Authenticity (8 page)

‘Does he have any interest in art himself?’

‘None whatsoever. Can’t understand it at all.’

‘And doesn’t that bother you?’

‘No, why should it? If I’d studied to be a physicist and brought him into the lab to show him what I did, he wouldn’t understand that either. It’s just not his thing, you know? He has his own life, and he accepts that I have mine. He’s always trusted me to know what my own best interests are and left me to make the big decisions for myself.’

‘And do you always know best?’

‘No; but I take full responsibility for my own mistakes when they do arise. What about you? Have you a family; children?’

‘Yes. Two.’ He took his wallet from the inside of his jacket pocket, flipped it open and passed it to her. There was a picture of Liz and the children on the inside flap, behind a rectangle of clear plastic. Julia took it and moved closer to the lamp to study it. He had noticed already how closely she looked at things: the cover of the book, the postcard and now the photographs. It was far from the cursory glance that most people gave. ‘They look like they’re the same age,’ she said.

‘Are they twins?’

He nodded.

‘What are they called?’

‘Sophie and Gregory.’

‘Good Irish names,’ she teased, but he was stung by this.

‘What should we have called them?’ he said. ‘Brigid and Patrick?’

‘You could have,’ she said. ‘It would have been unusual in their circle, I imagine.’

He wouldn’t have expected this sly blow from her, but she was right. Liz had wanted to call the girl Kathleen after her own mother, the child to be known as Kitty, but William wouldn’t hear tell of it. So bog-Irish a name, he said, it just wasn’t possible. He wanted something more unusual and they eventually settled on Sophie; but it turned out that there were three others so called in her class at school.

‘Sophie’s a good name for a giri,’ she said. ‘Sophia. Holy Wisdom. The female aspect of the Holy Spirit.’ Julia could see
to look at him now that he hadn’t known this. ‘How old are they?’

‘Seven. That was taken a while ago, they’re bigger now.’

‘The boy looks a lot like you. And this is your wife?’

‘Yes. That’s Liz.’

‘Thank you for showing it to me.’ She handed the wallet back to him.

While she was looking at the photograph he realised that he wanted to tell her everything: that he too had wanted to be a painter, and how it was the failure of that – the realisation that his life was passing and he hadn’t done it – that had in essence brought him here tonight. It had all been so gradual, his capitulation. He had read law to please his father, telling himself that once he had finished he would do as he wished. Then his results when he graduated had been so excellent that he bowed to pressure to follow through, to become fully qualified. Then there had been Liz, and marriage, and then gradually the life he had imagined for himself got pushed aside and another life took over. He became tired. Everyone became tired. Necessity wore people down, until just to keep their heads above water was as much as they could manage. Then a few years ago he had realised that the life he thought of as his real life was all an illusion, all a thing in his head, and that he had built around himself an impregnable reality, which was not compatible with the fantasy.

‘Do you know why I came here?’ he asked.

Julia studied him for a moment. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I do. You came to bring the book back to me. And I’m very grateful.’ There was nothing in her face to reveal what she was really thinking. ‘I’ll call a taxi for you, if you wish,’ she said.

He didn’t want to go, but it was clear that she didn’t want him to stay. He wouldn’t have minded leaving if there had been some opening, if she had given some signal that he might see her again. But then, he thought, why should she? His actual life had nothing in common with hers, his
imagined life everything. All she could see was a man in a business suit, a man whose world was alien to her own.

She had found a number for a taxi company and was speaking softly into the phone, giving her address and phone number, asking for a car to Dalkey. Already he saw himself sitting in the back of the cab, moving through the city at night. She put the receiver down. ‘It’ll be here in five minutes.’

‘I was planning to kill myself the day I met you.’

‘Were you indeed?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then your children would have had no father. Did you think about that?’ As she spoke she took up her cigarettes and lit one. She didn’t offer them to him, but threw the packet and lighter back down on the table.

‘I didn’t, no.’ If he was looking for sympathy, he had come to the wrong place.

‘Sophie, Gregory,’ she said. ‘Maybe you should think about them. Maybe you should stop being selfish and think about other people for a change. From what I can gather, your life isn’t a bad one. You’ve lots of things other people haven’t got and won’t ever have.’

‘Such as?’

‘Do you really need a stranger to tell you? Your wife. Your children. You have a job, I suppose, and enough money to live on; you have a fine home.’

‘It’s a brick box. It amounts to nothing. I hate my life and I hate myself.’

The vehemence with which he said this startled her, and at that there was the sound of a car horn from the street below. ‘That’s your cab.’ He gathered up his affairs – she made sure that he had forgotten absolutely nothing – and she saw him down to the front door. There was a tremendous awkwardness to their parting. They both felt they had said the wrong things and now could not bring themselves to say anything more, not even goodbye. The cab driver gave
them a sly smile, as though their tense and clumsy reticence on the doorstep was for his benefit but didn’t fool him for a minute: he knew exactly what had been going on when a buttoned-up middle-aged businessman was leaving a young woman’s house at near midnight.

‘Dalkey, is it?’

‘Dalkey,’ William said. ‘Drive out along by the edge of the sea.’

‘Let me get this straight,’ Roderic said. ‘You’re going to go and see some woman you’ve never met before to tell her that you think her husband, whom you met on a park bench, is having some kind of nervous breakdown?’

‘I wouldn’t have put it like that, but in essence I suppose, yes, that is what it amounts to,’ Julia said.

‘And you’ll tell her as well that he came to see you at your home late at night?’

‘Of course not. That would only worry and upset her.’

‘I bet it would. Well, seeing as how you’ve told me all this, I can only presume you’re asking me for advice and here it is: leave well alone. Don’t get involved.’

They were sitting in the kitchen of Julia’s house, having breakfast, and she had just told him everything about William. Although Roderic didn’t say so, she suspected he wasn’t particularly pleased about her having invited William into her flat late at night. ‘If you tell her the whole story it’ll do more harm than good; if you tell her only part of it – about meeting him on the Green – you’ll get caught in all sorts of half truths and evasions. She’ll only become suspicious and then where will you be?’

‘I hoped you wouldn’t take this attitude,’ she said. ‘I only want to help.’

‘More trouble starts by people wanting to help than in any other way.’

In the days since William’s visit to her house, the thought of his unhappiness had troubled her greatly. The resolution to do something about it had crystallised the preceding afternoon, in a supermarket, of all places. Standing in the queue, she watched idly as the woman in front of her set
her shopping on the moving belt. Julia was aware how much she could extrapolate about the woman’s life simply by looking at her purchases: gin, dog biscuits, a cake in the shape of a football, a bag of carrots already washed and chopped. The man behind the till rang the items up quickly and the woman hurried to put them in bags. To look at her confirmed what Julia had surmised: mid thirties, sober suit and briefcase, wedding ring and a cluster of diamonds. This will never be me, Julia thought; and at that, she suddenly perceived the other woman’s life in all its strangeness and complexity, as though it were some remarkable, extravagant construct. A dream palace, absurdly ornate, all turrets and domes: that was what she was building. Julia saw her painstakingly painting her nails. She saw her paying a telephone bill; saw her collect her son from a football match. All of these actions, no matter how small or banal, contributed to maintaining the strange, elaborate artifice that would someday vanish, as though it had never been. And although the woman’s life was alien to Julia – in many ways she was out of sympathy with the values that underpinned it – there was no denying its immense pathos.

The man behind the till rang up the total, and the woman took out a tan leather purse. She flicked it open and revealed a neat row of credit and cheque cards on one side, one of which she pulled out and handed to the man. On the other side of the wallet was the inevitable window, with the inevitable photographs, this time of a man and two children. And in that moment, Julia knew what she had to do.

‘So you’re going to ring her up,’ Roderic said. ‘What will you say to her in the first instance?’

‘I’ll tell her I want to talk to her about her husband.’

‘She’ll love that. Married women love it when a woman they don’t know rings up to say that they want to talk to them about their husbands. I can just imagine how mine would have reacted.’

‘I’ll tell her I barely know him, that I’m almost a stranger.’

‘And she, not unnaturally, will want to know who you are.’

‘Roderic, you’re not making this any easier.’

‘I’m trying to make it as difficult as possible so that you’ll drop the notion.’

‘Well, my mind is made up. I’m going to do it.

‘All right then,’ he said, ‘do it. Do it now. Look her up in the phone book; ring her and arrange to meet.’

‘I will,’ she said. ‘I’ll do just that.’ She stood up and moved to the door.

‘Oh, and Julia?’ he called after her.

‘Yes?’

‘Good luck.’

The cat hopped up into the chair she had vacated and Roderic sat listening. Through the closed doors he could hear her voice in the sitting room, but not her exact words, and his heart went out to her. She was well intentioned; he hoped her kindness wouldn’t backfire. As she came back into the kitchen Roderic and the cat turned to look at her, as though both were anxious to hear how she had got on. The effect was comical, but Julia was in no mood to be amused.

‘What on earth,’ she said, ‘am I getting into here?’

Standing in the hall of her home in Dalkey beside the longcase clock, Liz thought the ground had opened in front of her. Her hand was shaking so that she could barely replace the receiver.
You don’t know me, but I need to talk to you. It’s
about your husband.
She had thought never to hear those words again. She went into the drawing-room and crossed to the window. The garden was in its own way as restrained as the room in which she stood: with its formal lines and cropped grass, it bore William’s stamp. Liz would have preferred it to be wilder, for she liked trailing, straggling plants, sweet pea or honeysuckle. But he would have none of it, had objected even to the laburnum tree, because it grew at an angle. He was more overbearing than he knew, she often thought; in the house too, he subtly insisted on certain
things: the sombre clock, the old dark furniture, the modern paintings she disliked. On the lawn a blackbird tugged at a tenacious worm. The idea that it could be the old problem back again was almost more than she could bear. She thought of all that had happened in recent weeks and tried to fit it like a template over her memory of that time.

When it started, all those years ago, she hadn’t been able to put her finger on it, couldn’t define even to herself what was happening. It wasn’t, at first, anything William was doing but rather something he was. He’d been in a dream: she’d gradually realised that he was living in some kind of haze, as though he were sleepwalking through his days. And then when she realised she’d been wrong – he
was
doing something, the doing and being were linked – she’d chosen not to waken him, she’d chosen to join him in the haze. She’d been like a small child that thinks it cannot be seen because it has its eyes closed. She knew in time that William wanted to be woken up, but she determined not to do it. He wanted to be challenged and caught: that was part of the cruelty.

And so William would come back late at night.

‘Where have you been until now?’

‘Where do you think?’ a question she didn’t deign to answer. In time when he arrived back at midnight she would say nothing.

‘Aren’t you going to ask where I’ve been?’

‘No.’

She suspected the woman worked with William, a suspicion confirmed on meeting Martin. The concerned way in which he’d taken her hand and held it, the way he said, ‘Ah Liz, how are you at all?’ told her everything she didn’t want to know. (‘Fine,’ she’d replied, ‘never better.’) If he knew then Elaine knew. She brought up his name deliberately next time they met (‘William’s always so thoughtful’) and the cold hostility of her reply (‘Is he? Is he, indeed?’) was final proof.

He’d become more audacious, had rung the woman from home.
Hannah? Is that you? Are you free to talk?
One night amongst the contents of his emptied pockets, left on a flat china dish he kept in the bedroom for that express purpose, she found a receipt from a restaurant, Quo Vadis. The name was a nice touch, she almost wished she could have remarked to him on the elegant irony of it. She scanned the listed dishes, despised herself for being able to know which were William’s choices: melon and ham, cannelloni. It became ridiculous, the nadir possibly being the morning when she got into the car, and there was a golden earring, in the shape of a crescent moon.

It was left then to the other woman, Hannah, to act, and she must have been pretty desperate by that point. What had gone on between her and William before she had taken the final step of ringing Liz and forcing things into the open?
You don’t know me but I need to talk to you. It’s about your
husband.

And given that Liz had known so much at that point, she’d been taken aback by her own surprised rage, for in spite of everything it really was as if, until that moment, she hadn’t known. Her sudden fury had shocked William too, who had at least the grace not to say ‘But I thought you knew.’ He arrived home from work that night to be attacked by Liz as soon as he opened the door. She tore at his hair, scratched his face, ‘You pig, you pig,’ and he’d tried to resist her without harming her, but then she was gone, out into the car, a scorching of tyres and over to Elaine and Martin’s house. More tears there: ‘I knew, I knew, I wanted to tell you but I didn’t want you to be hurt.’ But it was Elaine who in the long run had persuaded her to give her marriage another chance; and she took some persuading, again surprising herself at how reluctant she was to forgive William. She finally agreed to stay solely on condition that they would start a family, something he had long resisted. In time, Liz even felt sorry for the woman involved, who had
had the misfortune to get tangled up in William’s mysterious pain. It had been so clear that he was acting out something that troubled him deeply, but that he barely understood, and Liz pitied her for having thought that anything could ever come of it. But was the same thing now happening again? In all honesty, she thought not. His present distress seemed of a different order, although she couldn’t understand what was at the back of it.

Later that day, as Liz led Julia through the hall, past the longcase clock, the mirror and into the dining room, Julia though momentarily of her own flat, and how extraordinarily tatty it must have looked to someone who was used to all this. But she was too preoccupied with how the meeting was to go to take in more than a general sense of comfort and wealth, a dimness of rugs and silver.

‘Do please sit down.’

On the chair facing her now was a small pale woman, about whom there was something soft and hesitant: not at all what Julia had expected, for Liz had been quite sharp when they’d spoken on the phone.

‘You’re quite sure we won’t be disturbed?’

‘Certain. William’s out at the moment, he won’t be back until much later.’

‘Well, then, the first thing I had better say is that I hardly know your husband. To be honest, he’s all but a stranger to me. But I met him recently and he was in a bad way, so much so that I thought it best that those close to him be told about it. Just, you know, in case anything happened.’

She paused, not knowing quite what to say next.

‘Do please continue.’

And so, as circumspectly as she could, Julia described meeting William recently on Stephen’s Green. She said he had been upset, and she had kept him company for a little while; they’d smoked a cigarette together and then he’d gone home. She omitted to say that she’d gone with him.

‘Did he tell you anything about himself?’

‘A little.’

‘What did he say?’

‘Oh we talked a bit about our families, our lives,’ she said vaguely. ‘Nothing of any great consequence.’

Liz stared hard at her. ‘Was this Friday two weeks ago?’ She nodded, and then Liz asked her exactly the same question Julia had asked William: ‘How did you know where to find me?’

‘Your husband told me his name and mentioned where he lived. I looked it up in the phone book. He was very upset; please believe me, that’s why I came here today. Truly, he’s a stranger to me still.’

In all of this, Liz felt there was something that didn’t quite add up, but she didn’t know what it was. She certainly didn’t know what to make of this odd young woman.

‘Friday, two weeks ago?’ she said again.

‘Yes.’

‘And the following Thursday – late at night – can you shed any light on that? I think it was the last day of February.’ At that, the phone rang in the hall. ‘Excuse me, I’ll be as quick as I can.’

Julia was immensely relieved by the interruption, saving her as it did from lies and evasion, for Thursday was the night William had visited her. Left alone now, she had her first chance to look around at the room in which she was sitting. Everything in it, burnished and glowing, bespoke money. The walls were painted a dark red that set off the gilt of the picture frames, and there was a vase containing a kind of flower Julia had never seen before, each stem bearing a tiny pointed cone of white blossom. Traditional in its overall style, with many antiques, the few modern pieces in the room were carefully chosen and perfectly integrated. On the table beside Liz’s chair was a lamp made of sea urchins, next to it, a row of antique paperweights. They had the air of limpid, luminous creatures dredged up from the bottom of the ocean as the sea urchins, oddly, did not. There was a heavy scent of
tuberose: some kind of room perfume, Julia guessed. Although she liked individual elements – the fine rugs, the delicate tables – the overall effect was stifling and oppressive; and suddenly she felt as though the strange dream palace she had imagined recently as a figure for another woman’s life was a real place, and here she was in it.

She could still hear Liz talking in the hall. Turning her attention to the bookcase beside where she sat she found to her surprise that it contained a remarkably eclectic and interesting library of art books. There were catalogues, monographs, biographies and collections of criticism, covering all periods of art history but with a marked bias to the twentieth century and to contemporary work. So he hadn’t been simply trying to flatter when he said he was interested in art, she thought, as she lifted down a volume on Joseph Cornell and leafed through it. She was not a covetous person – there was nothing else in the room she wanted – but for a moment she did envy William his fine cache of books. Replacing the volume, she stood up to look now at the pictures, which reflected the interests suggested in the bookcase and complemented the traditional nature of the room more harmoniously than she might have expected. There was a large fine nude in red chalk and a small abstract triptych of considerable power. Over by the window was a landscape painted in an expressionistic style, giving an idea of greenness, of vegetation and the heat of a summer’s day rather than an accurate representation of trees and fields. It was slightly slapdash, but not at all bad. It wasn’t an artist whose work she knew, and the signature was just a squiggle. She turned to walk back to where she had been sitting, and was utterly astounded by what she saw. There was no mistaking it: hanging on the wall behind the chair on which she had been sitting was one of Roderic’s paintings.