by Colm Toibin
I wish I knew how colours came to be made. Some days when I was teaching I looked out the window and thought that everything I was saying was easy to find out and had already been surmised. But there is a small oblong stone that I have carried up from the strand and I am looking at it now after a night of thunder and a day of grey skies over the sea. It is the early morning here in a house where the phone does not ring and the only post that comes brings bills.
I noticed the stone because of the subtlety of its colour against the sand, its light green with veins of white. Of all the stones I saw it seemed to carry most the message that it had been washed by the waves, its colour dissolved by water, yet all the more alive for that, as though the battle between colour and salt water had offered it a mute strength.
I have it on the desk here now. Surely the sea should be strong enough to get all the stones and make them white, or make them uniform, as the grains of sand are uniform? I do not know how the stones withstand the sea. As I walked yesterday in the humid late afternoon the waves came gently to rattle the stones at the shore, stones larger than pebbles, all different colours. I can turn this green stone around, the one that I carried home, and see that at one end it is less than smooth as though this is a join, a break, and it was once part of a larger mass.
I do not know how long it would have lasted down there, had I not rescued it; I have no idea what the life span is of a stone on a Wexford beach. I know what books George Eliot was reading in 1876, and what letters she was writing and what sentences she was composing, and maybe that is enough for me to know. The rest is science and I do not do science. It is possible then that I miss the point of most things – the mild windlessness of the day, the swallows’ flight, how these words appear on the screen as I enter them, the greenness of the stone.
Soon I will have to decide. I will have to call the car hire company at Dublin Airport and extend the time I am going to keep the car. Or I will have to drop the car back. Maybe get another car. Or return here with no car, just the mountain bike and some phone numbers for taxis. Or leave altogether. Late last night when the thunder had died down and there was no sound, I went online to look for telescopes, looking at prices, trying to find the one that Bill had shown me, which I found so easy to manipulate. I studied the length of time delivery would take and thought of waiting for this new key to the distant waves for a week or two weeks or six weeks, watching out from my dream house for a new dream to be delivered, for a van to come up this lane with a large package. I dreamed of setting it up out here in front of where I am sitting now, on the tripod that I would have ordered too, and starting, taking my time, to focus on a curling line of water, a piece of the world indifferent to the fact that there is language, that there are names to describe things, and grammar and verbs. My eye, solitary, filled with its own history, is desperate to evade, erase, forget; it is watching now, watching fiercely, like a scientist looking for a cure, deciding for some days to forget about words, to know at last that the words for colours, the blue-grey-green of the sea, the whiteness of the waves, will not work against the fullness of watching the rich chaos they yield and carry.
Two Women
As the taxi driver failed to notice that the lights had changed and seemed locked in a dull dream of his own, Frances wondered if it would be too rude to alert him, tell him he should move, get going. There was no car behind them to sound the horn impatiently; Dublin at six in the morning was a grey, empty place; it was the city she remembered and began to recognize once they had driven along the almost comically short motorway and were on the Upper Drumcondra Road.
What surprised her now was the speed with which she had resolved, on arrival at Dublin Airport, that she would never come here again, that this would be her last visit. The previous evening at JFK, on the other hand, she had found herself longing for Ireland, chatting with an Irish family as she waited to board; the idea that they were her people and that she was among them again had filled her with warmth. But now, as she was driven across the city towards her hotel, she felt that she was travelling through alien territory, low, miserable and grim. As long as she was open to such mood swings, she thought, then she must not be old.
It was important to behave briskly in the hotel lobby, keep an eye on all her bags and set her jaw firmly as though she were about to make a difficult decision. She had paid for the night before in case they would not have her room ready and she reminded the receptionist of this as the young woman fumbled with the keyboard of the computer, unable to find her reservation.
She pointed to the sheet of paper on the counter.
‘Rossiter, Frances,’ she said. ‘The name is Rossiter. Look under R.’
As the woman glanced up at her, Frances knew how intimidating she could be, and she made no effort to hide the hard impatience for which she was known by those who had worked with her over the years.
The receptionist finally found the booking and handed her a card to fill out, which she did quickly, almost perfunctorily.
‘Do you have luggage to take to your room?’
‘Yes, it’s here. Can it be brought up immediately?’
She kept close to her the large briefcase full of her drawings and specifications and made sure that she carried this herself. And once she was installed in the room she knew what to do – a quick shower to wash the grime of the night’s flying from her, fresh clothes left out on the chair beside the bed, and then darkness, lying there pretending that she was young and it had merely been a long night out somewhere and she had fallen home at dawn. In five or six hours she would be ready for a new day and her first meeting.
At one o’clock, when Gabi, the young woman who was to be her assistant, called from the lobby, she was dressed and had made out a list of the things they would need to discuss. Having told Gabi to come up, she moved the tray of half-eaten food from the sitting room table of her suite and placed it outside the door. She checked herself in the mirror knowing that Gabi would, in all likelihood, never before in her life have worked with a woman almost precisely halfway between seventy-five and eighty. Since she was old, she thought, it was her duty to look busy and bright.
Once Gabi arrived in her room it struck her that the scene being enacted was directly from a script. Gabi was fascinated by the size of the suite, the view over the Green, and then told her how much she admired her work and how many people in Dublin envied her for getting the job as assistant to such a famous designer.
‘I am not a designer,’ Frances said. ‘I dress sets. Now we have to concentrate because we have problems.’
‘I just didn’t think they had suites this big,’ Gabi said. ‘Do you always get a suite?’
‘I always get down to work as soon as I meet anyone. That’s what I always do.’
‘I know,’ Gabi said. ‘I checked you out.’
The director wanted certain colours but he could easily change his mind, she told Gabi, as the film was being shot. Some of his ideas, she was sure, would not work. And what she needed to do now was to make clear to Gabi how quickly they would have to move were the director to want something else, and to find out how hard this might be in a small country where films of this scope and ambition were seldom made.
‘The studio will have most things,’ Gabi said. ‘It’s not bad.’
‘Not bad is no use. We’ll have to go there as soon as I have spoken to a few more people and find out for ourselves. Can you drive?’
‘No.’
‘The studio must have a driver it uses. Tell him to call for me tomorrow at ten. And phone the people at the studio in advance and tell them I’m coming. I’ll need the person who actually controls the place, I have his name somewhere, for about two hours. You be there before me. And tell them no reception committee.’
‘Just down to work?’ Gabi smiled at her almost mockingly.
‘No tea, for example,’ she replied. ‘Or coffee or anything like that.’
‘And toilet breaks?’
‘I hate people goi
ng to the toilet,’ Frances replied. They both laughed.
What worried her most was the scene in the pub that the director wanted. The director used to be young, she smiled at the thought as she opened the set of drawings she had carried with her, but now he was no longer young. But he was not old enough to know that you got nothing extra from using a real pub, no matter how quaint and full of atmosphere, instead of a studio-built pub. A set, she knew, just needed a few spare props that suggested something; with a real pub you would have to spend hours removing objects that suggested too much, and painting over colours that seemed faded to the eye but would jar once bright lights and a camera were shone on them.
She had never once argued with a director, and would not argue now. She would listen, take notes, think carefully and arrange as much as she could in advance, then she would get down to work, and when it was ready she would stand out of the way to allow the real work to happen. By the time the film was made, most people would have almost forgotten who she was; she could linger in the shadows at the final party, having made one or two friends, and maybe three or four enemies.
Besides her career, nothing interested her now except her own house and her own mind. She had no interest in cities; even Dublin, where she had been brought up, seemed a miasma of disconnected shapes and figures with which she had no involvement. She would see her niece Betty, now already a middle-aged woman, in Killiney on one of her last days here, and maybe her niece’s grandchildren, and this would be a sweet time because they had no emotional pull on her and had enough money and would want nothing from her.
She had, in any case, told her niece years before what would happen to her money and her house in Los Angeles when she died. Betty had seemed almost relieved. She had appeared genuine in her approval of the plan.
Frances called them her neighbours now, but they were not her neighbours, they were the family who looked after her and lived in a cottage in her garden that had been, at her expense, extended many times.
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 parttime 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 painte
d 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.