Under the Rose (27 page)

I expect at any minute to hear from the nursing home where my wife is due to go into labour. They thought I was making her nervous, which is why they asked me to leave. I can’t blame them. After all, what could they know of our – what? Anomalies? So now I sit by the phone, thinking of the boy – we know it’s to be a boy – and of how he’ll be called Frank in memory of my father: Senator Leary, whose death, to quote the obituaries, was such a sore loss to his country. Soon there will be a new Frank Leary to take his place. Symmetry and
pietas
. He’d have liked that.

He laid out his principles for me on the day, not long after my nineteenth birthday, when I took up my duties as summer barman at the Moriarty Castle Hotel. He’d got me the job. The Knights sometimes held functions there, indeed were holding one that weekend, which was why he drove me down. My mother came in her own car and stopped off for lunch. She was en route to Galway where the League to Save the Unborn Child (SUC) had organized a rally. She’s one of their officers.

While she settled my father into his room I introduced myself to the head barman, who said he’d show me the ropes in the lull after lunch. Then back came my parents and my father asked me to pour him a drink: coke and rum. That surprised me because of his being a teetotaller. He grinned and so did my mother: a benedictory, parental grin. Declan’s an adult now was what it decreed; then he made his speech. You could sum it up to sound like hypocrisy – until you remembered about
that
being the tribute vice pays to virtue. Anyway,
his principle was simple – although its workings turn out not to be! He said he wanted me, during his stay at the castle, to do what trusted barmen around the country had been doing for years: slip a sizeable snort of rum into his Coca Cola but charge whoever was standing drinks for the coke only. Later, he would drop by and pay the difference. The common interest came before that of the individual. And he, a man in the public eye, must neither alienate voters nor weaken his own influence for good. What the eye didn’t see didn’t matter.

‘But father, surely drinking wouldn’t alienate many Irish people?’

‘As a politician I can’t afford to alienate any. For the sake of the causes I support.’

As this was one of the times when the Right-to-Lifers were making a push to stop creeping Liberalism, I guessed he meant them. ‘But what’, I objected, ‘about your conscience?’

‘That’, he cut me off, ‘is between me and my God.’ Then he said again about the general good coming first. ‘Abide by that rule and you can do what you like. Obedience’, he smiled, ‘makes for freedom!’ And raised an eyebrow.

I laughed.

He believed in having a sense of humour. The obituaries quoted him on how disarming it could be. It was, he liked to say, a tempering mechanism. Also: that conservatives must strive to surprise and dazzle so as to steal the opposition’s fire.

It’s been odd reading about this clever, shifty man. To be sure, some of the reminiscences went back to his school days – and how could he have stayed the same? Ironically, though, change was a bogy of his. One writer described him as ‘a man whose unwavering aim was to preserve on our island a state faithful to the more orthodox teachings of the Roman Catholic Church’. To do this, as he told me in the Moriarty Castle bar, you had to fight unethical innovation. Unchristian practices. Unseemly publications. You needed counter-seductions. Wit and paradox. Nonchalance. Panache.

No one denied he had
that
. Too much? Maybe. Maybe he ended up seducing and bamboozling himself?
I
certainly can’t be trusted to judge. He was fifty-seven but looked younger, in a Cary Grant sort of way: silver wings to his hair, white teeth, big frame, flat belly. He had a good tailor and could, as the saying goes, charm the birds off the trees – or, discreetly, pull birds. I was proud of him but apprehensive as to what he expected of me – or believed in really. My eldest brother has for years been a missionary in Ecuador, and it would be a mistake to suppose this pleased my father. According to him, most missionaries nowadays were crypto-Communists. Indeed, now that the official Communists had collapsed, they
were
the last Communists. Priests – which may sound odd from a militant layman – were dangerously gullible and monks worse. He’d sent me and my two brothers to school to the Benedictines with advice to take what they taught us with a pinch of salt. He wanted us to have a grounding in religion, yes, but also to be able to take the world on at its own game. And for this, the Benedictines, he was sorry to say, were insufficiently robust. They were considered classier than the Jesuits, but lacked the nous to spike their coke with rum. Or their red lemonade with whiskey, which I should also be prepared to serve. Likewise tonic with vodka. Doubleness was all. I guessed that the job as barman was meant to sharpen me – and was happy about this. I had been reading Stendhal and thought of Moriarty Castle in terms of his great houses where raw young men learn amatory wit. My second brother was in Australia. As an uncle of ours put it, he and my father were too alike, and two cocks in one barnyard upset the pecking order. My sisters were married, so on whom could my father’s hopes focus if not on me? I might have resented this if I had been surer of it. As it was, I was desperate to impress him.

I’ve rung the nursing home again. They’re to let me know just as soon as I’m needed – and are undoubtedly being patient because of whose son I am. In this city, you are never anonymous, so may as well reap the benefits, since there are drawbacks too. It’s odd: I haven’t thought so much about him for months. Not since the last panegyric was read and folded away. Maybe when the new Frank Leary is hogging attention I’ll forget the old one? Come to think of it, I’ll
be
the ‘old’ Leary then. Old, worldly and not quite twenty-one! Maybe, God help me, I’ll burst out in my fifties!

The drawbacks? Well with women for a start. Feminists. His name was a red rag to them, so I could never take things on their own terms. Every choice meant being with or against him and I always chose to be ‘with’. I had – I admit – a girlish admiration for his manliness and saw women as rivals.

Away from home though – I spent three summers abroad, learning modern languages – all this changed and by my second week in Italy, when I was fifteen, I was sharing a tent with a Danish girl. The tent was a tiny thing and dyed bright orange so that hunters would not shoot in our direction. I loved that: colour of flame and folly! I was over the moon to be out from under my Irish camouflage. Our parents, of course, thought we were in a hostel, but we simply moved out and after that I swear it was the difficulty of communicating – we talked pidgin Italian to each other – which made it easy to be together. I conclude that the answer to that old conundrum as to which language Adam and Eve spoke in Paradise may be ‘none’. Not being able to ask questions eliminates the tripwires of shyness, class, and wondering whether what you feel for each other is love or lust. As for the one about using ‘artificial contraceptives’, Vinca was on the pill and had a container with a dial which clicked forward a notch each time she took one. Streamlined
and sage, it made me glad I couldn’t tell her of the preserved foetus which my mother’s colleagues toted to their lectures on the ills the flesh is heir to. Silence was golden in our Umbrian olive grove – and we left chatter to the crickets.

But to return to Moriarty Castle: as I wasn’t yet, strictly speaking, on the staff, my father asked if it would be all right for me to sit down to lunch with my mother and himself. Later, such privilege would be off limits, like the swimming pool and the nine-hole golf course. Teasingly, he made me try a rum and coke.

Then my mother left and, as he and I strolled back through the lobby, he introduced me to the receptionist, a Miss Sheehy.

‘This is my son, Declan,’ he told her and she gave me a funny look. I told myself that I was imagining it and took her hand in a forthright grip. She was one of those slim, quivery girls who shy like deer and have a curtain of dark hair for hiding behind. I guessed her to be my age or maybe a bit older. More importantly, she was a beauty. My Stendhalian summer partner? Why not?

Later, after the barman had shown me how to mix drinks, I came back to the lobby. She was still on duty.

‘How does it feel to be the son of a famous father?’

This annoyed me, so I countered with ‘How does it feel to be a knockout beauty?’

That got a blush. I walked off regretting the balkiness of words. With Vinca and her summery successors I had rejoiced in their absence. Maybe it was auricular – Christ,
there’s
a word! – confession which poisoned them for me? All that talk of ‘bad’ thoughts. Maybe, I should become an explorer and live in the Amazon jungle: steamy heat, warm mud, bare-breasted Indian girls and, above all, no chat! I kept thinking of Miss Sheehy though. That hair had a tremulous life to it. Like seaweed. Now I’d got myself uselessly excited and should maybe take a run around the tennis courts – unless they were off limits too. I wondered: was Miss Sheehy?
As it happened, I had no time to find out because carloads of Knights started arriving and soon the bar was abuzz and I was kept busy. I wondered whether the castle chapel was off-limits to staff too? This seemed unlikely, so maybe I’d be able to watch them next day at their mumbo jumbo, robing and disrobing, in imitation of the Crusaders donning armour to fight the forces of darkness and fornication. I wasn’t sure how close my father’s connection with them was. They favour confidentiality and infiltration and he might be their man in the senate. He didn’t appear in the bar.

I finished work after midnight. There was no sign of Miss Sheehy. I fell on my bed and slept.

I was awoken before daylight. My mother wanted me on the ’phone. Or rather, it turned out, she wanted my father. There was some decision to do with the rally which only he could take. Neither she nor the other Pro-Life ladies took decisions. They were there to make it look as though
women
were opposing the feminists but were puppets really. She apologized for waking me but said she’d been ringing him since last night.

‘Your father’s not answering his ’phone,’ she told me. ‘It’s off the hook. I think maybe he knocked it off inadvertently and now he’ll miss all his calls.’

So I pulled on some clothes, took the lift to the guests’ part of the hotel, and arrived at his door just as Miss Sheehy emerged from it – or rather just as she started to emerge, for when she saw me she ducked back in. That was hard to misinterpret and froze me in my tracks. I mean if she had said ‘Hello Declan’ and that she had been answering a room-service call, I would have believed her. I would have accepted any plausible story because I was thinking of her in terms of my own designs, not his – but, instead, she turned tail on seeing me. For perhaps a minute, I stood transfixed. Then, as I turned to go, out she bobbed again.

‘Declan, can you come here, please. Your father wants you.’

I bolted. Unthinkingly. Or rather what I was thinking was that I didn’t want to know any more of his secrets.

Back in my room I started making faces at my mirror and told the clown grimacing back that I was a prize ass. Obviously he was ill and she
had
been answering a room-service call. Why, though, had she bobbed away? Clown, so as to tell him his son was outside. Clown, clown! What would they both think of me now? Worldliness, where were you? I had failed the test! Fallen at the first fence. Could my father, I even wondered, have set the thing up deliberately? I had heard of British Foreign Office candidates being tested like this on country-house weekends.

I wasn’t surprised by the knock on my door. It was Miss Sheehy to say that, just as I’d guessed, he was ill. Alarmingly so. Her manner had grown agitated and she was asking for my help. ‘He can’t walk and we can’t have the doctor finding him in my room.’

Her
room? I was so flustered that we were at its door before I remembered that, just now, they had been in his. How had he got here?

She brushed away the question. ‘Look, he’s passed out. We should get a doctor. It could be serious! A heart attack even! But he can’t be found
in my room
!’ Her voice had an edge of hysteria.

She opened her door and there he was on the carpet, I saw the urgency then. Jesus, I thought. Christ! As far as I could tell, his pulse was all right. Or was it? I tried, clumsily, to compare it to my own – but it’s hard to take two pulses simultaneously. Miss Sheehy became impatient.

‘Take his shoulders,’ she directed. ‘I’ll hold the door. Can you drag him to the lift? Or hoist him on your back?’

‘Supposing we’re seen?’

‘We’ll say he began to feel ill in your room. Then, when you tried to help him back to his, he fainted. I’m here because you rang the front desk.’

Good enough, I thought with relief, and gave myself to a frenzy of activity which kept my feelings in check. He was heavy but I’m strong and was able, like
pius Aeneas
fleeing the wars of Troy, to carry my father down the corridor, into the lift, then down another corridor to his room. By then, she had rung the doctor who was on his way. As I laid him on his bed, she divulged some facts. They had, she admitted, been quarrelling and her invitation to me to enter his room had been a move in the quarrel. When I left, she had rushed off, whereupon he, thinking she’d gone after me, followed her.

‘He’s terrified of his family finding out about us.’

‘Us?’ I asked stupidly.

‘Him and me.’

You, I wondered dourly, and how many others? I was in a sweat of filial guilt: unfounded, to be sure, but my feelings had run amok. My father’s poor, vulnerable, open eyes stared glassily and saw neither of us. Oh God, I prayed, don’t let him die. Not here. Not for years! Please, God! At the same time I was furious with him. For what about my mother? Did she know – I recalled her tolerance of the rum-and-coke – that as well as trusted barmen ‘up and down the country’, he also had – what? What was Miss Sheehy? His heart’s love or one of a team? A team of floozies? If so, how big? Basketball five? Hockey eleven? She, no doubt, imagined him to be in love with her. Might he be? I felt obscurely flouted, and confused.