Authenticity (15 page)

‘Pronto?’

Silence at the other end of the line, and then a female voice, but not Allegra’s as he had expected. Roderic always spoke to his daughters at this time on a Wednesday evening ever since renewing contact with them.

‘Um, Mr Kennedy? Have I got a wrong number?’ His response had clearly thrown the caller and he apologised, explaining that he was due to receive a call from abroad at any moment.

‘I’ll try to be brief then,’ she said. ‘My name’s Julia Fitzpatrick. I think Maria mentioned me to you, Maria Hill.’

Maria had had a studio in the same building as Roderic, just after the latter’s return to Ireland, and they had remained good friends after she moved to a new space. Earlier that week, he had met her by chance in a bookshop. ‘Speak of the devil,’ Maria said. ‘I was talking about you only the other day to a former student of mine. She might be going to Italy on a fellowship next year, and I thought it would be interesting for her to talk to you about it’

‘By all means,’ Roderic said. ‘Tell her to give me a ring,’

And yet, after he had chatted to Maria for some time and then said goodbye to her, he wondered what he could sensibly say to her protégée. In the ensuing days when he had thought of this woman at all it was to hope that she wouldn’t get in touch, but now that she had he felt it would be rude to refuse to see her. It was Maria to whom he had said yes, and after all she had done for him, he could never let her down.

They arranged to meet the following Friday afternoon in a city-centre café.

‘You’ll know me,’ she said, ‘because I have strange hair.’ No sooner had he put the receiver down than the phone rang again.

‘Ciao Babbo.’

‘Carissima ciao …’
And for the next half-hour he forgot all about Julia Fitzpatrick.

She had very strange hair indeed. He had thought her description of herself on the phone was self-deprecating; as soon as he saw her he realised that it was merely accurate. She walked into the café and he raised his arm, waved her over to the table where he sat. She approached him smiling, introduced herself and shook hands. Months later, at Christmas, they would discuss that moment. He would tell her how struck he had been by the easy way she dumped her bag on the floor and offered to buy him a coffee, how he watched her as she went to the counter and took a tray, narrowing her eyes to look at the choice of cakes scrawled faintly on a small slate. He would be able to describe to her the long green skirt and white blouse she had been wearing on that hot July afternoon long after she herself had forgotten. She would ask him frankly if he had found her attractive right from the start, and he would answer with equal candour no, not particularly; that in the first instance he hadn’t been looking at her in that light at all. Nor, unusually, had he thought of his daughters, as he habitually now did when in the company of young women. It had been himself he thought of when she finally sat down opposite him and said, ‘I’ve brought you here on a fool’s errand, I’m afraid. I’m not going to Italy after all.’

She had received the letter that morning saying that her application for the residency had been unsuccessful. ‘I feel embarrassed now, I shouldn’t have contacted you at all until I was sure.’ She had phoned him at once to cancel the appointment but he wasn’t there, had already left the house for his studio.

‘You must be bitterly disappointed.’

‘Gutted.’

He thought of himself, of how delighted he had been when he opened the envelope and received the news all those years ago. ‘Where in Italy is the place you hoped to go?’

‘In Tuscany,’ she said. ‘A foundation called the Villa Rosalba. It’s a long-established place, I believe. Perhaps you’ve heard of it?’

‘Indeed,’ he said. ‘I have indeed.’

‘Gutted,’ she said again. ‘I’m trying to be philosophic.

When one door closes, another one shuts, or whatever the saying is. I’ve got that wrong, haven’t I? Well, that’s what it feels like.’

‘Have you ever been to Italy before?’

‘Yes, that’s the problem. I went there briefly when I was a student and I’ve always wanted to go back for a longer spell. Were you there for a long time? Maria didn’t say’

‘I went for six months in the first instance,’ Roderic replied, ‘about twenty years ago. I stayed on for eleven years before coming back to Ireland.’

‘I suppose you return to Italy from time to time?’

‘As a matter of fact I was there recently, just a few weeks ago, in June,’ he remarked. He didn’t tell her then that it had been his first visit since leaving eight years earlier, and that he was still somewhat emotionally shell-shocked as a result.

‘It was foolish of me,’ she said ‘to think that everything was going to work out the way I wanted.’

‘Tell me about yourself. Are you a painter?’

‘No, I work in mixed media. I like your work very much,’ she went on quickly, and he would tell her when he knew her better that he hadn’t believed her. He thought it merely a tactic to direct attention away from herself, until she spoke of the one-man show he had had in Dublin the year before. The degree to which she remembered individual works, and homed in on the best, surprised and slightly unnerved him.

‘I liked the big cream and grey grid on the right of the door when you went in.’

‘And what about the blue and white painting at the bottom of the room?’ he said, deliberately singling out what he considered to be the weakest picture. ‘Do you remember that?’

‘Mmn.’

‘And what did you think of it?’

Julia looked at the floor. ‘It didn’t please me anything like as much,’ she said, ‘as the painting in cream and grey.’

This ethical refusal to flatter reminded him of her mentor. ‘So Maria used to teach you?’

‘Yes. She wrote me a reference for this place in Italy.’

‘Maria’s an old friend of mine. When I came back to Ireland we both had studios in the same building. It was a difficult time in my life and she was exceptionally kind to me.’ He sat in silence for a moment, thinking of the reality behind this and then, ‘She was,’ he said again, ‘exceptionally kind.’

‘So how do you manage?’ he asked Julia.

‘You mean what do I live on? Well, I live very simply, for one thing, and I have a part-time job in an antique shop. I get by on that, just about’

‘It’s good to have a bit of security,’ he said.

‘Security,’ and she ground out her cigarette. ‘
Security!
’ The scorn in her voice startled him.

‘Well, stability, then,’ he said, and she considered this.

‘Stability’s different,’ she said. ‘Stability, yes, I’ll grant you that, but there’s no such thing as security. It doesn’t exist.’

‘What makes you so sure?’ he asked

She looked him straight in the eye. ‘Experience,’ she said. ‘What else?’

He hadn’t allowed her to buy him a coffee when she arrived, but in the course of their conversation he had drained the mug in front of him. He went up to the counter (‘I couldn’t get over how tall you were when you stood up, I
almost laughed out loud,’) and now it was Julia’s turn to look at him and draw her own conclusions. Even after they knew each other well, he had to wheedle and coax to find out what she had thought. ‘I’d never seen a man,’ she finally admitted ‘who looked so lonely and forlorn. And yet I thought you were good company. I came close to saying, “Why don’t we go and have a walk after this, then maybe have something to eat, go to see a film or something?”’

‘Just think,’ he said, ‘of all the time we might have saved if you had.’

‘I was trying to remember what was on in the cinema, but then you came back to the table with your tray, and suddenly I felt intimidated. I remembered that you were established and eminent, a real big cheese, and I was just a tiddler straight out of art college. I wasn’t feeling very confident that day, as you can imagine. And so I said nothing.’

Roderic did notice that a sudden shyness had fallen over her when he returned to the table, but failed to guess the reason for it. When they left the café together she thanked him for meeting her. He brushed aside her renewed apologies for having wasted his time and said goodbye. They were going in opposite directions now and he moved to cross the road against a red pedestrian light. Immediately he felt someone tightly gripping his upper arm, pulling him back, and he turned around, astonished and even slightly irritated. ‘The light’s red,’ Julia said. ‘Wait until it turns green.’ She hadn’t struck him as overly cautious. He resisted, pulled against her and turned back to the road. At that moment, a motorbike he hadn’t seen shot past, missing him by inches. Julia gave him a look in which there was just the faintest hint of
I
told you so
. The traffic stopped and the light turned green; she released his arm from her grip. ‘Goodbye,’ she said again. ‘Look after yourself.’

Roderic saw her again within the week, in an incident so brief, so strange and full of otherness that even when he came to know her well he never asked her about it, not least
because he sometimes wondered if it was something he had imagined.

He had been in the middle of the city, again waiting to cross at a busy junction, when he saw her in the crowd on the far side of the road. He would have noticed her anywhere: with such extraordinary hair she was easily visible from a distance. She was standing still and looking up at the sky. The lights did not change and as he watched her he became aware that something out of the ordinary was happening. It was as if she were in a trance or having some kind of vision: rapt, silent, utterly cut off from the crowds who moved around her. He wondered how long she had been there like that, and if she was safe. He jabbed at the button on the panel fixed near by and it became illuminated, blue and white,
Wait,
as though chiding him for his impatience. He considered darting across the road against the lights in spite of her former warning, but the traffic was too heavy. Just as the walking green man lit up, he saw her move. He was swept across the road with the people who surrounded him to where she stood, but she was walking away now from where she had been. He considered calling to her but felt it would have been foolish: she could not have heard him in any case, above the noise of the city. The crowd thickened around her as he approached, someone stopped and blocked his way, distracting him momentarily, and when he looked up again she had disappeared.

He had reason to call Maria again a few days after that.

‘Are you ringing about Julia?’ she asked. ‘I may as well tell you, I was livid about her not getting that fellowship. There’s no justice in the world.’

‘Are you only finding that out now?’

‘I wouldn’t have suggested you meet her, only I was convinced she was on to a sure thing. Perhaps they thought she was too young; she’s only a year out of art college. I’m sorry for wasting your time.’

‘Don’t be silly, it was a pleasure. She’s nice; seems very bright.’

‘She is, believe me. Did you see any of her work? Well you ought to, you must. Give her a ring. Here’s her number.’

She was flustered when he called, thrown, in a way he hadn’t expected. ‘Visit my studio? Well you could, yes, I suppose. Why not? Maybe it’s awkward for you,’ and she seemed less than enthused when, on hearing that she lived in Francis Street, he said he was just around the corner. They made an arrangement for late in the afternoon two days later.

When she opened the door to Roderic she struck him as more severe than he remembered, more unsmiling. They went up to the sitting room where she made a great fuss of looking for her cigarettes and lighter, but didn’t seem particularly pleased when they were eventually found under a cushion.

‘The studio’s upstairs,’ she said rather shortly, and they were on the third step when he realised what he was doing.

‘We could,’ he said, ‘wait until another time.’

Julia stopped and turned to him. ‘Well, you’ve come all this way,’ she said, but he could sense her relief that he was offering her a way out.

‘I’m five minutes from home, if that.’

‘That’s twice now I’ve brought you on a fool’s errand,’ she said.

He told her he was capable of being extremely foolish on his own account, with help from no one, and she laughed. She was looking now for a final and gracious way out.

‘I could make tea,’ she said. ‘We could just talk for a while.’

They went into the kitchen and she made tea in the absent-minded, hit-or-miss fashion with which he was to become so familiar. He noted for the first time the details of her imperfect housekeeping: the broken biscuits, the milk that was just on the point of going sour. She introduced him to the ironic tomcat – ‘Say hello to Max’ – who surveyed the scene, perched, fastidious, on the top of the fridge, and subsequently disconcerted Roderic as he drank his tea by moving around the room at eye level, from the fridge to
the top of a press, to a shelf cluttered with tins of food. It was an enormous cat, with a huge thick neck and feet like pot scrubbers.

‘So how did Max come into your life?’ Roderic asked.

‘My father gave him to me,’ Julia said. ‘I was home in Wicklow one weekend, and I happened to say I would love a kitten. And the next time I went back, there was Max, waiting for me. My father spoils me rotten,’ she added. She said it without shame or qualification, stated it as a bald fact.

‘What do you do about Max when you go away?’ Roderic asked, and she pointed to a cat basket with a wire mesh door in the corner of the room.

‘Doesn’t he mind?’

‘Watch this,’ she said. She picked up the basket and the cat immediately shot behind the fridge. ‘QED. It’s all right Max, only kidding. We’re not going anywhere; you can come out now. There’s a souvenir of our last trip home,’ and she held her hand out for Roderic’s inspection, displaying a long red scratch mark. ‘He loves it when he gets there, climbs trees in the orchard and chases birds, but the hour of our departure is not for the faint hearted.’ The cat had still not emerged from its hiding place.

If she’d gone to Italy, Julia said, her father would have looked after Max while she was away, and Roderic asked her then if she’d got over her recent disappointment.