Authenticity (5 page)

The cacophony of the tuning-up died away. Silence, then applause as the conductor came to the podium, followed moments later by the soloist. And in that instant, something strange happened to Dennis: it always did at this point. He fancied that he was the pianist in evening dress walking on to the stage. The illusion was brief but complete. He looked out into the blackness of the auditorium beyond the footlights, and bowed to acknowledge the applause; was aware of the musicians behind him. Dennis liked to think of himself as utterly unimaginative. It was one of the flaws in his self-knowledge. Other people saw him as dull and unfanciful and he, oddly, colluded in this, even to himself. He was seemingly unconscious of his rich inner life, something that he could at times barely keep under control. He had a remarkable memory, and an astonishing imagination. The conductor tapped his baton and Dennis was back in his seat, beside a woman whose pearls gleamed in the dimness. Then the music started, pure, complex, sublime; and Dennis vanished into it.

The interval came and he shuffled out of the auditorium with everyone else, collected the small bottle of Chardonnay he had booked and paid for before the concert started, and stood alone drinking it in the crowded foyer under the majestic crystal chandelier. He felt his solitude keenly tonight; noticed that, apart from himself, everyone appeared to be part of a couple. Usually this was not something that troubled him, for Dennis did not believe in the concept of the Perfect Stranger, the person to whom one could become closer than to the siblings with whom one had grown up. ‘The thing about Beethoven,’ a man standing near him
was saying loudly, ‘in fact, the thing about all Romantic music …’ His female companion threw in the odd murmur of assent but was otherwise silent as the man droned on. It was Roderic who had first drawn his attention to these one-sided supposed conversations. He thought that one of the reasons women were so fond of Roderic was that he never held forth in this way: he was a good conversationalist, but more than that, he was a good listener.

He regretted now that he had been unable to hide his shock and dismay on meeting Julia. She had noticed it, he felt sure, although it had been impossible to read what she made of him.

Dennis had guessed not long before Christmas that Roderic was involved with a woman again. Nothing was said, but Dennis knew his brother too well to think otherwise. He and Roderic understood each other in an almost animal fashion. They were like dolphins clicking and chittering at each other in the deep, or like bats sending out high frequency signals through the silence of the night. Their understanding of each other was uncanny, at times it even unnerved them. So Dennis knew that the air of contentment and relaxation Roderic suddenly manifested could have only one meaning, and that worried him. Women had never been the root cause of Roderic’s troubles, but they had always been so deeply implicated that Dennis could not, in his mind, disassociate them from disaster. And yet Roderic loved women, seemed to need to always be involved with someone. He had been on his own for three years now, something of a record in his adult life.

The crisis that had finally come to a head three years ago had clearly taken its toll on Roderic – it had almost destroyed him – but it had exacted a heavy price from his brother too. A doctor had pointed this out to Dennis, had advised that as far as he possibly could he cultivate psychological detachment from Roderic. Roderic acknowledged this, and had promised in a fumbling and contrite fashion never again to burden
Dennis with his problems. At the time Dennis had been glad, and would never have believed that the day would come when he would miss the deep involvement he had had in his brother’s life; that he would even resent being spared Roderic’s woes.

He’d known something was up from around the time of the Paris trip at the end of last October. In the months leading up to it, Roderic had been cheerful and fairly relaxed, better than Dennis had seen him for a long time. He’d put it down to the Italian trip in June having been a success, even though Roderic admitted it had been far from easy. Still, he’d been happy during the summer, but then in September something definitely went wrong. Roderic became tense and despondent, right up until the time he went to France; yet on his return he was transformed. A mere holiday wasn’t enough to explain his elation. There was a woman at the back of it, there had to be.

‘Were you in Paris by yourself?’ The question came out one day over the Christmas holidays before Dennis could help it, but Roderic seemed grateful for the opening. ‘I was alone there, yes,’ he said, ‘but as a matter of fact I have been seeing someone over the past while. All very low key, you know, no heavy duty stuff. She’s a fine woman though, Julia, completely authentic. Solid. Yes, it’s good, Dennis, it’s going well.’

Solid. From this one adjective and from what he thought Roderic needed, Dennis tried in spite of himself to construct an image of this Julia. A mature woman, he thought, that was the first thing. She would be at least Roderic’s age, perhaps even older. A widow, or someone who was separated from her husband: in any case, someone who had been through her own dark marital experience, who had no illusions left, and for whom a part-time, take-it-or-leave-it, like-it-or-lump-it relationship was ideal. She wasn’t bitter. Kind hearted but tough, she lived alone in a big townhouse, where Roderic went to stay for a few days every couple of weeks.
All very
low key, you know.
She would cook him dinner, big feeds of chops and spuds, and the puddings and sweets he had become addicted to since he stopped drinking, and then she would take him up to her bed for companionable, unthreatening sex.
No heavy duty stuff.
No, he was glad for Roderic, he thought, really glad.

And then tonight Julia – the real Julia – had marched into the pub and sat down beside them. He had barely been able to conceal his shock and dismay. She was too young, he thought, far, far too young. Why, she could almost be his daughter. Did she know about Roderic’s past life? As Roderic had attempted to keep some semblance of conversation going, Dennis had stared appalled at this slim woman, with her wild hair, her wispy scarf and her easy manner. He thought back with some bitterness to the darkest, most wretched days that he and Roderic had been through together. Did she imagine for a moment she could have coped with all that? And as for the fond domestic images he had conjured up, it was laughable. She looked like she existed on a diet of tea, toast and cigarettes, this Julia. With uncanny prescience he imagined her kitchen: the sink clogged with teabags, the rancid butter, the cans of tuna and packets of orange lentils, the cartons of sour milk. He would be cooking for her, more like. What on earth, he thought, could this girl give to Roderic? In his head, clear as an auditory hallucination, he heard Roderic’s voice.
Intellectual companionship. Good
humour. Compassion. Complete sexual fulfilment. Need I continue?
Dennis had left the pub as soon as he decently could.

A shrill bell rang, announcing that the second half of the concert was about to begin. He drained his glass and returned to his seat.

The tall, redbrick house in a leafy road near Seapoint to which Dennis returned after the concert had been bought many years earlier, shortly after he started working in the bank. It had stretched his finances at the time but his
father had strongly advised him to do it, saying it would be a good investment, and had even helped out with a discreet but considerable loan. Property prices had of late risen to such a degree that it was now worth more than his father could ever have possibly imagined. It was a much bigger house than Dennis needed, and apart from the few years when Roderic had occupied the attic he had lived alone there. The house was warm when he went into it: he had the heating system on a timer. He paid a man to come and cut the grass, he paid a woman to come and do the housework. In the past few years, sometimes he felt as if the house was living a life of its own. He tapped in the code for the alarm and a deep silence fell, calling forth the same unusual loneliness that had cut into him in the concert hall. It was better that Roderic and he lived apart now: they both knew that, but that didn’t stop him from regretting it at times.

A smell of bleach and furniture polish reminded him that Mrs Hughes, his housekeeper, had been there today. When he went through to the kitchen there was further evidence of her labours in the form of seven crisp white shirts hanging from the backs of chairs and doors. Momentarily their still presence startled him, so strange did they look. It reminded him of a work of art he had seen at a group show in which Roderic had participated, where empty cotton dresses were suspended from the ceiling of a darkened room and lit eerily by lamps. Because he didn’t know anything about contemporary art he couldn’t understand why he had found it so disturbing, but Roderic said that was the whole point.

Dennis felt restless tonight. He went into the drawing room where his piano was, his fiftieth birthday present to himself, but couldn’t settle to play and so he went back to the kitchen. A cautious drinker, he reckoned that the Chardonnay and Guinness he had had earlier in the evening were enough for one day, so he eschewed the half bottle of Chianti that was sitting on the counter and opened the fridge for some
cranberry juice. The lit interior was full of chilled meals – lasagne, ratatouille, salmon in a lemon butter sauce – and bags of salad leaves, for Mrs Hughes also did his shopping for him. He stood at the sink as he poured and drank his juice; saw his own face reflected back in the black mirror that night made of his kitchen window.

Glass in hand, he wandered aimlessly through the house, looking at his paintings. Over the years, almost by default, he had amassed a considerable collection of his brother’s work. The earliest, a small, fluent watercolour of the house itself that Roderic had painted and framed as a housewarming gift when he was an art student, was, perhaps, Dennis’s favourite, although Roderic dismissed it as a trifle, and would even be faintly annoyed if its merits were too much insisted upon. The drawing room was dominated by a huge canvas, and that too had been a gift, given to him by his brother shortly after he left hospital. Roderic was an abstract painter. His mature style, which had evolved in the years after his return to Ireland and for which he had recently achieved much acclaim, consisted of stripes executed in pastel colours; his canvases likened memorably by one critic to ‘the pale flags of imaginary countries’. ‘lntelligent’, ‘haunting’ and ‘luminous’ were words frequently used to describe his work. Dennis thought the critics were at a loss to know what to say about paintings with no subject.

For the truth was, and Dennis would admit this to no one, didn’t even like to admit it to himself, he didn’t particularly like abstract art. Even though he had actually bought some of the paintings he owned, he had done so only out of kindness, only to help Roderic out of the occasional financial black hole. He wouldn’t have given them house room had they been painted by anyone else, and yet his attachment to them was considerable, although emotional rather than aesthetic. He couldn’t imagine now living without his paintings.

Even so, he hadn’t wanted the big painting in the drawing room, in truth he hadn’t Looking at it as he sipped his cranberry juice, at the bands of pink oils melding into cream, into soft blue, he remembered the day Roderic had summoned him to the studio, pointed at the canvas and said simply, ‘It’s for you.’ Dennis hoped that his immediate reaction – ‘God no, Roderic, I can’t, I can’t possibly accept such a gift’ – had sounded like consternation at his brother’s generosity rather than simple alarm. But he’d insisted; wouldn’t take no for an answer. ‘It’s for you, Dennis. I want you to have it. If you like, I’ll come to your house and help you hang it, advise you how to show it to best effect.’ It had taken the three years that had passed since then for Dennis to understand what Roderic had been doing in giving him the painting. It was, as he said at the time, a thank you gift for everything he had done for him down the years, ‘Not that anything could ever adequately repay you.’ But it was also, Dennis gradually realised, a farewell present. Roderic was withdrawing from him in a particular and final way, becoming distinctly separate from him for perhaps the first time in their adult lives. And although he had always thought that this would be a good thing, that it was something he actively wanted, now that it was actually happening he wasn’t quite so sure, no, not sure at all.

In all of this the actual painting was somehow incidental to Dennis: a symbol rather than a thing in itself. He didn’t understand what it meant until Roderic borrowed it back, together with a couple of his other canvases, for the retrospective of his work that had taken place a year ago. It had been a remarkable critical success and had definitively confirmed his reputation as a painter. Dennis was the only member of the Kennedy family to attend the opening of the exhibition and in this there was nothing new. His sisters had always shown scant interest in Roderic’s work. Watercolours framed and given to Cliona and Maeve for Christmas many years earlier had been coolly received and
never displayed. Dennis suspected they might even have destroyed them; and his sisters’ indifference annoyed him more than it troubled Roderic. That they didn’t understand the paintings, simply hadn’t a clue what their brother meant by his daubs and were amazed that anyone else saw merit in his work was, as far as Dennis was concerned, no excuse, because he didn’t understand the work either. ‘Forget about understanding,’ Roderic used to implore him. ‘There is nothing
to
understand. Just look at the damn thing and enjoy it.’ It was no reason not to be supportive. If Roderic believed in what he was doing, that was enough for Dennis. It was an act of faith, like believing in some particular religious teaching to do with, say, the fate of the dead and life to come, that ran in complete opposition to common sense and logic but which was irresistible. At least, Dennis found it so.