Authenticity

by Deirdre Madden

  Where did such moments go, he wondered? He would have liked to believe that there was some kind of place, some repository where incidents of such exquisite suffering were recorded and preserved. That they simply vanished and no meaning could be taken from them was, he thought, too cruel, as he watched the incident out on the Parisian pavement draw to a more cordial conclusion, the mother shaking hands with the woman who had restored her child to her, the stranger ruffling the curls on the little boy’s head before walking away.

  But it was Marta not Jeannie he thought of as soon as he stepped into Notre Dame later that morning. The cathedral was thronged with tourists, many of them lighting candles at the stands to the right of the entrance, beneath a great dark crucifix. There was something eerily alike about all these people. He studied their faces as, with intense concentration, they touched the wicks of the small flat lights to the flames of the candles already in place. What was it that drew these people here? To look at them was to feel that their cast of mind was utterly contemporary. With their expensive casual wear they had literally bought into the prevailing values of society. Were their actions today driven by mere sentimentality, or did it speak of a wish for something more, a wish that they would be embarrassed about, a faith that would have exhausted itself before the candles had burnt themselves out? The lofty greyness of the cathedral was pierced by the millefiori discs of the great rose windows. He perched himself on a small chair with a seat of woven straw and inhaled deeply that strangely musky odour of candlewax and stale incense that was so characteristic of Catholic churches and was for Roderic so evocative.

  The day after he’d gone with Elsa to see her friend at work, high on the scaffolding, he rang Marta at the number she’d given him. She told him there was another project she’d worked on, an altarpiece in a church near where she lived, that she particularly wanted to show him. Would he be free that Friday? As soon as he saw her waiting beside her blue car parked at a discreet distance from the Foundation on Friday midmorning, he knew that they would have made love before the day was out. The subtle manner in which she greeted him left him in no doubt that Marta knew this too. The shared sense of anticipation was so strong that it was as if they had already been together and were moving in the memory of each other’s touch, of their mouths, their bodies.

  ‘Well then,’ he said, ‘where’s this famous painting?’

  ‘We’ll get to it in due course,’ she replied. ‘What’s the rush?’

  But in truth, for all of the rest of that day he felt as though she were showing him a picture. It was as if her life was a series of great hinged wooden panels that she was continually opening up and folding back to reveal a series of bright scenes, ever more intricate and beautiful. They went to a market in the town where she lived, bought wine, bread and ham, peaches and cheese, then drove out into the country to visit a farm belonging to people she knew. There they were shown a wooden press for olives, were given a bottle of its fruits that Roderic held up to the light so that he could admire the deep jewel green of the heavy oil. The neck was sealed with a thick drip of red wax. In years to come he would take Dennis to some of these same places to entertain him during holiday visits. The traders who knew and greeted Marta today would come to know him too and in due course his children, would ask after Serena and Allegra if he went to the market alone. They made a picnic of the food they’d bought, ate it by the banks of a river. It was late afternoon by the time they returned to town. She parked outside the church. ‘My apartment’s up there,’ she said, pointing at the first-floor windows of a tall shuttered house, ‘so we don’t have far to go afterwards.’

  They stepped from the heat of the street into the coolness of the empty church. It was silent and sombre and dim, with that fusty smell of incense and candles that he was never to forget. ‘We need change,’ Marta murmured as she led him to the front of the nave. From her bag she took a handful of coins, sorted through them and fed a few into a small coffer beside the altar rails. All at once the painting, which hung behind the main altar, was flooded with light. The effect was startling: such a wealth of colour, such gold. The painting showed the coronation of the Virgin and was densely packed with sternly worshipping saints. Surrounding them were crowds of angels with long wings, and bright, urgent faces like the heads on coins new minted. Christ, enthroned, placed upon His mother’s head a crown whose delicate filigree was suggested again in the white stone of the canopy, bristling with little spires, beneath which they sat. In a low voice Marta explained to Roderic the work that had needed to be done to bring the panel back, after years of neglect, to such stunning glory. The time-switch expired, plunging them into abrupt darkness that seemed deeper than it had been before now that their eyes were used to the light. Marta put more coins in the machine and the painting was illuminated again.

  ‘I was christened in this church,’ she said. ‘My parents were married here.’ While they were down by the river she had told him of the great pride she took in her job, and she spoke of it again now, of the central place it had in her life. It was a joy, she said, to help save a work such as this from what she called ‘the harms of time’, so that it might be preserved for people in the years to come. That this particular painting and the church in which it was displayed had for her a close personal significance made the satisfaction, the sense of privilege, she said, all the greater. With that the light went out again, but Marta had no more coins. Roderic took a handful of loose change from his pocket and felt her fingertips on his palm as she sorted through it, selecting what she needed. Once more they heard the preternaturally loud clinks the coins made as they dropped them into the coffer.

  And then, standing before the lit picture for the third time, something strange happened. It was as though their future life together had already been lived and the essence of all that was good in it was encapsulated in those few moments. Only now, with hindsight, more than twenty years later could he begin to understand what had happened as they stood there in the dim and dusty chapel before that radiant image, breathing in the scent of incense. It was as though they had moved into a condition where the ordinary rules of time did not apply. Neither he nor Marta spoke. He barely knew her, but never in his life had he felt so close to anyone. It wasn’t that he was imagining things that might happen in the years to come – in truth, he had thought no further than of the night ahead – but the spirit of their future fell over them as completely as the light did. Sitting in the garden on a summer evening with Serena when she was a toddler, helpless with laughter at the funny things she said. Why has a tiger got stripes, Serena? So that it’ll look like a tiger. Going out to the Aran Islands with Marta and her delight when a seal popped up near the boat and swam along beside them, with its sleek fur, the soft pools of its eyes. The night in winter when they stayed in Rome and awoke to find snow falling on the ancient city The wholeness and perfection of moments such as these were figured forth years before ever they happened, as they stood together in the silent chapel.

  And then with a loud click the light expired, plunging them into darkness.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  There was no question of her not going to Wicklow to be with Dan on her birthday. It was in early June and fell on a Friday that year. ‘I’ll work as usual and then drive down in the evening,’ she told Roderic, who was not bothered by these plans. He realised that her family circumstances had given rise to certain fixed habits and customs, and one of these was that she always went home for her birthday. To break with the tradition would upset her father unduly. ‘But I’m not just doing it for him,’ she insisted. ‘I want to go.’ She did, however, spend all of Thursday evening with Roderic and stayed with him that night.

  On returning to her own house the following morning she found a scattering of birthday cards on the doormat, found Max sullen at having been left alone. She fed him and took him into the shop, let him sit on her knee and stroked him as she opened her post. Placated, the cat slept. She was pleased to find that Dan had encl
osed a letter with his card. Ever since she arrived in Dublin to attend art college, her father had written to her once a week. Sometimes he asked if there was any point in his continuing to do so as they also frequently spoke on the phone, but she urged him not to stop. Julia was always grateful to receive his letters. She needed their pure-hearted simplicity to set against the petty slights, against the vanities and small-mindedness she encountered and herself fell prey to as she tried to find her way as an artist, and establish herself in the city. Reading Dan’s letters was like receiving a blow from the stick of a Zen master, waking her back into reality.

  I found a bird’s nest in the orchard yesterday. It was lying in the grass. I will keep it to show to you when you come home. It is made out of moss and feathers. The last time I found a nest it was broken but this one is all right. The sky was very clear this morning when I went out, with only a few high clouds. I hope the weather holds until the weekend. On Monday night I was in the pub with Henry. He says Felim is home from Manchester for a holiday and that he was asking after you. He likes England. I don’t suppose he will come back to live here again. We had a good night. I am reading a book about the First World War.

  Her day turned out to be busier than she had expected, and she was later in leaving for Wicklow than she had hoped. Julia had her own car; without it she would doubtless have gone home much less often. Dan had bought it cheap for her from an ad in a newspaper and retuned it in his spare time. He regarded a car as a necessity rather than a luxury, and Julia found it useful for transporting work and materials. This evening she was bringing one of her boxes back to Wicklow to store it. Max, perhaps in a spirit of vengeance for having been neglected, was particularly uncooperative when the time came for him to be put in his cage. She had hoped her delayed departure would mean that she missed the worst of the rush hour, but almost immediately found herself stuck in jams and tailbacks. This didn’t bother her too much; like her father she was an excellent driver and a patient one. She found she could concentrate on the road and also think about things, allow her mind to wander constructively. Often it was like this that she found solutions to problems that had defeated her when she gave them more serious and considered thought.

  Her work absorbed her in two ways: as ideas for new pieces and in the practical problems that their execution required. How to make triangular holes in a series of mirrors. How to suspend feathers in a box so that they looked as if they were floating there. How to break a glass cleanly into two equal halves without smashing the whole thing to pieces. Sometimes good ideas foundered because she could not find a way to implement them and lately she had been worried that the project to do with smells might come to nothing for this very reason. She had let the idea lie fallow for some months but had taken it up again recently, making a list of scents with which to work. Friends had been given a new loaf to sniff, or a freshly laundered sheet, had been asked for a written account of what it evoked. The responses so far showed the whole scheme had potential but how was she to present it? More to the point, how was she to replicate the fragrances in a gallery so that visitors could experience them for themselves? And if she couldn’t, would the whole idea fail? She recalled some of the things that people had already told her.

  Looking out of the window she had an idea for something else she might do. Visitors to a gallery would be taken into a room, alone, where there was no light whatsoever. Perhaps they might have to be guided in so as not to stumble and fall. There would be a soft place for them to sit; there would be music. The air would be scented with – what? Roses? Sandalwood? Mint? Something pleasant and soothing. The whole idea would be to create an environment that was completely sublime, with this one condition: that it would remain in pitch darkness. There would be nothing to see. And in every other way it would be a completely exhilarating experience. She turned it over in her mind and decided it couldn’t be done, because people were too unalike. What to one person would be soothing or pleasurable in terms of music, sounds or smells would be to another neutral or even unpleasant. Each experience would have to be geared to each person. It was too particular; no, it couldn’t be done.

  From time to time she looked down at her lapel to admire the new brooch that was Roderic’s birthday present to her. It was a striking and unusual combination of materials – slate, copper, mother-of-pearl – that worked together particularly well. The iridescence of the fragment of shell, its rainbow colours like oil on water, was enhanced by the slate, blue-grey and dull, like a winter sky. The box that held it had been under her pillow when she awoke that morning, and she again wondered how Roderic had managed to put it there without waking her, for she was a light sleeper. Although her past relationships with men had been good, the experience she had been living with Roderic in recent months was the best, the deepest, the most complete. Tapping her fingers on the steering wheel she thought about being with him the night before, smiled with pleasure at the memory. She liked the sexual side of their life together, the complicity of it; liked living this secret, intense ecstatic reality.

  Gradually the traffic became lighter. She was glad to get out beyond the city, to see ahead of her the Dublin mountains, then the Great Sugarloaf and the Little Sugarloaf. Ever since she was a small child, to see them from this angle had been to know that she was headed for home.

  As she drove up the lane and parked outside the little house she blew the horn to let her father know that she had arrived. He appeared at the window, came out to greet her.

  Julia lifted the cage from the back seat of the car and opened the door, whereupon Max shot out as though he had been spring-loaded and ran over to the nearest tree. Like a pianist striking chords on a new piano to test it, he ran his claws briskly against the bark several times to make a sharp ripping sound, and then in a single bound sprang up into the branches and disappeared. ‘Happy now?’ Julia called after him laughing, as she went into the house with her father. As she took her jacket off to hang it up, she noticed Dan looking at her lapel.

  ‘Roderic gave me that for my birthday.’

  ‘It looks like it’s made of slate,’ he said, peering at it.

  ‘It is slate.’

  ‘Oh.’ She could see that he didn’t like it. Dan was of the old school, thought that jewellery should be made of gold and precious stones, the best you could afford, but he had long since come to realise that Julia and her friends had tastes and ideas that he could not fathom. ‘That was kind of him,’ he said diplomatically. She had been drip-feeding him selected information about Roderic in recent months. The complex of emotions that made Dan slightly possessive with regard to Julia also made him completely indulgent and sometimes these two attributes cancelled each other out.

  ‘You go on with what you’re doing; I have something to bring in from the car.’ She fetched the box and carried it up to the room in which Dan permitted her to store her work and the materials she was hoarding until such time as she found a use for them. For a few moments she stood looking around, at the piles of old sheet music, maps, at the skeins of ribbon and rope, and thought of how often people who were closely connected to the arts and professed an interest, even a love of them, were unhelpful and unsupportive towards people like herself. More often than not it was Dan, or someone like him who afforded her the practical assistance and support that made possible the work he admitted he found baffling.

  She went back down to the kitchen where he was in the middle of preparing the roast chicken that was his standard dish for special occasions. Completely self-taught, he was inordinately proud of his own cooking and liked to be praised for it. Celebration was vital to Dan. It was precisely because of the great sorrow at the centre of his life that he insisted on marking Christmas, Easter, birthdays and the like with as much ceremony as he could muster. ‘Life will give you plenty of kicks in the teeth and there’ll be nothing you can do about it,’ he used to say, ‘so why turn your back on the good times?’ Glad to be here with him, Julia watched as he scraped carrots, as he lit the
gas under the potatoes. The beauty and complexity of his personality was unfolding itself to her as the years passed, and she understood now that at the centre of him was something quite free of time and society. Later that night he would probably go outside to admire the stars. Julia could imagine him in another life that was wholly different in externals but in essence the same. She could picture him in Japan of the distant past, could see him standing with his friends on a wooden balcony, giving the order for cranes to be released across the face of the full moon when the moment was appropriate.

  ‘Go and look at the nest,’ he said. ‘It’s on the fireplace in the other room.’ In its artful perfection it humbled her, this tiny ball of moss, redolent of wildness, and she thought of the bird that had built it. Sitting near by was Dan’s book. The cover bore a drawing of poppies, their elegiac beauty part of the myth of its subject, part of the lie. Julia fell to leafing through it, became absorbed in the text and then sat reading until he called her to say that dinner was ready.

  It was precisely because Dan rarely asked for proof of anything that she was sometimes keen to justify her life to him, and so when he said to her over dinner, ‘How’s the work going?’ it was not a question she took lightly.

  ‘It’s going fine. Do you remember some months back I was gathering leaves? Well, I made a box with them and I sold it to a man recently.’

  His delight at this pleased her. That’s tremendous altogether. And what will he do with it? Is he going to give it to a museum or something?’

  ‘No, he’s a private collector. I expect he’ll put it in his house.’

  ‘And did he pay you well for it?’

  ‘I got what I asked for.’

  She could see he was amazed by this remarkable world where people paid good money for the things she made, but he was glad that this odd state of affairs was working to her advantage.