Authenticity (40 page)

Roderic stared at her, alarmed that she could even countenance such a thing. ‘It’s a fine piece of work,’ he said.

There was silence for a moment as they contemplated the painting. At the centre of the page was a great O like a circular cave into which the colour dripped in sharp stalactites, bristling with energy against the empty sweep of white paper. Towards the top of the page the deep blue bruised into a strong yellow that faded, faded, gradually
effacing itself into the blankness of the paper itself. The colours were the colours of a storm’s weird light; and the controlled passion of the work, its technical accomplishment, impressed Roderic more than he cared to admit.

‘But what am I to do with it?’ Julia asked petulantly.

‘Look after this painting. Keep it safe. Try to see the difference between the man and the work: their separateness. I’m not saying it’ll be easy, but that’s what I feel you must do if you want something redemptive to come of all this – something good.’

‘I do,’ Julia said. ‘I want that more than anything.’

They fell silent for a moment and then she said, ‘In which case I’d better tell you the truth. I wasn’t being straight when I told you how things ended between William and me. I told you that I dropped him but it wasn’t like that at all. He dropped me. As you predicted he would. After the last time I saw him I was so angry that I resolved to cut him out of my life. When he rang, I’d hang up. When he came to the house, I wouldn’t let him in. But he never contacted me again. It was all over between us from that day on.’

‘And what had happened,’ Roderic asked ‘to upset you so much? What did William do?’

With her eyes fixed on the painting, Julia gave him a frank and detailed account of their final meeting. She spoke dispassionately, somehow managing to keep her emotions in check, but when she had finished and turned to look at Roderic she saw how shocked he was.

‘You should have told me about this,’ he said and his voice was full of sorrow. ‘You should have told me. Oh, Julia,’ and he crossed the room to where she stood. ‘Close your eyes.’

He took her hand in his, brushed her hair back from her face and kissed her. In all of this there was intense physical recognition. She couldn’t see him but it could have been no one else but Roderic. Then he let fall her hand and stood back, but the sense of his presence still communicated itself to her in spite of there being no physical link between them.
‘You can’t see me,’ he said ‘but you recognise me. You do know that it’s me. Do you realise what I’m getting at? Do you understand?’ When she opened her eyes again in was upon a new reality and he understood what he had just shown her even before he spoke. ‘You
do
remember your mother. You do remember her.’

‘May I stay here?’ she said. ‘May I stay here tonight?’

‘Of course you may.’

She stayed with Roderic that night and when she awoke the next day she stared at where the morning light fell on the wall between the bookcase and the window. She thought of how, painted, it would appear as pure abstraction: the sharply defined oblong of lemon light on the pale surface, the two dark lines that bound the planes. It would be understood according to the titles one might give it:
Dawn Light: Window,
Wall, Bookcase,
or simply a number. She wanted to point it out to Roderic, to say to him, ‘Look at the wall, how the light falls there.’ But he was still asleep, and by the time he awoke the sharply defined edges of the rectangle she had noted earlier had expanded, grown softer as the light became more diffuse, dissolving completely now to fill the room with the clear light of a new day.

In the winter she used to wake late, long after the sun had come up. She lay there drowsing under the quilt for her father’s house had become a place in which to relax and dream. When finally she arose this morning she found that deep snow had fallen in the night and she came downstairs to see the kitchen bright as a studio, full of the strong flat bluish light that is reflected off snow. She had noticed before that the brighter and stronger the sun the less likely it was to penetrate the small deep windows, so that to enter the house on a hot summer’s day was like finding the sanctuary of a cool dark cave. She made tea and toast, lit a cigarette and settled by the kitchen table, warming her hands around the flank of the teapot and looking out into the orchard. They had managed to gather only a certain quantity of the apples this year. The rest had been left on the trees, to fall in red rings in the long grass, to be pecked at by the birds, to hang from the topmost branches for far longer than might have been expected given the weather, the rain, the storms. There was no wind today but a crystalline stillness and each of the last few remaining apples wore an airy cap of snow. At the sound of the door opening she turned round, and her father came into the room. ‘I suppose we should have gathered them all in,’ she said, ‘the apples.’ Dan came over and stood beside her, gazed out into the orchard.

‘Oh there’ll be apples, Julia,’ Dan said, ‘when we’re all of us gone.’

Deirdre Madden is from Toomebridge, Co. Antrim. Her novels include
The Birds of Innocent Wood, Nothing is Black, One by One in the Darkness,
which was shortlisted for the Orange Prize, and
Authenticity
. Her novel
Molly Fox’s Birthday
also was shortlisted for the Orange Prize. She teaches at Trinity College, Dublin and is a member of the Irish Arts Academy Aosdana.

HIDDEN SYMPTOMS

THE BIRDS OF THE INNOCENT WOOD

REMEMBERING LIGHT AND STONE

NOTHING IS BLACK

ONE BY ONE IN THE DARKNESS