Authenticity (32 page)

Mercifully there was a taxi rank across the street from the café. He made a rough guess as to how much the fare would be, doubled it and pressed the notes into her hand as she clambered sobbing into the back seat. The taxi sped off with squealing tyres, making her departure from the square as dramatic as her arrival had been. Turning back to settle the bill for their drinks Roderic saw that everyone in
the café – everyone in the square – had stopped what they were doing to stare enthralled at what had been happening. It briefly crossed his mind that he could go round with a hat, collect good money for the remarkable entertainment he had afforded them.

Back in the hotel, completely spent, he lay on his bed and looked at the ceiling. The heat in the room was stifling even though the shutters had been closed all day, and the clock in the bell tower that had kept him awake half the night struck the hour. He thought of Serena’s parting shot just before she slammed the door of the taxi, half boast, half accusation:
You don’t know who I am.
Did he? Well, did he? And if it came to that, did she know him? For Oriana, he was someone who shimmered at the outer limits of memory. ‘You’re like someone I dreamt about, long ago,’ she had said, ‘and now, here you are.’

When he went back to live in Ireland he had fully intended to keep in touch with his children. He rang them up, in his cups, in the middle of the night.

I want to speak to my daughters. Get Serena for me.

But it’s three o’clock in the morning, Roderic.

No, it’s not; it’s only two.

You’re forgetting the time difference; and anyway, two, three,
what does it matter? They’re all asleep and I’m not waking them for
you. I’ve nothing against you talking to the girls, but not at such
an ungodly hour, and not when you’re drunk,

It always ended with Marta hanging up on him, and she would then leave the phone off the hook so he couldn’t ring back.

He tried to write letters.

My darlings, How are you? Today I painted and then I drank.

That was all his life amounted to now. What more could he say? There were no words for the loneliness, no words to say how much he missed them. As his life sank further into failure and confusion, communication between him and his family in Italy dwindled into a series of functional and
increasingly sporadic exchanges. The only point in which he was constant was in meeting his financial obligations to them. A standing order was set up to transfer a fixed sum of money every month, and Roderic sometimes borrowed, got into debt or did without things he urgently needed for himself to ensure that the payment went through. Although she always thanked him politely for this when she wrote, Marta had never asked him for money, and could probably have managed quite well without his contributions. Throughout their years together she earned a good, steady salary from her job in art restoration, and she had inherited both money and property from her family. Roderic’s income, from painting and occasional short-term teaching contracts, was far more erratic and brought in much less. It was Roderic himself who had instigated the standing order and insisted upon it, even though he drew scant satisfaction from it.
Mr Provider:
his own sneering put-down when he thought of himself in this context, tottering into the bank at the last minute to lodge a roll of filthy, tattered banknotes; the cave man who trails the haunch of a dead pig back to the cave and thinks that gives him the right to club his woman over the head. Still, it gave him the illusion that his daughters still needed him, and even though he saw it for what it was – just that, an illusion – it was one he did not have the strength to live without.

The clock in the bell tower bonged the half hour. Half past what? Was it possible it was already five thirty? He must have fallen asleep, in spite of everything. He was to meet Allegra in the lobby of the hotel at six. There was a kettle in the room and the wherewithal to make hot drinks, so he brewed up a coffee, lit a cigarette and washed his face in an attempt to shake himself into consciousness. As he descended in the lift, however, he still felt weary and unrefreshed, in no way ready for what was ahead.

Through the glass doors of the hotel at exactly the appointed time, he saw Marta’s car pull up. Mother and
daughter both got out and although he was much too far away to hear what they were saying, it was clear that a brief altercation was taking place, that Marta wanted to come in with her and that Allegra wanted to go in alone. In the end Marta threw up her hands in annoyance and got back into the car as Allegra turned and resolutely marched into the hotel.

‘Papà! Papà!’ she cried as soon as he stood up to greet her, and she ran across the lobby to fling herself upon him, letting the artist’s folder she carried drop to the tiled floor with a loud slapping noise. It was years since anyone had launched themselves into Roderic’s embrace with such enthusiasm and it startled him. This was what he had wanted, wasn’t it, he thought, as he hugged her awkwardly. Surely this flood of feeling was better than Oriana’s timidity and reserve, than Serena’s downright hostility, and yet it unsettled him. He could feel the heat of her body through his shirt, could smell the perfume she was wearing. It was a complex, sophisticated fragrance, full of citrus and amber and endearingly unsuitable for the awkward teenager who wore it. Roderic recognised it at once: she had clearly gone into her mother’s bedroom and helped herself liberally from the crystal bottle.

‘I am very happy to see you, Papà,’ she said in heavily accented English. ‘How are you?’

‘I’m fine, happy to be here, delighted to see you. I thought we might stay here, go up to my room where we can talk in private, is that all right with you?’ He answered her in English, and nervousness made him speak more quickly than usual. She stared up at him, her face blank with incomprehension, so he repeated in Italian what he had just said. She smiled her agreement. He picked up her folder and carried it for her as they crossed the lobby.

Alone in the tiny lift as it creaked to the third floor, they did not speak. He was aware of Allegra staring up at him with adulation, as if he were a singer or an actor with whom she
was infatuated and was meeting for the first time. Roderic was not flattered, instead he felt how unworthy he was of such regard, felt exhausted, too: an emotional rather than a physical exhaustion. The three meetings he had had so far had taken more out of him than he had realised. Roderic would somehow have to get it across to Allegra that he was not the paragon she thought. He wanted her to know the truth about him and yet not reject him, and the temptation was to tell her as much in a few blunt statements, for he doubted that he could summon up this evening the necessary tact and subtlety of approach.
I’ve been a complete failure as
husband and father, Allegra. I treated your mother disgracefully. I
know you know this and yet still I want your love and respect more
than anything else in the world. Have you got that?
He looked down again at her, and she smiled up at him adoringly, her face and her heart as open as that of a baby in a pram, smiling back at a smiling stranger.

She tripped and almost fell as she stepped out of the lift. She was gauche and clumsy, as though she had not yet grown into her body, with its angular, rangy limbs.

‘Your room is nice,’ she said in English as he opened the door and ushered her in.

In replying this time he took care to speak slowly and clearly in short, simple sentences. ‘You can see the square,’ he said, opening the window to fold back the shutters. ‘The church is very near. I hear the bells. The bells wake me in the night.’

Allegra nodded, delighted to be able to understand him. ‘I like to speak with you like this,’ she said. ‘It is important for me to speak to you in your language.’ The effort with which she put this sentence together and the obvious sincerity of the sentiment was touching. ‘Perhaps I will go to Ireland to practise my English.’

‘You speak it very well already,’ he said, which was a lie but a kindly intended one. ‘It’s strange for me to be speaking Italian again after all these years. I’m the one who needs the
practice. Would you mind if that were the language that we used today?’ He had slipped out of English, even as he spoke, and was relieved when Allegra accepted his suggestion.

‘I would, though, I’d love to go to Ireland,’ she said. ‘After all, I am half Irish, aren’t I, so I’d be bound to fit in.’

Roderic was not convinced of the logic of this but said nothing,

‘Uncle Dennis sent us a calendar one year and I kept it afterwards, the photos are so beautiful. I want to see the Cliffs of Moher, and I want to see bogland. That must be the strangest thing. Dublin too, I want to go there. A friend of Serena’s was there last summer and she loved it’

‘Oh, it’s very lively, yes, you’d have a good time.’

‘Could I come and visit you?’

There was regret in her voice that she had to ask, that he hadn’t immediately suggested it, and his unenthusiastic response – ‘Well, yes, you could I suppose, at some time in the future’ – did not redress the balance. She wasn’t to know that he was wondering what she might make of his tiny redbrick terraced house with its blue painted door, in the shabby street where he dwelt like a lonely bear. How frugal and mean it would look in comparison with the splendid villa where she lived, with its bougainvillaea and vines. Would she think less of him for it?

‘I bet you’re really famous in Ireland,’ she said. ‘I bet everybody knows who you are.’

‘Oh good God, no,’ Roderic said, ‘far from it.’ His considerable eminence as a painter had not exactly turned him into a household name. The very idea of such fame made him feel ill. Life was hard enough coming to terms with his own consciousness of failure, without thinking that the entire country knew about his shortcomings.

Allegra did not share this sentiment: for a moment disappointment flickered across her features then she smiled again. ‘You’re only being modest. I bet you’re really famous there,’ and this time Roderic just smiled weakly, not having
the heart to disillusion her further. She was still smiling at him with that utterly uncritical devotion to which perhaps only the truly famous become habituated, thinking it their due. Roderic found it disconcerting. It was bizarre to gaze into her loving, trusting eyes, and think of how her sister had raged at him only a few hours earlier. The anger he merited was easier to bear than this undeserved adulation. Anxious to change the subject, he cast around for a suitable idea. Then he noticed the mini-bar.

‘I know what,’ he said in a loud, fake-jolly voice. ‘Lets have a drink!’

Her face closed, she flinched as Serena had done when he threatened to join her in a beer.

‘No thanks, Papà,’ she said, her voice shaky.

‘
Are you sure?’ To cover his embarrassment he knelt down and opened the tiny fridge. ‘They have everything here, look, they have Coke, Sprite, orange juice, what would you like? What’s this – a Toblerone, would you like that? Or peanuts, crisps: goodness, what haven’t they here?’

But the thing they had in awesome quantities was the thing he could not bring himself to mention: alcohol. There were two kinds of beer; wine, both red and white; and all manner of spirits: gin, whiskey, and vodka, together with a selection of particularly Italian drinks, sambuca, amaretto and marsala. From where he knelt he looked up at his daughter, who was sitting on the end of the bed. She gazed down at Roderic crouching over his cache of drink and her look was now filled with mingled pity and terror. A great weariness swept over him. He wanted to speak, to say something to justify himself, but could find no words, and so he hauled himself up from the floor in silence and sat down beside her. She did not shrink away as he had feared she might and so he tentatively put his arm around her. Allegra responded by leaning her head against his shoulder. The texture of her hair was brittle against his cheek and again he noticed the exotic perfume he had been aware of in the lobby. The crammed
fridge was still open before them. For some time they both simply sat there gazing into it, at all the bottles and cans, contemplating their past as a mystic might have contemplated his fate in a vanitas, the remarkable supply of alcohol serving the same function as the polished skull or bowl of rotting frait. He hugged her more tightly to him, could feel her body rise and fall with each breath she drew. Eventually Allegra stretched out and gently pushed the door of the fridge shut with her foot.

‘I brought some of my paintings along to show you,’ she said. ‘I did them using the paints you sent me for my birthday. I couldn’t believe it when I opened the box; they were exactly what I wanted.’

‘I’m glad you like them. They’re the best you can get. You must never compromise on the quality of your materials, always use the finest you can afford. If you don’t think your work merits it, you shouldn’t be painting at all. Cheap pigment and canvas is a false economy in any case. I thought of buying you a good easel but it would have been too awkward to send, and in any case perhaps you already have one.’

She shook her head. ‘I thought that’s what Gianni was going to buy me – I sort of hinted that that was what I wanted – but he bought me a dress instead. That’s typical of him, he never knows what you’re getting at unless you spell it out in capital letters.’

‘Do you like Gianni?’

‘He’s all right. He’s sort of dull; I don’t know how to put it. Serena really can’t stand him; they’re always quarrelling with each other. Oriana likes him, but then she likes everybody. Anyway, Nonno and Nonna gave me money for my birthday, and I’m going to use that to buy an easel.’

They talked around the subject and he told her the points to keep in mind when making her choice, said that he would go with her to help her. ‘What I said about materials holds true for equipment too. If you don’t think your birthday
money will be enough, let me know and I’ll give you whatever you need.’

Allegra, hanging on his every word, nodded vigorously. ‘I can’t tell you how much I want to be a painter,’ she said.