‘I went for six months in the first instance,’ Roderic replied, ‘about twenty years ago. I stayed on for eleven years before coming back to Ireland.’
‘I suppose you return to Italy from time to time?’
‘As a matter of fact I was there recently, just a few weeks ago, in June,’ he remarked. He didn’t tell her then that it had been his first visit since leaving eight years earlier, and that he was still somewhat emotionally shell-shocked as a result.
‘It was foolish of me,’ she said ‘to think that everything was going to work out the way I wanted.’
‘Tell me about yourself. Are you a painter?’
‘No, I work in mixed media. I like your work very much,’ she went on quickly, and he would tell her when he knew her better that he hadn’t believed her. He thought it merely a tactic to direct attention away from herself, until she spoke of the one-man show he had had in Dublin the year before. The degree to which she remembered individual works, and homed in on the best, surprised and slightly unnerved him.
‘I liked the big cream and grey grid on the right of the door when you went in.’
‘And what about the blue and white painting at the bottom of the room?’ he said, deliberately singling out what he considered to be the weakest picture. ‘Do you remember that?’
‘Mmn.’
‘And what did you think of it?’
Julia looked at the floor. ‘It didn’t please me anything like as much,’ she said, ‘as the painting in cream and grey.’
This ethical refusal to flatter reminded him of her mentor. ‘So Maria used to teach you?’
‘Yes. She wrote me a reference for this place in Italy.’
‘Maria’s an old friend of mine. When I came back to Ireland we both had studios in the same building. It was a difficult time in my life and she was exceptionally kind to me.’ He sat in silence for a moment, thinking of the reality behind this and then, ‘She was,’ he said again, ‘exceptionally kind.’
‘So how do you manage?’ he asked Julia.
‘You mean what do I live on? Well, I live very simply, for one thing, and I have a part-time job in an antique shop. I get by on that, just about’
‘It’s good to have a bit of security,’ he said.
‘Security,’ and she ground out her cigarette. ‘Security!’ The scorn in her voice startled him.
‘Well, stability, then,’ he said, and she considered this.
‘Stability’s different,’ she said. ‘Stability, yes, I’ll grant you that, but there’s no such thing as security. It doesn’t exist.’
‘What makes you so sure?’ he asked
She looked him straight in the eye. ‘Experience,’ she said. ‘What else?’
He hadn’t allowed her to buy him a coffee when she arrived, but in the course of their conversation he had drained the mug in front of him. He went up to the counter (‘I couldn’t get over how tall you were when you stood up, I almost laughed out loud,’) and now it was Julia’s turn to look at him and draw her own conclusions. Even after they knew each other well, he had to wheedle and coax to find out what she had thought. ‘I’d never seen a man,’ she finally admitted ‘who looked so lonely and forlorn. And yet I thought you were good company. I came close to saying, “Why don’t we go and have a walk after this, then maybe have something to eat, go to see a film or something?”’
‘Just think,’ he said, ‘of all the time we might have saved if you had.’
‘I was trying to remember what was on in the cinema, but then you came back to the table with your tray, and suddenly I felt intimidated. I remembered that you were established and eminent, a real big cheese, and I was just a tiddler straight out of art college. I wasn’t feeling very confident that day, as you can imagine. And so I said nothing.’
Roderic did notice that a sudden shyness had fallen over her when he returned to the table, but failed to guess the reason for it. When they left the café together she thanked him for meeting her. He brushed aside her renewed apologies for having wasted his time and said goodbye. They were going in opposite directions now and he moved to cross the road against a red pedestrian light. Immediately he felt someone tightly gripping his upper arm, pulling him back, and he turned around, astonished and even slightly irritated. ‘The light’s red,’ Julia said. ‘Wait until it turns green.’ She hadn’t struck him as overly cautious. He resisted, pulled against her and turned back to the road. At that moment, a motorbike he hadn’t seen shot past, missing him by inches. Julia gave him a look in which there was just the faintest hint of I told you so. The traffic stopped and the light turned green; she released his arm from her grip. ‘Goodbye,’ she said again. ‘Look after yourself.’
Roderic saw her again within the week, in an incident so brief, so strange and full of otherness that even when he came to know her well he never asked her about it, not least because he sometimes wondered if it was something he had imagined.
He had been in the middle of the city, again waiting to cross at a busy junction, when he saw her in the crowd on the far side of the road. He would have noticed her anywhere: with such extraordinary hair she was easily visible from a distance. She was standing still and looking up at the sky. The lights did not change and as he watched her he became aware that something out of the ordinary was happening. It was as if she were in a trance or having some kind of vision: rapt, silent, utterly cut off from the crowds who moved around her. He wondered how long she had been there like that, and if she was safe. He jabbed at the button on the panel fixed near by and it became illuminated, blue and white, Wait, as though chiding him for his impatience. He considered darting across the road against the lights in spite of her former warning, but the traffic was too heavy. Just as the walking green man lit up, he saw her move. He was swept across the road with the people who surrounded him to where she stood, but she was walking away now from where she had been. He considered calling to her but felt it would have been foolish: she could not have heard him in any case, above the noise of the city. The crowd thickened around her as he approached, someone stopped and blocked his way, distracting him momentarily, and when he looked up again she had disappeared.
He had reason to call Maria again a few days after that.
‘Are you ringing about Julia?’ she asked. ‘I may as well tell you, I was livid about her not getting that fellowship. There’s no justice in the world.’
‘Are you only finding that out now?’
‘I wouldn’t have suggested you meet her, only I was convinced she was on to a sure thing. Perhaps they thought she was too young; she’s only a year out of art college. I’m sorry for wasting your time.’
‘Don’t be silly, it was a pleasure. She’s nice; seems very bright.’
‘She is, believe me. Did you see any of her work? Well you ought to, you must. Give her a ring. Here’s her number.’
She was flustered when he called, thrown, in a way he hadn’t expected. ‘Visit my studio? Well you could, yes, I suppose. Why not? Maybe it’s awkward for you,’ and she seemed less than enthused when, on hearing that she lived in Francis Street, he said he was just around the corner. They made an arrangement for late in the afternoon two days later.
When she opened the door to Roderic she struck him as more severe than he remembered, more unsmiling. They went up to the sitting room where she made a great fuss of looking for her cigarettes and lighter, but didn’t seem particularly pleased when they were eventually found under a cushion.
‘The studio’s upstairs,’ she said rather shortly, and they were on the third step when he realised what he was doing.
‘We could,’ he said, ‘wait until another time.’
Julia stopped and turned to him. ‘Well, you’ve come all this way,’ she said, but he could sense her relief that he was offering her a way out.
‘I’m five minutes from home, if that.’
‘That’s twice now I’ve brought you on a fool’s errand,’ she said.
He told her he was cap
able of being extremely foolish on his own account, with help from no one, and she laughed. She was looking now for a final and gracious way out.
‘I could make tea,’ she said. ‘We could just talk for a while.’
They went into the kitchen and she made tea in the absent-minded, hit-or-miss fashion with which he was to become so familiar. He noted for the first time the details of her imperfect housekeeping: the broken biscuits, the milk that was just on the point of going sour. She introduced him to the ironic tomcat – ‘Say hello to Max’ – who surveyed the scene, perched, fastidious, on the top of the fridge, and subsequently disconcerted Roderic as he drank his tea by moving around the room at eye level, from the fridge to the top of a press, to a shelf cluttered with tins of food. It was an enormous cat, with a huge thick neck and feet like pot scrubbers.
‘So how did Max come into your life?’ Roderic asked.
‘My father gave him to me,’ Julia said. ‘I was home in Wicklow one weekend, and I happened to say I would love a kitten. And the next time I went back, there was Max, waiting for me. My father spoils me rotten,’ she added. She said it without shame or qualification, stated it as a bald fact.
‘What do you do about Max when you go away?’ Roderic asked, and she pointed to a cat basket with a wire mesh door in the corner of the room.
‘Doesn’t he mind?’
‘Watch this,’ she said. She picked up the basket and the cat immediately shot behind the fridge. ‘QED. It’s all right Max, only kidding. We’re not going anywhere; you can come out now. There’s a souvenir of our last trip home,’ and she held her hand out for Roderic’s inspection, displaying a long red scratch mark. ‘He loves it when he gets there, climbs trees in the orchard and chases birds, but the hour of our departure is not for the faint hearted.’ The cat had still not emerged from its hiding place.
If she’d gone to Italy, Julia said, her father would have looked after Max while she was away, and Roderic asked her then if she’d got over her recent disappointment.
‘Oh, sure,’ she said. ‘There’s no point in brooding on things, is there? Who knows, maybe something even better’s going to happen to me soon.’ Almost immediately she qualified this, to Roderic’s mind, almost perverse optimism by adding wistfully, ‘Don’t know what it could be, though. Italy would have been great. It was the smaller cities I particularly hoped to visit. Ferrara. Urbino. Also, I’m trying to change direction in my work at the moment and I thought it might help to go away for a while.’
‘Change in what way?’
‘When you’re ready we can go up to the studio and I’ll show you.’ He demurred but she insisted. ‘It’s all right. I’m asking you now.’
In the studio she showed him a series of boxes on which she was working, full of coloured feathers and glass beads, old photographs and torn letters. On some of them she had been experimenting with tinted glass that subtly altered one’s perception of the boxes’ contents. He complimented her sincerely on the work, remarking upon its beauty.
‘I’m glad you said that. I know it’s old-fashioned, but it’s important to me that the work should be beautiful. There’s enough ugliness in the world without me adding to it. I’m always struck by the – pleasure, for want of a better word, although it’s something much more than that – to be had by simply looking at a beautiful object.’
‘Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.’
‘That’s where I want to go next,’ she said. ‘It’s why I want to move away from making objects, because it’s not just the thing, it’s the person who’s looking at it. You know this idea that everyone can be an artist? I don’t believe that. But I do think that many people are artists without knowing it. It has nothing to do with craft, you know, the ability to paint or draw.’
‘I’m not sure I’d agree with you there,’ he said, ‘but that may be because I’m more than twenty years older than you.’
He couldn’t help feeling slightly piqued when she didn’t contradict this, but nodded and said, ‘Yes, that’s probably true, but let me explain. Take my father. I was out for a walk with him a while back and he pointed out to me a little tree that was growing in a clump of wild yellow irises. There was something about the relationship between the two – the fragility of the tree, the sense of multitude the flowers gave, yellow, green, and the whole thing moving in the wind, it was alive. I can’t explain. But it was for just that moment, that particular moment when my father noticed it, because
I passed the same spot a week later and it looked quite nondescript. It was just, you know, a tree.’
‘And that makes him an artist?’
‘In my book, yes.’
Propped against one of the walls beside where she was standing was a cork pin-board to which were fastened several papers including a telephone bill, an invoice from a shop selling art materials and a postcard reproduction of a still life. While they were talking his attention had been caught by the image on the postcard, and he gazed at it now: at the silver and the glass, the nutshells and the broken pastry, the luminous yellow light in which the whole was bathed, and suddenly it astounded him. ‘To think,’ he said ‘that people once painted like that. That was how they saw the world. And now we can’t trust our own eyes, can’t believe that what we see before us is what it is: a table, a bottle, a dish. Why is it, do you think, that people like still life paintings so much nowadays? Is it for the quality of attention that is in them?’
Together they looked at the postcard for a few more minutes.
‘No,’ Julia said. ‘A still life is full of repose. That, above all, is so hard to find in the world as it is now. That’s what people respond to, that’s what they seek.’
‘So where,’ he asked, ‘do you see your work going?’ and she laughed.
‘That’s another story altogether. I’m experimenting at the moment, but I’m going on with the boxes in the meantime. It’ll be a long time before I have the confidence to show the new work. I’m playing with ideas for the moment. Perhaps you could help me?’
He said he was willing and she gave him a paper and pen, asked him to write down all the most evocative smells he could think of. It took him quite a while, for he paused to think for a long time, then wrote something, then paused again. At last he handed her the paper and as she read it, she started to laugh. ‘I should have told you,’ she said, ‘to be more specific. I was thinking of things like coffee, you know, or bread, things like that.
This was what he had written on the page:
Smell of the hall in the house where I used to live in Italy
Candlewax and incense (old church?)
Antiseptic (sort of: as in a doctor’s surgery)
Perfume
The inside of a piano
‘What was the name of the perfume?’ she said.
He told her that he didn’t remember, and he knew by the way she looked at him that she didn’t believe it. ‘I hope you’re not going to ask me,’ he said, ‘what they mean to me?’
‘Not these things, no. But the project would be developed around that, about finding scents and offering them to any number of people, and then asking what they summon up to them. I have this theory,’ she said, ‘that it’ll all come down to either sex or childhood.’
‘I think,’ he said, ‘you may be on to something there.’
Chapter Sixteen
London, 15th April
Dear Julia,
My only luck at this difficult period of my life has been to meet you. Your kindness and understanding means more to me than I can easily say. My behaviour when I called to the gallery must have appeared at best strange, at worst rude, and for that I offer sincere apologies. I should always regret anything that were to lower me in your esteem.
With affection,
William.
P.S. I wonder what you’ll make of this particular woman?
The draught Julia made as she left the room had wafted the postcard right to his feet. Roderic glanced down at the image; knew it at
once for a Holbein, and picked it up. Unthinkingly, he turned it over. The handwriting was as neat and legible as print, and before he knew it, his eyes had scanned the message. He disliked the general tone of it, and the last line hit him like a hammer blow. He turned the card over again. The woman, in her oddly shaped fur bonnet, stared off inscrutably into the middle distance, as though pointedly ignoring him. The squirrel crammed a nut into its mouth and looked, Roderic thought, as though it was trying hard not to laugh. He turned the card over again and re-read the message, this time with conscious intent, for he needed to be sure that there was no mistake, that it wasn’t some wild fantasy of his own.
In his mind’s eye, as vividly as though he were watching a film, Roderic saw himself sitting at a café table in Paris. His recall of the scene that day at the end of last October was perfect: the small, thick white coffee cup, the sugar cubes wrapped in paper, one torn open, one intact, the glass and carafe for water, the scatter of silver coins, and the bill, crumpled and torn by the waiter, the fake marble of the table itself. And in amongst all of that was the paraphernalia of pens, stamps and the postcards he had bought in the galleries. He saw himself writing the cards, checking them off in his mind: one each to his daughters, choosing which would suit them best, one for Dennis. He had had Julia in mind when he bought her particular card and the teasing note he would add as a postscript.
But how did this other man, this William, know about it? How did he know?
He could hear Julia clumping back upstairs now from the shop. Hastily he replaced the card on the mantelpiece from which it had fallen, and just as he sat down again she came into the room. She had only been gone for moments, but the impact of her presence was considerable. Roderic gave her a look that he hoped would come across as merely enquiring. ‘Hester said someone bought the wardrobe today, so there’ll be room in the shop for the table,’ and she nodded towards the item as she mentioned it. ‘Someone will come to help move it down tomorrow morning. I can’t say I’ll be sorry to see the back of it’
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