Authenticity

by Deirdre Madden

  ‘It’s very late.’

  ‘I’ve brought you something,’ he said, fumbling open his briefcase. She looked like she wanted nothing from him, until he pulled out the book she had been reading in the pub some nights earlier and handed it to her.

  ‘Oh great! I thought I’d lost this for ever.’ It changed the atmosphere totally. They both laughed and smiled. ‘It’s very kind.’ At that moment, a few drops of rain started to fall. ‘Why don’t you … come up for a moment if you wish.’

  The hall contained nothing but a narrow flight of stairs. At the top he stepped into a living room, lit low. On a small table before the fire was a teapot, two mugs and a plate containing the ruins of a chocolate cake, its red box and yellow ribbon abandoned on the floor beside it. An overflowing ashtray completed the scene of casual domesticity, and now he understood that someone had been with her until moments earlier. When he rang the bell she thought that person had forgotten something and come back. Understandably, it must have been a shock to see William. ‘Please sit down,’ she said, pointing to a chair. He preferred the look of the sofa, so he settled there instead. She flung some pieces of turf on the fire, then went out and he heard the sound of a kettle being filled, the whoosh of a gas burner. There was a large orange cat sitting in front of the fire, that had woken up when they came into the room. It stared balefully into the flames that the fresh turf sent up. William called to it self-consciously, ‘Puss, puss, puss,’ and the cat turned to him with a look of stony contempt, blinked its eyes and looked away again.

  ‘Max suits himself.’ She was back in the room now. ‘He’s a bit aloof until you get to know him.’ She picked up a packet of cigarettes from the table and offered them to him. ‘I have my own, thanks.’ He took out his silver lighter too, but she had already picked up a lighter of her own, a cheap green plastic one, similar to the one which had failed her when they met. They made no reference to it, but for the first time since they came up to the flat, she gave a faint smile. ‘I’m delighted to have this,’ she said, picking up the book. ‘I went back the next day to the pub where I left it, but they didn’t know anything about it, so I thought it had gone the way of all good things. It’s not an easy book to get hold of.’

  ‘It looks interesting,’ he said.

  She looked at him shrewdly, not believing him, wondering why he was trying to curry favour in this way.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It is.’

  He was genuinely interested in the book – a collection of essays on aesthetics, with a picture of a Chinese vase on the cover – but the strange circumstances by which he had come upon it gave it a particular significance. The blue spine was whitened with use, and while nothing in it was underlined, the corners of two pages had been folded down. He had carried it around with him in the days since he had noticed it in the pub, on the couch where she had been sitting. He had taken it out at home and at work in moments when he knew he would not be interrupted. It was like a thing from another world, and he had felt uneasy with the hold it had over him. He liked that it had been used, there was an intimacy about it. It had been like having one of her shoes, he thought, and looking at the scuffed toes, the worn heel; or a wispy scarf, similar to the one she had been wearing in the pub that night.

  ‘The thing is,’ she said, ‘it’s not my book. I had borrowed it from a friend. He’ll be glad to have it back. I told him I’d lost it, and he was very good about it’ He felt cheated now; felt foolish, thinking of the times he had spent turning the book over in his hands, slightly furtively. It had lost all its allure, now that he knew she didn’t own it.

  Suddenly she looked up. ‘How did you know where to find me, anyway? How did you know I lived here?’

  ‘There’s a card,’ he said. ‘In the book, it’s … I suppose you were using it as a bookmark.’ She picked the volume up again and leafed through it, found no card. He opened his briefcase and pretended to look in it, took the card out and gave it to her. She studied it briefly: looked at the picture, turned it over and glanced at the written side, looked across the room at him. He had been trying to hold on to the card and she knew it. He had studied it with even more fetishistic attention than the book.

  The picture on the postcard was of a fifteenth-century painting, showing a woman with a demure pale face, wedged into a cleft mountain of crystal. She wore a dress with a belt that pulled the waist in tightly, and a clean white collar. On her head was a type of wimple. A clear stream ran from the crystal mountain, and before her were two lions with faces like angry teddy bears, bearing shields of burnished gold. In the landscape behind the mountain was a small walled city, all turrets and pointed red roofs. The whole scene, which the woman dominated from her lofty situation, was painted in soft tones of olive and ochre. ‘Hans Memling. Allégorie de la Pureté,’ was printed on the back, and there was a colourful French stamp. The right-hand side gave Julia’s name and the address of the house in Francis Street. William knew the message off by heart by now:

  30th October

  Dearest Julia,

  It’s raining here and Paris is grey, but grey like a pearl, all the hipped roofs slicked with rain, the river and the sky full of soft light. The galleries full of marvels: we’ll come here together someday, that’s a promise.

  Miss you. XXXX

  P.S. I know exactly what you’ll think of Madame in her crystal!

  William, however, had no idea at all of what Julia would think of the woman, and dearly wanted to know. He couldn’t, however, think of how to ask her without drawing attention to the fact that he had read her card, even though she knew he had. But the message was too private to make any comment that wouldn’t be rude or intrusive. He hoped she might remark upon it herself, for she didn’t replace the card in the book, but propped it up against a bottle on the fireplace, and stood for a moment looking at the picture. With a hysterical whistle, the kettle in the kitchen came to the boil. ‘Coffee or tea?’ she asked.

  While she was out in the kitchen, William had his first opportunity to look around with frank curiosity at the place in which he was sitting. It was a dim room, softly lit. Not since he was a student had he been in a room like this, perhaps not even then. It half appealed to him and half alarmed him: it was a shock to think people lived like this, for Julia wasn’t a student, he would have guessed. He had been married and had bought the house he was living in now before he was thirty, and although they had done a considerable amount to it since then, and bought many pieces of furniture, even at the beginning it had been infinitely more prosperous than this set-up. The sofa, for example, on which he was sitting was covered with a woollen blanket in heathery colours of purple and green, but it slipped away slightly at the arm to reveal that the original upholstery was torn and stained. Looking around, he could see that much else was like this, improvised and shabby: cloths not quite covering boxes that served as tables, a bookshelf constructed from planks and bricks, flowers in a cut-down plastic water bottle that served as a vase. Strangest of all, at the far end of the room were a few good pieces of antique furniture, including a hunting table and a wooden trunk: overstock from the shop downstairs, he correctly guessed. And yet for all this, William couldn’t remember when he had last been in a room that appealed to him so much. It was warm, not just because of the fire in the hearth, but because of the soft lighting and the general relaxed air. The sofa was comfortable. You could have burned a hole in the rug with a cigarette or knocked over a glass of red wine and it wouldn’t have been the calamity it would have been in his own house, for it was evidently something that had already happened here. He envied the cat, slumped now in front of the fire, and the cat knew it. Max looked at him smugly, stretched, gave a quick and dramatic yawn, showing a ferocious collection of teeth, and then slept again. He envied the cat who was in for the night. It was raining hard now and a wind had picked up. William would take a cab home; would ask the driver, as always, to take him out along by the sea. He thought of the rain, the roads falling away: it depressed h
im to consider the journey ahead.

  Julia came back into the room with a teapot and mugs, as unceremonious with him as she had evidently been with her last visitor. ‘You can have some of that if you want,’ she said, pointing to the cake on the table. ‘Or I think I might have biscuits.’ She went back into the kitchen and returned holding a packet of shortbread and a carton of milk. ‘I’m a bit low on milk, but I think there’ll be enough. Max would drink me out of house and home. Good thing cats don’t eat biscuits or there’d be no hope.’ The cat opened its eyes, and Julia laughed. ‘You know I’m talking about you, don’t you, you divil?’ she said, bending down and tickling it under the chin.

  ‘Do you like cats?’

  ‘Not particularly,’ William said. He actually loathed them.

  She poured two mugs of tea and as she leaned over to hand one to him she was closer to him physically than she had been since the first moment they met, when he lit her cigarette. Oddly, this proximity made her seem more separate and distant, bringing home the fact that she was, indeed, a stranger to him.

  ‘Thank you, Julia,’ he said as he took the mug. It was the first time he had addressed her using her name. ‘I’m William, by the way, William Armstrong.’ They were both conscious of how odd it was that they should have got to this point without having exchanged names.

  ‘Help yourself to whatever you want,’ she said, indicating the sugar and milk, the cake and the shortbread. This lack of finesse was, like the cluttered, shabby comfort of her home, a novelty to him.

  ‘I like your flat.’

  ‘Yes, it’s magnificent, isn’t it? It’s to be the main feature of House Beautiful magazine next month. Be sure not to miss it’

  ‘Really?’ It was out before he realised she was joking.

  ‘It’s a simple place, I know, and small, but it suits me. This part of town has become much more chic since I moved in, but then where hasn’t in Dublin? I keep thinking Hester’s suddenly going to triple the rent and sling me out.’

  ‘Hester?’

  ‘The woman who owns the shop downstairs. I work for her part time.’

  ‘What do you have here?’

  ‘Well, this room, and the room directly above, which I use as a studio.’

  ‘Studio?’

  ‘I’m an artist.’

  ‘Really? Why, you should have said!’ He was genuinely astonished and pleased to hear this, but she looked suspicious at his enthusiasm. ‘I love art.’

  ‘Do you?’ She thought he was trying to flatter her, as she had when he said he thought the book looked interesting.

  ‘Could we go up and see your work?’

  He knew he was being pushy, knew that she would refuse, but he hoped she would give him some kind of opening, that she might even say, ‘Maybe the next time.’ Instead she said nothing at all, just sat stroking the cat’s head. Her silences were eloquent and tactful; she knew how to say a great deal by saying nothing.

  ‘There’s a little bathroom beside the studio,’ she went on a moment later, as if he hadn’t spoken, ‘and that’s directly above the kitchen, which is equally small. And that’s the lot.’

  She hadn’t mentioned a bedroom. Maybe in the circumstances, the peculiar intimacy of sitting drinking tea with this stranger late at night, she didn’t want to mention it, and William himself was too embarrassed to ask.

  ‘I know what you’re thinking,’ she said, ‘and the answer is, no, there’s no bedroom.’

  He could scarcely believe this.

  ‘So where do you sleep, then?’

  ‘You’re sitting on the bed.’ Then she laughed. ‘I wish you could see your face,’ she said. ‘It’s a study’

  William laughed along with her, with some effort.

  ‘You sleep on the sofa? Really?’

  ‘It folds out,’ she said.

  She really didn’t have a bedroom: didn’t even have a bed. He scarcely knew what to say to this. ‘Where do you keep your bedding?’

  She pointed to a big dark wardrobe at the back of the room.

  ‘In there. It’s not as bad as you might think. It’s a bit of a nuisance some nights when you come in late and you’re exhausted and you have to set the whole thing up, move the table and everything, but you get used to it. And it’s nice to fall asleep in front of the fire.’

  ‘What do your family think of what you do?’

  It struck her as an odd question, but she answered it anyway. ‘I only have my father and he doesn’t mind. He’s quite indulgent towards me. That’s him there.’ She nodded towards a black and white photograph on the mantelpiece, and he noticed that even as she pointed to it her face relaxed. The photograph showed a small, jolly looking man in a dark coat, with a hat pushed back on his head at a rakish angle. A cigarette dangled from his lip and he was tugging on a piece of string, his cheerful glance skywards implying a kite on the other end of it. She smiled over as though acknowledging the presence of an actual person rather than a photograph.

  ‘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.’