Authenticity

by Deirdre Madden

  ‘I really don’t mind,’ the man replied. ‘They’re both nice. You decide.’

  The woman glowered at him. ‘You’re not being helpful Joe, not helpful at all.’

  It was, Dennis thought, like a vision of hell. Did they have wedding lists in Italy? At this precise moment was Roderic trailing around some china shop in Siena undergoing a similar ordeal?

  A week before he left, a woman phoned him late one night. ‘You probably won’t remember me,’ she said, and Dennis didn’t recall the name she gave. ‘I’m an old friend of Roderic’s. He invited me to his wedding and I have a present for him. I wondered if you’d be so kind as to take it out to Italy for me?’ They arranged that she would call to his office the following day.

  ‘Do you remember me now?’ she asked when they met.

  ‘I do indeed,’ Dennis said. The image of her that came to his mind was of seeing her sitting at his breakfast table wearing nothing but an old shirt of Roderic’s that came to her shins. They had been a couple for a few months in the early days, and had remained friends thereafter.

  ‘It’s kind of you to do this for me,’ she said. ‘I’d have posted it out but it wasn’t ready until yesterday.’ She was holding a bundle of coarse buff calico tied up with a silky green ribbon. ‘I wrapped it like this for the customs. I’d better show you what it is, in case you get asked,’ and she pulled the ribbon. The bundle contained a blanket made of thick, soft wool in colours of mosses and turf, shot through with blue. ‘I had a woman I know, a weaver, make it specially,’ she said. Dennis stared at her, unable to speak. ‘Tell him I’m sorry I can’t be there. Tell him I said good luck.’ And as Dennis watched, he saw a crown of wild flowers descend, and settle gently on her brow.

  *

  He arrived in Italy several days before the wedding to be met at the airport by Roderic and Marta, and to be swept up, all at once, into his brother’s new life. To begin with, Dennis was glad he had given Roderic no indication of his misgivings, for he felt now that he had been completely wrong. He had never been to Italy before. In spite of all Roderic had told him in letters, in spite of the photographs he had sent, in spite, even, of his own preternaturally vivid imagination, nothing had prepared him. He was enchanted, completely won over. Marta, whom he had dreaded meeting, visualising in the watches of the night her chill initial greeting: ‘So you must be Dennis,’ introduced herself by throwing her arms around him. ‘My dear brother,’ she said and she kissed him. ‘My dear, dear brother.’ At dinner on that first night, his brain fuddled by tiredness and the buzz around him of a language he could not understand, by too much wine drunk with the huge plates of food, pasta and chicken and salad that Marta’s mother had pressed upon him, he happened to glance up at Roderic. He was sitting with his chin propped in his hand, staring across the table at Marta who was staring back at him in the same wholly absorbed way. They were besotted with each other, Dennis thought, completely besotted.

  They had been living together for about six months when they decided to get married, at which point they moved from Marta’s small apartment into the house which had been her grandparents’ home. They were well established there by the time of the wedding. The morning after his arrival Roderic showed Dennis around the cool interior, with its long rooms and high ceilings; and the walled garden with its tomatoes and courgettes, its extravagant roses. ‘That’s my studio,’ Roderic said, pointing at a long outhouse on the left. ‘Come and I’ll show you.’ They went up three wooden steps and into a white room flooded with light.

  Although he was in no way territorial or secretive, Roderic had always been selective about who he did or didn’t let into his studio. To force the matter, to show up uninvited, to insist on being allowed in, was to risk disturbing the deep-seated irritable streak he got from Frank and that one engaged at one’s peril. ‘Letting someone into your studio is like letting someone into your head, so they can see how you think,’ he once said. ‘You have to be careful.’ Dennis had been one of the few who was always welcome, but even he would never have called unexpectedly to the studio in Dublin without good reason. He sat down now in a blue armchair and looked around. It was all, he thought, reassuringly familiar. It wasn’t just that Roderic had obviously set the place up along exactly the same lines as his old studio in Ireland – the comfortable chair beside the door, the trestle table pushed hard against the back wall and laden with painting materials, the bookcase, the easel, the lot. It was more than that: it was an atmosphere, a climate. His windows in Dublin had given on to a faded Georgian townhouse, his windows here the lush garden, but somehow it didn’t matter. Both spaces had the same brightness and cheer, with the sense of something serious, even sombre, at the back of it all. It was indeed, Dennis surmised, as close as one could get to being inside Roderic’s head.

  ‘I’ve done good work while I’ve been here. I’ve moved on to another level; it’s been great.’ As he spoke, he turned around some of the many canvases that were leaning against the wall, so that Dennis could see them. The patches of colour in which he worked had become more muted, and finer, more regular. That was the only difference Dennis could see, and he didn’t know what it amounted to, but Roderic seemed pleased. ‘It’s been a real breakthrough,’ he went on. ‘Funnily enough, I don’t think it has anything to do with being in Italy. I used to think it was the change of scene that had opened things up, but now I feel that it would have happened anyway. Something had to give. It’s like banging your head against a brick wall for ages and then you look round, and there’s an open door behind you. The relief! You can’t imagine, you just can’t imagine.’

  Dennis nodded, still staring at the paintings. ‘It’s good that Marta’s in the same line of work as yourself.’

  ‘She is and she isn’t,’ Roderic said, beginning to turn the canvases round to face the wall again. ‘There’s a considerable difference between what we do.’

  ‘Surely there’s some common ground?’

  ‘Yes, of course. I mean, we both love art. She’s got a good eye, Marta, extraordinarily good. But it’s a completely different approach, you know what I mean?’

  Dennis didn’t really, but he nodded and let it pass.

  They went back out into the hot garden. ‘That’s a passion flower,’ Roderic said, nodding at a vine that was twined around a trellis at the back door. ‘Hard to believe, isn’t it, me living in a house with a passion flower growing outside it. Sometimes even yet it all seems unreal. I think it’s a dream and I’m going to wake up back in your house, listening to the rain battering on the slates.’

  Oh, you should be so lucky, Dennis thought bitterly. You should be so lucky.

  That night, Dennis found it impossible to sleep. Marriage! How could anyone do it? It had always held for him a peculiar horror. He usually tried not to think too much about this side of his own life, but in the small hours of the morning he had no defence against it. People thought they had the measure of him, but they didn’t. They assumed in him an indifference to women which wasn’t the case at all, just as they usually failed to see that his gruff, rather forbidding manner hid a desperate shyness. Roderic probably thought that he had never had a girl in his whole life, but he would have been wrong.

  When Dennis was in his first year at university, he had been befriended by a young woman called Edith. Like him, she was studying music, with the violin as her specialisation. It was a time of such emotional turmoil and uncertainty for Dennis that looking back he wondered how he had come through it at all. He had to face up to the fact that he wasn’t going to make the grade as a concert pianist, and the rest of his life loomed before him, empty. Edith succoured him in his woe. She talked through his options with him, and gave him precious moral support when he had to summon up the courage to tell Frank he wanted to change to another course of studies. Together they went to concerts of baroque music and to the cinema, often going for a drink or a simple meal afterwards. Edith lived in a cosy, tiny bed-sit in Ranelagh. With its clutter of books and music
, its candles and posters and potted plants, it became a haven for Dennis, who was still living at home, and it was there one Friday night in front of the gas fire that, to his immense relief, she finally seduced him.

  She was only slightly less timid and marginally more experienced than he, so it was a somewhat fumbling and awkward encounter, but it didn’t matter. He loved being with her, and thought that her going to bed with him on a regular basis, as she did in the weeks that followed, was an act of great kindness. Their sedate, discreet affair continued and evolved until one day, just before a composition lecture, a mutual friend remarked, ‘I hear yourself and Edith are an item.’

  A cold, sickish feeling swept over Dennis. ‘Well, you heard wrong,’ he said shortly.

  He didn’t take in a single word the lecturer said that day, didn’t write down so much as a note. His mind raced. What was he to do? He didn’t want to lose her, but he didn’t want to be trapped. Trapped. That was what he had always feared, getting sucked into something from which he would never be able to extricate himself; and their relationship becoming public knowledge somehow seemed to make it more likely that this would happen, although he didn’t understand why. He felt anxious and confused. Much as he liked Edith, what if it all turned out to be the thin end of the wedge, with the thick end a life like Frank’s?

  He told her he didn’t want to go to the film she suggested that Saturday night, and didn’t know if he would be free for the concert on Wednesday; if he was, he would ring her. In backing off, Dennis didn’t mean to freeze her out, but he did. He didn’t want to lose her friendship. He didn’t want to lose the physical relationship either, but he didn’t want what these things, combined, seemed to imply. ‘I think you haven’t got a clue what you want,’ she said, with bitter accuracy. She couldn’t understand why he dropped her so abruptly, and was terribly hurt. It all fell apart, with not just Edith but also her friends staring icily through Dennis when their paths happened to cross. Edith. To this day he was grateful to her; to this day there was nothing he found so deeply arousing as the smell of a gas fire.

  He was subsequently tempted – on occasion sorely tempted – by the usual paths open to men seeking release without emotional involvement, but it was too sordid and depressing, he could never have gone through with it. It would have surprised Roderic to know when they were living together that it was his casual girlfriends he envied him, rather than his more stable relationships.

  And yet when he suggested to him that he handled his affairs with great skill, Roderic would have none of it. That side of my life is a mess. Great fun, much of it, but a complete shambles.’ Dennis could see what he meant, but didn’t agree. He was particularly impressed by his brother’s ability to end relationships without bitterness or acrimony, how he could make them modulate into friendship, or simply fade out amicably.

  The secret of his success was sometimes most clearly seen on nights such as the one when Dennis awoke to hear a woman’s tearful voice on the stairs.

  ‘I’m sorry, but I can’t go through with this, I just can’t.’

  ‘You don’t have to do anything you don’t want.’ Roderic’s voice was soft and reassuring. ‘Nothing has to happen. You can just sleep beside me; I’ll hold your hand if you like. Please don’t cry. Would you prefer to sleep on the sofa downstairs?’

  Again the woman’s voice, weepy and inaudible now.

  ‘Don’t apologise; there’s no need. You do as you wish. Look, go back down to the sitting room and I’ll fetch you a pillow and quilt.’

  There followed a prolonged sequence of footsteps up and down the stairs, snivelling, whispers, doors opening and closing and then a sudden and profound silence. Whoever she was, she had disappeared by morning: Dennis came down to find Roderic alone in the kitchen, making breakfast.

  ‘I hope I didn’t disturb you last night, coming in.’

  ‘No, not at all. Were you late?’

  ‘Late enough.’

  ‘Did you have a good evening?’

  ‘It was all right.’ He was completely inscrutable, Dennis thought, and with that he found himself wondering where in fact the woman had ended up spending the night: in Roderic’s room or on the sofa. The gentle approach he had taken might well have made the woman yield, and brought her to his bed; and for all his kindness was there not a wily streak in him that had known this? Watching him as he rummaged through the cupboard looking for the marmalade, Dennis couldn’t be sure.

  And yet he had his bad times too. Women ditched him, quarrelled with him, fled when he pursued them, clung to him tenaciously when he had long since lost interest. Dennis watched him hanging around the house, glum and disappointed when things were not going as he wished; or flapping his hands in anxious denial as Dennis answered the phone, mouthing to him silently, Tell her I’m out! Had it not been for moments such as these, their living such disparate lives in close proximity might have been a source of tension and frustration. But for Dennis to see the whole gamut at close quarters was highly instructive. He thought things through, and he drew his own conclusions. Roderic might let himself make the same mistake as Frank, but he wouldn’t. It was as simple as that.

  Dennis liked Marta a great deal and felt guilty about his growing conviction that she and Roderic were not suited to each other. He found it hard to say exactly what the problem was. Perhaps it was that she was Italian. Marriage was difficult enough in any case, but to add cultural difference to the mix was only asking for trouble. This theory also collapsed the following afternoon, when their friend Elsa arrived from Turin from the wedding. ‘So, Gulliver, you’re going to walk the plank, eh? This I had to see.’ Was it only because she wasn’t marrying Roderic that Dennis felt he wouldn’t have minded if she had? No: it was simpler than that, he decided, as he covertly watched the two women side by side, drinking an aperitif in the garden and talking to each other. Elsa would have been a more suitable companion in life for Roderic than Marta, and the fact that she was Italian would have been a thing of no consequence.

  The small detail of Roderic never having given the slightest indication that there was anything other than friendship between them, and that Elsa herself had recently set up home with a man from Mantua, was, Dennis thought, neither here nor there. He struggled to find words, but could find only attributes and indicators. She was sharper than Marta, and less elegant too, less evidently preoccupied with the concept of bella figura (the meaning of which Roderic had solemnly explained to Dennis and an understanding of which was seemingly essential in relation to the forthcoming wedding).

  It was the bomboniera that came closest to embodying for Dennis what was wrong. When they sat down to dinner at the wedding reception, Roderic told him, each guest would find at their place a small white porcelain dish, ‘yours to take home and treasure as a souvenir of the happy occasion,’ as he drily expressed it. Each dish would be full of sugared almonds, swathed in net and tied with ribbon that matched the bridesmaids’ dresses. The colour was a secret that had not yet been divulged, even to Roderic. It had cost, he admitted, a ‘terrifying sum’ and of all the aspects of the wedding, it was the one that had preoccupied Marta the most; she had literally lost sleep over it Would Elsa have wasted two minutes of her time on this nonsense? Dennis wondered. No, and Roderic ought not to be marrying any woman who would. But it was too late now to point this out.

  ‘This is such a busy time,’ Marta said to Dennis the following morning. ‘You must come back to visit us again soon, when all the fuss of the wedding is over, so that we can get to know each other. I really do believe that you don’t just marry another person, you marry a whole family, so it’s important that we become friends.’

  Dennis noticed Roderic register this remark, but he made no comment. Although nothing had been said, Dennis had sensed in Marta’s mother a suggestion of disappointment, a feeling that her daughter could have done better – much better – than this rather odd foreigner. ‘Roderic seems to be marrying into a nice, respectable family,’ Sinéad had
said, just before Dennis left Ireland. ‘You mean rich,’ Frank said bluntly. ‘You mean he’s fallen on his feet.’

  Frank turned out to be the Kennedy family’s unexpected trump card. Imposing and distinguished, his temper sweetened by the prospect of going to see Aïda in Verona, his arrival made a remarkable impact. Family and friends were arriving in number now, as the wedding approached. Cliona was with Frank, Ray came up from Florence, and many of Roderic’s old friends made the journey from Ireland, including Tony, Jim, Moira, and others whom Dennis recognised and knew. It was odd for him to see these people not just out of the context in which he usually met them, but to see them in a different configuration: to see sitting together the presidential Frank and the silent Tony, who had never met before now. How much stranger must it be, he thought, for Roderic.

  During that week Dennis stayed in Marta and Roderic’s house, but the day before the wedding the brothers moved to a hotel, where they shared a room. Dennis slept fitfully that night, listening at first with feelings of pathos, and then with growing irritation as Roderic snored peacefully in his twin bed. Sometime towards dawn he must have fallen into a fitful doze, for when he awoke Roderic was already up, standing at the open window with the shutters folded back, looking down into the street. ‘What was it Elsa said: walk the plank? Well she was right. That’s what it feels like.’

  Had he not said this, Dennis would never have guessed that Roderic was anything other than the life and soul of his own wedding. He looked handsome, but translated and unfamiliar in his elegant formal clothes. As on his first day in Italy, Dennis found himself being at first caught up in the spirit of everything around him. The wedding took place in a tiny fifteenth-century chapel, beneath an altarpiece of the coronation of the Virgin. Marta had told Dennis with some pride that she had worked on its restoration some years earlier, and later, when he thought back to that day, as though taking his cue from the painting, he would remember it as a series of static, radiant images. Marta, exquisite, with her ivory silk, her roses. The chapel, lit, gilded, like the interior of a reliquary, a shrine. The blazing torches in the scented garden of Marta’s parents’ house, where dinner was held that evening. The moon, pitted and absurdly huge, like a costly lantern of beaten silver that the family had suspended above the garden for the pleasure of their guests. Her father placing Marta’s hand in Roderic’s and proclaiming to applause and laughter, ‘Qui incipit vita nuova.’