Under the Rose (31 page)

His people.

‘No, Patwick! They are
not
fwiendly! It’s all a fwaud! They’re cold and sniggewing and smug! Bahbawwians!’

Well, there was no arguing with prejudice. And he knew right well what it was she missed in Ireland: smut and men making passes at her. What she’d have liked would be to
hobnob with the Ascendancy. Hadn’t she wanted to follow the hunt tomorrow?

‘The foliage will be glowious! Amanda’s keeping two places in her jeep. I’d have thought you’d have wanted to
see
the countwy. You
talk
enough about Ireland.’

He didn’t. He hated land untamed by pavements, had a feeling it was cannibalic and out to get him. Explicable: his ancestors had been evicted
off
it after toiling and starving
on
it. He’d got his flinty profile from men pared down by a constant blast of misfortune.

‘Please, Patwick. I told the Master we’d follow.’

‘No.’

The word ‘Master’ embarrassed him. He hated hunts: the discomfort of Amanda Shand’s jeep rattling his bones over frozen fields and withered heaps of ragweed. Booted and furred, the women would squeal and exchange dirty jokes as they followed the redcoats (‘Pink, Patwick! Please!’) on their bloody pursuit down lanes like river-beds where brass bedsteads served as slatternly gates, and untrimmed brambles clawed.

‘I’m spending the night at the club. I can’t make it.’

She pouted.

He shrugged.

She made little enough effort with
his
friends, so why should
he
put up with Miss Amanda Shand of Shand House, a trollopy piece, louse-poor but with the Ascendancy style to her still: vowels, pedigree dogs. The dogs she raised for a living, and was reputed to have given up her own bed to an Afghan bitch and litter. But, until the roof fell in on them, those people kept up the pretence. Elsie could have helped consolidate his position – he’d hoped for this – if she’d been the hostess here that she’d been in Scunthorpe. He needed friends. He was a briefless barrister and had been too long abroad. She could have increased his support so easily if she’d turned her charm on his clerical relatives. But no.
They
didn’t stand up when she came into a room.

‘A priest in this country takes precedence over a woman, Elsie.’

‘You’ve buwwied me among the beastly Hottentots!’

And tears. And accusations. Why did he leave her to moulder here? She’d given him the best years of her life. Why shouldn’t she come to his meeting tonight? Even Masons had a women’s night.

Masons!

‘The military monks, to whose Order I have the honour to belong, were celibate. There is no place for women in our ceremonies.’

More tears. He stayed on guard. In a long war, victory can be short-lived and tears a feint. When she said:

‘Don’t you care for me any more?’ he answered,

‘I love nobody but Jesus.’

‘Oh!’ Her mouth fell open unguardedly and showed her fillings. ‘Jesus!’ she repeated. ‘Jesus!’ She used a little scream and ran out of the room.

In the old days, she used to flatten him with humour. But then, on her own ground, she’d had a gallery. Without one, Jesus became invincible.

Patrick, beginning to feel sorry for her, was pouring her a drink, when the doorbell rang. Hennessy. Patrick put down the glass and ran to head him off. He mustn’t come in. A guest would resurrect Elsie who could make him her sounding-board, stooge, straight man and microphone to funnel God knew what bad language and hysteria to the clubs and pubs of half Dublin.

Condon bundled Hennessy down the stairs and back into his car.

‘Right you are,’ Hennessy kept acquiescing. ‘Right, right, Condon. We’ll have a drink in the local. I love pubs. Nice and relaxed. Fine, don’t give it a thought.’

Voices from the public bar:

‘Remember that time the UN took a contingent of Paddies to the Congo? No, dear,
not
the Irish Guards, the Free State Army. All dressed in bullswool.
That’s
what they call it, cross my heart. No, of course
I
don’t know is it from bulls, but it
is
as thick as asbestos and thorny as a fairy rath. And off they went dressed up to their necks in it to the Congo. Left, right, left, right, or whatever
that
is in Erse.’

‘To the tropics.’

‘Must have been cooked to an Irish stew.’

‘Ready for the cannibals.’

‘Which reminds me, Amanda, where are we dining?’

‘Not with me, dears, I haven’t a scrap in the place.’

So Amanda Shand was there. Patrick drank morosely. Hennessy stood up and said he had to go where no one could go for him. Patrick reflected that Hennessy was a bit vulgar sometimes all right. A bit of a Hottentot.

‘… hear the one about the two old Dublin biddies discussing the Congo. One says a neighbour’s son has been “caught by the Balloobas” “By the Balloobas, dija say, Mrs?” says her crony. “Oh
that
musta been terrible painful!”’

Laughter.

‘And the one about …’

Patrick closed his ears. Hear no, see no, think no evil. Difficult. It wormed its way everywhere, sapped the most doughty resistances.

He thought of a visit he had made that morning to a clerical cousin confined in a home for mad priests – a disagreeable duty but Patrick had felt obliged. Blood was thicker than
water and he had promised his aunt he’d go. He’d come away feeling pained. Weakness flowed like a contagion from Father Fahy. A mild fellow, shut up because of his embarrassing delusions, he thought himself the father of twelve children with a wife expecting a thirteenth.

‘I don’t mind the number,’ he had confided to Condon, ‘I’m not superstitious about such matters. As a priest …’ The smile flicked off and on. It was not impressive, for his teeth fitted badly and there were no funds to get inmates new ones. As long as he stayed shut up here, ecclesiastical authority saw little point in throwing good money after bad. ‘Poor Anna is worn out, tense, you know, frayed. She worries about our eldest, Brendan, who’s up in the College of Surgeons and …’ The priest had names and occupations for every member of his imagined brood. ‘You know yourself, Patrick, women …’

Fahy confided doubts about the Holy Father’s policy with regard to birth-control. ‘Poor Anna is a literal believer,’ he groaned, ‘a simple woman.’ He must have been a bad priest, a shirker. Wasn’t he trying to shift anxieties, which had sifted through the confessional grating, on to Patrick himself, the confessor’s confessor? Distasteful that a priest should imagine a wife for himself with such domestic clarity! How far, one tried to wonder,
did
the imaginings go? Bad times. Our Blessed Lady had foretold as much in 1917 to the children at Fatima. ‘My Son’, she had said, ‘has drawn back His hand to smite the world. I am holding it back but my arm grows tired.’ It must be numb by now. Well, Patrick was doing his bit, joining the Knights: a warrior against the forces of darkness. War. The language of the Church was heady with it but practice dampeningly meek. St George had been struck off the register of saints.

‘No, no and no, I won’t be beaten down!’ Amanda Shand’s voice rose in a flirtatious shriek. ‘The doggies are my bread and butter! Damn it all, Terry, I’m a single girl and …’

Girl
, thought Condon. Forty if she was a day. Selling one of her hounds. That sort lived by myth: distressed lady,
morya
. Couldn’t take a
real
job because if she worked from nine to five as a secretary, she would
be
a secretary. Dabbling in dog-breeding she could live off the smell of an oil rag and be a lady still. He doubted she saw meat more than once a week. Patrick had no patience with the like. Where was Hennessy? Bit of prostatic trouble there. What were we but future worm-food?

‘Seriously …’ Terry’s voice now. ‘It’s the youth. I hope I’m no old fogy. I’m thirty-nine and like my bit of fun. I don’t mind long hair or free love or any of that, but I think they’ve lost sight of some jolly important matters, what with all this fraternizing with nigs and …’

‘
Who’s
going out to fight for nig-nogs, Terry? Bet you don’t even know which side you’ll be on!’

‘Right! You’re absolutely right. I don’t give a damn which side I’m on. They’re all black to me, haha. No, but I do have a purpose. I think the next great war will be with the coloureds. Don’t laugh! I mean
they’ll
be attacking us. Look at South Africa, Rhodesia, the US. They’ve got the message. It’s easy for us to sit on our bums in Southern Ireland – the last country where a gentleman is recognized as such, by the way, which is why I like it here – to sit here on our bums and disapprove of the white supremacists. Much too easy. It may be less so in the future. Look at China. Count them up. They want what we’ve got, right? Right. I don’t say I blame the poor buggers but every man’s got to fight his own corner. And there isn’t enough to go round, right? Besides, a lot of decent things would go down the drain if the West went under…. Well, the long and the short of it is I’m going out to fight
for
the nigs in order to train myself to fight
against
them.’

‘And for the lolly.’

‘And for the lolly.’

‘Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civ., what?’

‘Right.’

‘… all that we have known and cared for will sink …’

Someone, not Terry, began to deliver in tones wavering between drunken parody and drunken sentiment, a speech which slipped through Condon’s defences. With astonishment, he realized that he and the rowdies in the bar had something in common. There was that fellow, in his literal, simple way, heeding the call of the times and assuming the military part of the knightly mission at the very moment when Condon himself was shouldering its spiritual side. They complemented each other. Well and why not? Hadn’t Protestant volunteers fought the Turk with Catholic knights at the siege of Malta? Patrick stood up. He was thinking of going into the bar when he heard Amanda say:

‘Hey, what about giving Elsie a tinkle?’

‘Elsie who?’

‘Elsie Condom or Condon or whatever. She’s got a soft spot for old Terry here and she’s sure to produce sandwiches. Her lord and master’s almost certain to be off the premises. Bet she’d like to light your fire, Terry, on your last night.’

‘Got her number?’

‘In the book. Listen, it’d be doing a good deed in a naughty world to poke old Elsie. Seriously. She doesn’t get much and….’

‘What about yourself, Amanda …’

‘Oh
well
, if …’

Patrick collided with Hennessy who was finally returning and pushed him, for the second time that evening, backwards out the door and into his own car. A yellow Austin Healey with a GB on its rump was drawn up beside it. Patrick resisted an impulse to give it a passing kick. His mind
jumbled thoughts, like a washing-machine throwing about soiled linen and, above it, he managed to chat about how time-was-getting-on-sorry-Hennessy-but-better-be-hitting-the-road-slippery-as-well-be-off-betimes. The man must think he was mad.

Patrick felt a thrust of humiliation knife him. He felt almost tearful. An unskinned part of himself had been reached. He had thought he and Elsie had something, a … union … a solidarity which … In his own head he groped sadly, reaching an unexplored place. Hennessy’s voice came to him but he couldn’t distinguish the words. He felt exposed, mutilated. Hennessy’s Volkswagen funnelled down the hedgy roads. Briars scraped the windows and squeaked.

‘There should be a quorum,’ Hennessy was saying. ‘We should hold out for that.’

‘Yes,’ managed Condon.

‘And what’s your position on the other matter?’

What matter? Which? Had Hennessy
heard
?

‘I … what?’

‘Are you feeling all right?’

‘No. I had a dizzy spell. I’m afraid I missed …’

‘Oh well, it doesn’t matter.’ Hennessy sounded miffed.

But Condon had to know. ‘No, no
tell
me.’

‘I’ve
been
telling you! Corcoran wants selection of the ambulance corps to be left up to him and his henchmen. A matter of getting the strings into his own hands and …’

‘Ah.’

Condon’s mind drifted again. Didn’t she
care
for him at all then, if she … Oh, and that was what
she
had asked him! He groaned.

‘Are you in pain?’

‘No, no, slight twinge. My ulcer…. Nothing serious.’

He
must
, would, pull himself together. Mind over matter. Yes.

The Knights’ ceremony was being held in a Dublin hotel. An entire floor had been taken over, but members spilled into
corridors and stairs and lobby where, cloaked and armed, they drew the eye, impressing the serf-grey citizenry with their spiritual and temporal pelf. A drunken poet got into the lift with Condon and Hennessy. Pink and pendulous, his nose (Condon reproved himself for thinking) resembled a skinned male organ. The poet fixed the Knights with his tight, urine-yellow goat’s eyes and grinned. A notorious lecher, he was not the sort of man with whom either would choose to associate, but they were, as always in Dublin, on nodding terms with him.

‘How are things, Ian?’

‘A wet old night.’

‘Ha,’ roared the poet in a peasant brogue, assumed, as all Dubliners know, to make them feel effete, urban and far from the loamy roots of things. ‘How are our Knights T-T-Templars? Still as r-r-rand-d-dy and roistering as when they were burnt at the stake by Philipe le Bel? Burnt,’ he hissed, ‘b-b-burrrrntt and their goods confiscated, ha! Not that
that’s
likely to happen again. There’s a rising tide of p-p-permiss-ssiveness, as they call it now. Still secret, still underground but about to oo-ooz-z-z-ze up and submerge us all in a f-f-f-foam of s-s-sperm! The age of Eros is upon us. I’ve just c-come back from the cu-cu-cunty counthrrry where they’ve been enjoying a spell of warm weather, and yez’d never credit the goings on I witnessed under hedges and d-d-ditches.’

‘I’m sure we wouldn’t,’ Hennessy told him. ‘This is our door.’ He stepped out with a gelid nod. ‘Be seeing you.’ But the poet followed them.