Authenticity (13 page)

When they were in London in April Liz insisted, much to his annoyance, on going with William to an exhibition on the Saturday morning.

‘You won’t enjoy it.’

‘What sort of art is it? Is it old stuff?’

For a moment he hesitated, tempted to lie before admitting,

‘No, it’s contemporary work. It’s a one-man show I very much want to see.’

Liz freely admitted that she had no real interest in or knowledge of art. There were about three painters in the whole of the western canon whose work she could easily recognise and that she liked: Van Gogh, Monet and Renoir. Her lack of an ‘eye’ for a picture – she couldn’t see the difference between works of the Flemish school and those of the Italian Renaissance – was something William simply failed to understand. ‘All old paintings look the same,’ she said. ‘A crucifixion is a crucifixion is a crucifixion.’ Her dislike of religious art (‘If I see another angel, I’ll scream’) was as nothing compared to her pathological dislike of mythological and classical subjects. ‘Battles, bums, lardy white women sitting around in fields having picnics with goats: how could anyone like this stuff?
Landscape with Aeneas
at Delos.
Who was Aeneas? Where was Delos? And did anyone really care?’ It was all, Liz said, boring, boring, boring. And as for the twentieth century: green-faced women with three eyes? Daubs and blobs of paint? No thank you.

In spite of this she had, when newly married, tried to take an interest in William’s passion and tagged along when he went to galleries and exhibitions. This irritated him enormously and the novelty soon wore off for Liz. She had
hoped he would be able to show her what it was that she was supposed to see, but her antipathy to painting was only confirmed and reinforced. An afternoon spent at a Poussin exhibition was one of the low points of their life together. But in trawling the galleries, they did make an odd discovery: Liz was quite receptive to contemporary art, although she didn’t like everything she saw and didn’t hesitate to say so.

Gallery going remained William’s ‘thing’: he had never known her to go by herself to see an exhibition but when she accompanied him he was always struck by how open minded she was, how willing to take the work on its own terms. She entered freezers and tents and tiny wooden cabins. In darkened rooms she watched videos of people singing, screaming, slapping themselves around the face, setting fire to their hair, giving birth, sleeping or simply gazing immobile into the eye of the camera. She looked at works made of ice, chocolate, flowers, toenails, rotting meat, briars, sand, old clothes, dead animals, beams of light. William had seen her enthuse over the beauty of cones of coloured pigment, turmeric, crimson and blue. He had seen her shocked by photos of tattooed pigs and baffled by rows of empty wire cages. In a dim room full of old and worn soft toys he had seen her moved to tears.

But today he wanted to be alone, and deeply resented her company. In the underground on the way to the exhibition he chose not to sit beside her to make the point clear. It would be an embarrassment to be seen with her in the gallery. How suburban she looked, how conventional, with her twin-set and her quilted handbag. ‘She’ll put silk flowers in the bathroom if you’re not careful,’ his own mother had warned him when he decided to marry Liz. ‘She’ll fill the house with Waterford glass and bits of Royal Doulton.’ Spiteful, yes, but true, he thought. She’d never fully settled into the money marriage had brought her, had never become completely at ease in his world. She caught his eye and smiled across the carriage at him. He stared back, stern and unbending.

The first room they entered on reaching the gallery was large and high, not brightly lit, and covered from eye level to ceiling with hundreds, perhaps thousands of photographs. They were all the same size and showed black and white portraits of people: old men and babies, soldiers, toddlers, grannies, young girls, middle-aged women, young men. The quality of the images varied. Some had evidently been taken from newsprint and enlarged, and the blurred, somewhat blank effect this created, particularly in the eyes of the subjects, only served to heighten their remarkable pathos. Some of the clothes they wore suggested they had lived many years earlier, most probably during the period of the Second World War, so that the babies would, if still alive, be old men by now, and the old men dead. There were no names given or nationality or ages, nothing to say who these people were; and now no one would ever know. William noticed that when visitors to the room spoke to each other, they did so in hushed and reverential tones, as they might have done in a church. Some people merely glanced up at the immense walls, taking in the general sepulchral effect before moving on. Others, including Liz, lingered for a long time, studying in turn as many of these anonymous faces as they could take in, as though paying silent tribute to the individuality of each person. ‘Isn’t it extraordinary?’ she whispered to William.

The effect of the photographs neutralised the annoyance he had felt towards her earlier. Together they went into the next room, and he watched her discreetly as she studied the work there: a series of small beds, high-sided like cots, each lit with its own harsh light-bulb. Although they contained pillows and blankets, they radiated a sense of emptiness. Not to have children was the greatest tragedy that could have befallen her, he thought. Without them she would have been in the same depressed fog in which he now found himself, the same dumb misery. As she moved to read a text on the wall relating to the exhibit, he noticed a woman, cool, young, who was looking Liz over. She whispered something to her
companion, and his eyes also flickered in Liz’s direction. He whispered something back to his friend and she laughed. The man looked again at Liz, smiled sardonically and turned away. William was hurt and angry on her behalf even though Liz hadn’t noticed a thing; even though on the way to the gallery he himself had sneered at her in exactly the same way.

They had lunch in a restaurant of William’s choosing. He liked eating out, enjoyed the opportunities it gave for small displays of dominance and control. He chose a bottle from the wine list; discreet and deferential, the waiter served it.

‘What will you do this afternoon?’

‘I’d like to go shopping. I’ll buy presents for the children.’

As they ate he watched her, thinking of their shared life.

‘Do you remember Spain? Seville, that little hotel?’

‘I don’t think so,’ she said. ‘Was it the place with the coloured tiles all the way up the stairs?’

‘No, that was in Granada.’

She shook her head. ‘Then I don’t remember it. What was the hotel in Seville like?’

‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘Then why did you ask?’

‘Liz, I said it doesn’t matter.’

They finished their main course in silence. William could feel a familiar mental darkness begin to close in around him. His attempt to establish a point of contact with her had only served to drive them further apart. The waiter came and removed their plates.

‘Did you enjoy the exhibition?’ she asked.

‘I don’t think “enjoy” is quite the word.’

‘I liked it. I thought it was sad. All those people, all so completely forgotten now.’

‘As we shall be.’

‘That’s why I liked it,’ she said.

William, surprised, didn’t know how to respond.

‘William, what is it you need? What do you want?’

‘I want a studio.’

He didn’t know how she’d hesitated before asking that simple question, for fear that he’d slipped so far out of her reach that he might ask for anything, that he might reply, ‘I want to leave you.’

‘A studio,’ she said. ‘I’m sure that can be arranged. There must be places in town you could rent. I don’t know how you’d go about it, but we can ask around, look into it’

‘I want it at home.’

‘But there’s no space in the house.’

‘There’s the spare bedroom.’ He could see her dismay. For the past year the spare bedroom had been her pet project. She’d spent an inordinate amount of time and money on it, and only two months ago had she completed it to her satisfaction. The effect she sought was countrified, all cream and pink, with muslin curtains and a narrow brass bed. William didn’t know why she’d put such effort into the making of this room: he’d never asked her. Every summer when she was a child she’d gone to stay with her grandmother on a farm in County Roscommon. She remembered it as a luminous place full of hooting birds. Corncrakes at dusk, the smell of the hen house, the stiff white wing with which her grandmother brushed flour from the griddle, the printed roses of the cheap wallpaper: all of this lost world she could re-enter by sitting quietly alone in the room she’d created. ‘When I was little, like you,’ she told the children, ‘I slept in a bed such as this.’

‘You asked me what I needed. I’m not asking for much. A plain bare whitewashed room, that’s all I want.’

‘Whitewash the walls?’

‘Yes.’

‘And the bed?’

‘We can sell it. Give it away.’

She wouldn’t rise to the bait, wouldn’t get angry. He knew how much he was asking of her, the magnitude of the sacrifice, even if he didn’t know why. If he’d acknowledged the effort she’d made, asked her would she mind, she’d have seen it differently. The room was something in her gift, and
she’d have gladly given it if she thought it would make him happy. But he’d asked her, she thought, in such a way as to deliberately hurt her, to disregard her feelings.

‘Do as you wish,’ she said evenly. ‘It’s a pity, of course. I had thought I might move in there myself before long, make that my bedroom.’ He hadn’t been expecting that, nor was it true. He made to speak, but she brushed him aside. ‘Do as you wish,’ she said again. ‘Shall we go now?’

William moved to take his credit card from his pocket, but before he could do so Liz had pulled several banknotes from her handbag. She gestured, smiling, at the man who had served them and handed him the money. The waiter returned with a silver dish bearing coins, a receipt, and placed it beside Liz. ‘Thank you, madam.’

Alone in the city, the lassitude and darkness closed in around him again. He walked the streets, ended up in the National Gallery in the late afternoon, ended up in tears. No one saw his distress, or if they did, they pretended not to. Perhaps they felt there was nothing they could do. Perhaps they were embarrassed by his emotion, or perhaps they were silently agreeing that his response was wholly natural. Who would not weep before
The Agony in the Garden,
Mantegna’s arid study of affliction: the bare rocks, the sleeping indifference of Christ’s companions, the unsettling perspective, the shut, walled city, and the crowd of soldiers approaching in the distance? Tomorrow was Sunday. They would not go to church, although Liz always took the children to Mass when they were at home. The galleries would be crowded. Art had taken the place of revealed religion for so many people nowadays; loss of faith was taken for granted. But what of the death of Imagination? Who recognised that in themselves? Who mourned it? William didn’t even bother to wipe his eyes.

A small boy sitting on the bench beside him looked ostentatiously at his watch. ‘We’ve been in this place now,’ he said, ‘for exactly two hours seventeen minutes and thirty
seconds.’ If Gregory were here, he wouldn’t be counting the minutes. He would be absorbed in the paintings, in the worksheet that the little boy held crumpled in his hand, his mother negotiating with him now, bribing him, cajoling, buying herself more time. Lots of children liked to paint: it was Gregory’s delight in pictures that was strange. In recent months he had shown more interest in his father’s books than his own. William had been astonished on coming into the drawing room one day to see him with a heavy volume about Kandinsky open upon his knee. The child had looked up, his eyes full of fear. ‘Is it all right?’ he asked. ‘I washed my hands before I started.’ William nodded, tried to smile. The child turned his attention again to the book, and William noticed his unnerving concentration, how he spent a considerable period of time studying each picture in turn, before slowly turning the page and moving on to the next one. Already he had learned how to look at things, something some adults never mastered. Most middle-class parents would have spent a fortune in the hope of interesting their child in art to this degree, but William had not encouraged Gregory. On the contrary, art had always been for him a private passion that he did not want to share. It afforded him an escape from family life, and he realised now with a start that for his son it had exactly the same function. Their home life was something from which, even at the age of seven, he needed a refuge. The child was a fetch, a tiny ghost made in his own image to walk beside him in life and to torment him.

The previous week Gregory had been playing in the garden when he suddenly exploded into the house, bawling, to the room where William was sitting. ‘What is it, Gregory, what happened?’ But even as he reached out to comfort his son, the boy pushed him violently away and continued on into the kitchen, to his mother. William sat listening, as Liz shushed and comforted him. He could feel the spot on his chest where the child had placed his hands to thrust himself
out of his father’s enclosing embrace, as if Gregory’s hands had been burning and had scorched him. The shrieks dwindled to sobs. He rose from his chair and went into the kitchen. Two faces looked up at him.

‘It’s nothing serious,’ Liz said. ‘He nipped his finger on the swing, he got a fright, that’s all.’

‘Well, if it’s nothing serious,’ William said, ‘is there really any need for all this racket?’

He flushed with shame to remember it. In the gallery shop he would buy something special for Gregory, a book or a kit. He stood up and attempted to shake himself out of his grief, walked from room to room and tried to focus on the works displayed. It struck him, not for the first time, that what was singular about the pictures was not the skill that had gone into their making, nor even the vision, but the energy they contained, contained and radiated. To look around the room without focusing on any one work was to be aware of how each picture demanded attention, seemed aware of its own weight and significance. What must it have been like for the artists to have felt that energy flowing through them, to have been a controlling channel for it? The power of the work contrasted sharply with William’s own weariness.