Authenticity (22 page)

‘You seem a bit distracted, that’s all. You’re not looking at me when you’re talking. You keep looking away. You keep staring at something here,’ and Roderic pointed at Frank, who grinned wolfishly at Dennis.

‘No I don’t,’ Dennis said, and he fixed his gaze on Roderic’s face, made a considerable effort to keep it there.

‘I’m fine, really. Go on, go on.’

‘And that the medical thing didn’t work out was a great blow, although he so rarely spoke of it. He’d have made a fine surgeon.’

‘Yes. I always thought he’d have found people easier to deal with if they were under a general anaesthetic and with their body cavity cut open,’ Dennis said, still not daring to look at Frank.

‘But if he hadn’t decided to get married so young I suppose we wouldn’t be sitting here today. And yet it was the wrong thing to do. The wrong thing.’ Roderic paused for a moment. ‘It’s tragic,’ he said, ‘to make an error early in your life, and then to have to live with the consequences for ever after, to have to try and limit the damage to other people who happen to be caught up in your stupid mistakes. He did try, Dennis, to live honourably, to behave with as good a grace as possible, given the circumstances.’

‘But did he succeed?’ Dennis said pitilessly.

Again Roderic paused for some time before he answered.

‘When I was a child,’ he said, ‘I was terrified of him. I thought him choleric and cold. I was afraid of the lash of his tongue, those sardonic remarks that could cut you to the core. When I grew older, I began to understand him more although I know he thought my life odd, painting, you know, and not seeming to get anywhere much with it. But I know he loved me passionately, as I loved him. I grew to realise over the years how alike we are – were,’ he said, correcting himself. ‘If he was cold, well, so too am I, only his coldness was a mask, whereas with me it’s the absolute centre of myself.’

To look at Frank had suddenly become for Dennis the more bearable option, but his father did not return his gaze. He was staring fixedly at his younger son and listening intently to all he said, his face full of sorrow and compassion. He had aged completely since the start of the conversation, looked
tired and elderly now, as he had done in the weeks before his death.

‘I hope we have a daughter,’ Roderic said. ‘I don’t know what I’ll do if it’s a boy, truly I don’t’

‘Don’t you know already? Aren’t there tests nowadays?’

‘Yes, but Marta absolutely refused to be told in advance. I know I’d be a bad father to a son. I’d make a better go of things with a girl, I feel sure of it. I wish these days were over. I dread tomorrow, I don’t know how I’m going to get through the funeral, and I keep thinking of how much Dad himself would have loathed it all.’

Dennis looked from Frank back to his brother.

‘We should have had him cremated,’ Roderic said, ‘and scattered his ashes over the Wicklow mountains. That was the one place on earth where I think he was happy, where he felt free.’

‘I’ll always feel close to him there, no matter what,’ Dennis replied. That had been his gift to Dennis, the love he shared for the hills in winter, for the rowans, the tumbling boggy rivers and the high bare skies.

‘If you could speak to him now, is there anything you would like to tell him?’ Dennis asked.

‘I hope he knew that I loved him, in spite of everything. I could never have told him that, any more than he could have told me. But I hope he knew. I hope he knew.’

But when Dennis looked back, Frank had disappeared. Nothing remained but an empty glass where he had been sitting, its sides laced with traces of froth, like the foam left by the waves on a deserted beach in winter.

He rang her from the airport. ‘I had an idea in the taxi: why don’t you come to Paris with me? I’ll buy you a ticket now for a flight going out later today, and you can collect it here. I’ll meet you when you arrive. Please, Julia.’

‘I wish I could but I can’t. My passport expired six months ago and I haven’t renewed it. By the time I get it sorted out you’ll be back. In any case, Hester would go mad if I asked for more time off.’

‘Then I won’t go,’ he said, but she dismissed this at once.

‘I’ll be here when you return, you can tell me all about it. Someday we’ll make a trip together. There’s no rush now, we have all the time in the world.’

He told her he loved her and said goodbye. As he walked away from the phone, past people trailing luggage, past straggling queues at the check-in desks, under the black destination board with its red lights, it occurred to him how strange it was to experience such happiness – no, elation, it was, pure
joy
– here, of all places. For years now, Dublin airport had been a particularly bitter and painful station in his way through life. How far back did he have to go to find a good memory? Perhaps not since he left for Italy for the first time all those years ago had he had a truly carefree trip. There had been visits home with Marta in the early days when he had fretted on her account, when the warmth of Frank’s welcome and interest in her did not quite cancel out the effect of his mother and sister’s cool indifference. Later came trips with Serena and then Allegra to rented houses in the west where the Irish weather conspired against them. The unseasonal wind and rain astounded Marta – that July could be so cold! – and sent them all back to Italy sneezing and
coughing. Because it was Roderic’s country he felt that it was all somehow his fault. Eventually the expense and effort of travelling such a long distance and trailing through departure lounges with small children and their aristocratic quantities of necessary goods – pushchairs and teddy bears and bottles and bibs – made them give up in despair. They took family holidays in Positano which bored Roderic intensely, and he came back to Dublin on his own from time to time to see his family. He remembered hurrying back when his father was seriously ill and Dennis meeting him here in the airport, telling him it was too late, that Frank was dead.

The screw tightened as the years went on, and his life in Italy soured. Apart from Dennis he had no strong bonds to Dublin now, and both departure and arrival left him miserable, torn between two realities neither of which was right. Drinking solved nothing, yet still he drank. His marriage fell apart and he compounded the error of having settled in Italy with Marta by returning eventually to Ireland. He remembered arriving back in Dublin airport knowing that he was doing the wrong thing, but he was too fuddled with alcohol and misery to know what he should do. A disastrous trip back to see Marta some months later, then nothing for years until the botched visit a year after he stopped drinking, and at last the final nervous departure in June when he went to be reconciled with his daughters. That was his experience of being in the airport.

And now this. Now this.

This sense of sudden transformation continued when he arrived in Paris. The weather there as in Dublin was bad, and yet still he found the city radiant under a wet silver sky, and strong winds were bringing down the leaves in the curiously formal gardens. He sat under the awning of a café and watched the life of the streets, thinking that if things had not gone well between him and Julia the city would have looked utterly different. Without the lustre given to it by love it
would have seemed claustrophobic and grim, just as he could objectively see that many of the women who passed him in the streets were more beautiful than Julia and yet still he thought her lovelier. He couldn’t believe what had happened to him, couldn’t believe his luck. That Julia loved him. That he himself was alive and sober with a roof over his head, that he was working well, that he was reconciled to his daughters; the cumulative grace of these things almost overwhelmed him. Rain dripped from the awning and the people in the streets huddled under coloured umbrellas. What would they think of him, these strangers, if they knew the truth of his life? No doubt they would consider him a failure on so many levels. They would not be able to grasp how astonishing an achievement it was for him to be there at the still centre of an ordinary life, ordinary happiness, something that had eluded him until now.

In the Louvre he saw a painting that he thought perfectly expressed this sense of beatitude: an angel, painted on a tiny gilded oblong of wood. He stared at it for a long time, at the branch of moist olives it held in one hand, the other calm upon its flat breast, its shock of hair, not dissimilar to Julia’s, its perfect fingernails and mild, androgynous face, its atmosphere of peaceful benevolence. Near by hung another much larger painting by the same artist. In the centre were the Madonna and the Christ Child, and at their feet, one on either side on a richly patterned carpet, knelt the donor and his wife. Behind them were the serried ranks of their children: seventeen in all, the girls behind their mother, the sons behind their father. Had anyone believed even then, all those years ago, that the painting had been commissioned out of religious faith, out of anything other than the sheer pride of parenthood, so that the stiff-faced citizen could show off his children? His sons, so magnificent, and his daughters, his brown-eyed, snub-nosed, clear-skinned girls, in their veils and linen bonnets?
I have three
daughters.

Apart from a guard slumped in a chair at the far end of the room there was no one else around. The next painting Roderic noticed was a crucifixion which he judged to be from the fifteenth century, given its style and content. At the foot of the cross on a landscape of broken stone were four female figures, two on each side and disproportionately small, who stared out sternly at the viewer. They wore pleated gowns of jewel-deep colours: emerald, sapphire, garnet and topaz; and on their heads were stiff linen wimples. Female martyrs who bore the emblems of their suffering: Saint Barbara with a model of the tower in which she had been imprisoned by her father; Saint Lucy, whose eyes had been gouged out and which she now displayed on the silver tray she held in her hands; Saint Agatha, whose breasts had been cut off and which she also offered on a platter for the viewer’s delectation. Roderic, familiar with the iconography, could identify these, but the last figure baffled him. Standing on the extreme right of the painting, she was also carrying a silver tray and on it were an array of flasks and flagons together with a drinking glass. He racked his brains but had no idea who this last saint could be, even though there was something about her face that was vaguely familiar.
The
Master of the Unfortunate Decision,
he read on the label pinned near by.
Italian School, early 15th C. Crucifixion with Four Female
Martyrs, SS. Barbara, Lucy, Agatha and Marta.
Marta? But she wasn’t a martyr! Even as he thought this a little voice said, ‘Are you sure about that?’ Wildly, Roderic looked back again at the painting and he saw now that the four tiny figures were alive, were living, breathing women and yes, the one on the right was Marta. Her stern features had now taken on an air of personal affront and without further ado she heaved forward the tray she was carrying, threw it straight out of the picture and into the room. It landed at Roderic’s feet with a tremendous clatter out of all proportion to its size, for it was like nothing so much as a doll’s tea set. The glass smashed on impact, wine and spirits poured from the broken flagons.
Marta wiped the palms of her hands against each other in a brisk gesture of dismissal and finality, while her diminutive companions, clearly appalled, struggled to maintain their sangfroid. Then she turned on her heel, marched towards the frame of the painting and simply disappeared like an actress going off into the wings. Simultaneously with all of this an alarm had gone off in the gallery, a shrill, urgent bell, and the slumped guard leapt out of his chair. ‘That’s him,’ he shouted, pointing at Roderic as more guards poured in from adjacent rooms and bore down on him. ‘He’s to blame. It’s all his fault.’ As Roderic tried to protest his innocence – feeling in his heart that this was not strictly true, that he had caused the mayhem although how he wasn’t exactly sure – a guard even bigger and stronger than he, a monster of a man, wrestled him to the ground and put him in an armlock …

He awoke, and knew at once that he wasn’t at home in his own bed. The weather he could hear, the wind and heavy rain, was the same as on the night he had been with Julia and he thought then for the briefest fraction of time that he was still there, that she was asleep beside him. He reached out his hand to touch her but the wide bed was empty and he remembered with an overwhelming sense of disappointment where he was: alone in a hotel room in a foreign city. Then far below, down in the narrow street, he could hear the familiar sound of a drunken man shouting and roaring. Most probably he was speaking in French but the rain and the wind made it impossible to hear properly. All at once Roderic had a weird out-of-body experience as though his self were split, as though he were both the man lying warm in bed listening and the lost creature down below howling his woes against the elements. Was it possible that his past self was not integrated into the man he now was, but was capable of detaching itself and walking abroad, haunting him like a ghost?

To distract himself from this disturbing idea he tried to imagine those he loved as they were at this precise moment.
He thought of his daughters off in Italy, in the same rooms into which he had crept at night when they were small children to watch them sleeping and to warm his soul. Julia, back in Ireland, would be curled up amidst her mismatched linen on the sofa. But a memory then arose unbidden in his mind of being with Marta some twenty years earlier, during his time at the Foundation. They were in bed together in her apartment late on a summer evening, talking about how his time in Italy was about to run out and what he might do to prolong his stay. It was then she had made her offer: ‘You could always come and live with me.’ Many times since then he had asked himself if he had engineered this moment. Had he put her in the position where she couldn’t but suggest they live together? Even in his darkest hour he had acquitted himself. He’d been genuinely surprised at what she said, but in accepting her offer he was sealing both their fates by opening the way to his own suggestion, a year later, that they should get married. Why had he done it? Because all his life he had been the recipient of others’ generosity and had reached the stage when he needed to be the giver rather than the recipient. But he had nothing to give except himself. And Marta, alas, said yes.

Having slept only fitfully, he was tired and overwrought the following day and the elation he had felt on his arrival in the city was beginning to ebb away. Not that there was any harm in that, he thought over breakfast, if it were to be replaced by a deeper understanding of the state he had come to. He was even glad now that Julia was not here with him: what he was facing he needed to face alone. How urgently his past pressed in upon him these days, as though insisting that it be integrated into his present life. It was something he hadn’t expected in Paris, as he had no strong personal links with the city and in itself he found it a neutral and detached place. And yet, as in the gallery, everything conspired to remind him of things that had happened in the past. As he sat in the glass-fronted café tearing apart a brioche, he saw out
on the street a little incident played out in dumb-show that did exactly this.

It reminded him of quarrelling with Jeannie; about what, he could no longer recall. They’d been standing on a corner in South Great George’s Street, and for once Jeannie was listening as he harangued her, or at least she seemed to be, as she stared away thoughtfully into the distance. Roderic suspected she was only preparing the more ferociously to tear into him when the time came but all of a sudden she walked away, just ten paces or so. ‘Hello, you. I’m Jeannie,’ she said, crouching down in front of a small boy who was howling and wailing. ‘What’s your name? You’ve lost your Mammy, haven’t you? Will we go and look for her?’ The little boy, who said that he was called Donal, stopped crying as though a switch had been thrown and cheerfully took Jeannie’s hand. ‘He wandered out of the arcade,’ she said to Roderic, nodding up the street. ‘I was watching him the whole time you were doing your nut.’ The three of them set off together. Not only had the child brightened up no end, giving them a long garbled monologue in which the story of. his life and the events of that day were confusingly mixed, but Jeannie had also undergone an astonishing metamorphosis, not just of mood but of personality since meeting Donal. Playful, jolly, expansive – Roderic had never seen her like this, but then he had never before seen her in the company of children. He was familiar with her in the aftermath of access visits to her own son and daughter and would bolster her through the black depressions into which she then fell. ‘I bet your Mum’s in here,’ she said to the child as they turned into the arcade. ‘I bet you anything you like.’

A woman with a baby in a pushchair and a girl of about three who looked exactly like Donal were at the far end of the arcade. ‘Where did you get to?’ she said severely. ‘How many times have I told you not to wander off like that?’ The child released Jeannie’s hand without a word and took hold of the handles of the pushchair. In doing so, he was completely
reabsorbed into his own family; it was as if he had moved into another dimension and could no longer even see Jeannie. His mother, however, looked her over coldly, taking in her dishevelled clothes, her hair in need of a wash, and turned away without speaking. And Jeannie was desolate, as desolate as Roderic had ever yet seen her. He put his arm around her shoulders and for once she didn’t push him away impatiently but slumped against him as though depending on him now to keep her vertical.