Under the Rose (7 page)

Next morning the blue-pennanted busload visited the Sacré Cœur, the Sainte Chapelle, Saint Sulpice and Notre Dame. The pilgrims, weary of churches, gabbled prayers, collected the available indulgences and settled back in their seats
with a profane zest when the captain proposed a drive into the country. He took them towards Rambouillet, along roads where mistletoe hung hairy smudges on the limbs of poplars, and sounds were spasms in the air. Returning, they decided to stretch their legs in the Bois de Boulogne and gaped at crisp-figured riders on distant bridle paths. The lake was diamond bright.

‘Golly!’ Jenny Lacey squeezed old Miss Taylor’s arm. ‘Doesn’t it
thrill
you to be here? Doesn’t it make your blood run faster?’ Heels puncturing the clay, she took off to sniff the passionate humours of the wood.

Kitty Lacey flung out her arms. ‘I want to hug you, captain,’ she threatened and did so with a buoyant gesture.

‘Oho!’ Mrs O’Keefe whispered. ’Tis easy seen a gay old time was had last night!’ A conniving elbow stabbed the captain’s waistcoat. As they got back into the bus, he noted that Maisie was wearing sensible flat shoes.

The next two days the captain left the group to their own devices until dinner time. He slipped off each morning, avoiding Mrs O’Keefe who was lurking at loose ends in the lounge, and did not return before seven. He spent one morning looking at pistols in an antique shop, another reading
The Times
in a bar where he partook of a liver paste sandwich and some Beaujolais by the glass, then meandered through grimy streets in the bleak vicinity of the Santé prison, coming in time to the Jardin de l’Observatoire where he sat by the lake and felt lonely for Stephen’s Green. At dinner, Mrs O’Keefe twitted him on his ‘mysterious double life’, remarking that things moved faster when one was abroad, didn’t he think?

The two younger Miss Laceys had meanwhile had their hair done. (‘Paris, ha, ha,’ said Miss Taylor, ‘has gone to their heads!’) A sculptural cut, removing the fuzz that had
shadowed their faces, revealed hitherto disguised rapacities.

On those two nights the captain played bridge again with Maisie and the two elder women while Jenny and Kitty went dancing with their Englishmen.

‘Toodloo!’ screamed Kitty, waving an arm bright with a dozen plastic bangles.

‘Keep your eye on sis, captain! She’ll clean you out!’

‘Still waters run deep! She’s a cardsharper!’

‘And a cannibal man-eater!’ They screamed with laughter.

Their sister winced. They were gone.

‘Whew!’ The captain caught Maisie’s embarrassed eye. She laughed back at him and he was pleased that she seemed in better form. Probably decided those young chaps weren’t worth being jealous over! He couldn’t have agreed more. Anyone who would put up with those screeching termagants…. Well, Mrs O’Keefe had shown judgement in isolating Maisie from the quartet. She was clearly several cuts above them…. Maisie and Mrs O’Keefe won back their losses that night.

The next day was to be the pilgrims’ last. The strike had been settled and seats were available on a plane the following morning. In the afternoon the hotel was taken over by a provincial wedding party which sang songs that reminded the Irish group of some of their own and struck up a gaiety in which they soon became involved. They were in the thick of it when the captain returned from his stroll. Someone was playing the accordion and a pair of highly liquored Frenchmen – rural types in stiff suits – had threaded arms through the armpits of Maisie and Mrs O’Keefe and were stamping about to the tune.

‘Captain! Come on! Where have you been all day!’

The barman handed him a glass of something and Maisie’s partner surrendered her. She was an excellent dancer. Light-footed.

‘I’ve always said’, the captain told her, ‘the best dancers come from down the country. Where are the other two?’

‘They’ve been out with their fellows since morning,’ she said. ‘They’re letting the last day be the longest.’

‘Well so can we,’ he comforted her and whirled her off again, for the accordionist had started up a waltz. The captain had won prizes for waltzing with his mother and told Maisie about this. ‘My father was killed when I was twelve. I used to take her to dances from the time I left school, but I never got a look in after the first dance or so. She was so popular.’

‘And she never remarried?’

‘No.’

‘You must miss her.’

‘Yes.’

The hotel service had been disrupted by the wedding, so guests had to be content with a supper of cold sandwiches, mostly left-overs. They ate them in the pauses between dancing.

‘It’s mad,’ Maisie said. ‘Like an Irish country hotel.’

‘It’s fun,’ said the captain.

At 2 a.m. he sponged his forehead with a damp handkerchief. ‘Been overdoing it,’ he apologized. ‘If you’ll excuse me, I’d better retire. Ladies,’ he turned towards Maisie who was resting on a couch. He sketched his usual departing bow and toppled into her lap.

There was a snigger from one of the dancing French, too far gone themselves to interpret the situation correctly.

‘Captain! Oh! Captain!’

Maisie had been thrown backwards by his impact and now he lay prostrated across her breast. Male smells breathed into her gasping mouth. She tried to lift him but he seemed to have gone rigid and her fingers merely managed to peel his jacket up his back. She probed the intimacy of flesh sweating through his shirt.

‘Someone …’ she begged. ‘Please … Mrs O’Keefe!’ She pulled the flaps of his coat down again. Hugging him violently to her, hands braced beneath his armpits, she got him
into a half sitting, half reclining position beside her on the couch. People gathered round at last.

‘Captain! Captain!’

‘Monsieur le Capitaine! Mais qu’est-ce qu’il a? Il est soûl?’

‘No, no, he must be ill!’

‘There’s a medicine chest in our room! Please, Monsieur, veuillez bien porter le capitaine…. Do you mind carrying the captain….’

The accordionist and a friend lugged him up the stairs and along a corridor. His eyes opened, glared. ‘Just a touch!’ he kept gasping out. ‘Nothing to worry about … passes over … malaria….’ O’Keefe and Maisie clucked along behind him. ‘Mind his head now!’ ‘No, no!’ he heard Maisie squawking. ‘Not here. This is
my
room!’ Like one of the three bears. ‘Mais alors?’ the accordionist complained. The captain, the captain thought he understood him to say, was no feather-weight. If she didn’t want him here, why didn’t she speak up sooner?
He
wasn’t a paid stretcher bearer. (‘Elles en font des manières, ces gonzesses!’) A door closed. ‘Put him on the bed,’ O’Keefe’s voice cut in. ‘Have sense! The man’s ill!’ ‘Yes, yes,’ the captain tried to shout. ‘Ill! It’ll pass. Only cover me up!’ His body was shaking with the cold. He hadn’t had a bout like this in years. His teeth, his very bones, were clattering with the cold. ‘More blankets,’ he commanded. ‘Hold my hand. Tightly. More tightly. More blankets. More. It’ll pass. It’ll pass.’ He clutched a hand, closed his eyes and heaved like an agonizing fish: his whole body leaping in spasms from the bed. ‘Just a few minutes. Never takes more,’ he heard himself say. ‘Half an hour at most. Hold me, Mummy! Mummy, hold me. Hold me tight. Lie beside me. Keep me warm.’

When he awoke from the nightmares that always came with his bouts, he felt her beside him, turned absurdly the other way so that their bottoms bumped and the arm he was clinging to held her pinioned like a clamp. When she felt him stir, she unclenched his fingers and sat up.

‘Would you like a cup of tea, captain?’ she asked, brushing down her skirt, tidying her blouse. ‘I have a spirit lamp and tea and sugar.’ (Wise virgins, they carried plastic-wrapped props against every incursion of the unforeseen.)

‘What? What?’ the captain groaned, his head throbbing less than he would have liked. There was something to be faced he could already tell. A trifle … what? Unorthodox? He could smell scenty stuff. An animal smell not his. He closed his eyes hopefully. Sleeping dogs. Let lie! The malaria dreams rushed at him.

‘Tea!’ said Maisie with assurance. ‘Wake
up
, captain. It will do you good.’

He sat up. ‘Where … your sisters?’ The three had shared a room.

‘With Mrs O’Keefe.’ She was laying out plastic cups. ‘Feel better? I can see you do!’

‘Yes.’

‘Good!’ She plumped his pillow efficiently.

‘You gave me some stuff?’

‘Quinine.’

He laughed. ‘By golly you’re a good nurse. I should marry you!’

She
laughed, ‘crisply’, enjoying the role.

‘And get me cheap? Have you a drop of Scots blood, captain?’

Mild whiff of scent from her.

‘You called me “Mummy”,’ she told him.

He blushed and decided to expire again.

A minute later Mrs O’Keefe bounced in in a satin kimono to know ‘how’s the patient?’

Maisie told her he was in the best of form. ‘Been proposing to me,’ she said. ‘I think that’s a good sign, don’t you?’

Mrs O’Keefe’s gargling intake of breath was like the last exodus of water from a bath. ‘We-ell! Of
all
the miracles!’ (He opened an eye, saw her fling her arms around Maisie’s
neck, and closed it quickly.) ‘
This
is what I’ve been praying for!’ gabbled she. ‘
Wait
till I tell the others! I can’t think of nicer news! I declare I’m happier than yourselves! My heartiest congratulations! I’ll say a prayer this minute to Saint Bernadette!’

‘Mrs O’Keefe! We were joking!’ He heard Maisie’s squawk.

‘
Joke!
After spending the night together! Sure the whole hotel has its eye on the pair of ye!’

The captain trembled.

‘We … I …’ Maisie strangled.

‘You’re excited! Shy!
I
understand! Bridal nerves! I’ll keep the others away!’ The door closed.

The captain opened his eyes again to see Maisie rush to it, lock it, unlock it and sit miserably in an armchair. ‘I
hate
that woman!’ she hissed.

‘A monster,’ the captain agreed timidly.

‘We’ll straighten things out,’ she told him. ‘It’s ridiculous! Maybe one day it’ll seem funny! Old cat!’ She began to cry. ‘This is nervous! I’m sorry. It’s … just that
I
’m never going to hear the end of this! Never! Oh!’ She buried her face in a cushion.

‘Maybe I should go after her,’ she said into her cushion. ‘At once. But they’d all be at me! I couldn’t face them this minute. In the morning,’ she promised. ‘We’ll straighten it out!’ She wept.

The captain stared unhappily about him. Charity towards one’s neighbour began by leaving them alone. Don’t rush in. Give her time to pick up the shreds. Poor girl! Tough furrow! Sisters like harpies! Hyenas! Think of them sucking the marrow from each others’ bones for years while he’d been in Egypt, Burma…. Locked up together like inmates of some female reformatory! He could just see their house in Sligo! Grey – Connemara stone – with a bumpy tennis-court – no man to roll it – wind-bent trees, fringes of nettle and dock. His eye skidded off the bidet where stockings had
been stretched, rose to observe flies and lees of dust in the ceiling lamp. He felt depressed. Squashed somehow. Normal enough after an attack. Drains one. But why the attack? Old age? Ha! No such thing! The wardrobe looked like a pair of upright coffins with claw feet. All the better to trail you with. He would be glad to get out of here.

‘I have always tried to be d-d-dignified!’ From behind the cushion.

Poor child! ‘Now, now!’ He comforted. ‘This could happen to a bishop. Go on,’ he advised. ‘Cry! It’ll do you good.’ But as she did he added: ‘What would you say to a walk?’

‘Now?’ She looked at her watch. ‘It’s 4 a.m.’

‘Why not? We won’t sleep after the tea. Fresh air! Clean the cobwebs out of our heads. This is Paris. All sorts of things go on! Let’s do a little reconnoitring.’

‘And your head?’

‘Best thing in the world for it. If you’re game we’ll slip out on the QT.’

They found a taxi rank and the captain, remembering something he had been told about being able to get a meal at any hour at Les Halles, asked the driver to take them there. ‘Some modest place,’ he directed. ‘We didn’t get much of a meal last night,’ he told Maisie restively. ‘We can go for a stroll afterwards and see the dawn maybe over Paris.’

The restaurant was shiny and noisy. Nobody looked at Maisie’s red eyes. Over white wine and oysters she grew febrile.

‘God!’ she groaned. ‘In this city one could be
alone
or choose one’s company.’ She watched a well-dressed woman who was eating a large meal alone with a book. A bottle of wine in front of her was three-quarters full. ‘People don’t stare and tattle and pity each other’s failures…. Oh, what do I know about it? Maybe they do!’ She lowered her eyes and ate.

‘Couldn’t you take a job?’ the captain asked. ‘Break out as it were? Go to Dublin or London….’ Shocked at his own indiscretion, he let his voice trail vaguely away. ‘Lots of
women are secretaries, aren’t they?’ he murmured.

‘I’m forty,’ said Maisie. ‘And I have had no experience.’

At the baldness of that he quivered. The unusual hour, the place, the wine after quinine perhaps, above all her frankness stirred him. The captain had rarely probed beneath the patina of conversational formula. What Maisie had shown of her private self troubled him.

‘My dear,’ he laid down knife and fork, wiped his lips and leaned towards her, ‘you could come and live with me! Why not? We can work out a
modus vivendi.
That is, if you would not greatly object. I would respect your privacy…. You could depend on that!’

She looked up. ‘You mean …?’

‘Yes, yes!’ He smiled in triumph at his own initiative, in assent to the warmth of solidarity, the possibilities that fanned out like fireworks once one removed the lid – the lid of what? The wine danced like a centipede in his throat.

‘Marry you?’

‘Why not? Why not? Absolutely…. That is to say….’ He put down his glass. ‘In a sense.’

‘Because of Mrs O’Keefe? The fuss?’

‘Why not,’ he insisted bravely. ‘We would be marrying to protect each other. From the others.’

‘Oh you are
kind
! You want to save my face…. We
could
simply let them go on assuming what they do. For a while.’