Under the Rose (29 page)

She drove him out the country to take tea in a favourite inn. Sir Walter Scott had stayed here and a letter, testifying to this, was framed in a glass case. Across from it, iridescent in a larger one, was a stuffed trout.

Liam buttered a scone and smiled at the waitress who returned his smile as women always had. ‘Women', he remarked, watching as she moved off in a delicate drift of body odour, ‘are the Trojan mare!
Mère
.' In his mouth the French word seethed breezily. He cocked a comical eye at Kitty and bit into the scone. ‘They don't like to be outsiders, you see. That's dangerous.'

The drive had perked him up. He loved these mountains, had rambled all over them and could attach stories to places which, to Kitty, were hardly places at all. It was late September. Bracken had turned bronze. Rowan leaves were an airborne yellow and a low, pallid sun, bleaching out the car mirror, made it hard to drive. Dark, little lakes gleamed like wet iron and Liam who, in his youth, had studied Celtic poetry, listed the foods on which, according to the old poets, hermits, mad exiled kings and other Wild Men of the Woods had managed to survive.

He paused as though a thought had stung him. Could it be fear that some wild man, slipping inside his own skull, had scrambled his clever lawyer's mind?

‘He's not himself,' Kate had mourned on Kitty's visits. The self Liam was losing had been such a model of clarity and grace that his undoing appalled them. He had been their light of lights and even now Kitty could not quite face the thought that he was failing. Now and again though, the process seemed so advanced as to make her wonder whether it might be less painful if speeded up? A release for him – who struggled so laboriously to slow it down.

‘Yew and rowan-berries,' she heard him drone like a child unsure of his lesson – not the clever child Liam must have been but a slow-witted changeling, ‘haws, was it,' he floundered, ‘and hazel-nuts, mast, acorns, pignuts … sloes …'

It was an exercise of the will.

‘Whortleberries … dillisk, salmon, badger fat, wood-sorrel, honey …' He faltered, ‘… eels … Did I say venison? Porpoise
steak …' His face was all focus: a knot, a noose. Its lines tautened as he grasped after two receding worlds: the Celtic one and that of the Twenties when he, and other Republicans had gone on the run like any wild man of the woods. They'd hardly have lived on berries though. Local sympathizers must, she guessed, have provided potatoes and bastable bread spread with salty butter. ‘Trout?' he remembered, and his mouth gasped with strain as if he had been hooked.

Now, though, tea and the stop in the inn had once again revived him. The old Liam, back and brave as bunting, was going through one of his routines. He had always been a bit of a showman.

‘In what way,' Kitty asked encouragingly, ‘are women Trojan horses?'

‘Not horses,' he corrected her. ‘Mares! Fillies! They conform. That's why. Anywhere and everywhere. Here, for instance, they go to the Church and, behold, it catches them.
It
gets inside
them
. It's as if Greeks inside the wooden horse inside the walls of Troy were to breathe in drugged fumes. They'd become Trojans, collaborate …'

Twinkling at her over his tea cup. The old teasing Liam. Back for how long? As with an unreliable lover, she feared letting down her defences. But wouldn't it be cruel not to? Yes-and-no? Kitty was a professional interpreter. She worked with three languages and liked to joke that her mind was inured to plurality and that the tight trio she, Kate and Liam had made when she was growing up had led to this. Her mother, going further, had blamed it for the rockiness of Kitty's marriage, an on-off arrangement which was currently on hold.

‘We were too close,' Kate used to say. ‘We made you old before your time.'

And it was true that Liam had modelled rebellious charm for her before she was eight. How could the boys she met later compete? Add to this that the house had been full of
young men about whom she knew too much too soon: his clients. One was a gaol bird and a bomber. Surprisingly domestic, he helped Kate in the kitchen and taught Kitty to ride a bike, running behind her, with one hand on the saddle. This, unfairly, made her suspicious later of helpful men.

‘A penny for them?'

Liam's blue, amused eyes held hers. ‘We', he repeated, ‘send our women into the Church and
it
slips inside their heads!' She recognized an old idea, dredged from some spilled filing system in his brain.

‘You sent me to school to nuns.' She had once resented this. ‘Was I a Trojan filly? A hostage? Would you have lost credibility if we'd found a secular school? Or were there none in those days?'

Liam smiled helplessly.

He had lost the thread. That happened now. Poor Liam! She gripped his knee. ‘Darling!' she comforted.

But he reared back with a small whinnying laugh. ‘I know what you're thinking!' he accused. ‘Liam, you're thinking, it's been nice knowing you. But now you're gone! Your mind's gone.'

‘It's not gone. You were very sharp just now about how the Church captured me and my mother.'

‘Oh, they didn't capture you the way they did her'.

‘They didn't capture her either.' Kitty wanted to be fair. ‘She was open to doubt. They don't like that.'

‘True enough.' He seemed cheered.

‘She was never a bigot.'

‘So you think we should go ahead with the Mass?'

‘Why not?'

A mash of red-raspberry faces lined the pews which were at right angles to the altar. Stick-limbed old survivors tottered
up the nave to condole with Liam and remind him of themselves. Some had fought beside him, seventy years ago, in the Troubles or, later, in Civil Liberties. They had seen the notices Kitty had put in national and provincial papers and travelled, in some cases, across Ireland, to this shrunken reunion. A straight-backed Liam stood dandified and dazed. Ready, Kitty guessed, to fly to bits if the shell of his suit had not held in his Humpty Dumpty self. The suit had been a sore point with her mother.

‘Riddled with tobacco burns!' had been her refrain. ‘For God's sake throw it out!'

He wouldn't though. And his tailor was dead. So Kitty's help was enlisted. She had scoured London for the sort of multi-buttoned, rigidly interlined suits which he recognized as ‘good' and which might well have repelled small bullets. His sartorial tastes were based on some Edwardian image of the British Empire which he had chosen to emulate, as athletes will an opponent's form. Nowadays, Japanese businessman seemed in pursuit of a modern approximation of it, for she kept running across them up and down Jermyn Street and in Burberries and Loeb.

Liam refused to wear the new clothes. Perhaps he missed the dirt in the old ones? Its anointing heft? Embracing him this morning, Kitty had sensed a flinching inside the resilient old cloth. Tired by their outing, he had regressed since into a combative confusion.

‘Kate!' he'd greeted her at breakfast and had to be reminded that Kate was dead. He'd cried then, though his mouth now was shut against grief. Anger, summoned to see him through the ceremony, boiled over before it began. When the Taoiseach's stand-in, his chest a compressed rainbow of decorations, came to pay his respects, the mouth risked unclenching to ask, ‘Is that one of the shits we fought in '22?'

‘No,' soothed Kitty, ‘no, love, he's from your side.'

She wasn't sure of this. Liam, a purist, had lambasted both
sides after the Civil War and pilloried all trimming when old friends came to terms with power. Today, mindful perhaps of the Trojan horse, he was in but not of this church and, ignoring its drill, provoked disarray in the congregation as he, the chief mourner, stood attentive to some inner command which forbade him to bow his head, genuflect or in any way acknowledge the ceremony.

He softened, however, on seeing his own Parish Priest serve the mass. This had not been provided for and the PP had come off his own bat. ‘For Kate,' Liam whispered to Kitty who, in her foreign ignorance, might fail to appreciate the tribute.

Suddenly, regretting his rudeness to Kate's old friend, he plopped to his knees at the wrong moment, hid his face in his hands and threw those taking their cue from him into chaos.

Afterwards, two Trinity chaplains came to talk to him. No doubt – the thought wavered on the edge of his mind – they expected to be slipped an envelope containing a cheque. But Kitty hadn't thought to get one ready and he no longer handled money. Its instability worried him. Just recently, he had gone to his old barber for a haircut and, as he was having his shoulders brushed, proffered a shilling. The barber laughed, said his charge was five pounds then, perhaps disarmed by Liam's amazement, accepted the offer. Liam, foxily, guessed he was getting a bargain – though, to be sure, the man might send round later for his proper payment to Kate? Perhaps the chaplains would too? No! For Kate was … she was … Liam could not confront the poisonous fact and the two young men backed off before the turmoil in his face.

As Kitty was leaving – she had work waiting in Strasbourg – Liam, enlivened by several goodbye whiskies, told of a rearguard skirmish with the Holy Joes. It had occurred in a nursing home where, though he had registered as an agnostic, a priest tried to browbeat him into taking the sacraments.

Liam's riposte had been to drawl: ‘Well, my dear fellow, I can accommodate you if it gives you pleasure!' This, he claimed, had sent the bully scuttling like a scalded cat.

He rang her in Strasbourg to say he wished he was with her and Kate. Unsure what this meant, she promised a visit as soon as she was free.

‘I'm hitting the bottle.'

‘I'll be over soon.'

Her husband, when she rang to say she couldn't come home yet because of Liam, warned, ‘You can't pay him back, you know. You'd better start resigning yourself. You can't give him life.'

Returning to Dublin now was like stepping into childhood. Liam, barricaded like a zoo creature in winter, had holed up in an overheated space which evoked for Kitty the hide-outs she had enjoyed making when she was five. Its fug recalled the smell of stored ground sheets, and its dust-tufts mimicked woolly toys. The housekeeper, counting on Liam's short-sightedness, had grown slack.

Interfering was tricky though. Last year, neighbours had told Kitty of seeing Liam fed porridge for dinner while good food went upstairs on a tray to the more alert Kate. The housekeeper was playing them up. Liam, when asked about this, had wept: ‘Poor Kate! Running the house was her pride
and now she can't.' Rather than complain and shame her, he preferred to eat the penitential porridge.

‘Was I a bad husband?' he asked Kitty who supposed he must be trying to make up for this.

He had a woman. The fact leaked from him as all facts or fictions – the barrier between them was down – now did. ‘She's nobody,' he told Kitty. ‘Just someone to talk to. I have to have that. I don't even find her attractive, but, well …' Smiling. Faithless. Grasping at bright straws. Weaving them, hopefully, into corn dollies.

‘She' – once or twice he said ‘you' – ‘takes me on drives which end up in churches.'

‘Ah? The Trojan mare?'

‘Last week we lit a candle for Kate. They were saying mass.'

‘It's your soul she's after then, not your body?'

‘Cruel!' His memento-mori face tried for jauntiness. ‘Well,
you
can't have me to live, can you, with your fly-by-night profession! Triple-tongued fly-by-night!' he teased. ‘There's no relying on you! Where are you off to next?'

‘Strasbourg for the meeting of the European Parliament.'

‘See!'

He was terrified of death. ‘I want', he confided, ‘to live and live.' Terrified too of relinquishing his self-esteem by ‘crawling' to a God in whom he didn't believe. ‘Why do people believe?' he wondered. Then: ‘Ah, I know you'll say from fear: phobophobia. They want immortality.' And his face twisted because he wanted it too.

On her next visits, he was a man dancing with an imaginary partner. A sly mime indicated the high-backed, winged armchair in which, he claimed, her mother sat in judgement on him. ‘Don't you start,' he warned. ‘I hear it all from her!'

This, if a joke, was out of control.

‘Psst!' he whispered. ‘She's showing disapproval.'

Courting it, he drank but wouldn't eat, threw out his pills, felt up a woman visitor, fired his housekeeper who was cramping his style and behaved as though he hoped to rouse his wife to show herself. Like believers defying their God! Or old lags wooing a gaol-sentence to get them through a cold snap. Spilled wine drew maps on Kate's Wilton carpet and, more than once, the gas had to be turned off by neighbours whose advice he ignored. After midnight, their letters warned Kitty, he stuffed great wads of cash into his pockets and set forth on stumbling walks through slick streets infested with muggers.

‘Things have changed here', cautioned the letters ‘from when you were a girl! Even the churchyards are full of junkies shooting it up!'

Liam too seemed to be seeking some siren thrill as he breasted the darkness, his pockets enticingly bulging with four-and-five-hundred-pound bait.

Splotched and spidery letters from him described a shrunken – then, unexpectedly, an expanding world.

Two angels – or were they demons? – were struggling over him. An old friend and neighbour, Emir, engaged in what he snootily dismissed as ‘good works', hoped to enlist his support. ‘Therapeutic?' wondered one letter touchily. ‘For my own good?' But Emir's causes were the very ones he had himself promoted for years. And who was the other demon/angel? The one who had taken him into churches was, it seemed, a nurse. Used to older men, she maybe liked him for himself ‘though I suppose she's too young for me'. Clearly he hoped not and that it was
not
his soul which concerned her.
She was persuading him to return to the bosom of Mother Church. Any bosom, clearly, had its appeal but Emir, though more congenial, was not offering hers.