Authenticity

by Deirdre Madden

  Julia was not looking at him. She was staring at a new painting propped against the wall. It used his familiar range of colours – grey and cream, pale blue and pink – in a series of interlocked rectangles that gave the effect of a mise en abime. This canvas was the original of the slide that Roderic now took up between forefinger and thumb and held before the lamp. The different medium and the effect of the light appeared to make the colours stronger, more vivid, and the small scale made it curiously poignant.

  ‘There’s something I want to tell you,’ she said.

  Roderic made no comment and went on studying the transparent miniature that he was holding.

  ‘It’s to do with the recording about the man with the fishing flies. I was listening to it again today and I realised what it might mean to you. I can hardly believe that I didn’t think of it at the time.’

  He set the slide on the table and sat there for a moment. The recording had unsettled him. He remembered walking home in the light of the full moon and lying awake, thinking about his daughters.

  ‘That’s the whole point of the exercise, isn’t it?’ he said eventually. That everyone brings their own experience to bear upon the work. You can’t be expected to second guess how everyone will react.’

  ‘But it wasn’t everyone. It was you. And it wasn’t a piece of work, it was only raw material.’

  ‘No, no, it was a good thing. It made me think,’ and he picked up a pen. In minuscule script he wrote the title of the painting, its dimensions and the date along the edge of the slide, then placed it in a little transparent pocket beside the neat rows of slides he had already catalogued. ‘In any case I thought you were going to say something about Mr Armstrong.’

  ‘Oh, him.’

  ‘Yes, him.’ He picked up another slide and looked at it, inverted it and peered at it again. ‘You haven’t mentioned him in a while.’

  ‘We had another falling out.’

  He glanced over at her ironically. ‘You don’t say. Have you mended your fences again with him yet? And what was it about this time?’

  ‘I’d rather not say, if you don’t mind.’

  Something in the tone of her voice made him turn to look at her properly. She reminded him of Max: she had that same air of sullen bristling fury as the cat did when it was in a rage.

  ‘I will tell you this, though: there’ll be no fence-mending, as you call it. This time it’s for keeps.’

  ‘What did he do, Julia?’

  She didn’t reply, but tears welled up in her eyes. Roderic was genuinely alarmed now; she almost never cried. He left the table and went over to where she was sitting.

  ‘He didn’t try anything on, did he, because if he did …’

  But his suggestion only seemed to make her more angry. ‘No, he bloody well didn’t, but is that the only thing you can think of? It was worse than that, much worse. And I don’t want to talk about it’

  Roderic was at a loss to know what William could possibly have done to upset her so much. ‘When did this happen?’

  ‘Some weeks back. I do blame myself, though. It was my fault.’ He offered her a handkerchief and she took it. ‘You warned me, do you remember? You told me it would end badly, but it wasn’t exactly as you said it would be. I dropped him.’ There was a note of almost childish triumph in the way she said this.

  Roderic had promised all those weeks ago that there would be no recriminations, that he wouldn’t cast her misplaced trust back at her. He struggled now to keep that promise, and wondered again what could have possibly happened. Perhaps he, Roderic, was implicated in it. William might have criticised him and they had quarrelled as a result; or perhaps Julia had somehow let him down, had been tricked into betraying some confidence which she afterwards resented and was too embarrassed to admit to. He studied her face as though he might read there the nature of their dispute, but saw only her misery.

  ‘Whatever it was, it’s over now,’ he said. ‘Put it from your mind and forget about it.’

  *

  Julia saw William once more after that. She noticed him in a crowd of people crossing Dame Street towards her at the end of a working day a few weeks before Christmas. Instinctively she drew back, and retreated behind a stand of postcards outside a newsagent’s. As she pretended to deliberate between a view of the façade of Trinity College and a row of cattle peering over a whitewashed wall, she watched him approach. William was wearing a grey suit and over it an unbuttoned navy overcoat, with a red silk paisley scarf. He was carrying a black leather briefcase; his face was stamped with that tense and forlorn expression that she knew so well. He was close to her now on the greasy stones of the rain-slicked pavement and he stopped to inspect a rack of newspapers, folded and arranged so as to display their mastheads. She disliked watching him in this underhand way but she hoped he wouldn’t notice her. Julia didn’t wish to speak to him: there was nothing to say. To look at him tonight, everything about him suggested that his life and his values were alien to hers, and she wondered what had ever possessed her to think that there was common ground between them. Why had she let herself be drawn into his world? He turned away from the newspapers. For a moment just before he vanished into the crowds again, into the city night, she thought that he had indeed noticed her standing there. But if he did, he gave her no sign.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  As she turns on to the narrow track, a single sheep high on the slope notices her. Bleating, it moves down the hill, and is joined by two, three others, then quickly six, ten, twenty, more, until every sheep on the slope is heading her way. ‘You creatures,’ she calls laughing, ‘I have nothing to give you,’ as they cluster by the wire that separates the track from the field. She can hardly hear her own voice over the loud humming sound of their bleating. Their backs are all stained indigo; and they run alongside the wire, tripping and tumbling, following her as she walks along until another line of wire halts their progress, penning them in. As she walks on up the valley, she can hear their sad weird cries gradually dying away.

  The track stays close to the course of a river for some distance, so that she has the slope of the hill on one side and the tumbling peaty water on the other, until suddenly it rises steeply, leaving the river far below with the rowans that fringe it, with its pools and stones. The land opens out and is unfenced now. The rowans, she thinks, the rowans … She comes here in all seasons. She has never been out of Ireland – she never will be – but she cannot think that there is anything anywhere more vivid than the rowans when they have their berries on a clear cold day when the sky is bare – the red of the berries, the green of the leaves, the hard blue of the sky. Even the Mediterranean, she thinks, cannot offer such strong and powerful colours. But it is not like that today, for now everything is grey and dun and soft blue, muted colours of green, the old gold of faded bracken.

  When human memory has been outlived, the landscape remembers. She passes potato drills from the last century, low soft shadowy ridges in the thin soil She passes the ruins of a farmhouse, forlorn now, its windows all shattered, its front door rotted and fallen, the roof collapsed in on itself, like a fire late at night. A pert wren vanishes. The track along which she is walking is not the original route up the valley but then the track cuts into the old path, which is bounded by drystone walls. Panting from the steepness of the climb, she stops. Looking back, she can see where the old road ran straight down, the stones of its walls broken and tumbled now, but still there, resilient, because the landscape does remember. In the distance she can see other grey ruins, deserted houses, and she finds it strange how utterly and completely the human community has gone from this mountainside.

  There are few trees now – a few tough hawthorns, their branches and trunks covered with lichens. She is tired but has almost reached her destination. Every time she comes here she returns to the same place, to a particular fold in the mountains. The path continues on from the point where she stops but not for much further. She settles down between the stones that form
a crude seat. She is out of the wind here, and she looks back down the valley, where the slopes softly interlock. In the foreground, directly in her line of vision, there is a single thorn. The sky is a crown of light, drifting, theatrical. It is not a fine day and the sky is constantly changing. She lies back and watches huge torn grey clouds move swiftly overhead, expanding, contracting, like liquid added to another liquid, like coloured ink in water; the same fringed dissolving quality. She likes it when this happens at night, when huge wild clouds are blown swiftly over a wild moon.

  Once, many years earlier, a strange and beautiful thing happened to her here. She was sitting on that day where she is sitting now, leaning back against the side of the hill with its low plants, its grasses and ferns. She had fallen into a sort of half-hypnotised, half-enchanted state, thinking of the landscape in which she was sitting but not in a willed or forced way, receptive rather than seeking to impose a thought or idea. She was aware of her own breathing, rising and falling, rising and falling; aware of the great slope of the mountain on which she sat. And then all at once she realised that the ground beneath her was alive. The earth was alive. It was as though the land against which she was leaning was the flank of a massive animal. And the sky too, the moving, shaggy clouds, the tumbling river, the thorn, the stones themselves, everything, everything, interconnected and living and complete. It was a sacred, astounding moment, and it passed as swiftly as the rushing clouds. She has never told anyone and she has certainly never forgotten it. This is why she has come to this place today, why she constantly returns. She feels she can enter here into the life of things in a way that is not possible otherwise or elsewhere. It has become a place as of which one might say, ‘This is where we saw the kingfisher.’ ‘This is where we found the rare wild orchid.’ One comes back not in the hope of finding such things again, but in gratitude for the mystery that was revealed there once.

  Sitting in that same spot now, she loses track of time. Her thoughts drift. She thinks about her own life in a vague, open-ended way, wondering what will happen to her in the years to come. On her wrist she wears a gold watch and she studies it with pleasure, thinking of the man who gave it to her. At night before she goes to sleep she places it carefully in its flat leather box and then sets it open on the dressing table beside her, so that it will be the first thing she sees in the morning when she wakes. The watch has a lozenge-shaped face and a supple gold bracelet, as if fashioned from the skin of some fabulous mythical fish. As she looks at it today, she realises that all her cherished thoughts of the future are an illusion. The things she is thinking about have not yet happened and there is no guarantee they ever will happen; there is no fixed promise that anything will happen, that there is a future. Just at that moment, she hears someone approach.

  A stranger. A hill walker. It is rare for her to meet anyone on this path. Once, in winter, she met a shepherd and his dog out foddering sheep, and on two or three other occasions she has met hikers like this man. He has been on up the valley beyond where the path runs out and far on into the mountains, and now he is returning. He stops and they greet each other. The man is exceptionally tall and somewhat eccentrically dressed. He is wearing heavy walking boots and thick socks, the short trousers of an alpine hiker. The effect is faintly ridiculous and she tries not to laugh. On his head is a knitted woollen hat as tight as the cap of an acorn on a nut. His face is flushed and excited.

  ‘Have you had a good day?’

  ‘It was marvellous.’

  ‘How far did you get?’

  ‘Up beyond the watershed so that you could see down into the next valley, and then back down again into this one.’

  ‘Are you out from Dublin?’

  He nods. ‘And you, you live locally?’

  She nods in her turn.

  ‘You’re fortunate to be able to come up here,’ he says, ‘whenever you want.’

  He thinks of the long drive back to the city, of the traffic, of the river of tail lights before him. He thinks of the suburban house to which he will return, of his family, of all the constraints of his life during the week to come. For a moment he envies this stranger so much and not just for where she lives but for her youth, her happiness. She is in her early twenties with thick curling hair, and grey eyes in an open trusting face. There is no evidence of her having already made any of those simple, fatal errors that can close a life down. She is wearing a tweed skirt and thick stockings, a dark blue jacket and a green scarf. ‘It’ll rain soon,’ he says. ‘I doubt if we’ll make it back down before it breaks.’

  ‘I don’t mind. I like walking in the rain.’ As he looks at her, he is overcome by an inexplicable sense of pity and compassion for this stranger. He has no idea why this should be but all at once it makes him feel close to her.

  ‘When I was up in the mountains today something happened.’

  She listens as he struggles to find words to convey the experience he has had. He evokes the physical aspect of the landscape that had triggered it – the brown velvet flanks of the mountain, the heather and thick bracken. In the silence a single bird was calling. The shifting light and the stones, the faraway pine forests, black as a winter lake: he tells her of all these things and of how, under his gaze, they had suddenly opened to afford him a remarkable insight into their nature. When he has finished they remain in silence for a few moments.

  And then she says, ‘Exactly the same thing happened to me here once.’

  The valley is now a tunnel of light. The strong blink of sun that heralds rain reaches its pitch of intensity. He suggests that she walk back down the valley with him; she thanks him and stands up, brushes a few wisps of dry grass from her skirt. They set off together and walk in companionable silence. The rain begins to fall and the sky darkens, all is greyness. She pulls her scarf up over her head. They walk through soft veils of rain under slow clouds. They pass the thorn, the broken wall that marks the abandoned road, they pass the empty farmhouse. They descend to the tree line, to where the hawthorns and the rowans grow, to where the river flows, its peaty water falling over stones. They see the sheep muster. When they reach the point where the track meets the road there is a man tending a bonfire and he greets them. They stand opposite him and all three look into the flames. The man’s face, seen through the haze of the heat, gives the impression of something seen through water. They feel simultaneously the heat of the fire and the chill of the rain; there is a smell of smoke and decay. They take leave of each other standing by the bonfire to return to their lives, to fulfil their destinies.

  Neither of them ever forgot the other. Neither of them ever spoke to anyone else of what had happened that day. They never met again.

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  As Roderic and Julia listened to the bells of Christchurch ringing in the New Year, he gave silent thanks for the year that was ending, for everything in it that had been joyful and complete. Two weeks later he returned to Italy to visit his daughters. He rang Julia at the end of every day during his time there, and although this trip was much more relaxed and enjoyable than his last visit, still he valued and needed these calls. On the rare occasions when he was briefly wrongfooted by some tension between himself and his family, to hear Julia’s voice was a comfort; when all had gone well his conversation with her made it perfect, and in both cases it succeeded in bringing his daughters and lover into a single reality. In themselves they were inconsequential, these late-night chats, drowsy and rambling. From the sound of her voice he could summon up her presence, her whole world, could see her curled up on the sofa with her skirt tucked in around her feet, her book spreadeagled beside her where she had abandoned it to answer the phone. He could visualise the low-lit room, its fire, its faded rugs. Once or twice he could even hear Max purring, fast asleep beside her so far, far away.

  And then at the end of the first week, something happened. He knew it as soon as she spoke, knew her so well that, even from the inflection of her voice when she said ‘Roderic, hello,’ he understood at onc
e that something was wrong. ‘It’s nothing,’ she said, ‘that I feel I can talk about over the phone.’ In the following days he probed gently, asked leading questions about her father, her work, about Hester and the shop, but her responses gave him no real clues.

  He spent his last night in Italy in Rome and flew back to Ireland early the following day, went straight from the airport to find Julia finishing up her morning’s work amongst the wardrobes and what nots, her delight to see him again matching his at being back with her. They went up to her flat and immediately he asked what was troubling her.

  Julia frowned. ‘It actually happened before you left, but I only found out about it after you’d gone.’

  ‘It’s to do with William, isn’t it?’

  Again she nodded.

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘He’s dead.’

  For a moment neither of them spoke. Roderic was genuinely shocked by the news, and was struck by Julia’s demeanour, for she looked angry, resentful even, rather than grieved.