Under the Rose (38 page)

‘He didn’t mean it that way.’

‘He bloody did. Thinks the world owes him a living.’

‘Well, doesn’t it? Owe everyone I mean.’

‘My dear Jenny …’

‘Oh, all
right
. Here.’

She put a match to the brandy-soaked pudding so that blue flames sprang over its globe making it look like a scorched, transfigured human head. ‘Go
on
. Take it while it’s alight.’ She pushed her husband in the direction of the dining-room and stood for a moment pulling faces at the impassive blankness of the kitchen fridge. Then she followed with the brandy butter.

Later, she came back to the kitchen to clean up. Vengefully, she let the men and her mother-in-law cope with each other over the coffee which their guest had at least not refused. He
had
refused sherry, also wine, also the pudding because it had brandy on it and had seemed to feel that it was his duty to explain why he did so and to point out the relativity of cultural values at the very moment when Robin’s grandmother was telling the child how to eat game politely.

‘Only
two
fingers, Robin,’ she’d been demonstrating daintily, ‘never your whole hand and only pick up a
neat
bone.’

‘We’, Mr Rao scooped up mashed chestnuts with a piece of bread, ‘eat everything with our hands.’ He laughed. ‘There are millions of us.’

The anarchy of this so undermined Robin’s sense of what might and might not be done on such an extraordinary day as Christmas that he threw mashed chestnuts at his grandmother and had to be exiled from the table. The older Mrs Middleton was unamused. Mr Rao bared his humourless, raking teeth.

‘You are strict with your children’, he said, ‘in imparting your class rituals. This is because as a people you still have confidence and prize cohesion. Maybe now you must relax?’

Nobody chose to discuss this. Doggedly, the family had helped each other to sauce and stuffing and Mr Rao began to use his knife and fork like everyone else. A diffidence in him
plucked at Jenny who saw that the incident with Robin had been meant as a joke: a humorous overture to the member of the family whom he had judged least likely to reject him. But Robin himself had been rejected, exiled to his room, and disapproval of Mr Rao hung unvoiced and irrefutable in the air. Seen by daylight, he was younger than she had supposed at the rally. His was a hurt, young face, puffy and unformed with bloodshot eyes and a soft, bluish, twitching mouth. He wanted to plead for Robin but could only talk in his magazine jargon. Perhaps he never spoke to people and knew no ordinary English at all? She imagined him sitting endlessly in the South Bank cafeteria reading political magazines and staring at the river.

‘Pedagogical theory, you see …’ he started and James, to deviate him – Robin’s exile had to last at least ten minutes to placate his grandmother, interrupted with some remark about a scheme for facilitating adult education with which he was concerned.

‘It’s designed for people who didn’t get a chance to go to university in the first instance,’ said James. ‘We give scholarships to deserving …’

‘Could you give me one?’ Mr Rao leaned across the table. ‘Please. Could you? I am needing time to think and that factory work is destroying my brain. Have you worked ever on an assembly line?’

‘You may certainly apply,’ James told him. ‘It’s open to all applicants.’

‘No.’ Mr Rao spoke excitedly and a small particle of mashed chestnut flew from his mouth and landed on James’s jogging suit. His words, spattering after it, seemed almost as tangible. ‘No, no,’ he denied, nervous with hope. ‘You see I apply before for such things and never get them. Inferior candidates pass me by. Here in England, there is a mode, a ritual, you see. It is like the way you educate your son.’ Mr Rao’s mouth twisted like a spider on a pin. ‘You teach him to give
signals,’ he accused. ‘To eat the chicken
so
– and then his own kind will recognize and reward him. I give the wrong signals so I am always rejected.’ He laughed sadly. ‘Merit is not noted. In intellectual matters this is even more true. Examiners will take a working-class man only if they think he can be absorbed into their class. I cannot.’

‘Then perhaps’, said James, ‘you are an unsuitable applicant?’

‘But the university’, pleaded Mr Rao, ‘is not a caste system? Not tribal surely? You cannot afford to exclude people with other ways of being than your own. Even capitalism must innoculate itself with a little of the virus it fears. Intellectual life’ – Mr Rao swung his fork like a pendulum – ‘is a dialectical process. You must violate your rules,’ he begged. ‘Isn’t that how change comes? Even in English law? First someone breaks a bad old law; then a judge condones the breaking and creates a precedent. I have read this. Now
you
’, Mr Rao pointed his fork at James, ‘must break your bureaucratic rule. Give me a scholarship. Be brave,’ he pleaded. The fork fell with a clatter but Mr Rao was too absorbed to care. ‘Give,’ he repeated, fixing James with feverish eyes as if he hoped to mesmerize him. The eyes, thought Jenny, looked molten and scorched like lumps of caramel when you burned a pudding. The fork was again swinging to and fro and it struck her that Mr Rao might not be above using hypnotism to try and make James acquiesce to his will.

She leaned over and took the fork from his fingers. He let it go. His energies were focused on James. The eyes were leeches now: animate, obscene. Melanie and her grandmother were collecting plates. They were outside the electric connection between the two men. Murmuring together, they seemed unaware of it. James’s mouth tightened. Mr Rao, Jenny saw, was in for a rocket. But the man was conscious only of his own need. It was naked now. He was frightened, visibly sweating, his nails scratched at the
tablecloth. He wiped his face with a napkin.

‘Men in lower positions must obey rules,’ he told James. ‘
They
will not let me through. Only you can make an exception. Is not the spirit of your scheme to let the alienated back into society? I am such a man,’ he said with dramatic intonation. ‘I’, he said proudly, ‘am needy, alienated, hard-working and well read. Do you not believe I am intelligent? I could get references, but my referees’, he laughed his unhappy laugh, ‘are tending to be in gaol: a minister of my country, the rector of my university. Oh, we had an establishment once.’

‘Then perhaps’, said James, ‘you understand about the need to eliminate personal appeals? Nepotism: the approach which corrupts a system. Did you’, asked James with contempt, ‘pick my wife up at that rally because you knew who she was? Wait!’ He held Jenny’s hand to stop her talking. ‘I’m quite well known. A number of people there could have recognized and pointed her out to you. A man like you is ruthless, isn’t he? For a higher aim, to be sure.’ James spoke with derision. ‘No doubt you feel you matter more than other people?’

The stuffing had gone out of Mr Rao. His head sank. His mouth, a puffy wound mobile in his face, never settled on an emotion with confidence. Even now there was a twitch of humour in its gloom. ‘Oh,’ he said listlessly, ‘many, many personal appeals are granted in this country. But it’s like I said: I don’t know the signals. I am an outsider here.’ He stood up.

‘Please!’ Jenny wrenched her wrist from her husband’s grip. ‘Mr Rao! You’re not going yet, are you?

But he had only stood up to welcome Robin who, released from his room by his grandmother, was returning in a haze of smiles and sulks.

The dishwasher was on. Its noise drowned his approach and added urgency to the hand she felt landing on her arm.

‘Jenny!’ Mr Rao’s shrewd, nervous face peered into hers. ‘I go now. I am thanking you and …’ Words, having betrayed him all day, seemed to be abandoning him utterly. ‘Sorry,’ he said as perfunctorily as Robin might have done. ‘It is not true what your husband said.’

‘Of course not. I’m sorry too – but I’m glad you came.’ She smiled with a guilty mixture of sorrow and relief. After all, what more could she do? She gave him her hand.

He didn’t take it. ‘I appreciated this,’ he said too eagerly. ‘Being in a family. You know? Mine is a people who care a lot about family life. I miss it. That was why meeting little Robin, I …’

She thought he was apologizing. ‘It’s not important.’

‘No, no. I know that with children things are always going wrong and being mended quickly. That is the joy of dealing with them. I miss children so much. Children and women – will you invite me again?’

She was astonished. Unaccountably, she felt a stab of longing to help him, to visit the unmapped regions where he lived: eager, vulnerable and alone, with no sense of what was possible any more than Robin had, or maybe great, mad saints. But how could she? The dishwasher had finished a cycle and begun another. It was so loud now that she could hardly hear what he was saying. He seemed to be repeating his question.

‘We’re going away for a while in January,’ she began evasively. ‘Skiing …’ But evasion wouldn’t do for this man. She looked him in the eye. ‘I can’t invite you,’ she said. ‘James and you didn’t hit it off. You must realize that.’

‘Will you meet me in town? I’ll give you my number.’

‘No.’

‘Please.’

‘Mr Rao …’

The wound of his mouth was going through a silent-movie routine: pleading, deriding, angry, all at once. ‘The poor have no dignity,’ he said, shocking her by this abrupt irruption of
sound. ‘They must beg for what others take.’

Suddenly, he had his arms around her and was slobbering, beseeching and hurting her in the hard grip of his hands. The sounds coming from him were animal: but like those of an animal which could both laugh and weep. One hand had got inside her blouse. ‘A woman,’ he seemed to be repeating, ‘a family … woman …’ Then a different cry got through to her: ‘Mummy!’

Melanie, looking horrified, stood next to them. The dishwasher, now emptying itself with a loud gurgle, made it impossible to hear whether she had said anything else. Behind her stunned face bobbed her grandmother’s which was merely puzzled. The older Mrs Middleton was a timorous lady, slow to grasp situations but constantly fearful of their not being as she would like.

‘Mother!’ yelled Melanie a second time.

Mr Rao, deafened by lust, loneliness or the noise of the dishwasher, was still clinging to Jenny and muttering incomprehensible, maybe foreign, sounds. She heaved him off and spoke with harsh clarity to his blind, intoxicated face.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry. But will you please go now. Just leave.’

Rereading the early stories in my first collection (1968) is, I find, like making a trip to a now defunct Ireland. It was the country of TB, earthen floors and lice; and the poverty lurking behind the efforts at jollity kept revealing itself. Hand-me-down clothing and bad dentistry were only half the story.

Yet it wasn’t all depression, even if some of my stories and titles suggest that it was. When I wonder about the futures of my characters, the word that comes to mind most insistently is resilience. Variety too. Irish people, like Italians, often cherish both. Some of the stories in this collection – though I doubt if many readers would guess which – are entirely invented; others are not. But all of them, I hope, are gutsy and likely to survive the challenges they face.

When I imagine myself returning to the places where my characters and situations were conceived – most were urban, apart from those set near or in Killiney Village – I think of taking a balloon trip in their wake. Would they like each other? Maybe not. Would they like me? What, my X-ray eyes? Why should they? Some people get angry at being put into a story. Others quite enjoy it. But why worry about this now, especially as most of them are dead?

In her Introduction to
The Faber Book of Modern Stories
(1937), Elizabeth Bowen claims that ‘The Short Story is a young art. As we now know it, it is the child of this century.’ I soon discovered that this was both true and misleading. Stories, after all, appear in the Bible. Fantasies, folk tales, ghost stories, excerpts from Homer and
The Thousand and One Nights
all go back a long way. Hunter-gatherers, whose
cave paintings offer such vivid images of their interests and activities, may well have delighted in stories too. Bowen’s conception of the modern short story really refers to the subtle and allusively suggestive short narratives that her generation of writers found and admired in the Russians, Turgenev and Chekhov, and Maupassant in France.

Miss Bowen also insists that stories should never seem contrived. ‘Execution must be voluntary and careful,’ she adds, ‘but conception should have been involuntary … the sought-about for subject gives the story a dead kernel.’

If contrivance also touches on the matter of rewriting, then her point is a debatable one for those of us whose revisions are often a search for simplicity. But I cede the debate to others. Before leaving Bowen, however, I want to quote her again: ‘The story’, she argues, ‘should have the valid central emotion and inner spontaneity of the lyric.’ Indeed, she claims, ‘poetic tautness and clarity are so essential to it that it may be said to stand at the edge of prose’.

Tautness can be the result of hard work, and this reminds me of my father’s – Sean O’Faolain’s – astonished report of how on one occasion, when staying at Bowen’s Court, he came on Elizabeth rising from her writing table and noticed that her face was dripping with perspiration. He should not have been so astonished, for he too worked long and hard on his stories, and his close friend, Frank O’Connor, would sometimes rewrite work which had already been published. This was too much for Sean. He described it as self-plagiarism and refused to do it.

There is of course the question of how the impulse to start a story begins. Looking back, I am reminded of the jokes and chaff around my parents’ lunch and tea tables in South County Dublin after the War, and of how at some point a guest might remark, ‘There’s the germ of a story there.’ Whereupon whoever had supplied the gossip might raise a hand and playfully claim, ‘Copyright.’ Surprisingly, some
stories thought up in this casual way actually got written, and still more surprisingly, people who were not themselves writers would sometimes give an anecdote to a writer friend. I am here reaching back to the 1950s, in the course of which I left Ireland, and so don’t know if such activity went on later. But what I do know is that after I left, I missed the offers of collaboration. The subtle gossip whose input can be vital in connecting life, love, and other disturbances is, I would argue, an asset to almost any drawing room.

The short story, some critics insist, should be short, as implied by Miss Bowen. And the bad feeling generated between the late American short-story writer, Raymond Carver and his editor at Knopf, Gordon Lish, shows how toxic disagreements about this could be. Lish seems to have been deft and ruthless when cutting Carver’s stories, while Carver in turn felt sharp resentment as he wondered about how fellow writers would react on learning of his surrender to his editor’s demands. A letter from him to Lish, written in 1980, reveals how painful such submission could be. It begs Lish’s forgiveness, but insists that he ‘stop production’ of Carver’s forthcoming collection of stories, which Carver’s friends had read in earlier, uncut versions. Lish’s cuts had been savage. Two stories had reportedly been slashed by nearly seventy per cent, and many others by almost half. Digressions and descriptions had been eliminated, and endings changed or cut, leaving their author unnerved to the point of desperation. A recovering alcoholic who had been described as ‘a fragile spirit’, Carver confessed in his letter that he was ‘confused, tired, paranoid and afraid’.

When I consider discussions about length in the short story, I see that the subject raises a false problem. My own stories range in length from three to forty-two pages. Equally to the point, a short story may grow into a novella. The question
then arises, when is a novella a novel? I will only add that limiting length in short stories – and this can be arbitrary – is most likely to be done by the fiction editors of magazines, such as
The New Yorker
, which published my first story. This also means that when writers submit stories to a magazine, they do so with the magazine’s expectations in mind.

My parents’ generation liked telling mine of the tough times suffered by theirs. One image which sticks with me is the description by Sean and Frank O’Connor of how they, as boys, used to come out of their noisy houses to find peace to read after dark by the light of street lamps. This made me wonder about how different the stories I was hoping to write would be from Sean’s. They had to be different because Ireland had changed while I was growing up and, unlike my parents, I had not spent my summer vacations learning Irish from native speakers. Instead, I had shuttled between long stays with French families and spells at Italian language schools. In spare moments, I also learned to recognize rude French words, such as
con
and
conne
, whose English equivalents would not enter my vocabulary for years. The daughters of the French families I stayed with didn’t use them, nor did I, but local men sang them lustily at us whenever we got on or off their bus.

Oral stories still lingered in the wilds of West Cork in my parents’ youth, and it has been observed that the freakish events which occurred in them had a purpose, which was to hold the attention of a semi-literate audience that did not enjoy the convenience of being able to check on the details of a story if the listeners became distracted and lost the thread. With luck, however, the freakish event would have imprinted itself on their memories, as must have happened to many readers of Flannery O’Connor’s story,
Good Country People
,
which is about a bible salesman who makes off with a young woman’s prosthetic leg, and more recently to readers of equally shocking fictions by Mary Gaitskill and A. M. Homes.

Celtic wonder tales can be as odd and unpredictable as those found in Homer, but they can also be grotesque. Here is a snippet to show what I mean. I draw it from one of my mother’s retellings of stories, which she assured me went back ‘a couple of thousand years’. They tended to start more or less like this:

‘It happened that at this time Ireland was frequently raided by savage bands of sea-robbers called the Fomorions, who swept down from their lands in the northern mists … Their King was Balor of the Evil Eye, and this single eye could cause an enemy to drop dead, as if struck by a thunderbolt. But as Balor grew old, the great flappy eyelid drooped over the deadly eye, and had to be hoisted up by pulleys and ropes, and the eye directed by his men on the one he wished to destroy.’

There is a touch of Monty Python here and indeed a flavour of Myles na Gopaleen. Something cartoonish also pervades the image of poor Balor. It reminds me of the English comics which my parents disapproved of and which I used to beg to be allowed to look at, when I saw other children in our bus folding them into their school bags.

My story
Man in the Cellar
may be said to have freakish traces. Cast in the form of a letter from a young English woman to her Italian mother-in-law, telling her how badly her marriage was going, it was written in the 1970s, when Italian feminism peaked, and rumours were rife about how certain brave young women had broken a doctor’s legs as punishment for his refusal to help one of their friends get an abortion, although this procedure had been recently legalized. The rumour was possibly false and only devised to scare recalcitrant doctors into being more helpful in the future.

Cruelty and argument can enliven a story, and there was
a good deal of cruelty in the civil-war stories of my parents’ generation.

Looking at my own early stories, which often take place among children, I can see that some may have been altered re-enactments of the tales that we were all told in childhood. My early stories focus on the trip wires of class and cruelty, as seen through a child’s eyes in our local village. Topic is everything, it seems! Because when I travelled, lived abroad, and wrote about that, the stories grew kinder – not, however, as kind as my father’s. He was fond of his characters, whereas I was often impatient with mine and more detached. The fact that he often forgave their foolishness showed that he was fond of Ireland itself, where he lived for most of his life. I, instead, left it and found that I was happier elsewhere.

Has the Irish imagination grown more gentle? I would like to think so, and to think too that small angers took the place of Balor’s killing eye, just as the libel action seems in some respects to have replaced older forms of violence, such as duels and ambushes. Could cruel pranks have come in as substitutes for murders? Who can tell? Children – I find with some shock – in one of my own earliest stories can entertain fierce fantasies. I have just reread one about a thirteen-year-old girl attacking a small, retarded boy. This is pure fantasy. I never knew of such a thing happening in our village, and certainly did not participate in one. But – is this worse? – I allowed it to happen in my head.

In our junior convent school, the nuns used to warn us that women, if given a chance, could become much more wicked than men. This shocked but also flattered us, even though we were unable to imagine any great wickedness. But it led us to wonder about the nuns. Had they locked themselves into convents, we asked each other, from the fear of unleashing fierce impulses? Such thoughts made school, and indeed life, a lot more interesting.