William nodded, and sat with his hands over his face, as Julia silently read through the text he had written. She read it slowly twice so as to give him time to compose himself. ‘I had forgotten that,’ he said at last when he could speak again. ‘Forgotten it for all these years.’ He looked up at her. Julia smiled at him and he struggled to smile back, looked away. Forlorn, he was the image of his own small son.
The task she had set him had created a strange atmosphere between them; an intimacy she did not want and was keen to dispel. ‘I’m sure you’re wondering why I asked you to do that,’ she said, but oddly it hadn’t crossed his mind. He had unthinkingly complied with her request. Julia explained the nature of the project upon which she was engaged. ‘I have a list,’ she said, taking it from a folder and passing it to him. ‘I’m exposing people to particular scents and then asking what it evokes for them. When I have enough material, I’m going to create a work around it. These are the scents and odours I’m using.’
William looked down at the paper in his hands:
Hot chocolate
Clean linen
The ocean
Hay
Coconut
Rotting apples
Mint
Bleach
Tea
Cut grass
Turf smoke
Fresh bread
Roses
‘It’s turning out to be a more potent idea than I had expected. People are often surprised or even shocked by what they themselves come up with,’ she said as though to console him. William sat nodding at this strange young woman in her dim room whom he really didn’t know, and who had unwittingly forced open a closed chamber of his heart, where his own past was hidden from himself. She took a sheaf of papers from the folder and glanced through them, told him that what had struck her so far was the discrepancy between the thing offered and the thing remembered. So far no one had simply evoked the thing itself, and strange circular links had been created. For William smoke suggested the ocean, for someone else the ocean evoked roses, and for someone else again roses were redolent of smoke. ‘For they told me of being in a public garden at the end of a day when the gardeners had been cutting the heads off roses and they were burning them on a great fire, as though it were an offering, a sacrifice. From then on, the person concerned could never disassociate the smell of roses from smoke.’ She took another page from the folder. She had offered someone clean linen, a sheet laundered, pressed, fresh from the line. The woman said it reminded her of betrayal.
‘How will you use them? Will you transcribe them?’
‘I don’t think so.’ She didn’t like to add that that would diminish their impact by removing, say, the contrast between William’s precise handwriting and the emotional force of what he expressed.
She asked then for his permission to keep the text, to use it anonymously in any project she might subsequently develop.
‘Has anyone refused you yet?’
‘Just one man.’
‘Was it your friend?’ he asked as though she had only one.
‘Roderic?’ she said, deliberately naming him. ‘No, it wasn’t Roderic. It was someone else.’
He tore the page from the notebook and looked at it as though considering whether or not to destroy it, then leaned over and handed it to her, although in doing so he had the strange feeling that he was handing over to her too much of himself, that he was giving her some kind of power over him. ‘I feel,’ he said deliberately, ‘that I’m giving you something private. Something precious.’
‘Yes, you are. You’re doing just that,’ Julia said. ‘That’s why I asked your permission.’
‘Is this,’ he asked, ‘what art has become?’
‘This,’ she said, ‘is what art has always been.’
Chapter Twenty-Seven
During their time at the Foundation Ray had a guide book, an American publication the exact title of which Roderic had forgotten over the years – something like Europe for People with no Money, or Italy on Half-Nothing. He teased Ray about it but consulted it too for his own forays around the country and it was there that he first read of the Albergo Perfetto. The name of the hotel amused him even more than the title of the book. Cheap, clean, central, charmless: $. He decided to try it on a weekend trip to Rome.
Located in a quiet street near Piazza Navona, the Albergo Perfetto advertised itself to passing trade by means of a rectangular light-up sign projecting from the wall above the front door. It bore the name of the hotel in blue letters and a single dismal star. The ‘B’ of ‘Albergo’ was missing. Behind the reception desk was a woman who, when Roderic arrived, was phlegmatically watching a quiz show on television. She regarded him with an air of grim forbearance as he signed the register and showed her his passport, as though she expected the very worst from all her guests and had yet to be disappointed. ‘Room three, first floor,’ she said, banging down on the counter a key attached to a tarnished and bulky brass tag. ‘Breakfast at eight o’clock?’ He nodded and without another word she turned back to her television.
Room three was a clean but dark place that smelt of bleach and there was an enormous bed that Roderic knew would accommodate even him. (Small beds were the bane of his life.) He had his own bathroom, something he hadn’t expected given the rock-bottom price he was paying, which boasted the simplest shower he had ever seen: a shower head, a tap and a drainage hole sunk in the mosaic tiled floor. There was no shower curtain. He was woken in the night by thunderous snoring, so loud that for a moment he thought an interloper must have sneaked into his room, crept into bed and fallen asleep beside him. Then he realised that he was merely a victim of the hotel’s paper-thin walls. In time he would come to know that snoring was amongst the least disconcerting noises by which a guest might be disturbed. He slept again and was awoken at eight by someone hammering on his door as though the building were on fire. When he answered this summons a young woman wordlessly thrust a tray into his hands then disappeared off down the corridor. He got back into bed with his breakfast. The bread rolls were stale and he didn’t like apricot jam, the only kind provided, but the coffee in the white pot was strong and hot and there was plenty of it.
He decided that whenever he was in Rome he would always stay in the Albergo Perfetto. Dirt cheap hotels were, Roderic considered, like horrendously expensive ones: you could do what you damn well pleased in them and nobody cared. It was in middle-ranking pretentious places that respectability held sway and you had to behave yourself. The Albergo Perfetto was, in its own small way, he thought as he travelled back to the Foundation by train that Sunday night, well, perfect.
Over the years the hotel never changed. The same woman was always behind the desk with her television. Sometimes for light relief she would be reading a magazine full of photo graphs concerning the births, deaths and marriages of the stars whose shows she impassively watched. Roderic never discovered her name, dubbed her in his mind Signora Perfetto. No matter how many times he stayed there she affected never to show the slightest flicker of recognition except for one occasion when she forgot, glancing up from her scandal sheet as he walked in and greeting him with the words, ‘So, Signor Kennedy, you’re back with us?’ Roderic found he was vexed rather than pleased that the fiction of anonymity had been broken.
But if the hotel never changed, his own life did, and with it the hotel’s function. To begin with it was a bachelor bolt-hole. In the first stages of his life with Marta and in his early marriage he would occasionally engineer reasons to go to Rome alone for a night or two. Roderic was fully aware of how pitifully limited his own vices were on these trips. A bit too much wine with his dinner was the height of it, if that, for he was not at the time a heavy drinker. But he suspected that it was the want of days such as these that many married people regretted and silently hankered for rather than lost sexual opportunities as was popularly supposed: silent, solitary days, idle and private. He guarded these sacred spaces in his life unobtrusively but fiercely, too. He was
, for instance, careful not to let Marta know how important all of this was to him. Not once did he take her to the Albergo Perfetto and not only because he knew she would hate it. When they had occasion to go to Rome together they put up in a smart place where they paid for a single night rates that would have kept them in the Albergo for a week.
On his trips back to Ireland to visit his family it would sometimes happen in the early years that he needed to break his journey for the night in Rome. Then he began to arrange his flights so that this was essential on both legs of the journey, as he moved between two lives and two realities, hardly able to bear to admit to himself how unsatisfactory both had become. The few hours of blessed peace he knew at 33,000 feet, looking at the blank blue sky and drinking as many diminutive bottles of red wine as he could charm off the stewardess, was no longer enough. Over the years the glowing, shabby sign outside the little hotel became balm to his soul signalling a haven, a refuge from all that troubled and irked him in life.
His visits home took the form of a round of family calls, dinners and teas that were informal but not relaxed. Frank died. He might have been irascible with a note of threat even in his good humour, but his had been an energising presence, Roderic realised now that he was gone. Quietly depressive in a way that sapped those around her, his mother became more distant than ever, more remote. ‘Poor Frank,’ she said, ‘we got on so well together. We were so well matched,’ and she stared out of the window daring her children to deny these outlandish untruths. She was never displeased to see Roderic again, but nor was she, it had to be said, particularly interested either. Only Maeve remained at home with her in the big family house where they had grown up, where Frank had had his surgery. She worked in the same accountant’s office she had been in since leaving school and looked after her mother with a rather bad grace. It pained Roderic to see what was happening to Maeve, as bitter disappointment in life hardened around her like ice on the ropes of an Arctic trawler. Like Roderic she was physically big but unlike him the formidable manner that he could just about plausibly summon up on the rare occasions he felt he needed it was her habitual temper. Her sardonic jibes – ‘It must be nice having a wife who can keep you’ – cut deep.
With Cliona and her husband Arthur he got on better, although sometimes he wondered what image, if any, they had of his life in Italy with Marta. He was surprised at how little curiosity they showed, how quickly and completely they forgot things he told them, and yet there was no unpleasantness, no hostility. Probably because he lived so far away and was a painter they thought they had nothing whatsoever in common with him. Even with Dennis, who couldn’t have been more welcoming and with whom he always stayed, things weren’t the same. And why should they be, he asked himself. His brother had his own life, solitary but busy – career and concerts, home improvements and hill walking – and Roderic no longer felt sure of his own place within it.
The brief stint of genteel socialising left him burnt out and he would crawl back to Rome, drained of all energy and worn down. It was painfully obvious to him why he had needed a few quiet hours alone to prepare himself in advance before going to Ireland. But on returning to Italy he would again check into the little hotel for a night or even two, where he now had to face up to a far harder question: why did he also need to steel himself in this way before returning to Marta and the children? In turn, he examined each element of his life but there was no one thing that he could put his finger on. It was the little details of family life, the endless decisions about minor matters, that irked him the most. All of this was somehow muddled and unclear in his mind. He knew that there had been a lie at the centre of the family that had produced him. Was it possible that there was a lie at the heart of the family of which he was now a part in Italy? Was it possible that this lie was an intrinsic and inevitable part of family life? It didn’t bear thinking about. All he really understood was that he moved with increasing dread between the two houses and that, as the years passed, he needed drink to protect himself. He used to lie on his bed in the hotel room drinking his litre bottle of duty-free Jameson’s from a tooth glass and thinking about it all.
*
At some point during the eight years since he had last been there, Signora Perfetto had departed. Her place was taken by a silent, sallow man who watched the same frantic programmes on the same television, who wordlessly registered Roderic and gave him a key. Room six. ‘You don’t have any other room available?’ The man shook his head. Roderic went upstairs and let himself in, sat down heavily on the bed and looked around. The familiar brown lino and dingy paintwork, the chipboard wardrobe he remembered so well – that he should be here in this room of all rooms, tonight of all nights!
The day their father was buried, Dennis had driven his brother in the late afternoon from the funeral lunch to Dublin airport from where Roderic tried three times to ring Marta. He called from the check-in area but the line was engaged, then made two further attempts at the departure gate, the final one as his fellow passengers had actually started to board. On both occasions he obtained a ringing tone but no one answered. He rang again from the baggage hall in Fiumicino as soon as he landed but the response was the same. It was clear now what had happened. He was too late. He rang Marta’s mother, but there was no answer there either. It was a week to Christmas, and the weather in Rome was foul. The coach journey in from the airport was interminable; the snarled traffic an inferno of accidents, flashing lights, sirens and horns. For up to ten minutes at a time the coach did not move at all. Roderic, fretting impotently and pointlessly willing the driver on, wiped the misted window with his fingers and peered out into the darkness. It was getting on for midnight by the time he arrived at the hotel and Signora Perfetto had to be summoned by means of a shrill chrome bell. He took the stairs two at a time up to room six and rang his mother-in-law again.
‘Auguri! You’re a father! E una femmina. Marta’s well, anche la tua figlia.’
Your daughter. Roderic replaced the receiver, lay down on the bed and started to cry. Later, he would wonder if even Serena, at the moment of her birth, had wept with such a complete lack of restraint; would wonder that even here, in this most permissive of establishments, no one came to see what was happening to him, or at the very least to tell him to shut up. He cried with the abandon of a small child but the physical strength of a huge, healthy man in his thirties and mourned Frank as he hadn’t been permitted to in Ireland. He grieved for all in his life that had been frustrated, unfulfilled and which nothing could now redeem. But he wept with relief too that he had not fathered a son. There would not be between him and his child the coldness, the lack of communication that had marred his relationship with Frank. The sound of his own howling frightened him.
Now, more than seventeen years later, he sat on the same bed in the silence of the same room and thought of how bitterly ironic it all was. For how much worse a father could he have been to sons than he had been to his three daughters?
He was awoken in the middle of that night by the sound of a woman’s scream. As her long sharp cry reached its height Roderic realised that she was calling out in ecstasy, rather than fear or pain. The woman was disturbingly close to him, too, her bed evidently separated from his by nothing more than the hotel’s flimsy walls. As the cry modulated into laughter then silence, a voice, voices, then silence again, the thought of this proximity astounded and aroused him. Marta had sounded exactly like this. An intense longing for her swept over him. And then, unexpected and unwanted, the thought of Gianni suddenly unmanned him.
Tomorrow he would see Marta for the first time in eight years. Eight years since … since what? Since he had walked out on his family, as she claimed? Or since she had thrown him out of the house, as he believed? They had quarrelled bitterly at the time about which it was and in the past year or so had resumed the discussion, this time in a more restrained and civilised fashion, but still failed to reach agreement. Marta insisted that in saying what she did she had only been firing a warn
ing shot across his bows. She’d expected him, she claimed, to move out to an apartment in the town or in nearby Siena until such time as he came to his senses and stopped drinking, got his life back on track. That he would simply flee to Ireland had never occurred to her. He, for his part, still thought it unreasonable to have expected him to understand all of that from one simple sentence. Once committed to a reconciliation they had tried to bank down as far as possible all the hostility and resentment between them, but still he was uneasy about meeting her again.
Would she greet him coldly tomorrow? To the best of his knowledge he had only ever shaken hands with Marta once in his life and that was on the night he met her. He remembered that moment with unparalleled vividness, the rush of attraction for this lovely stranger, holding her hand for just that little bit longer than was necessary, telling her his name. He had noticed then some of the attributes he would always most admire in her, her long neck, the delicate shape of her head, the wit, the kindness in her eyes and mouth. And yet he could remember so little of the rest of that evening; could recall its general atmosphere but few specific details. He had forgotten, for example, the moment of parting with Marta at the end of the night. He had sat near her at table but had he sat beside her? It had been someone’s birthday but whose he couldn’t recall. Ray’s? Elsa’s? He remembered Enzo carrying a cake lit with many candles through the darkness of the warm summer night, down the steps and out on to the terrace where they sat at dinner. Vaguely he remembered laughter, uneven singing and how the night had fallen around them again as the candles were blown out.
Two days later, he had gone with Elsa to visit the fresco restoration project on which Marta was working. She smiled and waved down at them from high on the scaffolding. Do you want to come up? He pretended that he couldn’t quite fathom the social codes of Italy and kissed her in greeting, feigned not to know that this was overstepping the mark with someone he barely knew. But Marta matched him by slipping a piece of paper with her telephone number into the pocket of his shirt when Elsa wasn’t looking. The visit to the chapel to see the painting followed three days later so that they made love for the first time within a week of having met. The final time had been within a few days of Marta telling him to leave. That the physical side of their life had been so constant and passionate had allowed Roderic to delude himself for far too long about the state of things generally. If there was no significant problem with sex, he reasoned, then none of the other difficulties they had were such that they couldn’t be overcome or simply ignored. That Marta eventually felt differently – I think you should just go, Roderic—had been a great shock, no matter what interpretation one chose to put upon her words.
Authenticity Page 27