Authenticity

by Deirdre Madden

  The meal was as enjoyable as it was basic, and it was as basic as could be imagined. Over coffee afterwards, she brushed away his thanks. ‘You might as well have been here, you’d probably just have been sitting at home on your own otherwise.’

  No he wouldn’t. Cliona. He covered his face with his hands and sat in silence for a few moments, then looked at a bemused Julia through spread fingers.

  ‘May I use your phone?’

  ‘I am going to skin you, Roderic. Skin you alive; and do you know something else? I’m going to enjoy it.’

  ‘Cliona, I can’t begin to apologise…’

  ‘You’re telling me. We waited for ages. You should have seen the salmon by the time we sat down to it.’

  ‘I can’t tell you how sorry I am. I knew there was something, all evening it was at the back of my mind, that I shouldn’t be where I was, that I ought to be elsewhere.’

  ‘I rang your house. Twice.’

  ‘I’m terribly sorry, truly I am.’ He continued to apologise profusely, but was aware that nothing he said now would neutralise his sister’s annoyance.

  When the call was over he remained sitting in Julia’s living room for a few moments. How familiar it all seemed: the dusty bookcase, the odd mix of make-do furniture and fine antiques, the shabby rugs. Familiar, too, the scene that had been called up to him as he spoke to Cliona: the diminutive paper napkins handed round with the drinks, the jug of orange squash ostentatious beside his place at table, the pastry-forks, the doilies, the numbing chit-chat, the wretched salmon itself; how glad he was to have missed it all. He returned to the kitchen. ‘Did you hear that?’

  Julia nodded.

  ‘Did I sound convincing?’

  She shook her head. ‘Not in the least,’ she said. ‘Not in the least!’

  And then two nights later he came home from the studio to see the green light flashing on his answering machine. He flopped down in a chair and pressed the button to hear the message without bothering to turn on the light: there was still just about brightness enough to see what he was doing.

  ‘Roderic, hello, this is Julia. That book you mentioned about land art. Could I borrow it before this weekend? Give me a call tonight or tomorrow. Look after yourself. Bye.’

  She had left messages on his machine before every bit as banal as this, and he had listened to them, called her, wiped them and forgotten about it. So he didn’t understand why tonight he pressed the button again. ‘Roderic, hello, this is Julia.’ Her voice was hesitant but clear, her words to the point as always. When the message had finished for the second time he put the receiver on the table beside the phone, pressed some more buttons, and now her tones filled the room. He sat back in his chair, listening to her accent, the exact timbre of her voice that he had heard so often but had, perhaps, never before truly listened to for its own qualities. The machine was set now so that the message was repeated endlessly, ‘Roderic, hello, this is Julia,’ and he sat there in the gathering dusk listening, at peace, deeply happy in a complete and sudden way, such as he hadn’t known for years.

  Chapter Nineteen

  She’d said it late one night, shortly before the end. They were sitting in the kitchen, at odds with each other but not quarrelling. Marta was slumped at the table, exhausted and resigned with her head in her hands, while Roderic drunkenly attempted to justify his ways.

  ‘There have been no other women,’ he said portentously. ‘I want you to know that, Marta. Whatever else, I’ve always been faithful to you.’

  Slowly she had lifted her head and stared at him, incredulous. ‘But who would have you, Roderic?’ she said and she actually laughed. ‘What woman in her right mind would want anything to do with you as you are now?’

  He was too shocked to reply. In those last weeks and months they each said deliberately hurtful things to each other; probably she would have been surprised to know that none of it cut him so deep or stayed in his mind so long as that single remark.

  The marriage collapsed shortly after their tenth anniversary and Roderic fled to Ireland. For the first month he stayed with Dennis, who was appalled by the situation, much more than he had expected him to be, and who made futile attempts to bring about a reconciliation. Roderic then moved into a place of his own, a small dingy flat in Rathmines. He hated it from the moment he saw it but took it as a stopgap, never thinking that, lacking the will or the energy to move elsewhere, he would be there for the next seven years. The life that he embarked upon now was a distorted version of the one he had lived before going to Italy. Although he still had friends from the old days, his whole social circle had subtly but profoundly changed: people had settled down, moved on, moved away. Nowhere was the difference more apparent than in his relations with women. But who would have you, Roderic? Well, now he was finding out. Like him, the women who gravitated towards him at this point in his life had something to expiate, something to prove. In the past he had had encounters as short-lived and casual as he now did: one-night stands, affairs that had burnt themselves out in the course of a few nights, the occasional fling after a party. Even when they had been botched or disappointing they had never been depressing, but invariably now he felt hollow and desperate afterwards, his loneliness more acute. It was a revelation to him that sex could be such a sordid, even squalid, thing. And then he met Jeannie.

  Like most of the women with whom he associated at this time, he met her in a pub. He noticed her one night near closing time, sitting alone in a corner crying. ‘Tell me what’s wrong. It can’t be that bad.’

  ‘I’ve lost my children.’

  There was nothing she could have said better calculated to engage his sympathy. The barman rang the bell and put towels over the taps, started to turn out the lights and stack chairs on tables in the hope of driving home the last patrons.

  ‘Come with me,’ Roderic said. ‘I’ll look after you.’

  She went with him, as meek as a lamb, something he was to remember with astonishment later when he was acquainted with the full force of her rage. They went back to his flat and although she attempted to tell him something of her life, it was some weeks before he could piece together exactly what had happened.

  Her story was not an unfamiliar one. Roderic had read variations of it in a couple of novels from the nineteenth century, but had never expected to come across so classic and painful a version of it so close to home. Early in life Jeannie had married a man much older than she. Within three years they had a son and a daughter, but the marriage was a cold, quarrelsome affair. Although she was unhappy she resigned herself to her fate, accepting that her children were to be her sole consolation in life. She denied it vehemently to Roderic, but he suspected that it was during these years that she started to drink. And then when the boy was nine and the girl eight, something completely unforeseen happened: Jeannie fell in love. She admitted that in leaving her family to be with the other man, as she did within a few weeks of meeting him, she hadn’t fully understood what she was setting in motion. ‘I was only trying to be honest,’ she said. ‘We could have kept the whole thing hidden and met secretly, but I believed that would have been wrong.’ She had thought that in her new situation she would be able to work out something in relation to the children when the dust settled, but within three months, everything had fallen apart. Her lover’s wife said she would take him back on condition that he broke off all relations with Jeannie and, for the sake of his daughter, he went. She found herself alone, locked in a bitter battle with her own husband over custody of their children. Much was made of her drinking, her desertion, and she lost the case, was granted only the most limited access. Her grief, her fury over her fate, knew no bounds, and Roderic was to bear the brunt of it.

  He settled into a relationship with her that, like the tenancy of his flat, dragged on pointlessly for years because he lacked the necessary resolution to bring it to an end. Such affection and companionship as existed between them was continually undermined by their mutual unhappiness. What he felt f
or her was at best a kind of pity, and it was the pity that sustained him throughout those years. Her sorrow for her life took the form of anger and, while Roderic had an irascible streak, he was not a violent man, which served her ends perfectly. Their main reason for being together he now saw had been to punish each other, an unspoken contract they had fulfilled with absolute dedication. He could still feel his scalp tighten when he thought of her pulling his hair, could still feel on occasion the tracks of her nails down his cheek. If his life in those years had been hell, Jeannie had provided the company of the damned. It was she who finally brought things to an end, telling him she never wanted to see him again.

  A few weeks after they parted he stopped drinking, and the numb misery of being constantly drunk was replaced by the searing pain of being constantly sober and obliged to face up to the harm he had done. But if his past behaviour towards Dennis, Jeannie and his friends was a scar on his life, the thought of Marta and the children was a wound, a living open wound, and he suffered on their account as he suffered for no one else. He had nightmares about Marta at that time which were peculiar because they were not in themselves unpleasant. He dreamt about her with unnerving clarity as she had been when they first met; saw her at work, perched on the scaffolding high above the nave of a church, waving down at him and smiling, far lovelier than the blank-faced saint whose image she was restoring. She gestured towards the ladder. Do you want to come up and join me? Do you want to come up? They were sitting in the garden at dusk, beneath a trellis covered in white roses. He had his arm around her and could feel the weight and the warmth of her body leaning against him. Silently he marvelled that he should have the luck to be loved by her.

  And then he would awake, and his conscious mind supplied the memories that transformed the dreams to nightmares. Furious rows about the amount of time he spent closed away in the studio; about his having been rude to her mother, about his not wanting to go on holiday with her parents; about his not wanting to go on holiday at all; about his indifference to decisions concerning the house and garden; about his drinking, his drinking, his drinking. Marta late at night, crying and trying to stifle her sobs so as not to wake the children. I married you in good faith, Roderic, and I’ve done my best, but I can’t take any more, and I can’t go on. I can’t go on. At two o’clock in the morning he paced the floor remembering all of this, chain smoking, wishing to Christ he could have a drink and knowing that if he did so it would only be to bring his whole life unravelling around him again.

  Concomitant with all this emotional tribulation when he stopped drinking had been a great number of practical problems to be sorted out. In the first instance, he needed a place to live. He couldn’t face going back to the flat in Rathmines, and moving in with Dennis again was out of the question. Through a friend of a friend he heard of a house that was available to rent, an artisan’s cottage in the Liberties. He went to see it and walked from room to empty room. The last tenant had painted it white throughout to maximise the light. The effect this gave was of a series of tiny interlinked cells, as in a monastery rather than a prison. Standing at an upstairs window he listened to the bells of Christchurch. It was the morning, and a patch of light fell on the wall in a soft rectangle. Surrounded by this quiet austerity he remembered the night of his wedding, and how in the middle of all the lavish celebrations, Marta’s father had taken her hand and placed it in his: Qui incipit vita nuova. He went downstairs and told the landlord who was waiting there that he would take the house.

  Although he had continued to paint, and painted remarkably well during all the years that he was drinking, what he referred to as ‘the business side of things’ – galleries, dealers, exhibitions – had been neglected and required serious attention. He was keen to be on better terms again with Cliona and Maeve, from whom he had drifted away and whose kindness to him when he was in hospital drying out had filled him with gratitude. Above all, he wanted to restore relations with his family in Italy and, as he expected, this proved to be the most complex and delicate of the many problems now confronting him. Given all of this, to think that there was no possibility of any imminent emotional entanglement was no hardship at all. There was as much likelihood, he told himself, of him embarking on a new relationship as there was of him setting out to walk across Antarctica.

  Although in his new sobriety he was often anxious and depressed his principal problem, he came to realise during that time, was a massive lack of confidence. With the doing of his work excepted, it permeated every aspect of his life and was what people were unconsciously referring to when they said how much he had changed; that he was quieter now, less sociable and ebullient than in the past. Roderic himself was occasionally taken aback at how it manifested itself, as on the day when he saw his friend Jim on Grafton Street. Instead of calling out to him and going over to say hello he instinctively shrank into a doorway, hoping he hadn’t been seen, and for the rest of that day he asked himself why. They had known each other since art college. Jim knew what Roderic had been through in recent months and they had even met and talked a few times since he came out of hospital, but today he simply couldn’t face him. His emotional resources were so depleted that he had nothing left over to give to another person and couldn’t believe he wouldn’t be found severely wanting, even by Jim, that most sympathetic of men.

  As time passed and things slowly resolved themselves this situation began to change, and if his great lack of confidence had ambushed him unexpectedly, so too did the beginnings of its resolution. Shortly after his first, abortive attempt to see his family again after he stopped drinking, he went one day to collect a jacket from the dry cleaners. There was some minor confusion over the docket and as it was being sorted out he made a little joke that genuinely amused the young woman behind the counter. Roderic laughed too, and he then smiled at her. The effect was startling, creating that sudden aura of connectedness that he had, in the past, deliberately drawn women into at will. This skill had been in abeyance during his years of tribulation, and to find it reasserting itself now so completely and so effortlessly astonished him more than it did the woman, who was experiencing it for the first time. He hardly knew how he found himself back out on the street again, with the jacket on its wire hanger and swathed in polythene. In the weeks that followed he cautiously tested his powers again and was reassured by the results. To begin with, these fleeting relations with strangers were enough. Later, when he occasionally chanced to meet someone particularly attractive or engaging he would wonder for a moment if his life might not be different, if he should perhaps take things a stage further. But with that an immense weariness would sweep over him as he remembered Jeannie’s drunken fury, her temper and her rages, remembered Marta’s face blotched with crying, her eyes swollen and red. But who would have you, Roderic?

  It was actually the prospect of seeing Marta again that precipitated his taking action, although he only realised this after the event. His starting to plan for his June trip to Italy – and this time he was determined to go through with it – coincided with a couple of short affairs that he embarked upon in a spirit of experimentation. If they didn’t lead to anything or weren’t particularly satisfactory it didn’t much matter, he told himself (which was just as well, because they didn’t and weren’t). He was glad, though, that they’d happened, doubly so because of Gianni, Marta’s new lover. He met Julia for the first time shortly after returning from Italy, but as he was preoccupied with consolidating his new relationship with his daughters and busy with his work he didn’t think of her in that light even as their friendship developed. The whole issue of women slipped quietly back down the agenda.

  And then in mid September Julia left the message on his answering machine.

  The following morning he took the book for which she had asked and went straight round to the shop. To his annoyance she was already with a customer, some early bird who had nothing better to do on a Friday morning than dither over firescreens, and so he sat down to wait until she was fre
e. Watching her, Roderic measured up the reality against the image he had had in his mind and didn’t find it wanting, found it surpassed. Did this indecisive fool – ‘The one with the grapes is nice but I like the colours of the other one; it’s so hard for me to make up my mind’ – did he know the luck he had had to call in this morning and meet Julia? He gave no sign of it. Why wouldn’t he just go away and leave them alone? ‘I’m also interested in candlesticks,’ he announced now. Was there no mercy? The door of the shop opened and a woman came in, wanting to buy a wardrobe. There was no mercy. Roderic set the book on a table and indicated to Julia that he had to go on. She smiled her thanks and regret, promised to call him soon. In fairness to Mr Firescreen, he thought as he continued on his way, he too had failed to fully appreciate Julia when he first met her. What was it he had said to Maria Hill? She’s a nice young woman. Seems very bright. Something absurd like that. Why on that first day hadn’t he suggested that they spend the rest of the evening together, to cheer her up after her disappointment about the fellowship? They could have gone for a meal or to the cinema and then, in the great euphemism of his youth, ‘seen how things developed from there’. Part of the problem now was that he knew her too well. He had always found it hard to fathom the need many women seemed to have for getting to know someone extremely well before going to bed with them. To him it was illogical; it made far more sense for sex to come into the picture early on – as soon as possible – and then to take things from there. The problem with going about it the other way and trying to get the emotional side sorted out first was that it raised the stakes too high. There was more potential for misunderstanding and embarrassment, more likelihood of people getting hurt. And this, by default, was the position in which he now found himself.