Authenticity (12 page)

‘It is a bit, isn’t it?’ Julia said, biting her lip and trying not to laugh at William’s discomfiture. ‘You look around,’ she said to him, ‘and I’ll show the children these other pieces. You’re going to have to take your shoes off,’ she said to them. ‘Do you need help with the laces, Gregory?’

Julia’s work consisted of a series of long wooden boxes, each sealed in front with a pane of glass. Over the glass hung a veil of white ribbons that fluttered and twirled in the draught made by a freestanding fan. This meant that the contents of the boxes could be glimpsed rather than plainly seen, like things partially concealed by the branches of trees. One box contained rolls of fur, of thick wool, of pleated muslin, heaped together and piled up against the surface of the glass. They made one long to touch them, which was of course impossible. In another box were displayed on shelves a series of china cups and saucers, each one perched precariously, as though they might fall at any moment. The
third held shells and stones. There was a lump of pink quartz, uncut and unpolished, reminding William momentarily of the scene he had witnessed in the shop, and there was a small cairn of plain black stones, dull and uniform in size. There were shells such as one might find on almost any beach in Ireland: winkles and cockles, modest bivalves, ridged or smooth, arranged in pale heaps. They were complemented by a few larger, more exotic shells, one spiked, opening into a glassy void pink as flesh; one a long fragile cone stippled with colour, one a solid whirl of pure iridescence, as though made of some kind of fabulous glass.

The final box contained a series of documents: faded newsprint, torn letters, faint and blurred snapshots. This William found the most frustrating, even more so than the box with the fur and the wool, because his inclination was to attempt to read the fragments of text it contained but the constantly fluttering ribbons prevented him from doing so. There was about all of them, he thought, a mysterious, elegiac atmosphere, each presenting a small, sealed, rather beautiful but utterly inaccessible world.

He turned away into the next room, and was shocked by what he found there.

On each of the three walls was a photograph, larger than life-size, showing a naked woman holding a naked baby to her breast. The women were young, perhaps all teenagers, unsmiling and with a shell-shocked, sullen look. The babies were tiny, wet, ugly, and all looked as if they had barely been ready to be born. How long was it since these women had given birth? Less than a day he would have thought, on the strength of the photos. Although they were young and attractive, there was not the slightest shred of eroticism or sexual appeal in them. They looked like people who had been through a violent and exhausting ordeal, which of course they had. A trickle of blood ran down the inside of one of the women’s legs. His mind habitually shrank from the memory of how Liz had suffered when the twins were born: the
violence of it, the screaming and the blood. But the following day when he had gone to see her she was sitting up in bed smiling, with the babies in her arms. ‘I feel,’ she said, ‘as though I’m at the centre of a crystal made of pure light.’ And what of these young women: had they also experienced this intense joy that drove Liz to express herself in such a mystical way? There was no evidence of it in the photographs of their stunned, blank faces.

From behind him he could hear the chuckles and laughter of his own two children.

‘Me now, me now, I want to go again,’ Gregory was shouting.

‘Off you go,’ said Julia.

William turned around to where they were. He saw the sides of the canvas tunnel undulate as his son moved through it, like a small struggling animal passing through the gullet of a boa constrictor. It reminded him of taking them to a funfair, the same flushed faces, the excitement,
I
want to go again,
again,
as Gregory tumbled chuckling out of the end of the tunnel, into the gallery.

‘You do it, Daddy,’ Sophie said.

He looked at Julia.

‘Why not? It is intended for adults rather than children,’ she said, with monumental understatement and an admirably straight face. ‘But you must take your shoes off first.’

He felt foolish standing in his loud argyle socks, and was glad to disappear into the first tunnel, the inside of which was lined with soft white feathers, so that in walking through it he felt that he was moving through a cloud. Some kind of illumination had been arranged, a series of tiny lights, so that he could see the whiteness that surrounded him. The tunnel was a collapsed tube that closed in on itself as he progressed through it, so that he had to gently push his way forward. Neither did he know when he would emerge: he could literally see no light at the end of the tunnel. He was
disconcerted, therefore, when he suddenly popped out into the room again. Julia was sitting on the floor with her arm around Sophie. Gregory immediately grabbed William’s hand and hauled him across the room, ‘The next one too, Daddy, the next one too.’

The inside of the second tunnel was darker, although like the first it was illuminated by tiny lights. There were no feathers: this tunnel was lined with dark red velvet, the same material from which the object on the wall was made. Again, he had to gingerly press his way through, again the tunnel closed behind him. The velvet brushed against his face, his whole body, and he could hear the laughter, the voices of the children. Suddenly he wished that he hadn’t brought them here, that he had come alone. He was swept with a feeling of confusion, and just at that moment he fell into the brightness of the room again.

‘Powerful piece of work, isn’t it?’ she said.

‘Put your shoes on,’ he said curtly to the children as he sat down and fumbled his way into his own brogues. Sophie, who was still sitting beside Julia, stood up and slipped her feet into her simple pumps. As she waited for William, who was helping Gregory on with his shoes now, she wandered over towards the entrance of the room where the photographs were displayed.

‘Sophie! Come here, don’t go into that room, do you hear me?’ and Sophie backed away, frightened by the force of his anger. The children could not understand why the atmosphere, so happy before, had suddenly gone sour. Gregory was angry too, truculent and struggling as his father attempted to tie the child’s laces. It was impossible to know what Julia was thinking. She was standing now, leaning against a wall, with her arms folded, looking at the floor. Her face was inscrutable, as it had been the night he had shown up unannounced at her house. William finished tying Gregory’s shoes and stood up. He started to thank her with cold formality, but she rolled her eyes and turned away. She
said goodbye to the children, and held the door open as they passed into the street.

All the way home William fretted about what to do next. If he told the children not to mention the visit at home, it would, coupled with the strange atmosphere in which it had all ended, compound their suspicion about the whole business. Then they might – or at least Gregory might – tell Liz just to cause trouble for William. Although his son was still so small, William already saw him as an adversary. If, however, he didn’t warn them off, they would probably tell Liz, and he was anxious that she should know nothing about it. He finally decided to simply hope for the best.

And after it happened, he would wonder how he had ever been so foolish as to think he would get away with it, and that nothing would be said. In the end it was Sophie, not Gregory, who piped up as they were sitting over their evening meal, the children with their chicken nuggets, their parents with their tortellini.

‘We met ever such a nice lady in town today, somebody Daddy knows. She was in this place full of odd things. There were big tunnels we could go down, only you had to take your shoes off first. Daddy did it too.’

Liz paused with her fork in mid-air and looked brightly from father to daughter and from daughter to father. ‘Did you? Did you indeed? That must have been fun. Tell me more.’

‘It was brilliant,’ Gregory said. ‘It was like being swallowed up by a big red animal. I loved it.’

‘And what about Daddy?’ Liz said. ‘Did he love being swallowed up too?’

William gave a small, forced laugh, which he knew sounded utterly unconvincing. ‘It was an art exhibition,’ he said, ‘some conceptual pieces, an installation, whatever you want to call it. There was a woman there, an artist, I don’t know her,’ he said, denying Sophie’s claim, ‘she’s all but a stranger to me,’ a remark which for some odd reason seemed
to thicken Liz’s suspicion rather than allay it. ‘That’s all there is to say. Gregory, sit up straight, how many times have I told you not to slump down in your seat like that?’ Gregory’s face, which had been bright and animated as he described the afternoon, closed into its habitual sullen tension. They went on eating in silence for a few moments.

‘Anyway, I saw what was in the room,’ Gregory eventually said in a sulky voice, ‘the room you wouldn’t let Sophie go into.’ He shoved a piece of chicken into a puddle of ketchup on the side of his plate. ‘I peeped into it when you were in the tunnel thing.’

‘What was in the room?’ Liz said.

Gregory held up the gobbet of chicken on his fork. ‘Ask Daddy,’ he said, then he crammed the food into his mouth and began to chew slowly.

‘What did you see? What was it?’ Liz asked again, her voice beginning to take on a hysterical edge.

Neither father nor son spoke. William thought of the trickle of blood running down the woman’s leg, of the spidery angry looking infants, of the women’s hostile, shocking faces. There was nothing he could say that would console Liz. He stared helplessly at Gregory.

‘What was in the room?’ Liz insisted.

The little boy swallowed his food with a loud gulp and threw his father a look of dismissive adult contempt. ‘Just photographs,’ he said. ‘Big photographs of three women with their babies. I don’t know why Daddy wouldn’t let Sophie see them. It was nothing bad. It was just photographs.’

‘You must be mad,’ Maeve said, when she heard what he was proposing. ‘Absolutely mad. How could anyone live with Roderic?’

Reasonably, Dennis pointed out that they had all lived with him from his birth until his second year in art college, when he had moved to a shared flat. Frank, eager to boot his offspring out of the nest, had been happy to bankroll this until such time as Roderic graduated.

‘He’s changed a lot over the years,’ she insisted, fixing her cold blue eyes on him. ‘Roderic has become very odd.’ She stretched this last word out as she uttered it to give a sense of horrid transformation, as though Roderic had grown an extra eye in the middle of his forehead or developed a forked tongue, instead of merely cultivating a modest and rather flattering beard. ‘I shouldn’t be surprised if his friends were strange too. Oh, I wouldn’t live with him if I were you.’

There had always been a certain amount of mutual dislike between Roderic and Maeve, and Dennis therefore took a sceptical view of this unsolicited advice. Frank’s opinion on the situation was more pertinent. ‘I believe Roderic’s giving up his job and moving in with you.’

This wasn’t quite accurate but Dennis confirmed the statement none the less.

Frank stared at him hard. ‘What are his plans, do you know?’

‘He’s found some part-time work, teaching evening classes in drawing; and he’s keeping on his studio. I don’t really think he has any game plan, he’s just going to work it out as he goes along: get by, you know.’

Frank absorbed this information without comment.

‘I’m only asking him for a nominal rent. I’m sure he’ll be all right financially; he’s not someone who wants or needs many material things.’

‘That’s true; he’s always seemed to manage to get along on half nothing.’

One thing that gave a rather bizarre slant to all of this was that Roderic had grown up to look exactly like his father, giving Dennis the sensation that he was conducting this rather guarded conversation about his future with Roderic himself. Although temperamentally they were, Dennis thought, utterly dissimilar, both men had the same unnerving intelligence and intense physical presence. Often, neither of them was aware of the effect these qualities had on those around them. Frank was still staring hard at his elder son. It didn’t seem possible that he hadn’t guessed the truth of Roderic’s situation.

When Dennis’s own dreams of a career as a concert pianist came to an end because of stage fright, he had found in Frank a surprising ally. It was the things he hadn’t said – ‘You’ll get over it, and in any case, I’m sure you’ll be just as happy teaching music’ – for which Dennis had been most grateful. He didn’t complain about the wasted fees when his son said he wanted to change course one year into a degree in music; but he had been concerned about whether or not Dennis would ultimately be satisfied with the business and economics he said he wanted to read instead. Frank urged him to take his time in making a decision and to follow his heart.

Immersed in his own disappointment, Dennis did not fully appreciate the remarkable delicacy of feeling that Frank displayed at the time, but he remembered it now, seeing much the same thing manifested as they discussed Roderic’s career problems. He suspected that Frank wanted to ask why Roderic lost his job, but he refrained from doing so, saying instead, ‘I’m glad he’ll be living with you. You can keep me posted on how things develop.’

‘I’m sure it will all work out well.’

Frank stared at him thoughtfully for a few minutes more, considering this. ‘You’re probably right,’ he said at last. ‘Roderic has always seemed to know what he’s about. Mind you,’ he added as caveat, ‘I’m buggered if anyone else does.’

Roderic moved into the house over a weekend in late August and was thrilled with the attic room. A veteran of shared houses, he asked Dennis if he wanted to draw up a cleaning rota or to establish a milk kitty. Dennis, who had only ever lived alone or with the family, had no idea what he was on about. ‘There are no rules and regulations,’ he said. ‘The only thing I would ask you to do,’ and he pointed at a pine wine rack as he spoke, ‘is not to drink my claret.’

He expected a painter’s life to be somewhat haphazard, its patterns of work dictated by inspiration and mood, and was surprised by the iron routine into which his brother quickly settled. He realised that he didn’t know Roderic as well as he had imagined. There was, for example, his remarkable popularity with women, something of which Dennis had been vaguely aware but to which he had given no particular thought. Three days after Roderic moved in, Dennis innocently pressed the button on his own answering machine.
Thank you for calling,
he heard his own brisk voice say.
If you have a message for either Dennis or Roderic, please speak
after the tone, and we’ll get back to you as soon as possible. Thank
you.
An ear-shattering bleep, and then a woman’s hesitant voice.
Roderic, um hi, this is Cathy. Sorry I missed you. I’ll try
again later, or maybe you could, um, give me a call?
Another bleep, another woman’s voice, this time confident and firm.
Roderic, this is Janet, just to say thanks for helping me move the
sculptures the other day. You really got me out of a jam there, and
if there’s ever anything I can do for you, don’t hesitate to ask.
Another bleep.
Roderic, this is you know who. So you’re out and
about. I wonder what you’re up to. I can just imagine. Hope you’ve
recovered from the other night. Call me soon.
The words were
innocuous enough, but the tone in which they were uttered made Dennis’s reflected face go pink in his own hall mirror. Another bleep.
Roderic, this is Bernie. We’re having a party on
Saturday night and I hope you can make it …
It went on and on and on, and Dennis stood listening, astounded.

Some weeks further into the autumn, Frank discreetly took Dennis aside just before Saturday lunch to ask how things were working out. ‘Roderic himself tells me it’s fine and that the teaching’s going well, that they’ve given him some extra hours.’

Dennis concurred with this, and reported well their situation. But he was struck too at how much he couldn’t tell Frank. The many girlfriends were the least of it, and wouldn’t have fazed him in the slightest. Frank was probably more concerned by Dennis’s apparent complete lack of interest in women than by Roderic’s fondness for them. Dennis had thought that temperamentally Roderic in no way resembled his father, but he had been wrong. Both men were capable of a remarkable degree of intellectual detachment, and as this was not a particularly endearing characteristic, Dennis thought it best not to comment upon it. Physically present but mentally remote, it was as though they were leading double (but not clandestine) lives. In fairness, Roderic had a cheerful disposition and little of Frank’s irascibility. He was tremendously sociable, but it was precisely this combination of emotional warmth and icy withdrawal that Dennis found so disconcerting in him.

He continued to think about this at lunch as he watched Roderic making small talk with Sinéad, as he watched him help to clear the table. This part of his life that he shared with his family and that was visible to them was only the tip of the iceberg. No one asked about, nor did Roderic allude to, the concealed massive bulk of his other, his real life. He thought about it again the following afternoon when the rain poured down and they stayed at home reading. Dennis drank tea and leafed idly through the Sunday papers, their magazines
and supplements, while Roderic sat silent and immobile for three solid hours immersed in a book called
The Dynamics of
Modernism
. He thought about it again as he ate his breakfast alone on Monday morning, his brother having already left for the studio, and again that night, when Roderic emerged from two hours closeted in the kitchen with his former flatmate Tony, ‘Just talking about painting,’ he said. This in itself impressed Dennis, who rarely managed to jemmy more from the taciturn Tony than ‘Hello’, except for one memorable occasion when they were left together for a few moments and Tony volunteered without any prompting, ‘Your brother’s a fucking brilliant painter so he is. Fucking brilliant,’ before lapsing back into impregnable silence.

He rather liked the effect that Roderic had upon his friends and colleagues at the sedate supper parties he occasionally gave. Towards the end of the meal he would hear the sound of a key in the door. ‘That’s my brother now. He’ll come in for a couple of minutes to say hello.’ He knew that his guests were expecting to meet someone similar to Dennis himself, which only made the effect of Roderic’s sudden presence all the more electrifying. Handsome, ebullient, larger than life, he was a great stone crashing into the still pool of their evening, and the effect remained, like ripples, long after he had swept out of the room again.

In general, Maeve’s warning about his friends was ill founded. With few exceptions Dennis enjoyed their company. The stream of short-term girlfriends who came and went throughout the autumn ended abruptly just before Christmas, when Roderic started going out with a photographer called Laura. It was a good time in both the brothers’ lives. They had settled down comfortably into their domestic arrangement. Dennis was doing well in his job, with promotion and a rise in salary. Although Roderic’s situation was precarious, and was to remain so for many years, he was satisfied with the time and freedom it afforded him. Dennis came to know Laura well in the months she was
with Roderic, and was fond of her for her monumental calmness, her dry wit. The relationship lasted until the summer, after which time they parted amicably. Dennis regretted it and although the couple remained on friendly terms, Roderic occasionally meeting her and passing on her greetings to Dennis, she no longer came to the house.

It was a pattern to be repeated in the years that followed. The arrangement they had undertaken lasted much longer than either of them had expected or intended. They reviewed the situation in June and decided to continue at least for the time being living as they did. Roderic took a job for the summer in London, living in the flat of a friend of a friend while its owner took over his studio in Dublin. Dennis went off to the Salzburg Music Festival for his holidays. In the autumn Roderic resumed his teaching, and towards the end of the year he took part in an important group exhibition. Dennis barely saw him in the weeks leading up to it as he put in longer hours at the studio than ever before. Roderic’s energy, his application, had always impressed him. Dennis changed his car and upgraded his private pension plan. He took up hill walking, and although they never went out together, it brought him closer to Frank, who shared with him his favourite routes and paths. And so the years went on.

People who knew both brothers marvelled that they could live such different lives in close proximity with no apparent friction. This was due in part to the strong emotional bond between them. There was no resentment because each understood the price the other was paying for the life he led and the things he had. When they chafed against their own situations, they didn’t have far to look to see in full detail and with all its implications a wholly other life, which never failed to reconcile them quickly to their own fate. Dennis’s house was their common territory, and neither of them felt wholly comfortable when he strayed into the other’s world. Roderic rarely called to Dennis’s stuffy, overheated office with its grey filing cabinets and tidy desk. How did he bear
it, month after month, he silently wondered, not knowing that Dennis had been similarly appalled when he called to the studio and found him working with no heating in the depths of winter, his breath misting white before him when he spoke. The studio was too big and too high to heat: quite simply, he couldn’t afford it. But more than the tedium or the discomfort, each shied away from the atmosphere of the other’s life. Living like Dennis, Roderic thought, he would feel that his life was already as good as over. Living like Roderic, Dennis considered, would be ultimately too hard on the nerves.

During these years there were periods of time when Roderic was completely absent from the house. He went to stay for a few months with a friend who had gone off to live in a remote part of Scotland; he went to Amsterdam on a residency for a month. In Kerry, he taught painting at a residential summer school. He started going out with a woman from Galway, and when she moved back to the west he went down to stay with her for increasingly lengthy visits. Just at the point when Dennis thought he would probably leave Dublin definitively and move to Galway, the relationship came to an end. Although he enjoyed his brother’s company in the house – there was something energising in just being around him – Dennis neither resented nor relished these absences. When, shortly before his twenty-seventh birthday, Roderic was awarded a six-month stay in a centre for artists in Italy, no one was more delighted for him than Dennis.