Nothing is Black (10 page)

ANNA WAS DELIGHTED
when Nuala suggested that they visit the surrounding area together, and immediately took out her maps and guide books. ‘I love this place so much,’ she said, ‘and it will give me great pleasure to share it with someone else.’ They planned a trip for the end of that week to visit a dolmen and a ring of standing stones about an hour’s drive away.

But standing in the middle of the stone circle that Friday afternoon, Nuala wondered why she was so disappointed. Was it the old pattern Kevin had pointed out in her so often: expecting too much from things so that disappointment inevitably followed? Perhaps. She knew that was a fault of hers, and a hard habit to break. But this time she wasn’t even clear what she had expected from this excursion. Anna too, she thought, was responsible to some degree for Nuala’s failure to enjoy the day, for she was in a foul temper. Nuala had never before seen her so tense and irritable. They had gone first to the dolmen. Nuala stood looking blankly at it, as if staring at the stone formation would force it to yield up its secret. ‘How old did you say this was?’ she asked, and was taken aback when Anna snapped, ‘I’ve already told you at least four times. Why don’t
you listen? Do you want to tell me to tell you four more?’

Nuala turned her stare from the dolmen to her
companion,
but said nothing. Anna looked away. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I feel wretched. I just couldn’t get to sleep at all last night, but there’s no reason for me to be taking it out on you.’

‘That’s all right,’ Nuala said. ‘I know how you feel, I’m like a bear if I miss a night’s sleep. It can’t be helped.’ She turned back to the strange stone
formation
, the flat slab on top perched in what seemed to be a precarious position on the lower stones. It looked like you could push the whole construction to the ground with one hand, which was absurd when you
considered
how solid a thing it actually was. The dolmen had been there for – how many thousands of years? She genuinely couldn’t remember, and she didn’t dare ask Anna again.

Claire had been surprisingly enthusiastic when Nuala told her where they were going. ‘You should have a great day, those are marvellous things to see,’ she said. She’d gone on to talk about the spirit of the places, how powerful it was, and the beauty of the stones, their colour and texture. But Nuala felt nothing either at the dolmen or the standing stone circle, nothing but wet and cold and disappointed. The stones were too abstract. The ruins of a church or a weathered statue would perhaps have meant something to her. Some form, some image was necessary for her to connect imaginatively with the distant past. She tried to imagine the ancient people who had placed these stones here, but the stones themselves prevented her
from doing so. ‘I can’t get back to the … the simplicity of it,’ she said to Anna.

‘But what makes you so sure they were simple?’ came the immediate response. ‘There was probably a
complexity
there, a sophistication of mind that we can only begin to imagine.’

Anna was beginning to develop an Irish accent, Nuala noted with mild irritation. Her own culture must have been pretty bland if she was able to slough it off like that and effortlessly absorb another. Nuala felt she ought to like the landscape around her. She ought to know more about it and find it as fascinating as Anna did, but she had to admit that it just wasn’t the case. The Donegal landscape bored Nuala, just as it had bored her mother, and suddenly she realized how foolish it was to try to connect with her in this way. She closed her eyes and tried to summon up a picture of her mother. She saw her sitting under the hood of a drier at the hairdressers. She could picture her standing in Buckleys debating on equal terms with the butcher about the number of dinners you could reasonably expect to get from the leg of lamb on the slab before them, and she could see her enjoying a gin and tonic before Sunday lunch. Try as she might, though, she couldn’t see her standing in a damp field in Donegal getting any sort of interest from looking at a few old lumps of stone.

Anna pulled a silver hip flask from her pocket, drank from it, then silently offered it to Nuala. The brandy scorched down her throat, making her even more aware of how much the damp cold had seeped into her. They went back to the car and ate the sandwiches and cake they had brought with them. Anna drank more of the
brandy. ‘I need this,’ she said. ‘I really need this today.’ Nuala offered to drive afterwards, and Anna, thanking her, willingly handed over the keys.

They had only gone a few miles when they came to a small church. Anna insisted that they stop to visit it. Nuala wasn’t so keen. ‘Maybe it won’t be open,’ she said.

‘Of course it will,’ said Anna. ‘Churches in the country in Ireland are always open, that’s one of the things I like about them.’ As they walked from the car, Anna started to explain why Catholic churches in Ireland were often so far from centres of population, when Nuala
interrupted
her, and said she already knew about that. Did the woman think she was completely ignorant of her own country and religion?

The church was a low, solid building without a spire. As Anna had predicted, it was unlocked. It was also empty, and unremarkable. Nuala had seen many churches like this in the past, and it was evidently familiar territory for Anna, too. Like all old churches, it reminded Nuala of her childhood. The altar rails had been taken away and the altar itself had been moved out from the wall as a token gesture to the reforms of Vatican Two, but otherwise nothing had changed: the plaster statues, the simple posies of wallflowers, the candles, the smell of wax and incense, the powerful silence.

Anna settled herself comfortably in a pew at the back of the church, and gestured to Nuala to come and sit beside her.

‘Isn’t it nice the way they keep the churches unlocked here, so that anyone can go into them,’ Anna said companionably, in her normal tone of voice. This
unnerved Nuala, who had been brought up to whisper in church, and still felt uncomfortable to do otherwise, or even to hear anyone else speak aloud. But she didn’t dare tell Anna to speak lower, so she listened miserably as her friend continued. ‘On the Continent, apart from cathedrals in the cities that are open for the tourists, they keep all the churches locked. If God existed, he would die of loneliness.’ She laughed, and Nuala felt even more uncomfortable. ‘It has to be like that, of course, or people would go in and steal things, or desecrate the place.

‘A couple went into a church a few years ago, I forget where, I think it was in Spain, and had sex on a side altar. Just imagine. They were caught, of course, and severely punished. I suppose the courts thought that if they let them off lightly it would have become a craze amongst the young. They’d all have been doing it, and then other people would have got upset.’

Nuala didn’t say anything. ‘What do you believe in?’ Anna asked her a few moments later. Nuala’s reply, when it came, was mumbled so low that Anna asked her to repeat it.

‘I said, I don’t know.’

‘Of course you don’t, how can anyone know?’ said Anna. ‘Then again, there are people who think that they know. Take Rita, for instance. Rita fascinates me. She has blind faith. I find that quite extraordinary. I can’t begin to understand it, and I told her so too. I said her religion was a mystery to me. She said it was a mystery to her. She went to Lourdes last summer. I wanted to ask her, “Can you honestly tell me that you believe all this … this nonsense?” Yes, I wanted to ask her, but I didn’t dare. I knew she would be offended, and I didn’t want
that because I like Rita. I genuinely like and respect her. She’s a good woman.’

No, Nuala didn’t know what she believed any longer, and she rarely gave it any thought. She hardly ever went to Mass and when she did, she felt vaguely uneasy, as though there were something false about her being there. But then again, she also felt guilty not going. ‘We ought to go to Mass more often,’ she said to Kevin one Sunday morning over the usual late breakfast and pile of newspapers.

‘Less of the “we”, please,’ he’d replied. ‘Don’t try to offload your Catholic guilt on to me. Go to Mass if you feel like it, I won’t stop you.’

‘It’s not that I want to, I just feel I ought to,’ she’d said. Kevin had put down his paper. ‘Nuala, if I had a fiver for every time I’d heard you say you ought to do something or other, I could close the restaurant tomorrow and retire to the south of France. If you really ought to be doing these things you talk about, then go and do them. Otherwise put them out of your mind and stop
tormenting
yourself. And me.’

It was all very well for Kevin to say that. About a month after her mother died, Nuala was coming out of the Powerscourt Centre when she noticed the Carmelite church in the street beside it. She had gone into it to say a prayer for her mother, because she wanted to, but also because she felt that she should do so. She thought about her mother constantly, but she never prayed for her. Perhaps by now she had forgotten how to pray, it was such a long time since she had tried, or had given it any serious attention. When she went into the church and knelt down, she was disconcerted to find how
difficult it was for her to focus her mind, and dismiss all the stray thoughts that crowded in, as persistent as they were trivial. She felt self-conscious kneeling there with her eyes squeezed shut, and after a few moments she gave up. She sat down, and just thought about her mother. She didn’t know what she believed about what had happened to her. The idea that she had been completely annihilated was as impossible for Nuala to believe as the thought of her being in some cotton-wool-clouded heaven. The only thing she knew for sure was that she missed her more than she would have ever thought possible.

‘I like these country churches,’ Anna said, glancing around her. ‘I like the sentimentality, the kitsch. There’s a simplicity of thought behind them that you don’t see anywhere else. Yes, I like them a lot, but if I am to be honest, I must say that I also despise them a little bit too.’

‘Why?’

‘Because they do enormous harm to people.
Catholicism
can break people’s spirits like nothing else. People cannot abide the idea of purity, you know. Complete purity, physical and mental, is impossible for any human being, and for most, it is so far above them that it angers them. It is showing people something, telling them that this is the highest good and that they ought to strive for it, but of course it’s impossible, they will never manage it. And so they grow angry and bitter, as is only to be expected. It’s particularly dangerous for women, because it’s aimed more at them, to keep them in their place, and then women have such scrupulous minds, I always think. The image the church presents of women is bad because it is incomplete. Do you know anything
about the ancient religions, Nuala? No? They are good, they are very wise,’ said Anna, who was choosing her words carefully. ‘These religions are mentally sound, not like Christianity which is fundamentally neurotic, and so the end is neurosis. The ancient religions are more complete, their gods and goddesses are more psychologically true, more complex, more in the image of humanity than is the case with Christianity. And yet you know, there is something very strange in this: that Ireland isn’t a Christian country at all. What I like about Ireland is that just below this crust of Catholicism it is pure paganism, not like where I come from, where it is Protestantism crusting over nihilism. And so you have the priests telling the women to be like Mary and some of them are trying, some of them are pretending, and some of them just don’t give a damn, because they are in touch with their own reality, they understand their own selves in a very deep, real way. They are free.’ She pointed up at the statue.

‘Some people think that the worst thing about
Catholicism
is that it sees women only in terms of their reproductive capacity, sees them only as mothers. But that is only part of it. The real problem is that they portray mothers as being only good, as being only like Mary: pure and long-suffering and selfless. But deep down, every woman knows that it’s not the whole story. Mothers have their dark side too.’ Her voice was full of derision. ‘Why, everyone knows that, even little
children
reading their fairy stories, where the cruel mother is a stepmother to make it a little more bearable for them. Everybody knows it, everybody who’s had a mother or been one, and yet this lie is maintained, no one wants to
talk about it out loud. Mothers can be good and bad. That’s why I don’t like this religion.’ She looked across at Nuala, but Nuala wasn’t shocked, as Anna had thought she would be. She was looking hard at her, trying to work out what was at the back of all this. For a moment, she thought Nuala was going to ask her what was wrong, but she evidently thought better of it. Nuala looked grave and thoughtful, but she said nothing.

Anna wished she were weaker, wished that she would break down and tell her friend what was troubling her. It wasn’t that she thought Nuala could help, she just wanted to talk to another person about it. Others confided in her, why couldn’t she do the same? No, she was too ashamed. Too proud. But then, wasn’t that what Lili had always said about her, that she was too proud?

When they were outside the church again, Nuala took another hard look at Anna. She could well believe that she had missed a night’s sleep. She looked haggard and older than Nuala had seen her looking before, older than she probably was. ‘Are you sure you feel all right?’ she asked tentatively. ‘Is anything troubling you?’

At first Anna did not reply, then she said, ‘What difference has it made to you, having your baby? If your mother had still been alive, do you think it would have brought you closer?’

Nuala’s reply to this was to turn her back on the other woman. ‘Why do you want to hurt me?’ she said eventually.

How must it be to be vulnerable like this? Anna thought. Why was she cursed with what seemed like strength, but which was really such a handicap, such a stupid thing. She wanted to tell Nuala why she was
upset, but she couldn’t do it. She just couldn’t make herself say the necessary words.