Authenticity

by Deirdre Madden

  There had always been a certain amount of mutual dislike between Roderic and Maeve, and Dennis therefore took a sceptical view of this unsolicited advice. Frank’s opinion on the situation was more pertinent. ‘I believe Roderic’s giving up his job and moving in with you.’

  This wasn’t quite accurate but Dennis confirmed the statement none the less.

  Frank stared at him hard. ‘What are his plans, do you know?’

  ‘He’s found some part-time work, teaching evening classes in drawing; and he’s keeping on his studio. I don’t really think he has any game plan, he’s just going to work it out as he goes along: get by, you know.’

  Frank absorbed this information without comment.

  ‘I’m only asking him for a nominal rent. I’m sure he’ll be all right financially; he’s not someone who wants or needs many material things.’

  ‘That’s true; he’s always seemed to manage to get along on half nothing.’

  One thing that gave a rather bizarre slant to all of this was that Roderic had grown up to look exactly like his father, giving Dennis the sensation that he was conducting this rather guarded conversation about his future with Roderic himself. Although temperamentally they were, Dennis thought, utterly dissimilar, both men had the same unnerving intelligence and intense physical presence. Often, neither of them was aware of the effect these qualities had on those around them. Frank was still staring hard at his elder son. It didn’t seem possible that he hadn’t guessed the truth of Roderic’s situation.

  When Dennis’s own dreams of a career as a concert pianist came to an end because of stage fright, he had found in Frank a surprising ally. It was the things he hadn’t said – ‘You’ll get over it, and in any case, I’m sure you’ll be just as happy teaching music’ – for which Dennis had been most grateful. He didn’t complain about the wasted fees when his son said he wanted to change course one year into a degree in music; but he had been concerned about whether or not Dennis would ultimately be satisfied with the business and economics he said he wanted to read instead. Frank urged him to take his time in making a decision and to follow his heart.

  Immersed in his own disappointment, Dennis did not fully appreciate the remarkable delicacy of feeling that Frank displayed at the time, but he remembered it now, seeing much the same thing manifested as they discussed Roderic’s career problems. He suspected that Frank wanted to ask why Roderic lost his job, but he refrained from doing so, saying instead, ‘I’m glad he’ll be living with you. You can keep me posted on how things develop.’

  ‘I’m sure it will all work out well.’

  Frank stared at him thoughtfully for a few minutes more, considering this. ‘You’re probably right,’ he said at last. ‘Roderic has always seemed to know what he’s about. Mind you,’ he added as caveat, ‘I’m buggered if anyone else does.’

  Roderic moved into the house over a weekend in late August and was thrilled with the attic room. A veteran of shared houses, he asked Dennis if he wanted to draw up a cleaning rota or to establish a milk kitty. Dennis, who had only ever lived alone or with the family, had no idea what he was on about. ‘There are no rules and regulations,’ he said. ‘The only thing I would ask you to do,’ and he pointed at a pine wine rack as he spoke, ‘is not to drink my claret.’

  He expected a painter’s life to be somewhat haphazard, its patterns of work dictated by inspiration and mood, and was surprised by the iron routine into which his brother quickly settled. He realised that he didn’t know Roderic as well as he had imagined. There was, for example, his remarkable popularity with women, something of which Dennis had been vaguely aware but to which he had given no particular thought. Three days after Roderic moved in, Dennis innocently pressed the button on his own answering machine. Thank you for calling, he heard his own brisk voice say. If you have a message for either Dennis or Roderic, please speak after the tone, and we’ll get back to you as soon as possible. Thank you. An ear-shattering bleep, and then a woman’s hesitant voice. Roderic, um hi, this is Cathy. Sorry I missed you. I’ll try again later, or maybe you could, um, give me a call? Another bleep, another woman’s voice, this time confident and firm. Roderic, this is Janet, just to say thanks for helping me move the sculptures the other day. You really got me out of a jam there, and if there’s ever anything I can do for you, don’t hesitate to ask. Another bleep. Roderic, this is you know who. So you’re out and about. I wonder what you’re up to. I can just imagine. Hope you’ve recovered from the other night. Call me soon. The words were innocuous enough, but the tone in which they were uttered made Dennis’s reflected face go pink in his own hall mirror. Another bleep. Roderic, this is Bernie. We’re having a party on Saturday night and I hope you can make it … It went on and on and on, and Dennis stood listening, astounded.

  Some weeks further into the autumn, Frank discreetly took Dennis aside just before Saturday lunch to ask how things were working out. ‘Roderic himself tells me it’s fine and that the teaching’s going well, that they’ve given him some extra hours.’

  Dennis concurred with this, and reported well their situation. But he was struck too at how much he couldn’t tell Frank. The many girlfriends were the least of it, and wouldn’t have fazed him in the slightest. Frank was probably more concerned by Dennis’s apparent complete lack of interest in women than by Roderic’s fondness for them. Dennis had thought that temperamentally Roderic in no way resembled his father, but he had been wrong. Both men were capable of a remarkable degree of intellectual detachment, and as this was not a particularly endearing characteristic, Dennis thought it best not to comment upon it. Physically present but mentally remote, it was as though they were leading double (but not clandestine) lives. In fairness, Roderic had a cheerful disposition and little of Frank’s irascibility. He was tremendously sociable, but it was precisely this combination of emotional warmth and icy withdrawal that Dennis found so disconcerting in him.

  He continued to think about this at lunch as he watched Roderic making small talk with Sinéad, as he watched him help to clear the table. This part of his life that he shared with his family and that was visible to them was only the tip of the iceberg. No one asked about, nor did Roderic allude to, the concealed massive bulk of his other, his real life. He thought about it again the following afternoon when the rain poured down and they stayed at home reading. Dennis drank tea and leafed idly through the Sunday papers, their magazines and supplements, while Roderic sat silent and immobile for three solid hours immersed in a book called The Dynamics of Modernism. He thought about it again as he ate his breakfast alone on Monday morning, his brother having already left for the studio, and again that night, when Roderic emerged from two hours closeted in the kitchen with his former flatmate Tony, ‘Just talking about painting,’ he said. This in itself impressed Dennis, who rarely managed to jemmy more from the taciturn Tony than ‘Hello’, except for one memorable occasion when they were left together for a few moments and Tony volunteered without any prompting, ‘Your brother’s a fucking brilliant painter so he is. Fucking brilliant,’ before lapsing back into impregnable silence.

  He rather liked the effect that Roderic had upon his friends and colleagues at the sedate supper parties he occasionally gave. Towards the end of the meal he would hear the sound of a key in the door. ‘That’s my brother now. He’ll come in for a couple of minutes to say hello.’ He knew that his guests were expecting to meet someone similar to Dennis himself, which only made the effect of Roderic’s sudden presence all the more electrifying. Handsome, ebullient, larger than life, he was a great stone crashing into the still pool of their evening, and the effect remained, like ripples, long after he had swept out of the room again.

  In general, Maeve’s warning about his friends was ill founded. With few exceptions Dennis enjoyed their company. The stream of short-term girlfriends who came and went throughout the autumn ended abruptly just before Christmas, when Roderic started going out with a photographer called Laura. It was a good time in both the broth
ers’ lives. They had settled down comfortably into their domestic arrangement. Dennis was doing well in his job, with promotion and a rise in salary. Although Roderic’s situation was precarious, and was to remain so for many years, he was satisfied with the time and freedom it afforded him. Dennis came to know Laura well in the months she was with Roderic, and was fond of her for her monumental calmness, her dry wit. The relationship lasted until the summer, after which time they parted amicably. Dennis regretted it and although the couple remained on friendly terms, Roderic occasionally meeting her and passing on her greetings to Dennis, she no longer came to the house.

  It was a pattern to be repeated in the years that followed. The arrangement they had undertaken lasted much longer than either of them had expected or intended. They reviewed the situation in June and decided to continue at least for the time being living as they did. Roderic took a job for the summer in London, living in the flat of a friend of a friend while its owner took over his studio in Dublin. Dennis went off to the Salzburg Music Festival for his holidays. In the autumn Roderic resumed his teaching, and towards the end of the year he took part in an important group exhibition. Dennis barely saw him in the weeks leading up to it as he put in longer hours at the studio than ever before. Roderic’s energy, his application, had always impressed him. Dennis changed his car and upgraded his private pension plan. He took up hill walking, and although they never went out together, it brought him closer to Frank, who shared with him his favourite routes and paths. And so the years went on.

  People who knew both brothers marvelled that they could live such different lives in close proximity with no apparent friction. This was due in part to the strong emotional bond between them. There was no resentment because each understood the price the other was paying for the life he led and the things he had. When they chafed against their own situations, they didn’t have far to look to see in full detail and with all its implications a wholly other life, which never failed to reconcile them quickly to their own fate. Dennis’s house was their common territory, and neither of them felt wholly comfortable when he strayed into the other’s world. Roderic rarely called to Dennis’s stuffy, overheated office with its grey filing cabinets and tidy desk. How did he bear it, month after month, he silently wondered, not knowing that Dennis had been similarly appalled when he called to the studio and found him working with no heating in the depths of winter, his breath misting white before him when he spoke. The studio was too big and too high to heat: quite simply, he couldn’t afford it. But more than the tedium or the discomfort, each shied away from the atmosphere of the other’s life. Living like Dennis, Roderic thought, he would feel that his life was already as good as over. Living like Roderic, Dennis considered, would be ultimately too hard on the nerves.

  During these years there were periods of time when Roderic was completely absent from the house. He went to stay for a few months with a friend who had gone off to live in a remote part of Scotland; he went to Amsterdam on a residency for a month. In Kerry, he taught painting at a residential summer school. He started going out with a woman from Galway, and when she moved back to the west he went down to stay with her for increasingly lengthy visits. Just at the point when Dennis thought he would probably leave Dublin definitively and move to Galway, the relationship came to an end. Although he enjoyed his brother’s company in the house – there was something energising in just being around him – Dennis neither resented nor relished these absences. When, shortly before his twenty-seventh birthday, Roderic was awarded a six-month stay in a centre for artists in Italy, no one was more delighted for him than Dennis.

  Chapter Thirteen

  When they were in London in April Liz insisted, much to his annoyance, on going with William to an exhibition on the Saturday morning.

  ‘You won’t enjoy it.’

  ‘What sort of art is it? Is it old stuff?’

  For a moment he hesitated, tempted to lie before admitting,

  ‘No, it’s contemporary work. It’s a one-man show I very much want to see.’

  Liz freely admitted that she had no real interest in or knowledge of art. There were about three painters in the whole of the western canon whose work she could easily recognise and that she liked: Van Gogh, Monet and Renoir. Her lack of an ‘eye’ for a picture – she couldn’t see the difference between works of the Flemish school and those of the Italian Renaissance – was something William simply failed to understand. ‘All old paintings look the same,’ she said. ‘A crucifixion is a crucifixion is a crucifixion.’ Her dislike of religious art (‘If I see another angel, I’ll scream’) was as nothing compared to her pathological dislike of mythological and classical subjects. ‘Battles, bums, lardy white women sitting around in fields having picnics with goats: how could anyone like this stuff? Landscape with Aeneas at Delos. Who was Aeneas? Where was Delos? And did anyone really care?’ It was all, Liz said, boring, boring, boring. And as for the twentieth century: green-faced women with three eyes? Daubs and blobs of paint? No thank you.

  In spite of this she had, when newly married, tried to take an interest in William’s passion and tagged along when he went to galleries and exhibitions. This irritated him enormously and the novelty soon wore off for Liz. She had hoped he would be able to show her what it was that she was supposed to see, but her antipathy to painting was only confirmed and reinforced. An afternoon spent at a Poussin exhibition was one of the low points of their life together. But in trawling the galleries, they did make an odd discovery: Liz was quite receptive to contemporary art, although she didn’t like everything she saw and didn’t hesitate to say so.

  Gallery going remained William’s ‘thing’: he had never known her to go by herself to see an exhibition but when she accompanied him he was always struck by how open minded she was, how willing to take the work on its own terms. She entered freezers and tents and tiny wooden cabins. In darkened rooms she watched videos of people singing, screaming, slapping themselves around the face, setting fire to their hair, giving birth, sleeping or simply gazing immobile into the eye of the camera. She looked at works made of ice, chocolate, flowers, toenails, rotting meat, briars, sand, old clothes, dead animals, beams of light. William had seen her enthuse over the beauty of cones of coloured pigment, turmeric, crimson and blue. He had seen her shocked by photos of tattooed pigs and baffled by rows of empty wire cages. In a dim room full of old and worn soft toys he had seen her moved to tears.

  But today he wanted to be alone, and deeply resented her company. In the underground on the way to the exhibition he chose not to sit beside her to make the point clear. It would be an embarrassment to be seen with her in the gallery. How suburban she looked, how conventional, with her twin-set and her quilted handbag. ‘She’ll put silk flowers in the bathroom if you’re not careful,’ his own mother had warned him when he decided to marry Liz. ‘She’ll fill the house with Waterford glass and bits of Royal Doulton.’ Spiteful, yes, but true, he thought. She’d never fully settled into the money marriage had brought her, had never become completely at ease in his world. She caught his eye and smiled across the carriage at him. He stared back, stern and unbending.

  The first room they entered on reaching the gallery was large and high, not brightly lit, and covered from eye level to ceiling with hundreds, perhaps thousands of photographs. They were all the same size and showed black and white portraits of people: old men and babies, soldiers, toddlers, grannies, young girls, middle-aged women, young men. The quality of the images varied. Some had evidently been taken from newsprint and enlarged, and the blurred, somewhat blank effect this created, particularly in the eyes of the subjects, only served to heighten their remarkable pathos. Some of the clothes they wore suggested they had lived many years earlier, most probably during the period of the Second World War, so that the babies would, if still alive, be old men by now, and the old men dead. There were no names given or nationality or ages, nothing to say who these people were; and now no one would ever know. William noticed that
when visitors to the room spoke to each other, they did so in hushed and reverential tones, as they might have done in a church. Some people merely glanced up at the immense walls, taking in the general sepulchral effect before moving on. Others, including Liz, lingered for a long time, studying in turn as many of these anonymous faces as they could take in, as though paying silent tribute to the individuality of each person. ‘Isn’t it extraordinary?’ she whispered to William.

  The effect of the photographs neutralised the annoyance he had felt towards her earlier. Together they went into the next room, and he watched her discreetly as she studied the work there: a series of small beds, high-sided like cots, each lit with its own harsh light-bulb. Although they contained pillows and blankets, they radiated a sense of emptiness. Not to have children was the greatest tragedy that could have befallen her, he thought. Without them she would have been in the same depressed fog in which he now found himself, the same dumb misery. As she moved to read a text on the wall relating to the exhibit, he noticed a woman, cool, young, who was looking Liz over. She whispered something to her companion, and his eyes also flickered in Liz’s direction. He whispered something back to his friend and she laughed. The man looked again at Liz, smiled sardonically and turned away. William was hurt and angry on her behalf even though Liz hadn’t noticed a thing; even though on the way to the gallery he himself had sneered at her in exactly the same way.

  They had lunch in a restaurant of William’s choosing. He liked eating out, enjoyed the opportunities it gave for small displays of dominance and control. He chose a bottle from the wine list; discreet and deferential, the waiter served it.

  ‘What will you do this afternoon?’

  ‘I’d like to go shopping. I’ll buy presents for the children.’

  As they ate he watched her, thinking of their shared life.