Authenticity (35 page)

She took the card, then said, ‘Wait a moment.’ She crossed to the table, wrote something on a square of yellow paper and passed it to him. ‘If it’s all getting you down too much and you need to talk to someone about it, call me. And again, don’t hesitate: day or night. There are some things you shouldn’t have to go through on your own.’ Touched by her kindness, Dennis was for a moment at a loss to know what to say

‘I don’t know where it’ll end. Sometimes I think he’s killing himself.’ He was amazed to hear himself blurt out something that he had hesitated until now to admit even in his own mind.

Maria did not respond directly to this remark. Instead she said, ‘Let me tell you, Dennis, someone very close to me, his father was a hell of a drinker and so I’ve seen at first hand the toll it takes on family members. There’s only so much you can do and most times it makes no difference anyway. So you look out for yourself, d’you hear me? You look out for yourself. You’d best be off to your office, or you’ll be late. And I meant what I said: call me if you need me.’

Just outside the pub, someone offered Roderic a flier for a mobile phone company which he unthinkingly took and stuffed into his pocket, wondering if the poor sap knew how ridiculous he looked. The man was actually dressed as a mobile phone, encased from ankle to head in an absurd rectangle of foam rubber from which his face stared forlornly above a console of numbers. The costume restricted his movements so that he was like a spancelled goat and could barely hobble towards the passers-by to offer them his leaflets, which in general were spurned.

He went into the pub and sat down. It was a place Julia liked, which was why he had suggested it for today. It was also a place of which Dennis was fond and it was there that the coincidental meeting of all three of them had taken place earlier in the year. Ever since then he had been more careful to arrange appointments so that there was no danger of an overlap. Holding a beermat between finger and thumb, he turned it over and over again on its edge and thought meditatively about his brother. He’d made real progress in his struggle to become less dependent on Dennis – not asking him to do little favours, to mediate between him and other family members and so forth. It had been a hard habit to break, but sometimes he thought it had been harder still for Dennis, who hadn’t quite yet come to terms with no longer being needed as he once had been. Just at that Julia came into the pub in the company of a middle-aged man, rather stocky, who was carrying a plastic bag from a bookshop. Roderic couldn’t imagine who he might be, foolishly so, he realised almost immediately: he should have recognised him from the photograph on her mantelpiece of the kite-flier. For when
Julia said, ‘Roderic, I want you to meet my father,’ he saw at once that it could be no one else.

‘I didn’t want to muscle in,’ Dan said by way of introduction. ‘Julia told me she had this arranged with you so I said I’d see her later in the day, but she wouldn’t hear tell of it.’

‘She did well’

‘Did you see your man outside?’ he went on as they settled themselves. ‘The poor fella with the leaflets? Did you ever see worse? It’s not enough for him to have a rotten job, they have to dress him up like a fool to do it, make a laughing stock of him in front of the entire city. They’d have us believe that we’re all on the pig’s back now. And then they’re always going on about choice,’ he said. ‘About freedom. Here’s the choice your man had: sit on the dole, or take a job that makes him look like a total arse. Where’s the choice in that, you tell me? Where’s the freedom?’

Just at that moment a waitress came to their table. They ordered salmon salads and Dan asked for a pint of Guinness. The young woman, who was clearly not Irish, had some difficulty in understanding what was being said and hesitantly asked Julia again what she wanted to drink. She scribbled it all down, forced a smile for them, then stripped a carbon copy of their order from the notepad and wedged it between the salt and pepper. ‘I wonder what part of the world she’s from?’ Dan said after she had gone. The country’s full of foreigners these days, and I’d say plenty of them are having a hard time of it.’

Suddenly Dan turned to Roderic with the same frank, steady gaze that Roderic found so attractive in Julia, and so disconcerting in her father. ‘I believe you lived abroad for a good few years. Julia tells me you used to live in Italy.’

‘I did, yes.’

‘So, will you tell me this,’ he said, with his gaze still fixed on him, ‘for this is something that interests me, and a thing I’d like to know. Were you ever in Pompeii?’

This was so far from what Roderic had been expecting that for a moment he was at a loss as to what to say. He simply nodded.

‘And Herculaneum. What about that? Have you been there?’

Roderic said that he hadn’t.

‘Because people say that it’s even more interesting than Pompeii, and I’d have been interested to have your opinion.’

‘You’re planning to go there Someday, aren’t you?’ Julia said.

‘I hope so, if I can ever get the money together and get myself organised. It would have to be a package thing, Rome and Pompeii, you know. I don’t think I’d be able to manage it on my own, what with the language. The language and the money That reminds me,’ and he reached for his plastic bag, ‘I’m after buying a good book, let me show it to you,’ but just at that moment the waitress returned with their salads.

‘Seeing as how you’re so interested in history,’ Roderic said as they ate, ‘perhaps when you retire you might think to study history, to do a degree.’

‘Me!’ Dan said. ‘At a university? Sure I have no education worth talking about. They’d never let me in.’

‘They don’t always require formal qualifications for mature students,’ Julia argued ‘and in any case, you know far more about history already than any student coming in with a Leaving Certificate.’

Still he wasn’t convinced. ‘I don’t know. I’m not sure that the way they go about things there would suit me. I have my own way of seeing things.’ Abruptly he put down his knife and fork. ‘We know nothing,’ he said. ‘We like to think we know it all, but the half of it we’re making up. Just imagine if in a thousand years’ time, people were trying to know about us: what life was like in Dublin now. Who we were and what we were. What we believed and what we wanted. And all they had to help them work it out was Glasnevin Cemetery,
a few bits of jewellery, bracelets and earrings, and what they could dig up of the Naas dual carriageway. Can you imagine what’d you’d come up with? Can you
imagine
?’

Julia said it was the same with painting: that the artists of the past would be amazed if they could see what had happened to their work: altarpieces taken out of churches and broken up, the central image displayed in Washington, the right panel in Berlin, the predella in London. What would they have thought to see these religious images displayed in blank white rooms beside court portraits, beside images that to them would have been wholly profane?

‘You’re a painter too, aren’t you?’ Dan said. ‘I don’t understand art.’ It was not a critical or defensive remark, he was simply stating a fact. ‘Not just the new stuff, you know, but any of it. It doesn’t speak to me, I don’t know why. I’ve tried, haven’t I?’ This last was addressed to Julia, who smiled ironically at him and nodded. He returned then to the subject of the man whom he had seen handing out leaflets. ‘If he’s still there when we go out, I’m going to say something to him. I’m going to ask him would he not think to learn a trade. Plumber or a sparks, something like that. Something real. With a trade you can even work for yourself. No boss. Or rather, you’re your own boss. Do you see what I mean? You plumb in a washing machine or you rewire a house, or, like me say, you fit a new exhaust system, and you’ve done something. You can point to it and you can say, I did that. Not like handing out leaflets. Handing out leaflets is no job for anybody. I’m going to tell him so.’

Roderic could see Julia was silently hoping that the human phone would have tottered off to another street by the time they had finished their lunch. He might not take kindly to Dan’s impromptu career advice, no matter how well intentioned or reasonably presented.

‘Did you see the moon the other night?’ Dan suddenly asked.

‘We did,’ said Julia. ‘I thought of you.’

‘I saw it coming up low from the horizon, a big golden moon. Huge, it was, and there was silence all over the valley. There was no wind, nothing, not so much as the sound of a bird singing. Only silence, and silence and silence, and then this big golden thing, the moon. Ah, that was something,’ he said, and he sat for a moment, remembering it. ‘That was something worth seeing.’

Roderic was aware that in spite of all the warmth and good will of the occasion, he and Dan were not breaking through to each other on any significant level. He thought of things that Julia had told him about her father, about his bouts of headlong drinking after the death of his wife. It was something with which Roderic could identify although he knew it was not an experience about which either of them would ever wish to speak to the other.

‘You must come down and visit us in Wicklow,’ Dan said. ‘Bring him with you some weekend when you’re coming, Julia.’

Was there not in that steady gaze an element of cold assessment, or was he simply reading in the other man something that he felt he would certainly be guilty of in the same circumstances?

They finished their meal. The waitress came back to take away their plates and they ordered tea.

‘I have to show you my book now,’ Dan said, putting on his glasses. He took a thick volume out of the plastic bag and opened it at random. ‘It’s an encyclopaedia of Irish history and it’s full of great stuff. Listen now; listen till you hear this. “Time,”’ he read. “‘In Ireland, as elsewhere, the standardisation of time was primarily a response to the exigencies of the railway timetable. Before that nearly every community had its own time. Clocks in Cork were eleven minutes behind those in Dublin, while those in Belfast were one minute and nineteen seconds ahead.” Did you ever hear the like of that?’ he said, looking at them over the top of his glasses. ‘Doesn’t that beat all?’

‘Oh, Daddy,’ Julia said, laughing.

“‘It was not until Greenwich Mean Time was extended to the whole of Ireland, in 1916, that the Albert Clock stopped showing Belfast time.” I think that’s remarkable,’ he said, leafing through the pages. ‘Remarkable. Or what about this:

“Haymaking was probably introduced to Ireland by the Normans.” Did you know that?’

‘What will you do this afternoon?’ Julia said. ‘Will you go to the museum?’

‘Ah no. I don’t go there every time I come up to Dublin.’

‘You used to. Do you remember? We used to go there.’ And they fell to talking of how he used to bring her as a child, in the hope that the gold torcs, the wooden canoe and the delicate fringe of Bronze Age horsehair would inspire her to share his love of history.

‘And I hated it,’ she said in delight, ‘
hated
it,’ as her father chuckled.

In his mind’s eye, Roderic could see them as they passed under the dome of the museum’s entrance hall, Dan pausing by the glass cases as he peered at the artefacts and their printed labels, while the small, wild-haired child Julia had once been fretted and grizzled mildly beside him.

‘Those axe-heads!’ Julia said. ‘Hundreds of them, it seemed to me. All those pots and guns! The only thing in the museum that caught my imagination was the biscuit, the prison biscuit. That’s children, you see: they can’t grasp the significance of a stone head, two thousand years old, but a biscuit older than your father, now that really is interesting.’

‘And all you wanted,’ Dan said, ‘was to go around the corner to the gallery, to look at the pictures. The painting of the parrots. You liked that.’ ‘The parrots, yes,’ she agreed. ‘The Goose Girl, and Jack Yeats’ horse, that looked to me as though it was made of glass.’

‘And that one of the mountains in the west, the blue mountains. It’s gone now, you know,’ he added. ‘The biscuit.’

‘Where to?’ Julia replied. ‘Don’t tell me they’ve thrown it out. They can’t have done. They shouldn’t have. It’s a part of our heritage.’

‘It probably went mouldy in the end,’ Dan said. ‘Nothing lasts for ever.’

His whole life, Roderic thought, had been a kind of desperate flight from the middle class into which he had been born. He had believed, especially in recent years, that he had indeed succeeded, that he had managed to escape. But if that was the case why was it that today, faced with Dan Fitzpatrick – who was quietly drinking his tea, who wanted to go to Pompeii but who had heard that Herculaneum was possibly more interesting, who thought that handing out leaflets was no kind of job for anyone, who had single-handedly brought up his daughter to be a beautiful and remarkable woman, who didn’t believe that he would ever be permitted to enrol at a university, and who had, in any case, his own way of seeing things, who was simply and utterly and completely himself – why was it that, faced with Dan Fitzpatrick, Roderic had never before felt so deeply conventional?

A silence fell over them now and annealed around them, that neither man had the will to break until Julia at last said, ‘Should we ask for the bill?’

Dan finally yielded to Roderic’s insistent offer that he would pay, but he took out his wallet anyway, to show them something. ‘A man in a pub,’ he said, ‘gave me this.’

He unfolded a yellowing paper, a receipt from a shop, Sweenys Haberdashery and General Merchants, and the date in perfect copperplate,
14th April 1900
.

Out in the street the weekly market is taking place. She can hear the men’s voices, the sound of switches on the flanks of the animals, their lowings, the stately dick of their hooves. Spring and winter struggle for the upper hand: white
blossom streams from a tree at the window. She watches the mark her pen makes. The slit in the nib opens gently under the pressure of her hand; the downstroke is thick, the slanted upstroke fine as a hair.
One pair of man’s boots,
she writes.
One
tin of ox-blood boot polish. One pair of laces.
Then the wind blows the clouds away from the sun. Sudden light pours into the shop and the woman looks up to find her whole world translated. Brass pins; spools of black waxed thread; cards of buttons, gilt and bone and mother-of-pearl: each one of these quotidian things is now separate and distinct. It is as if she had never seen them before now; it is as if each one of them is speaking to her, pleading with her out of its own reality. It is a gift. The light races over the walls. The clouds cover the sun again and she is back in the familiar shadows, the dimness, plunged back into her element of time.

And Dan wondered aloud if the docket that the waitress now presented to them: