Nothing is Black (9 page)

‘MAMMY, WHY IS BLACK BLACK
?’

‘Because it isn’t white.’

‘But why?’

‘Justice, child, give over with your questions!’

But Claire didn’t give over. Throughout her childhood she persistently asked such questions, not to be difficult or contrary, but because she genuinely wanted answers. The subject of colour was important to her even then. Her mother gave her short shrift especially when she demanded to know the colour of people’s souls. Her father took it all more patiently. Claire remembered how he would listen to her with an air of great seriousness, his lips pursed, as he tried not to smile at some of the things she said.

‘Daddy, why have some birds got blue eggs and some speckledy eggs? How many colours are there in the whole world? Is there a word for the colour a shadow is? Why is grass green? Is white really a colour?’

Her parents both agreed that she would keep a nation going.

She liked the words for the colours: yellow, green, red. Then she learnt new words. Turquoise, vermilion, aquamarine. Ochre, crimson, puce. This love of colour
did not diminish as she grew up. The questions never ended, they became more complex, the only difference was that she stopped going to her father for answers to them. She was sitting in the studio reading Frida Kahlo’s notes on colour.

‘Daddy,’ she’d said when she was eight, ‘why do people keep saying the sky is blue, when it almost never is?’ He’d laughed aloud at that.

Claire remembered this, turned the page of her book and savoured the silence not just of the studio, but of the whole house. It made her happy to know that she was alone. She somewhat regretted now that she had told Kevin that Nuala could come back on Sunday night to stay until the end of August as had been originally agreed. She had stipulated though that the situation would be – how had she put it? – ‘constantly under review’, yes, that was it.

She’d discussed this with Kevin in a whispered
conversation
over breakfast that morning, while Nuala was still upstairs, preparing to leave with Kevin for Sligo. Claire didn’t like having to speak so quietly in her own house; it didn’t seem right, but she was anxious that Nuala should not hear what she was saying. Claire had lain awake for a long time the night before wondering just what she should say about Nuala staying on. In one
way, she just wanted to see the back of her, but she also felt an inexplicable pity for both Kevin and Nuala, and found she couldn’t bring herself to be hard on them. But there had to be strict conditions. Looking over at the door, anxious that Nuala would come in at any moment, Claire leaned across the table and said quietly, ‘She can come back if she wants. I made a promise, and I don’t like to go back on it.’ As Kevin started to murmur his thanks, she added hurriedly, ‘But you must promise me this. Nuala mustn’t know that she can come back until late on Sunday. If she asks, just tell her I haven’t made my mind up yet. However, I can tell you now that when you phone me on Sunday afternoon, I’ll say yes. It’ll be best that way.’ Kevin looked puzzled, but he nodded and thanked her.

Claire cut another slice of bread, pleased that they had discussed the subject and that she had made her views known. She simply didn’t want Nuala to take her hospitality for granted. ‘Keep her guessing until the last minute, that’ll teach her,’ she thought. ‘And can you make one thing clear to her: any more fun and games like the other night, any more disappearing acts and you won’t have to come and fetch her, because I won’t wait long enough for you to get here. She’ll be on the first bus out of town.’ Kevin nodded miserably, and suddenly she felt sorry for him again. She offered him more tea, but he shook his head.

‘Kevin, while you’re away, think hard about Nuala’s being here, about whether or not this is the right thing to do,’ she urged him. ‘Sometimes I’m not at all sure that Donegal is the best place for Nuala right now. Talk to her about it.’

‘I’ll try to,’ he said.

The kitchen door opened at that point, and Nuala came in. Claire saw them off a few moments later, telling them she hoped they would have a great weekend, trying to keep the irony out of her voice. The emptiness of the house after they’d gone was as novel as it was delightful.

No, the sky wasn’t blue and the sea wasn’t blue either, and often the grass wasn’t green. What colour was ice? Water? The sun? This morning it was colourless, a circle of pure light in a white sky. ‘Daddy, do you think white is as frightening as black? I do.’

This morning, she wished she had enough money to buy the house where she was living. Up until now, she had had no interest in buying property: still didn’t, if she thought it through. Buying would be a declaration of how committed she was to staying in Donegal, rather than a desire to settle down and build a little domestic empire around herself. When Claire moved in, there’d been a small pane of glass broken in the back door. She’d nailed a board over it, and three years later, she still hadn’t got round to having the window mended. But even if she bought the house, it didn’t necessarily mean that she would then fix it, or that she would do something about the kitchen cupboard that had to be kicked before it would open, or any of the other
malfunctioning
fixtures and fittings. No, she’d never wanted a house, never even wanted to own things. Once they began to accumulate to any serious degree they made her feel nervous so that she had to get rid of them. Maybe it would be the same if she bought the house, she would immediately feel restless and trapped.
Anyway, it was all hypothetical: she wouldn’t buy it because she didn’t have enough money. Maybe it was just as well.

From things Kevin had said, she realized he thought she already owned the house. She didn’t say anything to disabuse him of the notion. Kevin would have found it incredible that someone could get to Claire’s stage in life and not have bought a house, even if it was only a small, draughty, isolated one.

She thought of Giacometti, shocked out of domesticity for ever by an early confrontation with death. It began with a chance, brief meeting on a train with an elderly Dutchman. Later he attempted to, and, amazingly, succeeded in tracing Giacometti through a classified advertisement in a newspaper. They planned a journey together to Venice, but had scarcely set out when the elder man fell ill and died. Giacometti was twenty. The horror he felt on seeing the transition from being to nothingness would never leave him. In the face of certain annihilation, the clutter of domesticity was, to him, a monstrous lie. Why pretend life is anything other than transitory? Why pretend you are anything other than utterly alone in your existence?

Oh, she knew the answer to that all right: because the lies were necessary, because to face the truth was just too damn hard. Because you need Giacometti’s courage to bear that sort of knowledge with the integrity he had shown, and the courage is much rarer than the
knowledge.
What Giacometti learned when his travelling companion died was not such a secret. Claire found it out the night Alice died, and Alice herself had known it all along. She remembered the moon, full over the cold,
still peaks, remembered the following morning when she awoke to a strange combination of sorrow and elation. Everything she saw that day was charged with fragility and tenderness: the faces of strangers in the streets, the white mountain houses, the cats that slept on their steps, the pale cattle that were driven through the streets of the village at dusk …

It had been strange and sad to see Kevin again. Her first impression was that he looked older than she had expected. He was only in his early thirties, but could easily have passed for ten years more than that. What had ravaged him? Nothing, she discovered with surprise when she looked at him more closely. He was glazed with money, that was the problem. The elegant well-cut clothes, the gold watch, the good accessories all
conspired
to put years on him. Physically, he was in good shape. It was his mind that had grown old. Her mother would have said that he looked ‘highly respectable’. She’d have been right.

Looking at him, Claire wondered not why he had given up painting, but why he had ever concerned himself with it at all. Alice had always had her doubts about him. ‘When Kevin is thirty,’ she used to say, ‘he’ll have completely turned himself inside out.’ Claire hadn’t known then what she meant. She knew now. When he was actually sitting there before her, she found it hard to remember him as he was when she’d known him at art school. They’d had a lot in common then (or thought they had) and she was baffled by this stranger. The mysteries of one’s own past ideas and choices can be greater than the strangeness of other people’s choices and opinions. You expect to feel more sympathy and
understanding with your own past self than is
sometimes
possible. He didn’t ask anything at all about her work, and she was grateful for that. She asked him about the restaurant with genuine interest, because Kevin and his job were so closely interrelated that you had to know about one to know about the other. She was glad when he said that it was going well; the opposite would have been worrying. It was a long time since she’d met someone whose whole sense of self was so closely bound up in their career, their possessions, their position in society: without them, she felt, he would be utterly adrift. They were sitting drinking tea, waiting for Nuala to come back from Anna’s house. ‘What are you thinking, Claire?’ he suddenly said. It was the most intimate question he asked her that day. To answer honestly she would have had to tell him, ‘I just don’t know how I ever thought I loved you.’ So of course, she told him a lie instead.

What colour is happiness? Some people think it’s yellow, but it’s really pale blue. Depression: grey, not black, unless it’s really severe, in which case it’s red.

He thought she was a failure. Nothing in particular had to be said for Claire to know that. There were several possible directions one could take upon leaving art college. A few people became successful painters, or went into related careers as photographers, designers or suchlike. Some became teachers. Others, like Kevin, accepted that they would make good only by forgetting about art and moving into an entirely different area: business or computing or whatever would bring
prosperity.
And then there were people like Claire who continued working for years at an art which brought
them neither fame nor money, living in spartan rented rooms, always strapped for cash, their creative energy and intellectual curiosity as intense as ever. To Kevin it was pure folly. To Claire, it was life, and a good life.

She knew that when Nuala left Donegal, it was unlikely that they would see each other again, in spite of Nuala having spoken about Claire coming to stay with them in Dublin. Nuala and Kevin having more money than Claire did make a difference, but it was just one strand in a complex web of social pressure and
conformity
which drew some people together and kept others apart. Like attracted like, the married gravitating to the married, those with children unconsciously seeking out their peers, everyone looking for the like-minded who would bolster them up and confirm their values, beliefs, fears and prejudices. Markus once said to her, ‘Take your yearly salary, and then dismiss the possibility of ever getting close to anyone who earns half as much as you, or twice as much as you.’ At the time, she had thought he was being cynical, but he had insisted he was right. ‘Never underestimate the force of social pressure. That’s what makes society run.’ No, she wouldn’t see them again. This was a period they would want to forget as soon as it had ended, and eliminating Claire from their lives would help them to that end.

She crossed to the window. Too much was made of the sun. The weak northern light had its own beauty; she liked its failure to dominate. She had spent sufficient time on the Continent to know the essence of the south, and the power of the sun, to know that the sun brings death as well as life. She remembered white towns full of hard shadows, and preferred the complexity of the soft
light she found in Ireland. It allowed the land, the sky, the ocean to each have their own place. She would never live far from the sea again, its vastness a comfort, its anonymous ancient waves crashing over the detritus of centuries: broken ships, coins, bones, weapons. She would never have believed that it would be possible to feel so much at home.

THEY DROVE BACK
from Sligo to Donegal on a
magnificent
summer evening. It had rained earlier in the day, but now the sun had broken through the heavy clouds, blazing fierce gold on the ocean and the rinsed
landscape
. Everything was radiant, as though the rain had strengthened the essence of the trees and the stones. The sun threw long shadows on the road ahead of them.

Kevin was glad he had come up to see Nuala, and that they had made the trip to Sligo together. He felt
something
had been resolved between them over the
weekend
, although he’d have been hard pressed to say exactly what it was, or how the change had been effected. When Claire told him Nuala had turned up safely following her overnight disappearance, he resolved to confront her: to ‘have things out’ was how he’d phrased it in his own mind. Wasn’t that why he had continued on to Donegal? And wasn’t that why they had gone to Sligo together, to have the privacy such a discussion demands? And wasn’t it typical that ‘having it out’ was just what they hadn’t done?

Evading the issue had been surprisingly easy. Nuala was in an apparently relaxed and amiable frame of mind,
and the moment to open a discussion never presented itself. In retrospect, Kevin was amazed at simply how enjoyable the weekend had been. On the Saturday they’d done nothing more strenuous than look around some antique shops (in one of which they bought a clock in a porcelain case), and eat a couple of
exceptionally
good meals.

But Kevin had lain awake far into Sunday morning, wondering which it was, cowardice or commonsense, that had allowed them to drift through the day without asking the questions which, in the small hours, formed themselves effortlessly (but painfully) in his mind. ‘Do you want to leave me? Why did you go away the other night? Why won’t you come back to Dublin with me? Did you love your mother more than you love me?’

He felt sure now that they had done the right thing. What had to be said was best said on the level of the remark Nuala made now as she leaned forward to change the cassette in the car stereo.

‘I’m ever so glad we got that clock. I wanted to buy something over this summer, something nice that we’ll have twenty years from now.’

‘You think you’ll want to be reminded?’

‘I don’t think it’ll do any harm,’ she said. ‘I must show it to Anna, I know she’ll love it.’

‘Anna?’

‘You know, the Dutch woman who lives beside Claire. I told you about her.’

‘Oh yes, sorry, I forgot. What’s she like, this Anna?’

‘She’s the loneliest person I’ve ever met,’ Nuala said decisively. ‘And the worst thing of all is that she doesn’t even know it. She likes to think she’s a solitary type, but
it just isn’t true. Claire, now, Claire’s a genuine loner. Anna isn’t like that, she needs company.’

‘You should be careful of her, then,’ Kevin said. ‘Lame ducks can do more harm than you’d ever believe.’

‘But it isn’t like that. I feel sorry for her sometimes, but that isn’t why I go to see her. She’s good company. You wouldn’t believe how much she knows about Irish culture and history. Sometimes it embarrasses me, she knows so much more about it than I do.’

Kevin laughed. ‘I wouldn’t lose too much sleep over that,’ he said.

‘But it’s true,’ Nuala said. ‘She knows Donegal so well too, and I ought to know it better, what with Mammy being from there.’

‘Is she really?’ Kevin asked, with fake amazement. ‘Now if you hadn’t told me that, I’d never have guessed.’

‘Kevin! Don’t be so mean!’

‘Ah, I’m only teasing you, Nuala, but you know what I’m getting at. It didn’t matter a damn to your mother that she was from Donegal. She got out of it as fast as she could, and hated going back, even for short visits.’

‘Yes, but it’s part of my background, whether I like it or not, so maybe it would be good for me to get to know it,’ Nuala persisted. Kevin sighed, and this time he wearily agreed with her. He suggested that she make some trips around the county during the remainder of her time there. ‘Ask Anna to go with you.’ Nuala brightened at this idea, and said she would do that.

‘But what about you, Kevin,’ she went on. ‘Wouldn’t you like to get to know Ireland better?’

‘No I wouldn’t,’ he said firmly. ‘I know it well enough as it is.’

‘But you haven’t been back to Tipperary since your granny died, have you?’

By now, Kevin was exasperated. ‘Look, Nuala, just be careful. Don’t get some false idea stuck in your head about what Ireland is; don’t get hung up on some sort of tourist board version of the place. This,’ he gestured at the fuschia hedges on either side of the road, ‘is Ireland, but so is Dublin. I’m not going to whip myself into some false fervour for the west, and pretend it’s somehow more “real” or more wonderful than where we live, and I’d advise you not to do it either.’

There was a pause in the conversation, and he was afraid that he had said too much and soured the atmosphere. ‘While you’ve been away,’ he said, ‘I’ve been thinking about holidays. Maybe we’ll go
somewhere
nice in September when you’re back home: Paris, Venice even. What do you say?’

‘I’d much rather we rented a horse-drawn caravan and did the Ring of Kerry.’

He looked over at her in amazement, and she stared back for a moment, then started to laugh.

‘I wish you could see your own face, Kevin, it’s a study.’

‘I sometimes wonder what I’m ever going to do with you,’ Kevin said, but he was laughing too.

They listened to the music as they drove on through the langorous dusk, and Kevin found himself
remembering
a conversation he’d had with Nuala’s doctor around the time she decided to go to Donegal for the summer. They’d been talking about her, and Kevin was surprised when the doctor abruptly asked him, ‘Have you ever had a crisis in your life?’

‘I’m not sure. What do you mean by “crisis”?’

The doctor laughed. ‘Then it’s clear that you haven’t. I mean losing everything. Oh, not material things, but perhaps everything else: all your self-confidence gone, all your faith in everything you ever believed,
everything
you felt sure you could count on. Nothing makes sense any more, and you can’t understand why.’

Kevin thought about it. No, nothing like that had ever happened to him, and he found it hard to imagine what it must be like.

‘What causes it?’

Again the doctor laughed, but this time more gently. ‘Life, Kevin, that’s what causes it. Past a certain point people begin to take stock of their lives, and sometimes they don’t feel good about what they’ve done. When you’re young, you really do think you’re immortal. Then one day you realize that it’s not true, you aren’t going to live for ever. You’re born alone and you die alone and everything that comes in between can be pretty lonely too.’

‘To tell you the truth, Doctor, I think what you’re saying sounds completely banal.’

‘But it is!’ cried the doctor. ‘That’s what makes it so hard to bear. The idea of being a martyr, of noble suffering, has a certain dignified appeal to it, but this …! Oh yes, you’re right, Kevin: what could be more banal than realizing that you’re a human being like any other, and that this is the central tragedy of your life?’

Nuala was humming along with the music now, tapping out the rhythm with her fingertips.

‘For how long have you been married now, Kevin?’

‘Ten years.’

‘My wife and I have been together for twenty years. It’s a good thing, marriage. It’s different every year, I’m sure you’ve found that too. Sometimes people come into the surgery and I wish I could write on the prescription pad “Marriage”, because it’s clear that that’s exactly what they need.’ He paused a moment. ‘Mind you, I must admit I also see some patients for whom I’d like to prescribe a speedy divorce. Still,’ he said briskly, ‘that’s not the case here. Nuala’ll be fine, it’ll just take time, and perhaps quite a long time too. Look after her, Kevin. She’ll be a support to you, I know, when your turn comes.’

‘My turn?’

The doctor shook his head and laughed again. ‘It doesn’t matter. Goodbye, Kevin, and good luck! I’ll talk to you again soon.’

‘Perhaps New Year would be better,’ Nuala said suddenly, and Kevin looked at her blankly. ‘To go away,’ she said. ‘To go to Venice or somewhere.’

‘Oh yes, sure, whatever you think.’

Nuala smiled and shook her head.

‘What is it?’

‘Nothing. Nothing at all.’

The cassette came to an end, and they switched on the radio. They listened to the news first, and then as night fell they listened to the weather forecast, then the shipping forecast. After that there was music again, and they listened to that too, let it wash over them in the blackness as they drove on through the night, until they arrived at last at Claire’s house.