Authenticity

by Deirdre Madden

  After breakfast, he happened to glance down from his bedroom window and saw them working in the garden. They were engaged in fixing the broken rose trellis that Marta had spoken of the night before and Dennis became absorbed in watching them, struck by the harmony with which they worked. Marta held a spar of wood steady while Roderic nailed it down, and then they carefully pinned up the long stray branches of the rose, debating how best to arrange them so as to give the whole a pleasing shape; warning each other against the thorns. Leaning against the window frame Dennis fell into a reverie. The absolute intimacy, the peculiarly complete togetherness that he was now witnessing unnerved him. It was like watching a single person work in the garden, so much were the two bodies of one mind. He thought of how strange a thing marriage was, and how glad he was that he had never entered into it. He knew in his heart, as he had always known, that it was not for him.

  They had finished with the rose now. Roderic flopped down on the garden sofa where Dennis had sat the night before, and patted the cushions, inviting Marta to join him. He put his arm around her shoulders as she went on talking, pointing to a wooden jardinière, painted white and containing a lemon tree. He was only pretending to listen to her, was gently pulling one of the straps of her vest off her shoulder. Protesting and laughing she pushed it back up again, pointed to a sunny, empty corner of the garden in which the lemon tree might be more advantageously situated. Roderic looked towards the place she indicated and nodded, but was again slyly pulling at the strap of her vest. Again she stopped him. He spoke. She laughed and shook her head; again he asked her something. Marta looked all around the garden as if to make sure that they were quite alone and then, to Dennis’s astonishment, she simply peeled off the lilac vest and tossed it aside. As Roderic bent over her to kiss her naked breasts Dennis leapt back from the window, ashamed of spying on them and terrified of being seen.

  Today was evidently one of their good days.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  He spent all morning in his studio but achieved nothing; nothing that pleased him in any case. When William had last painted, many years earlier, the works he produced had been strong and assertive, making up in verve for what they lacked in technical accomplishment. On taking his canvases out of storage to look at them again he was surprised at how good he’d once been. His studies in oils of trees and rivers, his still lifes, had somehow got at the essence of the things represented, although for the life of him now he couldn’t think how he had done it. This notwithstanding, his past accomplishments gave him confidence as he embarked upon his new phase of work. In the intervening years his interests and tastes had changed and what he wished to paint now were abstract works in watercolour. ‘Good luck,’ Julia had said to him when he told her this. ‘Believe me, you’re going to need it.’

  To begin with his initial enthusiasm had carried him along, together with the excitement of having his own studio space and the time in which to work in it, but in the past week or so he had become bogged down and could make no progress. He found he couldn’t control the colours, couldn’t make them conform to the idea he had in mind and wished to express. Was that the problem – was he taking too rigid a stance, trying to impose a form upon the work rather than taking a freer and more instinctive approach? In the painting he was engaged upon this morning, executed in reddish brown tones of ochre and rust, the effect he wanted was of transparency and light, the colours seeping into each other in a feathered and delicate way. He was failing utterly in this: the more he struggled for a translucent clarity the more murky and opaque the whole thing became.

  He gave up for the morning and after a short lunch alone – Liz was at work, the children off at day camp as they were on summer holidays from school – he returned to the studio. The painting looked even worse than he had thought, a heavy muddy daub, brown dominating red, the whole thing clumsy and ham fisted. There was nothing to be done but set it aside and start afresh. This time he tried to have no preconceptions but quickly found this meant he had no idea whatsoever of how or where to begin. William’s mind was racing now so that he couldn’t concentrate. It was precisely the worry of not being able to paint that was getting in the way and preventing him from even making a start. He stared at the blank sheet of paper, willing himself to pick up a brush as a deep sense of anxiety unfolded within him, immobilising him and putting paid to whatever last few shreds of his self-belief remained.

  In mid afternoon he gave up and decided to go into the city, leaving a note for Liz to say he would probably not be back in time for dinner. As he propped it against the teapot on the kitchen table he reflected that she would be annoyed by this, but didn’t consider changing his plans. Before leaving the house he went into the drawing-room to find a book to read on the train into town, and while he was there he caught sight of Roderic’s painting, which depressed him even further. He saw in it exactly that combination of freedom and control that he had sought so ardently all day and that had eluded him so completely. The fields of green and blue paint complemented each other like voices singing in harmony, each depending on the other for its full resonance and power, the formal restraint serving only to accentuate a wild beauty that it barely contained. Compared to this, his own laboured efforts seemed ludicrous.

  There were few people travelling into the city on this August afternoon and so he had no difficulty getting a seat on the train, but the book he had brought with him remained in his pocket. He looked out across Dublin Bay to Howth, the distant houses vague in the heat-haze. He had hoped that leaving the house would clear his head and permit him to think clearly, perhaps even to know what he might do when next he went to the studio, to break through the impasse in which he had found himself. The sea view, however, brought no enlightenment and still his mind was unfocused, was like a pack of scattered cards. The stations slipped past: Sydney Parade already, and he had given no thought to what he would do when he reached town where he often went now to wander aimlessly, to look in galleries and bookshops, to sit in pubs, wishing his life away.

  William left the train at Westland Row, crossed the road and went through the back gate into Trinity College. He was aware as he emerged onto College Green that he was tracing out now a skewed version of his past life. Empty-handed and casually dressed he dawdled along the exact same route where, not so long ago, he had strode among the early morning crowds with business suit and briefcase, purposeful and directed and desperate. What had changed in his life? But really changed? His mind shrank from the thought. Julia. He would go to see Julia, he decided, as he proceeded up Dame Street. He knew enough now about the pattern of her day to know that there was a good chance of finding her at home at this time; and then just at that moment, he saw her on the other side of the road.

  She was walking in the same direction as William; evidently she was on her way back to her house. He would have crossed over, called her name and joined her had she not been with Roderic. He trailed in their wake, hoping that her companion would leave her at some stage but that too, he knew, was unlikely. Logic said that he was also going home or, worse from William’s point of view, was on his way to Julia’s place. The sleeves of the blouse Julia was wearing hung down well past her knuckles, completely concealing her hands. From the depths of the left sleeve dangled a bag made of such thin white plastic that William could see through it and identify the modest haul of groceries it contained: a carton of milk, a loaf, some oranges, a tin of soup and a tin of cat food. Abruptly Roderic and Julia stopped walking and William stopped too, thereby causing a collision between himself and a woman walking immediately behind him, much to her irritation. Julia handed the plastic bag to Roderic and held on to his left forearm for balance while she stood on one leg and removed her shoe, a scuffed brown moccasin, then shook it to remove a pebble. As she did so, Roderic said something that made them both laugh, Julia so much that she wobbled and almost overbalanced. Dropping the shoe on to the pavement she shoved her foot back into it and playfully thumped him on the shoulder in
response to whatever his teasing remark had been, herself said something and again they both laughed. Roderic was still holding her shopping, and by his gesture William understood that he was offering to carry it for her but Julia shook her head. He handed it back and they continued on their way. It never occurred to William how disconcerted they both would have been had they known he was observing their inconsequential but, as they thought, private stroll through the city.

  Perched on a stool in a diner one lunch time not long before he had had to take leave from his job he had noticed, on glancing through the plate-glass window, a woman pass in the street. She was pretty in a rather conventional way, with blue eyes, carefully tinted blonde hair, and she wore a quilted rust-coloured jacket with gilt buttons. A silk scarf printed with Montgolfier balloons was folded around her throat. He noticed all of this, and also noticed that there was something spirited about her: the way her lips were pursed as though she were laughing at something she knew she ought not to find amusing but couldn’t resist. She looked as though she was fully aware of how little her own monied elegance amounted to; conscious of how, underneath it all, she was wholly her own woman. In a fraction of a second William noticed all of this, and it was only then that he recognised his own wife.

  As he walked up Dame Street now until it became Lord Edward Street, past offices and shops, past Dublin Castle, he consciously attempted to do the same thing in reverse with Roderic and Julia: to see them as though they were not people he had met, and, in Julia’s case, someone he liked to consider a friend, but total strangers. How unprepossessing they looked! Ambling home in the late afternoon with their shopping and their shabby clothes – her floppy skirt, his faded cord jacket – there was nothing, but nothing about them, to William’s mind, that suggested any kind of gift or accomplishment. No one could have guessed at their real selves, but then, wasn’t that always the case? Wasn’t that what was always said about murderers too, how unremarkable they seemed, and the more heinous their crime the more people insisted, marvelling upon their ordinariness? What did strike him today forcibly and surprisingly about Roderic and Julia was that they were a couple. As a complete stranger that was the only thing he could have intuited about them with any certainty. This was strange, for they weren’t holding hands and apart from the moment when she had balanced on his arm there was no physical contact at all between them. And yet in their easy confidence and the relaxed way in which they talked and laughed together their intimacy could be read as easily as on the day when he had seen them in the shop, speculating on the names of the semiprecious stones. It was as though walking along the street together they were encompassed in a field of radiant light that was theirs and theirs alone.

  For a moment William was overcome with jealousy, so powerful and acute it was like physical pain; it winded him and literally stopped him in his tracks. He resented Roderic so deeply that briefly he hated him. For all that he looked inconsequential he had what William wanted and yet would never, could never, have. Looking at the other man today he knew that. He was too alien, too unlike him; he would never be able to unmake himself to become what Roderic was. William had lost ground to the couple, they were still walking on and he followed them again, but half-heartedly now. Roderic threw back his head and roared with laughter at something Julia had said. It was worse than William had thought: it simply wasn’t in him to be what he wanted to be. His confidence was all gone and he had no real work to set against it, nothing to prove that he had achieved something exceptional in the past and therefore might reasonably expect to produce good work again in the future. It pained him more than ever now to remember the muddy paper over which he had laboured that morning to so little purpose. Against that he set Roderic’s painting and he recalled the beauty and energy of it, the tension there was between the rich pigment and the decisive intelligence of the form; and this was, moreover, far from being his finest work. There was a playful, even foolish side to him; the side that teased Julia and sported with Max, but this silliness did not negate, indeed had no impact whatsoever upon the detached genius that made the paintings. There was no denying the reality of the other man’s gift: the magnitude of it.

  They had come to the top of Lord Edward Street. Christchurch was before them and as Roderic and Julia waited to cross the road William hung back. There was no point in going any further. He couldn’t face either of them now and he turned away, wishing that he had never followed them in the first place.

  He rang Julia a few days later to arrange a meeting. She was cheerful as ever and asked him how his work was going.

  ‘Better not to ask.’

  ‘Do you know what the secret is?’

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘The secret is that there’s no secret. You just get on with it. You just do the work.’ She could hear him snort at the other end of the phone. ‘You think I’m joking? This is as serious as I get’ She suggested that he call by on Wednesday.

  As he walked up the street to her house he smelt the smoke of a turf fire, even though it was August. He commented on it when they were on their way up to her flat and she stopped on the stairs, turned to him. ‘Will you do something for me? Will you do me a favour?’

  In the sitting-room, she gave him a pen and a notepad. ‘I want you to write down what the turf smoke makes you think of, in as much detail as you wish to give me. Do you mind doing that?’ It wasn’t at all what he had expected, but he took up the pen and after a moment’s thought started to write.

  Turf smoke reminds me of the west of Ireland. We used to spend our family holidays there when I was a child. My mother was from Westport and we used to go there with her, my brother and I, for the whole summer. My father who was a lawyer came for occasional weekends and then for two weeks’ holiday. I liked being there because my parents, especially my father, had more time for us children than was usually the case. I found him less stern, less forbidding than when we were in Dublin, to a singular degree, almost as if he were another person. We used to go to Achill. We used to go to Keem, to the sunken cove in under the headland. We were there one day, I remember, in late summer. The holidays were almost over, which I regretted, for soon we would be going back to the city and the old, rigid regimen would take over again. My mother had settled down with us children in the middle of the strand, we were paddling, playing, digging in the sand. My father had gone down to the end of the beach some little way off, was sitting in the shadow of some rocks reading. I strayed into his territory without meaning to and I thought he might tell me to go away, but he smiled when he saw me and asked me to sit beside him. We looked out to sea, to Clare Island with its mountains, where the pirate queen had lived. The atmosphere was strange that afternoon, bright and full of heat, the light before rain, the light before a big storm. My father was staring out to sea. The sea was the colour of pewter. To me he seemed very serious, very old, although I realise that he can have been no older than I am now, if that. I thought for the hundredth time of how I would never measure up to him, neither what he was, nor his expectations of me. I was I think about ten years old. The light was strong, weird, making all the colours too vivid, almost painfully intense: the green of the slopes behind us, the sand, the rocks; all the colours drenched, saturated, like in a cheap postcard. Soon the weather would break, and all would soften into greyness, as the water, although riddled with light, was already grey. I could hear the cries of my brother, my mother’s voice calling to him. My father was still looking out to sea. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘out there, a school of porpoises. Can you see them?’ I looked to where he was pointing out in the bay, and I saw their dark fins shimmering in the water. It was a remarkable sight. As I write this, I can see them again. ‘Shall I tell the others?’ I asked my father, but he said no. He said that there would be other things for all the family but this moment was for just the two of us. We kept looking out to sea, at how the black backs dappled in the water, shiny as black glass, the water soft metal, now dark as lead, and it was as if my father and I were the
only two people in the world, so that there was only this moment, this ocean, these porpoises, my father, me. It made me feel so close to my father of whom, generally, I was afraid.

  And then the light reached breaking point. The sky darkened, and a bright fork of lightening tore down, there was thunder and my mother called to us. It began to rain, a few heavy drops, then more, then a torrent. I heard my brother shriek. My father and I stood up and together we ran along the beach, seeking a place of safety, a place of refuge.

  He put the pen down.

  ‘May I see?’