Authenticity

by Deirdre Madden

  He hadn’t expected to be allowed to say all this, had thought she would have interrupted him and howled him down after a couple of sentences. Instead, she heard him out thoughtfully, and remained in silence for a few moments after he had finished speaking. Then she said, ‘How do you know this?’

  ‘Because, Julia, I’m older and uglier than you are. Because, like you, I once had an open heart and life forced it shut. That’s how I know. It’s as simple as that’

  He was struck by how emotionally drained the conversation had left him. Signalling to the waitress for another cup of coffee, he asked Julia if she would join him. She shook her head, waited until the first set of cups had been cleared away and the fresh coffee brought to him before she spoke.

  ‘May I tell you what I think?’

  ‘Do, please.’

  ‘I think the problem with William is that he reminds you of yourself. When you look at him you see the man you might have become. Say you hadn’t taken to drink. Say you had instead become the person the situation seemed to require.’

  ‘It wasn’t in me. I couldn’t have done it even if I’d wanted to.’

  ‘I know, and we’ll come to the reason for that in a moment. Let’s just imagine that you had been able to damp it all down and lead a certain kind of life, one that went against the grain of the mental freedom that your work requires. What do you think would have been the effect?’

  ‘I’d have stopped painting, that’s for sure.’

  ‘For sure. But don’t you think that everything you’d repressed would finally have seeped out in exactly that depression and bitter anger you so dislike in William?’

  ‘Yes, but all this is academic. I’ve told you, it wasn’t in me to live like that.’

  ‘And here’s why,’ she said. ‘You told me that when you were about my age your plan was to be a schoolteacher until such time as you had established yourself as a painter. But the school rumbled you. They could see a mile off the sort of person you were – to use your own words, that it wasn’t in you “to live like that”. And so they said thanks, but no thanks.’

  ‘Julia, I know all this. I’m the one who told you.’

  She ignored him and pressed on. ‘Now let’s look at what might have happened next. What if your parents had put great pressure on you to find another job as a schoolteacher? What if, instead of being benevolently indifferent, your father had been actively hostile to the idea of your being a painter? Would you still have had the courage to press on? The courage of your gift, if you want to put it that way. Perhaps you might. But what if, on top of all this, Dennis hadn’t helped you? Would you still have been able to go on, or would you have got some job, as a supply teacher say, that would have worn you down until you had neither the will nor the energy for your own work? As you so rightly pointed out, we all have to live in the world.’

  He couldn’t believe what he was hearing. ‘Whose side are you on, Julia? Just tell me that. Whose side are you on?’

  ‘Don’t be angry. It’s not a question of taking sides. I’m just trying to make you see how what happened to William might have happened to you.’

  ‘But it didn’t. That’s the difference. I have three daughters, and the demands of the kind of life the world implied they needed might have been enough to start me drinking, but it wasn’t enough to stop me painting. If that didn’t do it, nothing could.’

  ‘Please don’t be angry,’ she said again. ‘I want to tell you something I haven’t told you before. It’s about the day I met William. He asked me to sit beside him for a moment. He was on the ropes, anyone could see that. I didn’t know what was wrong in his life – perhaps I still don’t – but I could see the state he was in. We didn’t talk at all, and then I started think of you and all that you had been through. Even before that day I often used to think of how our paths must have crossed in the city before we met. Perhaps I passed you many times on the street before I knew you. Maybe one day we even sat beside each other on a bench; maybe you were in distress like this man, but too far gone even to ask for help. I can’t imagine what it’s like to have to ask a complete stranger to give you some shred of comfort. It’s never happened to me. What if you had asked me? If you’d been drinking heavily I’d probably just have walked away. It was too late to do anything for you, but if I helped this man, perhaps I was retrospectively helping you. So I decided I would see it through. That was why I decided to go out to his house with him, just to keep him company in whatever it was he was going through. Do you understand, Roderic? I helped William on your account. I did it for you.’

  He sat in silence for some time before replying. ‘You must do as you think fit,’ he said eventually. ‘Continue in your friendship with William, but remember, it has nothing to do with me. If our paths happen to cross I’ll be civil to him, but I don’t want any prearranged meetings. And I promise you this: when it all falls apart, as it’s bound to do, there’ll be no recriminations. I won’t remind you that I told you so.’

  ‘Thanks,’ Julia said, loading the little word with as much sarcasm as she could muster, for his last remark had riled her. She changed the subject, but although they spoke of other things an underlying tension remained between them. It was only later that night, after they had parted, that they each realised this was the first serious disagreement they had had.

  And William was the cause of it.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Roderic was in Julia’s house one evening when a woman named Mairéad called by unexpectedly. She was a friend of Julia’s from their days together at art college and had never met Roderic before. Julia brushed aside her apologies for barging in on them. ‘It’s no problem, we were just chatting about the exhibition that’s on at the Douglas Hyde Gallery at the moment, have you seen it?’ Mairéad said that she had. Gradually she became absorbed into the conversation that she had interrupted and gradually Julia withdrew.

  Roderic was in an exceptionably good mood this evening, relaxed and cheerful, sitting by the empty hearth with the cat asleep at his feet. Looking at him and remembering the somewhat lonely and subdued man she’d met for the first time almost exactly a year earlier, Julia was aware of how he had changed since then. She was aware, too, and gratified to think of the part she had played in bringing about that change. Mairéad clearly found him stimulating company, exhilarating to the point of being alarming. Although they stayed on impersonal subjects – the potential of video art, the ways in which galleries influenced the very creation of the works they displayed – as Roderic warmed to his themes he emanated great waves of mental energy, seemingly unaware of the effect they might have been having – that they were having – upon her friend. But I agree with you, Mairéad. I completely agree. What if he had disagreed? What if, instead of being merely affable he had been actively trying to win her over?

  Looking at him tonight Julia could imagine how Roderic must have been as a young man, before his powerful personality had been tempered by experience, made hesitant by self-doubt She was aware that some people thought her relationship with him an unequal one because of the disparity in their ages, but in this they were wrong. Had they been peers, however, and met when they were both in their twenties, then there would have been a problem, Julia thought, as the sledgehammer of his enthusiasm continued to crack the nut of Mairéad’s diffidence. He must have been extraordinary then, as irresistible as a force of nature. She wasn’t sure that her own will would have been strong enough to resist his.

  After an hour or so Mairéad departed. ‘Where on earth did you find him, Julia?’ she asked as she was leaving. ‘He’s amazing.’

  Later, when Roderic had also gone home, she sat alone as the night closed in and thought about the implications of what had happened earlier. Roderic might have mellowed over the years but that powerful side of him was still real and it wasn’t to be underestimated. Although Mairéad didn’t realise it Julia knew full well that he had only been operating within the middle register of his personality this evening and
was capable of far greater psychic force than he had chosen to employ. It was a sobering thought In spite of herself she couldn’t help thinking that he must have been a difficult proposition as a father: not a bad father, she quickly qualified, but not an easy one. To grow up in the shadow of such energy and brilliance might well make one feel outstripped and defeated right from the very start of life; might leave one like a small boat spinning in the wake of a great liner. Never once had she felt this unease in relation to Dan: dreamy, gentle, indulgent and a threat to nobody, least of all Julia. These were not comfortable thoughts, but it was necessary to face up to all that they implied.

  The discussion she’d had with Roderic a month earlier just after her birthday about her friendship with William was a case in point. Even though she’d been greatly annoyed at the time, when she thought about it afterwards it forced her to ask herself some pertinent questions about William and she could see the value of that. Was he important to her? Not particularly. If he had drifted out of her life again in the weeks after he bought the box, would that have troubled her? Not in the least. But hadn’t that been, at least in part, the point that Roderic had been trying to make: that it was William who actively wanted the friendship to continue and that she was merely acquiescing, thoughtlessly and passively? If she did wish to stop seeing him, even now, it would be easy enough to engineer. She could make excuses and fob him off. She could discourage him from dropping into the shop in the mornings by telling him that Hester didn’t approve of her sitting chatting to her friends when she was supposed to be working (which wasn’t true: so long as she gave her full attention to genuine customers when they did appear, Hester wasn’t troubled by occasional visitors). She could claim to be busier than she was; she could even invoke Roderic from time to time if William wouldn’t take the hint, for while he admired him greatly as a painter, she knew that he found him intimidating and would quickly back off.

  And yet she liked William. To see him every so often for a drink and a chat was pleasant. Even Roderic had admitted that he was intelligent and could be agreeable company. It was true that his background and the world in which he lived were alien to hers but she didn’t think that of any great significance; there was enough common ground between them to make their connection valid and real.

  ‘What do you think, Max?’ she said out loud. ‘What should I do?’ The cat blinked and purred, moved to jump on to her knee but she pushed him down. ‘No, you’re too hot with your fur, go away.’ This was the nub of it: if she ended the friendship with William it would be for no other reason than to please Roderic. And that would be wrong. It was precisely because it wasn’t hugely important that she had to take a stand: it was the principle of the thing. Some of the points he had made against William were valid ones. If she was determined not to be eclipsed by Roderic, well, neither was she going to allow William to dictate the terms of the friendship against her will. Even in his late forties Roderic could be a handful; but if she could cope with him as a companion surely, she thought, she could cope with William as a friend.

  And so from here on out, Julia decided, she would be the one to take the initiative as far as William was concerned. The day after Mairéad’s visit she rang him to suggest that they meet in town for a drink. In making such an arrangement there would be less chance of his calling round to her flat unannounced at a time that didn’t suit. Determined that there should be nothing underhand about the relationship, she also made a point of ringing at a time when his wife was likely to be there, although Liz’s tone, detached, neutral, as though they’d never met, Yes, William’s here, one moment please and I’ll call him, was impossible to fathom.

  They met three days later in the same café where she and Roderic had all but quarrelled about William. He was there waiting for her when she arrived, and smiled when he saw her. The casual clothes he was wearing for the heat, chinos and an open-necked shirt, suited him far better than the dark business suits he had worn when she met him first. While it gratified her enormously to mark the change there had been in Roderic in the past year, it also pleased her on a much smaller scale to see how William’s situation had eased in recent months. She had never expected that she would be able to follow through on her good deed of February, but to see the difference between William as he had been then and as he was now was one of the reasons she was happy to continue meeting him. If this flattered her vanity, it did so to no great degree, for she set little store by the impact she had had upon his situation.

  ‘You look well,’ she remarked as she sat down.

  ‘I’m better than I have been,’ he conceded, ‘but I still have a way to go. I’m on some medication at the moment that’s disturbing my sleep; it leaves me feeling very groggy and hung-over the next day.’

  ‘I take it they’re doing you some good, these tablets?’

  ‘A bit. But I think it’s my being away from the office and the fact that my time’s my own that’s making the real difference, to tell you the truth.’

  Sun poured through the café’s vast plate-glass windows and fell upon the long low yellow wooden table where they sat with their cigarettes and coffee cups. He noticed her watch and admired it.

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Is it new?’

  ‘New to me,’ and she pulled her cuff down over it, changed the subject. She asked William if he had seen the exhibition she had talked about with Roderic and Mairéad; later she took out a biography of Matisse she was reading at that time and showed it to him. He, had visited the famous chapel in Vence some years earlier and described his impression of it: the scrawled violence of the stations of the cross, executed in black paint on the white walls, crudely powerful, like graffiti; the fronded aquatic pools of shifting coloured light cast by the stained-glass windows. Julia listened with interest. They talked about the concept of religious art in a secular age, then of spirituality in art, a subject on which they both held strong and opposing opinions.

  Late afternoon had drifted into early evening by the time they were ready to go, and out on the pavement still they stood talking prior to say goodbye, for William was loath to leave her. If Roderic was sometimes unaware of the impact he had upon people, it was also true that Julia this evening failed to see all she might be to William, the effect that her cheerfulness, her bright youthfulness might have upon him.

  ‘What will you do now?’ he asked her.

  ‘Don’t know. Go home and make something to eat I suppose, although I don’t know what. There’s nothing much in the house and the kitchen looks as if a bomb hit it’

  ‘Let me take you to dinner, then,’ William said immediately. ‘Please, Julia, it would be my pleasure; no, I insist,’ as she demurred. ‘You can have anything you want. Do you like Indian food? I know an extremely good restaurant in town.’

  But Julia wouldn’t be turned even though she was sorely tempted; she’d been telling the truth about the kitchen. ‘Thank you but no, really. I’ll go round to Roderic’s house. I want to see him in any case and he always has loads of food, he’s far more organised than I am.’

  But when she went round to Roderic’s place and found that he wasn’t at home, when she was thrown back on her own meagre resources – that fridge, that kitchen – she wondered if she were not taking all of this a little too seriously. Would it really have been such a mistake to go and have a curry with William? He was, after all, her friend.

  The next time she saw Roderic she casually mentioned having met William, and his response – neutral, indifferent even – made her feel sure that she was being over-cautious. It never occurred to her that if she was making a conscious effort not to be controlled by what Roderic wanted, he too might be making a similar effort not to be controlling.

  All through those hot summer months, June, July, into August when the weather finally broke, Julia was listening to a particular jazz cassette that Roderic had given to her. She listened to it all the time: as she worked in her dusty, cluttered studio and in the kitchen as she prepared her hap
hazard meals. She listened to it on her personal stereo as she walked through the city, past St Patrick’s Cathedral, past the domes and the high curved red gables of the Iveagh Buildings, so that it was as though her life was a film and this the soundtrack to it. It was sensual music, the haunting melody of the saxophone broken by the swishing brushes on the skin of the drums, by fading cymbals and the icy sound of horns, by potent silences. She listened to it alone at night, lying on the sofa and watching the blue smoke of her cigarette spiral and drift above her. She told herself that in the autumn she would put the cassette away, and whenever she listened to it again in the future it would be as delicately evocative as the fragrances with which she was working that summer, that first full summer when she and Roderic were together. The music would give those months back to her, immutable and perfect.

  What Julia did not understand was that between the joy of an experience such as she was then living and the recollection of it years later, might fall the shadow of the intervening time. She knew that each artist creates her own precursors. She knew too that a work of art was changed by being viewed through the filter of later works, but she did not understand that this was also true in life. Roderic could have told her this, so too could her father and even William.

  But Julia, at this time, did not know.

  Chapter Twenty-Five