Authenticity (27 page)

What struck Dennis most in all of this was how resigned Roderic appeared to be. There was none of the rancour and annoyance he suspected there might have been had the subject come up the night before, and although he had a glass of red wine to hand he seemed to have forgotten about it. As he talked to Dennis he had been arranging the meat on a wire rack which he now lifted and placed carefully over the glowing coals.

‘Where is Marta?’ Dennis asked.

‘Putting the baby to bed. This little minx,’ and he nodded at Serena, who had left the sofa and gone over to see what her
father was doing, ‘is allowed to stay up late tonight because it’s Friday. You’re a minx, aren’t you?’ he said, pretending to chase her with the long fork, making her giggle and shriek. ‘You’re a villain.’

‘The kids are fabulous,’ Dennis said.

‘Yes, aren’t they? We’re hoping for a third.’ In the light of recent days Dennis was surprised to hear this.

‘Really? That’s nice,’ he said sincerely. ‘Would you like to have a son next time?’

‘Jesus, don’t you start. Do you know what Marta’s mother said to me when Allegra was born? “What’s wrong with you, that you can’t make a boy baby?” Half in jest and whole in earnest. I want another daughter. I want to be like King Lear. I’ll go and visit them when I’m old and grey and difficult. I and my hundred knights. Yes, another daughter,’ he said, grabbing Serena and holding her tight, ‘and then another and another and another …’ She laughed and wriggled as he tickled her in a different place with each word, releasing her only when Marta appeared at the door which led out from the kitchen. She was wearing a cream linen dress and holding a blue glass bowl full of salad leaves, which she set down on the long tiled table where they were to eat.

‘Oh, hello Dennis,’ she said. ‘I didn’t hear you come in. Did you have a good day in Siena?’

‘Excellent. And you?’

‘Today was all right. I went over to see my mother at lunch time. They have an apartment in Positano, do you remember, they spoke of it the other night. I went to say goodbye to them. They’re going off there tomorrow so we won’t see them now for a whole month.’

Looking past Marta, who was standing with her back to her husband, Dennis saw Roderic punch the air gleefully as she said this. Marta noticed Dennis’s expression and followed the line of his gaze. She turned to look at Roderic, who was now turning the chops over with an air of studied innocence. She knew he had just scored some kind of
point against her but she didn’t know how. Evidently it rather amused her for she shrugged her shoulders and smiled. Speaking quietly to her daughter in Italian, she asked her to bring out the cutlery and plates from the kitchen to help set the table. ‘That rose,’ she said to Roderic, walking over to a white rambler that grew thick against the back wall of the garden. ‘The trellis has come loose and some of these branches need to be tied up. Will you help me do it tomorrow?’

‘Certainly,’ he said. ‘We can see to it after breakfast.’

She lit citronella candles to drive away the mosquitoes. ‘Are you hungry, Dennis? Where did you have lunch? Oh really? Which restaurant on the Campo?’ They fell into desultory conversation about Siena. Marta dressed the salad, Serena set the table and Roderic cooked the meat. He lit a cigarette now and as he narrowed his eyes against the smoke of the barbecue, he looked exactly as he had done when cooking weekend breakfasts at the time they lived together in Dublin, jabbing at rashers and sausages in the eye-level grill of the cooker.

If lunch had fallen short of Dennis’s expectations, dinner was everything he could have wished for in an Italian holiday. They ate in the warm scented garden, talking and laughing until far into the night. He enjoyed it even more than he might have done because he was relieved to be reassured about Marta and Roderic.

Dennis and Roderic were already in the kitchen the following morning when Marta came down. She was simply and lightly dressed, both for the heat of the day and for the work she was planning to do in the garden, wearing shorts and a tiny lilac vest with fine shoulder straps. The colour of the vest perfectly suited her tanned skin. It was cut low in the front and clung tightly to her, and even Dennis was struck by how alluring she looked. He also noticed how appreciatively Roderic studied her as she crossed the room, giving the lie to the idea that married people became inured
to each other’s bodies over the years, sheer habit making them take each other for granted. They were standing side by side now and, speaking in a low voice, Roderic said something to her in Italian. Marta’s eyes widened in mild shock and she blushed. Whatever the substance of the explicit compliment he had paid her, she was evidently pleased by it. She shot a quick glance over at Dennis and murmured something to Roderic, who also looked at him and then quietly replied to Marta. His reassurance that his brother would not be able to understand what he had said was actually something Dennis
could
understand,
capire,
as in
Non capisco,
being one of the few Italian verbs with which he was familiar. Marta bit her lip trying not to laugh, and Dennis felt oddly hurt at how they made of both their language and their sensuality a barrier to shut him out.

After breakfast, he happened to glance down from his bedroom window and saw them working in the garden. They were engaged in fixing the broken rose trellis that Marta had spoken of the night before and Dennis became absorbed in watching them, struck by the harmony with which they worked. Marta held a spar of wood steady while Roderic nailed it down, and then they carefully pinned up the long stray branches of the rose, debating how best to arrange them so as to give the whole a pleasing shape; warning each other against the thorns. Leaning against the window frame Dennis fell into a reverie. The absolute intimacy, the peculiarly complete togetherness that he was now witnessing unnerved him. It was like watching a single person work in the garden, so much were the two bodies of one mind. He thought of how strange a thing marriage was, and how glad he was that he had never entered into it. He knew in his heart, as he had always known, that it was not for him.

They had finished with the rose now. Roderic flopped down on the garden sofa where Dennis had sat the night before, and patted the cushions, inviting Marta to join him.
He put his arm around her shoulders as she went on talking, pointing to a wooden jardinière, painted white and containing a lemon tree. He was only pretending to listen to her, was gently pulling one of the straps of her vest off her shoulder. Protesting and laughing she pushed it back up again, pointed to a sunny, empty corner of the garden in which the lemon tree might be more advantageously situated. Roderic looked towards the place she indicated and nodded, but was again slyly pulling at the strap of her vest. Again she stopped him. He spoke. She laughed and shook her head; again he asked her something. Marta looked all around the garden as if to make sure that they were quite alone and then, to Dennis’s astonishment, she simply peeled off the lilac vest and tossed it aside. As Roderic bent over her to kiss her naked breasts Dennis leapt back from the window, ashamed of spying on them and terrified of being seen.

Today was evidently one of their good days.

He spent all morning in his studio but achieved nothing; nothing that pleased him in any case. When William had last painted, many years earlier, the works he produced had been strong and assertive, making up in verve for what they lacked in technical accomplishment. On taking his canvases out of storage to look at them again he was surprised at how good he’d once been. His studies in oils of trees and rivers, his still lifes, had somehow got at the essence of the things represented, although for the life of him now he couldn’t think how he had done it. This notwithstanding, his past accomplishments gave him confidence as he embarked upon his new phase of work. In the intervening years his interests and tastes had changed and what he wished to paint now were abstract works in watercolour. ‘Good luck,’ Julia had said to him when he told her this. ‘Believe me, you’re going to need it.’

To begin with his initial enthusiasm had carried him along, together with the excitement of having his own studio space and the time in which to work in it, but in the past week or so he had become bogged down and could make no progress. He found he couldn’t control the colours, couldn’t make them conform to the idea he had in mind and wished to express. Was that the problem – was he taking too rigid a stance, trying to impose a form upon the work rather than taking a freer and more instinctive approach? In the painting he was engaged upon this morning, executed in reddish brown tones of ochre and rust, the effect he wanted was of transparency and light, the colours seeping into each other in a feathered and delicate way. He was failing utterly in this: the more he struggled for
a translucent clarity the more murky and opaque the whole thing became.

He gave up for the morning and after a short lunch alone – Liz was at work, the children off at day camp as they were on summer holidays from school – he returned to the studio. The painting looked even worse than he had thought, a heavy muddy daub, brown dominating red, the whole thing clumsy and ham fisted. There was nothing to be done but set it aside and start afresh. This time he tried to have no preconceptions but quickly found this meant he had no idea whatsoever of how or where to begin. William’s mind was racing now so that he couldn’t concentrate. It was precisely the worry of not being able to paint that was getting in the way and preventing him from even making a start. He stared at the blank sheet of paper, willing himself to pick up a brush as a deep sense of anxiety unfolded within him, immobilising him and putting paid to whatever last few shreds of his self-belief remained.

In mid afternoon he gave up and decided to go into the city, leaving a note for Liz to say he would probably not be back in time for dinner. As he propped it against the teapot on the kitchen table he reflected that she would be annoyed by this, but didn’t consider changing his plans. Before leaving the house he went into the drawing-room to find a book to read on the train into town, and while he was there he caught sight of Roderic’s painting, which depressed him even further. He saw in it exactly that combination of freedom and control that he had sought so ardently all day and that had eluded him so completely. The fields of green and blue paint complemented each other like voices singing in harmony, each depending on the other for its full resonance and power, the formal restraint serving only to accentuate a wild beauty that it barely contained. Compared to this, his own laboured efforts seemed ludicrous.

There were few people travelling into the city on this August afternoon and so he had no difficulty getting a seat
on the train, but the book he had brought with him remained in his pocket. He looked out across Dublin Bay to Howth, the distant houses vague in the heat-haze. He had hoped that leaving the house would clear his head and permit him to think clearly, perhaps even to know what he might do when next he went to the studio, to break through the impasse in which he had found himself. The sea view, however, brought no enlightenment and still his mind was unfocused, was like a pack of scattered cards. The stations slipped past: Sydney Parade already, and he had given no thought to what he would do when he reached town where he often went now to wander aimlessly, to look in galleries and bookshops, to sit in pubs, wishing his life away.

William left the train at Westland Row, crossed the road and went through the back gate into Trinity College. He was aware as he emerged onto College Green that he was tracing out now a skewed version of his past life. Empty-handed and casually dressed he dawdled along the exact same route where, not so long ago, he had strode among the early morning crowds with business suit and briefcase, purposeful and directed and desperate. What had changed in his life? But
really
changed? His mind shrank from the thought. Julia. He would go to see Julia, he decided, as he proceeded up Dame Street. He knew enough now about the pattern of her day to know that there was a good chance of finding her at home at this time; and then just at that moment, he saw her on the other side of the road.

She was walking in the same direction as William; evidently she was on her way back to her house. He would have crossed over, called her name and joined her had she not been with Roderic. He trailed in their wake, hoping that her companion would leave her at some stage but that too, he knew, was unlikely. Logic said that he was also going home or, worse from William’s point of view, was on his way to Julia’s place. The sleeves of the blouse Julia was wearing hung down well past her knuckles, completely concealing
her hands. From the depths of the left sleeve dangled a bag made of such thin white plastic that William could see through it and identify the modest haul of groceries it contained: a carton of milk, a loaf, some oranges, a tin of soup and a tin of cat food. Abruptly Roderic and Julia stopped walking and William stopped too, thereby causing a collision between himself and a woman walking immediately behind him, much to her irritation. Julia handed the plastic bag to Roderic and held on to his left forearm for balance while she stood on one leg and removed her shoe, a scuffed brown moccasin, then shook it to remove a pebble. As she did so, Roderic said something that made them both laugh, Julia so much that she wobbled and almost overbalanced. Dropping the shoe on to the pavement she shoved her foot back into it and playfully thumped him on the shoulder in response to whatever his teasing remark had been, herself said something and again they both laughed. Roderic was still holding her shopping, and by his gesture William understood that he was offering to carry it for her but Julia shook her head. He handed it back and they continued on their way. It never occurred to William how disconcerted they both would have been had they known he was observing their inconsequential but, as they thought, private stroll through the city.

Perched on a stool in a diner one lunch time not long before he had had to take leave from his job he had noticed, on glancing through the plate-glass window, a woman pass in the street. She was pretty in a rather conventional way, with blue eyes, carefully tinted blonde hair, and she wore a quilted rust-coloured jacket with gilt buttons. A silk scarf printed with Montgolfier balloons was folded around her throat. He noticed all of this, and also noticed that there was something spirited about her: the way her lips were pursed as though she were laughing at something she knew she ought not to find amusing but couldn’t resist. She looked as though she was fully aware of how little her own monied elegance amounted to; conscious of how, underneath it all, she was
wholly her own woman. In a fraction of a second William noticed all of this, and it was only then that he recognised his own wife.

As he walked up Dame Street now until it became Lord Edward Street, past offices and shops, past Dublin Castle, he consciously attempted to do the same thing in reverse with Roderic and Julia: to see them as though they were not people he had met, and, in Julia’s case, someone he liked to consider a friend, but total strangers. How unprepossessing they looked! Ambling home in the late afternoon with their shopping and their shabby clothes – her floppy skirt, his faded cord jacket – there was nothing, but
nothing
about them, to William’s mind, that suggested any kind of gift or accomplishment. No one could have guessed at their real selves, but then, wasn’t that always the case? Wasn’t that what was always said about murderers too, how unremarkable they seemed, and the more heinous their crime the more people insisted, marvelling upon their ordinariness? What did strike him today forcibly and surprisingly about Roderic and Julia was that they were a couple. As a complete stranger that was the only thing he could have intuited about them with any certainty. This was strange, for they weren’t holding hands and apart from the moment when she had balanced on his arm there was no physical contact at all between them. And yet in their easy confidence and the relaxed way in which they talked and laughed together their intimacy could be read as easily as on the day when he had seen them in the shop, speculating on the names of the semiprecious stones. It was as though walking along the street together they were encompassed in a field of radiant light that was theirs and theirs alone.

For a moment William was overcome with jealousy, so powerful and acute it was like physical pain; it winded him and literally stopped him in his tracks. He resented Roderic so deeply that briefly he hated him. For all that he looked inconsequential he had what William wanted and yet would
never, could never, have. Looking at the other man today he knew that. He was too alien, too unlike him; he would never be able to unmake himself to become what Roderic was. William had lost ground to the couple, they were still walking on and he followed them again, but half-heartedly now. Roderic threw back his head and roared with laughter at something Julia had said. It was worse than William had thought: it simply wasn’t in him to be what he wanted to be. His confidence was all gone and he had no real work to set against it, nothing to prove that he had achieved something exceptional in the past and therefore might reasonably expect to produce good work again in the future. It pained him more than ever now to remember the muddy paper over which he had laboured that morning to so little purpose. Against that he set Roderic’s painting and he recalled the beauty and energy of it, the tension there was between the rich pigment and the decisive intelligence of the form; and this was, moreover, far from being his finest work. There was a playful, even foolish side to him; the side that teased Julia and sported with Max, but this silliness did not negate, indeed had no impact whatsoever upon the detached genius that made the paintings. There was no denying the reality of the other man’s gift: the magnitude of it.

They had come to the top of Lord Edward Street. Christchurch was before them and as Roderic and Julia waited to cross the road William hung back. There was no point in going any further. He couldn’t face either of them now and he turned away, wishing that he had never followed them in the first place.

He rang Julia a few days later to arrange a meeting. She was cheerful as ever and asked him how his work was going.

‘Better not to ask.’

‘Do you know what the secret is?’

‘Tell me.’

‘The secret is that there’s no secret. You just get on with it. You just do the work.’ She could hear him snort at the other
end of the phone. ‘You think I’m joking? This is as serious as I get’ She suggested that he call by on Wednesday.

As he walked up the street to her house he smelt the smoke of a turf fire, even though it was August. He commented on it when they were on their way up to her flat and she stopped on the stairs, turned to him. ‘Will you do something for me? Will you do me a favour?’

In the sitting-room, she gave him a pen and a notepad. ‘I want you to write down what the turf smoke makes you think of, in as much detail as you wish to give me. Do you mind doing that?’ It wasn’t at all what he had expected, but he took up the pen and after a moment’s thought started to write.