Her Name Is Rose Read online

  “I hate to remind you—”

  “Then don’t.”

  Tess smiled. It seemed there was almost nothing Iris could say that would offend her friend. She was permanently in good form even though there was plenty she could complain about. She lived her life half-full, not half-empty.

  “Iris?”

  “I know.”

  “In America they start you at forty, and you’re—”

  “Thank you.” Iris had glanced at her friend with a look that said, Please don’t say any more.

  “Go for one, will you? So I can stop pestering. And don’t get worked up about it … until you have to. Nothing to worry about. Just arrange it, okay?”

  It had taken her almost two years to make that appointment.

  The thing about poppies, which one is inclined to forget when one is standing in the garden admiring their pomposity, is that they make frightful cut flowers. Most unsatisfying if not downright depressing.

  If you are to have any success with bringing your poppies indoors, you must take a flame to their bottoms.

  Until blackened.

  With fire.

  A well-known British gardener suggests dipping them for thirty seconds in boiling hot water after collecting the flowers in the morning when the stems are fully turgid.

  Long live those turgid stems.

  Two days after the mammography, on the first of June, Iris had passed L at the entrance of the supermarket in Ennis. The nurse-out-of-uniform was wearing combats and a black T-shirt and if it hadn’t been for the purple-streaked hair, Iris mightn’t have recognized her. The combats must be some sort of defense strategy for nurses who perform breast scans, she thought. As the two women passed, the nurse averted her eyes and declined an invitation to be recognized. Iris was sure of it. She quickened her step and by the time she returned to her car, breathless, she felt exposed, like a dug-up plant whose knobby roots were shriveling in the cold.

  Iris spent the next few agonizing days waiting for Dr. O’Reilly to ring. She busied herself in the garden: mowing the lawn, pruning the spirea that had finished flowering, and spraying the rose bed with a Bordeaux mixture recommended by her friend at the Ennis farmers’ market. (She left the fixing of the cabin door for another day.) When she’d finished all her jobs she retrieved her sketchbook from her bedside table where she’d locked it away in a drawer after Luke had died. Making pretty pictures then hadn’t felt right. But now the Icelandic poppies in the front border inspired her to try, to just try. She was attempting to sketch one when the doctor’s office finally telephoned at the end of the week.

  “Mrs. Bowen? Will you hold for Dr. O’Reilly?”

  Iris paced with the phone from room to room. Her cat was asleep in a square of sun on the sitting room floor, just under the pine table. She left him sleeping and made her way to her daughter’s room where light slanted through the open curtains.

  “Iris, how are you?”

  “Fine. I’m fine. Well … not really, but—”

  “I know. I know. I have the results of the X-ray now. And I want to tell you first of all that I don’t think there is anything for you to be concerned about.”

  “O … kaaay…?”

  “One of the X-rays was sent down from the Ennis Hospital to the Breast Clinic at the Limerick Regional. Just for confirmation. It appears there’s a disturbance, what the radiologist calls an ‘architectural distortion.’”

  Iris took a sudden in-breath, and held it.

  “This is really important to hear…” The doctor softened her voice like she was sitting beside Iris holding her hand. “The radiologist phoned me this morning to say it’s nothing for you to worry about, but they do want to see you next week.”

  There was silence from Iris’s end. Architectural distortion?

  “Iris?”

  “Yes.” Iris replied finally. “Sounds iffy all the same, but you say I shouldn’t be worried?”

  “I can guess what you must be thinking, after Luke and everything, but it’s not bad news, Iris. Really. The radiologist just wants to make sure. Nine of out ten callbacks are what we call false-positives. The Breast Clinic has already sent you an appointment by post. You should get the letter on Monday.”

  “All right.”

  “Do you have someone to go with you?”

  Iris hesitated. “I do.”

  “Okay, then. Cheer up, please, and try to have a good day.” She paused. “I’ll be in touch after you’ve seen the consultant. And Iris?”

  “Yes?”

  “Call me if you need to.”

  Iris didn’t know what she was feeling. It was like nothing. Just a void. Or an empty air pocket. Or that moment when you’ve been asked a question and you don’t know the answer but you know you should. And you panic and suddenly you feel paralyzed. Why hadn’t she asked more questions. Architectural distortion? What the hell? Iris replaced the telephone and hauled herself outside with a crippling sort of feeling, as if her legs had lost their power.

  The sun was shining and she noted how odd that felt. The lawn was dappled in patches of different hues of green. If she could have drunk it in, like some green elixir, it might have calmed her. But as it was she stood a few moments, a frenzy building, then she grabbed her secateurs from the wooden table under the porch and scanned the freshly opened poppies. Crimson goblets with beads of light shining through them.

  She ordered herself to get a grip. It was a thing of nothing, the doctor implied.

  Iris sliced one stem, two stems, then three stems, clear down to the base of the plant.

  The cuts were swift and clean. The poppy stems a foot long.

  She brought the flowers inside and laid the stems on the counter, balancing them without bruising their petals, their faces clear. She would put these poppies to the test to see if they’d really hold their shape until morning. She’d photograph the sequence of singeing their cut-off ends and arranging them in a vase, and she’d photograph them again in the morning and upload them to her blog.

  The flower heads floated above the sink. Striking a match with her right hand, she took up the first long hairy stem and held the flame under the cut end—just like the blonde on Gardener’s World demonstrated. (“Until blackened,” she’d said.) It sizzled and oozed a greeny liquid. She laid each down and photographed their burnt ends. Then, with three poppies scorched, she placed them in a tall glass vase and centered them on the counter. She stepped back and for a few moments stood staring at them, half expecting the petals to separate and fall. She challenged them. Go on! I dare you. But in a kind of numbed stillness their open faces and dark centers held their pose and stared back.

  She took a few deep breaths. Tess had taught her: In with positive energy, out with the negative. In with white light, out with gray.

  In the empty house in Ashwood, the phrases “architectural distortion,” and “nine out of ten callbacks,” and “false-positives” boomeranged about her.

  White in, gray out.

  Water up, fire down.

  Two

  Sunshine pouring through the window of her Camden Lock flat in North West London reminds Rose of the song about a Chelsea morning. The one with the milk and toast and the oranges and butterscotch. It reminds her of her mother singing when the spring sunlight returns to the kitchen in Ashwood—sometime in the middle of March—before the cuckoo comes, before the swallows return, and the tulips fade. For six months of the year no sun shines in the north-facing kitchen until that first ray of spring light squeezes in from the east. Her mad, loveable mother would start singing, nearly as good as Joni Mitchell.

  Rose sings it now to herself as she stretches in the bed. She kicks off the duvet and slides to the edge, looking out her window on the canal below. Early-morning kayakers paddle. Seagulls squawk above the lock, noisy and loud. She loves the noise here compared to the utter quiet of the west of Ireland. She observes her room a moment before standing to dress, and counts, “One, two, three!” Three tea mugs. Not a record. She sm
iles, remembering the sort of Mexican stand-off she would sometimes have with her mother.

  “So here’s where all the mugs have got to, Rosie!” her mother would say, stepping into Rose’s bedroom to retrieve them, sidestepping music sheets and books and clothes. “How you manage to emerge from this…” she would say, somewhat exasperated, looking about and holding out her hands as if to receive piles of dirty laundry in her arms, “… is beyond me.”

  “Don’t know, Mum … just do.”

  “You’re like a butterfly coming from a cocoon.”

  “Yup.”

  “Mother find mugs?” Her father would ask when she hopped into the car later, not a minute too soon. He’d be sitting, waiting patiently to drive them: she to school and him to work.

  “Three.”

  “Not a record so. You could make her happy, if you wanted,” he said, looking at Rose seriously for a moment, “by giving your room a little tidy.”

  “I know, Dadda. I’m sorry.”

  “Was she cross?”

  “No. Not really.”

  Back then, Rose was at secondary school, and Luke’s law office was in the town near the old limestone courthouse. It was a daily ritual. Rose was always only just on time. Her father was the kind of man who felt being exactly on time was already being late. So in order to avoid the kind of confrontations Rose and Iris sometimes had—it being only natural with two females in the house—he allowed her to think he needed to be at work twenty minutes before he did. It was easy for him to make allowances for his daughter.

  A breeze stirs, the curtains move a wind chime. She plans to phone her mother later to say her room was flooded with light when she awoke. That’s what she will tell her—there was a song outside my window, Mum.

  Grabbing a pair of jeans, Rose lifts a gray cotton string top from among small piles scattered across the floor. She grabs a black cardigan and turns to her image in the mirror. She decides not to braid her long hair but tucks loose ends behind her ears. “Rosie dear, please tidy your room, soon. Now, there’s a good girl.” She carefully folds a black jersey dress and slips it into her rucksack.

  The sitting room is strewn with her roommate’s tissue-paper patterns and toiles. In the corner a tailor’s dummy is half-dressed with a print chiffon. “Hello, Dummy.” She writes a note and pins it to the dummy’s breast.

  Isobel, gone to master class. Wish me luck! Talk later. x Ro

  The Pirate Castle at Oval Road on the edge of the canal is below her flat. The stairs alongside it are iron-rusted and gum-stained. A paper cup sails on the gathered green algae. Rose now walks along the narrow sidewalk, dodges cyclists coming toward her, and hurries under the dark part of the railway bridge. She passes the floating Chinese restaurant at the canal’s turn at Regent’s Park, where she joins the stream of morning commuters and dog walkers.

  This morning, Tuesday, the grass verges of the Broad Walk in Regent’s Park are flaked with pink droppings from the horse chestnut trees. Blossoms pirouette in the wind. It’s snowing petals. For a moment she stands, closing her eyes, waiting for one to hit her face. She’s a girl standing still in the green heart of the moving city. She opens her mouth and sticks out her tongue to catch a petal and taste its pinkness, but without luck.

  The petals toss about in whirlwinds while she continues along at the edge, where the grass meets the pavement. Two petals land on the back of her head, wed themselves to her dark hair. There’s a man in a smart suit walking beside her, and he looks as if he wants to say something. She’s seen him before, on the daily commute through the park, one of those familiar strangers in our lives. But he doesn’t speak. Rose hoists the weight of her case on her back from one shoulder to other. The businessman follows a few paces behind.

  Rose is humming as they cross Chester Road, and she turns slightly right to walk along the western side of the Avenue Gardens, passing the colorful parrot tulips. At Park Square she turns right again in the direction of Baker Street and the Royal Academy of Music on Marylebone. The man pauses. He stops to watch her. She is like a picture of a girl in painting. The petals adorn her hair like gemstones as she heads up the steps of the academy.

  On the top step she turns, pauses momentarily. The young businessman crosses the road and walks east toward Portland Street. Another time, she thinks. Today is not the day. No. Today’s agenda is already full. No room for flirtations. She’s having a master class with Roger—Mr. Kiwi Dude, as some of the other students call him—in the afternoon but has one last practice with him this morning. She passes the porter. His crooked lips ignite into a smile.

  “Miss, you forgot to sign in.”

  She spins around and returns to his desk. “Sorry, George.” She signs. She senses his glance at the birthmark on her cheek. He can’t help himself. Rose knows; she’s used to it. She’d decided at the end of her teens not to keep trying to cover up the small, darkened stain and so, as she signs her name she smiles, hands the pen back to George.

  “There you go.”

  When George returns his eyes to the desk a pink fragment has appeared, like a thumb-size piece of silk, on his record book. As Rose moves off down the hallway the old porter shifts the petal to beside the girl’s name.

  Mr. Kiwi Dude is a handsome New Zealander and a virtuoso violinist. In addition to giving master classes, Roger Ballantyne is Rose’s tutor at the academy. She’s lucky. He used to play with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra before moving to London to take up the professorship in strings for second-year students. He isn’t one of the stuffy types they have there. He’s cool, the type of not-quite-fifty-year-old who looks not-quite-forty because his skin is permanently tanned and his curly hair is hardly gray. It has sun-bleached highlights. Does he dye it? Now that would be cool. Rose heard a segment on BBC radio about men wearing makeup. And why not? That would have made her father laugh. Too bad Dadda would never know things like that, like how she feels about men wearing makeup, or how she loves to take the tube around London, finding her way to places like Columbia Road Flower Market in Shoreditch, or discovering random hidden gems like the Fan Museum in Greenwich. Sometimes she visits the British Library just to see what’s on in case it’d be something her father would have liked. She knocks on Roger’s door.

  He opens and holds it. He’s wearing flip-flops and jeans and a brown T-shirt with the logo of a white wineglass. “Hey, Rose. Come in.” He steps aside. “Excited?”

  “Hi. Yeh … I am. Nervous, though.”

  “No worries … you’ll be fine.”

  Rose senses something about him is off but she continues, “I’m scared, actually, and feeling kinda hyper.”

  “Your final master class can do that, but it’s the end of a great year, Rose. You’ve done well so far. Don’t be worried.” He looks at his cell phone. “Anyone in your family coming to hear you today?”

  “No. There’s only my mother and she’s in Ireland. I told her it was next week. She gets too anxious for me. I’d be more worried for her being worried for me than I’d be nervous to play.”

  As if he really wasn’t listening, he says, “Maybe next year.”

  On the wall of his small office there is a poster of a surfer on a wave. Rose lays her case on a chair below it, unzips the cover, and undoes the clasps. Her violin lies open with a mottled layer of white just under the bridge. Crap. Light from the window overlooking Marylebone shines on the varnish as she takes her instrument up by the neck. Tiny specks of rosin run off the surface. As she bends slightly to position herself, the second pink petal falls from her hair onto the floor. Rose only notices the shower of rosin.

  “That dust I’m seeing, Rose…” He pauses. His fingers are tented under his chin. He taps them lightly. He looks at her like she’s a child. And the look makes her feel like one. “Rosin won’t make you play better, you know. Here, give it to me.” He takes her instrument and wipes the excess with the cloth he keeps on his music stand.

  Rose gets her sheet music and sets it up. The excitement of the morni
ng is gone. Her head is a jumble. The sheet music trembles as she adjusts it on the stand.

  “I was practicing last night. It was late.” She feels chastened, embarrassed. Her fingers have a clammy mind of their own as she takes up her bow and tightens it.

  When Roger hands back her instrument he is not pleased. “Begin with a G-minor scale, please. Three octaves.”

  Roger “the master” is preparing Rose for her first solo performance of Bach’s Sonata in G Minor. Serious stuff, she gets it, but this coolness increases her anxiety. What the hell? The student recital and master class is scheduled for the afternoon. Roger’s other students will be there. Some performing. Some not. Maybe he’s anxious, too. She lifts her violin with her left hand and brings it to her shoulder. Is he angry with her? It wasn’t that much rosin. Her chin senses for the familiar place on the rest and nestles into position like a cat finding a place in the sun. She bends her fingers and squares them, placing them in position for the scale. With her bow raised she takes a moment, counts to three, scans the room: the poster, the warm light that angles in from the window, Roger standing beside the door, his arms crossed over his chest. She begins. G A B flat, C D E flat, F G …

  “Good,” he says. “Again.”

  Again Rose plays. She relaxes and thinks, Okay, I’m feeling more confident now. Her old teacher, Andreas, appears for a moment in her mind.

  “Ready?”

  “Yes.”

  “Begin.”

  With the top of the bow hovering just a whisper above the strings, she nods imperceptibly to the surfer and begins the adagio, the first movement of the sonata, with a sweeping run into an arpeggio starting with a slow bow.

  Everything is good, Rose believes. She’s relaxed. She’s playing really well. Somewhere near the end of the second movement, the fugue, Roger’s cell phone rings.

  It rings once.

  She plays on. He’ll silence it in a second. She’s into the challenging ascent, and is careful not to lose the singing line, the melody line, but the damn phone is still ringing.