‘Well?’ Roderic asked after a moment, as she did not continue. ‘What were you going to say? William has what?’
‘I don’t know. I can’t remember. It’s gone.’
‘It must have been a lie,’ Roderic said coolly.
‘I’m very interested in contemporary painting,’ William said.
‘That’s what I was going to say,’ Julia claimed, adding, ‘you told me so the last time I saw you.’
Neither man believed her. William was about to add that he owned one of Roderic’s paintings, and then he thought again of the strange aborted sentence Julia had uttered. A curious idea formed in his mind. There was a certain logic to it, but she didn’t know about the picture. How could she? He definitely hadn’t mentioned it to her. In one way it made perfect sense, but she didn’t, couldn’t know. He stared at her, puzzled, and she bit her lip, blushed, looked away. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘art is my main interest in life.’
‘If that’s the case,’ Roderic said, ‘you should go and see Julia’s work. She’s in a group exhibition that opened last week,’ and he named the gallery. ‘It runs until the end of April.’
‘I shall most certainly do that,’ William said, addressing Julia. ‘I’d very much like to see what you do.’
Roderic had already lost interest in William and turned away, lifted the solitaire board off his lap and picked up a flat leather case that was sitting nearby. ‘Aren’t these fine?’ he said, snapping it open, and holding it up to show her the enamelled antique buttons it contained. ‘When my ship comes in I’ll buy you these. You can sew them on to your jumper; won’t they look stylish?’
Julia laughed. ‘How much longer is this woman going to be?’ she said, turning to look at the moon-crowned face of the tall clock. ‘Would you like to come up for a cup of coffee with us when she does come back?’
Roderic snapped shut the case. ‘Maybe that wouldn’t be such a good idea,’ he said in a voice so low as to be almost inaudible, but William did hear: he was meant to hear. He could imagine the state of the room upstairs, the dishevelled, abandoned bed that wasn’t even a bed.
‘On second thoughts, maybe not,’ she said. ‘There’s … um … there’s no milk.’
‘No milk! There’s never any milk, is there, Julia? Or else there is, but there isn’t enough. Or there’s plenty, but it’s all sour. I tell you what, as well as the buttons I’ll buy you a cow, then there’ll always be milk. We can tether it on the stairs. What do you say?’
And then Roderic did something that shocked William. He stood up. Unfurling himself out of the depths of the low chair, he revealed himself to be impossibly tall, impossibly robust, massive to a degree William would never have guessed at when he saw him seated. It was like watching a river god step out from a carving on the side of a bridge; like watching Poseidon or Triton emerge living from amongst the statues of a baroque fountain.
The cat walked over and sat at his feet. ‘Max, Max, Max,’ he said, ‘come here to me, you great old patriarch.’ He bent down and scooped up the cat, which had looked dignified and magisterial when sitting on its own, but now looked tiny and kittenish in Roderic’s great hand. He allowed Max to run nimbly up one arm, across the back of his neck and down the other, catching the cat dextrously as it reached his open left hand. He carefully placed the animal in the chair he had just vacated and as he straightened up again, he turned and looked at William. His brief, direct stare was full of intelligence but devoid of warmth. This glacial assessment – this hostility – was the last thing William expected after the horseplay with the cat. Which was why Roderic was doing it, he realised: he was warning William off. And Julia didn’t even appear to notice that anything had happened.
‘I must be going,’ William said. As he left the shop the longcase clock chimed again.
Roderic and Julia watched him through the window as he walked away. ‘So that’s your mercy mission,’ he said. ‘So that’s William Armstrong.’
‘Why didn’t you like him?’
Roderic didn’t deny the implication of this. ‘He made me feel uneasy.’
‘I suspect you had the same effect on him.’
‘I may well have done,’ he conceded. ‘There was something sinister about him, I don’t know how to express it.’
‘You think he’s just a dabbler, do you?’
‘I doubt if he’s even that But yes, he’s a classic example of a certain type of man: the moonlighting accountant’
‘He told me he was a lawyer.’
‘Whatever. You know what I mean. The kind of person who dislikes the situation in which he finds himself, and wants to do something creative; who wants to get in touch with another life, which he likes to think of as his real life. But the secret agenda is that never, not for a moment, will he do anything that might threaten his real, real life; that is, his money and his position in society.’
‘You’re in a very cynical mood all of a sudden.’
‘I’m just being realistic.’ Julia was about to challenge this when Hester returned. The woman had a rare gift, Roderic thought, for appearing at exactly the moment when she wasn’t wanted. She’d done it twice now today. By the time he and Julia were alone again the thread of their conversation had effectively been broken and they forgot about William; they spoke of other things.
*
William’s subsequent visit to the gallery was an odd second take on his visit to the shop. Then all was clutter, now all was bare and stark. Again, he saw Julia through the glass door from the street before she saw him. He had brought the children with him for protective colouring, just in case she happened to be there.
The warmth of Julia’s greeting when she saw them all was evidently genuine. ‘You must be Sophie and Gregory,’ she said, recognising the children from the photograph she had seen. The girl smiled trustingly, showing a gap-toothed mouth; the boy’s face remained closed. It had amused Julia when she saw their photos in William’s wallet to see how much the boy resembled his father, but in real life the effect was not so appealing. It shocked her to see in so small a child the same tightly buttoned air, the same cleft forehead, the same air of controlled anger.
Sophie was staring hard at her. ‘You have really funny hair,’ she said to Julia. ‘Can I touch it?’
Her father started to remonstrate, but Julia ignored him. ‘Of course you can,’ she said, crouching down. The child patted her gently on the head. ‘You too, if you want,’ she said to Gregory. The child leaned over and gently stroked her hair, as though she were a cat or a rabbit. He smiled for the first time since entering the gallery, and Julia, struck by how funny the whole thing was, laughed aloud. The little girl giggled and touched Julia’s hair again, and now all three of them were laughing, especially Gregory.
‘I think you can leave it at that now, children,’ William said, and they drew back. Julia, still laughing, stood up.
The gallery was a series of interconnected rooms. ‘My work is in there, and there are photographs in the other room.’ On the wall immediately beside where they stood was a thing made of dark red velvet, fold upon fold receding to a bright bead stitched in the centre. ‘I like that,’ Sophie said, pointing to it, ‘it’s like a spider’s web.’
‘It is a bit, isn’t it?’ Julia said, biting her lip and trying not to laugh at William’s discomfiture. ‘You look around,’ she said to him, ‘and I’ll show the children these other pieces. You’re going to have to take your shoes off,’ she said to them. ‘Do you need help with the laces, Gregory?’
Julia’s work consisted of a series of long wooden boxes, each sealed in front with a pane of glass. Over the glass hung a veil of white ribbons that fluttered and twirled in the draught made by a freestanding fan. This meant that the contents of the boxes could be glimpsed rather than plainly seen, like things partially concealed by the branches of trees. One box contained rolls of fur, of thick wool, of pleated muslin, heaped together and piled up against the surface of the glass. They made one long to touch them, which
was of course impossible. In another box were displayed on shelves a series of china cups and saucers, each one perched precariously, as though they might fall at any moment. The third held shells and stones. There was a lump of pink quartz, uncut and unpolished, reminding William momentarily of the scene he had witnessed in the shop, and there was a small cairn of plain black stones, dull and uniform in size. There were shells such as one might find on almost any beach in Ireland: winkles and cockles, modest bivalves, ridged or smooth, arranged in pale heaps. They were complemented by a few larger, more exotic shells, one spiked, opening into a glassy void pink as flesh; one a long fragile cone stippled with colour, one a solid whirl of pure iridescence, as though made of some kind of fabulous glass.
The final box contained a series of documents: faded newsprint, torn letters, faint and blurred snapshots. This William found the most frustrating, even more so than the box with the fur and the wool, because his inclination was to attempt to read the fragments of text it contained but the constantly fluttering ribbons prevented him from doing so. There was about all of them, he thought, a mysterious, elegiac atmosphere, each presenting a small, sealed, rather beautiful but utterly inaccessible world.
He turned away into the next room, and was shocked by what he found there.
On each of the three walls was a photograph, larger than life-size, showing a naked woman holding a naked baby to her breast. The women were young, perhaps all teenagers, unsmiling and with a shell-shocked, sullen look. The babies were tiny, wet, ugly, and all looked as if they had barely been ready to be born. How long was it since these women had given birth? Less than a day he would have thought, on the strength of the photos. Although they were young and attractive, there was not the slightest shred of eroticism or sexual appeal in them. They looked like people who had been through a violent and exhausting ordeal, which of course they had. A trickle of blood ran down the inside of one of the women’s legs. His mind habitually shrank from the memory of how Liz had suffered when the twins were born: the violence of it, the screaming and the blood. But the following day when he had gone to see her she was sitting up in bed smiling, with the babies in her arms. ‘I feel,’ she said, ‘as though I’m at the centre of a crystal made of pure light.’ And what of these young women: had they also experienced this intense joy that drove Liz to express herself in such a mystical way? There was no evidence of it in the photographs of their stunned, blank faces.
From behind him he could hear the chuckles and laughter of his own two children.
‘Me now, me now, I want to go again,’ Gregory was shouting.
‘Off you go,’ said Julia.
William turned around to where they were. He saw the sides of the canvas tunnel undulate as his son moved through it, like a small struggling animal passing through the gullet of a boa constrictor. It reminded him of taking them to a funfair, the same flushed faces, the excitement, I want to go again, again, as Gregory tumbled chuckling out of the end of the tunnel, into the gallery.
‘You do it, Daddy,’ Sophie said.
He looked at Julia.
‘Why not? It is intended for adults rather than children,’ she said, with monumental understatement and an admirably straight face. ‘But you must take your shoes off first.’
He felt foolish standing in his loud argyle socks, and was glad to disappear into the first tunnel, the inside of which was lined with soft white feathers, so that in walking through it he felt that he was moving through a cloud. Some kind of illumination had been arranged, a series of tiny lights, so that he could see the whiteness that surrounded him. The tunnel was a collapsed tube that closed in on itself as he progressed through it, so that he had to gently push his way forward. Neither did he know when he would emerge: he could literally see no light at the end of the tunnel. He was disconcerted, therefore, when he suddenly popped out into the room again. Julia was sitting on the floor with her arm around Sophie. Gregory immediately grabbed William’s hand and hauled him across the room, ‘The next one too, Daddy, the next one too.’
The inside of the second tunnel was darker, although like the first it was illuminated by tiny lights. There were no feathers: this tunnel was lined with dark red velvet, the same material from which the object on the wall was made. Again, he had to gingerly press his way through, again the tunnel closed behind him. The velvet brushed against his face, his whole body, and he could hear the laughter, the voices of the children. Suddenly he wished that he hadn’t brought them here, that he had come alone. He was swept with a feeling of confusion, and just at that moment he fell into the brightness of the room again.
‘Powerful piece of work, isn’t it?’ she said.
‘Put your shoes on,’ he said curtly to the children as he sat down and fumbled his way into his own brogues. Sophie, who was still sitting beside Julia, stood up and slipped her feet into her simple pumps. As she waited for William, who was helping Gregory on with his shoes now, she wandered over towards the entrance of the room where the photographs were displayed.
‘Sophie! Come here, don’t go into that room, do you hear me?’ and Sophie backed away, frightened by the force of his anger. The children could not understand why the atmosphere, so happy before, had suddenly gone sour. Gregory was angry too, truculent and struggling as his father attempted to tie the child’s laces. It was impossible to know what Julia was thinking. She was standing now, leaning against a wall, with her arms folded, looking at the floor. Her face was inscrutable, as it had been the night he had shown up unannounced at her house. William finished tying Gregory’s shoes and stood up. He started to thank her with cold formality, but she rolled her eyes and turned away. She said goodbye to the children, and held the door open as they passed into the street.
All the way home William fretted about what to do next. If he told the children not to mention the visit at home, it would, coupled with the strange atmosphere in which it had all ended, compound their suspicion about the whole business. Then they might – or at least Gregory might – tell Liz just to cause trouble for William. Although his son was still so small, William already saw him as an adversary. If, however, he didn’t warn them off, they would probably tell Liz, and he was anxious that she should know nothing about it. He finally decided to simply hope for the best.
And after it happened, he would wonder how he had ever been so foolish as to think he would get away with it, and that nothing would be said. In the end it was Sophie, not Gregory, who piped up as they were sitting over their evening meal, the children with their chicken nuggets, their parents with their tortellini.
‘We met ever such a nice lady in town today, somebody Daddy knows. She was in this place full of odd things. There were big tunnels we could go down, only you had to take your shoes off first. Daddy did it too.’
Liz paused with her fork in mid-air and looked brightly from father to daughter and from daughter to father. ‘Did you? Did you indeed? That must have been fun. Tell me more.’
‘It was brilliant,’ Gregory said. ‘It was like being swallowed up by a big red animal. I loved it.’
‘And what about Daddy?’ Liz said. ‘Did he love being swallowed up too?’
William gave a small, forced laugh, which he knew sounded utterly unconvincing. ‘It was an art exhibition,’ he said, ‘some conceptual pieces, an installation, whatever you want to call it. There was a woman there, an artist, I don’t know her,’ he said, denying Sophie’s claim, ‘she’s all but a stranger to me,’ a remark which for some odd reason seemed to thicken Liz’s suspicion rather than allay it. ‘That’s all there is to say. Gregory, sit up straight, how many times have I told you not to slump down in your seat like that?’ Gregory’s face, which had been bright and animated as he described the afternoon, closed into its habitual sullen tension. They went on eating in silence for a few moments.
‘Anyway, I saw what was in the room,’ Gregory eventually said in a sulky voice, ‘the room you wouldn’t let Sophie go into.’ He shoved a piece of chicken into a puddle
of ketchup on the side of his plate. ‘I peeped into it when you were in the tunnel thing.’
‘What was in the room?’ Liz said.
Gregory held up the gobbet of chicken on his fork. ‘Ask Daddy,’ he said, then he crammed the food into his mouth and began to chew slowly.
‘What did you see? What was it?’ Liz asked again, her voice beginning to take on a hysterical edge.
Neither father nor son spoke. William thought of the trickle of blood running down the woman’s leg, of the spidery angry looking infants, of the women’s hostile, shocking faces. There was nothing he could say that would console Liz. He stared helplessly at Gregory.
‘What was in the room?’ Liz insisted.
The little boy swallowed his food with a loud gulp and threw his father a look of dismissive adult contempt. ‘Just photographs,’ he said. ‘Big photographs of three women with their babies. I don’t know why Daddy wouldn’t let Sophie see them. It was nothing bad. It was just photographs.’
Chapter Twelve
‘You must be mad,’ Maeve said, when she heard what he was proposing. ‘Absolutely mad. How could anyone live with Roderic?’
Reasonably, Dennis pointed out that they had all lived with him from his birth until his second year in art college, when he had moved to a shared flat. Frank, eager to boot his offspring out of the nest, had been happy to bankroll this until such time as Roderic graduated.
‘He’s changed a lot over the years,’ she insisted, fixing her cold blue eyes on him. ‘Roderic has become very odd.’ She stretched this last word out as she uttered it to give a sense of horrid transformation, as though Roderic had grown an extra eye in the middle of his forehead or developed a forked tongue, instead of merely cultivating a modest and rather flattering beard. ‘I shouldn’t be surprised if his friends were strange too. Oh, I wouldn’t live with him if I were you.’
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