Authenticity

by Deirdre Madden

  At the end of the meal, one of Marta’s uncles plied Dennis with grappa, more than he could take. Ray acted as interpreter and negotiator for them. ‘He says it’s good for you, that it’s from the mountains.’ Dennis put his outspread palm across the top of his glass. ‘He says it’ll make you feel happy.’ Ray then said a few words in Italian. ‘I told him you’re happy already,’ he said. The uncle, not to be fooled, shook his head and made again to fill Dennis’s glass.

  When Dennis finally got back to the hotel, he sat and stared across at where Roderic had slept the night before. The chamber-maid had made up the bed, the sheets and blankets were tightly stretched and tucked in. The sense of emptiness it gave troubled him. He looked, too, at the things he had brought back to the room with him: the crumpled flower from his lapel; the white porcelain dishes that had been pressed upon him to be taken back to Ireland for his mother and sister; the bottle of grappa that Marta’s uncle had finally stuffed in his jacket pocket as they rose at last from the table.

  And then Dennis did something he had never done before, and about which he would never tell anyone for the rest of his life. He took a glass from the bathroom, opened the grappa, settled down and started to drink. He drank slowly, industriously until the air seemed to thicken and become heavy around him, and the quality of silence in the room changed in a way he couldn’t define. He kept drinking until he couldn’t trust himself to stand up, until his body no longer seemed to be under his command. When he awoke the following morning he was in bed, half undressed, although he couldn’t remember anything of how his night had finally ended. He realised that he might have killed himself, quite literally, had been vaguely aware of that fact even as he drank. Never in his life had he felt so sick, so wretched.

  It was an act he never regretted.

  Chapter Eighteen

  When Roderic was at art school he had been close to a painter who was much older than he, a man in his seventies. It had been an important friendship, with the same freedom, the same lack of pressure that he valued in his relations with Julia. As he got to know her better over the course of that summer when they first met it helped that she was not his peer, that they were not constantly and discreetly measuring their own lives against each other. This was something he found impossible to resist with people of his own generation, even his best and oldest friends, and it was a painful exercise, for he was always aware of how much ground he had lost through the vicissitudes of his life. If he did make comparisons with Julia, it was with himself at the same age, and the result was favourable. Cheerful, sociable, she reminded him of himself at one of the happiest times of his life. He was in her house one day when the phone rang three times in quick succession. The first call was from someone inviting her to a party, the other two from friends just wanting to chat and whom she promised to ring back later that evening.

  ‘Perhaps I should leave it off the hook, or we’ll never get any peace.’

  ‘At least you don’t know what it is to be lonely,’ he said.

  ‘No,’ she admitted, ‘I don’t’ At the same age he could have said the same thing: it was only when he got married that he had found out what loneliness was.

  When he passed the shop in the mornings he would see her inside. Usually she was engaged in one of the minor tasks of maintenance or restoration that her job entailed, waxing tables or polishing silver, but he noticed that she also used her time at work to catch up with her social life. Glancing through the window as he passed by, he would see her chatting with some young man or woman who clearly wasn’t a customer, and he even came to recognise the regulars, her best friends. One day at the end of July he called in himself to find her in the company of a slight, fair-haired man whom he hadn’t noticed from the street.

  ‘If late Thursday afternoon doesn’t suit, we could make it Friday,’ he was saying to Julia.

  ‘Next Thursday’s definitely out,’ she replied. ‘I’m not free then. Oh, hello, Roderic.’

  The young man, whom she introduced as Stephen, clearly regarded him as the fifth wheel on a cart. He refused to let himself be drawn into conversation and left the shop in something of a huff five minutes later, his appointment with Julia still unresolved. She made no particular comment about him after he had gone, nor did Roderic expect her to.

  ‘So what are you up to these days?’ she asked and he told her he was going to Edinburgh for a long weekend. ‘Are you indeed? Lucky for some.’ They talked about his plans for his time there and then she said, ‘We must get together when you’re back, so you can tell me about it’

  ‘When would suit?’

  ‘What about Thursday?’ she said, with only a ghost of a smile. ‘Next Thursday, late afternoon, I’m not doing anything special.’

  This little instance of duplicity amused him, but he was not so vain as to think of it as flattering him, saw it rather as a case of Stephen being given the brush-off. He had a clear distinction in his own mind between himself and these other friends of hers, to whom she was close or who wanted to be close to her. Their own relationship was warm but somewhat impersonal. He found her reserved and incurious, which suited him perfectly as his tribulations had made him more private and cautious than he would have been in the past. He didn’t want to talk about all he had been through, and she didn’t seem to be interested in knowing.

  The central facts of their lives – his years in Italy, her family situation – were established through oblique or passing references. When, for example, they were talking one day about art restoration and she commented that he seemed to be exceptionally well informed on the subject, he explained why. Every ten days or fortnight they would arrange to meet, sometimes at her house, more usually at a café. They loaned each other books and music, suggested films and plays each thought the other might like. Occasionally they went together to exhibitions. Roderic mentioned that he was interested in the impact of new technology on art but that he didn’t know a great deal about it, and so Julia arranged for him to meet a friend of hers who worked in this field.

  Each unwittingly said things at times that surprised or intrigued the other, that gave a glimpse of the unspoken hinterlands of their lives. Once they were talking about Joseph Beuys, and Julia said she had read somewhere that the story of his being wrapped in felt and fat by nomads in the Caucasus when they saved him from his crashed plane simply wasn’t true. And Roderic immediately said, ‘Oh I believe it. I believe it’s true. If you’ve ever been distressed, at an absolutely critical moment in your life, and someone puts a blanket round you, you never forget it, never, because you know that the worst is over. Now you’re going to get help, you’re going to be saved.’ The depth of feeling with which he spoke startled her and she didn’t know what to say, and then he in turn was embarrassed, as if he’d said too much. ‘Like, you know, if you were drowning and they pulled you from the water, and then in the lifeboat they put a blanket around you. That sort of thing. Drowning, yes.’

  Another time it was his turn to be surprised, when he said something about the zeitgeist, and she said, ‘The what? Oh that. I’m not interested in that.’

  ‘Why not? What are you interested in, then?’

  ‘Things that go beyond time, that sort of manage to get behind it or deny it in some way. Like Joseph Cornell falling in love with the dancer. It didn’t matter that he lived in New York in the nineteen forties and she’d been dead for a hundred years, he loved her so much that one day he saw her, in a building across the street.’

  In the shop she would occasionally show him particular pieces that caught her imagination. ‘Hester says that vase was made to hold celery, not flowers. People ate raw celery at the end of formal dinners in the nineteenth century.’ More often she was taken by objects that folded intricately into themselves, concealing their function with complex artifice: a gold locket that became a lorgnette, a walking stick that was also a telescope. Although he became used to seeing her in the shop there was something about it that never quite added up. It wasn’t, h
e thought, watching her as she unfolded an ivory fan, that she was a quintessentially contemporary person surrounded by outmoded things. He didn’t know what it was.

  ‘Would you like to have lived in the past?’ he asked, in an attempt at elucidation.

  ‘It depends. I wouldn’t like to have been the owner of this,’ and she slowly closed the fan again. ‘At least, I don’t think so. I hate the thought of the whole world it suggests – overstuffed, tightly buttoned – where women were supposed to be completely passive. And yet, who’s to say? Maybe the woman who owned this fan had a highly developed consciousness. It’s what’s going on in your head that matters. Maybe in herself she was completely free. I’d like to think that was the case.’

  Aware that he occasionally visited her but that she never visited him, Roderic gave her his address and urged her to call in whenever she wished. She took him at his word and arrived one Wednesday evening at the end of August shortly after seven, to be quickly ushered in. ‘I’m on the phone, long distance. It may take some time.’ He made to bring her into the sitting room, but when she saw that the telephone was there, Julia drew back.

  ‘I’ll stay in the hall.’

  ‘There’s no need, truly. You’ll be cold here,’ but she insisted and Roderic, anxious to get back to his call, had no option but to let her have her way.

  Settling down on the stairs, Julia immediately understood that her scruples on this point had been misplaced. Roderic’s house was tiny and the door between the two rooms didn’t close properly, so that she could hear him as distinctly as if she had indeed been sitting right beside him. More to the point, because he was speaking in Italian, she couldn’t understand a single word that was being said. Having no choice but to listen, she was struck by how fluent he was, how perfect his accent. From the inflection of his voice, she knew when he was asking a question, when reasoning, when explaining something. Whoever was at the other end of the line had evidently said something funny, for he laughed, asked something in tones of incredulity, listened to the response and laughed even more. He said goodbye, there was a pause, then he extravagantly greeted a new person on the line, and she noticed that his whole tone altered now, subtly but distinctly.

  Julia could follow all of this, but still had no idea of what he was specifically talking about. Nothing could have brought home to her more completely the reality of this other life he had had and about which she knew so little, this life in another country with the wife and daughters of whom he seldom spoke. Nothing could have better served to reinforce the idea of all that was closed to her and inaccessible in him than this wall of incomprehensible language. So powerful was the effect, so disconcerting and so distancing, that when he finished his call and reappeared, she was faintly surprised to see that it was indeed Roderic she had overheard some moments earlier, and not a complete stranger.

  He for his part was aware of the distance that had been created and sought to diminish it. ‘That was my daughters. I’ve been trying to mend my fences with them of late. We were estranged for a number of years. As you’ve probably gathered by now I had a major drink problem in the past and it pretty well blew my family life to smithereens. So ever since I stopped drinking a couple of years ago I’ve been trying to get things back on a better footing.’

  Julia nodded. For a moment she wondered if she ought to move the conversation back on to neutral ground then decided to follow through on the area he had opened up. ‘My father also drank heavily at one stage,’ she said, ‘but I think I understood why, even though I was quite small at the time. And it didn’t last too long, six months or so, if that.’

  ‘Are you saying it didn’t bother you?’

  ‘Oh, it bothered me hugely. I hated it. I was glad when he stopped. It was a short-term, intense thing, dreadful for both of us. It was a dreadful time.’

  ‘And he stopped completely?’

  ‘He got it under control, yes.’ She smiled ruefully. ‘After that, once, twice a year at most he used to go on a real bender. Maybe he still does. I don’t think he knows I know about this. He made a big effort to keep it from me, so I did the decent thing and pretended not to know.’

  He dropped in when passing the shop about ten days later, in mid September, surprised to find her there so late in the day as she usually worked mornings.

  ‘Hester asked me to switch with her, she had to go somewhere this afternoon. Tell me, what do you think of this?’ and she showed him a brooch made of three peacock feathers, cut short and sheathed in gold. She held it up against the jumper she wore, and the feathers shimmered. It didn’t suit her at all but would have been the perfect gift for Marta.

  ‘Not your style, I’d have thought.’

  ‘I know. Even if it was, I could never wear it,’ she replied, putting it back in the box. ‘My father has a hundred odd superstitions, things I’ve never heard from anyone else, and one of them is that peacock feathers are unlucky. He won’t have them in the house under any circumstances.’

  ‘You could wear it, still,’ Roderic said. ‘Your father doesn’t have to know about everything you do, does he?’

  She raised her head and smiled at him. ‘Oh he doesn’t know the half of it,’ she said. ‘Not the half of it. And he’s not going to, either.’

  This amused Roderic for an instant, until he thought of his own daughters, particularly of Serena.

  ‘But here’s the rub,’ she said, ‘what if I wore this, or something like it, and my luck turned. What if bad things started to happen to me, what then?’

  ‘So you’re saying that you’re superstitious too?’

  ‘Sounds like it, doesn’t it, although I like to think I’m not’

  ‘What’s he like, your father?’ he asked suddenly.

  Julia thought about this for a moment, then said, ‘Oh, he’s unique,’ still studying the feathers of the brooch.

  ‘Isn’t everybody?’

  ‘No. They ought to be, but the world tries to make people conform, makes them want to stamp out everything in themselves that’s individual. Stupid world. Stupid people. They don’t even realise what’s happening to them. And that’s the tragedy of life.’

  ‘One of the tragedies,’ Roderic said.

  ‘One of them, yes.’

  ‘What about your parents?’ she asked him then. ‘Are they both still alive?’

  ‘My father died a few years after I went to Italy, my mother about a year after I came back. His death made a big impact, hers much less so. I wasn’t dose to her, and at that time I was pretty much overwhelmed by other difficulties, all of them, it has to be said, of my own making.’

  ‘I can’t imagine the loss of a parent not being a trauma,’ she remarked.

  He considered this for a moment. He felt that by now he knew her well enough to ask the next question. ‘How old were you when you lost your mother?’

  ‘Six.’

  Her reply shocked him, for somewhere along the line he had got the impression that she was in her teens when it happened. ‘Do you remember her?’

  She looked at him with immense sadness. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Isn’t that wretched? I can’t remember her at all.’

  ‘Nothing?’ he said and she covered her face with her hands as though the better to concentrate, to see what she could dredge up out of the depths of her mind.

  ‘Oh, so little,’ she said eventually. ‘Strange things, nothing direct, nothing significant. I remember lying in bed when I was a child, late at night and hearing someone setting the table for breakfast. It must have been her. My father’s often told me he did no housework, none at all, when my mother was alive, and when there were just the two of us left, setting the table was my job. I did it in the morning, while he made the breakfast. The sound of cups and saucers. It isn’t much, is it? That’s what I remember.’

  ‘And nothing else?’

  ‘Yes, but like that, little things, fragments, scents, sounds, you know. I can’t see her, that’s the problem, I have no clear image in my mind,’ and her vo
ice had a note now of frustration, even anger, ‘I can’t see her.’

  Roderic was just about to tell her of his own experience with Oriana when the door of the shop opened and Hester came in, all fuss and business, shattering the privacy of the moment, much to his annoyance. Not that Hester noticed.

  ‘Julia, hello. Oh hello, pleased to meet you. Did the man ring about the mirror, the man in Naas? I knew he’d let me down, I just knew it. And Mrs Hall, has she made her mind up about the cabinet? Well that’s something, I suppose. You can go along now, thanks for doing the afternoon for me.’

  ‘Come upstairs, Roderic,’ Julia said as he made for the door. ‘I have books belonging to you I want to return.’

  They did not resume the conversation Hester had interrupted. Julia put on some new music she had recently bought, and as they sat talking, in a general, desultory way now, the room grew dark as the evening drew in. She switched on the light and asked him if he would like to stay for dinner. ‘It’ll be nothing special, believe me.’ Even as Roderic thanked her and said yes, something in the back of his mind told him he ought to refuse. She pulled her hair back with a tortoiseshell comb and washed the dishes. They continued to chat as she scraped carrots, spuds thundered into the sink and Julia rubbed the soil from them with a stiff brush. Why did he feel so uneasy? It was absurd that he should be so self-punishing. She was good company, intelligent and cheerful, so why this gnawing guilt? Two pork chops hissed and spat under the grill. Max, who had wandered off earlier, came back into the room and mewed to be fed. Roderic’s feeling that he should not be there persisted, no matter that he tried to damp it down. ‘The cutlery is in that drawer over there,’ she said, as she jabbed at the meat. ‘Could you set the table?’