Authenticity

by Deirdre Madden

  By the time he got to the end of the photographs, he was grateful he had seen them. He felt vindicated, could have offered this sheaf of bland shiny images as evidence in the case for the defence. How well he could imagine this holiday! How well he could fancy the idle days, the pool and the beach, the cycling and the volleyball. Marta’s mother spending the whole of the forenoon in the kitchen making hand-turned pasta for the lunch that would follow, the interminable lunch. He could see himself in the middle of all this peachy indolence, hanging around in a pair of plastic flip-flops, getting in his mother-in-law’s way, bored out of his skull and wishing to Christ he was back home so that he could get on with his work.

  As Oriana replaced the photographs in their wallet she said hesitantly, ‘Something odd happened recently. You know that box of oil paints you sent Allegra for her birthday? When she was showing them to me it was so strange, I just had this feeling of overwhelming happiness. I don’t know why. Pure happiness. It was the smell of them, you know. It was like remembering bits of a dream I’d had long ago. There was an old chair upholstered in blue. And music. Beautiful music. And pure happiness. Nothing else.’ They sat in a tense silence. He knew not to force it. Then she said, in a voice so low he could barely hear it, ‘Maybe I do remember you after all. I remember Tarquinia.’

  ‘Tarquinia!’ Not for years had he thought of that summer evening, the golden light that made everything ancient and pure; the sky, the broken viaduct, the slow grasses rippling in the fields like heavy silk. It had been the last of those little islands of peace they had known together as a family. ‘We had to go down into the earth but I didn’t want to. Someone told me there was nothing to be afraid of, that we would see marvellous coloured pictures. He carried me down.’ Yes, he’d borne her into the tomb, Pluto and Persephone as Bernini conceived them. How she’d writhed and cried in his grasp, but he’d soothed her and she did grow calm as they descended into the dark earth, where her mother and sisters had already gone. The child darted over and clung to Marta’s skirt. She smiled down at her daughter and stroked her head abstractedly. A guide was talking to the assembled group about how the Etruscans had greeted death and loss with defiance, with feasting and wild music. Looking at his wife Roderic suddenly knew the truth. Their marriage was doomed. How much longer would it last, he wondered – another month? Two months, six? Whatever it might be, he set that fragment of time against the huge implacable weight of the years that had passed since the tomb had been made and sealed, since the feasting and the music. Marta’s hand, so cold when he touched it afterwards. Did she find out too down there? Did she also come back up into the heat of the blinding sun with the knowledge that her marriage was dead? He could never ask her now.

  And what were all those thousands of years of unutterable silence when the tomb was undisturbed when set against the mere eight years that Oriana struggled to get back through now to find her lost father?

  ‘I’ve forgotten so many things,’ she said, ‘but I do remember Tarquinia.’

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  MODERN PAINTERS: Roderic Kennedy, to begin with a definition: you are frequently described as an abstract painter, but I believe this is something you strongly resist. Why?

  RODERIC KENNEDY: Because it isn’t accurate.

  MP: In what sense?

  RK: Well for a start, I would resist any discussion of my work that begins with a definition rather than working towards one. Even then I would be wary of the ultimate importance of any label used. I can see why critics like, perhaps even need these definitions, but the problem is that they almost inevitably distract from the work. That’s what it really should be about: tapping into the primary energy of the thing rather than thinking, ‘I’m looking at an abstract painting or a piece of conceptual art or whatever.’ It frightens people off, you see, that’s the danger. It’s too high falutin’, makes people think that they can’t, won’t, be able to understand, whereas it isn’t a case of understanding something but of experiencing it.

  MP: But if in art there is to be progress …

  RK: Progress? (Laughs) In art?

  MP: Well yes, but…

  RK: Go on, go on.

  MP: I think I’ve forgotten what I was going to say.

  RK: Maybe it’s just as well. (Laughs) Look, before we go any further I’d like to clear up a few things that bother me. First, I make no apology for being a painter. There’s a certain school of thought now that considers painting a waste of time: it’s all been said, all been done. That for the consciousness with which we now apprehend the world, nothing adequate can be expressed through painting. I don’t go along with that at all. So much of what one hears and sees nowadays is just fashion and the essence of fashion is that it passes.

  MP: To approach the thing from a different angle, perhaps we could look at your life, starting with your family and childhood. Do you come from a family of painters?

  RK: Oh God, no, far from it. I should qualify that, if you take art in the broadest sense of the term. My father was an opera buff, fanatically so. He used to play records all the time so there was always music in the house, Verdi, Mozart and so on. He was a doctor and his life was in most respects a straight-down-the-line middle-class existence. But that wasn’t the whole story. There was this other thing, this sublime music, this … this parallel, radiant world in which he also lived. I mean, it wasn’t just a question of his liking a bit of opera, it wasn’t mere entertainment. He was passionate about it. He was in any case a passionate man, and he needed art in this way, it was essential to him. And so I think it was primarily through him that I learned, quite early on, although I couldn’t have articulated it as I’m doing now, that as well as this functional, bread-and-butter world in which we all must live, there was also this … fabulous reality, I suppose you could call it, that is art.

  MP: So how was it that you became a visual artist rather than a musician?

  RK: The kind of paintings, or, to be strictly accurate, the kind of reproductions of paintings to which I was exposed while growing up was fairly conventional. Not bad, you know, but standard stuff. We had prints of Degas’ dancers in the hall at home and something by Renoir, I seem to remember. My mother liked the Irish Impressionists, Walter Osborne, that kind of thing. Now there was one particular image in the house that was the catalyst, a Malton print of the Custom House. When I was about eight the bank gave us a free calendar with photos of Dublin, which we hung in the kitchen. It had all the landmarks, the GPO, the Ha’penny Bridge and so on, and, inevitably, the Custom House. Now of course living in Dublin I was familiar with the building, and so I began to really look at and to think about these three things: the print, the photograph, and the Custom House itself. Every time I was in the city centre I used to want to go down the quays to see it, something with which my parents were soon fed up. My mother couldn’t understand it, she used to say to me, ‘Roderic, you saw it only last week, it hasn’t changed since then, I can promise you.’ But that was the point: it had. Every time I saw it, it looked different, depending on the light and weather. Sometimes it looked solid and imposing, sometimes much softer, as though it were floating there on the other side of the river, as though it were something I had imagined. Sometimes it was the dome that was the most striking thing about it, sometimes the carvings, and then another time still it would be the symmetry, the proportions of it that I noticed. I became obsessed with it. And one thing I particularly noticed was that it never ever looked like the photograph. There was never that odd blue sky, never that flatness.

  MP: And the Malton print?

  RK: The print was interesting, because the Custom House never looked exactly like that either, and yet I understood that it was somehow close to the truth of the thing, to the reality of the building, certainly much closer than the photograph. It was a sort of idealised image, it got at something essential. It was as if Malton wished to state clearly that it was impossible to represent it as it always was. And I understood that too, I had worked it out si
mply by looking at the Custom House. So I think that very early on I had got to grips with something significant about the idea of seeing things, and that what we take for reality isn’t fixed, isn’t static.

  MP: Amazing. You must have been a remarkable child.

  RK: Oh absolutely not, no, no, no. I can’t begin to tell you how ordinary I was. And obviously I couldn’t have explained it all to you then as I’m doing now.

  MP: But to think a thing through like that – to make those connections…

  RK: Oh, come on, any child could do it, they do it all the time. Perhaps not always with visual things but with sounds or words or whatever. They’re capable of making those almost metaphysical connections that are outside the limits of received opinion, because their minds are free. They haven’t yet been conditioned not to think for themselves. This brings us back to more or less where we came in. I mean at eight, I wasn’t thinking, ‘Ah yes, Malton, the Classical impulse in the art of the eighteenth century …’ I was simply looking at things that were there under my nose and drawing my own conclusions. We’re back to why I don’t like definitions. If you show someone a canvas and say, ‘Here’s an example of Russian expressionist art, what do you think?’ chances are you won’t get the response you would from showing the same person the same canvas and simply saying, ‘Look at this: do you like it?’

  MP: But you must concede that sometimes these labels, these definitions, are necessary.

  RK: Oh yes, sure. I’m all in favour of a philosophy of art, so long as it serves the work rather than trying to lead it.

  AW: So to get back to your own development, what happened next?

  RK: Well, I went to secondary school, and I had a wonderful teacher there, Mr Conway, Matthew Conway, and he made a huge difference as a good teacher always does. He taught me formal skills, drawing, watercolour and so on. I’d been doing this kind of thing but in an unfocused way and he gave it all more structure and direction. He introduced me to the art of the twentieth century, the modernists, Picasso, Braque and the rest.

  MP: And was that the catalyst?

  RK: The catalyst was late Turner. I was looking for a missing link. There was still something about getting close to the reality of a thing, the whole Custom House question you could call it, that I hadn’t resolved in my mind, that I didn’t understand. And then I came across a book of Turner’s work from the end of his life and that was it. Problem solved. You’d see this pearly, hazy image with a bridge just visible in it, or a town that seemed to float, and that was it, it was the thing itself. Turner was a revelation to me, it was like coming home.

  MP: Bringing you closer to abstraction.

  RK: Bringing me closer to reality.

  MP: A considerable period of your career has been spent abroad.

  RK: Mmn.

  MP: In Italy.

  RK: In Italy, yes.

  MP: Can you tell me what difference that made to your work? Do you think it was essential for you as a painter?

  ‘What are you reading?’ Julia asked. William hadn’t noticed her coming into the café until she was right beside him, looking over his shoulder at his magazine. ‘Oh that. Roderic wasn’t too pleased about it,’ she said as she sat down. ‘They didn’t tell him they were going to publish a straight transcript.’

  ‘I’m enjoying it, there are good things in it. How is your friend these days?’

  ‘Roderic? He’s fine.’

  ‘I half thought,’ William said, ‘that he might be along with you.’

  ‘He’s a busy man.’

  ‘We’re all busy.’

  He could see from her face that she registered the criticism implied in this and that it displeased her but all she said was, ‘Are you? Are you indeed? I’m glad to hear it. Last time I saw you, you didn’t seem to be getting much done.’

  ‘It’s been going better this past week or so,’ he conceded, ‘but it’s still very difficult.’

  ‘I’d be more worried if you said you were finding it easy. Tea please,’ she said, this last to the waitress who had come over to their table. ‘Did you try doing what I suggested?’

  ‘I did and it was a great help.’

  ‘I thought it might be. It’s important to be relaxed. If you go at the work all bottled up in yourself you won’t get anywhere.’

  ‘I brought along a few paintings today,’ he said hesitantly, ‘and I wondered if you might look at them for me, give me your honest opinion.’

  Julia said that she would on condition that he was clear in his mind about the difference between honesty and truth. ‘For I may be wrong,’ she said, ‘and being honest won’t make me right.’

  The first thing that surprised her about the work was its size, for William had chosen to work in a much smaller format than she would ever have imagined, each sheet of paper being no more than a foot square. She had also expected that the paintings would be somewhat assertive and bold but in reality they were understated, at times almost diffident experiments in colour. He had brought along two series, one executed in shades of olive green, the other in dark blue-greys that made her think of slates, of sloes, of a sky full of thunder, the colours calling up the thing as a word might. A certain area had been left unpainted on each page, its soft peach-like texture contrasting with the matt pigment that feathered or dripped into it.

  As Julia silently studied each painting in turn she did her best to remain impassive and inscrutable for he was looking at her anxiously, keen to know what she thought. Again she remembered how Roderic had warned her off him and in truth it was anything but a simple or straightforward situation. Certainly William’s money and status gave him a kind of power, but it was undercut by his desire for this other thing in his life: to be an artist. Being on surer ground in this area herself in turn gave her power over him and today it felt like complete power, so that William was the vulnerable one. By scorning or dismissing his work she could undermine him completely. She wasn’t sure that he realised this.

  Looking at the paintings she gradually became aware that her initial expectations had been utterly wrong, for these works were in fact an eloquent expression of his current insecurity. In the least accomplished paintings this became a hesitancy and an indecision that botched his technique and weakened any impact it might have had, but in the best these same qualities modulated into a delicate fragility. The colours, the form and the empty space interacted to set up a complex tension, suggesting the oriental.

  ‘They’re good,’ she said at last. ‘Some of them are very good indeed.’ She thought the blue series better than the green, and he was glad of this for he too preferred the former. They discussed the work at length now, with Julia picking out the individual paintings she had liked and explaining why, careful always to couch any negative remarks she might make as tactfully as possible. She talked to him about control of colour and developing technique, about confidence and the need for the habit of work. William listened to her intently, drinking in every word although she reminded him again that it was only her opinion, and that she wasn’t an authority on the subject. As he closed up again the leather binder in which he carried the paintings he thanked her for her help.

  ‘My big fear,’ he said, ‘is that I’ve left it too late.’

  ‘What, the painting? William, if you start to think like that, you’re lost. Focus on what you’re doing now and forget about the past. In any case, art has its own laws concerning time. It’s not like other things. The years you have left may well be all you ever needed.’

  The waitress brought tea and they talked about an exhibition they had both recently seen. She liked this kind of conversation with him. What she valued in her friendship with William was his intellectual companionship. Intelligent and well informed, his approach to his work interested her and his opinions on things were always worth hearing. What she didn’t want to know about were his private emotional difficulties or his family life, but of late it was precisely these things that he most wished to speak of. The last time they�
��d met like this, he’d suddenly brought the conversation round to his wife. He told Julia his marriage had gone through a difficult patch some years earlier and had almost ended. He admitted that it had been his fault, intimating that he had been unfaithful. Only now, he said, did he realise that it had all been a way – a clumsy and badly thought-out way – of attempting to change the situation they were in.

  ‘And perhaps it would have been better if Liz and I had separated then. We could have, you know, got on with our lives differently.’

  ‘What about your children?’ Julia said.

  But he dismissed this: ‘We didn’t have any children then. Having them was one of the conditions of our staying together. Liz insisted on it’

  His confidences embarrassed her. ‘William, I really don’t think you should be telling me all these things.’

  Having made the point she hoped he would be more reticent in future, but as she drank her tea today he told her that it was exactly a year since his father had died.

  ‘From that text I wrote for you, you may have thought we were close but we weren’t, not at all. He was a completely overbearing man, always finding fault with my brother and me, always banging on about achievement. My brother wanted to be a physics teacher but my father thought that showed a scandalous lack of ambition and nagged him out of it, pretty well forced him to do a doctorate. He’s a research scientist now, but he went to live in Australia years ago: you can draw your own conclusions from that. I always knew that when my father died I wouldn’t be grief stricken, but I don’t think I ever expected to be as relieved as I was. Knowing he wasn’t there made me feel free.’

  It was a view with which Julia, given her own family circumstances, could neither identify nor sympathise. It struck her that the crisis into which he had plunged in the year since then was perhaps not unrelated to the loss of his father, and she wondered if this had also occurred to William. From the way he spoke, she doubted it.