Under the Rose (2 page)

‘With us?’

‘With me. Don’t be obtuse.’

Dizzy had been bossing Maggy and Rosheen since the day they’d met her. They’d all been about twelve at the time. Maggy knew this because she remembered that she and Rosheen had been on their way back to the convent after winning medals for under thirteens at a Feis Ceol. Maggy’s was for verse-speaking and Rosheen’s for Irish
dance. Suddenly Rosheen let out a screech.

‘I’ve lost me medal. What’ll I do? The nuns’ll be raging. They all prayed for me to win it and now I haven’t got it to show.’

‘It’s winning that matters,’ Maggy tried to soothe her. ‘The medal isn’t valuable. Come on. We’ll miss our bus.’

‘I’m not moving from this spot till I make sure I’ve lost it.’

Rosheen began to frisk herself. They were standing on a traffic island in the middle of O’Connell Street and it wasn’t long before her manœuvres began to attract attention. When she unbuttoned her vest to grope inside it, a tripper with an English accent shouted: ‘Starting early, aren’t you? What are you doing, love? Giving us a bit of a striptease?’

Maggy spat at him. It was an odd, barbaric gesture but, remembering, she could again feel the fury of the convent girl at the man’s violation of dignity and knew her rage could not have been vented with less. Give her a knife and she’d have stuck it in him. The man must have seen insanity in her face for he wiped the spittle from his lapel and moved silently away. Rosheen, typically, had failed to notice the incident.

‘I’ve lost it,’ she decided, buttoning her blouse. ‘I’m going to pray to Saint Anthony to get it back for me.’ She knelt on the muddy pavement of the traffic island. ‘Kneel down and pray with me,’ she invited Maggy.

‘Here?’ Maggy’s voice shot upwards. ‘You shouldn’t be let out, Rosheen O’Dowd! You should be tied up. People are
looking
at you!’ Being looked at was agony to Maggy at that time. ‘Rosheen,’ she begged. ‘Get up. You’re destroying your gym-slip. Please, Rosheen. I bet’, she invented desperately, ‘it’s against the law. We’re obstructing traffic.
Rosheen!
’

But all Rosheen had to say was: ‘You’re full of human respect. Shame on you.’ And she began blessing herself with gestures designed for distant visibility. Like a swimmer signalling a lifeguard, she was trying for Saint Anthony’s attention. He was known to be a popular and busy saint.

‘I’m off.’ Maggy, unable to bear another second of this, stepped off the traffic island in front of the advancing wheels of a double-decker bus which stopped with a shriek of brakes.

‘Are you trying to make a murderer out of me?’ The driver jumped out to shake her by the shoulders. ‘That’s an offence,’ he yelled. ‘I could have you summonsed. In court. What’s your name and address?’

‘Magdalen Mary Cashin, Convent of the Daughters of Passion.’

‘What’s that? A nursery rhyme?’ The man was angry. Passengers were hanging out of the bus, staring. ‘Tell me your real name,’ the man roared, ‘or …’

Maggy ducked from his grasp, ran and, miraculously missing the rest of the traffic, made it to the opposite footpath.

‘What’s chasing you?’ A girl of about her own age was staring inquisitively at her. ‘You’re from the Passion Convent, aren’t you? I know the uniform. I may be coming next term.’

‘You?’ Maggy was alert for mockery. ‘You’re a Protestant.’

‘Not really. My parents are, vaguely, I suppose – but how did you know?’

Maggy shrugged. ‘It’s obvious.’

‘How? I’d better find out, hadn’t I?’ the girl argued. ‘If I’m coming to your school?’

‘You wouldn’t be let come like that.’

‘Like what?’

‘Look at your skirt.’ Maggy spoke reluctantly. She was still unsure that she was not being laughed at. ‘And you’ve no stockings on! Then there’s your hair …’ She gave up. The girl was hardly a girl at all. Protestants almost seemed to belong to another sex. Their skirts were as short as Highlanders’ kilts and their legs marbled and blue from exposure. ‘Don’t you feel the cold?’ she asked. Maybe Protestants didn’t.

‘No. I’m hardy. Do you wear vests and things? I despise vests and woolly knickers!’

The intimacy of this was offensive but Maggy’s indignation
had been so used up in the last ten minutes that her responses were unguarded.

‘I do too but I’m made to wear them,’ she said and felt suddenly bound to the person to whom she had made such a private admission.

‘My name’s Dizzy,’ said Dizzy. ‘Is that your friend over there? I think she’s signalling.’

‘She’s odd.’ Maggy disassociated herself from the embarrassing Rosheen, who was indeed waving and rising and replunging to her knees. ‘Don’t mind her,’ she begged. ‘It’s best to pay her no attention.’

‘She’s praying, isn’t she? That’s marvellous.’

‘What?’

‘She doesn’t give a damn. Catholicism interests me,’ Dizzy confided. ‘I think Catholics are more Irish, don’t you?’

‘More Irish than whom?’

‘Us.’

‘You?’

‘We
are
Irish, you know,’ Dizzy argued. ‘My family has been here since the time of Elizabeth the First. They’re mentioned in heaps of chronicles.’

That, to Maggy’s mind, only showed how foreign they were. The chronicles would have been written by the invaders. But she didn’t mention this. What interested her about Dizzy was not her likeness to herself but her difference. It was clear that she lacked the layers of doubt and caution which swaddled Maggy’s brain as thickly as the unmentionable vests and bloomers did her body.

‘I found it!’ Rosheen had arrived, all pant and spittle. She waved the medal excitedly. ‘Saint Anthony answered my prayer. I knew he would. Isn’t he great?’ Rosheen always spoke of saints as though they were as close to her as her dormitory mates. ‘Do you know where I found it? You’ll never believe me: in my shoe.’

‘This is Rosheen O’Dowd,’ said Maggy formally. ‘I’m
Magdalen Mary Cashin and you’re …?’ She was chary of the ridiculous name.

‘Dizzy,’ said Dizzy. ‘Desdemona FitzDesmond actually, but it’s a mouthful, isn’t it? So, Dizzy.’

‘We’re orphans,’ Maggy thought to say.

‘What luck,’ said Dizzy. ‘Wait till you meet my sow of a mother. She leads poor Daddy a dreadful dance. Drink, lovers, debts,’ she boasted. ‘Family life isn’t all roses, I can tell you.’

The orphans were interested and impressed.

‘Here’s your tea.’ The screw had brought a fresh tray. ‘You’d be well advised to have it. As well start as you plan to finish and, believe me, they all eat in the end! Chips this evening,’ she said.

Maggy smelled and imagined the pith of their insides and the crisply gilded shells. An ideal potato chip, big as a blimp, filled her mind’s sky. The door closed; a rattle of keys receded down the corridor. Heels thumped. Teeth in other cells would be sinking through crisp-soft chips. Tongues would be propelling the chewed stuff down throats. If the din of metal were to let up she would surely hear soft munching. Her own saliva tasted salty. Or was it sweat? Did they count the chips put in her tray? Wouldn’t put it past them. Tell us is she weakening. Keep count. They’d never. Wouldn’t they just? Besides, to eat even one would surely make her feel worse.

There was no political status in England. No political prisoners at all. So why insist on treatment you couldn’t get? They had made this point laboriously to her, then given up trying to talk sense to someone who wouldn’t listen. People had died recently from forced feeding so they were chary of starting that. They followed the Home Secretary’s Guidelines and what happened next was no skin off their noses. The
country had enough troubles without worrying about the bloody Irish. Always whining and drinking, or else refusing to eat and blaming the poor old UK for all their woes. They had their own country now but did that stop them? Not on your nelly, it didn’t. They were still over here in their droves taking work when a lot of English people couldn’t find it. Rowdy, noisy. Oh forget it. When you saw all the black and brown faces, you almost came to like the Paddies if only they’d stop making a nuisance of themselves.

A man had come to see her, a small man with a glass eye whom she’d seen twice in Dizzy’s flat. He was from the IRA. He winked his real eye while the glass one stared at her. He had claimed to be a relative, managing somehow to get visiting privileges. She must play along with his story, winked the eye. Was she demanding political status? Good.

‘They’ll deny it but we have to keep asking. It’s the principle of the thing.’

There had been a confusion about him as though he didn’t know whom to distrust most: her, himself, or the screws. His dead eye kept vigil and it occurred to her that one half of his face mistrusted the other.

Impossible to get comfortable. Her body felt as if enclosed in an orthopaedic cast. She had a sense of plaster oozing up her nose and felt tears on her cheeks but didn’t know why she was crying, unless from frustration at the way she had boxed herself in like a beetle in a matchbox. She was boxed in by her ballady story. It didn’t fit her, was inaccurate but couldn’t be adjusted, making its point with the simple speed of a traffic light or the informative symbol on a lavatory door. She was in a prison within a prison: the cast. Slogans were scrawled on it: graffiti. She was a public convenience promenading promises to blow, suck, bomb the Brits, logos, addresses of abortion clinics, racial taunts. ‘Wipe out all Paddies and nignogs now!’ shrieked one slogan cut deep into her plaster cast inside which she wasn’t sure she was. Maybe she’d wiped herself out?

She had committed a murder. Performed an execution. Saved a man’s life.

Depending on how you looked at it. Who had? Maggy the merciful murderess.

Her story was this: she had been an orphan, her mother probably a whore. Brought up by nuns, she had lost her faith, found another, fought for it and been imprisoned. This was inexact but serviceable. If they made a ballad about it, Rosheen could sing it in a Camden pub.

When she was very small the nuns told Maggy that she had forty mothers: their forty selves. An aunt, visiting from Liverpool, was indignant.

‘Frustrated old biddies!’ These, she asserted, were mock mothers. ‘You have your own,’ she said. ‘What are they trying to do? Kill her off? What do they know of the world?’ she asked. ‘Cheek.’

‘What world?’ Maggy wondered. She was maybe four.

‘Now don’t
you
be cheeky,’ said the aunt.

On what must have been a later visit the aunt reported the mother to be dead. Maggy remembered eating an egg which must have been provided for consolation.

‘I’ll bet they’ll say it’s for the best,’ raged the aunt and began painting her face in a small portable mirror. ‘You didn’t love her at all, did you?’ she interrogated, moistening her eyelash brush with spit. ‘I told her not to send you here. She’d have kept you by her if she could. Children’, the aunt said, ‘have no hearts.’

The aunt too must have died for she didn’t come back – and indeed maybe ‘aunt’ and ‘mother’ were one and the same? Maggy, when she grew older, guessed herself to be illegitimate, as there had never been any mention of a father. And so it proved when eventually she came to London and applied for a birth certificate to Somerset House.

‘You don’t know your luck. No beastly heritage to shuck off!’

Dizzy had come to the nuns’ school to spite her mother
who favoured agnosticism, raw fruit, fresh air and idleness for girls.

‘Not that it matters where she goes to school!’ The mother was mollified by the smallness of the nuns’ fee. ‘Nobody of my blood ever worked,’ she said. ‘Dizzy will marry young.’ She spoke without force for she was to die of diabetes when Dizzy was fourteen. After that Dizzy’s father became very vague and did not protest when she became a Catholic. Thus fortified, she was allowed by the nuns to invite Maggy home for weekends.

They spent these talking about what they took to be sex and dressing up in colonial gear which they found in the attic. Much of it was mildewed and so stiff that it seemed it must have been hewn rather than tailored. There were pith helmets and old-fashioned jodhpurs shaped like hearts. Dizzy’s father had served in Africa, although she herself had been born after his return to Ireland when her mother was forty-four.

‘I’m a child of the Change,’ she relished the phrase. ‘I’m not like them.’

Who she wanted to be like was the bulk of the local population, and, on Poppy Day, she hauled down the Union Jack which her father had raised. He was apologetic but this only annoyed her the more for she felt that he ought to have known his own mind. Dizzy was eager for order and when she became a Catholic fussed unfashionably about hats in church and fish on Fridays.

On leaving school, Maggy won a scholarship to an American university. Coming back, after eight years there, she met Dizzy again in London. This was a Dizzy who seemed to have lost much of her nerve for she blushed when Maggy asked: ‘Did you know I was in love with you when we were in our teens?’

This was a requiem for someone no longer discernible in Dizzy, whom Maggy recalled as pale and volatile as the fizz on soda water. Dizzy had had fly-away hair worn in a halo
as delicate as a dandelion clock. Her skin might have been blanched in the dusk of her secretive house. Agile and seeming boyish to Maggy who knew no boys, she swung up trees like a monkey so that one could see all the way up her skirt. She was Maggy’s anti-self. Once, in a spirit of scientific inquiry, they showed each other their private parts. Later, Dizzy discovered this to be a sin or at least the occasion of one.

‘You knew,’ she accused. ‘You should have told me.’

Maggy was disappointed to find freedom so fragile and each felt let down.

Now Dizzy’s skin was opaque, thickish. She had lost her charm, but Maggy, although she might not have liked her if they’d just met for the first time, was responsive to memory. She felt linked by a bond she could not gauge to this woman who had first alerted her to the possibility of frankness. Dizzy had provided a model of mannish virtue at a time when Maggy knew no men and now Maggy, who had lost and left a man in America, found herself eager for support. Dizzy could still act with vigour. Look at the way she had rescued Rosheen.