and learn to shop within the confines of almost any budget. References aplenty.
Premier prix de souplesse:
I can operate in French, British and American, upper to lower – well, better say lower-middle – class arenas.
Parfaitement
, Kiki, and don’t think apologies are intended. Either now or when we meet.

Look, if I take my style and world view from my current man and he his from his current job, whose integrity is weaker? Is it better to adapt for love or money? To embrace
the values of the Rand Corp., the Quai d’Orsay or the Faculté de Philo of the University of Grenoble? Or to embrace Rand etc. values through and in the person of a man?

I’ve no idea.

Truly. You see, Kiki, currently, I’m valueless, being manless, demobbed, out of uniform and with no reference points. The last ones turned out unreliable for the man was mad: a most disconcerting event. I wonder can you tell how disconcerting? No? Look, it was as though some executive were suddenly to learn that the corporation for which he worked did not exist, had been – say – a project cooked up by some well-funded psychologists eager to study executives’ behaviour. After months – or years – of diligence on his part, they tell him ‘it wasn’t real’, give him a golden handshake and let him go. Where does that leave him?

I wouldn’t know. I’ve lost my criteria.

(She lost her
what
? Oh some little thing she had removed. Probably one of those feminine ‘ops’ so common after thirty.)

Jokes, Kiki, are getting unfunny. I’m in one, you see: the reason I never knew he was mad was that I thought he was being funny. Funny-haha, you know, but instead he was funny-peculiar. Doesn’t it just kill you, Kiki. No, but it may me.

I wonder will you be glad or under strain when I turn up? I should, of course, have written – but some things are hard to get down on paper. I meant to. Really. I kept, keep, writing to you in my head.

‘Dear’ – goes my head-letter – ‘Kiki, I do think about you. I mayn’t write but I talk to you in my mind all the time. Well, “mind” is a word which makes me blush. I feel shame about using it of the place in which I spend my days and nights. It’s a cerebral slum, a
louche
blue-movie house …’

Dear Kiki, the truth is I have no mind. That’s why I can’t answer your concerned and reasonable letters. You always said I hadn’t. Remember? ‘Anne-Marie’, you said, ‘is alive from her waist down. As for her head …’ You shrugged your
hump. Your hump gave you prestige. It was something the rest of us didn’t have. It put you out of the running for the marriage-market and, by extension, out of our sex. Your extra protuberance made a man of you. You were, even before Jacques, Papa and Gerard died, the true
chef de famille
.

We’re in open country now: bare, frozen fields. The train zips over them, quick as a fly-zipper. A nip of brandy forward. I need support.

‘I hope’, your last letter says, ‘this marriage is not going to be another mistake. Tell me about Sam.’

Damn you, Kiki, you’ve made yourself my conscience. Do you know what the result has been? No, but I’ll tell you. This time when we meet you’re going to be told. It has meant that I’ve always left the job to you. Kiki has had the conscience, Anne-Marie the cunt-science. Oh weep tears of sperm and lubricant! I live in my cunt! You can’t begin to imagine what it feels like, can you? Can’t and wouldn’t try. But this isn’t a joke. Mentally I’m wound around, head between my own legs, eyes and brain swaddled in a monotonous cuntscape.

Apologia and quota of self-pity: another thing you can’t imagine is what it’s like to have to adjust to no longer trading on charm. At my age.

A hump-shrug here. I know. I know. Plain women have no patience with this plea, even take it for a kind of boast. You called me ‘the dumb beauty’ – but have you ever wondered why are dumb beauties dumb? Sister, the first reason is because they have no reason not to be and the second that the brain tuned to pleasure functions differently. Essential parts atrophy. Comes the day when it can only cope with dream. I think that’s happened to mine, Kiki. When I’m woken up I panic. When I lose a man …

Over the last few years I’ve lost several. I’ll tell you about one. Not Sam. A Greek who was very desirable, very grand and wanted to marry me. He changed his mind because I never emptied the ash-trays. It was a silly mistake but, you see, I
wasn’t tuned to the practical side of things. He was a sexually thrilling man. When we were together I could think of nothing but that and imagined that neither could he. We used to stay in bed all day, smoking; the ash from our cigarettes kept piling up and whenever a breeze blew in would sift around the room. It fell on our bed and he laughed and said we were like lovers in Pompeii and must make sure the lava would find us in the attitude of love. So we made love over and over while the curtains billowed in from the balconies like swollen sails or bridal veils and the ash circulated. It was June. We were staying at the Crillon. The weather was showery and, outside, the Place de la Concorde was all hazy and bright: a Renoir canvas. He kept telling me he loved me and wanted his mother to meet me. Then we’d ring for room-service and have food sent up with more cigarettes. When his mother did come the place was like a disaster-area: mascara on the sheets, my hair a bird’s nest, pairs of tights telescoped all over the floor. The flowers he had bought me had gone rank and there were apple-cores everywhere. She stood there looking astounded and all I could do was laugh. It was really a gasp – but I had no chance to explain. Terrible memory. Forget. Suppress. She would probably not have approved of me anyway so what the hell. Mothers never do. Neither do best friends, councils of responsible kin, etc., etc. That brigade has broken more of my engagements than I care to remember. They’re the Fates, the Furies. I know once they’re there I’m out. Sometimes they’ve offered me money. Sometimes I’ve had to accept it. Well what do you do if you’re turfed off a cruise in Crete or Reykjavik?

It’s – try and understand this, Kiki – the impinging, the crash-landing of one sort of reality on another. And does this make sense to you: when really grubby moments like that engulf me, I think of you. Maybe you’re my stake in the world of family-values?

That world is constantly threatening to withdraw my residence-permit. Others’ mothers issue those. Matrons.
Sweet and ruthless. Marsha’s the first who’s ever liked me. I knew her before I did Sam. She introduced us.

‘Hey Anne-Marie,’ she said last week, ‘I can’t tell you what a kick it gives me that you’re marrying Sam. I mean
we
get on so well! Now I know pleasing your mother-in-law is not the prime aim in marriage, but’, endearing laugh, endearing shrug, ‘if it happens it’s a bonus.’

Wait, Kiki, you’ll see the irony of that later.

Marsha’s from New York, boozy, a hairdresser’s blonde and likes a good giggle. Also she’s loaded.

Vulgar Anne-Marie!
Vulgaire!
I love that word: the first strongly charged one I learned. It’s so dated now! Its frank snobbery is, I suppose, vulgar in our devious days. I like your use of it: robust like the special corsets you get from your supplier in Annecy who claims his stock hasn’t varied in forty years. But, darling, I’m really not vulgar, not even venal. I guy myself when I think of you but actually I’m disinterested. I’ll do nothing for money. Not a thing. Oh – and maybe that’s what worries you most? I imagine you worrying. You adjust your poultice, sip your gargle, spit it out and worry. Who is this man I’m marrying
now
? This Sam?

Sam? He’s hard to pin down. Supply your own idea of ‘attractive’. He’s mine. He has that deadpan American humour which I don’t always get. He’ll say things like this: ‘Know something, Anne-Marie? You’re a double-nut! Why? Because you want to marry me and I – I’m telling you this up front – am a certified nut. Marsha had to smuggle me out of the States. They wanted to put my ass in the booby-trap. You thought I was dodging the draft, didn’t you? Well what I was dodging was the nut-house. That means that for me to want to marry you is rational. A normal is an asset to a nut but the normal who marries a nut is behaving in an irrational manner, hence nuttier than the nut!’

We laughed. Christ, Kiki, I thought he was joking! More deadpan Yankee humour. Irony and all. Ha! More irony: your
relief at hearing I was getting married again. I have your letter in my bag. It has grown soft as tissue from being carried there.

‘I had begun to despair’, it says, ‘of your ever settling down to a normal life … wondering how responsible we might be for the way you turned out. I suppose, since you were the youngest, we did spoil you and by spoil’, you elucidate, ‘I mean “damage”!’

Oh Kiki, did you? How much? And how can I tell?

Several hours yet to Chambéry. Rows of poplars slide past, leafless, rasping the sky. I root in my over-night case for a Valium. The case is in sealskin, carries the creams and colours of my identikit and is known to vulgar Parisiens as a
baise-en-ville
.

I thought of phoning you – but long-distance calls upset you. I imagined you in bed – it was 6 a.m. when I got the idea – and having to grope down two flights of uncarpeted stairs to the phone in the hall. Later, you would have been watching coffee on the kitchen stove. I saw it boil over, spattering onto the white enamel as you ran to take my call. After that you would go out to feed the hens and loose the dogs, slopping through muck in Wellingtons which you would have to drag off, cursing genteel curses in the doorway then rushing to stop the phone’s brash peal.

‘
Crotte
,’ you’d mutter, ‘
crotte de bique
.’

So I didn’t ring. I’ll just come.

‘What’s the matter?’ you’ll say. First thing. Braced, Anne-Marie means trouble, you think, has no sense, no head on her shoulders; sometimes you add ‘No brains!’

This shouldn’t annoy me but does. Every time. I was the only one in a family of seven sisters and one brother to pass the Baccalauréat – but somehow none of you was impressed. I am a paragraph-reader too and that counts against me. ‘Skims the surface,’ you say as you thumb your own laborious way down the columns of
La Croix
. When I do a long-division sum in my head, you react as though I’d done a conjuring
trick: something not in the best of taste and whose reliability had better be checked. ‘Remember’, you say ungenerously, ‘the hare and the tortoise!’ Haven’t you heard, Kiki, this is the jet-age? Hares have been rehabilitated. Tortoises are out! Your yardstick is obsolete – not that I’d care, if only you wouldn’t beat me with it. If only you wouldn’t keep on about hoping I’ll settle down to a ‘normal’ life. God, that dictatorial word. It’s going to get between us, Kiki. It’s going to make it hard for me to stay. Because I’m not going to sit around wearing penitential sackcloth admitting that every last thing I ever did was aberrant and that my failure confirms the authority of your norm.

Because, darling, there are more norms in the hexagon of France than you or I could imagine. Everyone thinks theirs is best. My ex-husband, Jean-Louis, couldn’t see for a minute what I found wrong with his. As a
prof de philo
, he should, one might have thought, have known about relativities and things looking different from different angles and in different temperatures. I always felt he had a band of cold air around him and his tempo was decidedly not mine. I have a high metabolism which means I do things fast. I get bored fast too, but while I’m with a man I’m totally involved. Frighteningly: I have an impulse to die when I make love. That’s why I keep the Nembutal in the garage. These impulses wilt in the time it takes to get downstairs. I said this to Jean-Louis and he thought it in terrible taste. I remember him switching on the light and pulling away from me. He had a look of someone who’s smelled gas and is worrying about the leak. He liked things mashed up in wordy abstractions. Then he could cope. He could cope with the most extreme notions once he’d put them into his abstract jargon, but by then I’d be bored. Besides I never did learn his vocabulary. I remember complaining – jokingly – to our local grocer that I couldn’t understand my husband’s philosophisms. The grocer was very quick-witted and a whizz at crosswords. He had a café in his grocery and I
used to sit there when I’d finished my shopping and we’d race each other through the day’s crossword. He had a dictionary of philosophical terms which he’d got for doing this and he gave it to me to help me understand my husband. ‘To promote understanding in family-life,’ he said. I told Jean-Louis and he was furious – said I was making a fool of him in the village, that the grocer’s nephew was in his class and that now all the pupils would be laughing behind his back. I couldn’t see this at all. But then I never could see things Jean-Louis’s way even after I had the dictionary. We moved to Grenoble shortly after that and he began teaching at the university and bringing a brilliant female student of his home for meals. She had very little money and needed feeding, he said. While I cooked, she and he used to talk about Althusser and Husserl and
épiphénomènes
and
épistémologie and épi
-this and
épi
-that and, though I kept the dictionary in the kitchen drawer, I could never remember which was which and used to get so furious that I would find myself putting sugar in the stew and chopping my finger into the parsley. He was sleeping with her of course and when I found out and said: OK, I hoped they’d enjoy each other and I was leaving, he couldn’t understand at all. It was quite normal, he said, for me to be annoyed, but it was normal for him to have been drawn to her as a fellow searcher in the same field and really the carnal thing between them had been just a moment of tenderness, a kind of seal on their friendship and no more and his long-term commitment was to me and it was not normal for me to fail to see this or to throw all up for a moment’s pique. Then he used one of his
épi
-words and I saw that the whole point of the jargon was to make very ordinary thinking seem grand and to camouflage the mean caution of his commitment to life in general and to me in particular. His favourite ordinary – non-jargon – word, Kiki, was ‘normal’. I’ve been suspicious of it since. I met him some years later in a street in Saint Tropez and we had a drink for old time’s sake. He said he had almost not recognized me
and I, as one does, asked had I got so old and he said no but that in the old days I used to dress in a normal way whereas now … I roared with laughter.