Authenticity (36 page)

and the date, all printed faintly in purple ink – he wondered if eventually it might seem as poignant as the faded paper, that he folded now and replaced in his wallet, when this day too was history.

During the time that he was in hospital Roderic became fixated upon the young woman who gave the weather forecast after the news. Television was in itself a novelty for him: he hadn’t had one since moving back to Ireland and much about it surprised him. In his occasional flashes of lucidity he was struck by how passive an activity it was for someone like himself who, until recently, had spent most of his waking hours in a conscious and active struggle to translate the vision in his mind on to paper or canvas. As an occupation for himself and his present companions in misfortune it was eminently suitable, but from time to time he would be amazed to think that this was how many people who had absolutely nothing wrong with them habitually passed hours of their time. He could cope only with the most anodyne of material. He watched polar bears break out of their snowy winter holts in the spring, watched a chef expertly bone a chicken and a gardener prune fruit trees. He didn’t like the news and would therefore lurk just outside the day room until he heard the music that announced the end of the bulletin, and then he would go in to see the weather report.

‘Well, hello! I’m afraid I can’t promise you any sunshine today; not until the end of the week in fact …’ Roderic studied her intently, marvelling at the way she could smile and talk simultaneously. Yesterday she had been wearing a shell pink dress and a pearl necklace; today she was wearing a yellow suit and gold clip earrings. Who was she? He speculated at length on her family situation. Did she have supportive siblings? ‘Over central England and East Anglia those storms will ease off as the day progresses …’ Were her
parents proud of her because she was on television or disappointed because she wasn’t doing something more exciting with her life, because she wasn’t an actress or a newsreader? It was hard to believe that away from her maps she actually had a life, perhaps even a chaotic and unhappy life like his own. Maybe her father was an alcoholic and she lay awake at night grieving for him, or worrying that some day the tabloids would find out and tell everyone:
Weather
Girl Dad’s Drunken Shame.
As though the shame was hers, rather than all his own. ‘And so, then, to sum up …’ Computerised clouds appeared and disappeared on the map behind her; neat, virtual rain fell from them. ‘That’s all from me for now, I’ll be back after the lunch-time bulletin with an update. Until then, enjoy the rest of your day.’

She said these last six words in a husky, slightly pleading voice, as though requesting some sexual favour. Seeing that it was evidently so important to her, Roderic promised silently in his heart that he would indeed try to enjoy the rest of his day; although looking around the day room at his fellow patients, he knew he was going to have his work cut out for him.

He realised now that he was still holding the uncompleted menu card he had been given earlier.

‘Mark? Have you decided what you’re having for lunch?’

‘Roast chicken with boiled potatoes, carrots and beans, then almond pudding and custard.’

As he listed the food Roderic surreptitiously checked off the same items on his own card. He found it impossible to make decisions these days even about something as trivial as this. He didn’t like almond pudding, but it seemed simpler to order it and then not bother to eat it than to make an active decision about some other dessert. Mark had been in hospital for far longer than Roderic and was completely institutionalised, but he also had a slightly higher degree of energy than many of the other patients. Looking at his fellow sufferers, it was their listlessness rather than their sorrow that
profoundly struck him. He gravitated to Mark whenever possible to try to tap into his energy, asking him now, ‘What are you going to do for the rest of the day?’

‘After the doctor’s been round I’m going to read, then this afternoon I have an art class. It’s good, that. Would you like to see my paintings?’

Roderic understood that this meant he wanted to show them to him. ‘I’d love to see them,’ he lied. Mark went off to fetch his folder as Roderic mentally prepared himself to praise a few clumsy watercolours of bowls of fruit, a few stiff landscapes or studies of roses.

The first picture was of a hunted-looking face staring through a mesh of heavy black bars. ‘That’s me,’ Mark said, unnecessarily. The next page showed the same fraught, tormented face, this time against a background of arrows and spears. Slowly and wordlessly the two men looked through the batch of pictures, in which all of Mark’s psychic trauma was figured forth with crude power and terrible pathos. Roderic thought of his own work and of what a disaster it would have been for him had he ever allowed his art to have this function: to become self-expressive and to serve him, rather than he serving his art. Although he had done little painting in recent months, and none at all in the past few weeks, he had at least been true to it until the end. He thought of his painting as though it were a flame, a fragile lit thing that he had guarded with his life, all his life. Entrusted to him, he had succeeded in keeping it from being extinguished in spite of the winds and storms through which he had carried it; in return, down through the years it had afforded him a subtle and complex joy. Although much of his inner life – his losses, grief and self-doubt – made its way into his work, it did so in such a manner as to be translated into something distanced and controlled, something formal and impersonal. That Mark was engaged with painting in a wholly different way was right for him, but in displaying his work he didn’t realise that he was showing Roderic an abyss.
And for Roderic, to fall into this particular abyss would have been the worst thing of all.

He was at something of a loss as to know what to say to Mark, who was studying his own paintings with fierce intensity.

‘Powerful work,’ he murmured eventually.

‘Thanks. It’s good, the art class,’ Mark said again. ‘The teacher’s nice. You should think to register for it.’

‘Oh, no, no, no, no, no,’ Roderic exclaimed, impressing himself as well as Mark with the force of his own refusal.

‘Suit yourself. But you never know what you can do until you try You should have a go at painting. You might surprise yourself.’

Not half as much as I’d surprise everyone else, thought Roderic, who had so far succeeded in keeping his unusual vocation a secret from his fellow patients. He would tell Dennis about this when he came in later. Perhaps it would amuse him and Roderic was grateful to have something funny, something lighthearted to share with him. Dennis was bound to come: he hadn’t missed a single day so far.

‘Are you expecting visitors later?’

‘Don’t know,’ Mark replied, as he put away his work. ‘Last time she was in, do you know what the missus said to me? She said, “What ever happened that you ended up in a place like this?” Ended up!
Ended up!
So I told her that if that was all she had to say she might as well stop at home.’

Roderic clicked his tongue sympathetically, although privately he thought Mark’s wife’s question a fair one. It was a question he had silently asked himself time without number since his admission to hospital.

He went back to the ward. On the locker beside his bed was a vase of pink carnations together with a card showing a rabbit in a straw hat. Both were from Maeve, and Roderic had been touched and surprised to receive them. If his family in Italy knew what had happened, he wondered, would they also be supportive and conciliatory? For now he absolutely
didn’t want them to know where he was and had made Dennis promise not to tell. He would write to them himself about it, although he suspected that it might yet be a long time before he was ready to do so. Just as he was thinking this, Dr Cullen came in. He greeted Roderic, unhooked the chart from the end of the bed and began to study it.

It was usually either Dr Sullivan who saw him or Dr Cullen. One of them was gentle and kind, the other distant and brusque, and Roderic asked himself if this was a deliberate policy on the part of the hospital: one to soften him up and the other to put the boot in when necessary. Even in his distressed state he could see that Dr Sullivan was a most remarkable person. He was an elderly man with a slightly weary air, as well he might be given the things he had heard and witnessed in the course of his working life. He knew the mind’s limits and what lay beyond, he knew all the darkest corners of the human heart, but it had not made him despair. Instead he radiated compassion, grounded in deep moral experience.

When Roderic spoke about having lived in Italy, he laughed and looked at his hands. ‘Let me tell you something foolish,’ he said. All his life, ever since he was a child, he had wanted to go to Venice. ‘And yet for one reason or another, it never happened. It didn’t seem like the most obvious destination when the children were small, and the time just never seemed right. Then in due course it became somewhere to think about rather than to go, do you understand?’ He laughed again and looked embarrassed. ‘You know, after a particularly hard day in here’ (and Roderic could picture the reality behind this euphemism) ‘I’d go home and sit down and dose my eyes and imagine I was there. On a balcony looking out over the lagoon, watching all the lights come on at dusk; listening to the sound of the water lapping against the building. It was enough.’ And then, he said, three things that he had never expected happened. First, his children bought his wife and himself a trip to Venice to celebrate their
thirtieth wedding anniversary. Second, he realised that he didn’t want to go. ‘But what could I do? How could I explain it to the children? I didn’t want to hurt their feelings and I couldn’t explain to them that it was because I knew the reality would cancel out all I’d imagined. I felt sure I was going to be disappointed but there was nothing to be done. Off we went.’

‘What was the third unexpected thing?’ Roderic asked.

‘We arrived in winter, at twilight. There was heavy fog; we took a boat in from the airport and then the city suddenly appeared before us. It looked as if it were constructed out of water and light. The third unexpected thing,’ he said ‘was this: that Venice didn’t in fact disappoint me, it far surpassed my expectations. And never –
not once
– had this possibility crossed my mind.’

If ever anyone, Roderic thought, deserved an experience of sublime beauty to set against all they had seen and known in life, it was Dr Sullivan, whom he was to remember always with affection and gratitude.

Dr Cullen was a different proposition altogether.

Roderic was slightly afraid of him and found his brisk perfection intimidating. Even Dennis’s life, he thought, would look messy and disorganised if set against the splendid rectitude of the doctor’s, although he would have had little confidence in a doctor who appeared to have made as spectacularly bad a fist of his life as Roderic himself had. In recent days, this unease had hardened into a dislike he suspected was mutual. The problem was that they understood each other just that little bit too well. He had gone to school with boys like Dr Cullen. Now they were lawyers and businessmen and auctioneers, and he had long since lost touch with them. Dennis or even Roderic might well have turned out to be like this had Frank himself not been such a wild card. It was exactly this familiarity that made them uneasy with each other. Without anything ever being said, he suspected that the doctor had little respect for
his life as an artist and this, coupled with his charmless bedside manner, turned Roderic sullenly against him. As a small act of rebellion, he used to try to picture Dr Cullen propositioning a woman. This morning he was actually making some headway with this baroque feat of imagination when the doctor suddenly raised his head and looked Roderic straight in the eye.

‘Anything in particular on your mind today?’

‘Nothing. Nothing at all.’

‘There’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you,’ the doctor said, replacing the chart. ‘When you get out of hospital, where will you go? What are your circumstances?’

Roderic told him that he lived alone in a small flat but he didn’t like it, and that after what had happened it had bad associations. He hoped to find a new place to live as part of the fresh start he was trying to make in his life, but until such time as he had something suitable he would move in with his brother.

‘How many brothers have you?’

‘Just the one.’

‘So you mean the man I was talking to on Tuesday?’

‘Dennis, yes.’

The doctor shook his head. ‘You will never live with him again. Ever. Under no circumstances.’

Roderic felt as if he was on a high wire, as if he had looked down and seen that there was no net beneath him. For a moment he couldn’t speak, then said hesitantly, ‘Did Dennis say that to you? That he doesn’t want me?’

‘Of course he didn’t. If he thought it was what you needed, or even just wanted, your brother would lie on the floor and let you wipe your feet on him.’

‘I know that,’ he replied, unwittingly giving Dr Cullen his cue.

‘And don’t you think that’s disgraceful? Absolutely disgraceful?’

There was nothing Roderic could say.

‘You nearly went over the edge the other day, but you don’t seem to appreciate that you almost took Dennis with you. If you go on like this, you will. You have a lot of changes to make in your life, and one of the most important is that you have to wean yourself off your dependence on your brother. It’s bad for you and it’s bad for him. Have you got that?’

‘Yes.’

‘Good. Right, now about your medication …’ He talked about tranquillisers and Roderic sat listening in silence, humbled and chastened. After the doctor had left him, he sat on the edge of the bed for some time, staring at the toes of his slippers. Then he lay down and closed his eyes.

Neither of the protagonists in the drama that was Roderic’s collapse had full knowledge of what had happened. This was all for the best, as each of them could just about cope with the memory of the part they had played or witnessed. Roderic afterwards remembered elements of it with pin-sharp, almost cinematic clarity, as he did many of the key moments in his life: meeting Marta, the birth of his daughters, seeing Frank in his coffin. Other aspects of the days leading up to the breakdown remained mercifully vague.