Authenticity (37 page)

About three weeks before the end he had a row with Jeannie. There was nothing new or remarkable in this, as quarrelling was their preferred means of communication. The difference was that this time when she said she never wanted to see him again, she actually meant it. When he contacted her after the usual cooling-off period of a day or two, she again told him to get lost; and then again with renewed vehemence and threatened violence when he made subsequent attempts, at which point he got the message. It came as something of a shock to be dumped by Jeannie. Even though it had never been much of a relationship it had dragged on for years and he had always told himself that Jeannie needed him more than he needed her.

Dennis called at the studio unannounced one lunch time. Roderic couldn’t remember his arriving; he just seemed to suddenly be there, staring balefully at the glass and whiskey bottle.

‘Want some?’

‘No thanks.’

‘Suit yourself.’

The place was eerily silent: there was no music from the adjoining room.

‘Maria isn’t around?’

‘Berlin,’ Roderic said. ‘Academic exchange. Be gone for two months. Dead quiet, isn’t it? There’s a new fellow in one of the studios upstairs but he’s a real stuck-up so-and-so. Say “Good morning,”’ to him and he’ll barely deign to answer you.’ (It was only when thinking about this weeks later in the hospital that it dawned on Roderic: the man had been simply terrified of the massive drunk on the ground floor.)

‘How’s the work going?’

‘It isn’t. You see the thing about art is this,’ Roderic said, and he drew hard on his cigarette. ‘You’ve got to have the vision and you’ve got to have the technique. Vision. And technique. You’ve got to have the vision and –’

‘All right, all right, I get the message.’

‘Sometimes I think I should paint and then sometimes I think I shouldn’t I don’t know.’ The point he was trying to make was that although not to paint depressed him, to paint badly and then to have to countenance the end result was even worse. He struggled to find a way to explain this lucidly. ‘It all comes down to vision,’ he said eventually. ‘Vision and technique.’

His brother put his head in his hands. His departure was as mysterious as his arrival, suddenly he wasn’t there any more. Roderic, noticing this, poured himself another drink. And then he also put his head in his hands.

In the days that followed he did stop painting. To look at the poor work he was producing – sickly smears of yellow
paint set in lifeless bands of grey – to look at this had easily become the worst option. But stopping painting had the curious effect of also stopping time, or at least slowing it down to a point where it appeared to have stopped. He drank more than ever now in a bid to make the hands of the clock move forward. During the final weekend before the crisis broke he didn’t go home at all but stayed in his studio drinking, sleeping, crying. He’d stayed there on many other occasions when he’d been too far gone to make it back to his flat, but this time was different. ‘This is what it must be like to be dead,’ he thought on the Saturday. He truly felt as if he had died but that his spirit was blocked from leaving his body so that, although his physical life went on, there was nothing else left, absolutely nothing. No one needed him any longer: not his children, not even Jeannie. He was nothing but a burden to Dennis. It would be better for all concerned if he were no longer there, if he could simply disappear. And yet even as he thought and realised all these things he did not feel them. The immobilising grief he experienced numbed him, cast over him a dark reverie that provided a final fragile defence. And then at last, on the Monday morning, that too gave way. A full realisation of all he had been going through, the implications of what he had been thinking, penetrated Roderic’s consciousness. Within the week he would say to Dr Sullivan, ‘It was the spiritual equivalent of waking up in the middle of open-heart surgery to realise that there was no anaesthetist.’

He was overcome by a sense of horror and could no longer bear to be on his own.

Forgetting that she wasn’t there he went and hammered on the door of Maria’s studio, shouting her name repeatedly, then ran out into the street and tried to hail a passing taxi. The taxi driver saw him first and decided, not unreasonably, that he didn’t want a huge crazed drunk in his cab. Although he managed to grab hold of the door handle the driver pressed the button to secure the locks, swerved and then
accelerated away, giving him the finger and almost driving over his foot. Roderic reeled back towards the pavement and as he did so he collided with a woman, almost knocked her down. ‘Oh sorry! Sorry!’ The woman shrank back from him, but he registered fully her revulsion, her fear. It knocked the heart out of him and he half collapsed, half sat down on the kerb to gather his resources for the next attempt. From this low vantage point he saw the next taxi before it saw him. It was slowed down in heavy traffic and he darted out, hailed it. Not as fully alert to the possibility of drunken punters early on a Monday morning as he would have been late on a Friday night, the driver had accepted him as a fare and let him into the back of the cab before fully registering just how far gone Roderic was. Then he looked in the mirror and said: ‘Right, you: out,’ Roderic ignored this and gave him the address of the bank where Dennis worked. The driver turned round now and noticed how big a man he was dealing with. ‘Out,’ he said again, but this time with less authority, as he struggled in his mind to think which was the least worst option, to have this man in the cab or to pick a fight with him. It didn’t take long to decide. He released the handbrake and they drove off.

Dennis’s job was a responsible and demanding one. It was rare for him to have in the course of the day even a few moments when he was not engaged on any particular task. He had just such a hiatus now but he was not enjoying it. He stood at the high window of his office looking out and thinking about Roderic, thinking in particular about Saturday night.

One of the strange anomalies of Roderic’s drinking was that it made Dennis feel he was the one with the problem. As though he had been a seeker of dark pleasures or excitement, a secret gambler, say, or a frequenter of prostitutes, his lot was now guilt, was a mania for concealment with a concomitant fear of exposure and shame. He had been trying, in the face of Roderic’s visible disintegration, to cling on to his own life
with its regularity and measured habits, and to this end had invited one of his colleagues to supper on Saturday night, together with his wife. He was fond of Paul. They weren’t intimate friends – Dennis had none – but he valued his fellowship in the office, and they shared an interest in music. He made a lamb casserole and a lemon pudding, carefully selected a few interesting wines. They hadn’t even got as far as the table when it happened. They were still sitting over drinks, and Dennis had truly been relaxed and enjoying himself when the doorbell rang.

Roderic.

It could be no one else. He would be drunk. He would disgrace him. And tonight Dennis couldn’t face it, so he ignored it. ‘Maureen, are you all right there, can I offer you more wine?’

‘I’m fine, thanks,’ she said, clearly puzzled as to why he wasn’t answering the door.

The bell rang again, more aggressively this time. ‘So, Paul, where were we?’ Dennis said, ‘Wexford. Lully,’ giving him his cue. The caller abandoned the bell and started to knock.

Maureen and Paul looked at each other in silence, then Maureen said, ‘I, ah, I think there’s someone at your door,’ clearly embarrassed at having to make so foolishly obvious a statement.

‘Do please excuse me,’ Dennis said with elaborate politeness as he stood up. ‘I shall only be a moment’

In the hall, he checked his pockets. He had thirty pounds in cash which he would give to Roderic if he needed it, to make him go away. For Dennis had crossed the Rubicon: he wasn’t going to let Roderic in. No matter what he said, no matter what his condition, Dennis would turn him away, a thing he had never done before. He would be too ashamed before his guests. Roderic, smashed and self-pitying, would deal a killer blow to his supper party and he wasn’t going to put up with it. He paused for a moment, steeling himself before opening the door.

‘Dennis, how are things? I’m running the Dublin marathon this year to raise money for a cancer charity. Will you sponsor me for it?’ Dennis stared wildly at his neighbour. ‘Sorry to make a racket, I’m doing the whole street tonight and I knew you were in, for I saw your lights on.’

His hands shook so that he could hardly fill in the form that was offered to him. His neighbour thanked him, complimented him on his fine show of roses and Dennis in turn thanked him, said goodbye. He closed the front door and stood leaning against it for some moments with his eyes shut, trying to control the emotional turmoil that threatened to defeat him In an ideal world, he could simply go back into the drawing room and say, ‘I thought it was my brother. He’s an alcoholic and I’m at the end of my tether.’ But it wasn’t an ideal world. Paul was his colleague and he’d never met Maureen before tonight. If he talked about it with anyone, he couldn’t be sure that he wouldn’t start crying. ‘Oh, fuck it all,’ he said out loud, there in the hall. ‘Fuck, fuck, fuck.’ And then he realised that Maureen and Paul would have heard him. He stood there for a few minutes more struggling to compose himself, then went back into the drawing room and carried on as if nothing had happened.

He thought of all this now as he stared out over the roofs of the city, at the slates, the spires and green domes, the turning yellow cranes. Poor Roderic was out there somewhere. What was he doing at exactly this moment in his lost life? With that the phone on his desk rang.

‘Mr Kennedy, there’s a man in reception demanding to see you. He’s very drunk. Could you get down here as quick as you possibly can?’

He could hear the fear in the receptionist’s voice, could hear Roderic shouting in the background. ‘DENNIS! WHERE ARE YOU, DENNIS? HELP ME!’ He didn’t take time to speak to the woman but simply threw the receiver back in its cradle; didn’t take time to wait for the lift, but ran down the three flights of stairs to the entrance of the building.

Roderic was sitting on the floor with his back to the receptionist’s desk and his forehead resting on his knees. The doorman, who was tiny, was hovering nervously over him like a Yorkshire terrier guarding a wounded wolfhound. ‘He’s grand now,’ he said to Dennis, ‘he’s grand,’ which was patently not true. Roderic looked disastrous. He hadn’t washed or changed his clothes for days; he was paralytic with drink and he was crying, great heaving boo-hoo-hooing sobs, like a small child in distress.

‘Ring for a taxi, please,’ Dennis said to the receptionist, and he knelt down beside his brother. ‘Don’t worry, Roderic, everything’s going to be all right. I’m with you now. I’ll look after you.’ He put his arms around him, hushed him and soothed him. From somewhere a blanket was fetched, and he tenderly placed it around Roderic’s shoulders. In his place of work Dennis was famed and feared as a martinet and the receptionist and doorman both stared at him now, astounded at this unexpected side, this gentleness and compassion. ‘We’re going to go to my house and you can sleep there, and you’ll be fine. We’ll get you a doctor and you’ll be looked after. Believe me, Roderic. Everything is going to be all right now.’

When they got to the house, Dennis took him straight upstairs to his own bedroom. ‘Just take your shoes off and lie down under the duvet.’ Bending down, Roderic struggled and fumbled with his laces but they defeated him. ‘Here, let me.’ Dennis knelt down in front of him and helped him out of his shoes, then settled him in the bed and pulled the quilt up around him. And then as he sat looking at his brother while waiting for the doctor to arrive, something strange happened. Under his gaze, Roderic began to change. He still looked wretched but not quite as bad as the man who had arrived in the office an hour earlier – more like the man who, to Dennis’s complete stupefaction, had showed up unannounced on his doorstep late one night some years earlier.
The marriage is over. I decided to come back. Have
you anything in the house I could drink?
He was definitely changing: his hair was darkening, and he had lost that bloated, raddled look. He was younger, stronger, like the troubled artist who’d lived in Italy with his wife and three daughters; like the cheerful handsome man who’d shared Dennis’s house and brightened his days with his laughter, his big personality. His face in sleep looked peaceful now as he became the bearded art student, then the energetic teenager. He was shrinking before Dennis’s very eyes, was becoming the curly-headed child he’d been so fond of, the toddler, the baby in the pink shawl that Sinéad had held out to him so many years ago, and whom he had loved with a deep visceral love from that moment onwards.

Will you look after him always?

Yes, I will I’ll look after him.

‘Do you know someone with apple trees?’

‘No.’

‘So you actually bought these?’ Julia took one of the apples from the wooden bowl on Roderic’s kitchen table and held it up.

‘I most certainly did. They were hard to find and they cost me dear.’

‘How much?’

He told her and she laughed. ‘They saw you coming.’

‘They’re organic apples,’ he said, and she laughed again.

‘They
definitely
saw you coming. The next time I’m down home I’ll bring you some apples back, like this only better, and as many of them as you want. I’m quite serious,’ she said, because now Roderic was laughing. ‘My father has a great orchard, but it produces more fruit than we can ever eat – more even than we can gather.’

The apples in the bowl were local too. She knew it to look at them. No one would ever have bothered to transport such humble fruit from one end of the planet to the other. They were small apples with thick woody stalks, and some of them were slightly misshapen, swollen out more on one side than on the other. The one Julia was holding had a small grey scab on it; some of the others had leaves still attached. Their skins were blushed and flecked, green shading into a rich orange red.

‘I hate those big red apples you buy in supermarkets,’ he said. ‘It’s like eating a cricket ball. They have no taste, no fragrance.’

She inhaled the rich sweet perfume of the fruit in her hand. ‘They look well against the wood of the bowl. They remind me of something,’ she said, ‘but I can’t think what.’

‘Your father’s orchard?’

‘Yes, but something else too. I don’t know what it is.’

On returning to her own house later, Julia was amused to find that there was an apple in the pocket of her jacket that Roderic had somehow managed to put there without her noticing. She set it on the mantelpiece of the living room and for the rest of that day it was a puzzle to her, pushing her towards some lost memory to which she simply could not get back. She picked it up from time to time, studied it closely and thoughtfully, did everything she could to make it offer up its secret, but it didn’t do so until the following night, which brought the first frost of that winter. She had been out visiting friends and on returning to the unheated flat near midnight she saw the apple. It was the bitter cold that made the connection. The revelation of the memory was like a trapdoor opening beneath her.

It was a morning in winter and the sky in the east was an intense deep pink. She was walking through the orchard at home, at the edge of which there was a ditch overhung with grass. This morning every blade was rimed silver and the water in the ditch was frozen. A few windfalls had been trapped beneath the ice and she stopped to look at them. Someone was with her. Someone was holding her hand; it was hot as a coal. The red of the apples was vivid through the thick glassy ice. Julia wanted to stand there and admire the trapped fruit but her companion did not wish to linger. She was chivvied along; she could remember nothing more.

Usually she cherished these fragments connected with her mother, but for some reason it was different this time. It depressed her to think that this was all she would ever have, for it wasn’t enough – not nearly enough. Her sense of loss was borne in upon her with a greater force than ever before. She slept badly that night and awoke with a headache that she couldn’t shake off all day. Her luck had broken, nothing went right with her. She rang Roderic in the early evening but
there was no reply. He had mentioned something about going to see his brother later in the week but she couldn’t recall which day. She rang her father but he wasn’t there either. There was only Max to console her in her loneliness and Max was fast asleep. Then shortly after eight the doorbell rang, the two short rings that she wanted to hear more than anything else this evening.

‘Oh. It’s you,’ William was aware of the disappointment in her voice.

‘I can go away again if you wish.’

‘No, please, you’re welcome.’

‘Is there anything in particular bothering you?’ he asked when they were settled upstairs.

‘Everything and nothing. You know how it is.’

‘Meaning?’

She covered her eyes with her hand. ‘Meaning that someone stole a silver dish when I was at work this morning and Hester went mad when she found out. That I checked my bank balance this afternoon and it was fifty pounds less than it ought to be and I have no idea why. That I had arranged to meet someone to interview them for the project I’m working on and they didn’t show. I waited for ages, so that was the afternoon lost.’ She lifted her hand away from her eyes and smiled at him. ‘Do you really want me to go on?’

‘I get the picture.’

She offered him wine from a bottle she happened to have open. ‘I am glad to see you,’ she said as she poured it. ‘I could be doing with company after a day like that. Hope life’s been treating you more kindly.’

‘I don’t know whether it has or not. My big news,’ he said, ‘is that I’m going back to work soon.’

‘Well that’s good, isn’t it? I take it that means you’re better,’ but he laughed at this somewhat sardonically.

‘The doctor I’ve been seeing said to me the other day, “Let me tell you something, William.
Cure
is a word I don’t like.” You can draw your own conclusions from that.’

‘I know what he means,’ Julia said. ‘
Heal
is probably more accurate. I mean, what you’ve been going through isn’t probably something that just comes to an end. It eases off and you can get on with your life again, but it never quite goes away completely.’

This slightly disconcerted William, for the doctor had gone on to express the same idea. ‘Mind you, I never thought it would last as long as this. Where are we now, October? I can hardly believe it’

‘And what exactly has changed for you during these past nine months since you left work?’

‘It’s been a strange time. Thinking about my life. Realising that I haven’t become the person I was supposed to become. Realising that it won’t ever happen now, and trying to come to terms with it.’

‘And you’re making some headway?’

‘No,’ he said bluntly. ‘I should have devoted my life to painting. I won’t ever be like you or like your friend. Have a reputation, critical attention, exhibitions and so on. It isn’t going to happen.’

Julia laughed. ‘
Critical attention!
I wouldn’t break my heart over missing out on that one if I were you.’

‘But to have done the work, that has been a good thing, I’m glad I had that. I know nobody else cared about it but it mattered to me. It gave me a kind of spiritual freedom that I needed.’

As she refilled their glasses Julia asked why he spoke of it all in the past tense. ‘You will keep painting when you go back to your job, won’t you? If you want to do it so much, you should be able to work out some sort of schedule for yourself.’

‘I suppose so.’

‘Do you know where it comes from,’ she asked, ‘this compulsion to paint?’

‘It was always there,’ he replied, ‘ever since I was a small child. I used to think it was a neutral thing but now I’m not
so sure. This compulsion, as you call it. This instinct. That’s how it strikes me, like an extra instinct. Not everyone has it but if you do, you ignore it at your peril. It’s like the need for sex. That can also seem to be a neutral thing, but it isn’t. It has a dark, blind, dangerous side.’

He told her about a man with whom he had worked when he was starting out as a lawyer, ‘A real pillar of society, all rectitude and respectability. What none of us knew was that he frequented prostitutes. The police recognised him from seeing him in court. They warned him off time and again but he paid no heed. Eventually they had no option but to arrest him. It blew everything apart – his career, his marriage, the lot.’

‘And you’re saying art is like that?’

‘I’m saying it also can destroy lives. It almost destroyed mine. I’m sure you can think of other examples closer to home.’

She knew what he was hinting at but refused to rise to the bait, only replied, ‘I don’t agree with you. I think sex is a good thing and I think art is a good thing.’

‘You may say so; my point is that it’s all a bit more complex than that.’

A silence fell over them and they sat looking at each other. Even though she was quite close to him – if he stretched out his hand he could have touched her – there was something about her that was completely remote and that didn’t square with the solidity of her presence. It was like seeing a ghost and being startled to realise that there was nothing ghostly about it. Julia had removed her shoes and was sitting on the sofa with her legs folded beneath her; her long green skirt was tucked in around her feet. Her hair was pinned back from her face, which looked wan and tired. What was it about her, he wondered, that made her look so impossibly distant? Something at the core of her constantly eluded him, and the more he tried to get at her the more she seemed to recede. He had noticed this quality in her before and was
never sure if it was something he was projecting on to her, or if it came from her deepest self. The fits of black depression from which he suffered had this distancing effect Often he felt as though he were experiencing the world through a sheet of plate glass, but with Julia it was something particular, something more. He didn’t know her. That was the simple truth. She drank her wine and stroked the head of the cat who was asleep beside her.

‘Everyone,’ she said ‘has trouble in life. It’s a question of keeping things in perspective and trying to draw strength from the good things that one does have.’

‘It’s easy for you to say that. You don’t know what it’s like to completely fall apart. Money, family and so on; it’s no consolation, it’s not enough. You don’t know what it’s like, this kind of crisis.’

‘lndeed. I’ve led a completely charmed life.’ There was no mistaking the sarcasm.

‘What I mean,’ he said, ‘is that you’re young.’

‘Age has nothing to do with it. Even little children can suffer.’

‘Do you mean my son?’

‘Not necessarily. No, I wasn’t thinking of him.’

Again they fell silent. They were both slightly taken aback at how quickly the atmosphere between them had soured. She offered him more wine in the hope of breaking the mood.

‘Thanks. What you say is true,’ William went on, keen in his turn to mollify her. ‘I do have good things in my life. For example, in these past months I’ve come to understand more about how things were between my father and myself. I value that knowledge even though getting to it has been extremely painful. Of course, your generation are far more at ease than mine when it comes to talking about psychological matters.’

Julia laughed and then she said, ‘It’s been ever such a long day. I’m worn out.’

She did look exhausted, William thought. She was flushed with the wine; and that distance he had noticed earlier was still there. She seemed to him like a woman in a pane of stained glass, or a figure woven into a tapestry, standing on a field of coloured flowers with a hawk at her wrist. ‘You never,’ he said, ‘talk about your mother.’

‘I don’t, do I? There’s nothing to say.’

‘Oh, come along, I can’t believe that.’ She looked at him warily. He knew he ought to drop the subject but his curiosity was aroused now and he risked pressing on. ‘You were very young when you lost her?’

He could see her weighing up in her mind whether or not to answer him and then she said, ‘I was six when she died. Oh, I’ve told you,’ she went on, suddenly impatient, ‘there’s nothing to say.’

‘Meaning?’

‘Meaning that I can’t remember.’

‘You were away from home when it happened?’

‘No, I was there. I was right at the eye of the storm. It’s just that I can’t remember anything about it’

‘But you do know what happened?’

Again she covered her eyes with her hand. She looked weary, but she was weakening, William could see. He was wearing her down. ‘It would help you to talk,’ he said gently.

‘It would do you good.’

‘Why?’

He had no idea. He had said this only because he thought it was what she might wish to hear. ‘Well, perhaps if you spoke about what you know, it might help you to remember.’

She took her hand away from her face and stared at him.

‘Do you really think so?’

William shrugged. ‘No harm in trying.’ Still she was looking at him, clearly thinking hard. He couldn’t understand what was going on in her mind and he didn’t really expect what happened next.

She told him all about her mother, that her name was Eileen and that she had been killed in a road accident that Julia herself and her father had witnessed. Distracted by something or simply not looking, she’d stepped out in front of a car while out on a family shopping trip one Saturday afternoon. She’d taken the full impact of the vehicle and died there on the road moments later, with Dan’s arms around her and Julia holding her hand. It upset her to speak of these things and she started to cry. William said nothing and she continued, telling him how she could remember almost nothing of her mother but fragments.

She told him about the sound of crockery in the morning, the gold watch, the apples under the ice. All her life she had kept the idea of her mother closed in her heart, like a fragile glass plate in a photographic darkroom where, under the right conditions, an image might slowly reveal itself. She had spoken explicitly of her loss to few people and never before in this flood of raw emotion that William’s persistent probing had unleashed with such unexpected force. Sniffing and gulping she took a paper tissue from the sleeve of her jumper and wiped her eyes.

William sat opposite her, watching. In recent times he had found her much less attractive than when he first met her and tonight, with her face red and puffy from crying, she looked particularly unappealing. Nine months had passed since first he had sat in this room and it surprised him now to think back on it and remember how different it had all seemed at the time. Then, it had excited him to be plunged into the life of this stranger, to be sitting in this room that seemed full of a careless glamour, that bespoke freedom; but tonight it struck him as merely the shabby, dusty flat of a young woman without a proper job and with no money. Knowing her had opened no doors for him. Still she was talking, but he was no longer listening. Her confidences bored him, and he waited until she paused again then said, ‘Well now, I’m sure you feel much better for that.’