Authenticity

by Deirdre Madden

  He loved her and wanted her, of that there was not the slightest doubt in his mind. He could spend four hours in her company talking and not see the time pass. When he was apart from her, he thought of her obsessively: of her wit, her thoughtful silences, the exactitude of her pronouncements on certain things, her insistence on accuracy; of the texture of her skin, her dear grey eyes, her breasts, her lips, her wrists. He wanted her so much that when he saw her again it was impossible that she wouldn’t know, that nothing would happen.

  She called round to his house that night. ‘So how have things been with you since last I saw you?’ she asked, lighting a cigarette and shaking the match to extinction.

  I’ve thought of nothing and no one but you. You’ve been the last thought in my mind before I go to sleep at night, and my first thought in the morning. I want to take you to bed and stay there for about a week.

  ‘Well?’ she said again, puzzled that he hadn’t answered her. ‘How have things been?’

  ‘Fine,’ he said. ‘Things have been fine. Well, all right. Not bad. I mean good.’

  ‘Do you think,’ she said, ‘you could be a bit more specific?’

  She was wearing jeans and a blue and white check shirt.

  There was a sticking plaster on her left hand. ‘Did the cat scratch you?’

  ‘No, I burnt myself on a pot.’

  She looked different, more – there was no other way to put it – more real, as if she were someone he had known only through photographs and was meeting for the first time. He stared at her and gave monosyllabic answers to her questions. She told him that she was going home for the weekend, to see her father.

  He had been wrong, he reflected after she’d gone. The main problem wasn’t that he knew her too well but that his confidence had once again completely deserted him. He sat imagining his younger self watching him with amazement and incredulity. In his youth he had never been gauche in this way and had been puzzled by men who were. If the relations between men and women were a language, it was one he spoke and understood fluently, down to the most complex rule of grammar, the most subtle nuance of idiom. But he had lost his nerve, lost the knack. It was like being thrown into a lake and discovering that it was indeed possible to forget how to swim.

  He was still brooding on it the following day, when he went to Dennis’s house for lunch. Roderic sat at the kitchen table while his brother moved around the room preparing the meal. Sometimes the perfection of Dennis’s life depressed Roderic: there seemed to be not a single aspect of it that he had bungled. Although it was never spoken of, Roderic knew that all Dennis’s affairs were in perfect order, that his life was hung around with financial securities, like a Viking long-ship hung with shields: life insurance and house insurance; health insurance and pensions; savings plans and financial investments.

  ‘Have you made your will?’

  Dennis, who had just set a glass of apple-juice in front of Roderic and was helping himself to some white Burgundy, looked surprised. ‘Of course I have,’ he said shortly. ‘Haven’t you?’

  ‘I’m thinking of getting round to it very soon.’

  Dennis shook his head slowly in disbelief. ‘You must be mad,’ he said. ‘Stark raving mad, not to have seen to it before now. Your pictures alone – the contents of your studio. If anything were to happen…’

  ‘I know, I know, I know,’ Roderic said, sorry that he had spoken. ‘I told you, I’m going to do it any day now.’

  ‘I’m glad to hear it,’ Dennis said. ‘Cheers.’ He sipped his wine and started to rub the papery pink skins off some garlic cloves.

  His job, too, Roderic considered, as he watched him: he’d risen steadily as the years passed, promotions and salary increases following on from each other with the regularity of the seasons. He’d made sensible home improvements that increased the value of the house, installing a sophisticated central heating system and having the garden landscaped, front and back; and then the economy had obligingly taken property prices to astronomical levels, making Dennis’s home worth a mind-boggling sum. Roderic drank his juice and looked around the kitchen with its electric juicer, its ceramic hob. It was the attention to detail that staggered him. On the wall there was a little slate on which Dennis wrote the names of things as he needed them. Olive oil, the slate read. Muesli. Cling film. He always had a pen beside the phone and kept a pair of scissors strictly for kitchen use. There was always a supply of spare light bulbs, and candles in case of a power cut.

  The peeled garlic looked like huge, strange teeth extracted from the jaw of some monster. Roderic imagined his father briskly whipping them out with a pair of pliers; imagined the monster whimpering and Frank telling it to belt up. Dennis placed one of them under the wide blade of a knife and brought his fist crashing down upon it hard, to smash and crush the clove.

  ‘Penny for your thoughts, Roderic.’

  ‘Oh, just the usual.’

  Dennis sprinkled salt from a salt pig on to the garlic and crushed it again.

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘I was just thinking for the billionth time about how you’ve made such a good fist of your life, and I’ve made such a pig’s arse of mine. That’s all.’

  Dennis stared at him neutrally for a few moments, then took a drink of wine. ‘If you’re referring to this place the housekeeper does pretty well everything, not me. Nothing else in particular bothering you?’

  God, he was a shrewd old coot too, Roderic thought. In general, he understood and fully accepted the difference between his brother’s life and his own. Dennis knew this, knew that it troubled him only when he was flagellating himself over some other problem in his life, as he was now over Julia.

  ‘What could I possibly have to bother me?’ Roderic replied rhetorically.

  ‘You tell me. Anything special on your mind?’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘Delighted to hear it,’ Dennis said, clearly not believing him for a minute.

  Once, years ago, not long after they started living in the same house, Roderic had tried to fix Dennis up with a woman. One Friday night at a party he’d met the sister of a friend of his. Irene: he could still remember her name after all these years. She was a reserved and soft-spoken woman, who worked in a building society and loved going to the theatre. As Roderic sat on the floor beside her chatting, a plot hatched in his mind. It evolved as the evening wore on and matured overnight, so that by the time he burst into the kitchen the following morning he was positively bubbling with enthusiasm for his scheme. ‘I’ve got great news for you, Dennis. Great news!’

  Dennis, hunched owlishly behind his Irish Times with a pot of tea and a rack of toast, glanced up briefly at his brother, not quite catching what Roderic said and not particularly interested either. ‘The kettle’s full. Bring it back up to the boil if you want to make coffee.’

  ‘No, no, listen to me. I met a woman last night …’

  ‘Now, there’s a novelty.’

  ‘I know you’ll really like her. You’ve got ever such a lot in common.’

  Dennis stared at him now as he rattled on, at first genuinely not getting the point, but as the meaning became clear embarrassment and annoyance showed on his face.

  ‘Knock it off, Roderic,’ he said, ‘I’m not remotely interested.’ Frowning, he pointedly turned back to his newspaper.

  ‘Her name’s Irene, she’s just your type …’

  ‘Drop it’

  ‘When you meet her you’ll see what I mean, you …’

  ‘Roderic, did you hear me? Did you hear what I said? I SAID NO!’

  It wasn’t so much the vehemence of this reply that surprised him – although that in itself was striking, for Dennis rarely raised his voice – as the distinct note of fear that he could detect. Remembering it now he cringed with embarrassment. He wished he could apologise, but guessed rightly that Dennis would not be best pleased to have the subject brought up again after all these years. In spite of their closeness, Dennis had remained for a long time an eni
gma to Roderic in terms of his emotional life. The seeming complete absence of women in his life had made him briefly wonder if his brother might be gay, but a complete absence of men seemed to give the lie to that too. Such friendships as he had tended to be work related, and struck Roderic as affectionate but detached. Against this, of course, had to be set his volcanic relationship with his father and, most particularly, his overheated and somewhat febrile attachment to Roderic himself. The rather solitary life he led clearly suited him. Roderic admired Dennis, and wondered if he had ever told him this explicitly. Now did not seem to be the moment.

  ‘Confidence,’ he said now. ‘My confidence has taken a battering over the past years, and I feel it keenly these days.’

  ‘Don’t try to force anything,’ Dennis said. ‘Let things take their course.’

  ‘Do you ever wonder is there a finite number of errors one can make in life? I mean serious, life-changing errors? You know, like a cat being supposed to have nine lives; only you don’t know how many there are, so you just go blundering on. Or at least, I go blundering on.’

  ‘You’re doing well these days,’ Dennis urged. ‘Don’t force things, don’t put yourself under unnecessary pressure.’

  He didn’t have the heart to ask him about necessary pressure.

  He enjoyed the rest of the day with his brother. It provided some distraction from his obsession with Julia, although he fell to thinking about it again as soon as he was back in his own house. The stakes, he told himself the following day, were too high. Much as he valued her friendship, he wanted more now, but was afraid that if he forced the issue he would spoil everything. He spent all of Sunday trying to wean himself off her by the rather unpleasant exercise of focusing on her bad points and weaknesses, starting with her physical shortcomings. Her incisors were too pointed, and made her, when she smiled, look uncannily like the dreaded Max. Her hair, when she didn’t have it pinned up or pulled back, could look distinctly odd, like Shockheaded Peter in the children’s book, and she had a strange way of walking, ungainly and slightly hen toed. Having quickly run out of ideas, he turned to her faults in a moral sphere. She was spoilt, she admitted it. An only child brought up by her father, she was used to being the doting focus of male attention, and expected it, took it for granted even. She was a man’s woman, and he was just one of many men. He remembered Stephen, poor Stephen, as he now thought of him, and how ruthlessly she’d dispatched him from the shop. If she knew the turmoil he was in she’d laugh at him for being so foolish as to think she would ever consider him in that light. He was just someone she happened to know. If there was an atmosphere, if there was some impulse or signal coming from her, she was just amusing herself, teasing him, practising so that she would be ready when she met someone whom she really did want. She was coldly … no. Not cold. Never cold. Whatever else, she was never that.

  He succeeded in holding a reasonably unflattering image of her in his mind for all of Sunday until the evening, when Julia appeared unexpectedly at his door, having just arrived back in Dublin, with Max sullen in his cage. That strange, unique mane of hair, that sensual feline smile, that walk – in less than a minute he was back to square one. She stayed only long enough to ask a few unwittingly pertinent questions – ‘So how was your weekend? What did you do today?’ for which he had no adequate answers. ‘Look at him now,’ she said to Max when she stood up to leave. ‘He’s going to sit and sulk for the rest of the evening, the fool. I can tell it just by looking at him.’ Roderic was about to defend himself against this remarkable slur when he realised, just in time, that she had actually been speaking to him about the cat and not to the cat about him.

  Having failed to find adequate fault in her, he turned to the simpler task of finding fault in himself. Why would she want him? What could she possibly see in him, with his drinker’s face and his wrecked marriage? He was more than twenty years older than she and he looked it: it would be embarrassing for her to be seen with him. She was too intelligent to be won over simply by the eminence he had achieved as a painter, and that notwithstanding, he had made a complete bags of everything else in his life. She might not have got that fellowship in Italy, but it was only a matter of time: something would come through and then both her life and her career would take off. He imagined her disappearing into the future as though it were a radiant forest, where the fruit on the trees were glittering prizes that showered down on her, and other men were waiting. No doubt some Good Samaritan had already shared with her tales of some of his more humiliating adventures, things he hated to remember, and forced himself to think of now. When she stared at him with her dear grey eyes and her mind appeared to be elsewhere, that was the kind of thing she was thinking of, not that she wanted him as a lover. The night he had thrown up in Maria Hill’s studio, for example, but he suspected Maria had kept that one to herself. More public humiliations then: almost anything involving Jeannie, such as the night she picked a fight with him in the pub, and they were both turfed out on to the street. Or what about the night he went round to her house and she wouldn’t let him in, and he had bellowed up at her window until the neighbours, quite reasonably, called the guards, and he’d been hauled off to the barracks, and Dennis had to come and get him. For no matter how pissed he’d been, he’d always been able to remember Dennis’s address and phone number, hadn’t he?

  In late September he set himself a deadline. At the end of October he was to go to Paris for a short holiday: the situation would be resolved before he left. To make this decision helped him; to know that he was working within a specific timeframe brought everything into sharper focus. When they were together now he was conscious of the tension there was in the absolute absence of physical contact, so that the spaces between them, across a table, across a hearth rug, were charged with a strange energy, like the spaces in an oriental painting. He moved into a hypnotic state, in which he thought of what he needed to do – reach out and touch her hand, stroke her cheek with his finger, lean over and kiss her – but he didn’t, still couldn’t do it. He remembered being in the chapel with Marta: the cool darkness, the sound of the coins falling and the flood of sudden light, the intense wave of desire.

  The month melted away until only a week was left. He was to go to Paris on the morning of the last Friday in October, and on the Monday he returned to his house from the studio to find the green light blinking on his answering machine. Even before he pressed the button, something told him it would be bad news. ‘Roderic, hello, this is Julia. My father rang to say he’s not well, so I’m taking time off work and going down to look after him. I probably won’t be back up in Dublin before you leave, so have a good time, and look after yourself. I’ll see you when you get back.’ A loud shrill bleep discreetly drowned out the torrent of effing and blinding with which Roderic greeted this information.

  The black mood into which this plunged him did not disperse in the following days, and was not helped by cold, rainy weather that showed no sign of breaking. He was taken aback at how keenly he felt his loneliness that week, with Julia away and no possibility of communicating with her; hoped the same mood wouldn’t dog him when he was in Paris. Thursday was ghastly. Dennis had called on Wednesday to say he was off work with flu, but refused Roderic’s offer to come and look after him. ‘Aren’t you going to France soon? I’m sure you’re busy. Don’t worry about me, I’ll be all right.’ In spite of this, he decided to drive over to Dennis’s place shortly before twelve the following day. He stopped off on the way to buy some things, and let himself in using a key that had been entrusted to him for emergencies such as this. The house was absolutely silent and still, eerily so. He picked up some letters that were scattered on the hall floor and carried them through to the kitchen, passing by his own paintings. Coming back, he spoke his brother’s name once, hesitantly, but there was no reply and then, trying to make as little noise as possible, he crept upstairs. The door of the main bedroom was ajar and standing on the threshold Roderic looked into the room.

&
nbsp; Dennis, tucked up under his duvet in his blue pyjamas, was fast asleep. On the bed beside him was a large box of tissues, on the bedside table a glass and a plastic bottle of water, together with a blister pack of aspirin, the foil punched through in several places. The air in the room was heavy and stale. Sleeping, he looked vulnerable, almost childlike, wholly unlike the fully taxed and insured, garlic-crushing Dennis who had recently entertained him. It broke Roderic’s heart to see him like this. The last time he had been in this room had been one of the worst days of his life; and if it upset him so much to see his brother brought low by a mere flu, how must Dennis have felt watching Roderic in his darkest hour. A detail that he’d forgotten came back to him now, of how he’d struggled to get his shoes off and hadn’t been able to manage it until Dennis offered to help him, had actually knelt down at his feet and untied his stinking trainers for him. Vividly he could see again the fragile crown of Dennis’s fair head bowed before him and the guilt and shame that he’d been too far gone to register at the time swept over him in a hot wave. As he remembered this his brother suddenly opened his eyes very wide and stared at Roderic with something close to terror, as though he too were thinking of that dreadful day and could hardly bear it. Then he closed them again.

  ‘Jesus, you frightened the life out of me. I didn’t hear you come in. I thought you were a burglar.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I was worried about you being sick here on your own. I brought you some things: apples, orange juice, a newspaper. If there’s anything else you need or want I’ll go and get it.’

  Dennis opened his eyes again. ‘Aren’t you very kind? Aren’t I lucky to have such a thoughtful brother?’

  The weather was still bad when he left the house. He got stuck in traffic, arrived back at his studio much later than he had expected, and was running behind schedule for the rest of the day as he struggled to get things tidied and finished up. Back home he packed his bags and it was well after nine o’clock before he had his evening meal, a dismal affair cobbled together out of the dregs of the fridge: an old piece of chicken, a hard boiled egg, and some lettuce on the point of no return. He was clearing up afterwards when the phone rang. It was Julia, back in Dublin sooner than either of them had expected.