Authenticity (17 page)

She nodded, and Roderic was genuinely surprised. He had been silently sure that William would balk at the price, and his delight for her was sincere, She told him she had felt anxious and that William when he arrived appeared to be completely on top of the situation, which had only made her
feel worse. He had considered what was on offer and the prices; had talked about her work and then spoken more generally. Just when she was sure that he was about to say he would think about it and be in touch – a polite way of saying no – he made her an offer for the box with the leaves.

‘Lower than the price you asked?’

‘Lower, yes, but not by as much as I’d feared. I told him it wasn’t negotiable, and suggested the feathers again. But he wanted the leaves.’

‘Of course he did. It’s the best piece.’

‘So he thought about it for a few minutes more, and then he said yes.’

Roderic congratulated her again. Later, he would think he should have been more explicit at that point, should have warned her off. ‘Let that be an end to it. If he rings you or makes contact again, refuse to see him. Tell him you’re busy.’ It wasn’t that he didn’t think of it at the time, those very words of warning formed in his mind, but he had thought too: ‘Who am I to tell her this? What right have I to lay down the law?’ In any case, Julia would never stand for being told what to do. He had made his unease concerning William plain enough, to say more at this stage would be to keep the issue open, just at the point when it seemed to be quietly drawing to a close.

‘Did you get one of these too?’ Maeve asked. Dennis nodded dumbly. She propped the card up on the mantelpiece and they both stared at it for a moment. ‘It’ll be a very grand affair if the invitation’s anything to go by,’ she said. ‘Look even at the envelope,’ and she thrust it under Dennis’s nose so that he could inspect the calligraphy and the thick, heavy paper lined with tissue.

‘I told you, I got one myself.’

The invitation was engraved, silver on white; the flowing letters looked as if they had been iced on to the card by a master baker. There were no images at all, no silver bells or golden rings, no silhouettes of bride and groom, no fake stained-glass windows and no candles. It was understated, elegant and in perfect taste, and as such, Dennis thought, wholly inappropriate as an invitation to Roderic’s wedding.

That Roderic would someday either marry or set up home with someone was a thought that had crossed Dennis’s mind from time to time over the years. It had come close to happening once or twice, with his girlfriend in the west, and with another woman, Annie. It had never bothered Dennis then as an idea, and, given that it bothered him so much now that it was becoming a reality, he asked himself why this should be. It was when Roderic had decided to extend his time in Italy and moved in with Marta that Dennis had started to feel uneasy. That he was now marrying her meant that he would probably never live in Ireland again. He stared at the invitation on Maeve’s mantelpiece with something close to anguish, as he had sat looking at his own in the house that morning. It was all wrong.

Now that it wasn’t going to happen, he could imagine the wedding Roderic might have had with one of the women he’d known when he lived with Dennis. He could see the invitation: a big jazzy card the size of a paving stone, WEDDING! written across it in thick paint, and surrounded by an ironic slather of ribbons and sequins and spangles, cheerfully over the top. Better that than this icy, massproduced thing that had arrived. Or perhaps there wouldn’t have been an invitation at all. He imagined his brother sitting beside the telephone, working his way through his address book.
Jim? Jim, it’s me. I have a bit of news for you. We’re getting
married. Yeah, cheers. We’re having a big bash that night, Friday
fortnight. Will you and Moira be there? Great stuff.
He saw Roderic with a gardenia pinned to his jumper, the bride in some mad muslin confection of her own making, barelegged and with a crown of wild flowers on her head. He saw the riotous party that was their wedding reception, with no speeches and no receiving line, no clear soup and no white cake: nothing that was conventional.

‘Chiesa di San Stefano,’ Maeve’s voice said, cutting into his thoughts. ‘Does that mean it’s to be in a church?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well I suppose that’s something, anyway. And she’s an arty type too, I gather?’

‘Who’s “she”?’

‘Why, this woman,’ Maeve said, ‘that Roderic’s marrying.’

‘Your future sister-in-law’s name is Marta, and she’s an expert in art restoration. Whether or not that makes her an “arty type” I couldn’t possibly say.’

His irritation irritated Maeve, but she decided to let it pass.

‘Her father’s a judge,’ she said. This was news to Dennis.

‘How do you know that?’

‘Mum asked Roderic when he rang to tell her he was getting married. I suppose you’ll go over to the wedding?’ ‘Of course. What about you?’ She shook her head.

‘Mum won’t be going either but Cliona’s thinking about it, and Daddy definitely wants to be there. Maybe you’ll take out presents from us to give to him?’

Dennis nodded. He couldn’t speak now. Maeve peered at him curiously. He looked as if he was going to cry and she couldn’t for the life of her think why this should be.

As the invitation sat uneasily with any idea of a wedding to which Roderic might be a party, the gifts, too, when they started to filter in, added to the sense of dislocation. Dennis saw that the embroidered linen Cliona bought, Maeve’s crystal and the silver cutlery his parents offered were suitable wedding presents in so far as they were typical. But as gifts for Roderic they seemed mystifyingly inappropriate, unless since moving to Italy he had undergone some tremendous sea change, some transmogrification of personality and lifestyle of which there was no evidence in the cheery letters he continued to send to his brother; nor in the enclosed photographs of him standing with his arm around Marta, or lifting his glass to the camera. Dennis himself was at a loss to know what he ought to buy. It was a particular source of anxiety because Roderic himself had, Dennis thought, a kind of genius for selecting presents, remarking once, ‘When you choose the right thing, it’s a way of saying to someone, “I know who you are,”’ For all that, he found himself falling in with the general ethos, found himself wandering glumly around displays of china and crystal in department stores. On one of these excursions, he saw a couple standing with a clipboard-wielding sales assistant before the dinner services.

‘Well, which
do
you prefer?’ the woman asked the man crossly. ‘The one with the ivy or the one with the gold line?’

‘I really don’t mind,’ the man replied. ‘They’re both nice. You decide.’

The woman glowered at him. ‘You’re not being helpful Joe, not helpful at all.’

It was, Dennis thought, like a vision of hell. Did they have wedding lists in Italy? At this precise moment was Roderic trailing around some china shop in Siena undergoing a similar ordeal?

A week before he left, a woman phoned him late one night. ‘You probably won’t remember me,’ she said, and Dennis didn’t recall the name she gave. ‘I’m an old friend of Roderic’s. He invited me to his wedding and I have a present for him. I wondered if you’d be so kind as to take it out to Italy for me?’ They arranged that she would call to his office the following day.

‘Do you remember me now?’ she asked when they met.

‘I do indeed,’ Dennis said. The image of her that came to his mind was of seeing her sitting at his breakfast table wearing nothing but an old shirt of Roderic’s that came to her shins. They had been a couple for a few months in the early days, and had remained friends thereafter.

‘It’s kind of you to do this for me,’ she said. ‘I’d have posted it out but it wasn’t ready until yesterday.’ She was holding a bundle of coarse buff calico tied up with a silky green ribbon. ‘I wrapped it like this for the customs. I’d better show you what it is, in case you get asked,’ and she pulled the ribbon. The bundle contained a blanket made of thick, soft wool in colours of mosses and turf, shot through with blue. ‘I had a woman I know, a weaver, make it specially,’ she said. Dennis stared at her, unable to speak. ‘Tell him I’m sorry I can’t be there. Tell him I said good luck.’ And as Dennis watched, he saw a crown of wild flowers descend, and settle gently on her brow.

He arrived in Italy several days before the wedding to be met at the airport by Roderic and Marta, and to be swept up, all at once, into his brother’s new life. To begin with, Dennis was glad he had given Roderic no indication of his misgivings, for he felt now that he had been completely wrong. He had never been to Italy before. In spite of all Roderic had told him in
letters, in spite of the photographs he had sent, in spite, even, of his own preternaturally vivid imagination, nothing had prepared him. He was enchanted, completely won over. Marta, whom he had dreaded meeting, visualising in the watches of the night her chill initial greeting: ‘So you must be Dennis,’ introduced herself by throwing her arms around him. ‘My dear brother,’ she said and she kissed him. ‘My dear, dear brother.’ At dinner on that first night, his brain fuddled by tiredness and the buzz around him of a language he could not understand, by too much wine drunk with the huge plates of food, pasta and chicken and salad that Marta’s mother had pressed upon him, he happened to glance up at Roderic. He was sitting with his chin propped in his hand, staring across the table at Marta who was staring back at him in the same wholly absorbed way. They were besotted with each other, Dennis thought, completely besotted.

They had been living together for about six months when they decided to get married, at which point they moved from Marta’s small apartment into the house which had been her grandparents’ home. They were well established there by the time of the wedding. The morning after his arrival Roderic showed Dennis around the cool interior, with its long rooms and high ceilings; and the walled garden with its tomatoes and courgettes, its extravagant roses. ‘That’s my studio,’ Roderic said, pointing at a long outhouse on the left. ‘Come and I’ll show you.’ They went up three wooden steps and into a white room flooded with light.

Although he was in no way territorial or secretive, Roderic had always been selective about who he did or didn’t let into his studio. To force the matter, to show up uninvited, to insist on being allowed in, was to risk disturbing the deep-seated irritable streak he got from Frank and that one engaged at one’s peril. ‘Letting someone into your studio is like letting someone into your head, so they can see how you think,’ he once said. ‘You have to be careful.’ Dennis had been one of the few who was always welcome, but even he would never
have called unexpectedly to the studio in Dublin without good reason. He sat down now in a blue armchair and looked around. It was all, he thought, reassuringly familiar. It wasn’t just that Roderic had obviously set the place up along exactly the same lines as his old studio in Ireland – the comfortable chair beside the door, the trestle table pushed hard against the back wall and laden with painting materials, the bookcase, the easel, the lot. It was more than that: it was an atmosphere, a climate. His windows in Dublin had given on to a faded Georgian townhouse, his windows here the lush garden, but somehow it didn’t matter. Both spaces had the same brightness and cheer, with the sense of something serious, even sombre, at the back of it all. It was indeed, Dennis surmised, as close as one could get to being inside Roderic’s head.

‘I’ve done good work while I’ve been here. I’ve moved on to another level; it’s been great.’ As he spoke, he turned around some of the many canvases that were leaning against the wall, so that Dennis could see them. The patches of colour in which he worked had become more muted, and finer, more regular. That was the only difference Dennis could see, and he didn’t know what it amounted to, but Roderic seemed pleased. ‘It’s been a real breakthrough,’ he went on. ‘Funnily enough, I don’t think it has anything to do with being in Italy. I used to think it was the change of scene that had opened things up, but now I feel that it would have happened anyway. Something had to give. It’s like banging your head against a brick wall for ages and then you look round, and there’s an open door behind you. The relief! You can’t imagine, you just can’t imagine.’

Dennis nodded, still staring at the paintings. ‘It’s good that Marta’s in the same line of work as yourself.’

‘She is and she isn’t,’ Roderic said, beginning to turn the canvases round to face the wall again. ‘There’s a considerable difference between what we do.’

‘Surely there’s some common ground?’

‘Yes, of course. I mean, we both love art. She’s got a good eye, Marta, extraordinarily good. But it’s a completely different approach, you know what I mean?’

Dennis didn’t really, but he nodded and let it pass.

They went back out into the hot garden. ‘That’s a passion flower,’ Roderic said, nodding at a vine that was twined around a trellis at the back door. ‘Hard to believe, isn’t it, me living in a house with a passion flower growing outside it. Sometimes even yet it all seems unreal. I think it’s a dream and I’m going to wake up back in your house, listening to the rain battering on the slates.’

Oh, you should be so lucky, Dennis thought bitterly. You should be so lucky.

That night, Dennis found it impossible to sleep. Marriage! How could
anyone
do it? It had always held for him a peculiar horror. He usually tried not to think too much about this side of his own life, but in the small hours of the morning he had no defence against it. People thought they had the measure of him, but they didn’t. They assumed in him an indifference to women which wasn’t the case at all, just as they usually failed to see that his gruff, rather forbidding manner hid a desperate shyness. Roderic probably thought that he had never had a girl in his whole life, but he would have been wrong.

When Dennis was in his first year at university, he had been befriended by a young woman called Edith. Like him, she was studying music, with the violin as her specialisation. It was a time of such emotional turmoil and uncertainty for Dennis that looking back he wondered how he had come through it at all. He had to face up to the fact that he wasn’t going to make the grade as a concert pianist, and the rest of his life loomed before him, empty. Edith succoured him in his woe. She talked through his options with him, and gave him precious moral support when he had to summon up the courage to tell Frank he wanted to change to another course of studies. Together they went to concerts of baroque music
and to the cinema, often going for a drink or a simple meal afterwards. Edith lived in a cosy, tiny bed-sit in Ranelagh. With its clutter of books and music, its candles and posters and potted plants, it became a haven for Dennis, who was still living at home, and it was there one Friday night in front of the gas fire that, to his immense relief, she finally seduced him.

She was only slightly less timid and marginally more experienced than he, so it was a somewhat fumbling and awkward encounter, but it didn’t matter. He loved being with her, and thought that her going to bed with him on a regular basis, as she did in the weeks that followed, was an act of great kindness. Their sedate, discreet affair continued and evolved until one day, just before a composition lecture, a mutual friend remarked, ‘I hear yourself and Edith are an item.’

A cold, sickish feeling swept over Dennis. ‘Well, you heard wrong,’ he said shortly.

He didn’t take in a single word the lecturer said that day, didn’t write down so much as a note. His mind raced. What was he to do? He didn’t want to lose her, but he didn’t want to be trapped.
Trapped
. That was what he had always feared, getting sucked into something from which he would never be able to extricate himself; and their relationship becoming public knowledge somehow seemed to make it more likely that this would happen, although he didn’t understand why. He felt anxious and confused. Much as he liked Edith, what if it all turned out to be the thin end of the wedge, with the thick end a life like Frank’s?