snatches of conversation around me that the exhibition was a striking achievement and should, with any luck, be a real success, so I was relieved for Agnes – I did not appear to have done any damage – and could set aside those worries for the moment while I examined once again what I had seen of the installation itself and more specifically try to fathom the shock I had in its presence, why had I felt so deeply about it all, why had I taken it so personally and, most bafflingly of all, how a man of my age could be so overcome by his own feelings, so totally undone as to make him feel very foolish since all I knew, standing there in the rain, was that this was something I did not appreciate one little bit, sifting through feelings that grated and twisted within me, trying to give them their proper place and measure with my back to the cut stone wall of the gallery and I had no need to step outside of myself to know that I must have presented a strange sight to anyone who cared to look, this burly man with a suit and tie on him and the raw winter face of a farmer, standing there as if he was outside second mass of a Sunday, and how ever this may have looked to those last stragglers who stood along the pavement, it was safe to say that no one could have guessed the degree of turmoil and inner vexation which troubled me because never
had the consequences of fatherhood and everything it entailed weighed so completely on me than at that moment with
the anxious worry that I might be responsible in some way for what was on the walls of the gallery behind me, a wringing fear within me which gathered to its tight core two decades of consequence, so that it was now clear to me that this whole evening might be nothing less than a full reappraisal of myself as a man and as a father, something I had not reckoned on when I got into the car that evening and drove the sixty or seventy miles to the gallery, that I was travelling towards this moment of reckoning with myself because, like many another man, I had gone through life with little in the way of self-examination, my right to a life of peace from such persecution something I had taken for granted, something I might have acknowledged as the responsibility of others but not the type of inward harrowing I ever expected of myself but which nevertheless I now found myself subjected to in a way which took its prompt from a central, twitching nerve within me which kept asking
had I failed my daughter
had I pushed her towards this – whatever this was – on the walls of the gallery, this was the question that would not resolve one way or another beneath the sifting rain which shadowed the street in both directions, with the conviction hardening within me that having lived a decent life might not in itself be enough – or a life which till now I had honestly thought had been decent – since there was now some definite charge or accusation in the air which made it appear that not having done anything wrong was not enough and I noticed also that
the rain had that steady fall to it which meant it was down for the rest of the evening with the traffic passing in a muted light that was cold and wet and made me realise I was now soaked, particularly across my shoulders and down my back but also, that I could not move, I could not go back inside from shame and embarrassment so I spent another fifteen minutes standing there alone with the wall pressed to my back until Mairead and Agnes finally showed up on the pavement beside me with a look of irritated relief on both their faces, exclaiming
so that’s where you are
we wondered where you’d got to and
I tried to avoid the look in Mairead’s eye, that look which told me that she was going to set aside her anger and disappointment for the moment but that I would hear about it later on, so I made some foolish play of welcoming them both, hopelessly pressing the excuse that
I’ve been here all the time, I needed some fresh air, which
was a lie neither of them believed but one they went along with for the moment in their anxiety to move out of the rain, Agnes grimacing and doing a little stamping dance of impatience on the pavement, her high-collared coat, buttoned up under her chin, transforming her from the pale totem of earlier in the evening to someone almost corporate-looking, her whole appearance now that of a young, professional woman who had just dropped into the exhibition on her way home from work and I remembered that this coat was a recent gift from Mairead in both our names to mark this occasion, the prize at the end of a long day spent shopping together, a day which had brought Mairead home glowing with a renewed sense of her daughter’s good taste in such things as coats because even if, as she admitted at the time, it would not have been the one she would have chosen for her – so conservative, plain even – and even if she was slightly perplexed by her choice, she was also pleased because for all her support of Agnes’s artistic career there were periods when Mairead openly worried about her and wondered would it not have been better if she had not chosen a career which was so governed by luck and uncertainty, a career which was likely to bring more than its share of disappointment and frustrations and
did I know how few practising artists managed to make a living from their work, did I
which of course I didn’t
but which sometimes gave me to believe when listening to Mairead going on in this vein, that her all worry was not really for Agnes but was in reality for herself in that it underlined some hesitancy in her own character, possibly evoked a moment in her own past when she might have done something similar with her life but had settled instead for the safer option of teaching, discovering somewhere along the way that for all her travel and adventuring abroad she lacked that courage to make the commitment to something as dicey as an artistic career so that now, whenever Agnes made a conservative choice in something like a coat it was as if Mairead was no longer suffering that rebuke to herself and
here she was now, our artist daughter in her sensible coat, looking so sharp that had she been someone else I would not have been surprised to hear that she worked in some sort of financial services job, insurance or something, some career where the value of the present moment was wagered against some unknowable future and standing there in the rain, looking at her, I found myself getting so carried away on this idea, this alternative life to which my daughter might have been born, that it took me a moment to realise that I was being spoken to, Agnes suggesting that we go for something to eat as she was meeting up with friends later for a few drinks but that it would be nice if we could have some time alone together, just the three of us, besides
I’m famished, she said, absolutely famished
as she hadn’t had time all day to have a proper meal and had not eaten since before noon, all nerves and anxiety, which might well account for the fevered glow of her cheeks now which blushed up her pale complexion in that same way that makes mothers want to place their hands on children’s foreheads and get them to stick out their tongue as she finished pulling on the leather gloves that completed her outfit, that final detail which so clinched the whole look from smart-casual to something much more purposeful and the sight of which galvanised me into a kind of blustering anxiety to move the whole evening on to another place and mood so
yes, something to eat, where can we go this time of the evening, won’t everywhere be booked out, we should have thought about this earlier and rung ahead and
Mairead was giving me that look, shaking her head sorrowfully and I hauled up, mid-surge
calm down for fuck’s sake, I said to myself, calm down
so I shut up and stood back while the two women consulted and eventually the three of us moved off, following Agnes up the narrow street and across the bridge, through a small alleyway in the shopping centre which opened into a parallel street where there was a restaurant wedged between a church on one side and a theatre on the other, a quiet place where we had the full attention of a waiter who stepped up and fussed around us when we entered, took our coats and bags and led us to a table, one of seven or eight in a small room that was near empty and I was glad to see how happily Mairead surveyed the tables with their linen napkins and heavy cutlery and,
