Authenticity (6 page)

At the opening of the retrospective he stood with a glass of white wine in his hand watching Roderic from a distance as he moved through the room accepting kisses and praise, shaking hands with people, smiling and laughing, loathing every minute of it. Only Dennis knew this, Dennis who adored such occasions, with their odd mix of people – some wilder than Roderic, some squarer still than Dennis. He loved the glamour of it all. (‘Glamour!’ Roderic exclaimed. ‘Sweet Jesus, are you serious?’)

‘Hello, I don’t know you,’ said a voice at his elbow. The man who had addressed him was one of the most correctly dressed people in the room. Normally a shy man, Dennis was happy to chat to people tonight, his pride giving him courage. The man introduced himself. His name meant nothing to Dennis, but the man gave the impression that it ought to.

‘I’m Roderic’s brother.’

‘Are you indeed?’ They fell to talking of the works in the exhibition, to which people were generally paying scant attention. How moved Dennis was to see his own painting in
this context. The fact that it was being ignored served only, Dennis thought, to enhance qualities that he had never appreciated until today, most particularly its remarkable presence. The painting created its own well of calm in the hubbub of the room. If people were indifferent to it, well, it was indifferent to them. Its cool, magisterial stillness astounded him, and when he told the man it belonged to him, his response, ‘I hope you have it insured for plenty,’ struck him as tawdry. ‘Don’t you think,’ Dennis said, ‘that’s a rather vulgar line to take?’

His wanderings through the house tonight had brought him, still holding his glass of cranberry juice, to the attic. It was cold: he only put the heat on there occasionally now. This had been Roderic’s room at the period when he lived with Dennis. It was still ‘his’ room in a certain sense, for he still stored there many things for which there was room neither in his studio nor in the small rented house in the Liberties, where he now lived. Tea-chests with the names of Indian plantations stencilled on their sides; stacked canvases, old sketch books, a folding easel; there were even, Dennis knew, some clothes still hanging in the wardrobe, a cord jacket and a blue shirt. Over in the corner was a pair of boots: absurdly big, they looked. Roderic’s ‘stuff
’.
Every so often when visiting he would ask if he might go up to look for something, would come back downstairs twenty minutes later shamefaced. ‘I simply must do something about all that junk, truly I must. It’s ridiculous after so many years. Half of it could go straight into the bin, you know. As soon as I have a free afternoon I’ll come over and sort it out.’ But he never would, Dennis knew. If he ever did, he didn’t think he could stand it. Books everywhere: art books, poetry, thrillers. He picked up a volume on French Gothic and leafed through it, looking at the grainy black and white pictures of dizzyingly high cathedral naves and gently smiling angels; at the coloured plates of stained glass.

It was only when he was at the bottom of the stairs that he realised he had left his drink up there. It didn’t matter: he would fetch it later.

Going into the drawing room Dennis sat down at the piano. Carefully he opened the lid, paused for a few moments. And then he began to play.

He had been practising chromatic scales for twenty minutes when the door of the drawing room opened.

‘Do you have to, Dennis? Do you absolutely have to?’

‘Of course I do, Mum. There are only two weeks left until the exam.’

‘How much longer will you be?’

‘I thought I’d keep going until lunch time.’

‘It’ll be a good hour before the meat’s ready.’

‘I know,’ he said. His mother gave him a pained, long-suffering look. She withdrew from the room and Dennis resumed his scales.

Almost everything about his home and family irritated him these days, not least the drawing room in which he was practising, with its botanical prints of daffodils and narcissi, its red velvet curtains and slightly dank smell. The room was separated from his father’s surgery by a thin wall and they each habitually complained about the noise the other made. He could hear now the sound of his father’s deep voice but not what he was saying, and then there was an explosion of laughter. Frank Kennedy was something of a legend amongst GPs in south Dublin. A complex and compassionate man with a volatile streak, he aroused strong feelings in his patients. Many loved him and were fiercely loyal; others found him simply terrifying. His rough charm and large personality were complemented by his physique, for he was a handsome, imposing man, well proportioned and exceptionally tall. Once, a patient had actually fled when Frank’s back was turned. Dennis had happened to be standing at the window of the drawing-room at the time and had seen the man stagger away at speed down the garden path with his
left sleeve still rolled up above his elbow. The sight of all six foot four of Frank bearing down on him with a hypodermic needle had obviously been more than he could endure. The miracle, Dennis thought, as he bent down to take a music book from the leather case at his feet and leafed through it for the piece he required, was that it had happened only once. Through the wall he could hear a woman’s voice, and then more loud laughter. He flexed his fingers and prepared to play.

He was six bars into the Field nocturne when the door opened again. He swore as he stopped playing and turned around in annoyance. A big gentle child with thick dark hair was peering round the door, and when Dennis saw who it was his face softened.

‘Oh hello, Roderic.’

‘Sorry to disturb you. I just wanted to ask do you know where my football is? I’ve looked everywhere.’

‘I haven’t seen it. You can borrow mine if you want, until such time as you find your own. It’s in my room, in the usual place.’

‘Thanks, Dennis. That was a nice piece of music you were playing on the piano when I came in,’ and he approached where his elder brother was sitting.

‘Did you like it? Do you want to stay while I play the whole thing through?’

‘I can’t. I promised I’d set the table for lunch.’

‘Didn’t you set it just the other day? Isn’t it Maeve’s turn?’

‘Dunno. I thought it was too but she says it isn’t.’

The piano was old and quaint, with an inlaid design of flowers worked in marquetry, and on either side candelabra on brackets that could be folded out. Roderic now reached out and did just that. Had his mother or sisters interrupted him and fidgeted with the piano in this way, Dennis would have complained bitterly, but because it was Roderic, he didn’t mind. The brothers unconsciously evoked the Renoir print that hung near by of two sisters: the fair-haired one
seated at the piano, the dark sibling leaning attentively against it.

‘You could put candles in these, blue candles,’ Roderic said, ‘and then put out all the lights and play. That would be magic. It’s a nice piano.’

‘No it’s not, it’s a lousy piano,’ Dennis replied. ‘I wish Daddy would buy me a new one.’

Roderic ran his finger across the painted gold words in Gothic script just above the keyboard. ‘Leipzig,’ he said.

‘What does that mean?’

‘It’s a city in Germany, where the piano was made. Bach lived there. I’m going to visit it’

‘Are you? Does Mum know? When are you going?’

‘Oh, some day. Not for years yet. When I’m my own man.’

Even to Roderic, Dennis didn’t want to talk about all Bach meant to him; all that Leipzig stood for. Against the dreary round of his own life as a suburban schoolboy, he carried with him always a perfected image of the German city. It was as if his heart was a camera obscura, the tilted mirrors of which could capture the past, offering up to him the image of a specific morning more than two centuries ago. The narrow streets and tall houses with their red tiled roofs, grey spires against the pristine blue of an icy winter sky; Kantor Bach, anonymous and unremarked as he makes his way through the city to the Nikolaikirche, and over it all the music, the music, sacred in every way. No, he didn’t want to share this, not even with Roderic. Not that he would have understood: he was too small, a mere ten to Dennis’s more grown-up fifteen. In years to come this difference would mean less, but for now it was crucial.

Dennis could remember his younger brother from before Roderic’s birth. Their mother, Sinéad, in an enlightened fashion for the time, told Cliona and Dennis well in advance that they were going to have a new brother or sister to play with. ‘A brother,’ Dennis said at once. ‘Maybe not. A
girl would be nice,’ said his mother, frankly partisan. ‘Don’t you think so, Cliona?’ But it would be a boy; it
was
a boy. Dennis just knew. She let them put their hands each in turn on her belly, so that they could feel their new sibling within. Dennis was five, and he remembered it as well as if it had happened yesterday. The excitement to think of his brother in there! He imagined a small boy sitting cross-legged inside their mother, with a full complement of conkers and marbles, reading a comic until such time as he could join them.

He was therefore not in the least surprised when Frank turned up to collect him after school one day and announced somewhat lugubriously that they had a new brother. The surprise – the shock, even – came when he was taken up to the Coombe to meet the new arrival. His mother was sitting propped up in bed, a study in pink: pink night dress, pink quilted bed jacket, pink even the carnations on her bedside locker and the shawl in which the baby was wrapped. The baby! He’d been promised a brother: no one had said anything about a baby. And here now was this helpless thing, no bigger than one of Cliona’s dolls, and seemingly more fragile, certainly more self-willed, yowling and yowling in his mother’s arms. But at least it was a boy.

‘Would you like to hold him?’ Sinéad asked. ‘Be careful, now. Will you look after him always?’

Dennis took the bundle in his arms. Unlike a doll it was pliant, warm, and its cries abated. He gazed down at his brother, whose dark unfocused eyes met his, then they closed, and he slept.

‘Yes,’ said Dennis. ‘I will. I’ll look after him.’

‘I suppose I’d better go and set the table,’ Roderic said.

‘Thanks for the football. I’ll put it back when I’ve finished with it’

Saturday lunch was sacrosanct in the Kennedy household. No excuses were accepted for absence from the table although afterwards they could, and did, flee to their own
friends and amusements. Roderic returned to his football, his crayons, his endless strings of chums; the girls went shopping with their mother. In summer and on fine winter days Frank went hill walking in Wicklow. When the weather was bad, he tussled with Dennis over occupancy of the drawing room, usually getting the upper hand and closing himself away there to listen to opera music at full volume. Saturday was the one day in the week when they ate in formal splendour. Their father turfed out his last patient of the day at half past twelve, and at one on the dot would sweep into the dining room, bringing with him a faint smell of antiseptic and a latent sense of threat. It was already clear to see that his younger son would inherit his height and his dark good looks. Dennis and Cliona were fair and fine-boned, like their mother. Her beauty faded but not completely gone, Sinéad carried through life the weary air of someone attending a disappointing party, where she was not the shining triumph she had expected to be.

‘Grand looking bit of lamb, that, Sinéad.’

‘Thank you, dear.’

The menu was always planned around a large piece of meat, a pork roast or a joint of beef, with gravy or a sauce to complement it. There would be potatoes, roast and mashed; two kinds of vegetable, one of which was always cauliflower. That it was a difficult vegetable to get right and that she did not have the necessary knack did not seem to put Sinéad off preparing it. There was a family myth that she was a marvellous cook. In response to praise she would modestly say, ‘I’m just a good plain cook,’ but it wasn’t true, she wasn’t even that. She was a very average cook indeed: no proud boast. Her broccoli was invariably overcooked, and her cauliflower, her sprouts waterlogged. There was always a pudding: apple sponge or plum crumble with cream or custard in winter, in summer a trifle or ice cream. The unchanging nature of this meal, its details and attendant rituals, had recently begun to annoy Dennis.

‘Can’t Mum carve?’ he asked today, as his father sliced the leg of lamb. ‘She cooked it, so why can’t she carve it?’

‘Don’t give me any lip when I’ve got this thing in my hand,’ his father said, waving a huge carving knife in his direction. ‘Pass me up those plates. Where’s the mint sauce? Maeve, go and fetch it, will you?’

‘You go, Roderic, you’re nearer,’ she said. Roderic obediently slipped off his chair and went into the kitchen.

He had done a thorough job of setting the table. A dextrous child, he had taught himself how to fold napkins in three different ways by following the diagrams in a book of Sinéad’s about home entertaining and on each of their plates today was a perfect water lily. The white tablecloth embroidered with a sprinkling of violets had been worked by their mother before she was married. Unfortunately, there was a wine stain on it, in a place where it could not be concealed by a judiciously placed pot-stand or table-mat. The cloth was too good for everyday use, but because of the stain, which repeated soakings and launderings had failed to eradicate, it was not considered fitting for company and so it graced their private family table.

‘This looks delicious, Mum,’ Cliona said.

‘Thank you, dear. I hope you all enjoy it.’

Every single week Cliona said exactly the same thing, and their mother responded with the same words. It irritated Dennis beyond belief, he found himself clutching at the table. It was like waiting for the other shoe to fall. ‘We need a new piano, Daddy,’ he said as they started to eat.

‘What’s wrong with the one we have?’

‘It’s crap. It’s out of tune and two of the keys stick.’

‘Don’t use language like that at the table, Dennis, I’m tired telling you,’ his mother interjected.

‘Well, you’ll just have to make do with it, we can’t afford a new one. I’m not made of bloody money. I’ve told you before not to practise when I’m in the surgery. It upsets the patients, makes them nervous. You spend far too much time
hammering on that damn thing anyway. Find a girl, be more your line.’ Cliona and Maeve looked at each other and sniggered. To his horror, Dennis felt his face go red. He was livid with his father, but couldn’t think of a quick, smart response.

‘I have a crow to pluck with you, Roderic.’ He stared at his mother, appalled. He had never heard this figure of speech before and thought she was literally going to produce a dead bird and make him pull its feathers out; but instead she narrowed her eyes and said, ‘Doilies. Does that mean anything to you?’

He blushed, bit his lip and looked down at his dinner.

‘Sorry. I meant to replace them, but I forgot.’

‘You’ll do it this afternoon and you’ll buy me two packets, what’s more.’

‘What the hell were you doing with doilies?’ Frank demanded of his younger son. ‘Giving a coffee morning, were you?’

‘You can … you can do a drawing on the white bit in the middle,’ he whispered, ‘and then the picture’s got a nice lacy frame.’ This amused his father, who gave a bark of laughter. He became more relaxed and expansive as the meal went on, relishing the prospect of a day and a half’s freedom from the surgery. ‘Looks like rain,’ he said briskly. ‘Still, forecast’s good for tomorrow. I’m going to try to make an early start for the mountains in the morning, be away by eight if I can manage it. I’ll make a few ham sandwiches for myself tonight. When you’re out this afternoon, you conldn’t think to get me a couple of bars of chocolate to take with me?’

‘You haven’t forgotten, have you.’ Sinéad said – she knew perfectly well that he had – ‘that we’re having the Bourkes tomorrow?’

Frank’s cutlery clattered into his plate. ‘Ah, sweet Jesus Christ no, not the bloody Burkes.’

‘Language, Frank. This has been arranged for weeks. Don’t you remember we went to their house, just after Easter?’

‘So what if we did? Does that mean they have to come round here and break our hearts? If it were an Olympic sport, Eammon Bourke could bore for Ireland.’

‘Evelyn Bourke is my friend.’

‘Bully for you. See Evelyn Bourke then, have her round to dinner, go shopping, go to her place, do whatever you fancy, but why in Christ’s name do you have to drag me into it?’

‘It’s nice, don’t you think, that we socialise as a family from time to time? Anyway,’ she said, ‘it’s not a sit down dinner; I’m preparing a finger buffet. Pinwheel sandwiches and baby quiches, that kind of thing, you know.’ At the words ‘finger buffet’ Frank slumped back in his chair, his face ashen.

Suddenly something crossed Dennis’s mind. ‘What do you mean, “socialise as a family”? You’re not expecting me to be there? And they’re not bringing Mick with them, are they?’

‘He’s invited, of course,’ their mother replied, ‘and Evelyn didn’t say that he wouldn’t be along.’

‘That means he will. Mick Bourke is a pain in the arse,’ Dennis said.

‘He must take after his father then,’ Frank said, before his wife could complain about her son’s language.

‘Well, this is very nice I must say,’ she exclaimed bitterly.

‘This is all the gratitude I get for the effort I make, for slaving after you all.’