When they got to the house, Dennis took him straight upstairs to his own bedroom. ‘Just take your shoes off and lie down under the duvet.’ Bending down, Roderic struggled and fumbled with his laces but they defeated him. ‘Here, let me.’ Dennis knelt down in front of him and helped him out of his shoes, then settled him in the bed and pulled the quilt up around him. And then as he sat looking at his brother while waiting for the doctor to arrive, something strange happened. Under his gaze, Roderic began to change. He still looked wretched but not quite as bad as the man who had arrived in the office an hour earlier – more like the man who, to Dennis’s complete stupefaction, had showed up unannounced on his doorstep late one night some years earlier. The marriage is over. I decided to come back. Have you anything in the house I could drink? He was definitely changing: his hair was darkening, and he had lost that bloated, raddled look. He was younger, stronger, like the troubled artist who’d lived in Italy with his wife and three daughters; like the cheerful handsome man who’d shared Dennis’s house and brightened his days with his laughter, his big personality. His face in sleep looked peaceful now as he became the bearded art student, then the energetic teenager. He was shrinking before Dennis’s very eyes, was becoming the curly-headed child he’d been so fond of, the toddler, the baby in the pink shawl that Sinéad had held out to him so many years ago, and whom he had loved with a deep visceral love from that moment onwards.
Will you look after him always?
Yes, I will I’ll look after him.
Chapter Thirty-Four
‘Do you know someone with apple trees?’
‘No.’
‘So you actually bought these?’ Julia took one of the apples from the wooden bowl on Roderic’s kitchen table and held it up.
‘I most certainly did. They were hard to find and they cost me dear.’
‘How much?’
He told her and she laughed. ‘They saw you coming.’
‘They’re organic apples,’ he said, and she laughed again.
‘They definitely saw you coming. The next time I’m down home I’ll bring you some apples back, like this only better, and as many of them as you want. I’m quite serious,’ she said, because now Roderic was laughing. ‘My father has a great orchard, but it produces more fruit than we can ever eat – more even than we can gather.’
The apples in the bowl were local too. She knew it to look at them. No one would ever have bothered to transport such humble fruit from one end of the planet to the other. They were small apples with thick woody stalks, and some of them were slightly misshapen, swollen out more on one side than on the other. The one Julia was holding had a small grey scab on it; some of the others had leaves still attached. Their skins were blushed and flecked, green shading into a rich orange red.
‘I hate those big red apples you buy in supermarkets,’ he said. ‘It’s like eating a cricket ball. They have no taste, no fragrance.’
She inhaled the rich sweet perfume of the fruit in her hand. ‘They look well against the wood of the bowl. They remind me of something,’ she said, ‘but I can’t think what.’
‘Your father’s orchard?’
‘Yes, but something else too. I don’t know what it is.’
On returning to her own house later, Julia was amused to find that there was an apple in the pocket of her jacket that Roderic had somehow managed to put there without her noticing. She set it on the mantelpiece of the living room and for the rest of that day it was a puzzle to her, pushing her towards some lost memory to which she simply could not get back. She picked it up from time to time, studied it closely and thoughtfully, did everything she could to make it offer up its secret, but it didn’t do so until the following night, which brought the first frost of that winter. She had been out visiting friends and on returning to the unheated flat near midnight she saw the apple. It was the bitter cold that made the connection. The revelation of the memory was like a trapdoor opening beneath her.
It was a morning in winter and the sky in the east was an intense deep pink. She was walking through the orchard at home, at the edge of which there was a ditch overhung with grass. This morning every blade was rimed silver and the water in the ditch was frozen. A few windfalls had been trapped beneath the ice and she stopped to look at them. Someone was with her. Someone was holding her hand; it was hot as a coal. The red of the apples was vivid through the thick glassy ice. Julia wanted to stand there and admire the trapped fruit but her companion did not wish to linger. She was chivvied along; she could remember nothing more.
Usually she cherished these fragments connected with her mother, but for some reason it was different this time. It depressed her to think that this was all she would ever have, for it wasn’t enough – not nearly enough. Her sense of loss was borne in upon her with a greater force than ever before. She slept badly that night and awoke with a headache that she couldn’t shake off all day. Her luck had broken, nothing went right with her. She rang Roderic in the early evening but there was no reply. He had mentioned something about going to see his brother later in the week but she couldn’t recall which day. She rang her father but he wasn’t there either. There was only Max to console her in her loneliness and Max was fast asleep. Then shortly after eight the doorbell rang, the two short rings that she wanted to hear more than anything else this evening.
‘Oh. It’s you,’ William was aware of the disappointment in her voice.
‘I can go away again if you wish.’
‘No, please, you’re welcome.’
‘Is there anything in particular bothering you?’ he asked when they were settled upstairs.
‘Everything and nothing. You know how it is.’
‘Meaning?’
She covered her eyes with her hand. ‘Meaning that someone stole a silver dish when I was at work this morning and Hester went mad when she found out. That I checked my bank balance this afternoon and it was fifty pounds less than it ought to be and I have no idea why. That I had arranged to meet someone to interview them for the project I’m working on and they didn’t show. I waited for ages, so that was the afternoon lost.’ She lifted her hand away from her eyes and smiled at him. ‘Do you really want me to go on?’
‘I get the picture.’
She offered him wine from a bottle she happened to have open. ‘I am glad to see you,’ she said as she poured it. ‘I could be doing with company after a day like that. Hope life’s been treating you more kindly.’
‘I don’t know whether it has or not. My big news,’ he said, ‘is that I’m going back to work soon.’
‘Well that’s good, isn’t it? I take it that means you’re better,’ but he laughed at this somewhat sardonically.
‘The doctor I’ve been seeing said to me the other day, “Let me tell you something, William. Cure is a word I don’t like.” You can draw your own conclusions from that.’
‘I know what he means,’ Julia said. ‘Heal is probably more accurate. I mean, what you’ve been going through isn’t probably something that just comes to an end. It eases off and you can get on with your life again, but it never quite goes away completely.’
This slightly disconcerted William, for the doctor had gone on to express the same idea. ‘Mind you, I never thought it would last as long as this. Where are we now, October? I can hardly believe it’
‘And what exactly has changed for you during these past nine months since you left work?’
‘It’s been a strange time. Thinking about my life. Realising that I haven’t become the person I was supposed to become. Realising that it won’t ever happen now, and trying to come to terms with it.’
‘And you’re making some headway?’
‘No,’ he said bluntly. ‘I should have devoted my life to painting. I won’t ever be like you or like your friend. Have a reputation, critical attention, exhibitions and so on. It isn’t going to happen.’
Julia laughed. ‘Critical attention! I wouldn’t break my heart over missing out on that one if I were
you.’
‘But to have done the work, that has been a good thing, I’m glad I had that. I know nobody else cared about it but it mattered to me. It gave me a kind of spiritual freedom that I needed.’
As she refilled their glasses Julia asked why he spoke of it all in the past tense. ‘You will keep painting when you go back to your job, won’t you? If you want to do it so much, you should be able to work out some sort of schedule for yourself.’
‘I suppose so.’
‘Do you know where it comes from,’ she asked, ‘this compulsion to paint?’
‘It was always there,’ he replied, ‘ever since I was a small child. I used to think it was a neutral thing but now I’m not so sure. This compulsion, as you call it. This instinct. That’s how it strikes me, like an extra instinct. Not everyone has it but if you do, you ignore it at your peril. It’s like the need for sex. That can also seem to be a neutral thing, but it isn’t. It has a dark, blind, dangerous side.’
He told her about a man with whom he had worked when he was starting out as a lawyer, ‘A real pillar of society, all rectitude and respectability. What none of us knew was that he frequented prostitutes. The police recognised him from seeing him in court. They warned him off time and again but he paid no heed. Eventually they had no option but to arrest him. It blew everything apart – his career, his marriage, the lot.’
‘And you’re saying art is like that?’
‘I’m saying it also can destroy lives. It almost destroyed mine. I’m sure you can think of other examples closer to home.’
She knew what he was hinting at but refused to rise to the bait, only replied, ‘I don’t agree with you. I think sex is a good thing and I think art is a good thing.’
‘You may say so; my point is that it’s all a bit more complex than that.’
A silence fell over them and they sat looking at each other. Even though she was quite close to him – if he stretched out his hand he could have touched her – there was something about her that was completely remote and that didn’t square with the solidity of her presence. It was like seeing a ghost and being startled to realise that there was nothing ghostly about it. Julia had removed her shoes and was sitting on the sofa with her legs folded beneath her; her long green skirt was tucked in around her feet. Her hair was pinned back from her face, which looked wan and tired. What was it about her, he wondered, that made her look so impossibly distant? Something at the core of her constantly eluded him, and the more he tried to get at her the more she seemed to recede. He had noticed this quality in her before and was never sure if it was something he was projecting on to her, or if it came from her deepest self. The fits of black depression from which he suffered had this distancing effect Often he felt as though he were experiencing the world through a sheet of plate glass, but with Julia it was something particular, something more. He didn’t know her. That was the simple truth. She drank her wine and stroked the head of the cat who was asleep beside her.
‘Everyone,’ she said ‘has trouble in life. It’s a question of keeping things in perspective and trying to draw strength from the good things that one does have.’
‘It’s easy for you to say that. You don’t know what it’s like to completely fall apart. Money, family and so on; it’s no consolation, it’s not enough. You don’t know what it’s like, this kind of crisis.’
‘lndeed. I’ve led a completely charmed life.’ There was no mistaking the sarcasm.
‘What I mean,’ he said, ‘is that you’re young.’
‘Age has nothing to do with it. Even little children can suffer.’
‘Do you mean my son?’
‘Not necessarily. No, I wasn’t thinking of him.’
Again they fell silent. They were both slightly taken aback at how quickly the atmosphere between them had soured. She offered him more wine in the hope of breaking the mood.
‘Thanks. What you say is true,’ William went on, keen in his turn to mollify her. ‘I do have good things in my life. For example, in these past months I’ve come to understand more about how things were between my father and myself. I value that knowledge even though getting to it has been extremely painful. Of course, your generation are far more at ease than mine when it comes to talking about psychological matters.’
Julia laughed and then she said, ‘It’s been ever such a long day. I’m worn out.’
She did look exhausted, William thought. She was flushed with the wine; and that distance he had noticed earlier was still there. She seemed to him like a woman in a pane of stained glass, or a figure woven into a tapestry, standing on a field of coloured flowers with a hawk at her wrist. ‘You never,’ he said, ‘talk about your mother.’
‘I don’t, do I? There’s nothing to say.’
‘Oh, come along, I can’t believe that.’ She looked at him warily. He knew he ought to drop the subject but his curiosity was aroused now and he risked pressing on. ‘You were very young when you lost her?’
He could see her weighing up in her mind whether or not to answer him and then she said, ‘I was six when she died. Oh, I’ve told you,’ she went on, suddenly impatient, ‘there’s nothing to say.’
‘Meaning?’
‘Meaning that I can’t remember.’
‘You were away from home when it happened?’
‘No, I was there. I was right at the eye of the storm. It’s just that I can’t remember anything about it’
‘But you do know what happened?’
Again she covered her eyes with her hand. She looked weary, but she was weakening, William could see. He was wearing her down. ‘It would help you to talk,’ he said gently.
‘It would do you good.’
‘Why?’
He had no idea. He had said this only because he thought it was what she might wish to hear. ‘Well, perhaps if you spoke about what you know, it might help you to remember.’
She took her hand away from her face and stared at him.
‘Do you really think so?’
William shrugged. ‘No harm in trying.’ Still she was looking at him, clearly thinking hard. He couldn’t understand what was going on in her mind and he didn’t really expect what happened next.
She told him all about her mother, that her name was Eileen and that she had been killed in a road accident that Julia herself and her father had witnessed. Distracted by something or simply not looking, she’d stepped out in front of a car while out on a family shopping trip one Saturday afternoon. She’d taken the full impact of the vehicle and died there on the road moments later, with Dan’s arms around her and Julia holding her hand. It upset her to speak of these things and she started to cry. William said nothing and she continued, telling him how she could remember almost nothing of her mother but fragments.
She told him about the sound of crockery in the morning, the gold watch, the apples under the ice. All her life she had kept the idea of her mother closed in her heart, like a fragile glass plate in a photographic darkroom where, under the right conditions, an image might slowly reveal itself. She had spoken explicitly of her loss to few people and never before in this flood of raw emotion that William’s persistent probing had unleashed with such unexpected force. Sniffing and gulping she took a paper tissue from the sleeve of her jumper and wiped her eyes.
William sat opposite her, watching. In recent times he had found her much less attractive than when he first met her and tonight, with her face red and puffy from crying, she looked particularly unappealing. Nine months had passed since first he had sat in this room and it surprised him now to think back on it and remember how different it had all seemed at the time. Then, it had excited him to be plunged into the life of this stranger, to be sitting in this room that seemed full of a careless glamour, that bespoke freedom; but tonight it struck him as merely the shabby, dusty flat of a young woman without a proper job and with no money. Knowing her had opened no doors for him. Still she was talking, but he was no longer listening. Her confidences bored him, and he wa
ited until she paused again then said, ‘Well now, I’m sure you feel much better for that.’
Julia stared at him with incredulity.
‘I should be heading for home. It’s getting late.’
‘Don’t leave me like this,’ Julia said. ‘Stay a little longer. I don’t want to be on my own.’
‘You’ll be fine.’
‘I’m asking you, William, please. Just another fifteen, twenty minutes. Stay and talk to me; don’t leave me like this.’
‘I have a long way to go.’ There was a distinct note of irritation in his voice now. ‘You’ll be fine,’ he said again. ‘Thanks for the wine. Will you see me out?’
Julia stood up. For a moment there was between them exactly that tension that he remembered between himself and Liz on the day she found out about Hannah, in the seconds before she started to hit him. When Julia moved towards him now he flinched but she walked straight past him, picked up her keys and left the room. He heard her feet descending the stairs and understood what was happening. She was waiting for him in the hall with the front door already open. He didn’t want it to end like this, and he paused on the threshold. ‘You mustn’t think …’ he said, but Julia gave a little growl of exasperation, put her hand under his elbow and literally pushed him out into the street The physical contact had the same effect as on the day when she had shoved the book into his hands, a kind of sexual thrill that was wholly unpleasant. She slammed the door closed behind him and he stood there on the pavement listening to the sound of her double-locking the door and driving the bolt home.
In the weeks that followed, William’s name did not come up in conversation between Roderic and Julia. Roderic noticed this but said nothing, waiting for her to bring up the subject. He was already preoccupied with his forthcoming trip to Italy at the start of the following year and was thinking of how it would be, of gifts he might bring to his daughters. He was also working hard to finish a particular cycle of paintings. Julia called to the studio one day to find him sitting at the table cataloguing slides and as it was a functional, mechanical task he was able to continue with it while chatting to her. It was a dark wet evening in November and he worked by the light of a desk lamp, glancing over from time to time to where she sat on the sofa. It eased his heart to see her there. She had stayed with him the night before and details of their lovemaking came back to him now, to flood and fill the silences that lay between them, making him feel miraculously close to her, making him feel known without anything at all ever being said.
Authenticity Page 36