The Kiss (3 page)

‘Nature inspired him, and life itself,’ he responded,
though he had to admit that it was true that Rodin had been obsessed by women and their sexuality. His sculptures demonstrated that fully and gloriously.

‘Would you call them erotic?’ asked a boy called Jason, tongue in cheek, as Cormac was aware. Jason had brought in a piece of work decorated with dog shit on one occasion and had pretended indignation when asked to remove it. ‘What about those pictures daubed with elephant shit? They were hung in a gallery.’ Cormac had said that the ordure of elephants obviously could not smell as strongly as that of dogs.

‘Or pornographic,’ put in Robbie, the Damien Hirst fan, and then answered himself. ‘It might be if it was on page three, mightn’t it?’

Cormac inclined his head, acknowledging his point.

‘Do you think an artist’s personality is reflected in his work?’ asked Clarinda, frowning a little.

‘What do you think?’ Cormac asked the class.

‘I reckon it was with Jason’s dog shit,’ said Robbie, which caused some laughter and meant that he had to duck out of Jason’s range.

‘I think we could say that Rodin’s personality is reflected in his work,’ said Cormac, bringing them back to the central topic, though he enjoyed it when their discussions wandered off at tangents. ‘He was a very passionate and sensual man. His work is charged with
emotion and energy, you can tell that even seeing it here on the screen, two-dimensionally.’

‘Did he have it off with his models then?’ asked Robbie.

‘As a matter of fact, yes, he usually did.’

The room was warm, the discussion genial. Cormac felt in good form and was not even riled when one of the boys asked him if he had any other heroes but Rodin, making him sound like a football follower.

‘Don’t you feel a need to move on?’

‘I hope I have moved on, in that I have looked at other things and I admire many of them, though I do confess – without shame! – that I find it difficult when it comes to sculpture to go past Rodin. To my mind he is the king.’

Cormac left school that afternoon, feeling buoyant, to walk home. Teaching got a sad press but he enjoyed it, most of the time. He’d had a good afternoon.

He sometimes thought he had better conversations with his students than he did when he and Rachel went to dinner parties, especially those given by colleagues of his or hers. They talked about Edinburgh restaurants and foreign holidays. He and Rachel usually went to southern Europe, to France, Italy or Spain, and so could not compare notes on Bangkok, Bali or Copocabana Beach.

Turning a corner, on his way home, he bumped into Clarinda. At the time that was what he thought: that he
had bumped into her, that their meeting was accidental. Later, while walking the streets and sitting in cafés, a suspended man, ruminating over his fate, he would come to wonder if she had been waiting for him that day and other days.

‘I really enjoy your classes, Mr Aherne,’ she said.

He was pleased, even flattered, for who would not be pleased when receiving praise from a pupil? The pupils were the ones that mattered most, after all, not the dreary inspectors who came and sat at the back of the class trying to look benign.

‘I do think Rodin’s wonderful, too. I’ve only seen your slides and photographs of course and I know they won’t be anything like the real thing. I can’t wait to get to Paris!’

Cormac smiled. He had felt like that on the brink of his first trip. His mother had not been happy about him going off to the French capital on his own even though he had been eighteen years old and about to go to art college in Edinburgh. She had not been happy about that, either, of course not. What did he want to go to Edinburgh for when there was a perfectly good college in Belfast and he could live more cheaply at home?

‘It’s great to be young,’ he told Clarinda, ‘and to be looking at things for the very first time.’

Hearing the trill of a bicycle bell, he glanced round to
see Alec McCaffy, teacher of geography, his ankles firmly clipped, mounted on his high bicycle. No mountain bike this, it looked like something Alec’s father might have left in the back shed before popping off. Alec still lived in his childhood home, with his mother.

‘Oh hi, Alec,’ muttered Cormac offhandedly and turned back to Clarinda.

She said, ‘I’d love to read something about Rodin.’

‘I’ll bring in a couple of books for you,’ he promised, glancing at his watch. ‘I must go. I’ve got to collect my son from the childminder’s.’

After he’d brought Davy home and given him his customary afternoon refreshment he went up to his studio and looked out some books on Rodin and his times. He gave them a dust. He had read them more than once in times past, when life had been more leisurely. He opened one book and the next thing he knew was Rachel calling from below, ‘Are you in, Cormac?’

He ran downstairs. She was taking off her coat in the hall. She looked tired.

‘How was your day?’ he asked.

‘Hellish. I thought I’d never get out of the surgery and when I did I had two emergency house calls. One died before I got there. I could do with a drink.’

He poured her a gin and tonic and took a dram for himself. They had the living room to themselves. Sophie
wasn’t back yet and Davy was watching television in his room. They had succumbed to buying a set for him in order to get a bit of peace for themselves. Not a worthy reason, they had both acknowledged, but they were full-time working people with fairly stressful jobs and they needed all the help they could get.

Rachel sighed. ‘That feels better. How was your day?’

‘Great,’ he said.

Next morning, in the staff room, waiting side by side for the kettle to boil for their Nescafé, Alec McCaffy said, ‘You seemed to be having quite a jaw-jaw with Miss Clarinda Bain on the corner there yesterday afternoon. She was hanging onto your every word.’

‘We were discussing art,’ said Cormac loftily, lifting the steaming kettle and pouring hissing water onto the brown powder in his mug. ‘In particular, Rodin and his sculpture, in preparation for our visit to Paris.’

‘I wasn’t suggesting you were talking about anything else,’ said Alec, with a little smirk that Cormac did not much care for.

For God’s sake, all he had been doing was talking to a pupil about his subject, in full view, on a corner! She was interested in art, this girl, passionate about it, which he could understand and relate to and he couldn’t
help it if some of his colleagues wouldn’t know what the word passion meant. As for Alec McCaffy, staleness came off him and his bicycle clips like bad breath.

He saw Clarinda in the corridor and told her that he had brought some books for her. ‘Come and see me at the end of the day.’

His last class on this day was a fourth-year group whom he found dispiriting. At least half of them couldn’t wait to leave school at the end of the year and were taking art, thinking it to be a soft option. They made nuisances of themselves splashing paint about and generally disrupting the concentration of the class, which meant that Cormac had to be constantly sniping at them. He was delighted to see the back of them and pleased to see Clarinda coming in the door with an eager face.

He took the books from his bag and laid them on the table in front of her.

‘You can dip into some of these.’

‘Fantastic!’

He wondered if any of Alec McCaffy’s pupils had ever pronounced anything to be fantastic in a class of his.

Clarinda opened one of the books and began to study the plates. ‘Looking at these makes me want to get on and do something.’

The door opened at their backs and his friend Ken Mason put his head in. ‘Oh, you’re busy, Cormac.’ He was about to withdraw.

‘No, it’s all right. I’m just coming.’ He’d promised to go for a drink with Ken.

Clarinda was gathering up the books. ‘Thank you very much for these, Mr Aherne,’ she said and clutching them to her bosom, left them.

‘Keen student?’ asked Ken.

‘Very keen.’

‘You can be such a fool at times, Cormac, like an innocent abroad!’ Rachel told him on the day he arrived home to tell her that he had been suspended. Sent home like a recalcitrant schoolboy by the headmaster. He had been sent home once before, when he was a pupil in primary school, for telling a teacher that he liked her blouse. You could see her bra through the gauzy material. The other boys put him up to it. ‘Go on, Cormie, tell her!’ ‘What did I do wrong, sir?’ he asked the headmaster. ‘It’s a nice blouse.’ He was told not to be cheeky and to hold out his hand. Then he was sent home to consider his sin. His mother took the headmaster’s side.

So once again, here he was, considering. Some people never learnt. They were standing in the
kitchen, he and Rachel, and Davy was upstairs in his room watching television with the sound turned up too high, which, for once, had its advantages. Rachel had come in only a minute ahead of Cormac and had not even had time to take off her coat when he’d blurted out his news. She was resting her back against the counter top as if her legs were too weak to hold her up. Cormac ran the cold tap and took a long drink. It soured his mouth to think that Archie Gibson had offered no word of support even after they’d concluded the formal part of the proceedings. He’d stopped at the door of his room to give him the opportunity but he’d been hunched over his desk with blank eyes writing a report for some damn fool bureaucrat. That legion of nit-pickers and snoopers that polluted the land. Cormac had seen Archie’s eyes flicker but he hadn’t looked up. So much for friendship. He took another drink of water. And now here was his wife calling him a fool.

‘Oh, I’m sorry, Cormac,’ she said with a sigh, heaving herself off the counter. ‘I didn’t mean it, really I didn’t.’

‘Yes, you did. And perhaps I am.’

She gave her head a quick shake as if to settle what was going on inside it. ‘It was just – well, it was a shock, damn it all! And you’re so impulsive always. You never stop to think and as a result you leave yourself exposed.
You’d think you might have learnt to protect yourself a bit better by this time.’

She was not by nature a harsh woman, except in odd moments, when she was exasperated as well as distressed. And this was one of them. She had been taken completely by surprise and so had spoken what was in her mind, without thinking. He didn’t doubt that any woman would be upset to hear that her husband had been accused of making sexual advances to a minor, a pupil in his care, and might even entertain a grain of doubt about his innocence. And what she had to say was true, about protecting himself. Putting up a guard. Covering his flanks. As in war. His trouble was that he was too spontaneous by nature and that on occasions had infuriated her. Like the time when they’d met some people on holiday in Greece (exceedingly boring as well as greedy people, said Rachel, telling the tale to friends afterwards) and he’d said casually that they were welcome to come and stay with them in Edinburgh and they did, two adults and two gargantuan teenagers, for ten whole days of the Festival in August, treating their house like a free B&B, expecting an evening meal thrown in, to which they contributed a cheap bottle of Bulgarian plonk that Rachel saw priced at one pound ninety nine in a supermarket. ‘Why
don’t
you think, Cormac, before
you open your mouth?’ she asked after the freeloaders had departed. It was always said that he was like his father in that respect, as well as being good with his hands. That was his mother’s term for it.

His father had been an ebullient man and liked a good laugh. He had a repertoire of jokes. ‘Have you heard the one about the man coming to the funeral, knocking on the door and asking, “Is this where the dead man lives?”’ He’d throw his head back and laugh till his wife left the room shaking her head. He liked a drink as well, did Pat Aherne, nothing wrong with that for he never drank too much or came home stocious, swearing and falling all over the place and beating up his wife and child, like some, like their next-door neighbour who was a Salvationist when sober. Pat Aherne liked the company as much as the beer and was known in the pub to be good crack.

He gave up the shoemaking since he was an obliging man and his wife thought he could do better for himself, and her. He got a job as a commercial traveller, later to be known as a sales representative, and thereafter he sold shoe polish the length and breadth of Ireland. He liked travelling the country, meeting people, and he liked staying in the cheap bacon-and-egg hotels and bed-and-breakfasts run by soft-bosomed women. It was
great, he told his son, getting bacon and egg and fried potato bread set in front of you every morning and no one wanting to nag at you! He got a car, too, and on Sundays he’d take his wife and child and one or two of his wife’s sisters for runs down the coast to Bangor and Donaghadee. The women would sit gossiping in the car while he and the boy kicked a football and built castles on the beach, sculpting the sand carefully, building it up piece by piece, until they could sit back on their hunkers and admire their handiwork. Their work of art. They never jumped on it to flatten the pile. ‘Let the sea take it when it’s ready,’ said Cormac’s father. ‘The main thing is to have built the castle.’

By this time the women would be getting restless and Cormac’s mother would have wound down her window and be calling out, ‘Are the two of youse not done yet? It’s getting chilly.’ To cheer them up Pat would buy them all ice cream sliders and the aunts would curl their tongues round the edge of the ices to stop them dripping on their Sunday clothes and say, ‘You’re in the money, Pat!’ ‘Not that much!’ his wife would retaliate sharply. It was all very well for him to be so open-handed and buy ice creams all round, not to mention standing rounds in the pub but, at the end of the day, it was she who would have to make ends meet.

At the end of the day, Cormac’s father disappeared. He didn’t come home one Friday afternoon as usual.

‘There’ll be a woman involved,’ said his Aunt Lily knowingly. ‘You can take my word for it! There usually is.’

His mother had feared that her son might grow up in the image of his father. He heard her say to her sister Lily in the kitchen one day that maybe it was as well his father had done a bunk. ‘He’d have been a bad influence on the boy so he would.’