Authenticity

by Deirdre Madden

  The response was out before Dennis had even thought about it.

  ‘Well, you could always come and live with me.’

  Chapter Ten

  There was no sign of life from the little house. No smoke from the chimney, the blue door shut, and all the curtains drawn as though it were a house of mourning, which, coincidentally, it was. This aspect of the windows gave the façade a blank, shut look; but for all that it looked perfected in the preternaturally sharp light of morning, pristine, rinsed. Henry stood for some moments staring at it, and wondering what he should do. He could simply put the letters through the door and continue on his round. Lifting the black painted metal flap he slipped in a phone bill and a white envelope, heard them fall on to the floor within. He listened in expectation for the sound of footsteps as someone came to pick up the letters, but there was only silence now. All around the house there were hedges of wild fuchsia, vivid, dripping red blossoms after the night’s rain. There was no wind. The orchard was utterly still, the twisted trees, to Henry’s eyes, weird and strange, pregnant with small fruit. Birdsong.

  He lifted the black knocker, let it fall once, waited, listened and was about to knock once more when suddenly the door opened. Standing in the hall beside the two envelopes, one buff, one white, was a frowsy child. She was five, maybe six, wild-haired and sleepy-eyed; shoeless but otherwise fully dressed.

  ‘Morning, Princess. Are you long up? You don’t look it’

  ‘Hello, Henry.’

  ‘Is your da in?’

  Yawning, the child nodded, held the door open wide for him, and he followed her through to the kitchen. The curtains here were also closed, but as his eyes became accustomed to the half light, Henry could see that there was a man sleeping on the sofa. He was covered with a quilted eiderdown, part of which, at his side, was bunched to form a kind of nest, a hollow, like the warm empty depression a small sleeping animal might have left pressed into long grass by the side of the road. There was a sinkful of unwashed dishes, and an unwrapped loaf on the bare board of the kitchen table. A bag of sugar sat sodden and split in a puddle of spilt tea. Before the sleeping man was an overflowing ashtray, a glass and an empty whiskey bottle. Henry stood in silence looking at these things, reading their meaning as fluently and profoundly as a scholar might have read the symbolism in a vanitas painting. He moved to speak, but the child theatrically held an index finger against her shut lips, and indicated the sleeping man. Henry hunkered down in front of her.

  ‘Look at that for a face,’ he whispered. ‘You’d scare a goat off its tether. Away upstairs and give yourself a wash.’ Without another word and with seeming obedience she trotted out of the kitchen, but took care not to close the door properly behind her. Half-way up the stairs she stopped and sat down to listen.

  There was the brisk, whishing sound of curtain rings against a curtain rail, then a low groan. ‘Dan? Dan? It’s me, Henry.’ Whish: the second set of curtains. ‘C’mon now, wakey wakey. Shake a leg.’ Another groan, a request to know what time it was, and then, noticing that the child was missing, an urgent, almost panicked demand to know where she was, and Henry’s voice, calm, reassuring, saying that she had gone upstairs. The sound of the tap, of water running, of the kettle being filled and set on the hob. ‘Are you out of smokes? Here, catch.’ The sound of a match being dragged across the rough side of the matchbox, the small explosion of it igniting, then, momentarily, silence.

  ‘Right now, Dan, listen to me. This isn’t going to do. Look at the state of the place.’

  ‘I’m doing my best’

  ‘Aye, well, that’s as may be, but you’re still going to have to do better.’

  A pause, then her father’s voice. ‘It’s only six months,’ and Henry’s response, surprisingly brutal:

  ‘How long do you want? How long is it going to take?’

  ‘I’ll never get over it.’

  ‘Aye, well,’ Henry said again, ‘that’s the point, you’re going to have to.’ A pause, and then: ‘The thing is this: if you don’t get yourself sorted out, you might lose her in the long run, the child. They might take her off you.’ Vehement protests at this, anger mixed with fear, into which Henry cut dismissively almost at once. ‘Oh you can say that, Dan, you can say that. Talk’s cheap. Say it wasn’t me showed up at your door this morning, your old friend Henry. Say it was a social worker. What then?’

  ‘It’s not that bad.’

  ‘Child sleeping fully dressed all night on a sofa with you – with you, mind – empty whiskey bottle on the floor. Not that bad – social worker sees worse every day in the week, but it doesn’t look too good either, does it? And my point is this: what’ll it be like in another six months? A year? Six years?’ He spoke quietly now. ‘The teachers are noticing, Dan. Everybody’s noticing. My Felim’s in Julia’s class. Said she came in the other day in two odd socks and her jumper on back to front, the label sticking up to her chin. Two days later, she fell asleep at her desk: sound asleep. They had to put her in the bookstore with a rug over her for the rest of the afternoon, and she only woke up when it was time to go home. Now if you was Lord Muck and had a pot of money you might just get away with it; they’d give you the benefit of the doubt. But you, you, working man, on your own, bringing up a child: if you can’t manage it, don’t expect sympathy, ‘cos you won’t get any. They’ll take Julia away from you, and do you know what you’ll be able to do to stop them? Sweet fuck all. Have you got that, Dan? Have you got that?’

  Dan mended his ways. He got his drinking under control and instigated a stricter regimen in the house under which Julia, a traditionalist and arch-conservative like all children, flourished and thrived. In his grief he had been indulgent to her, and she hadn’t liked it; had been cool about the dolls and bears and chocolates with which he showered her, as a cheated wife takes no pleasure in the flowers and jewellery her husband buys to placate his own guilt. She was six. He fixed regular bed-times and meal-times, established a routine, but left latitude within the order, so that when he went once to buy a sliced loaf in the local shop and saw a mango, he bought that too, because he had never seen one before. When a family of hedgehogs wandered up to the house late on a pale summer night, he woke her out of a sound sleep to come and see them, to give them milk.

  For all that, he never became a paragon of domestic management. The local women who found occasion to drop in noticed his slightly slapdash housekeeping. Dan noticed them notice, and Julia in turn took all of this in, closed her heart against women, for whom her father would never quite come up to the mark.

  When school ended for the day, she would walk the short distance to the garage where her father worked as a motor mechanic, to wait there until such time as his day was also over and they could go home together. Usually she sat in the stuffy glass box that was the office, where Edward, warmed by a gas fire, presided over a high clacking typewriter and a black Bakelite phone. She read a book or a comic, did her homework, or drew pictures with the paper and pens with which Edward furnished her. When bored with this, she would go out and dawdle around the garage, watching the men as they worked. What she liked best was to see things being welded. The radiant white light dripped and blazed; threw high, flickering shadows up to the vaulted roof of the garage, making of the place a sudden temple. The man with the welding torch, in his curious long metal mask, was the high priest of some archaic rite, the fitters his acolytes. And amongst all this Julia wandered, little vestal, isolated from her own sex but conscious already that from her loss came a certain power over men, from whom she expected nothing but kindness.

  ‘See you tomorrow, Dan. Bye, Julia.’

  ‘Cheerio, lads.’

  Dan’s fear that she might be taken from him atrophied, but in its place grew a more potent terror: that he might be taken from her. This was not an irrational thought, which made it all the worse. Last spring he had sat at the kitchen window and watched Julia and her mother together in the orchard, wading through the thick cow parsley beneath a can
opy of apple blossom. Now he sat and watched Julia alone. What if something was to happen to him? What then? How would she cope? He fretted silently about this, and could not bring himself to talk about it with anyone, not even with Henry or Edward, his closest friends. She was a good child, mature and companionable, not weepy or clingy, and he could only pray that she would stay that way. He would teach her, he resolved, to be capable. He would teach her to cycle and to swim. He would show her how to run a bank account and to make tax returns. As soon as she was old enough he would buy her a tool box, spanners, her own drill. They would do simple car mechanics, move on to basic plumbing. She would learn to drive. He would ensure she had a good education. In his heart Dan knew that, useful as these skills would be, they were not enough to protect her from what it was that he feared for her, as his own competence had not saved him.

  The night before it happened, he had gone outside to look at the stars. He often did this. ‘Don’t get lost in space,’ she’d called after him, teasing. How delicate the sky looked, how fragile its beauty! Far, far above the trees of the orchard, he picked out the constellations he knew: Orion’s Belt, the Plough, Cassiopeia. Standing there at the gable of the house, he knew who he was and where he was and what he was. He was fixed and rooted in his place in time: Dan Fitzpatrick, living out his years with his wife and daughter in Ireland, in Wicklow, as the twentieth century ended. The ancient sky was charged for him with the memory of the countless men and women who had also looked at the stars down the years, down the centuries. Now they were so completely forgotten that to think of them, as he did, was not true remembrance but an act of imagination. That this would be his fate too did not disturb him, but consoled him rather. He felt close to these men who worshipped strange gods, to these women who spoke dead languages.

  But after what happened to her, everything changed. He couldn’t bear to look at the night sky. It became to him a thing of horror. Looking at the stars, he felt atomised and helpless, adrift in time itself. There was only him, only Julia, they were two specks of dust in the immensity of the universe. Her teasing warning had come true: he was lost in space. No longer could he feel the silent presence of the ancient people; and the loneliness was overwhelming. Stunned, winded, he beat a retreat.

  Dan spoke of this to no one. He knew that others would assess his grief against another measure, but that until he could look again at the night sky, he would not know peace. It seemed to him impossible that the pain would ever diminish. It did happen, but not until many years later.

  By then, he understood that he was already living in eternity.

  Chapter Eleven

  The place was open; the thick metal grille he remembered from his nocturnal visit folded back. Then he had peered through the bars, this time he could see all too clearly. And there was Julia herself sitting in the shop. He had hoped that this would be so, had come over to this part of the city with the express wish of seeing her again, even though he was reluctant to admit as much, even to himself. But now that he was so close to his goal, he felt a mild sense of panic and confusion. For a moment he considered simply walking on; but surely she would have noticed him by now, lurking on the pavement. She might think his behaviour odd or even slightly sinister if he didn’t follow through, and so he forced himself to go in.

  Not only had she not seen him on the street, she failed to notice him immediately when he walked into the shop. Julia, who to William’s considerable disappointment was not alone, was seated on a particularly tall wooden chair with arms and a short back, like a barstool from a rather grand pub. The chair lifted her high above her companion, a middle-aged man who was sunk down in a low wing-backed armchair, upholstered in faded floral stuff. Their chairs were at some distance from each other, and on his knees the man was holding a wooden solitaire board, with coloured stones instead of the usual glass marbles. As William closed the door behind him, a longcase clock struck the hour, and in the light of its presence the whole shop appeared to him suddenly as a strange subverted version of his own home. There were the same rugs and sconces, the same blue and white china, the same delicate tables and solid chairs, even the same kind of fireplace, with coloured tiles and long brass fire irons lying on the fender. In his own front room all these objects were arranged with care and restraint, but here they were packed together higgledy-piggledy, any old way, with this rather strange couple lolling in the middle of it all. The effect was, he thought, highly disconcerting.

  Julia, who was smiling over at the other man, slowly broke her gaze and turned to look at the newcomer. ‘It’s you!’ she exclaimed. William wanted to flee but she waved him in. He had imagined a dozen times meeting her again, but not in this scenario, and not in this mood, for there was an odd atmosphere in the shop, something he couldn’t quite define. ‘This is Roderic Kennedy,’ she said. ‘Roderic, William Armstrong.’ The man in the chair gave a brief nod in William’s direction. Roderic Kennedy the painter: it had to be him, William remembered photographs he had seen from catalogues in the past. He wondered momentarily if he should mention how much he liked his work, but Roderic looked as though he would be indifferent to anything William might have to say.

  ‘Feel free to look around. Hester had to go out for a moment,’ Julia said, as though she thought William had come to buy antiques. ‘We’re minding the place.’

  ‘No, we’re not,’ Roderic said, ‘we’re just innocent bystanders. Max is in charge.’

  For the first time William noticed that the cat was also there, sitting bolt upright beside the empty grate. ‘You might not believe it but that cat,’ Roderic said solemnly, ‘is an expert – that cat is a world authority—on Georgian silver.’ Julia laughed, out of all proportion, William thought, given the silliness of the joke. It was the middle of the afternoon, and William wondered if perhaps she had been drinking. He remembered reading an article about Roderic in the paper once that alluded to his having a drink problem; he certainly had a toper’s face. ‘It’s true,’ Roderic said, ‘He’s an expert, aren’t you, Max? Wouldn’t you know it to look at him?’ At that moment, the cat put its head on one side and closed its eyes. The effect was comical, as though the animal was pleased but embarrassed to have its erudition spoken of so publicly, and both Roderic and Julia exploded with laughter. There was something about their mirth that made William feel he couldn’t join in; that he wasn’t supposed to.

  ‘I’m going to test you now,’ Roderic said to Julia, ‘see how well you know your semiprecious stones.’ From the solitaire board on his lap, he took up a translucent purple sphere.

  ‘Amethyst’

  He replaced it, held up another one, this time of an opaque, dense, radiant blue.

  ‘Lapis.’

  They continued in this fashion as though William wasn’t there, Roderic slowly holding up the coloured stones in silence and Julia naming them. ‘Rose quartz … Alabaster … Chalcedony.’ They hadn’t been drinking. They had been in bed, William realised as he watched. The cluttered shop was full of the sense of them together, and the physical distance between them only heightened the strangely erotic nature of the little game they were playing with the stones. ‘Agate … Moonstone … Obsidian.’ Roderic looked at her quizzically. ‘Jet?’ she said. ‘It could be jet. You don’t know either, do you?’ He shook his head and they both laughed, again in that closed, complicit way. William might have been able to settle the question for them, but he wasn’t asked.

  Julia stretched out and reached into a basin of pot-pourri on a dresser beside her chair. She stirred it idly with her hand, releasing into the air a warm scent of cloves, orange peel, resin and cones, enhancing, whether unwittingly or not, the charged atmosphere. It reminded William of just such an episode in his own life, many years earlier; of being in a hotel room in Seville with Liz. Something there had that same faint scent of citrus and spice: perhaps the soap provided in the bathroom, perhaps the perfume Liz was wearing. It was a hot afternoon, the powerful light seeping in even through the closed shutters. Ev
erything in the dim room was white: the walls, the curtains, the marble tiles, and the sheets of the bed on which he was making love with Liz. He remembered the feeling of being deep within her, the exquisite tension of the moment just before he came.

  He was shaken at the memory; so sudden was it, so vivid and intense, that when Julia turned to him now and said, ‘And you, William, how have you been since last I saw you?’ the question confused him. For a moment he could not speak.

  ‘Fine,’ he said at last, but he could hear his own voice become unsteady. There was no reason for this, he told himself. He could take protection from the fact that Roderic was here, saving him from a kind of confidence that he wanted with Julia, but that also made him feel uneasy. ‘Well, not bad,’ he qualified his earlier remark. ‘I’m very tired. I’ve taken some time off work at the moment. That helps. I’ll be all right. I’m going to London soon for the weekend.’

  ‘With your wife?’

  ‘With Liz, yes.’

  There was a pause. ‘You’re the painter, aren’t you?’ William blurted out.

  He was keen by now to deflect attention from himself but his appeal to the other man’s vanity failed, as Roderic merely glanced at him, then looked away again and said quietly, ‘I’m a painter, yes.’

  ‘William has –’ Julia started, but at that a most bizarre thing happened. She stopped speaking abruptly, almost violently, as though an invisible hand had gagged her from behind. The two men stared at her, mystified.