Authenticity (4 page)

Martin, a man who noticed nothing, was tremendously relaxing company. He chattered away brightly beside William about everything and nothing: it was like sitting dozing under a songbird’s cage. No more than the occasional nod or the odd murmur of consent was necessary to maintain the illusion that a conversation was taking place. Martin fascinated William, even as he bored him: his gift for happiness, the way he plunged and sparkled through every facet of his own life like an otter in a mountain stream was a source of wonder. What was so strange was that his life was so eerily like William’s own in everything except this contentment. His wife Elaine was Liz’s best friend; they also had a boy and a girl, although their children were older than Gregory and Sophie; their home in Clonskeagh was fashionably austere, while William’s own was more traditional in both architecture and furnishings. They worked in the same office, had both gone to Trinity, he was also the son of a lawyer … and yet, and yet … Many people considered that Martin was William’s best friend. In his darkest hours even William would allow himself to go along with this ridiculous notion in his own mind, but in general he realised that this was nothing more than perfect evidence of the false nature of the life he had made for himself. In the deepest, most fundamental points they had, he thought, little in common. There were even times when he despised Martin, particularly when he talked about women as he was doing now.

He had focused on a woman who was sitting up at the counter, out of earshot, in a pale blue suit and drinking gin and tonic.

‘I could buy her a drink, what do you think, do you think she’d join us? I think she’s drinking on her own, just waiting for somebody to take pity on her, wouldn’t you say? I’d say she’s desperate for a bit of company.’

This talk was typical of Martin, and that was all it ever amounted to: talk. William couldn’t bear it, and used to marvel that someone of Martin’s age – on the short road to
fifty, like himself, and with twenty years of marriage behind him – could gain any satisfaction from it. He would have called it adolescent were it not for the fact that even adolescents nowadays would have gained no thrill, and expected more action.

‘There now,’ he said, as a young man in a sharp suit swept into the bar, kissed the woman. ‘There’s my chance gone.’ He sounded delighted. The woman said something to her companion and nodded towards Martin, who abruptly turned away.

All gong and no dinner, as William had heard one of the women in the office describe him. It was William himself who had almost wrecked his own marriage with a stupid fling that had caused misery all round, and left a crack in his life with Liz that he now realised would be with them for ever. It was Martin who had seen what was happening, who had tried to stop him. It had been a reckless affair; he intended it to be destructive. Martin had hauled him off for drinks, had told him he was mad, that it wasn’t worth it, to stop now before any more harm was done. After Liz found out and wanted to leave him Martin had asked his own wife to talk to her, to coax her to stay. Elaine had told William in no uncertain terms that she was only doing it because she thought it was in Liz’s best interests, and to this day when she was in William’s company made no effort to conceal that she thought him beneath contempt. Martin, to his credit William thought, had never made any further allusion to the matter.

‘I’ll tell you this, though,’ he said now, nudging William, ‘you’re in with a chance down there.’ He nodded towards the back of the bar. ‘She’s pretending to read a book but she’s been giving you the eye this past ten minutes and more.’ William glanced wearily in the direction indicated and was utterly thrown to see the woman whom he had met on Stephen’s Green a few days earlier. He felt his face grow hot, and to his mortification Martin noticed it ‘Fancy her, do you?
She’s young, but I’ve seen better. I wouldn’t have thought she was your type. Fierce head of hair.’ William was so embarrassed he couldn’t speak, picked his glass up and almost dropped it. Martin looked at him narrowly. ‘Do you know her?’

‘Does she look like the sort of person I would know?’ William said: an inspired remark in the circumstances, for it was enough to put Martin off the trail.

‘Not likely,’ he said. Getting bored with the subject of women now, he unfolded the evening paper he had bought earlier. ‘More scandals,’ he said, pointing at the headline. ‘Will it never end?’ and he was off again on another rambling line of conversation.

William was still consumed by the thought of the woman at the far end of the room. Should he go over and thank her? If he did, he would have to wait until Martin was gone, and that might be hard to arrange without looking suspicious. Worst of all, what if she came over to him, when he had more or less denied knowing her to Martin? His mind played over increasingly labyrinthine possibilities and complications.

Martin jumped to his feet. ‘I’d better fly,’ he said, putting his paper in his briefcase. ‘You take your time, finish your drink.’ He nodded again towards the back of the bar and winked. ‘And behave yourself. Good luck.’

Left alone, William gazed at the table, almost frightened, imagining that the woman’s gaze was boring into him. But when he did finally look up and saw that she was gone, that she had slipped out the back door, he was far more disappointed and confused than he would have expected.

This is why Julia thinks she became an artist: because of a game she used to play with her father when she was a child. He devised it himself to occupy her on winter evenings. He would show her a picture, usually from an old greetings card or an outdated calendar, for a short, fixed period of time, and then she would have to describe it to him in as much detail as she could recall. She was good at this game. Her mind became quick and sharp; it was difficult for her father to find images complex enough to challenge her. She remembers one in particular, an old Christmas card, with a scene of men and women in old-fashioned clothes, skating on a frozen river, and wonders now at her father’s patience, sitting peering at it as she reeled off as much as she could recall. From time to time he would ask her leading questions to nudge her along. ‘The man you mentioned on the left, skating between the two women: can you describe how they’re dressed?’ How vexed she was when she said that both the women were in scarlet dresses and her father said no, it was the man who was wearing a red coat.

When she was too familiar with the image to have any further use for it in the game, still she liked looking at it. The painting had a peculiar atmosphere, frozen, golden, wistful, that drew her into the world of the picture in the way a photograph could never have done. She used to stare and stare at it, and imagine that if she looked at the picture long enough and hard enough, she would be able to break its spell. Then she would be able to see into that lost world, and the diminutive skaters would begin to move across the ice. Some of them would slip and fall, and those who were shown as having tumbled over in the painting would pick
themselves up, and wobble away on their bladed feet, and the vanes of the icy windmill would turn, and the tiny crow would fly from the tree.

Her father noticed that she got enormous pleasure from the picture, and what he did next was a stroke of pure genius: from a barrow of second-hand books in a street market he brought home a large book full of colour reproductions of old-master paintings. They used it for the memory game, and even she felt that she had met her match in Bruegel’s proverb painting: the running egg! The roof slated with fruit tarts! But afterwards, she was quite happy to sit on her own and leaf through the book, looking at the pictures and entering those other worlds, as she saw them, where things were similar to the world she knew, but different too, in a way she found impossible to define but which she knew to be real. In this frame of mind, it was not the most detailed pictures that interested her, but the still life paintings. A wooden platter of curled, frail wafers and a bottle of wine sheathed in wicker. Lobsters and oysters, a cut lemon, its pared peel hanging off the edge of the table. A streaked tulip, translucent grapes and a songbird’s nest. She stared and stared at these things, wondering how it was that they seemed more exact, more true, than the apples that grew in their orchard, than the cakes and biscuits her father provided for them. Her beloved father! He acted from the purest of motives; did not wish her to ‘get on’ in life, was not covertly trying to educate her. He had handed her the book with the words, ‘You’ll enjoy that.’

But even this was not enough. He led her on, further and further, like a blind man leading his companion to the very gates of a palace that he himself cannot see. ‘What do you like so much about these pictures?’ he asked her one day, glancing over her shoulder. ‘The things in them are realer than real things,’ she replied, which she knew her father would not challenge or ridicule, even though she didn’t expect him to understand. He nodded gravely and continued to stare at the page for a few moments before pointing to one particular
picture and saying, ‘Just imagine someone sitting down and painting that.’

It was a casual observation but she took it as an instruction. For days afterwards, she studied intently the painting he had been looking at when he had spoken. Two chased silver vessels, two drinking glasses, one long, ribbed, upright and full; the other elaborate, fluted and empty, lying tilted on the tabletop; and two plates, one of which bore an elaborate fruit pie and the spoon which had broken it up to serve it. The other plate held the portion that had been served, and stood at the edge of the table, so precariously positioned that it looked as if it might at any time fall forward, spilling the pastry and fruit on the floor. (Because there was a floor, there had to be a floor, didn’t there, even if she couldn’t see it.) What else? A few scattered hazelnuts and walnuts, a few shattered nutshells and a knife with a bone handle; the whole bathed in a rich buttery golden light that made much of the curves of the tilted fluted glass, and the soft lights hidden in the silver vessels.

The artist had set all these things out on the table, spent a considerable period of time arranging them to pleasing effect, and then begun to paint. She thought of the concentration it must have required, of how he would have stared at the things to get to their essence, but how he then managed to translate that to the canvas in paint was beyond her understanding. She could imagine, though, his thrill of satisfaction when the work was complete, in that short interval when the two existed together: the arrangement of objects on the table and, a few feet away, the painting that would preserve them for ever, perfected. And then the painter would have broken that link between the objects and their image, by leaning over and lifting up the tall ribbed glass, and the plate that contained the portion of pie. She imagined that he topped up the glass of wine, and perhaps served himself a more generous portion of the dessert. Maybe he took the silver spoon with which to eat.

She knows that he went out into the garden of his house, for by now she has entered so fully into his world that she can feel how stiff his fingers are, and his eyes are strained. For all that, he has the deep satisfaction of work well done, done as best he possibly could. She can feel the sun on his neck and shoulders, taste the short pastry and the sharpness of the apples and blackberries that the pie contained. She imagines him chewing, drinking, wiping the back of his hand across his mouth and lifting his face to the sun, its power and heat.

So deep was her pleasure in the scene she had conjured up that she decided to share something of it with her father. ‘I like to think,’ she said to him, ‘about how, when the painter had finished this picture, he ate the pie.’

His response knocked her flat. ‘Maybe there never was a pie,’ he said. ‘Maybe the painter made it all up.’

For a moment she literally couldn’t speak, so extraordinary was the idea. ‘What do you mean?’ she said at last. ‘How could there not have been a pie?’

‘Maybe he just imagined one from all the pies he had seen and eaten in his life. He might have painted it from a sort of picture he had in his head, rather than from a real thing. If he was as good a painter as all that he probably just made up what he painted, having in his mind all the pies – and glasses and knives and tables and silver cups – that he had ever seen in his life. Don’t you think that’s possible?’

She didn’t know. The idea had never occurred to her. She only knew that what he said destroyed at a stroke the pleasing image she had cultivated in her own mind, of the man with paint on his hands and crumbs on his lips, sitting in the sunshine, as delighted with himself and his work as she had been. But the man she was left with now, taking his ease having finished making a pie out of nothing but paint and imagination: that someone could do that seemed more extraordinary still. That night she couldn’t get to sleep for thinking about it, and she raised the subject again with her father the following morning.

‘You remember this picture?’ and she pointed it out again in the book. ‘Are you sure it’s as you say?’

‘I never said I was sure of anything,’ he replied. ‘And what does it matter? There’s a pie there now made of paint and canvas, what more do you want? What do you mean by real, anyway?’ He leafed through the book. ‘I don’t know why you like those ones so much,’ he said. ‘They’re too ordinary. I never see the sense when people go on about something being lifelike in a painting. Where’s the point in that? This is the sort of picture I love,’ he said. He was pointing at a picture of a bearded man suspended in midair, and she could see what her father meant when he said he wondered if the angels who were clinging to him, his legs gripped firmly in their arms, were trying to carry him off into the sky, or if he had wished to ascend to the heavens before his time was due and the angels had been dispatched to haul him back down to earth where he belonged.

‘You’re not going to tell me that’s real,’ he said, ‘that it all happened in front of the person who painted the picture.’

‘How do you know?’ The idea of just such a scene delighted her, and seemed to her mind no less likely than the painter of the still life having no objects before him to copy. She loved the thought of the painter working at his easel with the group of figures floating before him, beams of light coming through the ceiling to illuminate the scene, a light breeze keeping their vivid draperies in an exact, billowing arrangement.

‘So what happened then when the painter stopped painting?’ her father challenged her.

‘They floated down to the floor of the room and rested themselves. And then all of them – the saint, the angels and the painter – sat down together and ate a fruit pie that didn’t exist.’