Authenticity

by Deirdre Madden

  He left the house immediately and went straight round. ‘I’ve been thinking of you all week,’ she said as she led him up the stairs to the flat. ‘I was really disappointed to think that I wouldn’t see you before you left’ There was a fire burning in the grate and she knelt before it to stoke it up. She looked, Roderic thought, drawn and tired and when he asked her how her visit home had been she said frankly, ‘Difficult. Extremely difficult.’ She told him that her father was a bad patient, that because of having to look after her and be strong in the past he had developed an intense dislike of being weak, of being himself looked after. She sat back for a moment on her heels and looked into the flames. ‘And yet it’s exactly because of that, because of all he’s done for me that I want to help him. Do you understand?’ she added, turning to him.

  ‘Oh I do.’ He told her that Dennis had also been ill and of the guilt he had experienced on visiting him, and she listened carefully without comment as he spoke more frankly than he had ever done before about all he had put his brother through.

  ‘It’s not good to always be the one who takes,’ she remarked when he had finished, ‘but trying to break out of that pattern isn’t easy, as I well know.’

  She had settled down on the sofa with the cat beside her, and as they sat talking and the night wore on he remarked in her that hyper-real quality that he had noticed before but that struck him now with greater force than ever. She was completely there, solidly, physically present in a way that was oddly reassuring. Taking a hallucination as one aspect of perception, Julia as she was this evening with her grey skirt, her glass beads, was its exact opposite. Although he was enjoying talking to her it eased his heart also simply to look at her. Their conversation became desultory, with long pauses in which there was no tension or awkwardness. When he arrived she hadn’t put on a cassette as she usually did but the silences filled the room as though they were music.

  ‘Are you ready for Paris?’

  He told her that he had his bags packed, pulled his passport and tickets from his inside pocket.

  ‘Wish I was going,’ she said.

  ‘So do I.’

  He looked at his watch. It was almost midnight, and still the weather had not eased. The rain was blowing against the window and he wished he didn’t have to go out into it. She had kept the blaze in the hearth going; it crackled and flamed.

  ‘It must be comforting to fall asleep at night looking at the fire,’ he said.

  ‘It is,’ Julia agreed, and then she added, ‘you’ll see for yourself shortly just how good it can be.’ The silence in the room was immense now. Julia said nothing more, but she smiled at him and stretched out, touched his foot gently with hers.

  What happened next was, Roderic thought, bizarre. She stood up and unfolded the sofa. ‘I can tell you now,’ she said, ‘you’ll be too tall for this. Your feet will stick out over the end. Will you give me a hand with the bedding?’ The strange ordinariness of it, that was what he would remember, as she pulled a duvet from the press at the end of the room, and took clean, rough dried sheets from a blue plastic laundry bag. They made up the sofa a bed with great care: ‘Pull the sheet down a bit more on your side, will you? You’ll need more than that to tuck in at the bottom.’ Anything more unlike the heat of passion would have been hard to imagine, he thought, as she threw him a pillow and a pink pillowcase printed with tiny cream flowers. It clashed with the blue and white striped one she was now hauling over a pillow, and he even began to wonder had he misheard or misinterpreted what she said: had she simply asked him to help her make up the bed before he left? Given her dislike of housework there was a certain logic to it, reinforced by the homely effect of the finished bed, with its candy-striped sheets and mismatched linen. Had he imagined the whole thing?

  And then it dawned on him: Julia in recent weeks had had fixed in her mind exactly the same deadline as he.

  Chapter Twenty

  The brothers arrived at the funeral home moments after the rest of their family, who were getting out of their cars as Dennis drove up. His mother offered Roderic a dry cheek to kiss, as did Cliona and Maeve; Arthur offered him his hand, his sympathies, half embracing Roderic whom he had always liked. ‘This is a bad business, a bad business,’ he said as they went into the building and sat down in the waiting room beside each other on steel and moulded-plastic chairs. ‘It’s a sad homecoming for you.’

  ‘Yes,’ Roderic replied, grateful for his concern. The room, cold and discreet with a vague nod to religious sensibilities unnerved him.

  ‘Bloody awful places these, aren’t they?’ Arthur said. ‘Bed but no breakfast.’

  Roderic, taking in the garish stained glass, the stiff carnations thrust in a vase, could not but agree. As always, he felt scruffy beside Arthur. No matter how well he polished his shoes or brushed his jacket, he could never bring himself up to the sartorial heights his brother-in-law seemed to achieve effortlessly with his gold signet ring and his lime after-shave, his brogues like black glass and his well-cut overcoat. ‘I feel bad that I didn’t get here in time,’ Roderic added, but Arthur narrowed his eyes and shook his head.

  ‘Would have made no odds,’ he whispered, ‘no odds, so don’t think about it, don’t fret. Once the stroke hit, that was that. Believe me, I was there. Those extra two days in hospital … well, it was a mercy it was only the two days. No, Roderic, put it from your mind. You’re here now, that’s what counts.’

  ‘I came as soon as I could.’

  ‘Of course you did.’

  It was Maeve who had rung Roderic to tell him that their father was in hospital. It was the call he had dreaded receiving ever since he went to live abroad and had imagined many times; but in the event it baffled him.

  ‘How is he? Is it serious?’

  ‘Well, he’s not marvellous,’ Maeve said slowly after some thought, which told Roderic precisely nothing.

  ‘Should I come home?’

  ‘You can if you want,’ she replied calmly.

  ‘But what do you think?’

  ‘It’s not up to me. You must decide for yourself.’

  ‘Yes Maeve, I know that, but I think you’re missing the point. It’s impossible for me to know unless you tell me how critical the situation is. I need the information to make the right decision. You can appreciate that I don’t want to leave Marta at the moment unless it’s absolutely vital.’

  ‘Hmm, I was forgetting about Marta. When is she due?’

  ‘Yesterday’

  Maeve gave a pettish sigh, sounding exactly like their mother. ‘This is all very inconvenient, I must say, but it is down to you. Mum said that someone should probably ring Roderic and tell him what has happened so I’ve rung you. What more can I do?’

  At that Roderic gave up. He said good night and went back into the sitting room, where Marta was draped out full length on the sofa, which she completely filled, before a huge fire. Smiling, she held out her hands to him and he went over, kissed her, then perched behind her head.

  ‘What news from Ireland?’

  ‘Only bad news, I’m afraid. It’s Dad. He’s had a stroke.’

  ‘Poor Frank! Why, that’s terrible,’ Marta said.

  Some months after their wedding the preceding year they had made a short trip to Ireland so that Marta could meet his family and friends there. Frank had hit it off surprisingly well with his daughter-in-law at their first meeting and when she was in Dublin their mutual fondness for each other had been renewed and strengthened.

  ‘Will you go home to see him?’

  ‘That’s what I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to leave you, now above all.’

  ‘Yes, but if it can’t be helped …’ At that the phone rang again.

  Dennis was annoyed at how Maeve had handled the call and was as direct as she had been oblique. ‘You must come home,’ he said, ‘unless Marta is absolutely opposed to it. Under the circumstances I’d understand if she needed you there. I’ll square it for you with the rest of the family,
if needs be.’

  ‘I’ll come as soon as I can get a flight,’ Roderic said, and with Marta’s blessing he left for Ireland early the following morning, only to be met by his brother, red-eyed, at Dublin airport.

  He knew what had happened even before Dennis said: ‘It’s all over.’

  ‘This was bad timing for you,’ Arthur remarked, and Maeve, overhearing, interjected,

  ‘It’s a bad time for all of us, actually, not just for Roderic, what with it being so close to Christmas and everything.’

  ‘But it’s particularly bad for him,’ Arthur gently insisted, ‘what with Marta, you know.’

  ‘I see, yes,’ Maeve said, ‘I keep forgetting about that,’ and she shrugged, turned back to speak to her mother.

  ‘I suppose then you’ll be heading off as soon as possible after the funeral?’

  ‘I will,’ Roderic said. ‘I’ll be in Rome by late tomorrow night, and I’ll get a train north the following morning.’

  ‘I know you’d like to be there, but I’ll tell you this for nothing: when the time comes, she’ll have that baby whether you’re there or not,’ Arthur said, in a blunt attempt to console him.

  While they had been talking the room had slowly filled with other, more distant family members, with colleagues and friends come to pay their respects. The undertaker appeared and in a low voice ushered them into the room where the coffin was.

  Frank made a terrifying corpse. His face, grim in death, made him look more formidable than ever he had done in life, a thing Roderic would not have thought possible. He also bore an uncanny resemblance to Dennis, something that had not been evident heretofore. They made awkward conversation about the coffin and the shroud Frank wore, about how it had been a mercy that he hadn’t lingered. In one of the lacunae of these exchanges, Roderic suddenly burst into violent, passionate sobs. At first no one said anything. Even Dennis and Arthur were too mortified to make any move to comfort him.

  ‘Roderic, please,’ his mother then murmured, frowning.

  ‘I’m sorry, excuse me, I’m sorry …’

  He fumbled his way out and stood in the hall, trying to get a grip on himself. From the room he had just left he heard Maeve’s voice: ‘Oh, Roderic always was so emotional.’ He went out of the building so that he could hear no more.

  When Dennis came out to look for his brother a few moments later he found him sitting on a low wall smoking a cigarette. He looked like a truant schoolboy, Dennis thought. Roderic had an odd knack of being able to look utterly childlike, something his brother had noticed in him many times before. In spite of the height? In spite of the beard? In spite of the odd grey hair? Dennis asked himself, incredulous, every time he noticed it, and the answer was always yes. For years he had tried to work out what was at the root of this disconcerting trait; as Roderic now fumbled a cigarette packet out of his pocket and offered it to his brother, Dennis realised what it was. Even as an adult, Roderic was still capable of that absolute open-heartedness that is the essence of children. He wasn’t even aware of it himself, Dennis thought, didn’t see how vulnerable it made him, like a walled city with its gates left unlocked and unguarded at night. Without speaking he accepted a cigarette and lit it from Roderic’s; sat down beside him on the wall.

  ‘I realise it’s important that none of us show any emotion over the next few days,’ Roderic said. ‘I don’t understand why that should be the case, why it should be such a crime to shed a few tears, but I promise I’ll do my best to keep the lid on as required.’

  ‘It’s not a question of not expressing emotions,’ Dennis replied, ‘it’s a question of there not being any feelings to show.’

  Roderic considered the implications of this, and gave him the wounded look of a six-year-old.

  ‘I’ll do what I can,’ he said.

  But it was Dennis who cracked next, and in dramatic fashion. They returned later that day for refreshments in the family home where Maeve and their mother still lived. The curtains in the drawing-room had been closed in keeping with tradition. Maeve brought in a large plate from the kitchen. ‘Egg and onion on brown bread,’ she said, removing the cloth that covered the serried ranks of triangular sandwiches. ‘Ham and mustard on white. Roderic, will you ever pass them around? There are plates and napkins on the sideboard.’ She slipped wearily into an armchair with an air of almost professional languor. ‘Dennis …’

  ‘Yes, yes, I’ll serve the sherry,’ he said, making no effort to hide his annoyance.

  ‘I was going to ask you if you’d ever put the kettle on, actually,’ Maeve replied calmly.

  ‘I’ll do it,’ Cliona said. ‘Go ahead, Dennis, the decanter’s over there.’

  Cliona had returned to serve the tea and Dennis was going round the room for the second time to top up glasses when, over the buzz of conversation, he heard heavy familiar footsteps descending the stairs. He glanced over at the open door of the drawing-room and there, standing in the hall, was his father.

  Frank was dressed in his hill walking clothes: the close-fitting woollen hat, the top-class anorak, the practical but bizarre-looking combination of knee-length trousers, knee-high socks and heavy boots, about which he had always been utterly unselfconscious. The knapsack he was holding in his hands gaped open, and just before he closed over the flap Dennis could see the thermos and sandwiches it contained; they looked as solid and convincing as the crystal decanter Dennis held in his hands. He looked cheerful and relaxed as he always had done when setting out for the Wicklow mountains, and for a few moments he stood looking into the room. No one but Dennis seemed to be aware of his presence. Frank took it all in: the sherry glasses, the chintz, the small talk. ‘Sweet Jesus Christ,’ he exclaimed, ‘what a way to pass the afternoon. I’d rather be dead.’

  He turned away. Dennis could hear the sound of his boots clumping down the hall, the front door of the house closing behind him. And then Dennis started to laugh. Everyone in the room, including Roderic, stopped what they were doing and stared at him. ‘Please forgive me,’ he said, as he struggled to get the outburst under control. ‘I must apologise,’ but at that another yelp of laughter escaped him.

  ‘Roderic,’ Cliona said, ‘why don’t you … why don’t you … take Dennis out for a walk?’

  ‘Excellent idea,’ Roderic said, putting his tray down and taking the decanter from Dennis’s hands. ‘A bit of fresh air would do us both good.

  A couple of pints would be even better,’ he added in qualification moments later, as they stood on the front step of the house. ‘The usual place be all right?’

  Dennis nodded.

  ‘I don’t know what came over you back there,’ Roderic said as he carried two pints of Guinness over to their table from the bar, ‘but at least it got us out of the house. Ghastly business: I couldn’t help thinking of Dad and how much he would have loathed it. It’s a good thing people don’t have to attend their own funerals.’

  It startled Dennis that Roderic could unwittingly be so close to the mark about what had happened. He said nothing as his brother moved in beside him on to the curved banquette of buttoned red dralon. The pub was pretty well deserted at this hour and they sat in silence, staring at their drinks for some moments. Such was the state of Dennis’s nerves by this stage that he was hardly surprised when he noticed that a third perfectly manicured pint had appeared on the table, behind which, sitting between the two brothers, was Frank.

  ‘Well, cheers, then,’ Roderic said.

  ‘Cheers,’ Dennis replied, lifting his glass.

  ‘To Dad,’ Roderic added, and Frank smiled indulgently as his two sons drank to him.

  He looked well, as he had when Dennis saw him in the house, fit and relaxed, youthful, even.

  ‘Poor man,’ Roderic said as he put his glass down. ‘I’ve been thinking about him all the time, ever since I got the call in Italy; about his life, and what it amounted to.’

  Dennis, alarmed by the idea of post-mortem eavesdropping, moved to interrupt, but Frank raised
his right index finger to his pursed lips, then smiled.

  ‘Well?’ Roderic asked. ‘You were going to say?’

  ‘Nothing,’ Dennis replied.

  Frank sat back in the banquette and folded his arms.

  ‘We were talking about you the last time I was home,’ Roderic said, ‘about how good a life you had made for yourself; the job, you know, and your house. He admired you more than you might realise, and he said then, “Dennis is like me: an absolute loner.” It was only afterwards I realised what a tragedy it was, that someone who defined himself in that way should have ended up in the thick of family life. I don’t think he even knew that that was what he was telling me: he had buried the regret too deep.’

  ‘Oh, he knew all right,’ Dennis said and he stared hard at Frank, but Frank would have none of it, and kept his eyes fixed on his pint. ‘He knew exactly the degree to which his life hadn’t worked out’

  ‘Why do you think he did it?’

  ‘Did what? Got married? Oh, because he was a passionate man, impulsive too, and you know what a beauty Mum was when she was twenty.’

  ‘True. He always got on much better with women than with men,’ Roderic said, ‘and there was something about him that women loved. Even with Marta, when she met him, he charmed her totally. But of course there’s a world of difference between that and getting married.’

  At this Frank lifted his head and gave Dennis a shrewd sideways glance, for again Roderic had come eerily close to the mark, closer than he ever could know.

  ‘So Roderic’s going to jump the stick,’ Frank had said to Dennis when the wedding was announced. ‘Now there’s a turn-up for the books. Never thought Roderic would go and do a thing like that.’