Nothing is Black (8 page)

‘Whatever you think.’ she said in conclusion, looking again at Nuala. ‘As you’re on the road, if you want to come here, feel free …’

Claire said goodbye and hung up. ‘Kevin’s on his way,’ she said.

WHEN KEVIN WAS GROWING UP
, his mother had given him some advice. ‘If ever you think of marrying a girl, take a long hard look at her mother first.’ It was the only solid, explicit warning she had ever given him, (the only one he could remember, anyway). Naturally, he paid no heed to this, except after he was married, when, in the company of either Nuala or her mother, he would often find himself turning the idea over in his mind. It was too late by then. Sometimes he was afraid that Nuala would know what he was thinking. ‘Penny for your thoughts, Kevin,’ she would say sharply, and he would reply, ‘Oh nothing – nothing at all. I just wondered …’ and then he would garble out the first thing he could think of to distract her. Sometimes she frightened him. He didn’t understand her.

But driving out of Dublin that morning when she was missing, he asked himself if, in all honesty, he regretted marrying her, and he realized that he didn’t. If he had his life to live over, he would have married Nuala again, if only out of a sense of inevitability. To think in this way at all was unusual for him. He thought it was foolish to spend too much time analysing your life and
circumstances.
It could do little good, as far as Kevin was
concerned, and perhaps do harm, arousing
discontentment
and desires about which nothing could be done. Kevin and Nuala: of course they were married, of course they were together, that was the way it always was. In his heart, Kevin was contemptuous of people who expected marriage – indeed, who expected anything – to make them happy. He couldn’t understand people who expected their lives to be a contented, upward curve of social and economic achievement, rounded out by personal happiness. What was wrong with them? Didn’t they open their eyes and look around? Surely then they would see that such things only happened in movies and magazines. Sometimes he used to argue with Nuala about this, but when he said that people nowadays expected too much from life, she would always say, ‘Oh, don’t be such an old fogey. The real problem was that in the past, people didn’t expect enough.’

He took being married completely for granted, and up until now, he hadn’t seen anything wrong with this, (although he knew better than to say so out loud, especially to Nuala). It had always seemed inevitable that he would be married, and there had never seemed any possibility that it would be to anyone other than Nuala. The thought of her no longer being in his life struck him as absurd, rather than painful. He couldn’t remember meeting her. She’d been his sister’s best friend at school, and had been in and out of the house from about the age of twelve. She’d always been piggish about sweets: his earliest memory of her concerned the phenomenal quantity of chocolates she put away one evening in their house. That hadn’t changed over the years, whatever else had. Later on, she came to the
house just to see him, not to visit his sister. She’d been his first real girlfriend, and neither of their mothers had been happy about it. They said they thought it was too serious, they were afraid they’d get married as soon as they left school, that they’d distract each other from their studies, and so on. The real reasons were that neither mother liked her child’s choice: Nuala’s mother thought Kevin was feckless because he was planning to go to art school, because he wasn’t as respectable as she would have wanted him to be. Kevin’s mother frankly told him she thought Nuala was ‘a minx’. ‘It’s not just that she always has to get her own way: it’s the way she manages to make it look like chance or other people’s doing that I don’t like,’ she said, an observation so astute that Kevin was taken aback when his mother said it to him. He’d lost his virginity to Nuala earlier that month: it had all been Nuala’s idea, but without anything in particular being said, she had been able to make it look like it was all his doing, and she had yielded to him, rather than the other way round. Like the prodigious chocolate
consumption
, it was a trick she could still turn, years later.

Both sets of parents had been pleased when they went to college and happier still when the weekend visits cooled off and they gradually lost contact with each other and started seeing other people. They hadn’t even liked each other at that period, on the rare occasions when they met. She thought what he was doing was a childish waste of time. He loathed the clothes she now wore: stiff suits with shoulder pads and fake pearls, floppy bows at the neck of her blouses, the uniform of the business women whose ranks she wanted to join. Kevin thought it looked sterile. He didn’t think he could
have anything in common with someone who looked like that.

And yet as soon as they graduated they were together again within weeks. Before much more time had passed, they were planning their wedding, their house, their future life together. Kevin would never have claimed that he had drifted into marriage. ‘Drift’ was far too mild a word for the speed and velocity with which it
happened
. And it had never troubled him, never struck him as anything other than logical that it should be so.

Only now, when there was so clearly something wrong in his marriage did he stop to consider it carefully, to think what it might be. He hadn’t kept Nuala down, he was sure of that. If anything, he had deferred to her, knowing her to be stronger and shrewder than he. Kevin didn’t mind admitting that all their success with the restaurant had been due to Nuala.

They had both been doing reasonably well in the first years after they married. Nuala had been working with an insurance company in the city centre, Kevin had had a job in a commercial gallery. He would probably have been content to plod along in that way for years, but for a casual remark. They had gone out to dinner in a restaurant one night, and at the end of the meal, like countless other people before him, he’d said over the coffee and mints, ‘Wouldn’t it be lovely if we had our own restaurant?’ Afterwards, he couldn’t remember Nuala making any significant reply to this. It was a dream he had had for a long time, and he was
disconcerted
when Nuala came to him a week later, all briskness, with the facts and figures on a sheet of paper, announcing that having their own restaurant might well
be a viable possibility. She had been to talk to their bank manager, had looked around at possible properties, had spoken to her father about a loan (Kevin wasn’t at all happy about that,) and was still engaged in looking at the restaurants already in operation in Dublin to see what gap there was in the market. When Nuala spoke of it, it all sounded so real that it frightened him. ‘But what if it fails?’ he kept saying nervously.

‘It won’t fail because by the time I’ve finished doing my investigations I’ll know whether or not it’s a runner, and if it isn’t, then we won’t do it.’

‘Lots of restaurants fold,’ Kevin murmured.

‘Yes, of course they do, and do you know why? Because they’re run by people who know a lot about food, but don’t realize that they’re running a business. But I know how to run a business. See if I don’t!’

It was no empty boast. Kevin had watched anxiously as she carefully worked out all the financial aspects of the project before making a final decision. It brought out, or rather, it exposed to him, a side of Nuala that he hadn’t been aware of up until then. He wasn’t always sure that he liked it. Later, when staff they hired turned out to be unsatisfactory, Nuala fired them without a qualm. She’d insisted that it be an Irish restaurant: they had argued a bit about that, but of course he had given in at last, and of course she had been right. She left the hiring of a chef and the choice of décor to Kevin. She’d been right in everything. The restaurant quickly established a good reputation, and was now a popular and long-established feature of the Dublin social scene.

Nominally it was a partnership, but it was due to Nuala’s confidence and ability that it existed at all. Kevin
had learnt so much from her that he was now able to manage the place well in her absence, but he would never forget that it was all due to Nuala. He could never have done it on his own, and he loved it, loved the atmosphere of the place, the social status and the comfortable lifestyle it gave them. Nuala’s attitude was strange, though, and that troubled him. She wasn’t even very interested in food, she was cynical about the enterprise, he often thought, and would get cross when he complained about this. But she’d been like that right from the start, he didn’t understand what was troubling her so much now. Because he was never in the habit of reasoning out situations, particularly situations of emotional complexity, he didn’t know what to make of the present circumstances. He couldn’t bear to think that something had happened to Nuala. The thought of life without her frightened him. He started to look out anxiously for a phone box.

Resentment and relief struggled to get the upper hand when Claire told him that Nuala had turned up safe and well. He decided to press on and go to Donegal: he had to talk to Nuala about all this immediately. To turn round and go straight back to Dublin would be cowardly. As he drove on, he considered that he would also see Claire. That would be a mixed pleasure. It would be odd to see Nuala and Claire together, he considered them as each belonging to such separate phases of his life that it didn’t seem possible that they could both be there
simultaneously.
He wondered, not for the first time, if it had really been such a good idea for Nuala to stay in Claire’s house. How much was he to blame in this? Maybe he had handled it in the worst possible way in sending her
away. Had he just panicked, and thought about what would happen to the business if news of Nuala’s stealing things got about? But there had to be more to it than that. What had made her steal in the first place?

Was it the baby? Had he, perhaps without even being aware of it, pressurized her into having a baby she didn’t want? No, he was sure that it was not so (although he had to admit that he viewed the child with the same sense of inevitability that he saw in his marriage). No, Nuala had wanted the child, she’d seemed contented with the idea perhaps more before the baby was born than after its birth. But that wasn’t too surprising: Nuala always enjoyed looking forward to things more than the thing itself. ‘How come nothing is ever as good as you think it’s going to be?’ she said, peevishly, on more occasions than he cared to remember. But he always thought it was clear what Nuala was after, even if she was able to persuade you that it was your idea and wish rather than hers. He couldn’t help feeling that she ought to be happy, but he knew that thinking so did nothing to alleviate the fact that she was clearly miserable.

Around noon, he pulled the car over to the side of the road and took out his lunch. In spite of the circumstances in which he had left the house, he hadn’t neglected to take some food with him: french bread, some cold beef, a wedge of Roquefort cheese, fruit, bottled water. He remembered with horror some of the things he’d been offered in hotels and restaurants in rural Ireland on his rare forays out of the city. When Kevin left Dublin, he was only really happy if he was on his way to the airport. He associated long drives across the country with his childhood, when they went to visit his granny in
Tipperary. He’d never liked those visits. Even as a child he had been picky about his food; and even by the standards of the time and place, his granny had been an atrocious cook. He could still remember her gristly stew, and loaves of soda bread, baked to the consistency of a breeze block. As he ate the Roquefort, he remembered how she’d once found an old piece of Cheddar which had been forgotten at the back of the larder for weeks, and was covered with a hairy blue mould when she took it out. She’d set it on the kitchen table and said with amazement, ‘Now if you were to give that to a Frenchman, he’d probably think it was the nicest thing that ever he ate.’

It had been raining when he left the city, and now, as he sat in the parked car, rain lashed against the
windscreen
. He switched on the ignition, and briefly turned on the wipers. The Bog of Allen appeared before him, as abruptly and vividly as if he’d switched on a television set: rich brown earth, flat under a complicated sky full of heavy grey clouds. Christ, what a dump! Kevin thought he would rather be bricked up behind a wall than live in such a desolate spot. And yet he had sent Nuala to a place like this, a place where there was nothing. How could she be expected to survive without dress shops and department stores, without a bit of activity going on around her? Maybe she was angry with him, and wanted to give him a fright by doing a bunk for the night. He’d have certainly resented it if he’d been packed off from the city for the summer like that. He switched off the wipers, and let the falling rain obliterate the gloomy scene before him.

But Nuala was happy in Donegal. She didn’t want to
come home. It hurt him deeply to think this. Did she dislike him so much? What had he ever done to her to make her feel so hostile to him? He looked at the dashboard, the crumpled paper containing bread and meat on the seat beside him. He listened to the rain, and suddenly he thought: I want to stay here. He didn’t want to drive on to Donegal, to face Nuala or Claire or anybody, he just wanted to stay there quietly for as long as possible, all day, until night fell, and perhaps on through the night, because life was so baffling, so bloody
sad
that he just wanted to withdraw from it and be left in peace.

Was that what she felt too?

With deep reluctance he put away the remains of his lunch, and continued on his way.

THE CHIP SHOP
where Nuala went the night she stayed away wasn’t the only place locally where you could get a meal. There had been a degree of wilful perversity in her choosing to go there, rather than to some of the restaurants and hotels which had appeared as a result of the tourist trade. Claire suggested two possibilities: a hotel in town which she said did decent meals, and a
restaurant
called The Silver Salmon, which was patronized not only by tourists, but also the local fishermen and their families, when the catch had been good and they were in funds. They chose to go to the latter.

Kevin looked ironically at his plate, piled high with steak in a wine sauce, carrots, peas, and a mountain of chips. ‘Obviously nouvelle cuisine hasn’t got as far as Donegal,’ he said.

‘No, and I’ll tell you why, Kevin. It’s because the people here have more sense than to pay fifteen quid for a piece of meat the size of a stamp, with one mushroom sitting on top of it. They work too hard for their money here to waste it on nonsense like that.’ Food was the only thing Kevin and Nuala had rows about, sometimes quite serious ones. When they came home from a meal where style had been more important than substance, Nuala
would go straight to the fridge and get herself a hunk of bread and cheese, grumbling loudly. ‘What sort of idiots are we to pay money like that and end up coming home as hungry as we were when we left the house?’ Kevin used to wither with shame when she came out with things like that in front of his friends. He was afraid too, that people would get to know what she thought and that it would reflect badly on the restaurant.

She let her cynicism about the business show much more than was necessary, he often told her, as she mocked the customers behind their backs. ‘They deserve it,’ she insisted. ‘People just follow fashion, Kevin. They don’t know how to think for themselves.’ Sometimes she turned her invective on Kevin himself. ‘Who do you think you’re fooling, with your wild-nettle sauces and your wilted greens! You grew up on spuds, peas and chops, the same as everybody else.’ He’d tell her she was greedy and unsophisticated, but he knew she was every bit as choosy as he, and that a lot of it was just talk, or done to annoy him. But knowing this often didn’t help. ‘When all’s said and done, it’s just a bit of dinner, isn’t it?’ was a remark she could always rely on to infuriate him.

But tonight Nuala obviously regretted her remark about nouvelle cuisine as soon as she had said it. ‘Eat what you can, if there’s too much there for you,’ she said quietly, picking up her knife and fork.

All told, things weren’t going anything like as badly as Nuala had feared they would. Claire had come through with far more help and kindness than she had expected, and Nuala thought of her with gratitude. She suggested sensibly that Nuala should be out of the house when
Kevin arrived, and rang Anna to ask if Nuala could wait there. So it had been from Anna’s window that she saw Kevin’s car drive past, and she waited there for over half an hour before setting out to walk slowly, so very slowly back to Claire’s house. ‘Time to face the music,’ she said ruefully to Anna, pretending to a levity she certainly didn’t feel, and which didn’t convince Anna for a moment.

She wondered what Claire had said to Kevin, or what had passed between them before she arrived to make the atmosphere so relaxed and even cheerful. She realized now how nervous she’d been going into the room, afraid that Kevin would be cold and hostile, even that he would be angry and start to shout at her in front of Claire (but that had been a foolish notion: that wasn’t Kevin’s style at all). Without saying anything, he came straight over to her, and put his arms around her, hugged her tightly and kissed her. Nuala was enormously relieved. Claire stayed in the room with them for another three quarters of an hour or so: Nuala had feared that she would bolt off on some pretext as soon as Nuala arrived, leaving them alone together immediately. They had drunk tea and chatted in what was a remarkably relaxed and amiable fashion, given the circumstances.

Still, she knew that the hour of reckoning was to come sooner or later, and now, in the restaurant, she was afraid that at any moment Kevin would put down his knife and fork and begin to demand serious answers. She tried to evade this with chatter about anything she could think of: harmless anecdotes about Anna and Claire, and the life she had been leading since coming to Donegal. Kevin let her talk. She didn’t like the way he
was looking at her, but was willing to admit that perhaps she was just reading her own guilt into his face. Any other time she would have confronted him with it: ‘Penny for your thoughts, Kevin. What are you looking so serious about?’ but tonight she’d have given him anything for him to keep his thoughts strictly to himself.

She was reading him wrongly. Kevin’s actual mood, (as Nuala might have guessed, had she thought about it coolly) was one of weariness and disorientation. At exactly this time the night before, he had been standing in his own restaurant in Monkstown. The last place on earth he expected to be twenty-four hours later was sitting opposite Nuala in The Silver Salmon. He’d had to make hurried arrangements at work and find someone to mind the baby, then there had been the worry of wondering what had happened to Nuala, was it his fault that this had happened? And on top of all that, there was sheer weariness, after the long drive across the country. He was glad just to be here and to find Nuala well. The last thing he planned to do tonight was to stir up trouble, or to ‘have it out’ with Nuala, as she herself would have expressed it.

It had been strange for him to see Claire again. Only now could he admit how nervous he’d been about that. Once he knew Nuala was safe, for the remainder of the journey he’d been at least as preoccupied about seeing Claire as he had about seeing his wife. He had an image of Claire in his mind from over ten years ago, and he knew that when he met her again he would have to readjust that image. He didn’t want to see Claire looking older, more to the point, he didn’t want to see how she would react to an older version of him. And Claire had
never been – how could he put it? – a
comfortable
person. She’d had a way of looking at you sideways that he had always found upsetting, and he had discovered this afternoon that she could still do it. She had changed much less than he expected. But he’d remembered, too, all the reasons why he had liked her so much in the past. He’d found himself thinking ‘What if?’ and Claire
looking
at him sideways, wordlessly telling him to forget it. It had been a relief when Nuala came timidly into the room.

After the waitress cleared away their plates he said, ‘I don’t want to talk about why you went away – not tonight, in any case. There’ll be time for that when we get back to Dublin.’

‘Oh, I don’t have to go back just yet, do I?’

‘Of course you do,’ he said coldly, hurt at her
reluctance
to come home. ‘It’s too much of a responsibility to ask Claire to keep you here after what happened
yesterday.
She was more worried than you perhaps realize, but the main thing is that she thinks if you’re behaving like that, then it’s clear you’re not happy here, so there’s little point in your staying on.’

‘But I am happy! I am! I like it here. I’m not ready to go home yet.’

‘Well, it isn’t up to me, is it? You’ll have to talk to Claire about it. It’s her house, and she’s been
exceptionally
kind in having you to stay for so long already. But she is worried about the consequences of your being there.’

‘Nothing like yesterday will happen again, I promise it won’t.’

‘I’ve already told you, Nuala, it isn’t up to me.’ Kevin
said. ‘If you have an promises to make, make them to Claire. The matter is out of my hands. It’s up to her whether or not she wants to let you go on staying with her.’ She wasn’t even trying to hide how eager she was to remain away from home. He called the waitress back, and ordered a black coffee and no dessert.

‘I think the least you could do would be agree to spend a little time with me. I want you to come down to Sligo with me for a night or two.’ He delivered this firmly. Nuala knew just how far she could push him. ‘That would be lovely. I like Sligo.’ Their marriage was, to a large extent, a complicated system of bargain and
compromise
, the rules of which Nuala understood implicitly, even if she didn’t always abide by them. She’d known he wouldn’t like this part of Donegal. No, they could do worse than go to some gentrified little hotel in Sligo for a night or two, she’d think of how she was going to explain herself on the drive there. She called over the waitress, and asked for some dessert.

A glass-fronted trolley was wheeled to their table, and the waitress listed off the names of the confections it contained: chocolate mousse, pineapple gâteau,
pavlova
, fruit salad, crème caramel. Nuala chose pavlova. Was she doing this deliberately to annoy him, he wondered, as a huge helping of meringue was placed before her. The plate was scarcely big enough to hold it. There were few things Kevin thought more vulgar than large, inelegant desserts.

‘Yum yum!’ said Nuala, taking up her spoon. The waitress removed the trolley to the far side of the room. It was a quiet night, for a Friday in July, but the waitresses were glad enough of that. When things were
slack, they would gossip in the kitchen and speculate about the customers. They all did it, but the girl who served Nuala and Kevin that evening had practically raised it to an art form. Her speciality was to make outrageous speculations about the people at the tables the other waitresses were on, and she’d pass on these wild conjectures between courses, so then the others would have trouble keeping a straight face when they went back for the dessert orders.

They’d have died of embarrassment if they could have heard some of the things she said about them: not that she had any sympathy with them. That was the thing she really didn’t like about working as a waitress: you got to see the worst side of people. It would put you off humanity: certainly put you off getting married.
Sometimes
she felt sorry for people, but generally she thought it was their own fault. She looked across at the couple she had just finished serving, wishing the woman would finish her bloody pavlova and pay and go so that she could finish up and go home herself. They were
definitely
a married couple: she prided herself on being able to tell the ones that were really married, the ones that weren’t, and the ones who were pretending, who were there with people they shouldn’t have been with. This pair were no ad for wedded bliss, that was for sure. He looked nice: well, he would have looked nicer if he hadn’t had a face on him as long as a late breakfast. Could you blame him, married to her? You could tell just looking at her she was spoiled rotten, used to getting her own way all the time, and still not contented. What did people want out of life, anyway? They obviously had lots of money, for she had such beautiful clothes. You could
tell a good thing by the colour as much as the cut, and that peachy shade of her linen jacket didn’t come cheap.

The waitress narrowed her eyes and stared even harder at them. Sometimes she just invented crazy stories to make the other girls laugh, but she could also work out how things really were just by looking at people. This pair had been married not a long time, but not so recently either. Maybe seven or eight years at a guess. Long enough to feel really married, to have got to the point where security stopped being a relief and started to be a pain in the neck. It wasn’t that she was taking it for granted, it was different. Her sister was married, so she’d seen this sort of thing before. Nobody wanted to have a marriage that was shaky, ready to fall apart at any minute, but if it was too copperfastened, well, after a certain time you’d want to put it to the test, to sort of push against it, even kick against it, to see how far you would have to go before something gave. And she’d have bet her week’s wage that that was what was happening here, that this spoiled brat was running rings around her husband, rocking the boat just for the sake of it. But if push came to shove, she’d be the first to cry off: if she pushed him so far that he said, ‘It’s over, let’s go our separate ways,’ you could be sure she wouldn’t like it. The tears there would be then, the fuss she’d make. No, she didn’t understand life. She knew how it operated, but she didn’t understand it. Did anyone, though?

Kevin and Nuala had finished their meal, and
signalled
to the waitress to bring them their bill. After they’d gone, she moved to clear the table. They’d left her the biggest tip she’d had all season. She wondered if this
was to make up for the fact that they’d taken the pepper pot with them. No, she’d never understand what went on in people’s heads, not if she lived to be a hundred.