Authenticity (11 page)

The place was open; the thick metal grille he remembered from his nocturnal visit folded back. Then he had peered through the bars, this time he could see all too clearly. And there was Julia herself sitting in the shop. He had hoped that this would be so, had come over to this part of the city with the express wish of seeing her again, even though he was reluctant to admit as much, even to himself. But now that he was so close to his goal, he felt a mild sense of panic and confusion. For a moment he considered simply walking on; but surely she would have noticed him by now, lurking on the pavement. She might think his behaviour odd or even slightly sinister if he didn’t follow through, and so he forced himself to go in.

Not only had she not seen him on the street, she failed to notice him immediately when he walked into the shop. Julia, who to William’s considerable disappointment was not alone, was seated on a particularly tall wooden chair with arms and a short back, like a barstool from a rather grand pub. The chair lifted her high above her companion, a middle-aged man who was sunk down in a low wing-backed armchair, upholstered in faded floral stuff. Their chairs were at some distance from each other, and on his knees the man was holding a wooden solitaire board, with coloured stones instead of the usual glass marbles. As William closed the door behind him, a longcase clock struck the hour, and in the light of its presence the whole shop appeared to him suddenly as a strange subverted version of his own home. There were the same rugs and sconces, the same blue and white china, the same delicate tables and solid chairs, even the same kind of fireplace, with coloured tiles and long brass fire irons lying
on the fender. In his own front room all these objects were arranged with care and restraint, but here they were packed together higgledy-piggledy, any old way, with this rather strange couple lolling in the middle of it all. The effect was, he thought, highly disconcerting.

Julia, who was smiling over at the other man, slowly broke her gaze and turned to look at the newcomer. ‘It’s you!’ she exclaimed. William wanted to flee but she waved him in. He had imagined a dozen times meeting her again, but not in this scenario, and not in this mood, for there was an odd atmosphere in the shop, something he couldn’t quite define. ‘This is Roderic Kennedy,’ she said. ‘Roderic, William Armstrong.’ The man in the chair gave a brief nod in William’s direction. Roderic Kennedy the painter: it had to be him, William remembered photographs he had seen from catalogues in the past. He wondered momentarily if he should mention how much he liked his work, but Roderic looked as though he would be indifferent to anything William might have to say.

‘Feel free to look around. Hester had to go out for a moment,’ Julia said, as though she thought William had come to buy antiques. ‘We’re minding the place.’

‘No, we’re not,’ Roderic said, ‘we’re just innocent bystanders. Max is in charge.’

For the first time William noticed that the cat was also there, sitting bolt upright beside the empty grate. ‘You might not believe it but that cat,’ Roderic said solemnly, ‘is an expert – that cat is a
world authority
—on Georgian silver.’ Julia laughed, out of all proportion, William thought, given the silliness of the joke. It was the middle of the afternoon, and William wondered if perhaps she had been drinking. He remembered reading an article about Roderic in the paper once that alluded to his having a drink problem; he certainly had a toper’s face. ‘It’s true,’ Roderic said, ‘He’s an expert, aren’t you, Max? Wouldn’t you know it to look at him?’ At that moment, the cat put its head on one side and closed its
eyes. The effect was comical, as though the animal was pleased but embarrassed to have its erudition spoken of so publicly, and both Roderic and Julia exploded with laughter. There was something about their mirth that made William feel he couldn’t join in; that he wasn’t supposed to.

‘I’m going to test you now,’ Roderic said to Julia, ‘see how well you know your semiprecious stones.’ From the solitaire board on his lap, he took up a translucent purple sphere.

‘Amethyst’

He replaced it, held up another one, this time of an opaque, dense, radiant blue.

‘Lapis.’

They continued in this fashion as though William wasn’t there, Roderic slowly holding up the coloured stones in silence and Julia naming them. ‘Rose quartz … Alabaster … Chalcedony.’ They hadn’t been drinking. They had been in bed, William realised as he watched. The cluttered shop was full of the sense of them together, and the physical distance between them only heightened the strangely erotic nature of the little game they were playing with the stones. ‘Agate … Moonstone … Obsidian.’ Roderic looked at her quizzically. ‘Jet?’ she said. ‘It could be jet. You don’t know either, do you?’ He shook his head and they both laughed, again in that closed, complicit way. William might have been able to settle the question for them, but he wasn’t asked.

Julia stretched out and reached into a basin of pot-pourri on a dresser beside her chair. She stirred it idly with her hand, releasing into the air a warm scent of cloves, orange peel, resin and cones, enhancing, whether unwittingly or not, the charged atmosphere. It reminded William of just such an episode in his own life, many years earlier; of being in a hotel room in Seville with Liz. Something there had that same faint scent of citrus and spice: perhaps the soap provided in the bathroom, perhaps the perfume Liz was wearing. It was a hot afternoon, the powerful light seeping in even through the closed shutters. Everything in the dim room was white: the
walls, the curtains, the marble tiles, and the sheets of the bed on which he was making love with Liz. He remembered the feeling of being deep within her, the exquisite tension of the moment just before he came.

He was shaken at the memory; so sudden was it, so vivid and intense, that when Julia turned to him now and said, ‘And you, William, how have you been since last I saw you?’ the question confused him. For a moment he could not speak.

‘Fine,’ he said at last, but he could hear his own voice become unsteady. There was no reason for this, he told himself. He could take protection from the fact that Roderic was here, saving him from a kind of confidence that he wanted with Julia, but that also made him feel uneasy. ‘Well, not bad,’ he qualified his earlier remark. ‘I’m very tired. I’ve taken some time off work at the moment. That helps. I’ll be all right. I’m going to London soon for the weekend.’

‘With your wife?’

‘With Liz, yes.’

There was a pause. ‘You’re the painter, aren’t you?’ William blurted out.

He was keen by now to deflect attention from himself but his appeal to the other man’s vanity failed, as Roderic merely glanced at him, then looked away again and said quietly, ‘I’m a painter, yes.’

‘William has –’ Julia started, but at that a most bizarre thing happened. She stopped speaking abruptly, almost violently, as though an invisible hand had gagged her from behind. The two men stared at her, mystified.

‘Well?’ Roderic asked after a moment, as she did not continue. ‘What were you going to say? William has what?’

‘I don’t know. I can’t remember. It’s gone.’

‘It must have been a lie,’ Roderic said coolly.

‘I’m very interested in contemporary painting,’ William said.

‘That’s what I was going to say,’ Julia claimed, adding, ‘you told me so the last time I saw you.’

Neither man believed her. William was about to add that he owned one of Roderic’s paintings, and then he thought again of the strange aborted sentence Julia had uttered. A curious idea formed in his mind. There was a certain logic to it, but she didn’t know about the picture. How could she? He definitely hadn’t mentioned it to her. In one way it made perfect sense, but she didn’t, couldn’t know. He stared at her, puzzled, and she bit her lip, blushed, looked away. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘art is my main interest in life.’

‘If that’s the case,’ Roderic said, ‘you should go and see Julia’s work. She’s in a group exhibition that opened last week,’ and he named the gallery. ‘It runs until the end of April.’

‘I shall most certainly do that,’ William said, addressing Julia. ‘I’d very much like to see what you do.’

Roderic had already lost interest in William and turned away, lifted the solitaire board off his lap and picked up a flat leather case that was sitting nearby. ‘Aren’t these fine?’ he said, snapping it open, and holding it up to show her the enamelled antique buttons it contained. ‘When my ship comes in I’ll buy you these. You can sew them on to your jumper; won’t they look stylish?’

Julia laughed. ‘How much longer is this woman going to be?’ she said, turning to look at the moon-crowned face of the tall clock. ‘Would you like to come up for a cup of coffee with us when she does come back?’

Roderic snapped shut the case. ‘Maybe that wouldn’t be such a good idea,’ he said in a voice so low as to be almost inaudible, but William did hear: he was meant to hear. He could imagine the state of the room upstairs, the dishevelled, abandoned bed that wasn’t even a bed.

‘On second thoughts, maybe not,’ she said. ‘There’s … um … there’s no milk.’

‘No milk! There’s never any milk, is there, Julia? Or else there is, but there isn’t enough. Or there’s plenty, but it’s all sour. I tell you what, as well as the buttons I’ll buy you a cow,
then there’ll always be milk. We can tether it on the stairs. What do you say?’

And then Roderic did something that shocked William. He stood up. Unfurling himself out of the depths of the low chair, he revealed himself to be impossibly tall, impossibly robust, massive to a degree William would never have guessed at when he saw him seated. It was like watching a river god step out from a carving on the side of a bridge; like watching Poseidon or Triton emerge living from amongst the statues of a baroque fountain.

The cat walked over and sat at his feet. ‘Max, Max, Max,’ he said, ‘come here to me, you great old patriarch.’ He bent down and scooped up the cat, which had looked dignified and magisterial when sitting on its own, but now looked tiny and kittenish in Roderic’s great hand. He allowed Max to run nimbly up one arm, across the back of his neck and down the other, catching the cat dextrously as it reached his open left hand. He carefully placed the animal in the chair he had just vacated and as he straightened up again, he turned and looked at William. His brief, direct stare was full of intelligence but devoid of warmth. This glacial assessment – this hostility – was the last thing William expected after the horseplay with the cat. Which was why Roderic was doing it, he realised: he was warning William off. And Julia didn’t even appear to notice that anything had happened.

‘I must be going,’ William said. As he left the shop the longcase clock chimed again.

Roderic and Julia watched him through the window as he walked away. ‘So that’s your mercy mission,’ he said. ‘So that’s William Armstrong.’

‘Why didn’t you like him?’

Roderic didn’t deny the implication of this. ‘He made me feel uneasy.’

‘I suspect you had the same effect on him.’

‘I may well have done,’ he conceded. ‘There was something sinister about him, I don’t know how to express it.’

‘You think he’s just a dabbler, do you?’

‘I doubt if he’s even that But yes, he’s a classic example of a certain type of man: the moonlighting accountant’

‘He told me he was a lawyer.’

‘Whatever. You know what I mean. The kind of person who dislikes the situation in which he finds himself, and wants to do something creative; who wants to get in touch with another life, which he likes to think of as his real life. But the secret agenda is that never, not for a moment, will he do anything that might threaten his real,
real
life; that is, his money and his position in society.’

‘You’re in a very cynical mood all of a sudden.’

‘I’m just being realistic.’ Julia was about to challenge this when Hester returned. The woman had a rare gift, Roderic thought, for appearing at exactly the moment when she wasn’t wanted. She’d done it twice now today. By the time he and Julia were alone again the thread of their conversation had effectively been broken and they forgot about William; they spoke of other things.

William’s subsequent visit to the gallery was an odd second take on his visit to the shop. Then all was clutter, now all was bare and stark. Again, he saw Julia through the glass door from the street before she saw him. He had brought the children with him for protective colouring, just in case she happened to be there.

The warmth of Julia’s greeting when she saw them all was evidently genuine. ‘You must be Sophie and Gregory,’ she said, recognising the children from the photograph she had seen. The girl smiled trustingly, showing a gap-toothed mouth; the boy’s face remained closed. It had amused Julia when she saw their photos in William’s wallet to see how much the boy resembled his father, but in real life the effect was not so appealing. It shocked her to see in so small a child the same tightly buttoned air, the same cleft forehead, the same air of controlled anger.

Sophie was staring hard at her. ‘You have really funny hair,’ she said to Julia. ‘Can I touch it?’

Her father started to remonstrate, but Julia ignored him. ‘Of course you can,’ she said, crouching down. The child patted her gently on the head. ‘You too, if you want,’ she said to Gregory. The child leaned over and gently stroked her hair, as though she were a cat or a rabbit. He smiled for the first time since entering the gallery, and Julia, struck by how funny the whole thing was, laughed aloud. The little girl giggled and touched Julia’s hair again, and now all three of them were laughing, especially Gregory.

‘I think you can leave it at that now, children,’ William said, and they drew back. Julia, still laughing, stood up.

The gallery was a series of interconnected rooms. ‘My work is in there, and there are photographs in the other room.’ On the wall immediately beside where they stood was a thing made of dark red velvet, fold upon fold receding to a bright bead stitched in the centre. ‘I like that,’ Sophie said, pointing to it, ‘it’s like a spider’s web.’