Authenticity (10 page)

‘You mean to say you don’t have one?’

‘I do. I have at least two, but I can’t find one of them, and the other one isn’t up to much.’ Dennis could imagine the sorry shred of fabric behind this euphemism.

‘Absolutely no problem,’ he said. ‘I can certainly lend you a tie.’

He could have gone to a shop, Roderic thought, and not had as good a choice. There were ties of every imaginable colour and texture. Watched by Dennis, who was sitting on the end of his own bed, he selected one in plain dark green silk and moved to the mirror to experiment in tying it.

‘Is anyone else in line for this job?’

‘I think three others have been called for interview. They couldn’t just give it to me, the permanent contract, they have to advertise it, go through the formalities, you know.’

Dennis paused before risking the next question. ‘And what if you don’t get it?’ He was dismayed to see that this possibility hadn’t even crossed Roderic’s mind.

‘What are you on about? It’s my job.’

‘Yes, but they don’t
have
to give it to you, do they?’

‘They have no reason not to.’ He was clearly baffled by Dennis’s line of questioning. ‘I’ve put in a good year, worked like a horse. Everyone says how much the girls’ work has picked up, that I’ve transformed the department. Even the other art teachers would credit me with that.’

‘But in principle, they would be within their rights to give the contract to someone else.’

‘In principle, yes,’ he conceded, with great reluctance, ‘but I mean, God, do you really think … ?’

When he arrived at his parents’ house the following Saturday, Roderic was already there, sitting alone in the drawing-room. From his inside jacket pocket he took a letter, and handed it to Dennis.

‘Efforts,’ Roderic said, as Dennis handed the letter back to him. ‘
Efforts!
’

At that, Cliona glanced into the room. ‘Oh hello Dennis, I don’t think Mum knows you’re here. I’ll tell her she can serve up.’

‘This,’ Roderic said when they were alone again, and he held up the letter, ‘was in my pigeon-hole in the staffroom. The headmistress didn’t even have the courage to tell me to my face. So I went straight to her office and asked why it had “been decided” not to offer me the post. She said they felt that for various reasons – I liked that, various reasons – it was felt that I wasn’t fully committed to my teaching work. I told her she knew that wasn’t true. So then she said, “You’re pushing me to this: you have a bad attitude to the pupils. You over-identify with them, you’re too keen to be liked.” I said, “You know that isn’t true either. I don’t see the need to be disliked by them to bring out the best of which they’re capable; and that’s another thing entirely from wanting to be liked.” She told me to stop contradicting her. I asked her what I was going to live on. She said she had no idea, and that it wasn’t her concern. Then she had the nerve to say that she thought I would be glad, because it would give me time for other things in which I was interested. And then she said she was busy and would I go, and so I did.’

‘And what has the reaction been generally in the school?’

‘The girls are up in arms. My two drinking companions came to me in floods of tears, they thought it might have something to do with them. Quite a few of the other teachers have come to me privately to say they think that it’s outrageous, and I’ve been treated disgracefully and the head and the governors should be ashamed, and so on and so forth. For of course none of it will make a blind bit of difference. No one will speak up for me in public or do anything to have me reinstated, because they’re afraid for their own skins. Fear and power, that’s what so much of what goes on in the workplace comes down to, Dennis. I’ve learned that in the past year, if nothing else. And here comes the cherry on the cake: Tony announced yesterday that he’s going to buy a house. Jim is moving in with Moira, so that’s that happy home blown to the four winds. I don’t even know where I’m going to live come the autumn.’ Down the hall, they could hear the
voices of their sisters and mother. ‘Jesus, Dennis, I’ve lost my job!’ and he spoke as if he was only now realising the enormity of what had happened. ‘I’ve lost my job; what am I going to do?’

The response was out before Dennis had even thought about it.

‘Well, you could always come and live with me.’

There was no sign of life from the little house. No smoke from the chimney, the blue door shut, and all the curtains drawn as though it were a house of mourning, which, coincidentally, it was. This aspect of the windows gave the façade a blank, shut look; but for all that it looked perfected in the preternaturally sharp light of morning, pristine, rinsed. Henry stood for some moments staring at it, and wondering what he should do. He could simply put the letters through the door and continue on his round. Lifting the black painted metal flap he slipped in a phone bill and a white envelope, heard them fall on to the floor within. He listened in expectation for the sound of footsteps as someone came to pick up the letters, but there was only silence now. All around the house there were hedges of wild fuchsia, vivid, dripping red blossoms after the night’s rain. There was no wind. The orchard was utterly still, the twisted trees, to Henry’s eyes, weird and strange, pregnant with small fruit. Birdsong.

He lifted the black knocker, let it fall once, waited, listened and was about to knock once more when suddenly the door opened. Standing in the hall beside the two envelopes, one buff, one white, was a frowsy child. She was five, maybe six, wild-haired and sleepy-eyed; shoeless but otherwise fully dressed.

‘Morning, Princess. Are you long up? You don’t look it’

‘Hello, Henry.’

‘Is your da in?’

Yawning, the child nodded, held the door open wide for him, and he followed her through to the kitchen. The curtains here were also closed, but as his eyes became accustomed to the half light, Henry could see that there was a man sleeping
on the sofa. He was covered with a quilted eiderdown, part of which, at his side, was bunched to form a kind of nest, a hollow, like the warm empty depression a small sleeping animal might have left pressed into long grass by the side of the road. There was a sinkful of unwashed dishes, and an unwrapped loaf on the bare board of the kitchen table. A bag of sugar sat sodden and split in a puddle of spilt tea. Before the sleeping man was an overflowing ashtray, a glass and an empty whiskey bottle. Henry stood in silence looking at these things, reading their meaning as fluently and profoundly as a scholar might have read the symbolism in a vanitas painting. He moved to speak, but the child theatrically held an index finger against her shut lips, and indicated the sleeping man. Henry hunkered down in front of her.

‘Look at that for a face,’ he whispered. ‘You’d scare a goat off its tether. Away upstairs and give yourself a wash.’ Without another word and with seeming obedience she trotted out of the kitchen, but took care not to close the door properly behind her. Half-way up the stairs she stopped and sat down to listen.

There was the brisk, whishing sound of curtain rings against a curtain rail, then a low groan. ‘Dan? Dan? It’s me, Henry.’
Whish
: the second set of curtains. ‘C’mon now, wakey wakey. Shake a leg.’ Another groan, a request to know what time it was, and then, noticing that the child was missing, an urgent, almost panicked demand to know where she was, and Henry’s voice, calm, reassuring, saying that she had gone upstairs. The sound of the tap, of water running, of the kettle being filled and set on the hob. ‘Are you out of smokes? Here, catch.’ The sound of a match being dragged across the rough side of the matchbox, the small explosion of it igniting, then, momentarily, silence.

‘Right now, Dan, listen to me. This isn’t going to do. Look at the state of the place.’

‘I’m doing my best’

‘Aye, well, that’s as may be, but you’re still going to have to do better.’

A pause, then her father’s voice. ‘It’s only six months,’ and Henry’s response, surprisingly brutal:

‘How long do you want? How long is it going to take?’

‘I’ll never get over it.’

‘Aye, well,’ Henry said again, ‘that’s the point, you’re going to have to.’ A pause, and then: ‘The thing is this: if you don’t get yourself sorted out, you might lose her in the long run, the child. They might take her off you.’ Vehement protests at this, anger mixed with fear, into which Henry cut dismissively almost at once. ‘Oh you can say that, Dan, you can say that. Talk’s cheap. Say it wasn’t me showed up at your door this morning, your old friend Henry. Say it was a social worker. What then?’

‘It’s not that bad.’

‘Child sleeping fully dressed all night on a sofa with you – with you, mind – empty whiskey bottle on the floor. Not that bad – social worker sees worse every day in the week, but it doesn’t look too good either, does it? And my point is this: what’ll it be like in another six months? A year? Six years?’ He spoke quietly now. ‘The teachers are noticing, Dan. Everybody’s noticing. My Felim’s in Julia’s class. Said she came in the other day in two odd socks and her jumper on back to front, the label sticking up to her chin. Two days later, she fell asleep at her desk: sound asleep. They had to put her in the bookstore with a rug over her for the rest of the afternoon, and she only woke up when it was time to go home. Now if you was Lord Muck and had a pot of money you might just get away with it; they’d give you the benefit of the doubt. But you, you, working man, on your own, bringing up a child: if you can’t manage it, don’t expect sympathy, ‘cos you won’t get any. They’ll take Julia away from you, and do you know what you’ll be able to do to stop them? Sweet fuck all. Have you got that, Dan? Have you got that?’

Dan mended his ways. He got his drinking under control and instigated a stricter regimen in the house under which Julia, a traditionalist and arch-conservative like all children, flourished and thrived. In his grief he had been indulgent to her, and she hadn’t liked it; had been cool about the dolls and bears and chocolates with which he showered her, as a cheated wife takes no pleasure in the flowers and jewellery her husband buys to placate his own guilt. She was six. He fixed regular bed-times and meal-times, established a routine, but left latitude within the order, so that when he went once to buy a sliced loaf in the local shop and saw a mango, he bought that too, because he had never seen one before. When a family of hedgehogs wandered up to the house late on a pale summer night, he woke her out of a sound sleep to come and see them, to give them milk.

For all that, he never became a paragon of domestic management. The local women who found occasion to drop in noticed his slightly slapdash housekeeping. Dan noticed them notice, and Julia in turn took all of this in, closed her heart against women, for whom her father would never quite come up to the mark.

When school ended for the day, she would walk the short distance to the garage where her father worked as a motor mechanic, to wait there until such time as his day was also over and they could go home together. Usually she sat in the stuffy glass box that was the office, where Edward, warmed by a gas fire, presided over a high clacking typewriter and a black Bakelite phone. She read a book or a comic, did her homework, or drew pictures with the paper and pens with which Edward furnished her. When bored with this, she would go out and dawdle around the garage, watching the men as they worked. What she liked best was to see things being welded. The radiant white light dripped and blazed; threw high, flickering shadows up to the vaulted roof of the garage, making of the place a sudden temple. The man with the welding torch, in his curious long metal mask, was the
high priest of some archaic rite, the fitters his acolytes. And amongst all this Julia wandered, little vestal, isolated from her own sex but conscious already that from her loss came a certain power over men, from whom she expected nothing but kindness.

‘See you tomorrow, Dan. Bye, Julia.’

‘Cheerio, lads.’

Dan’s fear that she might be taken from him atrophied, but in its place grew a more potent terror: that
he
might be taken from
her
. This was not an irrational thought, which made it all the worse. Last spring he had sat at the kitchen window and watched Julia and her mother together in the orchard, wading through the thick cow parsley beneath a canopy of apple blossom. Now he sat and watched Julia alone. What if something was to happen to him? What then? How would she cope? He fretted silently about this, and could not bring himself to talk about it with anyone, not even with Henry or Edward, his closest friends. She was a good child, mature and companionable, not weepy or clingy, and he could only pray that she would stay that way. He would teach her, he resolved, to be capable. He would teach her to cycle and to swim. He would show her how to run a bank account and to make tax returns. As soon as she was old enough he would buy her a tool box, spanners, her own drill. They would do simple car mechanics, move on to basic plumbing. She would learn to drive. He would ensure she had a good education. In his heart Dan knew that, useful as these skills would be, they were not enough to protect her from what it was that he feared for her, as his own competence had not saved him.

The night before it happened, he had gone outside to look at the stars. He often did this. ‘Don’t get lost in space,’ she’d called after him, teasing. How delicate the sky looked, how fragile its beauty! Far, far above the trees of the orchard, he picked out the constellations he knew: Orion’s Belt, the Plough, Cassiopeia. Standing there at the gable of the house, he knew who he was and where he was and what he was. He
was fixed and rooted in his place in time: Dan Fitzpatrick, living out his years with his wife and daughter in Ireland, in Wicklow, as the twentieth century ended. The ancient sky was charged for him with the memory of the countless men and women who had also looked at the stars down the years, down the centuries. Now they were so completely forgotten that to think of them, as he did, was not true remembrance but an act of imagination. That this would be his fate too did not disturb him, but consoled him rather. He felt close to these men who worshipped strange gods, to these women who spoke dead languages.

But after what happened to her, everything changed. He couldn’t bear to look at the night sky. It became to him a thing of horror. Looking at the stars, he felt atomised and helpless, adrift in time itself. There was only him, only Julia, they were two specks of dust in the immensity of the universe. Her teasing warning had come true: he
was
lost in space. No longer could he feel the silent presence of the ancient people; and the loneliness was overwhelming. Stunned, winded, he beat a retreat.

Dan spoke of this to no one. He knew that others would assess his grief against another measure, but that until he could look again at the night sky, he would not know peace. It seemed to him impossible that the pain would ever diminish. It did happen, but not until many years later.

By then, he understood that he was already living in eternity.