The Empty Family (7 page)

Ito had been the driver she had used when she worked for one of the studios. She had liked his manner, his ability to be silent and never complain about late hours or time kept waiting, but also his intelligence, his good looks and his kindness. A few times, when he found that she was living on junk food, he had stopped the car at the places that he thought were best but had never once offered to take her to the apartment he shared with his wife, his mother and his daughters, for the suppers that his wife cooked. She had appreciated that. She knew that he came from Guatemala, but beyond that and his immediate circumstances she learned nothing. She never asked, and they often spent hours in the car together without speaking. He never once asked her a single question about herself and she appreciated that too.

It was when her tenant was leaving the cottage and she knew that she would soon be working in England that she had asked Ito one evening to come with her and look at the small property. It had only two bedrooms but she guessed that it was bigger and better equipped than the apartment where he lived with his family. He walked around the rooms and came into the living room and smiled at her and shrugged.

‘Nice,’ he said.

‘Is it better than where you live?’ she asked.

He did not reply, and she took this to mean that it was much better indeed.

‘You can have it for nothing,’ she said.

‘Why?’

‘Because I need someone to cut the grass and paint the fence and maybe grow some flowers, and check my house is not broken into while I’m away.’

‘Nothing else?’

‘Nothing else.’

Slowly, however, when she discovered that Ito’s wife, Rosario, was as reticent and quietly smart as her husband, she found more things for them to do. They had gradually taken on the role of part-time housekeeper and part-time driver while Frances paid for their daughters’ school and made the cottage as comfortable as they wanted it, adding on two small rooms. She had also managed to get them documents and then finally paid what it cost to get them citizenship.

They liked it, she believed, when she gave parties in the house, or when she had visitors to stay. It allowed them a glimpse of her when she was not working, an involvement in her real life that was otherwise denied them, just as they denied her any part in their domestic and intimate lives. Over years, she learned little more about them than she already knew, but she grew used to their tactful friendship and found evidence, sometimes at the most unlikely moments, that they trusted her and felt affection for her, and maybe, she thought, as she grew older, they came to worry about her.

Their daughters were grown up now, and on Sundays the house and the garden were full of the sounds of their grandchildren, and, as these sounds made her happy and did not disturb her at all, she made clear to them that on such occasions the garden belonged to them and she would not need anything at all, and she was careful to refuse any invitation to eat with them. It was their day with their family and she did not think they needed an outsider with them, no matter how long they had all been living in close proximity. In any case, she always had things to do, even on hot Sundays when she was at home.

When she was away working as she was now, and then came home, she found the refrigerator full and the bed aired, her clothes washed and fresh and the garden full of flowers. Ito, unless he was working for the studio, collected her at the airport. Now that she had more money she paid them more, and when she made her will she asked Ito and Rosario to come with her to the lawyer’s office along with witnesses to see that she had left them the entire property, which had grown more valuable with the years, and whatever money she had. By that time there was no one more important in her life and she knew that there would not be again.

She walked out of the hotel and along Merrion Row and then down Merrion Street to the National Gallery. She wondered if looking at the colours of the Irish paintings might give her ideas for some scenes in the film. As she was checking her bag for her purse to find the entrance charge she realized that it was free, that she could walk in, that no one even wanted to inspect her bag. She remembered from years back that there had been a long room with two staircases leading out of it and in her mind this room was straight in front of the entrance hall, but what she found instead was a set of smaller rooms leading into each other.

The pictures seemed to go from the eighteenth century to the nineteenth and were full of stock scenes of bucolic happiness and figures standing near waterfalls. No wonder these rooms were empty of people, she thought; most of the pictures were not worth a second glance. It was only when she came to the last two rooms that the paintings began to interest her; they were by men with Irish names trying to paint like French painters. All of these artists, she thought, must have left here to get away from the dreary low skies, the dingy city, the bleak landscape, faces locked in northern misery. Her director, the man for whom she was working now, had got away too, she surmised. He was interested in Ireland only as a subject, but the colours he wanted, the backgrounds, his customary way of turning the camera and editing film, were pure Italian when they were not French.

She moved from painting to painting, especially the ones that depicted Irish scenes, studying the composition and the colour, which were French in style, and it made her remember her meetings in Los Angeles and New York with the director and caused her to wonder if she should not rethink the background colours she had chosen for certain scenes, have them bolder, wash any sense of Ireland out of them, so that the film might look more beautiful and much stronger. If she did it once, she would have to do it all the time, she realized. And then she thought no, it could be done using colours directly from some of these pictures, in a few key scenes, leaving the rest of the film starker. It would be a risk, but the director had told her that he wanted something stylish, and that his budget was high enough to pay for it and low enough not to need to make something for a mass audience.

She would come back later with a notebook, and now, as she began to examine French scenes painted by Irish painters, she took in the happy tone of some of the compositions and the sheer beauty of the colours and she smiled to herself at the idea of how relieved they must have been on spring mornings and summer days when there was no drizzle or dark clouds approaching, or shifts in the light every two seconds. It made her wish to be back now in her own house in California, but glad she had been brought up in this country for long enough to appreciate being so far away from it.

In one of the earlier rooms as she stopped in front of one of the paintings she had glanced at a uniformed porter sitting on a chair. When he had greeted her, she had returned the greeting briefly. He was a man in his early sixties, thin-faced, grey-haired, with bright eyes; he seemed happy in his job. Now, as she prepared to leave the gallery, she noticed him bustling by her, finding a colleague who was in the room adjoining the room where the Irish paintings done in France were hanging.

She took in through the doorway the encounter between the two porters while pretending to study a painting closely. She was not able to hear what they were saying, but she could watch as the porter who had greeted her told the other porter something and the man listened with an absolute curiosity and a sort of glee. At times both men laughed even though the story, whatever it was, had still not ended. Some of it seemed unbearably funny to both of them, but then they became serious again as the man who was talking whispered the last part even though there was no one nearby. Finally, they stared at each other in mock wonder and surprise.

They were too wrapped up in their exchange to notice that she had been watching them, and as the porter walked past her to return to his post, she averted her eyes and looked at the painting once more. What had come back to her suddenly was the single time in her life when she had been in love. The first porter’s face did not in any way resemble Luke Freaney’s face, which was much narrower. Luke was also a few inches smaller. His features were more irregular. But it was the lightness in the walk, and the way of speaking as though the slightest remark were a way of taking you into his confidence, the constant laughter and then the face, so vivid to her now as she remembered it, slowly becoming serious. All of it belonged to Luke. Perhaps, she thought, it was Irish, but he had brought it to a fine art and used it as a mask and made it into pure charm, something warm and loving, at the same time.

And now she had seen it again, enacted by a porter in the National Gallery, not having seen it for thirty years, having believed it was something that had belonged to Luke alone. He was dead for more than a decade. She had trained herself in the early years of losing him not to miss him or give him a thought. On this and other visits to Dublin since his death, she had kept him out of her mind. But she had not bargained for what she had just seen, the core of his personality, what she remembered most about him, appearing again as a part of life.

She was busy for the rest of the day with meetings and then, since she was too tired to go downstairs, she had her supper in her room and read for a while before falling asleep. In the morning, as arranged, the car took her to the studio; on the way she marked the scenes in the script where she thought she might heighten the colour, but she would make no final decisions on this until she spoke to the director again. She would need, in case he was against the idea, to make sure that the studio could quickly change the previous plans, but she believed that if she saw the director on his own and was absolutely clear about what she had in mind, then he would not be opposed to what she would suggest.

She had not dreamed in the night and had woken fresh, ready for work, so it was only now in the car as a drizzle settled over south Dublin and the strong coffee she had taken over breakfast started to kick in that the scene in the National Gallery came into her thoughts again. She had been with Luke for twelve years, but she had never lived with him. They had mostly met in New York, or London, or Paris. And his way of greeting her, or of seeing her to a taxi, almost tearful in the amount of tenderness he could offer, stood in for the domestic life they never had together.

When he was not talking about his work – and she had loved these discussions with him, had loved his earnestness about the roles he played and how he prepared for them – then he was busy making her laugh. When they met, they drank and stayed up late, but she knew there was another side to him, that he was disciplined, a rigid timekeeper, that he was deeply committed to his life in the theatre, but oddly tolerant of directors and writers and other actors, as long as they had something he could work with, even if it was something that irritated him, or that he found difficult. He was, she knew, the best comic actor of his generation, and if he had been luckier, and maybe if he had not been Irish, she thought, he could have been better again, he could have played more serious parts. Somehow, the gap between the two – his immense talent and his sense that it would come to nothing except playing clowns and fools – had eaten away at him, and at her too, as the years went on, no matter how much he tried to play the hero for her in their time together, the time they snatched between jobs.

A few times he came to Hollywood to act in Irish films and in a small part as an Irish-American barman and these visits might have appeared to other people, she thought, like the happiest times for her and for Luke. But they were not the happiest times, despite the parties and all the hours they could be with each other. How he worked affected Luke, as though work were a season and bit parts were a harsh winter, just as anything by Eugene O’Neill or Sean O’Casey would always belong to high glorious summer. She saw how easily he could become despondent and how hard it was for him not to show contempt when he felt it.

Their happiest times, she thought, were spent alone in the dark with each other. His body was much stronger than it seemed. Sex excited him, or maybe it was she who excited him. There were nights in hotel rooms, nights when he had had a few drinks after a performance, nights when his own deep confidence in himself and a tender strength, things he kept mostly hidden, things he folded away wrapped in cynicism and self-mockery, were not afraid to appear. This was when she had loved him most.

He was the sort of man, she thought, that women might wish to reform or mother. But she had wanted none of this. She had her own needs; she never once, for example, let him get in the way of her work. This made their meetings all the more intense, but chaotic too, and there were years when her phone bill was almost higher than her tax bill and certainly higher than the money she spent on food. As Luke approached each new performance, he needed to talk to her, to tell her about it in detail, and she loved his voice and his seriousness and then the jokes he told. She never minded that it was often the middle of the night when she put the phone down. At the end of these long calls he left her smiling.

She was smiling now at the memory of this as the car pulled up outside the studio.

‘How long will you be?’ the driver asked her.

‘I don’t know,’ she replied as she gathered her papers.

‘I mean, will I come back for you, or will I wait?’

‘You will wait,’ she said.

As always, she needed to identify someone among the team with whom she could work. It could be someone young or old, who spoke early in the meeting or who remained silent throughout, who nodded when she emphasized a point or who seemed to resist every idea she had. She would know him – it was usually a male – by an aura of pure, calm competence he gave off. She would watch for the person who appeared to be concentrating most, the one least open to distraction.

She did not speak as she was introduced to the staff.

‘Is everyone here?’ she asked.

‘You mean … ?’ the studio manager asked.

‘I mean everyone who will be working with me. The painters, the builders, the props manager.’