Nothing is Black (11 page)

‘I’m sorry,’ she said at last. ‘I didn’t mean to hurt you, although I can see that I have. Please forgive me.’ Nuala turned to her, and put her arms round her. She hugged the older woman tightly, and was kind enough to pretend not to see the tears that this brought to her eyes.

EVELIEN, THE WOMAN
with whom Anna had first visited Ireland, was her oldest and best friend. They had been to school together, and during the winter, when Anna was back in Holland, they saw each other
frequently
. Neither woman was a good correspondent: in the course of the summer a postcard was usually as much communication as there would be between them. The day before Anna went to the stone circle with Nuala, however, she had a letter from Evelien.

As she picked up the envelope in the hall, Anna’s pleasure when she recognized the handwriting quickly changed to unease. A letter from her friend was such an unusual event that Anna felt sure it must contain bad news. She ripped the envelope open and scanned the letter impatiently. It was a long, rambling missive, but Anna quickly got to the hard, bald fact around which it was constructed. Then she went to the sitting-room
cupboard
, poured a shot of whiskey and knocked it straight back. She waited a few moments and then repeated this with a larger measure of whiskey. It was half past nine in the morning. She sat still and quiet for some time. Then she picked up the letter again, and this time she read it slowly and carefully, paying attention to every word.

Evelien had written to tell Anna that Lili had had a baby. She was clearly embarrassed to be doing so, and therefore the letter was full of generalities, this main piece of news treated in an almost throwaway fashion. Evelien was tactful enough to pretend that of course Anna knew all about this, but kind enough to include such details as anyone in Anna’s position would want to know. The baby was a girl, now aged about four months. Evelien had been sitting in a café when Lili came in with another woman, and sat at a nearby table. She didn’t notice Evelien, and Evelien confessed that she hadn’t drawn attention to herself. On the contrary: she’d hidden behind a newspaper and peeped around it at the young woman, catching the odd fragment of her
conversation
. Because of the rift between Lili and Anna, Evelien would have felt hypocritical approaching Lili. In any case, she would probably have been snubbed. Evelien thought Lili was being unfair to her mother and she’d once gone so far as to tell her so, and of course it had ended in a quarrel. But with quiet insistence, Evelien left Anna in no doubt about the circumstances. From things she’d overheard, it was absolutely clear that the baby was Lili’s own, not a friend’s child she was looking after. She also remarked that it was a long time since she’d seen anyone looking so contented and happy.

Anna folded up the letter, and carefully put it back into the envelope. She went to the kitchen and made a pot of strong coffee.

Well, she’d thought this might happen. Tell the truth, hadn’t she even hoped it might happen? But not like this. No, never like this. If Lili became a mother, Anna
had always thought, it would ease Anna’s conscience, by proving that she hadn’t turned her daughter off the idea of families completely. Did she feel that relief now? Yes, to some extent. But she’d also hoped that it would bring a change of heart, that when Lili was a mother herself she would understand why Anna had behaved as she did, and then they would be reconciled. But Lili hadn’t bothered to let Anna know that she was
pregnant
. She’d had the baby and told her mother nothing, and this cut Anna to the heart. She thought of Evelien, who knew how much Anna wanted to be on better terms with her daughter. Once, Anna had even suggested to Evelien, ‘I could pretend to be sick, couldn’t I? I mean if I were really sick she would have to know, and she might see things differently then.’

‘But you aren’t ill,’ Evelien had said sharply. ‘And if you lied to her about that, just as a way of getting close to her again, she would never forgive you when she found out.’ Evelien was the only person who knew the lengths to which Anna was prepared to go in this matter. That was why she had written, and why she had been so tactful. She alone knew how deeply hurt Anna would be. Hurt and ashamed.

She brooded on this news for the rest of the day, and that night she couldn’t sleep. The trip with Nuala had been arranged for the following morning, and they set out as planned, but it all went badly. Nuala appeared bored by the places they visited, and this annoyed Anna, who felt tense and short tempered. She knew she tended to take things out on Nuala sometimes because she reminded her of Lili. She was also aware of how unfair this was, but today she didn’t care, because it was foolish
to expect fairness in life. Was it fair that her husband had left her and wrecked their marriage? That she could become a grandmother without her daughter bothering to tell her about it? That Nuala’s mother had died before Nuala’s baby had been born? Where was the fairness in any of that? But she pushed Nuala too far that day, and regretted it afterwards when it was too late, and Nuala was clearly upset.

At the end of that week Claire also received a letter, which she opened at breakfast. ‘It’s from Mammy,’ she said to Nuala, laughing.

‘What’s the joke?’

Claire passed to Nuala a photograph which her mother had enclosed with the letter, and Nuala began to laugh too.

‘Look at us! What are we like? I’ve never seen this photo before, have you?’

‘Yes, but I’d forgotten all about it. I can even
remember
the day it was taken. It was Granny’s seventieth birthday, and there was a little family party. You came up from Dublin with your parents and stayed with us, do you remember?’

‘I can barely remember that, although I know we did it. We were very small then. How old, four? Five?’

‘About that. It was summer, and we were both going to start school in the autumn, and you already knew all the alphabet and could count much higher than I could.’ Nuala passed the photograph back to her, and Claire studied it. Her memories of the visit were much more vivid and complete than she was prepared to tell Nuala, for she didn’t remember her cousin in a particularly flattering light. She’d looked forward to seeing her
relatives from Dublin, and how disappointed she’d been. Her parents wanted her to play with Nuala, but Nuala was aloof, and wanted only to stay with her mother the whole time. Auntie Kate had indulged her in this, hugging Nuala and saying of course she didn’t have to go outside if she didn’t want to. Even as a child Claire could see how much this annoyed her own mother, who hated children sitting listening in to adult conversation.

‘I’ll take you out and show you the farmyard,’ Claire had offered. ‘I’ll show you the pigs.’

Nuala shook her head, and buried her face in her mother’s side.

‘See the pigs, indeed,’ said Auntie Kate, as though this were the most ridiculous suggestion in the world. Nuala preferred to show off her superior learning. Twenty-five,’ she said slowly. ‘Twenty-six. Twenty-seven.’

Claire didn’t like Auntie Kate. She pretended to be nice to you, but Claire knew it was all put on. ‘You don’t like her either, do you Mammy?’ she’d said, and was surprised when her mother said, ‘Why, what gave you that idea? I like Auntie Kate very much, don’t ever let me hear you say things like that again.’ She’d overheard her father saying to her mother on the way home from Granny’s party, ‘That Nuala one’s as old-fashioned as a field,’ and, remembering this over thirty years later, Claire smiled as she glanced up from the photograph to Nuala, innocently buttering toast on the other side of the table.

The Christmas after the party Auntie Kate had sent Claire a pound note, and for the first time ever Claire didn’t have that warm contented feeling you usually got when someone gave you money. She’d put the pound in
her purse, but looking at it had made her feel uneasy. It wasn’t like when Granny gave you a half crown when it was as good just to have it as to spend it. She didn’t realize that she was experiencing for the first time the difference between a thing itself and its emotional connection. She just knew she wanted to spend the money on sweets that she could eat and then forget. She didn’t want to use the money to buy something lasting, that would sit around reminding her unpleasantly of Auntie Kate every time she looked at it.

Claire would have been surprised to realize just how much Nuala also remembered of that visit: far more than she was prepared to admit. She could even recall the journey up to Donegal, and how her mother had kept pulling at her fingers to make the bones crack, until Nuala’s father asked her to stop, and she did, for a while but then started it again. They’d stopped somewhere to have a meal in a hotel, and Nuala and her mother had gone off to the toilet together. ‘Stand by that basin and wait for me,’ her mother commanded, before darting into a cubicle. Nuala heard the bolt click, then the unmistakable sound of someone being sick. Her mother came out, her eyes unusually bright. ‘Don’t tell Daddy, Nuala. He’d only be cross with me.’ Nuala nodded, and felt her own tummy tighten. She didn’t know what all this was about, but she knew she didn’t like it.

She didn’t like the farm either when she got there. It wasn’t how she had imagined it would be from picture books about farms. There was a strange, sourish smell in the dark kitchen. They’d sat down on a sofa, and she’d clung to her mother. She could see Auntie Pat didn’t like her much, which was a shock: no one had ever not liked
Nuala before in her life. She clung more tightly to her mother in hurt and defiance, refusing to be wooed out to the farmyard to see the animals. They’d wanted her to play with Claire until her mother defended her, and said Nuala didn’t have to do anything she didn’t want to do.

On the journey back to Dublin they stopped off again in the same hotel. This time Nuala stood by the basin and watched her mother putting on some vivid lipstick. She smiled indulgently when she noticed her daughter’s fixed gaze, and, bending down, put some lipstick on her too. Nothing held a greater fascination for Nuala than her mother’s make-up bag, and her mother only allowed her access to it when she was in an exceptionally good mood. She tried to imagine being grown up and having a bag like that of her own, but it was beyond her. ‘Here, look.’ Her mother fished out a little pot of rouge and offered it to Nuala. ‘Yes, you can keep it. It’s yours now. When we get back to Dublin I’ll have a look and see what else I have that you might like. We’ll do something nice tomorrow, too, something special. I know! We’ll go to the zoo! Just the two of us, would you like that?’

Nuala gazed up at her. She would never in all her life love anyone as she loved her mother in that moment.

FOR ABOUT AN HOUR NOW
, Claire had been sitting on a hard kitchen chair in her studio, smoking cigarettes and looking at the paintings she had done over the course of the summer. First she arranged them all around the studio in careful sequence, and then simply sat looking at them. She stared at each one in turn, and then considered it first in relation to the pictures on either side of it, and then to the whole cycle of paintings.
Occasionally
she would stand up and rearrange the sequence slightly, then sit down again to consider the effect of this change. Once she got up and removed a canvas
completely
from the arrangement, propping it behind her chair, with the image facing the wall.

The longer she looked at the paintings, the more uncertain she became about their merits and failings. It was not just possible but necessary to look at them in different ways. At first, she tried to evaluate them in terms of their being her own work. How did they compare with paintings she had done in the past? Did they fulfil the intentions she had had when she embarked on the project? If not, did that matter? Was she satisfied with the work?

Of course not. She was never satisfied. Only dissatisfaction 
could drive her on, keep her painting in the hope that the next time would be better, while knowing always that it would never be good enough.

The paintings were based on a series of anatomical drawings she had made two years earlier. For a long time her work had been heavily emotional, and the drawings, red chalk on paper, had been an attempt to change direction. Before assessing the pictures today, she had looked again at the slides of the drawings, remembering how fascinated she had become by pure form, while still knowing that it wasn’t enough. She’d looked at the spine then as though it weren’t a spine, just an
extraordinarily
complex and beautiful structure. She’d drawn fans of muscle and the joints of fingers as though they had nothing at all to do with the human body. Then one day, while out walking, she came across a magnificent escarpment of fissured rock. Slabs of stone had fallen cleanly away, leaving a series of flat planes. She’d wanted to paint it immediately, but without reference to the surrounding landscape or the sky. No, just the rocks themselves, their colour and texture and form. Then she’d laid her hand upon the stone, her warm, living hand upon the cold inanimate stone, and suddenly knew the drawings were a blind alley.

She’d changed medium, hoping that by going back to painting again she would find it easier to combine form and feeling in the way she desired. Now she painted bones and muscles as though they were not just
beautiful
abstractions, but also parts of a strong and vulnerable body. Well, that was what she had tried to do, and she still wasn’t at all sure that she had succeeded.

She got up abruptly from the chair and walked over to
the window, feeling that she would be sick if she looked at the paintings for one more minute. Alice had said to her once, ‘There are days when what I like most about painting is that you’re making something, you’re left with something solid at the end of it, and there are other days when I hate it, for that very reason.’ She’d been sitting on the floor of her own studio when she said this, surrounded by paintings which she was preparing to put in store. ‘You work and you work and then you’re left with all these
things
and you don’t know what to do with them. It must be great to be a musician creating nothing more tangible than sound.’

‘And do you really think you’d prefer that?’

Alice had laughed at that. ‘Of course not. I’m only griping because these pictures will take up the last of my storage space, and after that I just don’t know where the hell I’m going to keep my work. I’m also fed up trying to scrape together the money I need to buy paints and canvas, so I can see the appeal of an art form that requires minimal space and materials. But what I love about it too is just that: the energy of things. I like the paradox of it. Strength and frailty, don’t you see? People confuse immortality with the indestructible, but it’s not the same thing at all. Take, say, Vermeer’s
Portrait
Of
a
Young
Woman
in
a
Turban.
What that painting means is beyond words, beyond time. And yet, in purely material terms, it’s a layer of paint a couple of millimetres thick on a piece of canvas.’

‘What you’re saying is that it’s more than a sum of its parts?’

‘No, what I’m saying is that it’s so much more that it’s beyond comprehension, it’s almost eerie. That’s the
magic of it, the only magic I could ever believe in. To take things and make something charged with that sort of knowledge and energy. It’s worth devoting your life to that.’

Material permanence: as terrible a concept as perfect memory. Claire ran her finger through the dust on the windowsill. Sea glass, shells, a fragment of bark. Petals that had fallen from a vase of roses. She bent over the flowers and breathed in their deep, heavy scent. Two flat pieces of stone that fitted together like a cut fruit, a fossil of a horsetail fern on either side when you split them apart. How many millions of years?

It was raining outside. She rubbed the back of her hand across the misted glass. When she came into the studio on a winter’s morning sometimes the windows would be iced on the inside, with thick swirls of frost flowers. She would admire them, then put her mouth close to the glass and melt them with a long hot breath. The wind was blowing hard too. It was often stormy in August, but then sometimes the weather would settle down again in September and be calm and fine for a week or so. But in August you could already sense the start of winter: there was a new edge to the cold.

Nuala would be leaving soon. How different people were from each other, and how separate they seemed doomed to remain! ‘Try to see it from my point of view,’ she’d said to Claire one day in the course of conversation, and Claire had known, even without attempting it, that she wouldn’t be able to do it. Certainly they’d got to know each other better during the time Nuala had been there, and she’d become quite fond of her, but Claire knew they would always be isolated from each
other at a fundamental level. Maybe it could only be like that. How much of one’s self was it possible to
communicate
to another person? Probably far less than is
generally
admitted. Imagine being able to enter into another person’s mind, even for just a few moments. It was bound to be a revelation, particularly if it was someone you thought you knew well, and a shock to see how far one’s perception of a person could be from how that person actually saw themselves.

‘Look at the cut of me!’ Claire’s mother had said the last time she’d visited her. She’d been sitting by a mirror, combing out her faded hair. ‘I’m as grey as a badger. How come I look so old, yet I feel no different to what I was forty years ago? Where’s the sense in that?’ She’d started to laugh, and added, ‘I remember when I was a child, I used to look at my grandmother and marvel at just how old somebody could be; it almost frightened me. And then the other day when I was in town I saw this little girl looking at me and looking at me, and suddenly I realized, “As far as she’s concerned, I’m an old lady.” And so I did a few calculations, and do you know, I’m older now already than my grandmother was when she died. I could hardly believe it, so I told your daddy, and he said, “Well then, that proves it. You
are
an old lady!”

Claire understood exactly what her mother meant, but it wasn’t the whole story. You
did
change. Life changed you, whether you liked it or not. You saw options that you’d always taken for granted in life close for ever. You suddenly realized that you were going to die someday. ‘Painting’s a bit like life,’ she’d said to Nuala the previous evening, when their conversation had edged
towards this same subject. ‘There’s no point in just sitting there thinking about it. You have to get the paint on to the canvas. You may not like what you end up with; it may fall short of what you had thought or hoped it would be – in fact, it usually does. But at least there’s something there; at least it’s real.’

‘When I was a child,’ Nuala had said, ‘I used to look forward to being grown up. I was always trying to imagine how it would be. And sometimes now I look at my life and say to myself, “Well, now you know.” But it still doesn’t fit, it doesn’t add up. Not,’ she added quickly, ‘that I don’t like my life. No, not that. I’m a very lucky person; it’s a good life. No, it’s not that I don’t like it, it’s … it’s that …’ Her voice trailed away.

‘It’s that you don’t understand it,’ Claire said.

‘Something like that,’ Nuala mumbled, looking at her hands. Claire nodded.

‘And yes, you’re right,’ she added. ‘You are lucky. We all are.’

‘All?’

‘You, me, Kevin: we’re lucky. Our lives are good. Maybe not always what we would want, but good, for all that.’

‘The door of the studio, which had been slightly ajar, suddenly banged shut with a force that made Claire jump up from the windowsill in fright. She listened, and then she could hear Nuala moving about in the kitchen. She must have just come into the house, and in opening the front door created a draught that made the studio door slam. Claire didn’t like unexplained movements and noises in the house. She’d have been ashamed to admit to anyone how nervous she was, even how
superstitious … was it superstition? Perhaps she should tell someone about what had happened all those years ago, but she’d never been able to bring herself to do so.

On the first anniversary of Alice’s death, Claire had made a small memorial to her. Because she had been abroad when Alice died and had missed her funeral, she felt she hadn’t had a chance to say goodbye to her properly. She therefore decided to make something for Alice, just for that day. On a table in a corner of the studio, she’d set up what amounted to a secular altar. The painting Alice had given her had formed the
centrepiece
. She put a white candle on the table, and vases full of cut flowers.

She worked as usual that day, and would glance up at the table in the corner now and again. Years had passed, but it still made Claire shiver to think about what had happened.

Late in the forenoon, the phone had rung. She went into the next room and picked up the receiver, but there was silence at the other end. As she hung up, she heard a crash from the studio.

Something had destroyed the memorial. The painting was still on the table, but the floor was a mess of flowers, water, broken glass, melted wax from the extinguished candle. She knew at once that however much she wanted to, she would never be able to explain this away. No draughts: the studio door was wedged open, every other door and window firmly shut. No one else was in the house; there was no cat to blame. The wreckage was a good six feet away from the table. The flowers and candle had not simply fallen over, they had been swept violently to the floor.

She’d been so frightened and upset that it was hours before she could even bring herself to clear away the mess. There was fear, too, in her reluctance to tell anyone. She didn’t want to disturb things even more. It would vulgarize it to tell people. It would become a story friends would tell friends, ‘I know someone and the strangest thing happened to her.’ It would be
exaggerated,
embroidered, cheapened. But nothing would explain it. Nothing could.

In succeeding years, she had ignored Alice’s
anniversary
, tried not even to think about her on that day. Nothing of the kind had ever happened again, but sudden noises startled Claire, even when there was a simple explanation. She turned again to the sequence of paintings. The impact they made when she looked at them this time pleased her more than before, pleased her more than she would have expected.