Suddenly Dan turned to Roderic with the same frank, steady gaze that Roderic found so attractive in Julia, and so disconcerting in her father. ‘I believe you lived abroad for a good few years. Julia tells me you used to live in Italy.’
‘I did, yes.’
‘So, will you tell me this,’ he said, with his gaze still fixed on him, ‘for this is something that interests me, and a thing I’d like to know. Were you ever in Pompeii?’
This was so far from what Roderic had been expecting that for a moment he was at a loss as to what to say. He simply nodded.
‘And Herculaneum. What about that? Have you been there?’
Roderic said that he hadn’t.
‘Because people say that it’s even more interesting than Pompeii, and I’d have been interested to have your opinion.’
‘You’re planning to go there Someday, aren’t you?’ Julia said.
‘I hope so, if I can ever get the money together and get myself organised. It would have to be a package thing, Rome and Pompeii, you know. I don’t think I’d be able to manage it on my own, what with the language. The language and the money That reminds me,’ and he reached for his plastic bag, ‘I’m after buying a good book, let me show it to you,’ but just at that moment the waitress returned with their salads.
‘Seeing as how you’re so interested in history,’ Roderic said as they ate, ‘perhaps when you retire you might think to study history, to do a degree.’
‘Me!’ Dan said. ‘At a university? Sure I have no education worth talking about. They’d never let me in.’
‘They don’t always require formal qualifications for mature students,’ Julia argued ‘and in any case, you know far more about history already than any student coming in with a Leaving Certificate.’
Still he wasn’t convinced. ‘I don’t know. I’m not sure that the way they go about things there would suit me. I have my own way of seeing things.’ Abruptly he put down his knife and fork. ‘We know nothing,’ he said. ‘We like to think we know it all, but the half of it we’re making up. Just imagine if in a thousand years’ time, people were trying to know about us: what life was like in Dublin now. Who we were and what we were. What we believed and what we wanted. And all they had to help them work it out was Glasnevin Cemetery, a few bits of jewellery, bracelets and earrings, and what they could dig up of the Naas dual carriageway. Can you imagine what’d you’d come up with? Can you imagine?’
Julia said it was the same with painting: that the artists of the past would be amazed if they could see what had happened to their work: altarpieces taken out of churches and broken up, the central image displayed in Washington, the right panel in Berlin, the predella in London. What would they have thought to see these religious images displayed in blank white rooms beside court portraits, beside images that to them would have been wholly profane?
‘You’re a painter too, aren’t you?’ Dan said. ‘I don’t understand art.’ It was not a critical or defensive remark, he was simply stating a fact. ‘Not just the new stuff, you know, but any of it. It doesn’t speak to me, I don’t know why. I’ve tried, haven’t I?’ This last was addressed to Julia, who smiled ironically at him and nodded. He returned then to the subject of the man whom he had seen handing out leaflets. ‘If he’s still there when we go out, I’m going to say something to him. I’m going to ask him would he not think to learn a trade. Plumber or a sparks, something like that. Something real. With a trade you can even work for yourself. No boss. Or rather, you’re your own boss. Do you see what I mean? You plumb in a washing machine or you rewire a house, or, like me say, you fit a new exhaust system, and you’ve done something. You can point to it and you can say, I did that. Not like handing out leaflets. Handing out leaflets is no job for anybody. I’m going to tell him so.’
Roderic could see Julia was silently hoping that the human phone would have tottered off to another street by the time they had finished their lunch. He might not take kindly to Dan’s impromptu career advice, no matter how well intentioned or reasonably presented.
‘Did you see the moon the other night?’ Dan suddenly asked.
‘We did,’ said Julia. ‘I thought of you.’
‘I saw it coming up low from the horizon, a big golden moon. Huge, it was, and there was silence all over the valley. There was no wind, nothing, not so much as the sound of a bird singing. Only silence, and silence and silence, and then this big golden thing, the moon. Ah, that was something,’ he said, and he sat for a moment, remembering it. ‘That was something worth seeing.’
Roderic was aware that in spite of all the warmth and good will of the occasion, he and Dan were not breaking through to each other on any significant level. He thought of things that Julia had told him about her father, about his bouts of headlong drinking after the death of his wife. It was something with which Roderic could identify although he knew it was not an experience about which either of them would ever wish to speak to the other.
‘You must come down and visit us in Wicklow,’ Dan said. ‘Bring him with you some weekend when you’re coming, Julia.’
Was there not in that steady gaze an element of cold assessment, or was he simply reading in the other man something that he felt he would certainly be guilty of in the same circumstances?
They finished their meal. The waitress came back to take away their plates and they ordered tea.
‘I have to show you my book now,’ Dan said, putting on his glasses. He took a thick volume out of the plastic bag and opened it at random. ‘It’s an encyclopaedia of Irish history and it’s full of great stuff. Listen now; listen till you hear this. “Time,”’ he read. “‘In Ireland, as elsewhere, the standardisation of time was primarily a response to the exigencies of the railway timetable. Before that nearly every community had its own time. Clocks in Cork were eleven minutes behind those in Dublin, while those in Belfast were one minute and nineteen seconds ahead.” Did you ever hear the like of that?’ he said, looking at them over the top of his glasses. ‘Doesn’t that beat all?’
‘Oh, Daddy,’ Julia said, laughing.
“‘It was not until Greenwich Mean Time was extended to the whole of Ireland, in 1916, that the Albert Clock stopped showing Belfast time.” I think that’s remarkable,’ he said, leafing through the pages. ‘Remarkable. Or what about this:
“Haymaking was probably introduced to Ireland by the Normans.” Did you know that?’
‘What will you do this afternoon?’ Julia said. ‘Will you go to the museum?’
‘Ah no. I don’t go there every time I come up to Dublin.’
‘You used to. Do you remember? We used to go there.’ And they fell to talking of how he used to bring her as a child, in the hope that the gold torcs, the wooden canoe and the delicate fringe of Bronze Age horsehair would inspire her to share his love of history.
‘And I hated it,’ she said in delight, ‘hated it,’ as her father chuckled.
In his mind’s eye, Roderic could see them as they passed under the dome of the museum’s entrance hall, Dan pausing by the glass cases as he peered at the artefacts and their printed labels, while the small, wild-haired child Julia had once been fretted and grizzled mildly beside him.
‘Those axe-heads!’ Julia said. ‘Hundreds of them, it seemed to me. All those pots and guns! The only thing in the museum that caught my imagination was the biscuit, the prison biscuit. That’s children, you see: they can’t grasp the significance of a stone head, two thousand years old, but a biscuit older than your father, now that really is interesting.’
‘And all you wanted,’ Dan said, ‘was to go around the corner to the gallery, to look at the pictures. The painting of the parrots. You liked that.’ ‘The parrots, yes,’ she agreed. ‘The Goose Girl, and Jack Yeats’ horse, that looked to me as though it was made of glass.’
‘And that one of the mountains in the west, the blue mountains. It’s gone now, you know,’ he added. ‘The biscuit.’
‘Where to?’ Julia replied. ‘Don�
��t tell me they’ve thrown it out. They can’t have done. They shouldn’t have. It’s a part of our heritage.’
‘It probably went mouldy in the end,’ Dan said. ‘Nothing lasts for ever.’
His whole life, Roderic thought, had been a kind of desperate flight from the middle class into which he had been born. He had believed, especially in recent years, that he had indeed succeeded, that he had managed to escape. But if that was the case why was it that today, faced with Dan Fitzpatrick – who was quietly drinking his tea, who wanted to go to Pompeii but who had heard that Herculaneum was possibly more interesting, who thought that handing out leaflets was no kind of job for anyone, who had single-handedly brought up his daughter to be a beautiful and remarkable woman, who didn’t believe that he would ever be permitted to enrol at a university, and who had, in any case, his own way of seeing things, who was simply and utterly and completely himself – why was it that, faced with Dan Fitzpatrick, Roderic had never before felt so deeply conventional?
A silence fell over them now and annealed around them, that neither man had the will to break until Julia at last said, ‘Should we ask for the bill?’
Dan finally yielded to Roderic’s insistent offer that he would pay, but he took out his wallet anyway, to show them something. ‘A man in a pub,’ he said, ‘gave me this.’
He unfolded a yellowing paper, a receipt from a shop, Sweenys Haberdashery and General Merchants, and the date in perfect copperplate, 14th April 1900.
Out in the street the weekly market is taking place. She can hear the men’s voices, the sound of switches on the flanks of the animals, their lowings, the stately dick of their hooves. Spring and winter struggle for the upper hand: white blossom streams from a tree at the window. She watches the mark her pen makes. The slit in the nib opens gently under the pressure of her hand; the downstroke is thick, the slanted upstroke fine as a hair. One pair of man’s boots, she writes. One tin of ox-blood boot polish. One pair of laces. Then the wind blows the clouds away from the sun. Sudden light pours into the shop and the woman looks up to find her whole world translated. Brass pins; spools of black waxed thread; cards of buttons, gilt and bone and mother-of-pearl: each one of these quotidian things is now separate and distinct. It is as if she had never seen them before now; it is as if each one of them is speaking to her, pleading with her out of its own reality. It is a gift. The light races over the walls. The clouds cover the sun again and she is back in the familiar shadows, the dimness, plunged back into her element of time.
And Dan wondered aloud if the docket that the waitress now presented to them:
Salmon salad x 3
pt Guinness x 1
pt Smithwicks x 1
Ballygowan x 1
Tea x 3
Helena served you today
Thank you
and the date, all printed faintly in purple ink – he wondered if eventually it might seem as poignant as the faded paper, that he folded now and replaced in his wallet, when this day too was history.
Chapter Thirty-Three
During the time that he was in hospital Roderic became fixated upon the young woman who gave the weather forecast after the news. Television was in itself a novelty for him: he hadn’t had one since moving back to Ireland and much about it surprised him. In his occasional flashes of lucidity he was struck by how passive an activity it was for someone like himself who, until recently, had spent most of his waking hours in a conscious and active struggle to translate the vision in his mind on to paper or canvas. As an occupation for himself and his present companions in misfortune it was eminently suitable, but from time to time he would be amazed to think that this was how many people who had absolutely nothing wrong with them habitually passed hours of their time. He could cope only with the most anodyne of material. He watched polar bears break out of their snowy winter holts in the spring, watched a chef expertly bone a chicken and a gardener prune fruit trees. He didn’t like the news and would therefore lurk just outside the day room until he heard the music that announced the end of the bulletin, and then he would go in to see the weather report.
‘Well, hello! I’m afraid I can’t promise you any sunshine today; not until the end of the week in fact …’ Roderic studied her intently, marvelling at the way she could smile and talk simultaneously. Yesterday she had been wearing a shell pink dress and a pearl necklace; today she was wearing a yellow suit and gold clip earrings. Who was she? He speculated at length on her family situation. Did she have supportive siblings? ‘Over central England and East Anglia those storms will ease off as the day progresses …’ Were her parents proud of her because she was on television or disappointed because she wasn’t doing something more exciting with her life, because she wasn’t an actress or a newsreader? It was hard to believe that away from her maps she actually had a life, perhaps even a chaotic and unhappy life like his own. Maybe her father was an alcoholic and she lay awake at night grieving for him, or worrying that some day the tabloids would find out and tell everyone: Weather Girl Dad’s Drunken Shame. As though the shame was hers, rather than all his own. ‘And so, then, to sum up …’ Computerised clouds appeared and disappeared on the map behind her; neat, virtual rain fell from them. ‘That’s all from me for now, I’ll be back after the lunch-time bulletin with an update. Until then, enjoy the rest of your day.’
She said these last six words in a husky, slightly pleading voice, as though requesting some sexual favour. Seeing that it was evidently so important to her, Roderic promised silently in his heart that he would indeed try to enjoy the rest of his day; although looking around the day room at his fellow patients, he knew he was going to have his work cut out for him.
He realised now that he was still holding the uncompleted menu card he had been given earlier.
‘Mark? Have you decided what you’re having for lunch?’
‘Roast chicken with boiled potatoes, carrots and beans, then almond pudding and custard.’
As he listed the food Roderic surreptitiously checked off the same items on his own card. He found it impossible to make decisions these days even about something as trivial as this. He didn’t like almond pudding, but it seemed simpler to order it and then not bother to eat it than to make an active decision about some other dessert. Mark had been in hospital for far longer than Roderic and was completely institutionalised, but he also had a slightly higher degree of energy than many of the other patients. Looking at his fellow sufferers, it was their listlessness rather than their sorrow that profoundly struck him. He gravitated to Mark whenever possible to try to tap into his energy, asking him now, ‘What are you going to do for the rest of the day?’
‘After the doctor’s been round I’m going to read, then this afternoon I have an art class. It’s good, that. Would you like to see my paintings?’
Roderic understood that this meant he wanted to show them to him. ‘I’d love to see them,’ he lied. Mark went off to fetch his folder as Roderic mentally prepared himself to praise a few clumsy watercolours of bowls of fruit, a few stiff landscapes or studies of roses.
The first picture was of a hunted-looking face staring through a mesh of heavy black bars. ‘That’s me,’ Mark said, unnecessarily. The next page showed the same fraught, tormented face, this time against a background of arrows and spears. Slowly and wordlessly the two men looked through the batch of pictures, in which all of Mark’s psychic trauma was figured forth with crude power and terrible pathos. Roderic thought of his own work and of what a disaster it would have been for him had he ever allowed his art to have this function: to become self-expressive and to serve him, rather than he serving his art. Although he had done little painting in recent months, and none at all in the past few weeks, he had at least been true to it until the end. He thought of his painting as though it were a flame, a fragile lit thing that he had guarded with his life, all his life. Entrusted to him, he had succeeded in keeping it from being extinguished in spite of the winds and storms through which he had carried it; in re
turn, down through the years it had afforded him a subtle and complex joy. Although much of his inner life – his losses, grief and self-doubt – made its way into his work, it did so in such a manner as to be translated into something distanced and controlled, something formal and impersonal. That Mark was engaged with painting in a wholly different way was right for him, but in displaying his work he didn’t realise that he was showing Roderic an abyss. And for Roderic, to fall into this particular abyss would have been the worst thing of all.
He was at something of a loss as to know what to say to Mark, who was studying his own paintings with fierce intensity.
‘Powerful work,’ he murmured eventually.
‘Thanks. It’s good, the art class,’ Mark said again. ‘The teacher’s nice. You should think to register for it.’
‘Oh, no, no, no, no, no,’ Roderic exclaimed, impressing himself as well as Mark with the force of his own refusal.
‘Suit yourself. But you never know what you can do until you try You should have a go at painting. You might surprise yourself.’
Not half as much as I’d surprise everyone else, thought Roderic, who had so far succeeded in keeping his unusual vocation a secret from his fellow patients. He would tell Dennis about this when he came in later. Perhaps it would amuse him and Roderic was grateful to have something funny, something lighthearted to share with him. Dennis was bound to come: he hadn’t missed a single day so far.
‘Are you expecting visitors later?’
‘Don’t know,’ Mark replied, as he put away his work. ‘Last time she was in, do you know what the missus said to me? She said, “What ever happened that you ended up in a place like this?” Ended up! Ended up! So I told her that if that was all she had to say she might as well stop at home.’
Roderic clicked his tongue sympathetically, although privately he thought Mark’s wife’s question a fair one. It was a question he had silently asked himself time without number since his admission to hospital.
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