Authenticity

by Deirdre Madden

  He went back to the ward. On the locker beside his bed was a vase of pink carnations together with a card showing a rabbit in a straw hat. Both were from Maeve, and Roderic had been touched and surprised to receive them. If his family in Italy knew what had happened, he wondered, would they also be supportive and conciliatory? For now he absolutely didn’t want them to know where he was and had made Dennis promise not to tell. He would write to them himself about it, although he suspected that it might yet be a long time before he was ready to do so. Just as he was thinking this, Dr Cullen came in. He greeted Roderic, unhooked the chart from the end of the bed and began to study it.

  It was usually either Dr Sullivan who saw him or Dr Cullen. One of them was gentle and kind, the other distant and brusque, and Roderic asked himself if this was a deliberate policy on the part of the hospital: one to soften him up and the other to put the boot in when necessary. Even in his distressed state he could see that Dr Sullivan was a most remarkable person. He was an elderly man with a slightly weary air, as well he might be given the things he had heard and witnessed in the course of his working life. He knew the mind’s limits and what lay beyond, he knew all the darkest corners of the human heart, but it had not made him despair. Instead he radiated compassion, grounded in deep moral experience.

  When Roderic spoke about having lived in Italy, he laughed and looked at his hands. ‘Let me tell you something foolish,’ he said. All his life, ever since he was a child, he had wanted to go to Venice. ‘And yet for one reason or another, it never happened. It didn’t seem like the most obvious destination when the children were small, and the time just never seemed right. Then in due course it became somewhere to think about rather than to go, do you understand?’ He laughed again and looked embarrassed. ‘You know, after a particularly hard day in here’ (and Roderic could picture the reality behind this euphemism) ‘I’d go home and sit down and dose my eyes and imagine I was there. On a balcony looking out over the lagoon, watching all the lights come on at dusk; listening to the sound of the water lapping against the building. It was enough.’ And then, he said, three things that he had never expected happened. First, his children bought his wife and himself a trip to Venice to celebrate their thirtieth wedding anniversary. Second, he realised that he didn’t want to go. ‘But what could I do? How could I explain it to the children? I didn’t want to hurt their feelings and I couldn’t explain to them that it was because I knew the reality would cancel out all I’d imagined. I felt sure I was going to be disappointed but there was nothing to be done. Off we went.’

  ‘What was the third unexpected thing?’ Roderic asked.

  ‘We arrived in winter, at twilight. There was heavy fog; we took a boat in from the airport and then the city suddenly appeared before us. It looked as if it were constructed out of water and light. The third unexpected thing,’ he said ‘was this: that Venice didn’t in fact disappoint me, it far surpassed my expectations. And never – not once – had this possibility crossed my mind.’

  If ever anyone, Roderic thought, deserved an experience of sublime beauty to set against all they had seen and known in life, it was Dr Sullivan, whom he was to remember always with affection and gratitude.

  Dr Cullen was a different proposition altogether.

  Roderic was slightly afraid of him and found his brisk perfection intimidating. Even Dennis’s life, he thought, would look messy and disorganised if set against the splendid rectitude of the doctor’s, although he would have had little confidence in a doctor who appeared to have made as spectacularly bad a fist of his life as Roderic himself had. In recent days, this unease had hardened into a dislike he suspected was mutual. The problem was that they understood each other just that little bit too well. He had gone to school with boys like Dr Cullen. Now they were lawyers and businessmen and auctioneers, and he had long since lost touch with them. Dennis or even Roderic might well have turned out to be like this had Frank himself not been such a wild card. It was exactly this familiarity that made them uneasy with each other. Without anything ever being said, he suspected that the doctor had little respect for his life as an artist and this, coupled with his charmless bedside manner, turned Roderic sullenly against him. As a small act of rebellion, he used to try to picture Dr Cullen propositioning a woman. This morning he was actually making some headway with this baroque feat of imagination when the doctor suddenly raised his head and looked Roderic straight in the eye.

  ‘Anything in particular on your mind today?’

  ‘Nothing. Nothing at all.’

  ‘There’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you,’ the doctor said, replacing the chart. ‘When you get out of hospital, where will you go? What are your circumstances?’

  Roderic told him that he lived alone in a small flat but he didn’t like it, and that after what had happened it had bad associations. He hoped to find a new place to live as part of the fresh start he was trying to make in his life, but until such time as he had something suitable he would move in with his brother.

  ‘How many brothers have you?’

  ‘Just the one.’

  ‘So you mean the man I was talking to on Tuesday?’

  ‘Dennis, yes.’

  The doctor shook his head. ‘You will never live with him again. Ever. Under no circumstances.’

  Roderic felt as if he was on a high wire, as if he had looked down and seen that there was no net beneath him. For a moment he couldn’t speak, then said hesitantly, ‘Did Dennis say that to you? That he doesn’t want me?’

  ‘Of course he didn’t. If he thought it was what you needed, or even just wanted, your brother would lie on the floor and let you wipe your feet on him.’

  ‘I know that,’ he replied, unwittingly giving Dr Cullen his cue.

  ‘And don’t you think that’s disgraceful? Absolutely disgraceful?’

  There was nothing Roderic could say.

  ‘You nearly went over the edge the other day, but you don’t seem to appreciate that you almost took Dennis with you. If you go on like this, you will. You have a lot of changes to make in your life, and one of the most important is that you have to wean yourself off your dependence on your brother. It’s bad for you and it’s bad for him. Have you got that?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Good. Right, now about your medication …’ He talked about tranquillisers and Roderic sat listening in silence, humbled and chastened. After the doctor had left him, he sat on the edge of the bed for some time, staring at the toes of his slippers. Then he lay down and closed his eyes.

  *

  Neither of the protagonists in the drama that was Roderic’s collapse had full knowledge of what had happened. This was all for the best, as each of them could just about cope with the memory of the part they had played or witnessed. Roderic afterwards remembered elements of it with pin-sharp, almost cinematic clarity, as he did many of the key moments in his life: meeting Marta, the birth of his daughters, seeing Frank in his coffin. Other aspects of the days leading up to the breakdown remained mercifully vague.

  About three weeks before the end he had a row with Jeannie. There was nothing new or remarkable in this, as quarrelling was their preferred means of communication. The difference was that this time when she said she never wanted to see him again, she actually meant it. When he contacted her after the usual cooling-off period of a day or two, she again told him to get lost; and then again with renewed vehemence and threatened violence when he made subsequent attempts, at which point he got the message. It came as something of a shock to be dumped by Jeannie. Even though it had never been much of a relationship it had dragged on for years and he had always told himself that Jeannie needed him more than he needed her.

  Dennis called at the studio unannounced one lunch time. Roderic couldn’t remember his arriving; he just seemed to suddenly be there, staring balefully at the glass and whiskey bottle.

  ‘Want some?’

  ‘No thanks.’

  ‘Suit yourself.’

  The p
lace was eerily silent: there was no music from the adjoining room.

  ‘Maria isn’t around?’

  ‘Berlin,’ Roderic said. ‘Academic exchange. Be gone for two months. Dead quiet, isn’t it? There’s a new fellow in one of the studios upstairs but he’s a real stuck-up so-and-so. Say “Good morning,”’ to him and he’ll barely deign to answer you.’ (It was only when thinking about this weeks later in the hospital that it dawned on Roderic: the man had been simply terrified of the massive drunk on the ground floor.)

  ‘How’s the work going?’

  ‘It isn’t. You see the thing about art is this,’ Roderic said, and he drew hard on his cigarette. ‘You’ve got to have the vision and you’ve got to have the technique. Vision. And technique. You’ve got to have the vision and –’

  ‘All right, all right, I get the message.’

  ‘Sometimes I think I should paint and then sometimes I think I shouldn’t I don’t know.’ The point he was trying to make was that although not to paint depressed him, to paint badly and then to have to countenance the end result was even worse. He struggled to find a way to explain this lucidly. ‘It all comes down to vision,’ he said eventually. ‘Vision and technique.’

  His brother put his head in his hands. His departure was as mysterious as his arrival, suddenly he wasn’t there any more. Roderic, noticing this, poured himself another drink. And then he also put his head in his hands.

  In the days that followed he did stop painting. To look at the poor work he was producing – sickly smears of yellow paint set in lifeless bands of grey – to look at this had easily become the worst option. But stopping painting had the curious effect of also stopping time, or at least slowing it down to a point where it appeared to have stopped. He drank more than ever now in a bid to make the hands of the clock move forward. During the final weekend before the crisis broke he didn’t go home at all but stayed in his studio drinking, sleeping, crying. He’d stayed there on many other occasions when he’d been too far gone to make it back to his flat, but this time was different. ‘This is what it must be like to be dead,’ he thought on the Saturday. He truly felt as if he had died but that his spirit was blocked from leaving his body so that, although his physical life went on, there was nothing else left, absolutely nothing. No one needed him any longer: not his children, not even Jeannie. He was nothing but a burden to Dennis. It would be better for all concerned if he were no longer there, if he could simply disappear. And yet even as he thought and realised all these things he did not feel them. The immobilising grief he experienced numbed him, cast over him a dark reverie that provided a final fragile defence. And then at last, on the Monday morning, that too gave way. A full realisation of all he had been going through, the implications of what he had been thinking, penetrated Roderic’s consciousness. Within the week he would say to Dr Sullivan, ‘It was the spiritual equivalent of waking up in the middle of open-heart surgery to realise that there was no anaesthetist.’

  He was overcome by a sense of horror and could no longer bear to be on his own.

  Forgetting that she wasn’t there he went and hammered on the door of Maria’s studio, shouting her name repeatedly, then ran out into the street and tried to hail a passing taxi. The taxi driver saw him first and decided, not unreasonably, that he didn’t want a huge crazed drunk in his cab. Although he managed to grab hold of the door handle the driver pressed the button to secure the locks, swerved and then accelerated away, giving him the finger and almost driving over his foot. Roderic reeled back towards the pavement and as he did so he collided with a woman, almost knocked her down. ‘Oh sorry! Sorry!’ The woman shrank back from him, but he registered fully her revulsion, her fear. It knocked the heart out of him and he half collapsed, half sat down on the kerb to gather his resources for the next attempt. From this low vantage point he saw the next taxi before it saw him. It was slowed down in heavy traffic and he darted out, hailed it. Not as fully alert to the possibility of drunken punters early on a Monday morning as he would have been late on a Friday night, the driver had accepted him as a fare and let him into the back of the cab before fully registering just how far gone Roderic was. Then he looked in the mirror and said: ‘Right, you: out,’ Roderic ignored this and gave him the address of the bank where Dennis worked. The driver turned round now and noticed how big a man he was dealing with. ‘Out,’ he said again, but this time with less authority, as he struggled in his mind to think which was the least worst option, to have this man in the cab or to pick a fight with him. It didn’t take long to decide. He released the handbrake and they drove off.

  Dennis’s job was a responsible and demanding one. It was rare for him to have in the course of the day even a few moments when he was not engaged on any particular task. He had just such a hiatus now but he was not enjoying it. He stood at the high window of his office looking out and thinking about Roderic, thinking in particular about Saturday night.

  One of the strange anomalies of Roderic’s drinking was that it made Dennis feel he was the one with the problem. As though he had been a seeker of dark pleasures or excitement, a secret gambler, say, or a frequenter of prostitutes, his lot was now guilt, was a mania for concealment with a concomitant fear of exposure and shame. He had been trying, in the face of Roderic’s visible disintegration, to cling on to his own life with its regularity and measured habits, and to this end had invited one of his colleagues to supper on Saturday night, together with his wife. He was fond of Paul. They weren’t intimate friends – Dennis had none – but he valued his fellowship in the office, and they shared an interest in music. He made a lamb casserole and a lemon pudding, carefully selected a few interesting wines. They hadn’t even got as far as the table when it happened. They were still sitting over drinks, and Dennis had truly been relaxed and enjoying himself when the doorbell rang.

  Roderic.

  It could be no one else. He would be drunk. He would disgrace him. And tonight Dennis couldn’t face it, so he ignored it. ‘Maureen, are you all right there, can I offer you more wine?’

  ‘I’m fine, thanks,’ she said, clearly puzzled as to why he wasn’t answering the door.

  The bell rang again, more aggressively this time. ‘So, Paul, where were we?’ Dennis said, ‘Wexford. Lully,’ giving him his cue. The caller abandoned the bell and started to knock.

  Maureen and Paul looked at each other in silence, then Maureen said, ‘I, ah, I think there’s someone at your door,’ clearly embarrassed at having to make so foolishly obvious a statement.

  ‘Do please excuse me,’ Dennis said with elaborate politeness as he stood up. ‘I shall only be a moment’

  In the hall, he checked his pockets. He had thirty pounds in cash which he would give to Roderic if he needed it, to make him go away. For Dennis had crossed the Rubicon: he wasn’t going to let Roderic in. No matter what he said, no matter what his condition, Dennis would turn him away, a thing he had never done before. He would be too ashamed before his guests. Roderic, smashed and self-pitying, would deal a killer blow to his supper party and he wasn’t going to put up with it. He paused for a moment, steeling himself before opening the door.

  ‘Dennis, how are things? I’m running the Dublin marathon this year to raise money for a cancer charity. Will you sponsor me for it?’ Dennis stared wildly at his neighbour. ‘Sorry to make a racket, I’m doing the whole street tonight and I knew you were in, for I saw your lights on.’

  His hands shook so that he could hardly fill in the form that was offered to him. His neighbour thanked him, complimented him on his fine show of roses and Dennis in turn thanked him, said goodbye. He closed the front door and stood leaning against it for some moments with his eyes shut, trying to control the emotional turmoil that threatened to defeat him In an ideal world, he could simply go back into the drawing room and say, ‘I thought it was my brother. He’s an alcoholic and I’m at the end of my tether.’ But it wasn’t an ideal world. Paul was his colleague and he’d never met Maureen before tonight. If he talk
ed about it with anyone, he couldn’t be sure that he wouldn’t start crying. ‘Oh, fuck it all,’ he said out loud, there in the hall. ‘Fuck, fuck, fuck.’ And then he realised that Maureen and Paul would have heard him. He stood there for a few minutes more struggling to compose himself, then went back into the drawing room and carried on as if nothing had happened.

  He thought of all this now as he stared out over the roofs of the city, at the slates, the spires and green domes, the turning yellow cranes. Poor Roderic was out there somewhere. What was he doing at exactly this moment in his lost life? With that the phone on his desk rang.

  ‘Mr Kennedy, there’s a man in reception demanding to see you. He’s very drunk. Could you get down here as quick as you possibly can?’

  He could hear the fear in the receptionist’s voice, could hear Roderic shouting in the background. ‘DENNIS! WHERE ARE YOU, DENNIS? HELP ME!’ He didn’t take time to speak to the woman but simply threw the receiver back in its cradle; didn’t take time to wait for the lift, but ran down the three flights of stairs to the entrance of the building.

  Roderic was sitting on the floor with his back to the receptionist’s desk and his forehead resting on his knees. The doorman, who was tiny, was hovering nervously over him like a Yorkshire terrier guarding a wounded wolfhound. ‘He’s grand now,’ he said to Dennis, ‘he’s grand,’ which was patently not true. Roderic looked disastrous. He hadn’t washed or changed his clothes for days; he was paralytic with drink and he was crying, great heaving boo-hoo-hooing sobs, like a small child in distress.

  ‘Ring for a taxi, please,’ Dennis said to the receptionist, and he knelt down beside his brother. ‘Don’t worry, Roderic, everything’s going to be all right. I’m with you now. I’ll look after you.’ He put his arms around him, hushed him and soothed him. From somewhere a blanket was fetched, and he tenderly placed it around Roderic’s shoulders. In his place of work Dennis was famed and feared as a martinet and the receptionist and doorman both stared at him now, astounded at this unexpected side, this gentleness and compassion. ‘We’re going to go to my house and you can sleep there, and you’ll be fine. We’ll get you a doctor and you’ll be looked after. Believe me, Roderic. Everything is going to be all right now.’